Great sales people and effective sales processes are pivotal for any organization to make money. But for startups, it can be difficult to transition from founder-led sales to establishing a good sales team and putting the structure in place for effective sales processes. This can cause some serious disruption in an otherwise good business. Today’s guests understand this problem and know how to address it.

Rex Biberston and Kevin Hopp of help organizations build internal sales teams with their company, The Sales Developers. Although outsourcing is a small part of what they do, they built the company with the intent of giving companies the systems, and processes, and methodologies needed to improve their own sales companies. Listen to the episode to hear what Rex and Kevin have to say about what they do, tools that they use to improve efficiency and messaging, and what it’s like to be a millennial in sales.

Episode Highlights:

• Kevin’s and Rex’s company, The Sales Developers, and how they got started
• How The Sales Developers help their clients by giving them the tools they need to build internal sales organizations
• The gap between the startup phase of a company and the time when the company is a fully-formed organization, and how that affects sales
• How Kevin’s background showed him the difficulty of scaling a sales team inside of a startup
• How The Sales Developers can make sales people more effective by improving the company’s sales processes
• Tools that can help companies handle both full and part-time prospecting
• Why the number of conversations is more important than the number of dials per day in sales
• How salespeople can focus on the things that are going to bring them closest to revenue
• The Sales Developers’ Message Builder tool and how it can improve sales messaging
• The book Rex co-authored, Outbound Sales, No Fluff
• How getting the messaging right affects the closing ratio
• Why Rex mentioned that he and co-author Ryan Reisert were millennials in their book

Resources:

The Sales Developers

Rex Biberston

Kevin Hopp

Transcript: 

 

Marylou: Hi everyone, it’s Marylou Tyler. This week’s guest, I have two wonderful guests, two, not one, two. Kevin and Rex from the Sales Developers are here to talk to us today about a myriad of things but first and foremost is my misconception of what they do. It’s really interesting when you look at this whole thing of awareness and understanding. When you look at a website, or get an email from somebody, and you’re trying to piece together what is it that you do, and where do you differentiate yourself.

I think I missed the mark on this one, so they’re going to set me straight, and then set all of us straight on how functional they are in a number of different areas. When I looked at their website, I thought they were outsourcers for business development. I understand from Kevin and Rex that that’s only one little portion, right?

Rex: Yeah, that’s a great question. We’re a new company you might say. We’ve been doing this for a long time separately, and then finally came together as a team to build this company. What we have as far as the website was, it was an exciting compilation of all of our ideas of what was happening at the time, and you’ve probably seen one version, and somebody today would see a totally different version. I’m not surprised you heard from that description online that we are outsourcing. Ryan Reisert and I, the cofounder Ryan and I, we originally a couple of years ago, we each had our own outsource sales companies.

To some degree, we were both outsourcing sales development, lead generation, that sort of thing. We’ve experienced what it’s like to run one of those agencies, and when we came together after writing our book called, Outbound Sales, No Fluff, we wrote a book together just kind of as friends in this space, and compadres––people who understood what it was like to need to build outbound sales, we said, “Look, we don’t want to build an outsource sales agency again.” We don’t want to struggle with the same kinds of mistakes and challenges that happened with a typical outsourcing operation.

We don’t want to be a black box where clients don’t have any clue of what’s happening, we even tried to solve this in our old companies but the clients don’t really know what’s happening, their expectations are totally different than what they’re actually getting, and there are some real challenges of outsourcing.

In fact, we started the company, the whole goal was to give teams who want to build internal sales organizations a leg up on the competition by giving them the systems, and processes, and methodologies that are going to make them more successful, having more, and better conversations with their ideal partners.

It really came from the perspective of, “We don’t want to outsource.” Now, as we engaged with more early stage companies that were struggling to build their sales organization and their sale stack, all of these things, there were some cases where we realized, we’re building this and they need support, they need somebody. They’re not ready to hire just yet. They don’t have the staffing available, they don’t have the resources to do this. We’ll go ahead and continue the execution we’ve been doing to prove that the system works, that we built for them, we’ll just continue to execute on that, and eventually that became a more fully baked out, we call it STR service offering. The goal has always been that the client gets all of the knowledge, sees all of the reporting, with just way more transparency in your typical outsource shop.

Marylou: Okay, to encapsulate what you just said, you have been in the trenches developing the perfect process for clients in your former life, and I love what you said because you said, typical mistakes and challenges. I bet you, people listening on this call do not know what those typical mistakes the challenges are, and they plop into an outsource arrangement not having really this checklist. It sounds like you guys have not only the process, but a checklist of all the things one would need to do in order to be able to consider outsourcing.

I come from the old school of, if you can’t figure it out in-house, how the heck are you going to manage an outsourced entity who’s going to do it for you. I know that you’re coming to the table with experiences across a variety of business development platforms, business development sales messaging systems, and different companies, different verticals, different prospect personas, so you have a lot more umf in figuring out, let’s take a little from here, a little from there, a little from there, it’s like you’re the master chef, I totally get that.

That’s why I cringe a little bit when I hear people start up to go outsource. I also understand that if they can’t get the FTEs, the full time employees, or get that whole side of the HR thing figured out, then what you do is a very viable option to get the numbers one needs especially if they’re going for funding additional realms and be able to say, “Hey, look at our dashboard, look at our ramp, look at how we’re doing consistently, and repeatedly so that we can scale, but we need money to do that.”

Rex: We found that time and time again for early stage companies, this happens across even later stage companies that still kind of consider themselves a startup, there’s this big gap between founder-led sales, and a fully baked sales organization. I wrote an article on LinkedIn a long time ago when I was just doing consulting individually about a lot of startup founders think that they can just put out this, “Hey, I’ve got this cool thing we’re selling, we’re really excited about it. I’m going to hire a sales rep for a low cost, they’re going to come over, and they’re going to build the process, and actually execute sales, and train people in the future, and manage a team.” like they’re trying to hire a VP or director of sales and they’re willing to pay them an STR salary. That’s the gap that we see all the time.

Our goal here is really to say, for founder-led sales teams or early stage sales teams, you don’t really have the time, bandwidth, energy, and knowledge to look at all the tools out there. I mean the sales stack is growing at the same rate that the marketing text stack grew. We’re getting into the hundreds and eventually thousands of vendors in sales technologies. I was employee maybe number 350 at insidesales.com. I really cut my teeth on sales exploration technology earlier in my career and I love it.

I love what it can do, but there’s just so many competitors out there nowadays. It’s hard as a founder, or an early sales leader to say, “Which technologies do I need to use? Well, I probably need to take a demo with six different vendors to see which one really fits our processes and, oh, wait, what’s our process? I don’t actually know. We’ve only sold to a few friends, and family, and coworkers.” There’s all kinds of things you have to figure out.

We try and provide the foundational elements, and whether the actual sales execution from an STR kind of top of funnel activity happens in-house or with us, the knowledge, and the learnings, and the systems are all the same.

Marylou: Okay. Kevin, tell us about your background and how you fit into this puzzle of helping salespeople do more than just selling.

Kevin: Yeah, good question. I joined the Sale Developers because I lived all the pain points that we’re trying to solve. I’ve been in a number of early stage startups and faced these same issues. The number one experience that I pulled from, that kind of help me realize, “Man, Rex and I really get it.” Let me just say that I have the book, read their book, and had followed Rex and Ryan on LinkedIn for over a year before I joined the Sales Developers. I’m kind of working with my heroes here in a way.

I love the way that they think, I’ve followed all of their thought leadership and said, “Man, they’ve you’ve got to really do it the right way.” I was part of the early stage startup that raised a series A round of $12 million. They have actually bootstrapped for a number of years. The staff went from 40 employees to 65 very quickly.

With the $12 million that they raised, they went and hired 15 STRs, they said, “Hey, we’ve got all these things, time for the hockey stick.” It does seem like this idea like, “Okay, we’re just going to raise a bunch of money, and then throw a bunch of people at a sales problem within roughly about 12 months, they had hired and then fired/laid off/let go/ people and left about 30 sale people.

I watched this all happen, and I was part of the wave of getting laid off, and what we are all in there trying to do our STR work, getting good meetings, not getting enough meetings, meetings not converting. The bottom line, I watched what a startup with venture capital backing try and scale a sales team from the inside. I saw the issue.

The real big issue of what we work with all of our clients on is the map of sales. The map of sales doesn’t lie. Ryan, our CEO is kind of the guy who creates this awesome formula that we that we walked and found us through that really show, you need to understand how many activities lead to how many meetings lead to how much pipeline.

Everybody has a sale target, but not enough people spend enough time working all the way backwards. That’s where Sales Developers comes in, we not only help you understand what your map of sales is, but we show you that you probably don’t have a people problem. You probably have a process problem, and you’re probably not doing enough of the right things enough times.

If you can focus granularly on those little thing, whether it’s phone calls, emails, LinkedIn connections, having the right messaging, it’s all about earning more conversations and better conversations, and that’s either going to help you go to market really quickly, and have a lot of success, or it’s going to help you iterate to find out really quickly, “Hey, this isn’t working.”

Our systems are designed to make any sales person using them four to five times more effective than what they can do on their own, and that’s based off those averages––industry averages, so that’s why I joined the Sales Developers, and that’s kind of a big problem that we’re solving, helping people either figure out really quickly, this is going to work, or, “Hey, this is really working,” and then they can add fuel to the fire and we can help them do it with the outsource model, or we hand off the systems happily and kind of hope to maintain them.

Marylou: Okay, this is not only for those listening, for startups, or for founder-led, I work up market, usually bigger enterprises, and a lot of times, I’m going into organizations that have the traditional legacy type of sales selling methodologies in place, and they’re thinking, “Wow, we should probably start looking at lead generation and opportunity management what have you, and we want to put this thing in,” and have no idea how to go about it. A lot of the reps have been there for a long time, they do all roles, so there’s this whole issue of separation of roles. Do you guys believe in separation of roles, or do you think this could also work for the account executive that’s out there that is also prospecting 20% of his time? Do you have models for both full and part time prospecting?

Rex: Yes, I’ll fill this one because I am a huge ticket for those account executives who want to be filling their funnel, they should be able to. The average account executive is being forced to prospect based on a number that their sales manager is making up. You’ve got to handle all inbound leads, and you should probably be making 40 dials a day. There’s a number thrown out there, and that’s what they’re expected to accomplish. At 3% contact rate on average, they’re probably having one conversation a day or fewer, if they’re even doing their dials, if they’re even sending their emails.

There’s all this work that they have to do, but the numbers are being set at random. What we advocate is using technology to add fuel to the fire as Kevin said. If you’ve already got a process that you know, we’ve got inbound lead, meaning they’re closing at a good clip, if we went outbound, or if we started to accelerate the rate at which we contact those inbound leads using our full cycle reps, we believe that technology can help to simplify that and make it happen faster. We use tools, we always share the tools we use, we use Outreach, ConnectAndSell, there are some other great tools that we are looking to partner with in the future.

We use video as well, like GoVideo from Vidyard. We use these technologies to accelerate the rate at which we can have those conversations. For example, connect and sell, a sales rep who’s got half an hour between meetings, he or she are probably either going to twiddle their thumbs, maybe prep for the meeting, go talk to a sales manager and say, “Hey, I’m really excited about this call,” and then they’re going to sit down to get on the call.

What we would advocate for in a half hour, use ConnectAndSell, or use our system that we build including ConnectAndSell, have five conversations, have two to three conversations with prospective buyers in between that time, and make that half hour as effective as you possibly can be. I think it’s a huge win for full cycle sales reps. I love specialization because it allows people to improve on those skills. If you can iterate at a fast enough clip as a full cycle rep, I think this also provides huge benefits to you as well.

Marylou: I love the idea of, I call it on demand prospecting because for lack of a better term. When I was in the call center, I managed a large call center of 50 agents that did outbound prospecting. When there was that idle time, we would fill that with learning materials. If they were sitting there idle, and this would pop in, “Oh no you’re not going to sit here, you’re going to learn something new,” or something for a client for compliance reasons.

I love the idea that you can just switch this on while you’re waiting, get three to four combos in a day, that would be so great for the folks that are in all roles because of the fact that they don’t necessarily have this block time rhythm or habit yet. They’re getting there but not quite, and it’s difficult.

Like you said, I was just at a conference last year where I almost cringed sitting in my seat when the sales managers got up there and said, “It’s all about 100 dials a day.” I’m just like, where have you been? This is not the case. Things have changed.

Kevin: What was interesting about the experience that I’ve had, I’ve had a situation where it was, my daily goal as a salesperson were based off of conversations. My manager said, “You need 20 conversations a day.” I was like, “Wow, how am I going to get 20 conversations a day?”

Rex: Kevin, you walk to a mall and you stop people and say, “Hey, I’d like to talk to you about this tool.” There’s no way to get 20, man.

Kevin: Not with the typical methods. What we did was high velocity dialing and they took away the chairs so we had to stand up. We’re standing up, headsets on, and we were punching numbers all day, just dialing and dialing. When you got two or three good conversations in a row, you had to go back and you have to get to 20. It was very interesting, but that’s once again, we’re using tools that make 20 conversations a day doable, but you’re going to have to spend a long time before you get there.

With everyone who’s not familiar with ConnectAndSell, it takes away all the pain, the hassle of actually dialing, of losing the gatekeepers, you put in a lead list and they only connect you to the person when they find that lead. So, if I’m trying to reach Marylou, it’s only going to connect me if it’s Marylou on the line, so it’s conversations on demand, and we’re huge advocates for flipping that model like you have been saying. It’s not about the number of dials, it’s about the number of conversations, and earning the conversations in the right channel, at the right time, and the right place.

That’s why we don’t just lean on only phones, and we don’t just set up email campaigns, it’s all together, but then the message needs to be there as well, and messaging is something that Rex is a wizard at. It’s really interesting working with Rex so far.

Rex: Well, talking about the numbers, Marylou, I don’t know if you saw the recent report, the 2018 report from the Bridge Group, did you have a chance to look at the state of STRs?

Marylou: Not yet, no, I quoted Trish in our book, so I love what they’re doing.

Rex: She’s fantastic. We love their data, we rely on it every day, we use it to have conversations with clients and prospects about sales, and how it all functions, there’s a really sad and kind of scary number in there that the average rep is in. We’re talking about STRs, so their entire job is to have conversations with qualified buyers every single day. They’re having 5.1 conversations on average, 5.1 which means, if you’re having five conversations, you’ve got to have 20% conversion rate to meetings just to get a meeting a day.

If your entire job is that, boy that’s frustrating, what are all the other non selling things that you’re doing, what are the things that are getting away? How much research and how much time did you spend on it? That’s when we talk about more conversations with qualified buyers, it’s to think that these poor STRs out there are spending right hours a day, having five good conversations, and maybe converting one or two on their best day.

I’ve been that guy, I’ve dealt with that as an individual contributor, and it’s really challenging. I get up earlier, and stay later, and make more calls, and send more emails than everybody else because I knew I had to hit my number, like we’re talking about for most reps as a dream, that they can get all this technology, have those process put in place, but they’re not in charge of it. For those individual contributors out there who are thinking about this, “Well, how can this impact me?” What we recommend is to look at the things that you can control in one effort and where do you direct that effort?

If there’s one message we could share for those people who have to sell every single day it’s, focus on the things that are going to bring you closest to revenue. If your manager had 100 dials that you have to hit, but you know that you scheduled a meeting yesterday that’s due today, go confirm the meeting first, because you’re most likely, you’re comped on qualified opportunities very likely, and at the very least, it helps the company because they want a qualified opportunity that turns into a sale.

I mean nothing happens really until something is sold, you don’t earn money as a company until something is actually sold and paid for. We would recommend, look at the things that are closest to converting and spend most of your time focused on that, and then back fill with the additional effort. Don’t start by thinking, “Well, I’ve got to do 100 calls today, and then I’ll try and confirm some appointments if I have time.” Because then you’re just going to set more appointments on hold. Does that makes sense?

Marylou: Yes, in fact we use in the book the impact versus effort. Sometimes, some people are visual, so when they see that quadrant, and they are able to prioritize tasks or activities based on that quadrant, it naturally puts it in the order that you were talking about which is the things that are going to give us the highest impact first and then working on down.

It’s almost like the old Steven Covey time management, important but not urgent, it’s sort of related to that, but we use it for activity organizing because of the fact that a lot of times during the day, reps get pulled into a myriad of different directions and it’s sometimes hard to focus.

I mean, I get pulled in a million directions during a day. I have my block time because I am trained, I just believe in block time. I do my whole day like that, but there are sometimes, things happen that you get pulled out.

Rex: I think from a rep’s perspective, it’s chasing that one lead that you found on LinkedIn, you’re going to find all the contact information, you jump on over to Gmail, send an email, it bounces, you call them, you get told to call back. There’s all these things, like what you’re saying, time blocking is a fantastic methodology, but if you don’t have the system in place for where you should be spending your time, and how to use it most efficiently, it can drive you nuts. Even just walking outside for a prospect, I could spend two hours trying to get a hold of five people, it could kill me.

Marylou: You guys mentioned earlier that you are building an engine, and the engine is fed with records, and you mentioned about the messaging piece, and also about––you’ve got to fill that thing with quality. Tell us a little bit about how you go about working with any type of client in readying the engine so that the fuel that’s going in there is high octane rocket fuel as opposed to a concoction you mix in your kitchen kind of thing.

Rex: Well, I think the difference between the analogy with the fuel here is that we can’t get it right or perfect right off the bat. You can certainly use best practices and take your our very best stab at it. We built a tool called the Message Builder. It allows us to interview our clients, get all of the information we need from them in order to build a complete campaign of messaging and either they’re running or we’re running, it doesn’t matter. The concept is the same as we’re going to iterate on that messaging.

If we’re not first of all consistent, we can’t iterate on anything because we’re constantly iterating we have no—it’s like a multivariate test. We’re looking at too many things changing all at once. What I would recommend is start with that consistent messaging even if it’s bad messaging, you’re better off than one in every 10 conversations having—or a great message even and then the rest being kind of average. You can learn more over time by starting with a consistent message. That’s where we started. Let’s say, it’s fuel that we funnel in there and over time it gets higher and higher octane.

Marylou: Right, because my whole big thing is statistically relevant sampling. We want to make sure that we go in and just freezes it, it’s the desire to tweak, that’s the hardest thing.

Rex: Everybody wants to tweak. If that prospect was mean to me, I’m just dying to change my script, or that email didn’t land very well, so I’m dying to change my template that sort of thing.

Marylou: Exactly, you can’t do that. you got to really hit the––you said, everything is math related or least a lot of it is math related, so is the testing piece, especially when you’re split testing, you want to make sure that that term is statistically relevant. Now, that can fluctuate based on your audience size and the actual segment that you’re working on, but if you hold off, put your ego in your pocket, let the data help you decide what you should change next and then score that, I think you’re right.

It definitely allows you to get going on higher quality, high revenue potential clients that will close at a higher rate. Tell us a little bit about the close rates. I know we start off, we’re limping along, and we’re iterating, and we’re testing, and we’re analyzing, and we’re iterating, and we’re designing, when we get to not quite running yet, but walking stage, is what you’re doing affecting the close rates, and are the close rates growing because you’re putting more quality in, or where do you guys fit in that spectrum of closing the actual opportunities?

Kevin: It should absolutely play into the closing rates right? A lot of companies that we work with, what’s interesting is, there’s this book that Rex and I wrote called Outbound Sales, No Fluff, our focus is outbound.

For companies that come to us, it might be the first time that they’re seriously going to try outbound. Outbound as we all know, opportunities can be a little different than inbound opportunities. If you have a lot of lead gen going on, and you kind of maxed out the marketing in your space, then all of a sudden, you’re not going on a hockey stick, we’ve got to go outbound.

It should absolutely affect the closing ratio if you’re having the right conversations with the right cost, and at the right time. We don’t really track exactly how it goes into effect with the closing ratio.

If you’re really working on your message the way that we described at the top of the funnel, you’re not going to be putting bad leads in and the efficiency of our system is going to make sure that you’re going to talk to everyone on your vessel market in a shorter amount of time and get the right messaging in the front of them. Anything you want to add, Rex?

Rex: We think about the formula for prospecting as the right target with the right message at the right time and the right channel. It all starts with targeting. Of course, if we’re going outbound, if we’re focusing on the exact right buyer personas and we know that we can solve a pain that they’re most likely experiencing, which is the only thing they care about, is solving a problem for them. They don’t care about the article we just wrote on Forbes that we got featured on such and such, or our data has been used for this other cool thing.

Nobody cares about the funding we’ve received. If we know we can solve a problem for them, it definitely impacts the closing rate because we can identify that problem earlier, we’re having the conversations around that. It’s not about the eBook that they downloaded and trying to eventually get to prime. If they don’t think they have a problem we can solve, we’re not earning the next conversation.

It definitely impacts those closing rates. Of course with outbound, it’s not the same kind of timing signal than it is with inbound. In inbound, if you get a qualified opportunity, it’s likely that they are looking for a solution today or they are investing a solution for the future. With outbound, they might take a meeting because they’re experiencing a problem, but they’re not ready to buy because, “Well, this is something that’s on our radar for this quarter, we’ve got it slated for next quarter.”

But imagine if you could talk to everyone in your target demographic, everyone you’re trying to sell to today who’s an ideal buyer, just a perfect buyer, and they could tell you when they’re going to be ready to buy, that’s better than an inbound lead because you’ve confirmed timing from them telling you from you actually seeing what their priorities are today.

It definitely impacts closing rates, we couldn’t say broadly, “Hey it’s an X percent increase.” It definitely depends on the market, the targeting, and all those good things. That’s how we look at it.

Marylou: I think because of the fact that we’re targeting, so we’re not casting that wide net, we are focused and narrow. Narrow as much as possible, by definition if we’re targeting the right people which the assumption is we are with outbound, then our close rates will be higher because there’s more quality going through. The other thing to note is the hand off between the business development team and the account executive should be higher quality and those conversion rates should be 90% or more.

For every 10 we hand off, one may come back floating over because we’ve done such a great job in the disqualification process, we’ve worked through who the ideal folks are, we know the stakeholders, we’ve mapped through their pain points, we’ve aligned the product, and the buying scenario with each. We know their levels of awareness––all that has to happen for the outbound to work properly, and once we get it to opportunity stage, those are going to close at a higher rate, and they’re also going to convert to opportunities of forecasting. The forecasting is more accurate as the result of all the work that we do preparing to get the right leads in the engine to begin with.

Tell us now the book, Outbound Sales, No Fluff, the second portion of it says, “Written by two millennials who have actually sold something this decade.” Why did you put that in there?

Rex: I think because we’re young folks, since we’re only a couple of millennials that have really broken through in terms of consulting or an expertise, people that actually respect what they have to say, like Morgan Ingram is a young guy who has been very successful in putting his name out there for example. Ryan and I want to emphasize like look, “We may be what everyone terms a millennial, but that doesn’t mean that we haven’t done something worth listening to our thoughts on.”

While we may not have the credibility of an enterprise seller who’s been doing this for 30 years, we’ve sold something, we know what buying looks like today, we know what selling looks like today because things have changed over the last 30 years.

A book that was relevant 30 years ago, maybe not so much today because of the specifics that they get into. We were trying to make the statement, “Look, it’s relevant, it’s worth reading.” The emphasis is no fluff and we get some feedback from people, it’s all just way too short. The fact is, most people don’t read the books they buy, most people don’t take any action on any of the books they read, so our goal here was just to say, “Look, it’s something worth taking a look at.”

Of course it’s a little controversial because we’re in a space of, if you’re in sales consulting obviously we’re not competing necessarily, but we’re playing in the big leagues with people who have been doing this for dozens of years, and whom we respect by the way. That was the other thing, we didn’t really want to call anyone out because at the end of the book, you’ll see we have thought leader after thought leader who of course are maybe 30 or 40 years our senior who are experts in their space who we trust in and have learned so much from. The idea is really, “Look, don’t just count us just because we’ve got young faces,” that’s not something that we expect.

Marylou: Okay, because you know what I thought? I thought it meant, here we hear a lot of chatter about millennials not knowing how to sell. They’re not comfortable with the phone, they’re not comfortable with…

Rex: Right, millennials don’t dial.

Marylou: That’s the way I looked at it, I looked at it as, “Here we are guys, we don’t have to do this. We’ve cracked the code and we’re millennials.” That’s the way I look at it.

Rex: I think we used the #millennialswhodial on LinkedIn for a long time. I got somebody who emailed me from reading the book and I think they forgot the subtitle to include the word millennials in it because he emailed me and said, “Hey, I’ve got a whole team of millennials, and they won’t call. These darn millennials.”

So I get on a call, we’re having a conversation, I don’t think he realizes how young I am, and he’s just digging into millennials, and I give him some advice, and I’m friendly with him. This wasn’t going to happen there, the fact is, you can’t blame it on their age, you can’t blame it on a bracket of any—it has to do with coaching and learning. Are they the right the right kind of person anyway? I know 50 year olds who won’t dial, it doesn’t really matter on age. I think, definitely in part, we wanted to say, “Look, we make calls and we love it.”

Marylou: Right, so to everyone listening, the website is thesalesdevelopers.com. I’ll put all the links to the book, to the site, and then Kevin and Rex, if there’s anything you want to pop over for me to add to the page, feel free to do that.

It’s really about preparing and understanding what to feed these engines, and if you’re in the position where your hands are tied of what to get with the stack, or you can’t purchase, like some of my folks have to go through years of getting IT to approve things, still in this day and age. There’s another option here that allows you to supplement your existing sales team with the actual heavy duty engine in place that I think is great.

I love the idea of supplemental because sometimes, I have clients for example who have a rush of time, where they need to ramp up for an extended period of time, and then when it’s over, they go back to their core group. That’s another way you can utilize these services, is on demand type of thing over a period of time.

I’m sure you have a multi month/year contract or whatever. That’s another way to look at this, sometimes, when you’re pushing new products or you’ve got a window of opportunity, if there’s a compliance change where you want to maximize the market by getting out there ahead of everybody else, these are great systems for that.

If you can’t put that stack into place, all the ones you’ve mentioned, I think are very helpful once you understand that sales conversation canvass of how you’re going to start that dialogue, how many touches you’re going to have, what types of touches you’re going to have, so that’s great. I really like what you guys are doing, and thank you so much for coming on the podcast today.

Rex: Well we appreciate it and you know, the funny thing is, we’re not always selling our services just because we always love talking about sales. If anybody reaches out, we’re always happy to point them in the right direction, share with them thoughts we’ve got, or people that we respect who have expertise in a certain field. Don’t hesitate to reach out if it’s something not directly related to buying our services, we don’t mind, we love it.

Marylou: I know, it’s all about helping our community, and we’re all about that, well thanks a lot you guys, I really appreciate it.

Rex: Yeah, thanks Marylou.

Kevin: Thank you.

Marketing and sales may intersect more than you previously thought. In fact, there are good reasons why sales should have some involvement in designing marketing for a product or service – after all, it’s the sales team that ultimately has to convince their prospects to buy, so it makes sense for sales to have some input into the marketing process.

Today’s guest is Sean Campbell, CEO of Cascade Insights, a B2B market research firm. Sean is also the host of his own podcast, called B2B Revealed. In today’s episode, Sean brings his perspective from the marketing side of things to talk about what’s going on in sales. Listen to what Sean has to say about some sales terms that you may not have heard yet, how saying “no” can actually help you sell, and why the sales team should be involved in the marketing process.

Episode Highlights:

• What Sean’s research firm does and how he got into it
• New sales and marketing terminology
• Why it’s important for companies to define boundaries
• How saying “no” can help you sell
• Why sales needs to be involved in marketing
• The importance of choosing the right people for a sales research study
• How the GDPR is affecting email lists
• The reason why salespeople should send more tailored messages in narrower channels
• Why you need to have a waterfall
• How to stack good habits

Resources:

Sean Campbell

Cascade Insights

Email Sean at sean@cascadeinsights.com

Transcript:

Marylou: Hi everybody. It’s Marylou Tyler. This week’s guest is Sean Campbell. He’s a CEO of B2B Market Research Firm that’s focused on the tech industry. He has got some great knowledge that I think we can all benefit from coming, maybe, from the marketing side a little bit more but understanding what is going on in sales.

I wanted him to come on the podcast to talk about his theories, his passions, as it relates to top-of-funnel, especially. Some of that newer things that are coming out, some of the newer terms that really resonate with us as we start working through to figuring out how to be heard, how to be seen, how to get in front of people, he’s really focused on that.

Welcome to the podcast, Sean.

Sean: Thanks for having me.

Marylou: Tell us more about the research firm. What got you interested in it and what are you guys working on these days?

Sean: Well, I promised to keep this short. We’ve always found ourselves probably, if you listen to podcast enough to listen to seven minutes intro, I promised I won’t do that. If you want to find out more, we’re in cascadeinsights.com.

I’m the CEO. The firm’s co-owned by another guy named Scott Swigart—we’re equal owners—been running it since 2006. Really narrow front door to the firm. We just focus on working with technology companies, which we predominantly mean computer software by that. We do market research and competitive work form. We’ve been doing it for a while now.

I got into it because I like research, I like helping companies solve problems. We get hired for one of two things: either paying or opportunity. Paying in the form of a competitor that’s causing some kind of grief and opportunity, because they may be launching a new product to renew initiative into a market segment.

Boutique company of about 12 employees in Portland. We’re always interested in talking to folks that want to move to Portland, which usually is pretty easy for us, it’s an easier area to recruit firm.

I’ve been a business owner for 20 years. I had a previous company before that, that I grew and sold too. That’s basically the bio.

Marylou: Okay. We’ve talked off line a little bit about some topics that we thought might be of interest to my audience which are mostly sales professionals who are responsible for business development, typically net new logos.

You hit on a term that I was like, “Alright, I really want to know this.” What they don’t do was one term that you’ve mentioned. Marketing the invisible was another. Then, you started talking about personas. Pick either one of those and go. Tell us what you think we need to know—top-of-funnel, building pipeline for net new sales.

Sean: Yeah, sure. The interesting thing, I think, about marketing these days—this is something I talked a fair amount about in my show, B2B Revealed, that with a lot of marketing leaders and stuff too. People are living on the age of narrow. I don’t know if I coined that phrase so for those of you out there if you found the post that already has it in it, you can tell me that I didn’t. Just send me an email and say, “No, you didn’t coined it. You just hadn’t come across it yet.”

I don’t think I’ve seen it yet. Everybody has the narrowcast, nobody broadcasts anymore. Yet, companies are still broadcasting. We’ll do brand studies for tech companies and they are completely undifferentiated. They use the same colors. It’s like they hired the same graphic artist. They hired the same people that wrote the messaging which probably is true because they left from one company and went to work to the other one so they wrote the messaging the same.

The ads were all very safe. Nobody says what they don’t do—they just don’t. They never find any boundary to their area of competency and yet there must be a boundary. I see people kind of fight me back on this and say, “I don’t want to miss out on any opportunity.” I’m like, “Okay, we’ll, do you build rockets?” You know what I mean? There’s things you don’t do. There’s some limits to your firm’s capabilities, “We might do that.” Yes, and when you do that, and you can prove it, and you have testimonials, and you have all kinds of things you do to prove things, then say, “We’re going to move the fence post out a little further. Now, this is what we don’t do.”

I think there’s just a hunger for it in the marketplace. Everybody is overpitched. They’re pitched by seller emails that are on 17-step email chains, to the point that you’re like, “Oh, wow. That’s the same email chain from what I saw yesterday. Different company, though.” But it’s the same chain. They all read the same prospecting book.

Nobody seems willing to say, “What’s my boundary?” As a side note, I think that’s particularly important for services firms. There’s a reason I say that. Product firms, by definition, you’re a little bounded by your product. We also know that’s great. We have a data center applying to those—everything. Our platform—platform is always code for “just buy it from us,” it’ll do anything you want, which never really plays out but that’s what platform, sometimes it’s used for and so…

Services firms are even more fungible in a way because it’s consulting and it’s using brains as opposed to software directly. There’s this tendency for consulting firm owners in particular to say like, “Sure. We could do that. Let’s go hire some folks and grab some contractors and we’ll get it done.” I think, what I sometimes call “marketing the invisible,” which is a play off a book—very direct play so I want to pay homage to it. There’s fairly famous old book called Selling the Invisible.

When you’re marketing the invisible, your marketing professional services, I think it’s incredibly important to differentiate on what you don’t do. Just try it once, that’s what I would tell people. If you’re like, “He’s out of his mind. They must lose all kinds of opportunities.” Okay, fine, take one call and burn it. Get on the call and start the call by saying what you don’t do. I guarantee you’ll probably sell that person on whatever it is that you do because I’ve seen it over and over again.

Another way I’ve said it sometimes is you win more by saying no than yes. People, they just don’t hear it. They’re not used to it. Again, it’s a smart no. It’s not an obnoxious no. It’s not an arrogant no—it’s just a smart no. If you know when to use it, I think you’re in a really good place. That’s to me all about the age of narrow. You have to let people know what lane you’re in. At least, for that call, that opportunity.

Where I think that helps marketing is, there’s so much content out there. I’ll stop after this point. I want to chime in and ask whatever questions or direct to me however you like, but one of the other things I kind of rant about sometimes is that the content marketing intelligence. I go to these conferences over and over again they’re like, “You need better quality content.”

I’ve always said that something said solemnly and slowly doesn’t make it smart. We’ve seen these a million times. You’re in a meeting and a guy says, or a woman says, “We need to take a focus on accountability.” And you’re like, “What’s new about that?” We’ve been accountable since the middle ages. I understand. Quality doesn’t do it anymore. It’s not enough. It’s simply not enough.

Now, you have to decide, “How am I going to narrowcast that? Am I going to write the right ad and narrowcast to it for pay-per-click? Am I going to put in on the right properties at narrowcast? Am I going to even broadcast?” Sometimes, the phrase they use broadcast on Channel 800. “Am I going to broadcast on Channel 800 because I know it’s going to exactly get into my buyers.” Maybe I have another campaign on Channel 801, for the other thing I offer. But I’m not going to try do this thing where I broadcast everything on Channel 800. My brand, my logo, and my funnel looks just like everybody else.

Marylou: Right. I can totally relate to saying what you don’t do. I just launched a class myself and it’s a 12-week instructor lead i.e. me class. In the video for the classes that I’ve introduced, I said, “Basically, do not take this class unless you’re ready to commit to a 12-week-college-style course where I want you to finish it. You can’t abandon me halfway through. If you think you’re the abandoning type, don’t even bother to register. You’re not going to get value. I’m not going to get value.”

To have the courage to eliminate, which is probably the most of my market because we all know the abandonment rates of all my courses are very high. Now, I have a solid student body that’s taking this class. I know we’ll be successful because they’ll do the work.

I can totally relate to saying “no.”

Sean: I would take that one step further. I think the thing is also what does the class not do? What is this class not for? Who should not read this book? Who should not listen to this podcast?

You’re right—saying no. A funny vignette on training, you’re very smart to do that. Early in my career, one of the things I got started, full disclosure, I’m 47. I’ve been intact for awhile. I was doing technical training—teaching networking, software and database, and programming. These were five-day courses when that was kind of the thing. I remember every Monday, I do something religiously.

“How many of you read the outline before you came here? Before you flew to Denver from all around the world? How many of you read the outline?” Consistently, the early market research in me—it was like 5% of the room. Part of me as an entrepreneur is like, “I’m not flying anywhere for five days if I don’t know what I’m going to get” Who does that? I have things to do. I just sit with my kids and go take them fishing instead or write something.

I’m amazed at how many people kind of walk into the room and I’m not trying to knock listeners or anything. Ask yourself, how many times did you go somewhere just kind of because you were following everybody? This seems like a good idea and it sets up such a huge problem for both sides because by Monday afternoon you feel like you shouldn’t be there. The instructor feels like they can’t answer your questions because you shouldn’t have been there.

It’s just that degree of polarity that I think we have to kind of just shove out there. It’s on the brands and the companies to do it because they are the ones sending the messaging.

Marylou: They’re sending the messaging in business development, we’re parroting the messaging because we’re reaching out and we are basically the human billboard for the company. The words, the language, the usage, the used cases—everything—is driven by what we’re told to say to gain interest.

Sean: Let me stop you there. One of the things that I think should—there’s a talk I give sometimes called Marketing the Invisible, I just kind of brought that thing up before. I think, one of the things I say is that your messaging should come from sales.

Marylou: Yes. Amen.

Sean: How effective we’ve seen it, we’re like, if you are in your average enterprise company, they’re going to have a message meeting. Who’s going to be in the room? I know this is true because we do market research on messaging. We will come into the stakeholders and I will meet the stakeholders. We love our stakeholders—I don’t want anybody stop working with us. But I will go and meet the stakeholders. This will be some fairly big technology product. I’ll go around the room and 75% of them will be from marketing. There’ll be somebody there from market research. There’ll be somebody there from product development. There’ll be nobody there from sales.

I’m like, sales is the ultimate qualitative market research source you could find. We did a blog post of this on our website called Sales Need to Stay in Strategy. All we said in it was, we get sales has their biases. They’re always going to complain about price and they’re always going to complain about certain things—we get that. Sales never has good enough leads. I don’t care what they are. But at the end of the day, sales is having messaging conversations. That’s what they’re doing.

I’m talking about B2B more than B2C. In B2C, that’s a space I play in a bit. I could see why you want to push messaging down into the call center a little bit differently. I think there’s even a point of doing this there where you kind of take it back and you say, “Who has the best conversation? What are they saying? What are the phrases? What is the language are you using? What’s the tone?” And then say, “Does our messaging look anything like that?” I think what happens a lot of times is the messaging is vanilla, generic, or off-target, and sales has to fix it live. It’s like giving an actor a script that’s busted and broken. They have to go up on stage and kind of adlib until it’s right. I think that’s a wrong way to fly.

I do understand the risk when some marketers probably listen to saying, “Ask sales.” That seems crazy. Ask yourself. Who’s actually having the conversation that changes minds? Probably sales.

Marylou: Yeah. We did a test recently in one of my classes where we had, I’ve ran into this situation all the time so I’m feeling the pain that you’re talking about. We had marketing create, our cadence, our rhythm, our secret sauce of how we talk to clients. They put it into a touch sequence. We took a couple of the marketing generated emails. I had my students pretend they were talking to the prospect belly to belly, record in their phone, the sales conversation, get it transcribed. Then, we assembled a test email to compete against the marketing email.

Overwhelmingly, the response rates and the conversion rate of the sales generated talk track kind of buckled together versus the marketing speak, won. We had tremendous response rates compared to what marketing did.

We used their baseline. We used the sentiment. We used the pain points and the way the argument was positioned by marketing but we transcribed it into sales speak and it resonated a lot more with our target audience.

Sean: Yeah. It makes sense. In one caution that I’m sure marketers are thinking too, I’ve never seen a salesperson who avoids a run-on sentence.

One of my favorite movies is, A River Runs Through It, and my marketing manager’s nickname it half as long and if anybody’s ever seen that scene in the movie where like, he tells him to rewrite it and tell him to keep making it shorter. Then, in the end he says, “Throw it away.” It’s really comical because she’s about five feet tall. She finds it doubly funny like this is her nickname. I didn’t necessarily gave it to her. I told her about the scene and she was like, “I loved that. I like sentences that are half as long. I really love them.”

I think it’s this relationship that needs to be there. Everybody’s talked about that. I just haven’t really seen anybody brave enough usually to say sales needs the kind of drive a lot of the messaging. Then, marketing’s more in the assistant role.

Marylou: Right, when we go up market for sure – when we go up market, I just retained a new client, for example, where marketing came in on the initial call. Very feathers’ ruffled, you can feel it here and see it the voice like, “Why are you here? Why are you doing this? Why are you setting up these sequences?” This is our job. This is what we do.

It’s starts off a little rocky but then as we start working together, and this development is the perfect area for the blend and the collaboration between marketing and sales, I think.

Sean: Yeah, I would agree. That’s why I said, if you’re selling stuff out of a call center and it’s B2C, I understand if you put a 19-year-old on the phone and they’re selling—heaven forbid, although I know this happens—you put a 19-year-old on the phone and they’re selling complex cyber security solutions at an FDR rate. Okay, please give them a script. I understand that.

The belly to belly, B2B selling, is different. I know we were going to talk a little bit about this, it’s probably a good point to segue, I guess or bring me back if you don’t want to go here. But that whole point about websites kind of targeting the wrong persona, that has kind of a similar plan I think.

Marylou: That’s a big one for me because a lot of times—and this is sales’ fault. Sales’ sitting out there, this is your fault because we’re taking the marketing personas as ours. The call to action on the marketing persona is typically to gain interest. The call to action on the business development is to get the first meeting. Just by definition, we have two different persona definitions.

One is landing more towards sales. We can use marketing’s persona and we loved what they have done but we need to add on to that to create the selling canvass of what we’re trying to do which is to get that first feed and get our foot in the door and start building those relationships.

Sean: Right, exactly. I think one of the places where the skits misaligned is that—we’ll get brought in to do research and one of the normal things people will say to us is like, or we asked them I guess, as we say, “Who are the right people for the study?”

A lot of times people will say C-levels or VP levels or whatever. We always probe that because one of the things we find is not only, is it maybe wrong because it’s not where they spend the bulk of their sales time, which is how a pivot form sometimes. We’ll be like, “How much of your sales cycle is spent in the C-level’s office?” “What do you mean?” I’m like, “Really, how much of this cycle you spent there?” They’re like, “5% toward the end.” Do we have a front funnel problem we’re trying to adjust with this research or back funnel problem because it’s two different things.

Same thing with the websites, if you go through your average tech company website because that’s a space we hang out in, if you go through and look at them, they’ll have C-level language all the way through.

Do C-levels go to Google and try to find vendors to solve marketing automation, cyber security document management…

Marylou: AI

Sean: AI, no. The idea that your website is aligned with these senior strategic perspectives, I think it’s kind of a fail because it’s should be aligned with the people who are going to come and visit it. Like you were alluding to earlier, there’s multiple people in the sales C, D, said it, and everybody also said it. It’s funny, no matter how many times people say that like 5.4 people, 6.8 people, 3.2 people—whatever statistics you want that’s greater than one, people act like it’s one, they do it over and over again. They title lock on this one persona. I don’t know if it’s an expediency thing, I don’t know if it’s just a human nature thing, I don’t know what it is but they have a really hard thing blending in a meaningful way and giving on-ramps to each time of person.

There are companies that do it well. Surprisingly, Microsoft is actually one of them, which might shock anybody listening because usually they’re the punching bag for certain things. If you look at some of the portions of their website, they target individual types of buyers and technical folks—I’m not talking about the consumer side of their business, they sometimes do a pretty good job with that.

Anyway, that’s another place where there’s a lot of room for improvement. That’s also a relationship between sales and marketing because they can talk a little more about, “Where do we spend the bulk of our time in the sales cycle? What’s the initial contact like and who is that?” All of that stuff really matters.

Marylou: I think there’s a little bit of a mystique around, if I start too low from the sales perspective, then I’m going to get stuck in the lower echelons. But if I start high and get referred down, then the cultural biases and behavioral biases will help me get in the door of the right people, eventually. If I start high and work low, I’m going to have a better success than starting low and working high.

That’s I think—partly sales issue where they don’t want to get stuck at a certain level and not being able to go up. You hear that all the time. Just sell to the C-suite, they’ll refer you down to the right person and then eventually you can work with the right people to get further into the cycle.

All of the marketing for us starts higher level to get, “Hey, go take a look at these people. Go look at these guys, they sent me an email. I like what they’re saying.” That’s I think why we do that as well. We start higher then lower, it’s easier to carry further down.

Sean: Right. But if you went into the database and said like for all those contact form sales, how many of them said CIO at the bottom?

Marylou: Very few.

Sean: They’re very few with the CIO right. I think you get higher up, that’s where marketing can help like in the sense of with more of maybe not, maybe the front door to the site but things that actually can be directed to. You can get some mind share with those upper level folks because if somebody underneath them forwards them something, that’s fine. But that’s different than the front door to the site that’s going to be discovered initially by that kind of lower level person which is all tied to the idea that a lot of these sales funnel has become digital.

If that wasn’t true and it was simply a matter, where do I choose to enter the atmosphere in this company’s home planet? It was old school selling and we were just dialing for dollars, sure, start high. I’m going to enter the atmosphere and land there. That’s where I want to go. But if it’s organic and I have to wait for them to move a little bit, then, I just have to deal with reality. The CIO’s not web searching.

Marylou: No. Hence, the reason why there are multiple ways that we get in into an account. That’s not just digital, there’s analog versions, there’s direct mail—it even has a comeback for some of the work that we do to bring awareness around or offer our service, why we matter, why they should change, why now.

I think having an arsenal of what my friends calls the toolkit of getting in the door, various things depending on the persona but you can’t narrow the personas to the point where you’re just talking to one person type. You’ve got to branch out and get multiple opinions, multiple conversations going so that finally someone’s going to invite you in because you’re persistent.

The persistence of a good message, I think, that gets you more often than targeting the right person so to speak or going to the CEO or the CFO. You’re going to be banging your head against the wall half the time trying to get in.

Sean: Yeah. Persistence definitely matters, that’s for sure. I think that’s been true in sales for a long time. Appropriately pursued accounts are going to get one, I mean all the stats show it. You look at the number of responses to email sequences. There’s this huge bump when you get to four, five, or six, that’s why we all get seven or eight of them. That’s been true for a very long time.

Marylou: We all get seven or eight, but some of them are not worthy of responding. I get like you’ve said before it’s so resonating with me. I think I’ve seen the same Yesware template fifty times in one week in my inbox. Let’s get a little bit more creative, people. How we address our target market, if I hear this one more time about, “Just checking in to see your—did you get my previous email? Did you see my previous thread?” I was like, “No, I did not.”

Sean: I actually interviewed somebody for my show way back. We had a really good conversation but I’m not trying to throw him under the bus. We had a conversation about something and I asked him a little to the side and I said, “Do you think that the fact that you own one of these sales automation platforms that helps people generate lots of emails—” I said it a little differently but to summarize it for this show like, “It’s contributing a lot of evil to the world, you really think that’s possible?” I wasn’t quite that pointed right.

“All of these emails that nobody wants.” He said, “No, absolutely not. If they don’t want it, they could just delete it.” I’m kind of like, “Okay, well…”

Marylou: “That’s not the point.”

Sean: He said a lot of other great things but then that one area, I felt like it’s a misfire. There’s a lot of bad that’s being done with those tools and I don’t think it’s entirely going well. Although, I will say GDPR has put a nice chilling effect with some of that kind of behavior.

Marylou: No, it’s definitely good. I don’t know if you’ve been looking at that, the delivery rates, the bounce rates, are off charts now. Things are not going through.

Sean: Well, right. I was jokingly telling our staff because we ended up getting a lot of work in the last few weeks even just from GDPR rolling out. In our world, a certain percentage of the work is done with the customer’s list. We will do our own recruiting for research, certainly we get that a lot. There are lists though, they’re not sure how clean they are. These are very large companies, and who knows if somebody loaded something into it a long time ago and there’s issues with GDPR isn’t about the domain that person’s from. What citizens they are of—the country they’re of, they could be in a different locale at the moment. It’s really really fascinating.

We’ve been joking about the fact that I’m sure all of next year’s marketing session or conferences are going to be things like, how GDPR killed our email lists, how we survived with our email letter with GDPR.

It’s not going to be the same world. There’s a lot of other stuff that tie with that too—the fishbowl, the trade show. If you’re following the letter of that law and we all know that we’re 20 court cases away from really understanding what our law does, because there’s lot of edge] cases that have to be played out.

It’s just a sign that some of that kind of slammed the universe with a bunch of emails kind of stuff—it’s just going away. They’re going to have to figure out what to do after that.

Marylou: I double opted-in on my email list and I sent out an email to my list prior to GDPR saying, “Hey, we’re starting from scratch.” “This is my last email to you. If you want to come join my list again, we’re going to have to go through everything all over again with the notices for GDPR.”

We went from x to zero overnight.

Sean: That’s interesting because that’s actually exactly what I said a few weeks back. I said there’s a lot of small companies that will just make the decision to basically delete their list and start over, not because they were doing anything wrong, it’s just they don’t have the ability to go through a full compliance regime. It’s easier to just say that we’ll come back.

One of the funniest things I saw on that, I don’t know if you saw it, but there’s a court’s article that came out right around the day GDPR launched. The reporters had collected all the subject lines. They were receiving and they categorized them by emotion. It was like, angry, dismissive, sad, depressed—you know what I mean? “We don’t want to lose you from our list.” It’s just really funny.

Marylou: Yeah, more funny. It’s like, “Here we are. We’re getting ready now.” I mean, and on my list, I got complaints to send out that last email. That’s the first time I ever gotten complaints when I sent out that GDPR email.

Sean: Complaints in what way?

Marylou: When they click the complain button, I don’t know, just when it showed up on my automation system it said a percent complaints of the email itself. I’ve never gotten that red little flag on any of my emails that I sent out over the years—it’s first time.

Sean: I think first thing about the email chains—we went through a period of experimentation with kind of a little more broad-based email campaigns, a few years back. We actually shut it all down and invested more in the top-of-the-funnel marketing, kind of like drive engagement.

One of the reasons I shut it down finally was I realized when somebody can send you an email where they’re basically not even reading the email, you can just tell. They’re your right kind of buyer and all they do is say, “Take me off your list. I don’t know how you got my name. I have nothing to do with you.” This was the right persona with the right message. In a sales conversation, that exact same language would resonate, it just tells me that I’m just annoying them. They justified that an email inbound from a vendor they don’t know just gets vaporized.

Worst yet, I probably left a stain with them that if they ever remember who we are, and I have a sales conversation later, we’ve got an issue.

Marylou: Exactly.

Sean: That doesn’t mean all of those email sequences need to go to content heaven—they don’t need to all die. I just think that our content hell, I guess in this case, only good stuff should go to content heaven. I think it’s a matter of time before that stuff has to just evolved. Honestly, a lot of these automation platforms have created a problem because there are some young startup with three people and they go do it.

Listeners might be thinking, “What’s the solution?” I would say, it’s back to the age of narrow. You have to decide what are your channels—800, 801, 802, 803, that you’re going to broadcast on. You’re just going to send messaging that is just really tailored to them.

There’s no excuse in digital. You can make targeted stuff like that. That’s really the thing, and the other reason people are doing it is because broadcast is technically easier than narrowcasting—at least, that’s what I think.

Marylou: No, I mean it’s in the mindset right now. It’s the rhythmic mindset of that’s what you do is that you just throw it out to the wind and hope for the best and then you’re okay with the response rate that’s optimal. That means you have to get 3 out of 100, that’s better than nothing.

I see the narrowing happening. I know even me, from my work, when Predictable Revenue came out, we talked a lot about transactional type of emails. Now, it’s hyper-personalized and it’s looking at signals that are coming in, leveraging some of the tools that can see when people are talking about you, that’s a nice way to kind of segue into, “Hey, I saw you were talking about me in this article. I’d like to introduce myself, thanks for saying that.” or whatever it is.

It gives you a reason to have a conversation. I’ve seen more of that. We’re back into our 20-30 accounts a day. We always were. Where we worked the 20 accounts today and we find something unique and different to discuss with our 20 accounts and the people within those accounts.

We keep hammering away pleasantly and persistently until we get to a point where we decide—maybe we should put them in incubation and bring somebody else to replace that account.

Sean: Yeah, it’s basically a more humane way of selling your marketing into what people want. I think you’re right about the 20-30 accounts.

Marylou: My friend, Anthony said 40-60. I personally cannot do 40-60 a day. I don’t know how he does it but he’s a machine. But I do 20-30 and that seems to work just fine. That’s my number and I can get those done and still have a life at the end of the day.

Sean: Yeah. I think it’s really a number of contacts at the end of the day. It obviously depends on—depending on where you’re at in the sales world. Are you kind of managing a couple of mega accounts or are you managing the individual accounts but you’re right. You have to know your limit in the number of catch points you can manage if you’re related to complex sales processes, without turning yourself into some transactional robot or having too few of those relationships too.

Marylou: The key for us is the waterfall. I can’t tell you how many people don’t have a waterfall. How many opportunities do we need for a month to generate revenues we’re looking for to get the commission structure or the life that we want. You work it backwards from that and that’s your number.

I can’t tell you how many times I had to put students through what is your number? What does that mean in terms of conversations or discovery calls and fit calls. That’ll back up all the way up the funnel to how many accounts you need to be looking at on a daily basis, how many conversations you need to be having on a daily basis to make that number. People won’t do that.

Sean: No, they don’t. The other thing that I think is interesting on that point, we have a little tool that we use internally for my team of seller-doers. We’re a consulting firm. Outside of my role as leading sales and marketing, and business ops, we don’t have quite a dedicated seller and I’m not a full-time seller either. That’s typical of consulting firms. The principles will sell some and different levels of people in the company, they’ll do seller-doer activities.

Related to what you’re getting about knowing how your activity leads to an end result, we have a little bit of a leader board that I include all the sales activities that somebody should do in a month. We kind of keep track of it in a fun leaderboard kind of way. The other thing that happens is you just forget to do the hygiene. You fall into the habit of taking seven phone calls with your favorite sales friends that you call and you forget to go out there and just prospect on LinkedIn and see who changed ops and see what’s going on, and then you forgot to freshen up you Twitter account.

Whatever those 20 or 30 things that you need to do a month to keep going, some of them you do—I’ll give my business partner credit for this phrase, he said, “We’re either busy or busy trying to be busy.”

I think really good business owners, that’s kind of where they at. There’s no other switch than those two things. You need to have a framework for the second part of that. That’s more than just a couple set of actions.

Marylou: Yeah. You need to have it stacked up that was a term actually my doctor gave to me because I was trying to do a handstand when I turned 60. That was my goal, to do a handstand. He said, “Have it stacked Marylou.” I’m like, “What the heck are you talking about?” I couldn’t even do a push up at that time. When I got my coffee, I would do one push up. Now, I’m up to 20 pushups while I’m waiting for my coffee. You add on to these good habits and eventually rather than grit and discipline, it becomes habit. That’s what we need in our role to continually generate the revenue and the opportunities that were looking for.

It’s a process but we can get there but we can’t do this sort of shiny object thing and go to the next thing without finishing the task we had at hand. It’s tough to teach that, very tough.

Sean: I love that, though. I’m going to steal that—habit stack. I think the staffs going to hear that from me the minute this podcast is going to be over. I think I’ll send that an email.

Marylou: Very good. Speaking of which, we’ve got way over our time and that’s okay. Sean, how do people get ahold of you to learn more about you, your firm, and what you do? What’s the best way we can connect with you?

Sean: Few things, if you want to hear my voice more, if you haven’t heard enough of it already, check out our show, it’s called B2B Revealed. It’s on all the major podcast players. We interview a lot of B2B thought leaders, book authors, folks focused on marketing and sales. We also hit some hot button issues sometimes. We cover business neutrality. I recently did an interview on CEO activism that’ll go live in a few weeks.

Marylou: Wonderful.

Sean: That was really interesting. In terms of the company, it’s cascadeinsights.com. There you’ll find a bunch of stuff about us in terms like who we work with, what we do, and what we don’t do. You’ll get some sense about that too.

Finally, anybody can reach out to me directly if they want. My email’s sean@cascadeinsights.com. Thanks for having me.

Marylou: I’ll be sure to put all these on your page. If you guys are driving right now and trying to find a piece of paper, don’t worry, it’ll be on his page with his beautiful picture at Portland, Oregon where we stood in line for Voodoo Doughnuts one time for almost an hour just to get a doughnut.

Sean: With many people, if you go through PDX we usually use the same, even if you’re a native, pretty much any flight out of PDX, there’s somebody holding a pink box of Voodoo Doughnuts almost guaranteed on their flight. That’s definitely a good place. On a later show, we’ll do it again. I’ll tell you all the places to go in Oregon.

Marylou: Perfect. I love that. My little girl is looking at Vancouver, Washington because she loves that area up there. She’s in college right now. We have ways to go but she definitely has her eyes set on that area. It’s a place to potentially open up a trampoline gym, of all things.

Sean: That would work out here. This is definitely an alternative sports land in a good way. I was a Midwest kid, grew up in Chicago, moved out here 25 years ago, so I can totally fake native here. I joked that I’ve done everything but shoot something meaning I haven’t hunted.

I love the outdoors here. I’ve got a boat, a trailer, we fished, we camp, hike, and everything. The city I grew up in, we all talked baseball and football. Out here, everybody has an alternative sport. Trampoline gyms, skiing, kickballs—there’s kickball leagues here. My business partner has been in a few of those. That’s kind of a fun thing. It’s a great place to do those kinds of things and a bunch of other stuff.

Marylou: Wonderful. Sean, thank you so much for your time and we enjoyed the conversation. We’ll be in touch and I will put all the notes on your page so people can get ahold of you to find out more. Thanks again.

Sean: Thanks.

Social interaction is part of the business of selling. In the past, salespeople often met with prospects face-to-face and spent time with them in their homes or in social settings. In today’s sales environment, many of these in-person interactions have been replaced by online interactions on social media sites. However, these digital interactions are just as important as the in-person interactions that they’ve replaced.

Today’s guest is Jon Ferrara. Jon is the founder and CEO of Nimble, a contact management solution that enhances basic contact information with richly detailed social information that helps you gain new insights about people in your network. This can help you deepen your social media relationships. Listen to the episode to hear what Jon has to say about the importance of social interactions in business, how Nimble can improve those interactions, and what role artificial intelligence plays in Nimble. You’ll also get a special offer from Jon.

Episode Highlights:

• What made Jon want to start Nimble
• The importance of the social aspect of prospecting and business
• How to scale social media interactions
• How Nimble works
• What an effective curation methodology looks like
• Tools that can help curate content and engage prospects in conversation
• How Nimble is reimagining CRM and what it looks like to use Nimble
• How artificial intelligence factors into Nimble
• Why AI can automate processes but not replace human beings
• A special offer from Jon

Resources:

Jon Ferrara

Email Jon at: Jon@nimble.com

Nimble

Special Offer: Sign up for the Nimble free trial. Before the end of the 2-week free trial, enter promo code JON40 to get 40% off Nimble for the first 3 months.

Transcript:

Marylou: Hi everyone. It’s Marylou Tyler. I have with me Jon Ferrara who’s the CEO of Nimble. I have known Jon, when I first started my company back in 1992; I went to go visit him. He was the founder and developer with another gentleman at the time of GoldMine Software. That software was the software that we all used in sales when I was selling to large accounts. John, welcome to the podcast. It’s so great to have you.

Jon: Marylou, it’s such a pleasure to be with you and your audience today. I really welcome the opportunity to connect with dear friends like you, as well as to inspire and educate other people because I think that’s why we are here on this planet, to help other people grow.

Marylou: Yeah, I am so impressed. Do you know you have your own Wikipedia page?

Jon: I didn’t create that. I don’t know who did but I will get paid to look at that.

Marylou: I was like, “Oh my gosh. Jon has his own Wikipedia page. I am talking to a legend.”

Jon: I hope there’s a bigger picture of me there.

Marylou: Yeah, you were on a suit, though. I don’t remember you wearing a suit ever but you do wear suits, I guess, all the time.

Jon: Yeah. I put one every once in a while. It what’s funny, is back in the day, I was an assistant engineer. That was my first job out of college when I got my computer science degree and I used to have to wear a suit every day. Back in the day, I had to work on hardware and my tie would always get caught on the back of the circuit board and I tear them. I never like to tear those things because they’re not cheap. Thank God we don’t have to wear suits everyday like that, like we used to.

Marylou: Yes. I am forever indebted because it was your software back in the day when I had my six accounts—the Bell operating companies were my accounts—which, six accounts doesn’t sound a lot but there’s a lot of people within those accounts that I had to go figure out where they were and figure out whether they needed what I had. I used GoldMine and I loved the way you organized the thought process and the way you designed that software was so intuitive. I’m assuming that Nimble is very similar.

You could have ridden off to the sunset when you sold GoldMine. What brought you back to this world? You said you want to continually educate, help people break through barriers. What was it that made you start Nimble?

Jon: After I sold GoldMine in 1999, I thought I’d go back and do something soon. I hit a little bump in the road about a year after selling the company and I ended up getting a head tumor. It was a pretty serious cancer. After going through the journey of healing, as well as growing—because if you think when you deal with a serious illness, you ideally take a look at yourself, your perspective and situation in the world—I came to the conclusion that we’re on this planet to grow by helping other people grow and the best way to grow is to connect with people you love.

As entrepreneur, I didn’t spend a lot of time with my family and friends. I was busy building. I decided I’d dedicate the next period of my life to being a present father, husband, friend, and member of my community. So I dedicated the next ten years of my life to raising three babies. I tell you, Marylou, you can really grow by being a present father and husband around three kids in the process thereof.

Around 2006, 2007, and 2008, once I got my kids into school, things began to change. I had more time and I began to use social media. I saw the way it’s going to change the way we work, play, buy, and sell, and I looked for a relationship manager that would help me to manage and connect to those conversations. I couldn’t find that. Now, it seems logical that contacts should be connected to conversations.

I found a dashboard called Hootsuite that enabled me to manage the conversations but it didn’t tie the conversations to the contacts. Ultimately, without conversations tied to contacts, you don’t have context. That was really what we built with GoldMine and that’s how I suffered as a salesperson.

Why I built GoldMine, was I was trying to manage relationships via email, calendar, my day timer, and spreadsheet with my forecast and really need to connect all those dots. That’s what GoldMine did. It unified email, contact, calendar, sales, market automation before Outlook or Salesforce existed. Most people can’t even imagine that Outlook didn’t exist at one point but it did. GoldMine not only was the first contact manager for teams, it was the first Sales Force Automation and CRM.

I continued that thought process when I build Nimble. I saw that social conversations weren’t tied to contacts so I looked for a contact manager that was social and I found basically that, really we all live today—back in those days when I started GoldMine, our Nimble—in Gmail or G Suite. That was our contact manager in the cloud. In Gmail/G Suite, your contacts aren’t connected to email or calendar. Now that’s a problem because you need to be able to bring up a contact record and view the history of interactions.

So I saw not only was the contact manager most people use not connected to email and calendar, but it wasn’t connected to social, either. I started to think, “Well, okay what about CRM, where is that today?” I started looking at CRM and I saw that CRM today isn’t really about relationships. It’s about reporting and management control. Today, CRM really stands for Customer Reporting Manager and not Customer Relationship Manager, and all CRMs weren’t social.

The big disconnect is this: Most people don’t live in their CRM. They live in their email and now, more and more of their social strains. People live in Outlook but they go to the CRM, defeat it so management gets off their back. I said to myself, “That’s so backwards because everybody lived in GoldMine back in the day because it’s a relationship manager, it was a contact manager.” What happened was Outlook came on board. Outlook separated contact management from CRM. Then Siebel and Salesforce was more about command, control, and reporting.

So I said, “Hmm, this seems like a business opportunity.” To build the next generation of GoldMine in the cloud with social that would be the first CRM that automagically worked for you by building itself and then work with you everywhere you work. I think the biggest cause of failure is CRM’s lack of use and then if you do use it, that data—there’s 225 million global businesses—less than 1% use any CRM which is a blue ocean opportunity to accompany that, say, can help people become more nimble, if you will.

Marylou: Right. This whole social, when you define, what does that mean to you? Is it living in social media or is it tracking the conversations that your ideal prospect is a part of during their interaction? I’m trying to get my arms around why social is important when we’re directly targeting people?

Jon: Sure. Marylou life is social. Business is social. People buy from people they like, know, and trust. Would you agree?

Marylou: Yeah.

Jon: And in the old days, business was totally social. You brought people to a ball game, a restaurant, a pub, or your home. Digitally, social media is just another means of connecting with human beings. If you think about it, relationships aren’t built on the business connection. They are built on the intimacy and trust that developed, and that what I call the five Fs of life: family, friend, food, fun, and fellowship. People don’t connect on the fact that they’re both sales experts or CEOs. They connect across the commonalities, the softer things in life. Social media gives you access to understand who somebody is, what they’re about, and what their business is about.

Marylou, in the old days, I used to teach my sales people. When you go in somebody’s office, look at their walls. Look at the books they read, the degree of the school they went to, the knick knacks they collect. All these things give you a clue into sharing a commonality that opens up that intimacy and trust, and social media’s just a new way to do it electronically at scale.

Marylou: The word ‘scale’ is really a word that I love to hear but I don’t associate scale with social. I don’t see how you scale.

Jon: Let me give you an example. I think that the sales funnel is broken, it’s dead. The sales funnel was created in France in 1880 and essentially, it’s not a funnel, it’s more like a pretzel. For you to stay top on mind with your buyer during their journey—because they’re not always in a buying cycle, they may be in a referring cycle or just not-ready-to-buy cycle, so for you to stay top of mind with your prospects, customers, and ideally their influencers as well, you need to establish yourself as a trusted adviser. You don’t do that by talking about yourself or your products. Nobody cares. They care about how they could become better, smarter, and faster.

So what you should be talking about is how you could help other people grow. For you to be able to do that today, you can’t do that through advertising, or monthly newsletters, or by emailing them how great you are, or your product is. You need to inspire and educate other people daily at scale.

The way that you that is you establish your identity—both personal and professional—and your company identity on the various social platforms: Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Pinterest, Instagram, Foursquare, Google+, Coinspace and AngelList, and more. Then, you put a great photo of yourself, you put a background of yourself, and you begin to share content that is inspirational, educational, not about yourself or your products, maybe 20%, 25% of that. But most of it, 70%–80% should be how you can help other people grow.

If you do that, it’s like dripping digital lures in the social business river outside of your office, and people bite on that. When they bite of that, they begin to see you as somebody who is trustworthy, who can help them grow in and around the areas of promise to your products and services, and I’ll show an example of that. Do you know who Tiffani Bova is?

Marylou: Yes.

Jon: Okay. So Tiffani Bova was the CRM analyst at Gartner back in the day and Salesforce has intelligently hired most of the top analysts to become spokespeople for Salesforce. So she now works for Salesforce and she works with a guy named John Taschek, who I taught about CRM back when he was an editor at PC Computing.

Nevertheless, Tiffani was sharing on social the other day that CRM isn’t about commanding control. It’s about relationships and empowering customer-facing business team members. Somebody said bullshit—that’s a reply to that tweet—and said, “It is about commanding control and winner sales managers’ going to loosen the grip and isn’t this what John Ferrara’s been teaching with GoldMine and building with Nimble?”

Nimble listens to signals in social and automatically enriches the people who are talking to or about you or your brand, maps data on them, and then uses AI to determine if one of those people matches the personas of who you should connect to, and alerted me. So, I Nimbled the person, Nimble automatically built a record, and told me that this person was the head of data in CRM at Disney. Disney’s a pretty large company and they happen to be in my area at Burbank, just over the hill.

I replied to his tweet and thanked him. Nimble gives me prospect information and gave me his email and phone number. Now, because of the way he talked about me, I felt permission to respond to him personally. I sent him an email thanking him and invited him for our connection and conversation. He followed up with a LinkedIn connection, and then messaged me on LinkedIn.

The conversation shifted from Twitter—which would have never happened if I wasn’t dripping these digital drips of inspirational, educational content in and around the area as promised to my product and services, sales, marketing, social, et cetera—and he didn’t begin to see me as a trusted adviser and then talked to me. So the conversation shifted from Twitter, to email, to LinkedIn messaging. Nimble followed me along that whole way, giving me the record on all those different flows. In LinkedIn, I learned that not only does he live in my town but his daughter goes to my school.

I believe that the more digital with, the more human we need to be, and we need to take these digital relationships into face-to-face connections. So I invited him for breakfast. We met for breakfast and I asked him a few questions. I just shut up and I just listened for forty minutes and he told me everything about him, what he does, and how I might be able to help him. I figured that out based on that listening. I added some value to what he is doing and he became an advocate where he’s online supporting Nimble and what we’re doing. Now, Disney is a customer.

That’s an example of scale using social to inspire and educate, which creates connections and conversations that you can then reel in into measurable business outcomes.

Marylou: That’s a great story. Wow. Is it proper to say curation of information to inspire and educate? Are we crafting all of this information ourselves? How does that look on a canvas in order for someone to get started doing that?

Jon: Sure. Marylou, you started out with the systems Genie, right?

Marylou: Yup.

Jon: And you’re probably math-computer science-oriented, right?

Marylou: Correct.

Jon: And by the way, you were a pioneer, thank you for blazing the trail for my daughter.

Marylou: Yes, I was a pioneer on multiple levels because I’m female and I’m Latin. So I hit all the boxes.

Jon: So, as a math-computer science major, they should read and study math-computer science. I wasn’t that good in English and I don’t really enjoy writing, although I become much better in my business career. Most business people aren’t necessarily good writers. Asking them to create, write original content and share that at scale is impossible.

You have written great books. You got Predictable Prospecting and other books. I think that’s helped build your brand and established yourself as a trusted adviser. But anybody listening to this today has forgotten more about their products and services in their industry than most of the people they sell to will ever know in their lives. Would you agree?

Marylou: Yes, I agree.

Jon: Okay, and that most people are passionate about the stuff that they do, read stuff regularly to become better, smarter, and faster at what they do. So imagine if all they did is periodically shared stuff that moves them.

Marylou: Yes.

Jon: That’s curation and that’s exactly what you should be doing but when you do it there’s a methodology to it. What you want to do is you want to use tools to find content and influencers that are creating that content, in and around the areas of promise your products and services.

There’s a product called BuzzSumo that does this really well, buzzsumo.com, and if you put in a category like sales or marketing or CRM or wine or gardening, you would get content and/or influencers that are in and around your area of products and services.

So then you can share that content and what you should do is hashtag the category with a hashtag—that’s a pound sign and the name of it, so if I was going to hashtag something about sales and marketing it will be #sales #marketing, and if it’s gardening or wine, you can figure out what the hashtags people talk around—and that helps people see the content.

Then you attribute the person’s name. So you want to say, @marylou or whatever the person’s name that created the content, and what that does is it helps people to see the content because people listen to these categories. People want to learn and grow, and they listen to content about what they’re passionate about, #sales, #marketing, #wine, #gardening, and the person that you shared the content of, their community listens to that person, and the person listens to people talking about them.

So you just killed three birds. You got people listening to that content, you got people listening to that person, and you got the person that you could all connect with. When you start having conversations with other thought leaders, eventually you become a thought leader. Because of new people walk in the room, they see you standing next to Marylou, they’re going to assume that you’re also a sales process expert as well.

If you want to build your brand in and around the areas of promise, your products, and services, simply curate content on a daily basis. It’s going to take the time that you drink your coffee in the morning and you basically use a tool like Buffer or Hootsuite to share the content and you use BuzzSumo to find the content, or just your regular places you read stuff, but then the most important thing you could do is then listen and engage.

If you drop fishing lures outside of your business boat into the social river and fish bite on and you don’t pull the fish in, if you don’t pull the hook and set the hook, if you don’t take it to the next level, then people are going to stop talking to you and your whole content strategy will have no effect. You need to then listen and engage in order the find ways to have value and I think that again gets back to your purpose to be on this planet, I think it to serve others. Service is the new sales.

Your job whenever you enter any engagement, is to figure out how you might add value to that person even if it means recommending somebody else’s products. But if you do is just share, if you share content on a daily basis, you’re on Twitter, you can do it literally every hour on the hour. On LinkedIn, you could probably do it three or four times a day. I even share business content on your Facebook stream because Facebook is just another channel of connecting on a personal level to business contacts. Then what happens is people going to +1, like, comment, engage. Then you need to use a tool like Nimble to reel them in, to start conversations that result in, ideally, a mutually beneficial, measurable business outcome.

Marylou: So let’s now break this down. I am a business developer who also closes accounts. I have the role of generating new business, closing that business, if luckily I can hand off the servicing to somebody else. What is my typical day in the life look like if I had Nimble sitting at my desktop? I’m also not relying on marketing to do any of this type of curation, I’m doing it myself, I get my coffee, I sit down to my desk. What’s a natural rhythm now for utilizing and engaging with a Nimble-like platform?

Jon: I think that you should make curation and sharing a regular part of your motion, whether you do it once a day or once every other day. I’d say spend 30 minutes a day curating content and sharing it appropriately. Then you want to plan your day and work your plan. What Nimble does is it goes in and unifies your email, contacts, and calendar from Gmail, G Suite, Office, and iCloud, and unifies the email and calendar to the contacts, and then enriches the contacts with people and company data. You don’t have to Google somebody before a meeting, you nimble them.

Then we create a dashboard that essentially gives you this glimpse of your day. You see all the people you’re meeting with and the background on those people, you’d see your pipeline, you would see your to-dos and tasks and calls you plan to make, and you’d also see signals of people of interest that have engaged with your social streams. Then from that dashboard you’d know where you really need to spend your time.

Generally speaking, I like to prepare before I speak to somebody so I’ll go to the Nimble record and I’ll get an update of who the person is, the history and interactions that my team and I had, as well as walking that person’s digital footprint and ideally I value to them so that when they do go into the meeting I’m prepared.

Then the most important thing is the follow-up and follow-through. Scheduling and taking some notes on the call and scheduling an auction is critical and I think that’s where we all fall down. Of course, I have to dig through my email hell each day. I use G Suite. Nimble then follows me in my workflow across all the apps. Not only do we unify your email, contact, calendar, social, contacts, and conversations in Nimble. We also unify over 100 different business apps.

If you’re using MailChimp or QuickBooks or whatever program you’re using, Nimble unifies all those contacts into Nimble, enriches them, and then we have a plugin into your browser, in Chrome, Safari, Firefox, and Edge, that enables you to take your contacts with you into all the apps you used up today.

So I’m going to my email and I do triage. It’s kind of like the battlefield. I look through the email and I look for ones that are important, and I’ll go into those and I’ll deal with them. When I open an email, Nimble sits there in my side tray at Gmail—this also happens to work in Office 365 as well—and it basically gives me the record of the person I open up the email from, if it exists in Nimble, and if it doesn’t, it automagically builds the record in seconds, giving me the people and company information, history, interactions, so that when I’m reading email, I have context and insights because they need to have context and insights.

Context is the history of interactions, insights is who are they, what their business is about. I need context and insights in order to be effective at the response that they do. Sometimes the response is replying to them, but if I have the history of interactions for myself and my team, I’m going to reply much more effectively.

But in many cases, it requires an exception. What I’m able to do because Nimble sits there with me as I schedule that task for myself or delegate it to my team, or I may need to message somebody about this person but ultimately, this is where the breakdown happens in business because your CRM and your contact tools are separate, and you have to go to the CRM to update those records, schedule those tasks, and log those notes. And that’s why we don’t do them.

That’s why Nimble, I think, is reimagining CRM because we’re the first CRM that works for you by building itself, and then we work with you wherever you’re working. So my flow goes from drinking coffee and doing a little curation, then going to my dashboard and preparing for my day, going into my email and doing some triage. Then I might go and look at some social streams and signals, like I go into Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn, I’ll see people talking to me or about me, and Nimble follows me in those places as well.

I might run into somebody who’s talking about me in Twitter of Facebook or LinkedIn, and could then nimble them, pull them out of that stream, build a record for them, and take the next step with them. I’m prospecting all day long.

Marylou: That’s what it sounds like and those signals are the catalyst. If you align the signals with your dream accounts—in some cases a lot of my clients have a top 20 dream account that they’re really want to watch and make sure that they’re top of mind as much as possible so that when they see that buying signal, that level of awareness moving to more interest and then evaluating, they are already in, they’re already there before that happens so that they can bring them into the fold and take them the rest if the way through the pipeline.

You mentioned artificial intelligence. Right now, some of us in our world are a little shaky when it comes to artificial intelligence because the way it’s described is as a replacement for what we do for our business development. How do you use artificial intelligence in your application?

Jon: Marylou, I think we miss stuff. I think that we’re human beings and there’s a thing called the Dunbar limit. What stage is that, you can only manage 100–200 people in your head at one time. Most people have thousands of connections. If you do what I’m teaching you to do, in order to build your brand and grow your network by sharing content, to set yourself up to the trusted adviser so you’re top of mind with not only your prospects and customers but their influencers throughout their customer journey, you’re going to get over-connected and over-communicated. It will happen because that is the nature of digital conversations. So you need AI to listen to your signals to surface people that matter. How many times have you missed an email from somebody important, Marylou?

Marylou: A lot. In fact I was walking with my daughter last night and it dawned on me that I got an email a week ago from somebody I meant to respond to and I still haven’t done that.

Jon: Yes and shouldn’t software listen to your signals and enrich them with people, company, and data to enable you to not miss signals like that person from Disney that was talking about me that never would have seen? Or an email from somebody you’ve had historical appointments and conversations with that’s going to be different than a blind Outreach.io prospecting email that’s automated from some sales person that you have never met with or spoke with? You almost need that AI ability to see through the noise and to be able to connect with people that matters most.

Marylou: But it doesn’t replace you in that initial conversation.

Jon: No, of course not.

Marylou: They were showing something recently where they connected, made an appointment, all under the guise of business developer but it was the AI system that did it.

Jon: It’s possible to do that. I think it’s entirely possible to completely automate some portions of prospecting but it will never replace human beings because I think that the more digital we get, the more human we need to be and that a handwritten note is going to trump any automated email outreach, and that ultimately by being human you stand out and you will succeed far beyond any kind of automation you could ever apply to business and sales.

Marylou: Very well said. Well Jon, we’ve extended our time. I’m so appreciative that you came on the call today. How can we reach you or what’s the best path to get more information about Nimble, your company, your message, et cetera?

Jon: First off, please connect with me and let me know how I might be of service to you. I’m easy to find. You can Google me, Jon Ferrara. You can Nimble me if you sign up for Nimble at nimble.com. My email’s jon@nimble.com. It’s easy.

Marylou: And he has his own Wikipedia page, people.

Jon: Yeah.

Marylou: That’s so great. Well, thank you so much for being on the show and I will put all the information in the show notes. I would highly recommend for those of you who are struggling with contact management, this conversation context contact triage that Jon was talking about, definitely look at the Nimble software. You guys hold regular webinars on how to use the software, etcetera, what it’s all about?

Jon: We have daily Q&A and we could do one-on-one as well. But Marylou, I want to leave you with a thought.

Marylou: Yes,

Jon: Your network is your net worth. Your personal brand plus your professional network will have to achieve your goals in life and that most people don’t manage their golden Rolodex very well. Would you agree?

Marylou: I agree 100%

Jon: Okay. Most people don’t have a place. They put them as precious contacts in and use them on a regular basis. Nimble can either be your social, sales, and marketing CRM, or work within the existing social, sales, and marketing CRM that you’re forced to use at work. I think that anybody listening to this today should have their own personal Nimble account and it will work within Salesforce or HubSpot CRM or any CRM that they use because we’ll bidirectionally synchronize with the CRM and help them any contact they prospect will automatically go into the CRM.

They could then take their network with them throughout the whole process of the flow. I’m going to give your audience a gift. If you sign up for a trial of Nimble, before the end of the two-week trial if you enter JON40, you’re going to get 40% off your first three months. So you have no excuse. The cost of Nimble is going to be less than a burger that you buy for lunch, okay?

Marylou: Perfect. Yup. Thank you so much for that. I’ll put that in the notes, everybody, but yes. In fact, if you’re going to be taking one of my classes, we’re going to start with by using the CRM to help us understand the process of prospecting and how it integrates, as Jon said, it goes with you wherever you go. I love that concept and it’s very similar to what we had way back in the day when there was this product called GoldMine. It gave us and opened up the world to us, being able to manage our relationships in a way that was authentic and very consistent. So, thank you for that, Jon, for that original software. Appreciate it.

Jon: You bet, Marylou. Thank you for being a friend and a supporter of my journey and my dreams. I think we share that together and we thrive in helping others. That’s why I think I love you so much.

Marylou: Oh, well, thank you, Jon. Well, take it easy and thank you again for joining us. Appreciate it.

Jon: Thank you.

Marylou: Wonderful. Wow. I took so many notes. I think what I’m going to do is take this conversation because we start our class on Monday and I’m going to do a demo of how I’m using Nimble. Some of this dialog that you and I have had really cements the why behind a tool like this is so vital as they’re learning how to become better at prospecting and starting those conversations. Perfect segue into getting them comfortable with this is how we use it, this is why it’s important, and this is how it’s going to transform your business development life. So thank you for that.

Jon: Cool. You have a wonderful day.

Marylou: Thank you. You too.

Jon: Make sure you share a link with Michaela so we can amplify the shares once you get it setup and online.

Marylou: Yes, I have her. I will update her regularly. I’ll make sure that once we get rolling on this, I’ll share. I told her I’m going to share everything that I put together so that in the event we decide to do something like this going forward in a joint venture type of thing. She’ll have all the information and can read through what’s important for your audience and vice-versa in the business development side of life. I’m so excited that we’re working together on this project. That’s great.

Jon: I have an idea. There are a lot of companies out there that onboard new interns and students to their companies, to try and turn them into sales people. For example, Northwestern Mutual. You’ve heard of Northwestern?

Marylou: Oh yes.

Jon: Northwestern Mutual is where my son is doing an internship. They’re teaching him prospecting. He said, “Dad, they just thrown me into the fire. I got one day of training, I’m on the phone cold-calling people,” and I said, “Well, they could do a better job with that.” And I started thinking, I think, Marylou, that this is a business opportunity that most of these companies don’t really teach prospecting as it is today or tools necessary to do it. I think that what you’re doing with your students can be translated into companies like Northwestern at scale.

As my son goes through the process, I’m going to figure out who are the decision makers and maybe what you could do is you could do some sort of a class or webinar or something that could lead to not just doing something Northwestern but other companies like them. Also, I think that this can be turned into courseware in a class where you can then work with other peers at other colleges to implement some sort of curriculum that could be utilized in colleges across the nation.

Marylou: Yeah and I really like that, too. I taught a class in prospecting at Drake University here in Des Moines. They have 15 marketing classes, 0 sales classes. So I went to them, I said, “Let’s try prospecting classes and see how it goes over.” They loved it. It was real-life world stuff and it was the executive MBA program. These folks, some of them were working already in companies. They weren’t necessarily responsible for revenue but they had some exposure to business development but had no idea where to begin.

So I agree. Getting this into curriculum that could be used in colleges for kids coming out that want to get a taste for sales, it would be just a great way to help those students so that they aren’t like your son, just sinking and swimming, just thrown in the deep-end kind of thing, which is still prevalent today. Most of the clients that work with that are in the larger enterprises do sales like it was back in the 1980s.

Jon: Yeah and that’s why I really want to support you in this process of the class to make sure that that is incredibly successful. So please let me know what I can do. I’m willing to do a webinar for your class and just share a little bit of inspiration education, if you feel that it might be beneficial.

Marylou: I would love to do that. I’ll talk to Michaela and see where we can get that fit in because I want them to have a baseline of access to Nimble first so they’re just not listening to. I like the kind of webinars where they’re actionable in nature, especially in class. And because I’m doing accreditation for this particular class, I told them already, this is learning and doing. It’s not sitting back listening to your teacher. It’s not that kind of class.

I think that real life examples as they’re working through it will put in my pipeline. When I was working with Michaela, the opportunity to close the pipeline comes standard with Nimble but there wasn’t anything for prospecting the way I do it, so we added in that pipeline. I want them to be all set up with that pipeline if we would have a webinar with you, going through, “Okay, here the day in a life.” I think that’s where we really need for them is don’t get overwhelmed, it takes a portion of time, but any good habit takes repetition to discipline to then eventually become habit.

Jon: Cool. All right, let me know how I can be of service.

Marylou: Will do. Thanks, Jon.

Jon: Thank you, Marylou.

Marylou: See you later.

Jon: Bye-bye.

In a world powered by social media, social selling is a crucial aspect of sales. Social media allows salespeople to interact with prospects in a way that provides real value for those prospects. You can answer questions and offer useful content in a way that not only shows the prospect why they want to buy, but also why they would want to do business with you personally. Social selling allows you to create more loyal, engaged customers.

Today’s guest is Brynne Tillman. She’s an authority on social selling and the author of the book The LinkedIn Sales Playbook: A Tactical Guide to Social Selling. Listen to the episode to learn more about how social selling can be used to bring more predictability and reliability to your sales pipeline.

Episode Highlights:

• How Brynne’s book lays out the step-by-step social selling process for LinkedIn
• The four major pieces of social selling
• How to take your LinkedIn profile from resume to resource
• When to connect with and message prospects on LinkedIn
• How you can use LinkedIn to identify and target connections of your connections
• How to set goals for social selling on LinkedIn
• Metrics that can help track the success of social sales
• What a typical scenario for onboarding of social selling environment for sales looks like
• Brynne’s work with Vangreso, and how she got started with that team

Resources:

Brynne Tillman

The LinkedIn Sales Playbook: A Tactical Guide to Social Selling

Vengreso

Transcript:

Marylou: Hi everyone, it’s Marylou Tyler. This week’s guest is one of the utmost, formative experts in everything social selling. I met Brynne, at a trade show, I think it was. When I went to their booth, she’ll tell you about the other professionals with whom she works. I was just blown away by the knowledge of what they know about social selling.

I’ve asked Brynne to come on the podcast today because not only is she the author of The LinkedIn Sales Playbook: A Tactical Guide to Social Selling, which you can get on Amazon and probably other places, too. She is really very knowledgeable about how to incorporate social selling into what we do––our direct outreach.

The reason why you listen to my podcast is all about predictability. There may be a way to utilize social selling to help with that consistent predictability and repeatability that we’re looking for in building our pipelines. Brynne, welcome to the podcast.

Brynne: Thank you so much for having me. I’m excited to be here today.

Marylou: You are one of, I think four or five now, that have come together as a group of experts to help us understand what social selling is, how to leverage it in our business? I’d like to talk about prospecting because that’s my favorite topic. I’m sure you’ve covered the entire pipeline. Also, understand where we begin if we’re a newbie. I consider myself a newbie. I have connections on LinkedIn that I don’t really know what to do with.

You could start wherever you want. I’m really intrigued by the collection of professionals that are now your team. The floor is yours. The first question I always have is, the title is the Tactical Guide to Social Selling, what does that mean?

Brynne: Oh, yes. My book. My book is The LinkedIn Sales Playbook: A Tactical Guide to Social Selling. It’s exactly what it is––it walks you step by step from the first minute all the way through the social selling journey for not only LinkedIn, but there’s a little Twitter in there, a bit.

Primarily, LinkedIn and it really covers essentially the four major areas of social selling, which is first, the profile which is your foundation. Having you present yourself, the thought leader and subject matter expert, attract, teach and engage your buyers, get them serious and wanting to take your call.

The second piece is having engaged in your new and existing network and stay top of mind. Be seen as a thought leader through sharing content, both original and curated. Ultimately, build a reputation and credibility as the subject matter expert. The third one is something which I totally, absolutely, I’m obsessed with and it is how do we find and engage with targeted stakeholders by leveraging our current network to get warm introductions and how do we get on the radar of people that we would normally have cold called and warmed up, so by the time we get on the call, probably scheduled and they’re excited to talk to us.

The fourth piece which I think is absolutely critical is content. How are we feeding our network of thought leadership––thoughts, ideas, strategies, and insights––that lead them back to our solution.

Marylou: Okay, wow. Foundation is profile. Is LinkedIn is still seen as a glorified job description, talking about what it is you do in terms of in the eyes of getting another job or is profile the selling piece––the big business card, the billboard of who you are as a professional and how you help others?

Brynne: That’s a great question. If you are in business development, you really want to make sure that you are building your profile, but engaging your targeted audience. A glorified resume doesn’t do it.

Years ago, I coined the term from some resume to resource, but then it sort of stuck. I think that’s really the goal, what does our audience care about. In fact, let’s go one level higher and say, “What is our goal of social selling?” In most cases, the goal of social selling is to get more phone calls and qualified buyers. It’s not to actually sell anything, it’s to start to call people on wanting to have a conversation.

If you look at it from that perspective, then we have to make sure that everything that we’re doing is working for that goal and that includes our profile. They don’t about your mission, your passion, your years in business. Yes, you haven’t earned the right for them to care about you personally, all they care about is what’s the value to them.

When you can convert a certain resume or a resource and you’re providing insights, you are creating both curiosity and credibility. When you get the right person at the right time, then they’re going to raise their hands and want to have a conversation.

Marylou: When you say raise their hand, is that connecting with you? Or is that the fact that they viewed your profile? For us, in direct outreach, there are three areas that we can engage. We obviously can engage when someone replies to our request. We can also engage when someone links through to a content piece that we attached in our email or left a voicemail and directed them to.

At the very high level, if they open our email, that could be enough for us to connect that way. What is the LinkedIn sort of hierarchy of when it’s appropriate to start connecting and start sending messages to prospects?

Brynne: I love the cadence part of that question of versus hierarchy of what do we do to grab their attention and get them to our profile and get them to a phone call?

There are a few things that you can do initially before you connect with them. You can like, comment, and engage on content that they’ve already shared. You can follow them. You can engage with people in their inner circle. If they actually engage with people on LinkedIn, you can engage with them.

You can drop your presents in little mini bite-sized pieces and then when you actually do reach out on LinkedIn. “Hey, I’ve been following you for a couple of days, I see some content that you shared or you’ve engage on. I had a chance to look at your profile. I’m really interested in…” say something personal about them. “I’d love to connect and I have some insights I can share with you once we do.” You connect with them. Then, you send a welcome message.

You determine, “What is my cadence of a welcome message?” Is my cadence to get them to pieces of content? Is it to ask them for a phone call? How quickly does it make sense? Maybe the next piece is, “Thank you so much for connecting with me on LinkedIn. I’m not sure if you’re using LinkedIn for sales, but I wanted to share these resources with you that really may be of benefit. I’d love to hear your feedback.”

Now, you’ve provided something of value and I’m in PointDrive which is an enterprise level Sales Navigator product. I can see PointDrive––it’s sort of a landing page of content. I can see stopped by, how long they were there, what they downloaded. That’s pretty cool.

Now, I engage with them based on what they’ve read. Of course, I want to ask that question when they ask that question if I know that they clicked through, I can certainly respond to them with that knowledge. If I know they didn’t click through, I can respond to them with that knowledge.

I would say, if I end most my messaging with either, “I’d love to hear your feedback,” or “Can I ask you a question?” I get probably 10% to 20% of those folks that actually start a conversation.

Marylou: That’s a pretty good number.

Brynne: It’s pretty good, yeah. The other piece is how do I warm them before I have a phone call with them? If I share a really good piece of insight with them, something that’s really moving, I may follow up with a message that now says, “I hope you’ve got some value from the content I shared. I’d love to jump on a quick call and share some additional insights specifically to your situation. Even if we never worked together, I’m confident the call will provide a lot of value. There’s a link to my calendar. Pick a time that works best for you.” Now, that’s one way.

If I’m going to reach out, I could say, “I’ll be reaching out next week. I’d love to share additional insights. If you’d like to schedule sooner, here in my calendar.” When you do that, you’ve actually told them that you will be calling them. Even if there’s a gatekeeper, “Is she expecting your call?” “Yes.” Like you said, you’re calling.

Marylou: Right. Like that as well. We do a little bit of mini test in one of my classes since I’m not a LinkedIn expert. We did a high level permission-based test where we sent to a prospect that we were hoping to connect with. We told him about an article that we had written, that we thought maybe of interest to them.

The email or that message in LinkedIn just really said, “Please, get back to me if you think this article is of interest and I’ll send you the link.” We didn’t even include the link inside the body of that first request. We just put the fact that we had this document, we gave them some results of what they could expect if they were to read the document and implement. Then, politely asked them to get back to us with the link.

We had in some cases, 40% return. For every 100 we sent out, manually, because we didn’t have a tool to do any type of automated process, we got 40 back, saying, “Yeah, send me the link. I’d love to see what you’ve got.”

Brynne: Yeah, that’s great.

Marylou: Yeah. That’s why I’m excited about this, but not really sure from there how to mechanize that process, so that you do this on a daily basis or whenever you’re prospecting, it becomes a habit to reach out to “X” number of people with this type of cadence as you call it. With the goal, its call action, may be different depending on what it is that you’re trying to accomplish. It seems to me what you’re saying is there’s a rhythm here. There’s maybe a daily interaction of doing this?

Brynne: Yup.

Marylou: Yeah, okay. Based on segmenting accounts and doing all that just like we do?

Brynne: This is sales. It’s just using social as a tool. It’s certainly not siloed by any means. It really does need to align with whatever your other sales activities are. Really, social selling makes it all easier. It’s the best way to look at it.

The highest level of logic of LinkedIn, LinkedIn provides that no other tool in the world does, is the ability to search and filter your connection’s connection. You can identify you and your network, can help you gain access to targeted people. There are lot of different ways to this with your ABM or Account Based Marketing, an account based salesperson, or if the world is your oyster, whatever that looks like, you do, you figure out who is your ideal client, your buyer, using LinkedIn filter.

Then we use the second degree filter, so who in your network knows these ideal people. Sometimes they’ll be hundreds if not thousands. It’s amazing the level of connection that one degree holds for us. Now, I have the opportunity to either look broadly or look at one-person-connection and see who they know.

If it is a networking opportunity where I’m meeting someone for coffee, I’ll say, “Hey, these are my connections, I have 15-20 names I can do the same and when we’re together, we can go on down to 2-3 meaningful introduction.”

If it’s a client, how am I identifying who that client is? And positioning myself to ask them for referrals? Those are all really important things to do.

If you’re going mass scale and want to connect with 10 new people every single day, you need to have a plan around that. Maybe, it’s three companies a week or five, maybe it is a company a day. If you’re going after companies, maybe you’re going after particular titles in certain industries like you’ve got to figure out, “What I want to do? How much time do I want to invest? What is my biggest bang for the buck?” When it comes to prospecting.

If it’s a call center and you’re expected to make 40 outbound or 40 conversations a day, sometimes, when I start working with a client if they’re outbound, that they’re responsible to do. We might modify that and say, “You know what? The goal isn’t really 40 outbound, but five meaningful conversations.” It may not be necessarily an outbound call. It might be some schedule because I had a great engagement on LinkedIn. We gave them a LinkedIn schedule, a call with me.

Marylou: Right.

Brynne: But it’s probably worth 40 calls, one of those is probably worth 40 upend dials. It’s reevaluating what are our ultimate goal is, and when I talk to––I know what to expect on inside sales, although, we don’t do it across the board, sometimes, I will start with, “So, what is your goal for your reps?” It’s like, “45 calls a day. 45 calls a day.” I say, “That’s really your goal?” “Yes, that’s our goal.” Well, it’s actually not your goal. It should be how many people became a lead? How many leads are we getting? How many meaningful conversations are we having?

If you think 45, maybe 10 can do it. Maybe you need 100 to do it, but let’s set the goal as a results goal that we really want to do. The activity goal has to become second. This is getting what we want to achieve and then what activity can we do to get the right goal.

A lot of times, just dials isn’t going to get up there. Believe me, you have to have conversations, but our goal is more conversations.

There are a lot of ways to warm things up and get people not just picking up the phone when you call, but excited to talk to you because you are now a thought leader that they come to with insights and can guide them.

I may have gone on a little off tangent there, but I think it’s really important as sales leaders that we look at, is what we’re doing working toward our goal? Or is it working towards sort of this number that we’ve put out there because we think it means something?

Marylou: That’s perfect. With my students, we work on what we call a waterfall. We start with the number of opportunities we’re looking to generate, let’s say, in a month. From there, we look to see, how many discovery calls? Qualification calls? Were you meeting the decision makers together with your team, their team? How many of those do we need in order to generate the number of opportunities that we’re looking for? We just keep working it up, up the pipeline, up the funnel, until we get to the number of, in our case, phone conversations or emails that are meaningful in nature that get us that first meeting.

It sounds very similar for social selling, but we actually have benchmarks. We actually have at each step, a goal in mind to work towards, and we start with the benchmark. We may exceed it or we may fall short depending on the industry, the prospect types, et cetera, the roles, but we have sort of a baseline of that waterfall. Does something like that exist for social selling? Or is it because of the nature of social selling and the personas that it’s difficult to do that?

Brynne: No, I mean, there is a chastity of the CRM and we’ll put all of the stages. Remember, for us, the social selling is aligned with our selling. It’s just a tool that we’re using, too, as a sales process. Depending on where you want to start to measure, if you add them into the CRM and you just track it from there.

There are other metrics that you can measure like the number of new right connection out of the search. Let’s say we’re selling to CEOs in the medical field. We can do a search in someone’s connections, and say, you have nine and then in a month, when we’ll meet, you’ll have 40. Now, I know you’ve got 31 new connections. We can look at that as one of the benchmarks.

Now, we can see if our goal was 40 and we’ve got 31. We can see, did that hurt the rest of the benchmark? Let’s say we wanted 25 and you’ve got 31 and you still didn’t meet your future benchmark, then maybe 25 was the wrong number. We start to use those––we have to adjust the benchmark. It’s usually five, six, or seven, depending on how long the process is. It could be as little as three for very low cost sales like a fast transaction.

If you can’t see where it’s broken, you can’t fix it. You need to make sure that you’re measuring at each stage and then look at where––did this stage could get you to the next one and meet your goal? Each stage, they’ll want it, so you get to that result. You can easily see where the chain is broken and where the system is failing so you can change it.

Marylou: That’s great. I like that because I like the idea of marking, I call it on a freeway, we’re marking the mile markers, which are the meaningful conversations. We may have points of interests along the freeway that are more meaningful than just the mile markers. Those are the stages.

We also want to attract what goes out––what fell out and why? So that in the next search that we do to build our members, to go after, we’ll be smarter with our segmentation so that our numbers should improve. It does sound like it’s a crawl, walk, run, type of rap, which I’m happy to hear that, too. You’ve got to put some skin in the game to figure out where it is your sweet spot is and it is not the same for everybody.

Brynne: That’s correct. There are some basics that can work across the board, they’re definitely foundational KPIs that we can work off of. But, when we work with the sales team, we try to really customize it, but align it with their existing stages, make sure that it works into their CRM, and that we’re attracting everything appropriately, that the KPIs that we’ve set are based on proven data in the past, so it’s not like we’re not starting from scratch every single time. Every company tends to be slightly different.

Marylou: We know that from the work that we do in outreach, a case and point would be, we did a campaign where we were looking at liaisons––IT liaison people. We found in our house list that there were 500 of those that we can call into and go after. When we did a LinkedIn search, there were 50,000. Same role, same process, so we had really have to adjust where we were going to put social selling into that mix because we weren’t going to update our list––our house list at all. We needed to really start looking at the social aspect as one of our main channels for prospecting.

Once we understood that, list size differences, we were able to engage accordingly with the folks, in this case, on LinkedIn. It made a big difference for us to be able to take a universe of people that would be qualified to have that first meeting with. Although, most of them sat in the social environment as opposed to inside the company list.

Brynne: Interesting.

Marylou: You’ve mentioned a couple of times, when we go in with the process, tell us about the relationship you have now and how a typical engagement works from the standpoint of the foundation? I’m a company who is wanting to invest sales time using social selling, not really sure where to begin. I also have right now an inbound channel that generates maybe 25% of our revenue. The rest of it is at direct outreach.

I know the importance of social selling, but I’m not really sure how to go about that. Can you talk us through a typical scenario for onboarding of social selling environment for sales?

Brynne: There’s really 10 major steps. The very first one is defining the KPIs in your goal and the desired outcome of the program. If you don’t do that, it’s impossible to put together a program. A lot of people will start a social selling program and not have those KPIs identified. You can never measure if it is working or not if you don’t do it, so start in KPIs.

The second one is buyer identification and mapping. A lot of times in sales, we’ve been taught in marketing to create this persona of the people that we’re going after. I don’t care if they’re married with three kids, a dog and a Mercedes. That’s not what I’m looking for. What I’m looking for are the filters inside of LinkedIn that make up my perfect buyer or as close as I can get based on how I can search for them.

Sometimes it comes with kind of breaking down the search features of our ideal clients today, but we really work at creating identification mapping and search strings that will make sure that we are getting as close to the ideal buyer as possible when we’re doing our searches.

The next piece is identifying the content strategy––curation, creation, and distribution. As an organization, what’s our content strategy? Once we get through that, we are able to choose our digital tools or productivity tools which can be anything from free Chrome extensions like autotext standard to scheduling tools like Calendly, or with Sales Navigator, using Twitter, or we’re using an employee advocacy tool content sharing platform that the organizations can define, “What tools are we using?” And make sure that it’s all through IP and all that stuff.

Then, we develop our customized playbook that’s aligned with our current sales process. My book is a generic playbook. The book that is on Amazon. We’ve kind of tweaked that and customized it for each client, that comes up.

Customize it for each client which includes––which is actually––it goes into step six, but includes developing custom profile taglines, banners, job description, summary, to make that we can surge the client in our playbook, so that they can easily copy and paste their profile and tweak it if they want to make it personal, but we know that sales people, if we just tell them to do it and undo it if we serve it up to them on a silver platter, there’s a better chance that they’ll implement it.

But also, in that playbook, what is a daily activity that lead to our KPIs. We actually will do that reverse exercise that you talked a little bit about. We do something very similar, but we identify what should the folks be doing on a daily basis.

Step seven is the training. That’s when we roll it all out, train the people how to do it, get them feeling comfortable with the playbook, understanding what their daily activity is. Usually, we do workshops, so that they are practicing and playing that day. We actually have people, a lot of times we get the, “Oh, I can’t pull my people out of the fields for the day.” I’m like, “You’re going to get more appointments in a day in a workshop than you would if you’re in the field.” It’s really productive.

We hope to the companies that they’re driving adoption through gamification, we can help with that, but gamification and recognition is a big deal and we have to obviously measure and we do a lot of––the shops continue, what are we effectively doing and continue doing, so we’ve got to make sure that we are effective and then we coach the teams to improve.

Marylou: Okay. Very cool.

Brynne: I think I got them all.

Marylou: If you missed any, everybody knows where to find your book on Amazon. The LinkedIn Sales Playbook: A Tactical Guide to Social Selling. Brynne’s said she’s outlined the playbook––a generic one smack dab in that book. Start smart, download that, get an understanding of that.

Lastly, I want to leave everybody with your connection with the team that you’ve started. I guess, it’s about a year ago now with Vengreso. If you’ll give us the “why” behind that, how you guys came together, and what your charter is to help us get better at social selling.

Brynne: Thank you. There were a lot of individuals in the marketplace, they were sort of all solopreneurs, some slight entrepreneurs, but really just a lot of really good people in the marketplace, and Mario who is the CEO of Vengreso approached each of us individually and said, “How do you like to join?” They’re all forces.

I don’t think any of us thought that he could make it happen. Initially, I’m like, “Yeah, I really appreciate it, and Viveka von Rosen, “I’ll talk to you about it.” Actually, I was the first one that said, “If you can get them, I’ll say yes.” But as we all sort of had, and I think everyone––no one said, “Oh, my gosh, that’s going to happen.” We all thought it was a great idea, but he pulled pulled it together and really, it’s been amazing just collaborating with some of the best minds in the business and really creating a company that’s really making a difference at scale now, so if we could do this for larger companies where we each kind of thought we could, but not nearly the way that we can in other worlds.

Marylou: Right. The team members, Mario Martinez, Viveka von Rosen.

Brynne: Kurt Shaver and Bernie Borges.

Marylou: All right. Great team. For anyone who’s listening to this and wants more information on Vengreso, I’ll put it in the show notes of Brynne– of how to get ahold of her, how to get ahold of the company.

Please, if you’re really considering adding social selling as a leverage for prospecting, get her book. It’s a great way for you to get started and get started smart instead of just like she said, you’ve got to start with those KPIs. It’s the same thing as my world. If you don’t do that work, you’ll never really know how successful you can be or how to scale it or even where to begin.

I think that’s a great advice to follow those steps in the order that she indicated and that’s also in the book.

Brynne, thank you so much for being a guest on the podcast. We wish you the best with your new company and the team and look forward to reading more and learning more from you all as time progresses because LinkedIn is one of those beasts that changes every 10 seconds, it seems like. Thanks again for your time.

Brynne: Thank you. Great. Thanks so much.

How can you keep yourself at the top of your prospects’ and clients’ minds? LinkedIn is a powerful tool that can help you do just that, but only if you know how to use it. Unfortunately, LinkedIn can also be confusing and changeable, and even if you have a LinkedIn profile, you may not know how to leverage it to get the most out of it.

Today’s guest is Viveka von Rosen. Viveka is an author, speaker, and LinkedIn expert. She’s also a CVO & Co-founder of Vangreso, a digital sales solution provider that works with people to help create their personal brand online and create content for sales. Listen to the episode to learn more about what Vangreso has to offer, as well as what Viveka has to say about the benefits of LinkedIn, the challenges of using LinkedIn more effectively, and what you should do to turn your LinkedIn profile into a useful resource.

Episode Highlights:

• Viveka’s company and what they do
• The benefits that Viveka sees in LinkedIn
• The challenges of using LinkedIn
• Where to start learning how to use LinkedIn
• How LinkedIn can help you establish your brand within your company
• The importance of consistency when using LinkedIn
• Why it’s important to make your LinkedIn profile into a useful resource
• How creating a LinkedIn community to share content can drive visibility
• The importance of engaging with people who engage with the content on your LinkedIn feed
• How to use LinkedIn’s analytics
• How LinkedIn allows you to monitor and take advantage of opportunities presented when prospects move from one company to another
• What to do after creating a client-facing LinkedIn profile

Resources:

Viveka von Rosen

Vengreso

Email Viveka at: viveka@vengreso.com

Transcript: 

Marylou: Hi everybody, it’s Marylou Tyler, and this week’s guest is Viveka von Rosen. She is the foremost authority, in my humble opinion, on LinkedIn, all things LinkedIn and really all things social selling and it’s such a mystical thing for people like me who are targeted, direct, list-based, to have someone come along and actually be able to replicate what I do, but in the social world. I’m going to let her introduce the company that she works with and how they came together, because it’s a great story, but I’ll totally screw it up if I say. Without further ado, Viveka, welcome to the podcast.

Viveka: Thank you so much. I said you can call me an authority, but thank you for almost calling me the––I’m thrilled to be here. This is what I love about this whole social community, recently, four of my competitors and I got together and decided to form a new company which is called Vengreso. I’m one of the cool founders obviously of Vengreso.

We’re really a digital sales solution provider. What we mean by that or other people call it social selling, but we really want to work with people as far as creating their personal brand online, as far as creating that content for sales so that we keep in touch, or that our clients keep in touch and keep on top of mind with their audience, and with their prospects.

The whole social selling piece that comes along with that as far as lead generation, and using some of the tools out there of which I am a ginormous fan of LinkedIn despite its ups and downs, and its purchases, and its changes, which seem to happen every time I release something big and new, a book, or a program, LinkedIn decides to change.

Nonetheless, it’s still I think especially in the B2B world, one of the most powerful tools that we can use for the things I just mentioned; for that personal branding, for lead generation, and for content marketing, and engagement, and creating that top of mind awareness all coming back to building that know, like, and trust factor, all things being equal, people do business with people they know, like, and trust. It’s just another tool in the long run. That was a really long run-on sentence there. Get it all in one sentence and don’t breathe.

Marylou: My experience with LinkedIn is a double-edged sword really in a lot of ways because I’m used to the mechanization of targeted outreach. When I get over to LinkedIn, I’m like fumble fingers. I don’t know where to begin to how to do whatever I need to do.

I know you’re going to laugh at my story but I had a very small workshop that I did in Des Moine, Iowa and I do it every year as a thank you to the city and also to update my headshots because my hair is getting grayer, and grayer as I get into the 60 range of age.

I update that every year, and I decided this is the perfect time to use a tool to reach out to my gigantic network on LinkedIn, and I could isolate my people in Iowa to invite them to the event. I found a tool to do that, and I woke up and sent 30 emails a day, that’s all I did people, not 3 million, not 3,000, not 300, 30 emails a day and I ended up lo and behold filling the butts in seats for the workshops. I thought this was really cool. Then I stopped using it, because I’ve only needed it for the one time thing. LinkedIn wrote to me saying, “You have unauthorized use of a tool, you’re going to be suspended from LinkedIn if you continue to use it.”

Viveka: Yeah, we’re going to put you in LinkedIn jail.

Marylou: That scared me, I think started the marketing process, the campaign, 30 emails a day over the course of five business days, I sent a whopping 150 emails, which I could have done Control C, Control V.

There is almost an off putting nature to LinkedIn, so when I hear you say, build your top of mind, your know, like, and trust, how the heck do you do that with LinkedIn? Where do you begin with dummies like me, a dummy 101 course or something. How does that work?

Viveka: It’s not your fault because A, there’s companies out there who are like, “We’ll build thousands and thousands of leads for you. We’ll generate millions of touches for you on LinkedIn.”

What they don’t tell you is that they’re using third party apps and that that’ll probably get your LinkedIn profile if not shut down, definitely like you said, you’ll get the warning letter, you’ll get thrown in jail.

Ironically you said, “I could have done copy paste.” I’ve got an assistant and I used to love all of those tools because it was, it was kind of one touch shopping.

LinkedIn is very much against third party apps and so I had my assistant go in and copy paste, and LinkedIn still restricted my account, and that was just with my assistant doing it manually. They’re very touchy about that right now.

Here’s the thing, it’s funny because LinkedIn is so unclear in people’s minds as to what the purpose of it is. A lot of people especially in the B2B space, especially executives, still think of it just as an online resume, and maybe a recruitment tool.

They might have their profile that they popped up there in 2007 and haven’t looked at since, and an inbox full of messages and leads that they don’t even know about because they’ve got this perception or someone in their company told them back in 2007, “You have to be on LinkedIn.” They’re like, “Okay, I will.” And that was that.

To the extreme of people out there going, “You can contact anyone you want to in the whole entire world on LinkedIn,” which in some ways is true but it’s not as easy as all that, or we’d all be using it.

You get these third party tools that are on the outside seem very powerful as far as lead generation, but realistically not so much, and then you get LinkedIn’s paid accounts, a Sales Navigator, I’m a fan of.

Again, they don’t really tell you how to use them, and then they give you these tools. It’s like giving fire to a baby. “Here’s a bunch of emails, go piss people off.”

Marylou: I give you permission. I’ll wave a magic wand over your head to give you permission just to be unpleasantly persistent.

Viveka: Here’s some ads, go spend a bunch of money without any kind of decent targeting and tell the world that they don’t work. They’re great tools, but it is, it’s fire to a baby, and people don’t know how to use it, and so LinkedIn gets a bad rep, plus they change things, you get really accustomed to a feature and then they’re like, “Yeah, we’re going to take that away now.” That’s the frustrating part of it.

However, that being said, and back to my original statement of what we do, who we are, and who we serve. For the B2B world, LinkedIn can be really powerful. For an executive, for a sales professional, for a marketing professional, for a business owner, as I first mentioned, being able to establish your brand within your company.

If you work for Oracle, who are you within Oracle? If you work for your own little company, how do you separate it out so you look like you’re more than a solopreneur, or if you’re head of marketing, how do you use LinkedIn to help promote the thought leaders and industry leaders within your companies, or within your client’s companies. It’s a really powerful tool, it doesn’t take nearly the time that it takes to develop a website, and I’m not saying either or, certainly not saying either or but most definitely for sales leaders within larger enterprise sized companies, how do you differentiate yourself?

The fact is, people are Googling you. The modern buyer is most definitely researching you and that’s a big mistake that we make, we have all these tools and we don’t even research our prospects, but they’re researching you, and if you show up on LinkedIn or you don’t show up, if you show up with “a barely there profile,” it can actually cost you and the company credibility, or if you don’t show up at all, in this day and age is like, “Is this person even real?” How can you be a sales professional and not have a profile on LinkedIn, or you’re hard to find because you don’t know how to optimize your profile in the right way.

It’s a real miss and so having that strong personal brand is I think very foundational to success on LinkedIn, but then on top of that, yes, you actually can find connect and engage with almost anybody. You just have to do it the right way, and you have to look at LinkedIn, and I’m sure you’ve all heard this before, but you have to look it LinkedIn like you would any kind of networking event, hopefully, you’re not going to walk into a networking event, a chamber event, a conference, a trade show, with a handful of business cards going, “Buy my stuff.” Yet that’s how most people on LinkedIn interact. “Hi, you don’t know me, I’d like to connect so I could sell you my stuff and put you on my mailing list without your permission.” That’s not the way to do it.

Marylou: No, and I think the other thing, too, is, there is this mystique around the—I’ve seen a lot of posts that some of the executives that are connected with me are constantly complaining that LinkedIn is not Facebook, and a lot of times, people are creating an environment within LinkedIn that’s not professional enough.

There are some unwritten rules. Using this service, you kind of get a gist and using your common sense. There is a mystique around how to get the most out of it for both you and your clients. How to be able to create an environment that allows them to watch you, look at you, read about you, understand who you are without being too pushy.

This is where I have a disconnect because the targeted outreach is all about being patiently, pleasantly persistent. Persistent is the word.

In LinkedIn, this is my interpretation, you could always just stomp over it. LinkedIn is like this sort of attraction, it’s like a big dating game where you throw a little bit out there and let them have a little bit more about you. A taste, kind of reel them in, get your little fishing rod out there, you give them a little bit more until they finally say, “Okay, I give. What have you got?

The other thing I learned, too, is that, in targeted outreach again, we don’t put a lot of links in our emails, but it’s not really permission based, it can be, I shouldn’t say that, I’m going to talk both sides of my mouth on this one. It could be help, ask, or you could just ask right up front and then help. LinkedIn though is really permission based, is it not? Can you get direct on there?

Viveka: You can get direct with it but it depends very much of who you are and what your industry is. I’ve got a client and he’s really well-known in his industry and he has a very unique offer, and so yeah, he can pretty much go out say, “Hey, you need me and here you go.” People are all over it because they need him, and they know who he is, and there you go.

In most cases, it really is about educating your audience, but the persistence and the consistency thing is very important. The problem is, I’m somewhat guilty of this myself, the problem is you find a new toy on LinkedIn, maybe it’s LinkedIn video, maybe it’s LinkedIn long form posts, maybe it’s LinkedIn publisher, when you find this new toy, you’re all over it, you build expectation, you start to get followers and then you get distracted by a different shiny objects, maybe on Instagram.

It is harder to be consistent using LinkedIn unless you really do have a strategy in place and quite frankly you either use a tool, an approved third party tool, or put it in your calendar, I have to go do this today.

In most cases 90% of the time, it is about creating that helpful, useful persona about making your profile a resource, and making your content a resource as opposed to the hard sell.

As you mentioned with the links, it’s interesting, LinkedIn, even though it’s in their name, LinkedIn like Facebook, like Twitter is starting to limit visibility on updates that have links in them.

It’s a little bit frustrating because you can get a lot of visibility, I think it was our friend, Alice who did the question about shoes, anyway. It was business related, hundreds and hundreds of comments and reactions, no links in there, and that’s great for building top of mind awareness, but it’s not exactly driving business to a website.

Where do you measure? Do you create that top of mind awareness and then you follow up with either an ad or a private message? Once you’ve built that know, like, and trust factor, people are more likely to click on and click through, or do you try to game the system and get a link in there, maybe in the comments section.

How do you balance that and how do you utilize LinkedIn? General rule of thumb is as you mentioned, it’s a dance, and it’s about offering a little bit of cool information and getting people to come to you, and the fishing because you’ve got to have the right bait on your fishing rod, it’s not just about finding the right pool and throwing your line in the water. You’ve got to have the right bait and tickle people towards you.

You can do that through a video, and through long form posts, and through publisher posts, and through various other features and tools out there but with content your own and other people’s, but you do need to create that kind of interest, and consistency is key to that.

Unfortunately, unless you’re using LinkedIn ads, where you’re limited is that you don’t really control who sees it other than your network. You can’t really control who’s going to see that content unless you send them a private message. That’s where things like email marketing are much more powerful because at least you know what they’re getting and when they’re getting it, and you can see your click through, and open rates, and things like that. LinkedIn has some statistics I don’t know how really useful they are.

Marylou: I remember that one time I did a post, it was a very simple post that referenced an article, and somebody responded to the article, or to that post on my thread who is very well-known and all the sudden, in a course of a day, it jumped up to 38,000 views and almost 300 likes.

Did that impact my world at all, even though it’s all under my name, and people looked at my profile, everything went up, everything went up. Did that impact my day-to-day? Not in the slightest.

Viveka: Thank you for bringing that up because there’s some ninja tricks here to help take that to the next level. On LinkedIn, it’s always about the engagement, it’s always about the engagement.

First of all, to your point, I had someone really well-known comment and suddenly bam more visibility. It’s a great idea whether you do it through email, or through LinkedIn’s own messaging, private messaging system, or however you want to do it, through Slack, through whatever tool you want to use, but where you get a little community of people to share each other’s content. The more influential they are, the better.

We’ve got a little community of people and we share each other’s content, and that does most definitely drive visibility. Another thing that you can do is employ advocacy. If you’ve got a large employee base, if you are in Oracle or whatever, you can use tools like GaggleAmp, or EveryoneSocial, or LinkedIn even has a tool called Elevate that really helps with employee advocacy and helping your employees to promote your visibility, and the visibility of your content because, that’s great, you can pop it on your company page, but depending on how many people follow your company page, that’s pretty much going to limit who sees that content unless you promote it, you pay for it.

But, if you’ve got your employees doing it for you, or you’ve got friends, and you’re helping to promote each other’s content, that’s going to get you a lot more visibility, that’s ninja trick number one. People just don’t seem to do it very much on LinkedIn.

The other is actually engaging on your engagement. One of the things that I like about LinkedIn and most people, I think they realize you could do it, but don’t do anything with it, is when people like and, or comment on your content, you can just scroll over and see who they are, and immediately message them, or invite them to connect, or if you’re not connected to them, you can certainly publicly respond to them.

You can start to build those conversations that way. If you see that a top prospect of yours either through buyer persona, or an actual person that you know, or an actual company that you know, is commenting on your feed, it’s definitely worth engaging. All the great third party apps that used to do that for you have now been decommissioned by LinkedIn as far as I know.

That’s where we’re having a super gray area because no one was supposed to sign in to your profile but you, but that’s where having an assistant, and someone from overseas is going to be a little less expensive. If you want someone from the Philippines $5 to $12 an hour, but that’s where having someone like that come in, or if you’ve got an assistant in your company, great, even better, come in, scroll through and then either with text you’ve already created, or just letting you know, “Hey, this person commented, you might want to follow up with.”

Similar to what you do in your blog post, if you’re getting comments on your blog post and one of them is a hot prospect, then you probably want to one follow up with them. You can do that on LinkedIn, too, but it’s a little bit more of a manual process.

Marylou: I would equate it to a direct response, opening an email is like the viewing of a post on LinkedIn. It’s cool to see, but it’s not necessarily the cat’s meow. If you get a click through on the targeted outreach direct response, that’s kind of equivalent to someone actually liking your post. If you get a response, a direct response, that’s like the holy grail, that would be like a comment equivalent.

Viveka: That’s exactly right, and you know the cool thing is, it’s really frustrating actually, LinkedIn gives you analytics on who’s viewed your profile, I could see which big companies are viewing my profile at any given time, and I can see the titles, and even the locations, but I can’t see the people, but I can see the people who’ve gone the second step and liked it, or the third step and commented on it. That’s really where the magic is.

Marylou: Yeah, so if you’re feeling overwhelmed like someone like me who gets a ton of likes on things, I would probably just want to look at the people who—if I’m thinking, “Okay, let me start small and peel the onion.” I would totally want to look at those people who connect with me on a daily basis.

I get around 20 connections a day. I love 20 and 30, those two numbers because they seem like a habit stacking point of view, like something I can do like doing one push up versus 30.

I can do 30 touches a day manually without breaking my fingers and I could think of customizing it or personalizing it to the point where LinkedIn won’t get upset because I’m actually substituting, I wonder if you do a word count or a parts count, how do they know that you’re cutting and pasting other than just exact match?

Viveka: Yeah, I don’t, doing something with the IP, you know more about this than I do. Something with the IP address is probably how they’re tracking a lot of the activity. Having said that, I’m a huge fan of auto text expander. We’re actually designing one of our own for Vengreso, but right now I use the Chrome extension Texter––what a great way to manually, but very easily respond, and I don’t know why I find it even easier to do that than copying and pasting, I mean it’s probably the same amount of clicks.

I have four or five slightly different responses to people who’ve invited me to connect say, depending on who they are, and why they’re—it’s like, one is LI reply, one is LI referral, or ref, one is LI thanks, one is LI book, one is LI book camp.

I have all of these responses and so I can very easily go through and do those touches whether it’s to people who have invited me the connect, or the people who I’m inviting to connect, or to people who’ve endorsed my profile.

I don’t do that anymore, but you still can, and it’s a great way, “Thanks so much for endorsing my profile. I really appreciate it. Let me know what I can do for you and hey, I see that you do blah, blah, blah, let’s talk.” Anything to start that conversation kind of the coffee or the water cooler or the coffee station of LinkedIn, just a place where you can hang out and start a conversation with a prospect.

Marylou: The other thing I think it’s invaluable for is movement of people. Because we all get notified, because usually the person updates their profile if they get a promotion, if they move to a new company.

Moving to a company may not come as quickly if there is a little bit of not compete thing going on, or they have to let the waters mellow out before they announce that they’re gone. It’s mostly in sales.

Those are two areas I watch for all the time, because if my people have moved, then chances are I need to remind them that we had such a great time when they were at this other company. The movement of people I think is a really cool thing about LinkedIn that I know none of my students really take advantage of that.

Viveka: It’s huge, and I mentioned Sales Navigator earlier which like I said, big fan. On Sales Navigator, you can actually sort by companies, and who’s just changed jobs within that company, and so there’s a lot of opportunity there.

To your point, a lot of us find one advocate within a company, or one coach within a company, or one point of contact within a company and then they leave, and that’s a great opportunity if you’re following up with them to make sure that, “Hey, now I can bring my product to service over to the new company that they’re with.”

In the meantime, what about that old company? We’re trying to find something that doesn’t sound so much like a virus, you want to infiltrate and spread within your targeted accounts, or your named accounts so that when one person leaves you can go, “Hey Josh, I heard that John left. Bummer, he was such a great guy, but by the way I’ll be in your office on Friday. Should I stick my head in and say hi?”

You need to expand beyond your one targeted person because there is so much change over, and there is so much shifting. That’s such a great feature on LinkedIn and most people turn that off in the notifications because they find it annoying, which is crazy.

Marylou: That’s one of the best thing to track, firstly for business development where it takes a long time for us to develop relationships because of the nature of where we are sitting in the pipeline.

The fact that we’ve taken all this time to develop these relationships, we want to make sure that if they extend beyond the current company, or like you pointed out, within the company building new relationships, it’s going to be a heck of a lot easier to build upon a relationship that you’ve had versus going out cold and trying to find someone who will talk to you. I think those are two other areas for LinkedIn.

As we wrap up this session which I can go on for days, this is one of those things where it’s like this piece that’s out there that I know I’m supposed to be thankful for. I’m so much more comfortable being in control of my list, where we’re not really in control in LinkedIn, so just by virtue of that, Marylou Tyler get sort of turned off by the whole aspect.

But having said that, if I am starting out and let’s pretend that I’m a sales executive. I prospect not necessarily every day, but I prospect, I close. What are the two or three things, I heard profile is number one. After I get my profile to the point where it’s client facing as opposed to it’s all about me. What’s the next thing I should look at?

I know a lot of it is depending on the persona, but let’s pretend I’m trying to do business development, what are the other things, the next two or three things that I can then focus on, and then how long should I anticipate a week of time, is it a daily thing? Is it twice a week? What’s a good rhythm just to get started to maybe generate, I don’t know five to ten new contacts, or new interested people a week?

Viveka: The cadence you create is one that you can actually do. Ideally, we have this cadence that we share with our clients, 30 minutes in the morning, 30 minutes in the day, and 30 minutes in the evening, but who is actually going to do that? A busy sales professional probably not.

If you’re willing to commit 90 minutes a day to LinkedIn, it’s going to change your business around. However, most people are not. Some of the like at the very least to do this type of things, check your inbox, see if you’ve got any––I call it inbox, now it’s messaging––but check your network and your messaging to see if you’ve got any new leads who are just sitting there, who’ve invited you to connect that you need to respond to.

Same thing, check your inbox, and just see if there’s any business waiting for you to respond to it. Well, if you haven’t done it in a couple years, that’s going to take you a while because you probably have over a thousand messages you need to sift through. However, after you’ve done that, it’s probably going to take you a minute or two a day. That’s always good because that goes right into the book an appointment, so that’s very exciting. That should fill you with joy and expectation.

Share an article a day, and I don’t care if it’s one that you’ve written for your own blog post, I don’t care if it’s one that your company has written, I don’t care if it’s one that you find on your own timeline that is relevant to LinkedIn, and your audience on LinkedIn, I don’t care if you’re making a comment, or you’re quoting your favorite author, but just one update a day is actually going to vastly increase the visibility of your profile which builds an interest factor.

That I would do, check your inbox one or two minutes a day, share an update one or two minutes a day.

Now, as far as active prospecting, another thing that people don’t do or they do it badly is, using LinkedIn to get referrals, or to get introductions. In fact, LinkedIn took the introduction tool out of the free account, and put it into Sales Navigator.

But again, a lot of people don’t make use of this tool and yet if you were to go to a networking event, or visibility to use LinkedIn this way, if you were to go to a networking event, you could go in, sure, and start introducing yourself to people who don’t know you, but it works a little bit better when you see a friend of yours talking to someone.

You want to meet and say, “Hey, how are you doing John? Oh, by the way, I’m Viveka, nice to meet you. I see you’re talking my friend John here. Isn’t he a great guy?” You can do the same type of thing on LinkedIn.

I would take a couple of minutes every day to go through LinkedIn to do searches using as advanced a search as you can using LinkedIn free now, finding those good prospects, seeing who you have in common, and asking not just one person, but a couple of people if they’re willing to introduce you to them, and you might have to do it old school, through email, or even through a phone call. God forbid you get on the phone with somebody.

Having someone actually, physically introduce you to a prospect is going to be really powerful. So seeing who you have in common, and who those people could be, that’s a great way to spend a couple of minutes of your day every day. Just those few things. Maybe it’s not going to take you more than 15 to 20 minutes a day and it could vastly improve your success on LinkedIn. Of course, if you do have an hour a day, I’ve got a checklist for you. If you don’t, just those few things will make a difference.

Marylou: Okay so for someone like me who has my prospecting hat on twice a week, I would probably want to spend a little bit more time two days a week, and then the rest of the time, I would do the speedy LinkedIn prospecting version. One article a day to update and share that’s a lot more than I do right now. I’m making my podcast every week, and sometimes on Saturdays I do one.

Another thing I’ll put out there for everybody that we like to know in direct outreach and targeted outreach is to start getting a sense of best times, best times to do these things because everyone especially in the social world, there’s a lot more transactions going through.

You want to make sure that you track at least for the first month or so, what ebbs and flows in terms of likeability, and views, and things like that so you can get in a rhythm time of day to do the speedy LinkedIn and then also the full prospecting LinkedIn. I found that two very successful to me.

Tuesdays and Saturdays, sometimes, Sunday afternoons because I do a lot of work with leaders and things, I check the stuff before they get ready for the office on Monday, so that’s not a good time. Viveka, this has been really great information. I’m sure people are sitting at the edge of their seats saying, “This is great.”

Viveka: Tip of the iceberg, yes.

Marylou: So where do we go to find more, take classes, I get that checklist you’re talking about, what do we do?

Viveka: I’ll send you the checklist and you can just put it in the show notes. Let me do that right now for you. If you go to Vengreso––vengreso.com, we’ve have a blog, we’ve got podcast, so there’s a whole bunch of really useful information on the whole realm of social selling from all five founders of Vengreso.

If you want to email me directly, my email is viveka@vengreso.com and any questions you have, I’m more than happy to answer and actually email surprisingly enough is still the best way to get me just because I have almost too much activity on LinkedIn.

If you want to connect on LinkedIn, if you just Google LinkedIn Expert, my LinkedIn profile is the first one to show up. Just please customize your invitation because I am at my limit which is 30,000. Just let me know that you heard me on Marylou’s podcast, and I’ll make sure to kick somebody off and put you into my network.

Yeah, the email is probably the best way. We’ve got a boot camp that we’re starting in July. Again, we’re literally finishing it up tomorrow, but we’re starting it again in July. We’ve got online learning programs that’s good for the solopreneur, and we can certainly scale it up to enterprise size. We’ve got the information for you if you need it, but for the meantime, any questions that you have, I’m more than happy to answer through email.

Marylou: Very good, we very much appreciate your time, and this is going to be one of the more popular podcasts for sure because LinkedIn is still this beast out there. Actually, I think Sales Navigator doesn’t do a fabulous job, I don’t think in educating the base, because I don’t have Sales Navigator and I don’t even know how to use it.

Viveka: It’s such a great tool and no one knows how to use it, and that’s not your fault. We’re actually working right now on a training program specifically at LM, Learning Management a downloadable training program just on Sales Navigator because I hear that literally every day.

Marylou: They were actually at a booth, I think the show that you and I met at. It’s like, give us a dummy’s guide or a preflight checklist. The checklist manifesto, whatever you want to call it, give it to us, because I can’t even tell you how difficult it is from a user interface to get in there and do anything, at least just for me. I just don’t get it, I’m a programmer.

Viveka: Exactly, I’m glad in a way because it means I’ve got a job. If they would have been easy to use, I’d be out of a job.

Marylou: I think you’re quite safe. Well thank you so much.

Viveka: My pleasure.

Marylou: I very much appreciate you being on the podcast and great success for you guys, I’ll be watching and hopefully see you soon again at another event.

Viveka: Thank you so much.

Marylou: Take care.

Viveka: Bye.

Have you ever wondered what it might be like to be make a pitch on ABC’s Shark Tank? Today’s guest has been there and done that, and in today’s episode, she’ll share some of what she learned in the process.

Today’s guest is Michelle Weinstein. She is the entrepreneur behind The Pitch Queen, and she’s successfully raised money and landed contracts with companies like Costco and The Vitamin Shoppe. She has 20 years of experience in sales to draw on, and of course, she was featured on Shark Tank. Listen to the episode to hear more about that experience, as well as Michelle’s thoughts on the importance of continued learning, the value of persistence, and what it means to be “professionally annoying.”

Episode Highlights:

• How Michelle got started in sales
• How continued learning can help salespeople improve
• Michelle’s Shark Tank experience and how she prepared for it
• How Michelle’s experience on Shark Tank figures into her work on The Pitch Queen
• How persistence can add value in a sales context
• How cold outreach can not only offer solutions to problems, but also let prospects know that they have a problem in the first place
• Actionable steps that prospectors can take to improve their sales pitches

Resources:

Michelle Weinstein

The Pitch Queen

Five-Step Pitch Queen system

Success Unfiltered

Transcript:

Marylou: Hi everybody, it’s Marylou Tyler. This week’s incredible guest is Michelle Weinstein. The cool thing about her is, she’s the only person on the planet that I know that has been on ABC’s Shark Tank. She’s here to talk to us today about how to be a better entrepreneur. She’s got some great years of experience, 20 plus years. She’s done a ton a stuff. She’s raised money, she’s land contracts with big clients like Costco and Vitamin Shoppe. Of course, the Shark Tank thing is above cool. Michelle, welcome to the podcast. Happy to have you.

Michelle: Thank you so much for having me. It’s an honor to be here.

Marylou: This is great. I want to know all about Shark Tank but I’m sure we want to weave that into the conversation. I’m curious, you’re a woman in sales, there’s very few of us in the planet. What got you started into this beautiful career that we love but it’s tough for women to break into. How did you do that?

Michelle: I think sales really just was maybe in my DNA. I just didn’t know it. I would say that my first set of formal training happened at Nordstrom. Out of college, I got a regular job at a company called Moss Adams. I was a financial analyst and was sitting in a cubicle for most of my life for about three years, and I was miserable. I started teaching my own boot camp classes and I got a part time job at Nordstrom. I was always buying business clothes and I said, “Might as well get 40% off and work the sales at their flagship store downtown.”

When I was there I learned that I actually had a skill just in me. I was really good. I love selling clothes to the women. I was then one of the women’s departments at the time. It came natural to me, I guess, you could say. But I really learned customer service and I really learned even more
higher level sales by going through some of their training programs. I said, “If I’m going to be here, let me see what this Nordstrom training thing is all about.” That’s really where I learned that I was really good at sales.

From that moment forward, I’m like, “How do I get out of this cubicle,” because this cubicle is not a sales job.” I was inputting spreadsheets. Actually, my nickname from one of my best friends was ‘Spreadsheet.’ She’s the comedian, her name’s Monique Marvez and she has a
whole bit about me because I do all her invoicing for her because I’m so good at spreadsheets. Literally, that’s pretty much what I did out of college. I inputted and learned formulas and this techie stuff in Excel. I said, “What could I do with numbers and with sales,” at that time. I knew I was good and up with people. Really, that’s really what it’s about. Sales is just serving
people.

In college, I also was a cocktail waitress for four years. I didn’t know that was a sales job but it really was. When you’re a waitress selling high-end tequila shots or high-end clothes, it’s the same thing. You’re serving people what they want. That’s really what we do in the profession of
sales or if you’re an entrepreneur, you signed up for 24×7 sales career.

Anyone who’s in business for themselves, you’re selling all they wanted. I was actually talking to a mom the other day, and she said, “You know, as a mom I’m a salesperson all day long too.” I’m like, “Yeah, I guess so.” I’m not a mom but I could see it. That’s really how it all started.

Marylou: Wow, but I heard a couple of things that I want to make sure the audience also heard. Michelle, who is now the founder of her own gig, The Pitch Queen, and I’ll put her links and everything about her in the show notes. She sought out education, she definitely tried to learn more about this thing called sales, and how moving parts all fit together. She comes from
a little bit of a technical background, so there’s this idea of detail that’s woven throughout, and I think sometimes when we see this type of salesperson’s persona, they have an undeniable desire to continue learning and getting better. They definitely want to track their progress. They don’t necessarily wing every conversation, and you sounding like you have that basic DNA that
would allow you or give you permission to explore this field where you’re now teaching business owners and entrepreneurs how to do what you do.

Michelle: Yeah, and that’s exactly right. I think I’m always still learning. I even have a friend who I’ve met and we do a lot of role playing still because you can’t be the best at your craft if you stop learning.

If you want to be able to charge premium prices and you want to be able to be at the top of your game, I equate it to the top-paid NFL quarterback in NFL. That person isn’t the top-paid person because they stop throwing the ball. They actually went above and beyond and probably did more on their nutrition side. They probably did more on their workouts. They probably watched more film. They probably evolved. Whatever it was, they always worked on their game. I believe as entrepreneurs or whatever your exact craft is, we always have to be learning. I always look for other sales courses, even if I can learn one new thing from one course or one place, then I can be that much better. That’s really what this is all about.

Marylou: And you probably also put that one thing into action, to start testing it, to see if it’s something that would fit into your normal rhythms.

Let’s go to this Shark Tank’s side. Now, that is a huge thing that you have accomplished. Thinking about it, I equate it to being able to prepare, to actually pitch to a large corporation or a multi-million dollar contract, and that process of preparation. Can you tell us a little about the
history of that? How did that all start and what were some of the milestones that you took along the way that our audience can relate to as they’re trying to generate new business in their companies or if they’re entrepreneurs, to build revenue for their companies. Was there a correlation that you found in getting to Shark Tank, and if so, what did that look like?

Michelle: At the time, it was July 2014 or 2012, and it was with my last company. I was looking for my second round of investment at the time and I said, “Well, you know what? I watched the show religiously so why don’t I just apply? I think I’ll be a perfect candidate.”

I applied—and similar to how everyone here listening is probably getting ready to pitch for a new customer or grow their top line revenue, whatever it may be, you have to get prepared. I did my homework. I found every producer on Twitter and LinkedIn. I started following them. I
started engaging with them. I sent emails. I applied online and I think I hit every single angle that I got a response.

I did my first interview, and then you go to the next process, which you had to submit and video and fill out a hundred pieces of paper through the test. But if you think about getting put through the test every single opportunity that came after that for me, it was putting me through
the test.

I think everything that we do, you have to think about it as—I called my Shark Tank experience—going to the Olympics. For some of my friends that have been to the Olympics, you have to go to the trials. First, you do your regionals, then you go to the Olympic trials, and then if you make the trials, then you actually get to go to the Olympics.

This wasn’t any different and it correlates 1000% with gaining a really big client. If it’s in the multi-million dollar type contracts or any significant, large contract or customer? You can’t just wing it. You have to prepare.

I did season four and one of the others ways I prepared is, I watched season one, two, and three. I made a spreadsheet—obviously, my nickname was Spreadsheet and all I know how to use was Excel—and I documented every single pitch and deal from season one, two, and three, and studied the questions that were asked. I had all the answers; I saw the ratios as far as how much are people giving up their companies versus how much the investment was. I did so much due diligence. I ran Shark Tank pitches with my current investors I had at the time at my house and we did practice sessions with the questions, what I research from writing all the questions out. I prepared, you get to really learn, and I think for each person listening, how to be an unknown.
Honestly, when you can get comfortable with being comfortable in the unknown, which is very uncomfortable, then that’s where I think a lot of magic is created.

That was the Shark Tank experience, pretty much from July whenever, I taped, I probably applied three to four months prior, and every time they hang up the phone with you, they say, “We’ll let you know what the next step is and just know that there are no guarantees.” Every single call and email, that’s what you would hear, “Just so you know there’s nothing guaranteed. Just so you know, you might not hear about from us.” It was nuts to even think that that was even possible and they say until you see yourself on TV, then that’s when you know it’s real.

Here’s the funny thing. Well, now it’s funny, at the time it wasn’t. One third of every single taping, doesn’t air. If they had 140 […] actually pitch and tape. Prior to that, they send people home because you have to pitch to the producers prior. If you don’t pass the producer pitch then you get sent home.

So, there’s the regionals, there’s the nationals, there’s that Olympic trials, and then you get to go to the Olympics and not standing in front of them. At every moment you can get cut. There was about 40 of us that got this email that says, “I’m so sorry but those of you with deals and no deals, unfortunately, your episodes will not be airing this season, and we’ll let you know if it does in the future.”

My episode number aired after all of that but I said that experience is what helped me with my last company. I pitched to Vitamin Shoppe a really outside-the-box idea to really change the supplement industry to more of a preventative approach, and we were able to do a 10-store test inside Vitamin Shoppe. I was meeting the CEO of a multi-billion dollar company. That experience of preparation for Shark Tank got me prepared for anything.

So, I got into the Vitamin Shoppe. They invested over a million dollars in a project, it was great at the time, and was able to pitch to buyers for Costco with my products. I did a lot of B2B business. All I can say is thanks to the Shark Tank experience that got me prepared for being
uncomfortable, being comfortable, and being in the unknown.

Marylou: But also, as you said, the thread through this is at each step you earned the right to actually go to the next step. When we look at prospecting and we break it down into the steps of prospecting at the various stages in the pipeline, which is what I teach, it’s all about what you
need to do at the step you’re at in order to earn the right to either go to the next step in the active pipeline or put them to sleep for a while because they’re not a good fit right now, or actually get them out because they’re definitely never going to come back into the active pipeline. You’ve set that stage that each step is important, each step has meaning, and each step earned you that right to go to the next step. It’s so great that you had that experience.

Let’s take that experience now and let’s focus on The Pitch Queen. What aspects of the Shark Tank or that experience do you instill now in your troops? In your business owners, entrepreneurs, and people who love to work with you, where do they start? Is there a mountain they’re climbing or do you spoon feed them with the various pieces of information that they need in order to skyrocket their revenue?

Michelle: Mostly with what I do today with The Pitch Queen and the brand—obviously it’s a lot of sales, but primarily, people that are selling a really high ticket offer, a high-value service. I work with a lot of certified public accountants, CPAs, that have clients that are doing services of anywhere from $3000–$10,000 every month in revenue or maybe one-time engagements of
$50,000–$100,000, what is that process of selling and building that relationship with that type of client, and how do you service that type of client at that level. That’s really what my main focus is. It’s really on the high offer, high value service process of selling.

I would say that The Shark Tank experience and how it correlates in what I teach today, is really about persistence. I teach a skill set called being professionally annoying because, for everyone listening, you all know how much you have to follow up. But if there’s someone you really want
to work with, there’s really great ways on how you can follow up and how you can do it in a professional manner. I would say that even The Vitamin Shoppe or Costco or anyone that I’ve worked with in the last eight years, they say that that is the quality that I have and now I teach it to people.

I think a lot of times we might be feeling this too in the beginning stages of when you are selling or starting your business. You don’t want to annoy people. You don’t want to be, not only annoying, but you don’t want to bother them. Well, to be honest, if you’ve got something great or you got a solution to a massive problem and I believe that every single thing I do today or the clients I worked with, you have to have a significant solution to a massive problem. If you don’t follow up or you think you’re bothering them but you have the solution, then you’re actually doing them a disservice, or you’re doing that company a disservice.

If The Vitamin Shoppe told me, “We really want to be different that GNC and everyone else,” and I had these fresh prepared meals, and I was 1000% that this would differentiate them. I knew that I could execute and make this big, huge project happen. If I didn’t follow up, they would have actually never worked with me. But they told me that because I was so persistent, that’s why they chose me over three of my other big competitors at the time, that were much larger companies than us. But they knew that because of my persistence and because of my willingness to pretty much go above and beyond, that that’s why they chose me and my company.

All of that is in me but it even got a lot deeper with the Shark Tank experience because if I didn’t follow-up and wasn’t persistent, guess what? I probably wouldn’t even have made it past August. I probably would have never even have had a taping. They want people that are hungry. But you
can do it in a professional not annoying way, that you’re not bothering people, and that you’re actually there to wake them up. If you don’t wake these people up then you’re actually hurting them by not being persistent and following up. At that time with my food company, I was here to change lives one meal at a time.

So that was my mission and you obviously have and mission and a passion that correlates with it, but that’s what helped everything and how I was able to get a lot of those B2B deals done.

Marylou: As part of that, we’re getting drilled ad nauseam in our world about adding value for every sales conversation that you had, but there is no definition of what that means, adding value, adding value. Being professionally annoying is also adding value because each conversation that you choose to have does something so that the prospect recognizes that, “Wow, this is different. This is something that I want to learn about, get to know, have more conversations around.” That blueprint that you’re teaching your clients, what I call patiently persistent or pleasantly persistent.

Michelle: Yeah, or I call professionally annoying—they’re all the same thing.

Marylou: Professionally annoying. It’s all the same. But I think having that framework of what exactly does that mean and how do I link conversation to conversation, especially if I’m top of funnel, where I’m starting more cold conversations in my world—we do targeted outreach—so we’re trying to start conversations with people we don’t know. I too have had that same experience as you, of people saying, “Oh my gosh, Marylou. Thank you so much for continuing this conversation. I don’t think I would have found you had you not reached out to me.”

Michelle: Sometimes people don’t think they have a problem. If that’s what I think it is, even with the people that I work with, certified public accountants, a lot of them don’t think they have a sales problem. Why would they go look for you if they didn’t even know that they had
a problem? But if you open up their eyes to the possibility that maybe, for my CPAs, why their business isn’t over a million yet, well, a million in revenue means you need to increase your sales. If, you have a problem in your sales process or you just keep answering people’s crises, or when a client calls, say how much do you cost and you just give them a number, that’s a problem. But they don’t even know that that’s a sales problem.

Marylou: Exactly.

Michelle: For all of you who are doing some cold outreach, just remember, they don’t even really know if they have a problem.

Marylou: They don’t. They’re unaware, like you said, they don’t know that they have a problem. They think they might have a small problem but they have no idea where to look for solutions. There’s five levels of awareness that we have to be prepared for in that sales conversation in order to be able to get them to bubble up.

The other thing I found, is that we don’t define who we are and why we matter well enough in these conversations, so value is also about you. It’s about why people should change what they’re doing now and start having a conversation with you. It’s not all product-related at all, really at top of the funnel.

Michelle: It has nothing to do with product.

Marylou: Yeah, exactly.

Michelle: It all has to do with relationship and the rapport that you build with the person because we all know that people buy from people. If it was about the product, Vitamin Shoppe would have never worked with us. Granted that we have a great product, but they were buying the person.

Marylou: Exactly. So in our parting comments, I want to be respectful of our time with our folks. I’m going to put all the information of how people can reach you, on your page or website but let us know, tell us in parting what are the two or three actionable things that people can start today, after listening to this podcast? I heard planning, planning is one.

Michelle: Planning yes. Also, take one thing that’s been on your to-do list and go do it, or one thing that you’ve been wanting to work on in your sales skills and actually implement it, not just talk about it.

Marylou: Definitely. And then, you have a framework. You have a way of getting people to uncover this value. How do you spread out this value and become professionally annoying, but do so in a way that you have reason why to contact them multiple times.

This is the biggest problem that I see. People are afraid to contact because they are “annoying,” but you’re not annoying if you are adding that value. But what does that mean? That definition of value, I think, that’s where your methodology would really help audiences like mine. But we’re
starting these conversations, we’re trying to build the relationship first before we start talking about product, feature, benefit, and results. We used to talk about results but we do it in a very emotional way to get people curious, fascinated, asking us, “Well, how do you do that?” and I think that that’s where, from what I heard in this conversation, you really excel in getting your folks to start moving in that direction.

Michelle: Yes, for sure. I have so many worksheets and different things that you guys can use but I would say the best way is to go to sellwithoutsleaze.com and you’ll get my Five-Step Pitch Queen system, and I do cover this thing called professionally annoying. If you go to sellwithoutsleaze.com put in the best email address, you’ll really be able to hopefully boost your
confidence in the conversations you’re having with people but also again how you bring value to them.

Like you said, it’s all about value but for each person listening, each have a different product but just think about the human connection. It’s all about the human part of it. So hopefully, that will really make a big impact.

On my emails, I send out also two a week. One for my podcast called Success Unfiltered, and then one from my live show. I do a Facebook live show. I also record the audio called Coffee Is For Closers. I think I did a whole month of following up and exactly on what we just talked
about.

You’ll be able to see that and again just go to sellwithoutsleaze.com, put in your best email and you’ll get my five steps system that really take the stress out of selling for good but also really build that confidence.

You can also listen the whole month of the follow-up. The art of the follow-up. But just take one thing and do one thing because like you said earlier, if you don’t put anything into action, then you’re not going in the forward direction. You can listen to me, you can listen to every single
guest here all day long, but if you actually don’t implement, then you’re not doing yourself any good and you’re not doing your clients any good.

Marylou: Exactly. Amen, Michelle. Well, thank you so much for your time. I will put all these links on Michelle’s page so that you guys can get over there. I would definitely download that five-step process because that’s going to get your started thinking about chunking down those
conversations into multiple steps are you’re working through the pipeline, from that initial conversation through the following-up sequences, and then on to the opportunity stage.

For us it’s a must-have type of framework, so that you can craft the right conversation for each of the different people that you’re selling to along the way. As you’re moving these accounts from that first stage all the way through to opportunity, and then beyond, which I don’t cover, but Michelle probably covers all the way to close but you have information going on there.

Wonderful. Thank you very much for your time and we will be sure to put all these links for everybody.

Michelle: Oh, thank you so much. It was an honor to be here. Thanks again.

Marylou: Okay. That’s a wrap. How did that feel for you? That was great. Really good.

Michelle: Good. Awesome.

Marylou: Awesome tools and things that you put together. It’s so great, I love it.

Michelle: Oh, thank you.

Marylou: What I do is I have The Pitch Queen—

Michelle: Or email the stuff for when you’re in town, too.

Marylou: Yes, I’ll get that over to you right away.

Michelle: Because I want to put it in my calendar.

Marylou: Yeah, and if there’s any special links you want me to include, if I go to thepitchqueen.com, there’s the links to a lot of these other places, but I’d like to give them the
list of the links that are there, that you want to look out like the, Sell Without Sleaze, the Coffee Is For Closers, are those all different websites?

Michelle: No. The Coffee Is For Closers page is on my website. The Sell Without Sleaze is the only one and then the podcast page. If you want, I can just send them to you right now.

Marylou: Yeah, let’s do that so I have it I can send it off to my team so they get this thing ready. They put the page together and stick it out there on my website, in iTunes, and wherever else it goes. Very good. So, I will send you—

Michelle: And then just let me know when it goes live and we’ll share it out for you.

Marylou: Yes, I’m running about a month behind now, it looks like end of May-ish, somewhere around there, I’ll have a better idea. As I look through the schedule, but I think it’s around end of May, early June at this year.

Michelle: Okay. Perfect.

Marylou: All right. Thank you so much. I look forward to hopefully seeing you in person.

Michelle: Thank you. Yeah, please. Send it.

Marylou: I will. Take it easy, Michelle. Thanks again.

Michelle: Alright, bye.

Marylou: Bye.