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