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