Marylou:    Donato is probably one of the experts when it comes to working and utilizing the phone for your sales conversation. The data in your pipeline needs to be fresh and updated. Technology can help but very few can keep their pipelines clean while using them properly, i.e. they get full of gunk.    Donato is the Founder and General Manager of Data Services at Ring Lead, a company that offers the tools you need for your company’s contacts. In this podcast, Donato reveals the problem with thinking cold calling or cold emailing is dead, tips for tracking your numbers and pacing your interactions with leads, contacting multiple influencers to move prospects through the cycle, and the culprits that are keeping good sales processes down. Hey everyone, it’s Marylou Tyler, Predictable Prospecting. Today’s guest is someone that you’re really going to want to listen to, why? Because he has just really drilled down to a level that is so impressive with working with the phone. Part of our process, if you’re followers of Predictable Revenue, you know that the Predictable Revenue framework really talked more about email. In order for this thing, this framework, this assembly line that we’re building, in order for it to actually improve in velocity and reduce the lag, we need to use the phone and we need to use the phone in a way that’s smart. I listened to our guest, Donato Diorio, I listened to a webinar of his where he talked a lot about the use of the phone and how in this case voice mail but that’s only of one small sliver of what this man knows. He’s currently the Founder and General Manager of database services over at RingLead and I’ll put his contact information after we wrap-up the call in the show notes. He’s got a lot of expertise in the areas that matter in terms of pipeline. Without further ado, I’d like to introduce Donato and first question is tell us about who you are. Donato:    Sure. I’m a technologist who became a recruiter years and years ago, who then went and ran and started a software company and come full circle. I’ve kind of had many, many different careers to get me to where I am today. Today, I am, you said one of the Founders and the General Manager of data services at RingLead. What that means is when people have problems on their CRM, it is the thing that RingLead does, we take care of people’s data end to end, but one of the big problems that people have that software can’t solve is, what about all the existing data in people’s systems? The different strategies and processes in technologies that I put together help get people’s data up to speed. We remediate all the data so then technologies and software can take over to keep it clean, to keep it moving forward. I get to explore, I’m on the bleeding edge of how and what are the latest things to clean up and add some interesting intel into people’s data, that’s what I’m currently doing. Marylou:    Okay, very cool. As you know with the data that’s collective in the pipeline at sales stages from my world, it’s cold conversation or initial conversation through the qualified opportunity and then of course there’s an opportunity record all the way down to close one, close lost. There’s data being collected at all those steps. I’ve really focused on in my area is, what were those sales conversations, with whom were they with. Because we’re trying to establish a predictable formula for revenue, we’re looking at the funnel itself, the pipeline, we’re looking at the average deal sizes that are flowing through it and we’re also looking at time. The data elements are being collected but would you agree, Donato, that very few people really know how to take that and make something actionable out of it, that they can feed back into their marketing assets, to their marketing campaigns, to their voicemails, to their scripts, everything else. What do you say about that? Donato:    I’m going to blame sales representatives. Let’s just throw down the gauntlet. Think about this, that one of the early products that we developed was cold contact capture. This is when I was a running brawl because of CEO and I found the company before emerges RingLead and contact capture is a little tool that you highlight information, press the button, and it would parse it and allow you to move it into your CRM. I learned this basic axiom in watching salespeople and I guess it’s the same case for marketing people is that sales people, marketing people, people in general will only adopt a technology if it’s easier then what’s our currently doing, it’s that simple. If you bring this fantastic new thing into their life but it requires them to change their process, to do additional things, they probably won’t do it. Technologists, I’ll include myself, we need to be smarter and we need to make sure to collect that data, so I am circling around your question, to collect that data, to collect those things in conversations and the whom and who. Then what has to happen is the process has to as it naturally unfolds, as you naturally go to your daily process, the data must be collected as part of that process. That’s the challenge, that’s where things like the iPhone came in, one of the first user-friendly phones that you could do stuff with just a swipe or click or pinch. Yes, we are not collecting it but the responsibility is on technologists and the user-interface and things like that to make sure that the daily things that people do, collects that information as they go. That’s the challenge, it’s not that they don’t want to, it’s not that they don’t realize it, it’s just that they’re not going to do it. That’s the solution to that problem and it’s not an easy solution. Marylou:    No, not at all. My biggest pet peeve since at the top of the pipeline we’re really more of a numbers game, still even to this day in that you open up the picket, there’s names going in. We may get out of every 300 records, three to ten people who’s like one raises an eyelash and one may raise a pinky, the other one might raise his hand. Those conversations are a drip compared to what we’re sending out. My biggest pet peeve is look folks, we hope to have five meaningful conversations a day, what is the problem in trying to wrap up those five conversations. What are your thoughts about that? Donato:    One of the first things I’ll point out is that a lot of people are selling something. Cold calling is dead, email is dead then came companies like Pardot and Marketo. What’s next, when do you say your talking is dead. A while ago in the 2005, phone conversations are dead and it’s all going to be email. Everything has to be a multi pronged approach. There is no single solution. For those listening to put your radar on when someone says this point solution is the only thing you need, they’re selling something. The reality is you need email, you need phone conversations, you need social media, and you need to figure out how your business model and your selling model best works to figure out which degrees of what things you need. Example, case and point, one of the most successful campaigns I ever had was selling to equipment leasing vendors. I was selling sales lead prospecting, data mining/software and I have some success with couple. I want to reach out and build a list of couple of hundred of these and I started going through and somewhere along the way I started looking at the numbers of my call, I tracked everything. This is the before Sales Force days. I think I was using gold mine, it was really easy to use. If you remember those desktop point and click interfaces. I started tracking my numbers and I realized that I was blowing through my list just way too fast, way too fast. What that meant is that in a very short time, my list was going to be done. I, by mistake, it wasn’t genius or anything, by mistake I said oh let me make a second pass through. First path, I reached out to the VP’s of sales and second path I started reaching the VP of marketing. I still had my notes from the first outreach. I started doing things like well, Joe, in the next minutes I’m also going to be reaching out to Harry who’s the VP of marketing and I started leveraging people and kind of using addition, basically name dropping, schoolyard peer pressure and I saw a massive bump in my response rate. I was like that’s interesting. Then, I said what if I call three people at each company. I did my research first, I think it was the VP marketing, VP of sales and CFO at each company or whenever the equivalent of a CFO would be, maybe the CEO. I did a three by three call approach, each person got a call and on each call I referenced to two other people that I am going to be reaching out. They may ask you about around the water cooler today. I kept changing it around. When it was all said and done, I changed my sales advance. A sales advance basically means that something moved forward in the sales cycle that I got a call, I put out a demo, I moved it to one of my sales reps, whatever, but a sales advance. It moves from one out of ten to nine out of ten. We used the bulk from the blue. I shared it with my co-founder Braw Bookin, he’s like oh yeah, that’s spear of influence selling, I’ve been doing that for years. I was like whoa, why didn’t you tell me? I built this software product, I’m learning sales by the seat of my pants, and he’s like thanks for sharing, yeah, it’s obvious you call multiple people and you get there. Dan and I developed a whole training program around this method. It worked out for us in a great way because of course, we are a company that sold the product that generated data of people at companies. The lesson still works to this day that you can greatly improve your outreach and stop burning through your leads if you do a three by three approach. It’s interesting, if I would’ve thought back to when I was a young recruiter in 1995 and my boss told me, “Donato you got to call and email somebody because it’s going to double your chances of getting a hold of that person.” Years later, I tracked the metrics and if you call and email somebody, it’s actually 1.3, you got 1.3 times a chance of getting a sales advance, that means adding a LinkedIn invite or any venue, Skype, Twitter, whatever. It’s only adding .3. The single and most impactful way to get that sales advance is calling multiple people, having your research done, leveraging and not burning through your data one contact per company. Marylou:    Yup, and the Predictable Revenue book is now very outdated but in 2011 when that was published we were trying to instill in folks that they needed to be emailing three people at the company at a time asking one question, who’s responsible for X. We were trying to get the internal referral and we used three people per company to do so and consistently with all the records that we tested, we’re getting a 79% response rate of positive, negative or neutral. A case in point since I was a business developer testing this out, I sent three emails to Chase Bank. One email came back saying we don’t give out any referral information, I didn’t hear from the second one and the third person gave me a name. It’s just amazing when you start adding in what you call sphere of influence we call the actual influence map. If you put your desired buyer in the middle of the bulls eye, we have a second tier that has direct influencers in the company, people with whom the buyer will actually listen to or they have his or her ear. Then, the third ring are indirect influencers, they might be users of the product or service or they might be a liaison type of person. We define all of those people when we’re working through the assembly of a framework for outreach so that we can do what we call intraday calling which is taking that bulls eye and then making calls on the same day within the company. I didn’t know that there was a magic three number. When I listened to your webinar and heard 3X, so 3×3 is 9, I was like, wow, and is that still holding? Donato:    Yes, and we’ve tracked the metrics for quite a while during the entire time from I think 2005, 2006 somewhere in that is when I first started experimenting with this and yes, the numbers still hold. Here is the interesting thing, here’s the rub, you know this, you call it one thing, I know it, I call it something else. Dan, my co-founder knows it and won’t tell anybody. How’d you get into that account, I’m just good. A lot of people know this and they’ve read your book so even more people know it, why isn’t it the norm. I’m going to put my finger on two culprits. Number one, the data companies. When you go to a data company, they sell you data by the contact. If you want a second or third contact, that’s three times as much, that’s a problem. It’s almost like the old story, you go to the parent/teacher conference and they say, “Hey Marylou, there’s some problems with your child, all his crayon drawings are in black and we’re really concerned because he only draws stuffs in black.” Later on if I ask to the kid and was like the black crayon is all I had. Nothing wrong with the kid, he just has black crayons. That’s the problem. The data companies, the traditional brick and mortar old style list vendors that tried to make the switch to technology and really failed, they sell the contact one at a time or they charge per contact. We change that model at  Ring Lead and we’re like hey, going to data mine the entire account and give everybody what you pick. That’s one thing and it’s important. The second thing is if this is important, do you know for example of any Merkato or HubSpot or Pardot campaigns that leverage in automated passion reaching out on a three by three approach and using that knowledge in the scripting? “Hi Marylou, in the next few minutes I’m going to be reaching out to Donato and Dan.” Nothing. The problem is in the existing momentum of old ways of thinking and old technology infrastructure. It’s simple to switch, number one, do what you can to buy multiple contacts, stop blowing with your leads. Number two, start pre-fabricating or pre-aligning your data. If you’ve got four points to contact, here’s an example, this is innovation that I’ve been playing with. If you segment on just title and you try to find oh this person has marketing on their title, you’re very limited. But marketing department could be email campaign, it could be category manager, it could be a lot of things that mean marketing. We’ve learned that if you’re able to segment a title by both level and department and then compare all the people in the department to each other, you could actually have an accurate role of something, a designation, a tag like top marketing contact. You can’t do that looking at a single title alone and not comparing it to its peers. If you pre-process your data and you assign a level at a department and some role tags in your marketing repository, you can do outreach campaign that are absolutely brilliant. I don’t see anybody taking advantage of anything like that yet, but they should. Marylou:    No, we have lots of bond aids in outreach. Our work around is essentially we still ask for internal referral. Once we get an inkling of where people are, we move it to working status. What you just described is done by hand. We call it under the umbrella of a highly personalized email where we define the template ahead of time that gives the robust sales message and then the representatives have to personalize usually the first paragraph and that’s where they would put what you’ve just said technology should be able to do. Donato:    Yes, and the problem is that when you’re looking at a contact alone, that is data. When you’re looking at five contacts at a company and you are adding fields to your marketing system that show the influence vector, for example first person John Smith, Director Marketing, Title: Director Marketing, Level: Director, Department Marketing. But then you compare him to the CMO, you see that a up influencer is the CMO, the down influencer is a Marketing Manager and Campaign Manager, the peer influencer is a Director of Sales at the same location. All those things should be designated and pre-processed in your marketing repository, that way it can be automated. That’s the challenge, that people just haven’t got to that level of sophistication yet. The data is there which is what’s nice. The data is there but next step is the technology has to catch up. Marylou:    Being a programmer, my brain is going a million miles an hour now. With level and department, if you have thousands of records in your house list, for example, how the heck, where do you start? Donato:    The first thing that you do in any data remediation is you go through and you clean up your account data first. You’ve got to have accurate information. If you’ve got accurate account information, you can then build your contacts. For example we’ve got a process, step one is making sure the data’s standardized or normalized. Step two means you fill in the company website, the website’s like the DNA for finding additional contact and information on the people in the future. Then, you can mine the contacts but starting out remediating and fixing the account data is step one, everything else falls in after that. Marylou:    I’m sure people listening on this call who are driving down the freeway like data geeks like the rest of us are thinking wow, I want this, what do I need to do, where do I go? Donato:    Yeah, Ring Lead can help you out. We’ve got patents, we love this stuff. We dive in and there’s tons of free information that I’ve written on my blog donatodiorio.com, that’s simple. Everything from Ten Things Not To Do With Data With Ten Things To Do With Data. The challenge is you got to get sales, marketing, operations alignment. Because if you don’t, everything sales wants to do, everything marketing wants to do, everything operations do supporting it won’t work. That alignment is one of the first things that I will seek when I consult with an organization that wants to bring their data to the next step is really understanding where they want to go, adding some insight of what’s possible and letting them dream a little bit. Marylou:    Well, here’s the rub is that point of entry. I’m talking up market accounts now so for those of you who are SMB’s, smaller businesses or startups, you probably have one guy that does all but the rub for me is always the point of entry of sales. They’re not making their numbers, the leads coming through from marketing aren’t high quality so they want control of the process. They think that outreach is going to be the answer to at least feed their pipeline with qualified opportunities. They want to get their own data, they want to house it in their own little shiloh. They will use marketing assets but in terms of the tool to actually generate an outreach campaign, they would love an outbound prospecting system that they can use that’s independent of the marketing system, of the marketing communication system. How the heck do you bridge that gap? Donato:    I think that you go back to the adage, the concept that sales representative would do and use what’s easier than what they’ve used before. No one can control it, it has to be a hybrid approach, account based data. Account should not get into the system unless it has size of company, number of employees, SIC code, all those perma graphic data. That should not be something a sales representative should mess with. Understanding where the hand off is. When it comes to sales, the sales person, they look at the LinkedIn profile or social profile of some sort and say well, this person has a great interest in the Final Four and you reach out and your first phone conversation is hey, how would you like to have court side tickets to the Final Four? I was just talking to a guy earlier today, that would be his dream, then boom there starts the conversation. You’re not going to be able to automate that, not in any real way. You got to figure out what sales handle, what sales should handle, what marketing handle, which marketing should handle. The simplest thing, Ben Franklin list, make a list marketing does this, sales does that and there may be some contention points. I think when it comes to data, it’s very simple, it’s just like the difference between marketing sale. Marketing is many to one outreach, and sales is more of the one to one. Marylou:    Correct. Belly to belly, we used to call it. Donato:    Yeah, how do you split up the data challenges? The same thing. When you’re going to act upon an entire CRM of data or entire marketing automation system full of data, you don’t put that in sales hands, you put that in marketing’s hands because the mass operation. When it comes to the okay I’ve got the information, I’m able to reach out, that’s when sales takes over. You can give them tools like, we’ve got our capture product, that’s a great example. I’ll do my plug, ringlead.com/capture, little chrome plug in, you’ll land on a LinkedIn profile, it’s the guy you want because sales found his phone number and then you found this LinkedIn profile but you don’t have any more information on him. You press the button to capture, it goes out and fends on the additional information that will help you in doing your outreach to that person. Let sales do what sales does and let market do what marketing does. Marylou:    Let’s paint a picture for the startup, the folks who are listening to this who say hey I’m marketing sales and ops because we’re a small company. What’s the perfect scenario for them to start building and architecting a robust data driven engine that will allow them to push multiple channels of lead generation through it from a data perspective, where would they start? Donato:    I don’t think it’s a sales or marketing challenge as much as a product challenge. If you’ve got the right product and you build it steadily, you get your referrals. I am not going to solve that with sales or marketing. You could have a tool like capture, that would be a great tool for a solo operator because a lot of people that use LinkedIn, they don’t want to buy a list, they have access to a free version of LinkedIn, they get the contact information, solutions like that can work there so they get momentum. Startups, you tend to have general lists that are not expert to any one thing. Just like you’ll reading in books like Innovator’s Dilemma, you’ll see people tend to become specialist as the company grows. We’ve gone through that at RingLead, we’re getting some really amazing new hires that are great at marketing, they’re great at sales management, they’re great at operations and it’s exciting because it frees up people to focus, I can focus on leadership and other things. Start the product of your startup, make sure your product’s right, that’s my best, I’ve been through it three times, get your product right and everything else will fall in place. Marylou:    The other thing that I run into a lot is we do a lot of work in persona development. Marketing has personas that they developed but sometimes they fall short in the sense of the sales conversation and behaviorally where people are positionally in the pipeline. It makes a difference in who’s entering. A lot of times people, the personas ebb and flow, come in, go out, depending on the product or services that they’re selling. We develop personas then we go to the database and try to get counts of how many people. I’ll give you an example of a client just recently where we found a person, we developed a person we felt would be the ideal person to make a business decision on this product. We went to the house list, we did a count. We then went to LinkedIn and surprisingly we’re able to get a count that we felt wow this is great. The house list had 50 to a 100 of this people and LinkedIn ended up reporting in somewhere in the neighborhood of 25 to 30 thousand. That kind of disconnect in the house list versus what’s out there on the social or what’s out there in databases that are not resident in the company repository is another big issue that I’ve run into a lot. Donato:    Basically, mapping your total available market. I think that you’ve got to take a multi pronged approach there. The challenge often is the data you’re basing the persona building on may be inaccurate. For example, you may start by saying where were our last 20 sales, if they weren’t coded right your persona’s off. You think of it this way that everybody wants great, predictive abilities. Predictive is like the high level, hey I’m going to predict that this is the person you want to talk to based on this, this, and this. Predictive technologies are going to rely on analytics. Why is this the right the person looking at the data that you want what you want? Analytics is dependent on reporting. If you’re not getting the right data and fields, then you can’t analyze and draw conclusion to then have a predictive model that is anything but a solid. Then, the reports depend on the data. Get your data right, make sure the data goes into your system that you’re making all your decisions on is dialed. If not, then you’re not ready to develop a persona, you’re not ready for reporting, you’re not ready for analytics, you’re not ready for anything predictive. Get the data right first and the rest will fall into place because it won’t be complex, it will be simple, it will be like things you’re just dropping into that last puzzle piece, oh there it is. Marylou:    Perfect. Well listen, I would like to talk to you forever and I’m sure the people listening on this call are thinking wow, to me this is an awareness that a lot of people just don’t have an awareness around how, not like it’s complicated but how pivotal this is, how important it is, and how many people just aren’t there, is the scary part but it’s true. In closing, if I was someone whose head is spinning right now and thinking okay, what’s my first step? You said get the data right. If they would like to speak with you, Donato, on helping them figure out a blueprint, a plan, follow the yellow brick road at the beginning, how do they get a hold of you to do that? Donato:    I’m easy to find, I’m so easy to find. I’m on every social network. If you Google my name and can’t find me, don’t be in sales or marketing and no, I’m pretty easy. Best way to reach me probably is just send me an email just dd@ringlead.com or better yet send me a message on LinkedIn. Anybody who sends me a personalized message, I will respond to. Anybody who sends me a connection request with nothing but since you’re a person I trust, I’m like no, no, no. I’ve got 17,000 connections on LinkedIn from my recruiting years and I like and appreciate and respect the personalized invite. It’s linkedin.com/in/donatodiorio. Marylou:    Okay, so guys heard that, that’s the way to get a hold of him and perhaps we’ll have the subsequent call to talk about voice mail because I know that’s one area that I actually review that webinar. You can send me the webinar link and I’ll put it in the show notes but for those of you who are listening the voice mail, actually, Donato gave three examples of what he calls like three little pigs. Donato:    The straw, the wood and the brick. Marylou:    The straw, the wood and the brick and he gives examples of the straw voicemail which is going to blow your house over. The wood one which will convert up and the brick one which is indestructible. I think the webinar was done in 2014, I don’t know if you have any more updated voice mail analytics or on your donatodiorio.com blog but I’ll point people there and I’ll point people to this webinar. As he said before, it’s 3X the results that you’re going to get. If we go back to my old 79% response rate on email and you run it through a sequence and you include voice mail and you include the telephone in, we’re talking double digit response by the time you finish that campaign. Talk about less exhaustion, that will really make the list last longer, you’ll be able to get more value out of your list and not blow through records. The quality coming out of there is going to reduce the lag and get you further into the pipeline than you are today. Really listen to this webinar and I think that part of your tools should be to really understand the value and the power of voice mail. I’m talking to you millennials out there who love to text and email and maybe not use the phone as much anymore, it’s still the main way to generate Predictable Revenue and to actually have conversations that are meaningful in nature so that as Donato said you can advance the sales to the next step. Thanks so much Donato for your time, I really enjoyed having you on the call. Donato:    Thanks Marylou, it was fun.