Predictable Prospecting
Episode 22: Building Skillset and Education in an Ever-changing Market - Jake Spear
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Episode Highlights:
- Jake Spear’s sales journey
- Importance of continuing your education
- Putting the right person in the right sales role
- Know your audience: non-tech vs tech sales
- Sales Hacker June 2016 and November 2016 conferences
Resources: Sales Hacker Read Sales Hacker Blog Posts & Educational Resources Request to join the Sales Hacker Linkedin Group Contact Jake Spear: jake@saleshacker.com Podcast Listener Discount Code
Episode Transcript
Marylou: If you’re feeling the pressure to keep up with new tools and apps in the sales world, this episode is for you. Our guest, Jake, is a sales executive for Sales Hacker. He’s a great resource to help you keep up with the craft and avoid detrimental overwhelm and he’ll be sharing some awesome ways to keep yourself educated and in the sales game.In this podcast, Jake reveals the crucial importance of continuing your sales education, tips for knowing your audience both in and out of the tech world, information on the upcoming sales hacker conference. We’re gathered here to talk about your role and what you’re doing now. Also, those listening to the podcast are going to be people who might be struggling with prospecting or they may want to pick up some additional tools and ideas and experiences that you’ve had that you might want to share with the audience. Tell us about your path to what you’re doing now and lessons learned and a couple of tidbits to take away so that people can start activating right away as the result of our call. Jake: Yeah. My path was when I first got out of college. Marylou: Yeah. Jake: I went to work for a company as a management trainee in the semi-trailer leasing business. Marylou: Okay. Jake: Nothing tech related at all but a big portion of my job was prospecting. They were very old school so it was just pick up the phone, make a little email, just cold calling right and left, trying to get transportation managers on the phone. That company ended up getting sold so I had to move on but I realized when I started looking for a job after that, the tech world specifically but more industries are catching up to it, really specializes in just prospecting. I didn’t know that was a thing until I found a company called Velocify in El Segundo and they hired me on as one of their BDRs to do prospecting. I thought, “Well this is perfect, I was just doing this. I didn’t know you could specialize in this role.” Because before my role is sort of a hybrid of a lot of different things. Marylou: Right. Jake: That’s how I got into being a BDR there. I loved it. I thought the challenge of trying to get people not only to get on a demo but just to get on a call with you was sort of exhilarating. When I was there, one of the main ways that I utilized my community to prospect was through the Sales Hacker LinkedIn group. That’s how I got involved here. I loved what they were doing, what they were saying. I learned a lot from them. I didn’t just use them for prospecting. I learned how to prospect from other people, what tools were good to use. When they were looking for someone to run sponsorships for them it just seemed like a logical place for me to be since I believed in what we’re doing here. Marylou: That’s awesome. I had a conversation with Max this morning so I ask specifically what portions of the pipeline do you specialize with training and dissemination of information and he’s like, “The full gamut,” which is great. I just focus on that little pie sales process from cold conversation to qualified opportunity which is a subject like Predictable Revenue. I have never strayed from that for the last 25 years. That’s what I’ve been doing. It was really refreshing to hear that anyone who has an inkling of wanting to get into the sales profession can go to this resource that has pretty much all the sales roles figured with educational material so they could first of all decide where am I best suited. One of the issues that I see a lot, granted I’m not skills training, I’m sales process, but one of the issues that I see a lot is that we got the wrong person in the role of a business developer. They maybe should be someone who manages the account after it’s sold and then grows that account through cross-selling or up-selling, I’m sure those terms are pretty familiar to our audience. Jake: Sure. Marylou: There’s the whole account executive role which to me is like you’re engaged now and you’re trying to get married. Where I am most comfortable is I’m in the dating mode, so I’m trying to get people to notice me, to see how wonderful I am and also to go to the first part of the path with me towards becoming a client. That was really refreshing. That’s a lot to cover. Jake: It is a lot to cover but it’s definitely necessary. When I was using it as a BDR, I had the goals and aspirations to become an account executive and sometime in the future maybe a VP of Sales or something like that. I read that information not that was pertaining to just my role but to the roles that I wanted to be in. They say you should dress for the job you want, not the job you’re in. To me, that was the same kind of situation, I should learn about the job that I wanted to be in and not just the job I’m in, and the skills. Marylou: That’s great. When did Sales Hacker start publishing? Jake: A few years ago. It started with just some meet-ups around San Francisco bay area and as it grew in popularity, people were coming to those, it became a blog, it became webinars, and it became events where we are today. Marylou: I have personally read at least 200 of your blog posts it seems like, because there’s always information. People like me who have been doing this for a long time, you’re constantly learning. I think one of the things that I want our audience to really understand is that we’re never finished with our learnings. Jake: Definitely. Marylou: Especially now, when I was talking to Max, the tools that are out there for sales are just so ubiquitous that it’s kind of like wow. Jake: Yeah. It’s overwhelming. Sales is moving so fast and technology is trying to keep up with any way it can. There’s new product every day. It changes the game. Marylou: It changes the game but then there’s products that overlap and this whole concept of the actual sales stack, that terminology I think wasn’t even in existence a couple years ago. Jake: No, definitely not. Marylou: What tools can you use together to start conversation, to get them through the top of the pipeline towards an opportunity and then get them to close one hopefully, and then from there get them serviced and success, keeping the lifetime value. Jake: Exactly. Marylou: There’s tools for all that now. Jake: There are tools for all of that. Marylou: Yeah. Jake: You can all do either one piece, or multiple pieces, they overlap as you said. Marylou: It’s almost like you need to have a constant advisory as to which tools work best with others. An organization like yours that talks about the latest technological breakthroughs or tools and then also shares experiences of what people have done and which tools they’ve used, I think it’s just fabulous. I love that. Jake: That’s the goal of all of our events. We named our event Sales Stack, not the one in June with Salesforce but the November one that we’re going to be doing annually is Sales Stack for that very reason. We want people, sales leaders, who don’t know what piece of their sales pipeline is missing, we want them to come and fill up, build their own sales stack right there on our marketplace. Marylou: Tell us about the events that are coming up and also who would be best served by attending these events. You mentioned there’s a June event, and you mentioned there’s another one in November, you said? Jake: In November. Marylou: November. Tell us about the June event first. Who’s the ideal person to go to that event? Jake: The June event is going to be called Sales Machine 2016. It’s the first ever of its concept that we’ve done and that’s because we’re co-hosting it with Sales Force. That’s a big deal for us. The event is going to be highly focused on the enterprise. We’re looking at targeting companies that have a thousand plus total employees. Those are the kinds of companies that are going to get the most value out of attending this kind of conference. What we’ve seen in the sort of trend of sales is that we talk to a lot of tech people every day because that’s the sort of the space that we’re in but the same problems are plaguing every sales team around the country. It’s not just tech people that need to add to their sales technology stack or their sales processes, it’s everyone. We’re going to be covering a wide variety of industries. It’s going to be focused on not just sales technology but just sales process using general, how to best on board train your reps, how to hire the best reps, top of the line funnel management with your BDRs or SDRs and all the way through closing an account management. It’s covering the whole process, not just technology but also managing that team. Marylou: Wow, what I call sales skill, sales management, sales process, all of those items are going to be covered. Are you having workshops? What is the format of that event? Jake: Yeah. We are. We’re going to have a couple of workshops the day before. The event will be June 15th and 16th. The workshops will be on the 14th. It’ll be in New York. The workshops will be a little bit more intimate, with a smaller group of people, maybe 30 or 40 with one person leading the session. Then at the actual event we will have some massive keynote speakers like Arianna Huffington, or Billy Bean, the guy from Money Ball. Marylou: Wow. Jake: And then we’re going to intersperse that with some panels. We find it’s best at our events when we have a specific topic led by a moderator and a few other folks who are experts in that space each share their ideas. That way, we get more ideas all at once as opposed to just one person speaking at a time. A lot of them will be panels. Marylou: Perfect. Just so the listeners know, there will be some notes in the show notes for this podcast that will be codes if you want to go to the event that Max has agreed to a discount code for you, for attendees. Jake: Awesome. Marylou: Check out the show notes for this podcast and you’ll see what the code is in order to be able to attend the event. Tell us now about the November one. How does that differ from the one in June? Jake: Yeah, so the November one is going to be a little more focused on the sales technology stack that we we’re talking about before. It’s not as broad, it’s a little bit more on how do we build this technology stack to automate the current process within our teams and how do we implement it all together because I think as we’ve talked about before, actually on our last call, sales ops has a lot of responsibility already and integrating all the new apps together is just another thing to lay on their plates. Marylou: For those old timers like me, it reminds me of when we went from 1999 to 2000, we had the 2000 date thing we had to all worry about. I’m sure it’s before your time. Jake: I still remember. Marylou: I was an IT at the time, consulting, mostly doing conversions. It was a nightmare but it’s not that bad but it does, for someone like me who’s been through nothing, there was no CRM, there was no internet when I started working in this industry and then going into now where there’s so many tools, it’s just mind-boggling, it’s daunting. Jake: It is daunting. Marylou: The fact that you guys are going to cover the entire pipeline and beyond I think it’s just fabulous. I love that. Good. Someone who would want to go to that event would be a sales ops or teams that are involved in integrating the different types of tools into their architecture. Jake: Sure, I mean there’s definitely some overlap too with the June event. Sales leaders are going to be showing up at both. We’re going to see a pretty decent size of enterprise groups there as well. That event will also be helpful to smaller companies as well, startups, in market companies that are looking to build out their stack, that’s a very good resource for them too. It’s sort of more of a catch on in terms of company size. Marylou: Okay, great. Before we depart, I want you to tell me about your journey. You mentioned about the fact that you worked for a non-tech startup community, what got you interested in the technology company itself? Is that in your mind different? Do you sell differently when you’re in a tech company versus when you’re in transportation company or is it you can apply the principles across? A lot of times, we’re all coming from, a lot of us, a technology background but people who are lawyers, professional service companies, accountants, brokers, real estate people, can’t they all get a baseline understanding and a knowledge that can help them in their business since you went from a non-tech to a tech? Can you share what that experience was like for you? Jake: I think the absolute most important thing that I’ve learned so far in the world of sales is to know your audience. Marylou: Okay. Jake: A lot of these same best practices and tools sort of overlap with different industries. We were a pretty old school company that I used to work for so we weren’t using those tools. We didn’t even have a CRM. It was very minuscule in terms of the technology we were using but that technology overlapped. Definitely we could have made use of a lot of those types of things that are available today. But knowing your audience is still key. I was talking to, as I mentioned before, transportation managers back then but now I’m talking to sales leaders and marketing leaders within the tech world. You need to approach them differently. Obviously, the technology—I can still prospect with a tool like SalesLoft or Type Desk or something like that to both industries but once I actually apply my messaging or talk to someone on the phone, it’s a very different feel and a very different approach that I need to take based on not only who I’m speaking with individually but the type of company, the industry they’re in. All that I figured out matters a lot specifically going from, as you said, non-tech to tech. It was a different outreach process, the language and lingo was different. I had to portray myself in a different way then as I do now. It really opened my eyes to the fact that each person should be approached in a meaningful personal way, to the point where you’re not just giving the same spiel to every person you talk to and hoping that it sticks. Marylou: Right. Jake: It really has to be targeted to that person and demographic. Marylou: I hit you hit the nail in the head. The technology allows us to leverage systems, and leverage probably some research components. But when it comes down to having that conversation, you cannot throw people into a mass bucket and speak to them all the same way, you’ve got to set some context around what is different about this person because they get bombarded too with people who are doing it in the lazy way. Sales people have sort of a right or wrong, they can get lazy especially when they’re looking at these high tech tools that can really streamline their workflow. At the end of the day, it’s still a person to person communication. Jake: That’s exactly right. Marylou: You may be able to cut through. In the olden days, we used to use predictive dialing which used to dial thousands of numbers until someone says hello which meant you didn’t have to dial everybody, you just get the people who were on the other end of the line. But still even then, if you didn’t have something impactful or value to say to that person, it’s a wasted call. Jake: Exactly. Marylou: It’s the same thing with the email systems and all these other things. You have to be able to get on that phone and say the reason why I’m calling is. John Barrows, I talked to him this afternoon, he’s a Sales Force trainer, consultant. Jake: Yeah, I love John. He speaks at some of the events that we run. He says some valuable things for sure. Marylou: Yeah, and he’s the one who said that—he quoted somebody else so I’m quoting a third removed about context over content and he also talked about the fact that at the end of the day, it’s still a person. What I do is I create that superhighway that allows you to put more stuff through it but the stuff has to be quality. You cannot have the quality going down that pipeline. I’m really happy that this community is where it is and it’s growing and it’s starting to infiltrate into the enterprise because technology companies, because they are technology companies, embrace technology a lot faster and are more willing to pivot if, “Well, this stack didn’t work so let’s move to this stack.” There’s a lot of iteration, it’s in the DNA of the company in a lot of ways that you’re going to be able to iterate, improve the whole lean model. But when you get to the larger enterprise and go upstream, you’ve got more bodies to worry about, they all have opinions and sometimes it takes a little bit longer to get the message in that, “Hey, technology can help us do this better, faster, cheaper and with more quality.” Jake: Exactly. Marylou: I’m very happy that you guys are out there helping people kind of open their eyes that the stacks are going to be different depending on who your audience is, that it’s first, your audience. Who are you selling to, and they need to know why you, why change, why now, why you, basically. Once you get through that, then we can leverage technology to do more of the quality sale. Jake: Exactly. Marylou: Let me get the dates right for people, for them listening. There’s a June date and then there’s a November date and I think we’ll have that in the show notes, the June date information. If they want to get a hold of you, Jake, to find out more, what’s the best way that people can contact you? Jake: I’d say jake@saleshacker.com. Marylou: Okay, jake@saleshacker.com and you respond right away with quality. Jake: I’ll respond within 30 seconds to a minute. It comes through my phone email, it comes through my computer email, it comes from all over the place. Marylou: I encourage you listening to this podcast, if you think about that, “Wow, we could be more efficient, we could be more effective.” Or you to just learn what’s out there. Because for marketing, there are now transit maps of all the tools that are available for marketing people. If you’re doing a certain type of campaign, the entry point, what tool. I haven’t seen one yet for sales. Actually connecting with Sales Hacker and what they are doing, you’ll get a really great idea of at least where to begin. You may not have the recipe tweaked exactly the way you want it but you’ll at least have the foundational elements that can get you further along than if you didn’t review them or follow what they have. I would read their blog. It’s just pretty amazing. The guest blogging on that thing is incredible. Jake: We really appreciate that. I read it every day too. I’m still learning as you said, we’re all still learning. Marylou: We’re all still learning and I think we’ll all continue. Things are changing so rapidly now. Whoever’s listening to this, shame on you if you’re not learning every day. Thank you so much Jake, really appreciate your time. Again, jake@sakeshacker.com is where you go. Jake: Thanks for having me. Marylou: Thank you.