Michael Maximoff: AI Didn't Break Sales. Broken Processes Did.

Business. Business.

Business.

Business. Ah, that sounds all right. Welcome to Go-To-Market, a podcast for RevOps, sales, and marketing leaders to dive deep into industry insights and best practices. Go-To-Market is sponsored by Fulcast and Silicon Slopes. I'm so excited today to welcome Michael Maximov, Chief Growth Officer and co-founder of Belkins. Michael, how are you today?

I'm great, Amy. Thanks so much for having me. We've had, you know, we had amazing conversation when I had you on my show, so I'm very excited to have this round 2 with you right now, being part of your show. So thanks for having me too.

I had so much fun. I was like dying to get you on the show, and I'm so happy that you accepted. Thank you so much. One of the things I loved about your— our last conversation is that you go so deep into everything and you're, you're very analytical, but then you also have this incredible breadth. So, it's just fun to be able to just chat everything, like go-to-market with you, marketing, sales, and the rest. But how did you, how did you get so good at your job? What is your background? How did you start?

So, I have a background in sales. I started in sales in my early 20s and then 4 years in B2B sales, I've met my, my co-founder Vlad, who helped me to start the business and we're still, we're in our early 20s back in the day. So for the next 10 years, I've been in the trenches grinding, building the agency as a business owner. And then I always said that, you know, professional services is one of the best business schools, like the best MBAs, right? Because like, you know everything. So you know how to get customers, how to retain the customers, how to hire people, how to motivate them and just generally just know life in a way, right? And its essence with ups and downs, because like, you, you know, you, you need to know how to, to get revenue to pay salaries and how to retain customers, right? And just the whole thing, right? And so, you know, by, by building my agency, obviously, you know, for over the 10 years and being the operator for all this time, I've been, you know, I've been part of all the decisions in the company from, you know, building the compensation package to, you know, how do we build the best customer success strategy. So, you know, really, that gave me the best, you know, push forward in terms of my knowledge. And then because we've been growing extremely well in terms of the business, about, you know, 200% year over year over the span of like 7 years and reached, you know, 7, 8, 8-figure company. We were spending a lot on our marketing, like a lot. So at some point we were, you know, spending $2.5, $3 million in marketing and I had to become good at marketing, right? Because when you're spending that much and you have 25 people on the team and they're doing everything and you really need to do the quality assurance control and you make sure that everyone is on point. So I learned the marketing. So, you know, over the years I have kind of also became like a CMO and that this title of Chief Growth Officer just happened to be a kind of, you know, to connect the sales part, the marketing part and the customer relationship part all together. And that's kind of how I was landed the growth role basically. So.

Interesting. So I, I coming from an agency background myself, I totally understand and resonate with what you were saying about you have to learn how to do it all. You have to sell, you have to market, you have to keep your customers happy. You have to motivate your internal team. And when you're in a little startup like that, I would recommend everybody do a startup at some point because you get really good at optimizing your costs and learning what channels work well. And so that's really interesting to hear about your background. So, well, so with all of this knowledge, with all of the things that, you know, you've been talking about, one of the things that is just such a hot button right now is the AI SDR. I'm really curious about what your thoughts are about the AI SDR. Is it, do we lean in? Do we lean in with caution? Do we say this is not gonna work? Like, what's your thought on that?

I agree with folks saying that AI, one of the best things that happened to our space. I truly believe that 'cause You know, if before AI, if you want to do something good, you had to do it manually, right? If you want to find a prospect contact information, you had to do and go and dig that manually. If you need to verify something, if you did. So we were like, literally, I just remember the days where, you know, I was creating every copy, every post, everything kind of manually and doing the research myself. So you spend hours through the research and then you spend hours crafting the thing, right? So absolutely AI is the best thing that happened in the space. The problem I have with kind of the AI SDR and generally where this is all going is that people start leaning on AI too fast without adopting it, right? So they were looking for the solution of their broken marketing playbook. We would like, oh, let me automate that, let me do this, let me do that. So they were looking into, you know, maybe we're not doing something and then AI can come in and do that instead of trying to build the foundation of your marketing, right? So that's why when most of the people that think about the AI as the other thing about this tool that helps them to solve all their problems in the space that I'm in, in the SDR space, right? And they're not. So most of the customers that we work with, they just have broken process. And from your agency background, you know yourself, right? So the problem is not in the shiny tool that you're using. The problem is how you're deploying it and what are the key strategic decisions you're making with it, right? So I really believe that AI is a good thing, but only when it's done properly in the hands of the people that know how to do it. But not every organization can use it or should use it or are at the stage of using it at this point, right? But it's very easy to market it, right? Because like we have lots of our competitors and lots of the folks that I know in the space, they just talk about, hey, let's use this AI, you know, agent, or let's use this AI tool that helps us to generate leads while you sleep, right? Or do this work or do that work. Or like, this AI agent helped me to bring 500 opportunities to my door of the funnel. And then lots of the folks on LinkedIn, they're reading this and like, oh, I want the same for my business.

Yeah, absolutely right.

But that's, that's not the case most of the time. So really kind of my, my, you know, my, my uphill battle, let's say that is just really to just kind of bring some honesty into the conversation with like, is that you know, the way we want to handle things and just start asking hard questions and then try to figure out what's the best solution moving forward. And sometimes it's one of that could be an AI, some is that they're not. But when it comes to AI SDRs as an object or as something that can generate you, your pipeline can do everything from prospecting, qualification, outreach, booking meetings, and then, you know, nurturing and doing all of that and your business is self-sustainable. Like, you know, when you listen to lots of AI experts saying that you can have a one billion, one man billion dollar company or, you know, I don't need employees, I just need the, you know, the AI agency will do the work. We're not there yet, especially in marketing and probably the marketing that I work in, we're never going to be there, right? We're going to see SDRs probably, you know, using lots of automation like we used to have, right? We already used to have lots of tools in the past, like nothing changed. Those tools just became smarter. But they, they, but the tools do, tools didn't replace people. Right. And so that's kind of the thing.

I totally agree with that. And one of the things that makes me kind of worried a little bit about our space is that even though we have so many tools and we spend so much on sales enablement right now, the most recent statistic from our benchmark reporting is that 14% of the sellers are doing 80% of the work. And we've never, and we've never had such a high percentage of sellers miss their quotas.

Yeah.

Like 78% of people this year missed their quotas. Like, that's crazy to me. And I'm like, we've never been more enabled. So why is it that we've got, we're throwing more money at it than ever before and sales teams are missing the mark more than ever before? Why is that?

Yeah, I read that statistic as well, and I was also surprised. I mean, we missed our market this year as well. I'll be honest with you, we hit only like 75% of it, and we've expected to hit more. It's been a challenging year and the year before that as well, especially in technology. When I think about the missed mark, I think about two things. The first is the anxiety to grow, the anxiety to perform. It just, we need, we really need to perform every year. Like we cannot miss a year, you know, like we need to grow 30%, 50%, 100%. We need to deliver that because if we don't grow, then we die, right? Because like, you know, every year.

That was our mantra at the agency too. It was the same. We're grow or die.

Right, exactly, exactly. So like, I think like for, it's, you know, every person I talk to, they're like, hey, if I'm not going to hit this target, I can lose my job, or I'm not going to be able to pay this, or I have investors, or I have the banks, whatever, right? But you really need to hit the mark, right? So this kind of anxiety of just always pushing and delivering at a very high pace without stopping, it always have a certain, you know, fatigue day to it, right? I think like, so it just kind of at the end of the day should be a time where you just a little bit need to slow down a little bit, right? So that's kind of one thing. The second thing is, I think, like, just access to the information, access to resources, access to data, access to playbooks. Just, you know, when I started in 2016, the only player in the market of prospecting was ZoomInfo and Outreach.io, right? And then you need to spend $25,000 to get the leads and then you need to negotiate. And then, so it's just, it's been very difficult to do any outreach, right? And, but once you have access to it and you do it, then you can get the results. Now you can get leads with like $20 subscription for like Apollo or something, right? Like just at a very low cost. Most of the automation enablement tools are free. Lots of them are free, right? So they're like really playing the down market. So instead of building more features where they're more kind of, you know, they're more sophisticated, they're helping the experienced users, they're building backwards more easier, simpler features that will just access the bigger market share, right? So now, you know, anyone can run an outreach campaign, a LinkedIn automation, a calling campaign everywhere in the world at a very low affordable cost, and they can train AI or get lots of the playbooks and lots of knowledge at the same time. So now, like, you know, it's just as easy as possible.

So as a result of that, the barrier to entry is like almost zero now for doing that. Like, I totally agree with that. That's super interesting. So, so how are we gonna differentiate ourselves then if anyone can do it? Yeah. What's the differentiator and, and how can companies be successful with this kind of stuff now?

I think the, the game is show me that you know me. I think you need to be, you need to position yourself and the way you want to run your marketing is around just really knowing your customers in terms of their title, their industry, their stage of their company, and really speaking about it. So no more generic marketing, no more, you know, just solution pages, just really go deeper into, you know, I am a buyer, tell me that you know my pains and your solutions and how you've done that and what you've done that and just being personalized about it, right? So before I might, the way I would The way we run campaigns before were like, we have a customer, they come in, we know, you know, which industry they want to target and we're probably going to look at, let's say, a manufacturing industry or like, you know, or healthcare and we're like, okay, well, listen, this is how we're going to position you in the healthcare space. Let's do it.

Yeah.

Now you need to break that healthcare into 25 different categories because like, and then—

Perfect goals.

Yes, exactly. And then within those categories, you need then to map out the buyers because now selling the same product to a title number 1 and title number 2 is totally different because they look at the product differently, right? So you really need to speak their language and address their needs, which that's where AI comes in, right? That's where AI can help you to personalize it. But we are not using AI to that extent yet. So, you know, the way I deploy AI in my organization is not to help my SDRs to send more emails or to have my SDRs to generate more meetings at the lower cost so that they can work with more clients. I use AI to help my marketing strategists and account directors to build a better strategy for customers, right? Just to be more personalized, to kind of, yeah, to really better understand the market they're in, not spending 2 weeks through the research. They can spend 5 hours do the research with AI, but that research needs to be damn very detailed one and then be based on the data. So that's kind of the idea. So I think like that's the only option. That's the only option going forward. So I think like the best companies will be those that would deploy technology at the level where they can create a truly personalized and kind of tailored journeys for the majority of their niche customers, like niching down customers in a lot of different, like you would call it like a cohort-based ABM in a way, right? Something like that. And then there will be the rest who will just do a lot of pray and spray and then the budget is going to win. Because like at the end of the day, you know, if you have $300,000 to spend on Google Ads, you probably can create more noise than others. So there will be two types of companies that they will be creating the noise because they have the budgets and only a few percentage will have access to that. You're going to have the median market that would just have flowed lots of noise and it's going to be very difficult to break through it and the conversions will be always low. And then there will be those that would really want to build those smarter cross-channel kind of omnichannel strategies that worked, but then it would take them years to build them out and optimize. So they would not be able to expect the results within year one. It's going to be a 5-year plan of ongoing optimization to the point where they build it in a more sophisticated manner.

Yeah, that's very interesting. So if I'm understanding you correctly, the show me that you know me is going to be more important than ever. Like, you've got to be able to personalize the experience. And AI can help with that personalization, but it has to be at a level that it goes a lot further than even just basic industry. It has to go down into what you're calling the cohort-based ABM.

Yeah.

Okay. That's awesome. I'm gonna, I'm taking notes and I'm gonna go with you. That's one of the things that we do at Copy AI is we do that very personalized experience as well. And I think that it just has, I mean, it has changed our marketing, you know, in 2 months of using it because we went all in on it once we acquired it, you know, we've gone up 10 points in AI visibility. We've increased our productivity 7 times. But the things that are really interesting and exciting about it is that ability to personalize at scale. And that is, I think, the differentiator that you, that you've articulated so well there.

Yeah, the only thing just to add on this, when I think about personalization at scale, it's all about how you prompt it, you know what I mean? So it's not about that. So what the initial strategy and by prompt, I mean like the actual build out strategy, right? So we've done, so I've started testing this cohort ABM for clients 2, 2.5 years ago. And the reason was that when I was building my business and coming up, we were one of the best cold email agencies in the world. Like literally we're like cold emailing with a very high conversion. It had like 15-20% response rate. Like we were like very, we had, we had a very, yeah, we had like really cool kind of, you know, I built my own email durability tool. We'd done manual research, we've created like a lot of targeted emails. So we were like very good at emails and we have a high conversion. So I was like just building the business, making profits, everything was good. And then starting from 2022 onward, conversions start dropping down. We were also doing the benchmark reports back in the day and we're still doing them. And then every year the engagement level response rate went down from 15%, 12%, 7%, 5%, and just dropping down every year. So when it landed in a very critical mass, when I knew that I couldn't just do a single channel kind of cold outreach, even if I'm the best in the world doing it, if my copy is the best, if my leads are the best, like literally that's not the marketing. I would run, I start looking back into what I'm doing with my, with Belkins marketing because like we've been very successfully, you know, attracting thousands of customers every month that wants to do business with us that, you know, they just really leads that coming into us and then we were doing a lot of different things and I kind of realized that what we really were doing is we were doubling down on certain industries. We were then the entire marketing team were creating the kind of an end-to-end customer journey for that specific industry within the stages with webinars, with content, with ads, with, you know, lead magnets, with, you know, thought leadership, with like emails, literally, we're just creating this kind of dome of information that we're gonna put, you know, the customer on and then optimizing, optimizing, going deeper, deeper, deeper. And then over the years, we've had, we branched out multiple of those kind of industry-based things. And then I've, I look at it, they say like, okay, Now I understand why I have results because all these channels interconnecting, talking to each other, and then we're building touchpoints with customers. And then as a result of that, our cost of acquisition goes down. Whereas what I'm doing with customer year 1, year 2, year 3, we're getting the meetings, but neither cost of acquisition goes down nor the buying intent goes up because we're always kind of scratching the surface with them, just reaching out to a very small percentage of the market who actually has the buying intent, right? So that kind of was the idea. So I was like, I reverse engineer it back and say, all right, can I do the same playbook for customers? So that was the time when I ended up sort of like figuring out the way of like, I call it like a bottom-up approach where there's a top of the funnel motion where you build the top of the funnel and then you kind of work with marketing to qualify prospects down to a bottom of the funnel. This approach doesn't work for our customers because they don't have budgets or time or the professional marketing team or like Neil Sedarsky to do that. So we've flipped that upside down and then you start. So the way it looks right now is like you start with the conversion. So you really wanted to first tap into market to identify, are we talking the right language with buyers? Is the messaging make sense? Everything makes sense. And then you've try adding marketing campaigns or programs to be able to increase the number of conversations you generate and everything is very intentional. So you only add a certain type of content like webinars or blog or ads if they will increase the conversational level that you had from previous stage to the very specific cohort of customers. And then you build it out again and again, and then you circle back again. And then you kind of create this flywheel effect of ongoing conversation around this in a very effective manner. And it actually worked, which I was very happy about, because if it didn't work, then we're going to probably close out in the shop. But because it worked, I had to rebuild the entire company from the ground up. And I've been doing that for the last 2 years, literally building up the entire company with this value proposition from the ground up. So.

Wow. That is absolutely fascinating. Well, I mean, clearly you are at the top of your game, Michael. And I hope that when we publish this podcast, that we could, we could get a framework that, that you've used to rebuild your company. And that would be phenomenal to understand what you did before versus now how you've rebuilt the company in the last 2 years. Like, that's fascinating. How, how did you get so good? This is my final question for our podcast. What do you do to stay at the top of your game?

I work with customers a lot. I work with my delivery team a lot. I'm trying to be curious about how they're, you know, working with customers, what they're doing, what, you know, what approaches they're building. So, I'm trying to be very active in continuing refining Belkin's playbook to this day. Although I spend most of my time on the other matters, I still try to spend at least 30 to 40% of my time just really focusing on working with customers, right? And all the things I am very good with and with very good connections with all the other competitors in the space. Like I know all the agencies and they know me and I'm friends with many of them. So we are open competitor. So we are talking very loudly about how we do things and why we do things because we know that only this way we can really grow the industry together. I have this amazing example I want to share that really inspired me. I read somewhere about this woman that was back in the day who worked in the diamond industry and had been tasked into to sell more diamonds, right? And they had so many diamonds back in the day and nothing, what no one was selling in them. And so she created this, and I'm sure people know this, but I don't remember the name, but what she did, she kind of, she thought about long about like, what I can do to, you know, to sell my diamonds. And what she figured out was that She was the one who created this saying that kind of diamonds are eternity and then the engagements and eternity. So she was the one that put diamond on engagement ring basically. And her thought—

No way.

Yeah. So her thought process was that if more people will buy diamonds in general, then she would be able to sell her own diamonds basically. So she helped the entire industry to sell out their diamonds. So her diamonds also went off the stock. And she also, because of that, she was actually had some award or something on like the Hall of Fame of marketers. But I also think about the same way about my space, whereas when I started, it was very kind of broken down, like, you know, lots of different groups, lots of agencies competing with each other. And over the years, I realized that that's not the right approach in my space because without a unified, you know, agency network where agents are talking to each other, they're sharing feedback, they're speaking out loud about the best practices, all of them are keeping each one accountable about the result, and then all of them can grow and share. So that was my approach over the years, and that really helped me to refine my playbook. Because if I had questions, I can reach out to my peers about them, as well as if I post something, it's better need to be bulletproof, because if it's not, then I will get feedback from the peers. So I need to have— so why this works. So because of that, it really kept me on my toes, comfortable over the years, and helped me to do more and more R&D. And actually, I posted before I published my framework, I posted about 10 newsletters. They're like, you know, 10 pages long in newsletter. One of the, yeah, I post one of the longest newsletters in the industry. They like, you need to read it out, you know, in the, on Substack, not in email. Dash really had it. But yeah, and I read it about like, you know, coming out about problems in the industry, why I was a part of the problem and then how I was trying to solve that. And you know, there's more agencies that are looking at these things and say, hey, 'Hey, you know, we also agree with you, Michael. We also want to do that.' That kind of created the very nice movement in the SDR space, which I really love.

Oh, I love that. Well, thank you, Michael, so much for not only what you have done for us on this podcast, but also what you're doing for the industry. And as a former marketing agency owner, I really appreciate that, that very generous outlook about how we work with our competitors and how we level up everybody's experience together. So thank you so much for, for being on today. For sharing your insights, and I, I look forward to being one of those avid readers on your newsletter.

Thank you so much, Amy Cook. Thanks for having me. I appreciate you guys listening to us.

Thank you.