Episode 18: Why Sales Prospecting Has Evolved, with Collin Mitchell

Hi everyone, I'm Ben Wright, successful entrepreneur, corporate leader and expert sales coach to some of the most talented people our amazing planet has to offer. You're listening to the Stronger Sales Team podcast where we bring together and simplify the complex world of B2B sales management. And to help the millions of sales managers worldwide build, motivate and keep together highly effective sales teams. Teams who grow revenue and make their businesses actual profits along the journey. We also provide great insights and actionable steps to managing your personal health. A happy and productive year is not only better for your teams, but everyone around you. So if you're an ambitious sales leader who wants to build the highest performing and engaged teams, stronger sales teams is right where you need to be. Okay. Welcome to Stronger Sales Teams. Great to have you here today and we have a very special guest with us, it's Colin Mitchell, a man who is a four times founder, very passionate man about sales, entrepreneurship and podcasting. At the moment, Colin is the VP of Sales at ledium. So leadium are helping sellers personalize the entire sales process, really to aim to build more rapport and close more deals. We know how much I love a modernized sales process. So I think we're going to have a good chat with Colin as we go through today. Colin's also the host of Sales Transformation, so he's got his own podcast. Very similar story to me. Started with nothing, but he managed to grow his first business from nothing from pure startup to 5 million average run rate in just over two years. Right. Which is a fantastic effort, an effort that many of us try to repeat or even aspire to doing just once. So Colin's been in sales for about 13 years. SaaS industry is a big part of what he's done and he's currently managing a team of salespeople. So welcome Colin, thank you very much for taking some time out to join us today.

Yeah, awesome. Thanks Ben. Glad to be here. Happy to jump into some of these topics that we're going to delve into today and appreciate the opportunity.

Awesome. Well, first thing off the rank, happy birthday for last week.

Thank you. I think this year maybe managed to get myself a few more gray hairs than the previous year. So doing good.

Wait till you hit your 40s. Things change then. In fact, Colin's telling me he's got four kids. Any of us who know her have one or two kids? It's difficult, but when you've got four and you're trying to run a world in the sales market which just it commands more than the average type of job. Hats off to you. So, yeah, no doubt that'll keep you young. Okay, so before we get into it, tell us more about ledium. What do you do and why is Lydium successful?

Yeah, so, you know, I'll tell you just a quick story about Lithium and then tell you about it, but I actually used to be a Lithium customer, so I've actually, you know, scaled multiple businesses myself. A few small exits and ledium helped play a part in those. So I've actually known Kevin and Sergey, the founders of ledium, for quite some time and so it made it, you know, pretty easy decision to join them, you know, more recently as their VP of sales. I'm one of the partners in Lithium. And so what we do at Lithium is really two core services, all to do with top of funnel. So we help sales organizations solve their top of funnel challenges. One could be their inbound lead management. So we manage all of their inbound leads, get those, you know, qualified and on the calendar and then we run, you know, outbound campaigns for companies. Interesting enough, the inbound lead management is something that's actually becoming more popular. I actually saw somebody, you know, did a bit of an experiment recently where I think he reached out to a hundred plus SaaS, companies filled out a form on their website. Right. We all know that, you know, speed to lead is important. Right. The chances of actually winning the business increase drastically if you can reach out within the first five minutes of that inquiry. And I don't remember the exact numbers, to be honest, as far as like how many reached out within five minutes? I think it was really low. How many reached out within like an hour or a couple of hours, 24 hours, 48 hours and so on. But the thing that shocked me the Most was over 30% of those inbound inquiries, they didn't reach out at all. Like they never reached out.

Big number. Yeah.

I mean these are people requesting more information, requesting a demo and never got contacted.

Yeah. What a way to ruin all that hard work that has been put in in that type of funnel activity. So one of the things that I know ledium does is you try to personalise the sales process in a modern world where throughput and cookie cutter and efficiency, it's talked about with sales teams all the time, how do you make sure that that's successful to be able to personalize that process?

So a lot of people think like, oh, that means it's got to be done one to one. That's not necessarily the case. Personalization done well can be done at Scale. And there's a lot of people who disagree with that. But it really comes down to two core things. One, your strategy, right? Setting proper goals and expectations, defining what success looks like, having a hypothesis of, you know, who your ideal customer is, what channels you should reach out to them, things like that. Those are all things you should spend some, you know, good amount of time. People often skip this strategy step and just want to get right into activity, right? And see, hey, we'll just see what works and what doesn't. But the way that you can really personalize well and, you know, sort of stand out on these channels and be different is by leveraging data. I mean, the amount of data that's available today is insane. Most people stop at the really basic level stuff like, hey, here's the types of companies, like, industry. Here's the, you know, size, meaning, like, how many employees they have, here's the revenue of that company. And then they get, you know, the contacts, right, with email, phone, and maybe socials, and that's it. But there's a lot of pieces to the puzzle that are missing there to really personalize. Well, and I'm talking about things like triggers, right? Do they have any current job openings? Has they had any recent rounds of funding? Has somebody changed jobs, things like that. Those are all good triggers that could identify, like, now is a good time to reach out. The other thing is, like technographics. You know, more people are trying to adopt this, but, you know, what CRM are they using? What web technologies are they using, things like that. These are all segmentation points where I can now tailor my messaging based on this information that I know. And then from there, you want to identify the pain points of these people. You can enrich this data with their personality. So. So we're talking about psychographic data. You know, what type of person is Ben, you know, is he a dominant, influential, or steady type of person? Those are all vastly different communication skills and styles of how I would message to the person based on that. And these are, I think, all of the things that, you know, set the foundation for a good outbound sales program before we even get into, like, messaging or technology or anything else.

Yeah, it's amazing when we have so much technology now available to us at such a low cost, say when we were coming through the grade 15, 20 years ago, when. When we were new in our sales careers. It's just chalk and cheese now, but lazy salespeople and lazy sales teams just don't take advantage of this enough. So we're talking about Outbound lead generation. And we're going to try and say a lot around top of funnel activities today. Are you someone that believes this is a marketing activity to be out generating leads, or are you someone that looks at sales or in between, what are your thoughts around what the modern teams need to do to generate leads?

I'm glad you brought that up because this is always an interesting topic and people have a very, you know, different opinion about it. People think, hey, prospecting is a sales activity, and maybe they're right to some extent. But I believe it should be treated like a marketing activity. And, you know, outbound is an acquisition channel. The problem with the way that a lot of teams are running outbound, they're not running it like a marketing campaign, but if they did, it would be far more successful. And I'll give you an example. Right? Think about this. Let's say you're running an outbound sales campaign. Typically, it's, hey, you know, we maybe have a bit of a strategy. We, you know, have a list of prospects. We have some data on them, we craft some messaging, put it in a sequence, hit, go put a, you know, fresh out of college, you know, guy or gal, you know, to start having conversations and get people to raise their hand to want to have a demo.

Right?

Typical outbound.

Yep. Yep.

Rarely is it measured on the things that matter, like conversions. Right. Typically measured on activity. And so that means, hey, we just need you. If we need to hit these revenue goals, we add more people, you know, we email more people, we call more people, we need more SDRs to call more people and so on. And it's like playing that whole sales is a numbers game type of thing. Right? Now think about it from a marketing lens. Could you imagine if that's how marketing ran their ad campaigns? Hey, we don't really know who we're going to target, but we're just going to slap some ads up. We're going to see how it goes. If it doesn't go well, we'll just run more ads, spend more money. Now, never has marketing ever ran a campaign like that. It's all about data optimization, you know, refining, retooling, testing, all of those things so that when somebody serves you an ad, Ben, it's typically very personalized and relevant. Right. It's based on some activity that you've done online. It's. It's based on your interests and things like that that are a little bit creepy. But all of the decisions that they make on who they're gonna serve those ads to and what those ads are gonna say are based on data and performance and constantly optimizing. Why aren't outbound campaigns measured that way?

Could not agree more. That it's not about how hard we're working, but about the results we're getting. And I live by this saying, there's nothing worse than a hard working, underperforming salesperson that flows through anything in a business is you've gotta be smart about how you're working. So if you're a sales team now and you're inputting to your marketing outbound activities, or even still, if your outbound activities are sitting with you as a sales team and you're the sales leader of that team, what can you be doing and what can your team be doing to help personalize that process and be increasing close rates rather than number of appointments?

Yeah. So I think the things that need to be fixed that are broken first. Right. There's quite a few things, but let's just talk about some of the most important things. The most important things is start measuring conversions and not activity. Right. And start to constantly review, analyze and optimize. Right. So what is working, what is not working? Always be testing things. Right. That could be new technologies, that could be new, you know, segmented, you know, parts of your market, that could be new messaging. Like, there's just so many things that can be tested to optimize for performance. Right. Because it's not about getting more meetings. It's about getting the right meetings with the right people. Right. So even if we get these meetings, are they actually going from a first meeting to a second meeting? Are they even making it into an opportunity? And how long is it taking to close those opportunities? What's the win rate on those? Right. Those all need to be measured by each channel because then you can identify is outbound even an effective channel for us? We don't know. Most people don't know. I talk to sales leaders every day, and if you ask them how much does it cost you to get a meeting today, they don't know. What are your metrics on outbound as an acquisition channel? As far as how many go from first meeting to second meeting to become an opportunity to actually close? I don't know that's a problem.

Absolutely. So in our business, we talk about three metrics for measuring salespeople. We use three metrics and only three metrics because it's so easy, in our opinion, to get lost in that world of CRM dashboards and outputs. And what we're talking about now is the energy. Right, which is our first metric. And Colin, you haven't seen this three box model, but I'm happy to show it to you one day. I'd love to show it to you actually one day. But in the energy it's all about making sure we are targeting the right people. But I think what you're saying is that we're targeting the right people with the right message at the right time as well. So working out they may be a great prospect for the future, but they're not a great prospect for now. So it's working out when that really is the right time. Okay, so if we're talking about being out there in that top of funnel activity and generating leads, what do you think are the things that have changed the two or three or four things that have really changed in the last few years? Whether you call that pre versus post Covid, I probably actually prefer to call it the data movement, the AI movement. What do you think has really changed in these last few years?

I mean a lot has changed, right? I mean the pandemic has changed a lot of things, right? As far as more people working remotely, you know, all of those sort of things. But if we're talking about outbound specifically, well, I mean AI is huge. Some people are scared of it, think it's going to take their jobs. And hey, if you're scared that's going to take your job, probably should take your job. Sorry. But the smart people are leaning into it, learning it, mastering it and leveraging it to do their job better. And so that's the thing that has changed, right? Like research that would take you a good amount of time, you can do in minutes now. You know, there's AI that's now updating your CRM in real time based on like medic or medpick, based on like the conversations that you're having. So like sellers need to be spending time with potential buyers and buyers either creating pipeline or advancing pipeline, that's it, that's the most important thing. Anything else that can be automated, you know, leveraged with AI, you name it, those were investments should be made. Because the most costly expense for any business is their people and usually their salespeople. So wouldn't you want them doing what the most valuable thing is, which is spending time with prospects and advancing deals?

It's a great challenge for salespeople, particularly those in that second half of their careers. So our business, our experience and myself personally, a lot of B2B selling. For me there's a two speed economy in B2B selling, we have the next generation which let's put us in the middle, let's say our age group, that late 30s, early 40s, West Mac, Bang, in the middle of our careers there. But those who are coming after us that are pretty tech savvy, right, this type of stuff is easy for them to pick up. And then there are those who have gone before us that have knowledge bases that are significant, far greater, I would say, than those that are coming through. They've lived through many changes before. But this, I think is one of the greatest challenges for B2B salespeople in their second half of their career. And that's how to adopt the tech that they need to. It's not how to find it and bring it into the business, but it's how to use it. How have you seen people that have been successful at really, because it's a significant change making that change around tech. What have you seen them do over the last couple of years?

You mean as far as like adopting technology in the roles?

Yeah. So let's say you're a second half of your career beta bay salesperson or even a sales leader and you know that you need to change because if you're not spending more time advancing customers through the pipeline or getting them into the pipeline, as you say that you're behind your competition, right? So you are already going to be 10, 20, 30, 40% behind. What's your advice for these people on getting familiar with tech and actually getting it into their business?

Yeah, I mean, I think that good sales organizations have good enablement programs to teach, you know, their sellers how to use and leverage technology. But let's assume you're maybe in a smaller organization. That's not the case. If you're not getting the resources from the organization that you work for, it's up to you to go out and make it happen. Like you are responsible as a seller or as a person for your own growth, personally and professionally. And so if you're not getting the resources, just complaining about it or moaning about it or you know, poor me, you know, all that good stuff, forget it. Like it's up to you to go out and take the action to make sure that you are leveraging technology, using the best in class tools to make your job easier as a seller to, you know, hit your goals. And so, you know, I think yeah, there's the older generation of people that maybe that's a little bit more challenging. But like if you get into action, then that is the best thing. But there's something else to kind of consider here that has nothing to do with age and more just to do with, like, the time in the market, right. I think in the last, let's say before we got into this down market, right, in the last, like 12 months or so, where budgets are tighter, harder to get deals done, deals are smaller, everybody's your competition. That's the selling environment today. Before that, it was the exact opposite, right? Markets were good, interest rates were low, there was no inflation. Like, you know, it wasn't hard to raise money. You know, companies were getting these crazy valuations when they didn't even have any profitability and didn't even have a repeatable sales process figured out. Like, it was just nuts, right? That environment, which, you know, went on for quite some time, contributed to a breed of salesperson that is weak because ultimately it wasn't that hard to get a deal done. You didn't have to have a strong enough business case. It was like, hey, tech sounds cool, let's do it, let's try it. And then you have all these companies with all this technology that doesn't even move the needle for them that they don't even use, you know, and so that's the problem. Like, doesn't really matter how old you are or how young you are, but that time period of selling made people a little weak. Even if you're more tenured now, it's hard. If you're new in sales and you survive in today's environment, you'll be great. Because if times are good, times are bad, you know how to survive, you know how to swim, right? And so I think the people that, you know, really were riding that wave for a long time and now have to actually really level up their skills to get deals across the finish line. Those people are struggling with or without technology.

You've touched on so many things in there that I like, but I want to try and summarise these for our sales leaders that listen to us. And for me, the first one is the only thing worse than hearing about a problem is hearing about a problem without a solution. So if you're out there, sales leaders, you have to be training your teams. The new technical skills that you need to be training your teams on are not just objection, handling and closing deals and building rapport and relationships, but it's also about embracing tech embrace and the new ways of doing things. So that's the number one for sales leaders that's coming out of this for me. Number two for sales leaders and individual salespeople. That are out there as well. Strs any type of role that you're out there is if you're not getting the training, it's up to you to go and find it. I love the saying if it's to be, it's up to me. I live by it. Colin, I'm a big, big fan of one liners. You'll hear them from me constantly. If it's to be, it's up to me, right? So get out there, embrace it and find it yourself. Because if you can learn how to hunt or if you can learn how to farm more effectively or the bottom line is if you know how to find your own business, you will never be out of a job. Right? Good economy, bad economy, doesn't matter what it is. Those that know how to build relationships and bring in business are by far the most successful. Yeah, really like that. Okay, so what are your top few kind of tech pieces or tech go to's that you would recommend? Salespeople or sales leaders more importantly start to look at for their teams. Do you have any real go to? It's like for me duck soup and LinkedIn sales navigator been using it, love it, right? Fantastic way to build your prospect database. If you get your data qualification right. What about yourself, what are you using?

I mean I think Sales Navigator is like table stakes. If you're working for a company that doesn't provide you a sales navigator, like go look for a new job, right? But I mean clearly you need some of the basics, right? You need a good CRM. Like I used to be a Salesforce guy forever, but I've really come to love HubSpot quite a bit. Um, and then you know, it also depends. Like Salesforce and HubSpot's not always the best fit for everybody. Like maybe you have really simple basic needs. Like you know, people are using things like ClickUp and Monday as their CRM, right? Where like if you have like some project based stuff that's involved in your process, like having that end to end and simplicity actually works really well. So foundation like basics, like good CRM obviously you know, LinkedIn, you know, if you're in B2B like you need sales navigation, you know, it's worth it for so many reasons. And then from there, you know, I'm a big fan of like I would say this is another like essential basic having a good video tool, right? Whether that's Bombbomb Loom or Vidyard, right? Any of those are great. I've used them all. You know, video is so underutilized in the sales process all the way from prospecting to closing. And it's very effective and it's an easy way to stand out. So I would say that's like an essential, simple tool. And then from there, like we can go into all the AI tools, we can go into the sales engagement platforms and so on. But I'd say, like, those are the basics that you need. And then you know, anything that you can use to free your salesperson up so that they can spend more time creating pipeline and advancing pipeline. I'm a fan for all of those.

Awesome. Well, good news out of that is me too. I'm using all those tools that you've just gone through myself. So nice when you hear people using the same thing, gives them a little bit of validation to how you're going about things. Okay, so changing direction a little bit. Have been following your daily podcasts and social media. You are about as active as anyone I know. Colin podcasts every day. Well done. One of the things that I heard on your podcast was you were talking about bringing guests onto your podcast or guesting on other podcasts and how that can be a form of lead generation for you down the track. You also spoke about the importance of making sure that the guest experience was really positive. And hey, I hope your experience today by the end of it's been positive too. So if you're a sales team and you don't have a podcast. Okay. And I would actually say most sales teams probably don't. Let's say you don't. What would be your equivalent? Could you think of it? Would you have a suggestion for how people could run a program that's similar to a podcast, where you can bring guests in that you form a relationship with and may become future prospects or customer of yours?

Yeah, I mean, there's a few things. Essentially, podcasting is just a great, effective, you know, network building exercise. Right. And so whether that's going on podcasts, whether it's having a podcast or doing a video series or collaborating for content or bringing them on for like a webinar or something like that, or even an in person event, those are all like equivalent, great options. But there's actually a few ways that you can use podcasting. It doesn't always mean like, I need to have a podcast. There's three, really. One, somebody on your team, you know, can be guesting on shows. Right. That's a great path to building relationships, you know, driving awareness and revenue and ultimately pipeline. The second one is obviously having a podcast, which we Kind of touched on. And then the third is probably, like, the easiest, you know, place to start that most people are not using. If you're looking for, like, a meaningful way to reach out to your prospects, go check out the podcast that they've maybe been on. So maybe you're, you know, the people you sell to go on podcasts or. Or their executive team or whatever the case is. But there's sites like Listen Notes and podchaser that you can go to. You can search people's names, and then it'll show you all of the podcasts that they've been on. You can listen to them. People typically share, you know, pretty interesting stuff on podcast stuff they're passionate about personal things, things that you can use to really break through the noise and catch your prospect's attention if you're reaching out.

Yeah, haven't thought of that third one before. And that really comes down to supporting what you're saying about the amount of data that we have available to us. Right. If you can jump onto podchaser, and that's a different way of following your customer like you would online at the moment through LinkedIn or another type of social media platform. Awesome. Great. Thank you. Okay, so we're gonna change tack a little bit. I won't keep you too much longer. So you're a sales leader. You are a sales leader now. You've been a sales leader in the past, and I think there is a lot to be said about having experienced time in roles. Right. It just gives you the opportunity to be confronted with more situations, to learn what your playbook is in that situation. Right. And then be able to respond without emotion, without stress. Right. But for me, my job, and I suspect you see this as well, is that we want to try and make the future for up and coming sales leaders as smooth as possible. You don't want to do their job for them because there's no substitute for a little bit of hard knocks. Right. But we definitely want to make sure that we're helping them learn. So, of the sales leaders that you work with across leading ML before, a couple of really successful traits, couple of things that you consistently see that make these sales leaders successful, what. What would they be?

Hmm. That's a tough one. Because there's so many sales leaders that frankly shouldn't be sales leaders.

And I got there by default.

What's that?

They got there by default.

They got there by being top performers and then promoted to, you know, leaders, managers. And those are just two totally different skill sets. But I would say Great leaders understand people, right? Not just selling and like the, you know, techniques and strategies of being a great seller. They understand people, right? Psychology and how to motivate their team and how to understand different learning styles and how to really support their team. A lot of sales leaders think that the people on their team work for them. But great sales leaders understand that they work for their team.

Emotional intelligence is as important now as your iq, no doubt about it, that being able to work with people. Okay, last but not least, we've spoken about learning a little bit today. What's your personal go tos when you know you need to go learn something? Where do you go?

Oh, I'm a podcast. You know, podcast and audiobooks.

Yeah, yeah, audiobooks. What's the latest audiobook you read, Paul?

I actually have the book right here. So I have the physical copy, but I have it on audio as well.

Awesome. Very good one for me to look at too.

Yeah.

Okay. Thank you, Colin. Very grateful for today. I think for me summarizing what we've gone through is there is no substitute for moving with the time. The times are saying we need to be embracing tech. There is absolutely ways that we can be personalizing the sales development channel. Right. Marketing qualified leads or sales qualified leads. Right. We can still provide personalize if we are targeting effectively. So get to the right people at the right time and we're going to have more success. And then everything above that is we need to be learning, right? Embracing tech. And if we're not learning ourselves or through our businesses, then we're dinosaurs and we're done. Okay, so for everyone, please, Colin has generously given us some of his time today. Please check out Ledium L E A D I U M LE dum dot com. I loved your video when I got in there. That was really cool. I'm going to ask you after this, who made your video follow Colin Mitchell as well. So, Colin, where can people find you if they want to know more?

Yeah, best places, like number one. Hey, it's really hard to consistently put out good content like this podcast here. So first thing you can do is just, you know, show your gratitude to Ben and write a review, subscribe and share this show with your friends because it's a lot of work to consistently put on a good quality podcast like this here. And the second thing you can do is if you really enjoy podcasts, you can check out Sales transformation on on whatever podcast platform you're listening to this on. And there we drop daily. And when I say daily, I mean seven days per week sales content every day to help transform the way that you sell.

Excellent. Fantastic. Thank you, Colin. Well, that's gonna wrap up for us today. We won't jump into a health and fitness tip because we've got some jam packed health and fitness stuff coming up over the next couple of weeks as well. But. But for now, everyone, keep living in a world of possibility and you'll be amazed by what you can achieve. Thanks, guys. Want to be kept up to date with any of our free materials to help you build the best sales teams possible? Well, the easiest way you can do so is to follow us on your favourite social media channel. We're onger sales teams on most of them and if you DM us stronger, we'll send you right back some great resources to help you build your skill superpowered sales team. If you'd like a little more help, please get in touch directly and book a free discovery call with me. I run a limited number of these sessions and they're free for my podcast listeners. I'd love to help you out. Until then, see you next week for another podcast of stronger sales team.