Winning President's Club 6x w/ Brian LaManna, Account Executive at Gong

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Hello and welcome back to the Colin Cadmus Podcast. Today I'm joined by Brian lamanna. Brian is an Enterprise Account Executive at gong, where he's worked for the past four years, crushing quota and winning his way into Presidents Club. Prior to gong, he also served as a top AE at Bright Edge for three years. Brian is also the founder of Closed One, where he shares a newsletter, podcast and sales playbooks along with sharing his wisdom across LinkedIn and X. Needless to say, Brian has been winning the sales game for a long time and I'm excited to get his thoughts on what he thinks is working and what isn't for B2B sales in 2025 and beyond. Before we get started, if you're watching on YouTube, please take a moment to subscribe to the channel like the video and leave us a comment if you have questions or feedback. Subscribers, if you're joining us from Spotify or Apple Podcasts, please drop us a review and let us know what you think of the episode. This is much appreciated. Without further ado, let's dive in and get his thoughts. Brian, thanks for joining me and welcome to the show.

Thanks Colin. Super excited to be here.

Likewise. Likewise. So I've changed up and I think I mentioned this in the last episode, but I've been sort of starting to shift the direction of the questions here. I spent a lot of time over the last, I don't know, 10, 20 or maybe even 30 plus episodes covering a lot of the problems of like what's broken? What's going on? We were digging into obviously broken outbound model, quota attainment being low, average 10 year being low, all that type of stuff. And I'm starting to shift the questions. I still want to start with the broken sort of outbound model, get your take on that. But then we're going to dive more into stuff that like what's working for you today? That's what people want to know. What should we be doing in 2025? And so we'll go through sort of different topics there, like outbound, we'll go from sort of what's broken to what's working. Then we'll cover AI and sales. Get your thoughts on like what's going on, are salespeople being replaced? All that type of stuff. And then we'll jump into discovery and differentiated selling, which are sort of your your playbook topics. So we'll get your high level thoughts on those. Obviously if people want to learn more, they can always purchase your playbooks and and dive in that way. But let's Start at the top. I want to get your thoughts here. You've been obviously crushing it at Gong for, for quite a while now. What do you think is going on with outbound sales? I mean, give me your high level take here. People say like outbound's dead or col falling is dying, all this sort of stuff. And I've sort of altered the way I've asked the question here because I don't want to be presumptive in your, in your opinion. So I'm asking it this way now. Is traditional outbound sales broken, dead or dying? If yes, how so? Obviously if no. Like you can go in whatever direction you want to there. I think there's semantics and like there's some nuance. So take it away wherever you want to go on that topic.

Yeah. And I'm glad you were able to cover some of the problems and challenges in other podcast episodes. You could probably spend a full hour on what those are. But as an ae, like I always like to kind of flip it around too. And I think anytime there are a lot of problems and challenges, it also poses a huge opportunity for sellers that are doing things the right way. From my lens, we have a pretty unique perspective at Gong where we sell the revenue team. So I speak to Chief Revenue Officers, VPs of Sales, Rev ops leaders, enablement leaders, business development leaders every single day. And everybody does have a little bit of a different take and a perspective on it. So think of my perspective as almost like a, a hybrid between kind of hearing all those different perspectives and then through my own lens as well as selling. But I don't think it's dead. I don't think it's dying. I think outbound and the way we think about it is simply evolving. I think those old tactics of spray and pray or blast emailing or just kind of sheer volume as a strategy and doing like split AB testing in most industries, in most spaces, that is what's dead. That's no longer working column. Think about yourself as a, you know, previous multi time sales leader. How many times did you probably respond like a 100% automated, fully templated message?

Very, very, very few. If ever, if ever. Maybe the one thing that I will say that it does, and this is why I start to fall in the camp of like a lot of that stuff should just be automated. Is it, it builds awareness, right? Like what I am guilty of doing is clicking links and, and being like, well what is that? Let me like take a look. But that's about as far as it goes to 99.99% of the time.

Yeah, yeah, I totally agree. And I think at that point they're almost like marketing awareness, like very beginning of the buyer's journey. Type. Yeah. Emails and type messaging. And I would argue for most, especially account executives and most SDRs, you will want to have more of a focus on being able to convert those meetings and book pipeline and book meetings. So I almost compare it to. Think about a decade or two when people are saying, like, hey, are newspapers going to be totally dead? I think the answer is in between. Right. They didn't die overnight. There's still newspapers in 2025 getting delivered to doorsteps. And it still works for some people.

Baby boomers like my father.

He can't.

Wake up without opening the Wall Street Journal.

Nothing replaces the physical copy. Right?

Yeah.

But, yeah, it evolves. Right. And I think just like me saying spray and pray is dead, that can still work to generate some meetings and showcase some results. Just because you're able to book a meeting from it doesn't mean, no, it's alive and well. There's always going to be kind of 80, 20 rules or extraneous results from it. That doesn't apply to the greater data set that we see as a whole. But I think it's really evolving to more. More personalized, more relevant methods that are more difficult to scale. Because I think the biggest challenge on 2025 is simply the fact of breaking through the noise. There's more emails, there's more calls, there's more messages than ever. It's a tension economy. It's simply getting somebody to open up and read that message and capturing their attention for a minute or two. And that's gotta be your first goal when you think about outbound tech.

Yeah, and I'm glad you touched on the point earlier, which I was actually just thinking deeply about this the other day, which is the fact that you're selling. You're a salesperson on a sales team, but you're selling to salespeople on sales teams. And, you know, it just sort of clicked in my head. I mean, I always kind of knew this, but was really thinking about it the other day for some reason of, like, I think that that puts you and like, folks who sell outreach or something, you know, sort of in the similar camp. It puts you in a different level of understanding this world because you're living in it, but you're also. Everyone you're talking to is living in it. So you're getting similar to me as a consultant. You're getting this Wide range of experiences. And so I always find it particularly interesting to get, you know, sort of this feedback from folks. Now of course you can make the argument of like, also, well, you're selling Gong and so maybe that's easier in some ways because actually want what you're selling. And so, you know, it goes both ways. But I think you guys have just this very holistic view by having, you know, speaking to so many people. It's like if you're selling, you know, marketing solutions to doctors, it's like you're spending actually most of your day thinking about marketing for doctors, not thinking about sales, but you're actually doing it across the board. Like when you're in your job, when you're preparing for your job, all those meetings are on the same topic. So I always find the take to be particularly insightful there. And I think you hit the nail on the head. Right? Everything's evolving away from Spray and pray from all this stuff. I'm curious to ask though, from your experience specifically at Gong, have you guys sort of seen that decline as well that people are describing in the industry on just general outbound? Like, has it also just gotten a bit harder for you guys as well, even with the big brand name?

Yeah, I'd say we're, we're having thus far, we just got warned about social media guidelines that's flashing through my head.

But we're gonna say what you can.

Yeah, our best year from a pipe gen perspective so far. But we, we made a lot of pivots. Of course we do have the great brand name behind us, which, you know, I think obviously helps. And it would be silly for me to completely ignore that piece as part of what could be driving some of those results. But what we've really pivoted to is I'd say more of the unscalable methods that you can't just load into Chat GPT or hit an AI button and get that message out to 50 different people. It's the unscalable methods. Like we've put a huge, huge emphasis on warm introductions and looking at like team link connections. So if I'm targeting Error call, right, a company Colin used to work at, the first thing we're really trained to look at now is, hey, let's look across that org and let's figure out Gong's a company of 1,000 plus people that's super well networked. Is there someone at Gong that knows someone over at Air Call before we just put them into a 22 step 35 day sequence? Could I message that person internally and ask hey, how well do you know Colin? I saw you're connected. It mean the world if you could send a quick introduction to those little things like that. It doesn't mean Colin's going to take the meeting but you know, 90% chance you're going to respond if somebody you know in your network reaches out to you to introduce. And maybe it's more like a 50, 50 whether you're willing to take a meeting. So that's been a really big strategy along with direct mail and gifting has been super, super successful. Trying to put in extra work, talking to maybe an IC like an account executive or an SDR at the company first and getting their perspective on some of their challenges or hey, tell me about your CRO Colin.

Like oh, so you'll do the bottom up. So you'll go in and speak to the potential user and then what do you want to get some feedback from them so you can go to the leader and say hey I just spoke with so and so and here's, here's sort of what we talked about.

Absolutely. And like yes, that takes more effort but that's why it works because if there's a hundred people reaching out to that CRO, we might be one of two companies that's willing to put the extra time, the extra effort in because it's not just as easy as hitting hey, enroll into flow. And it's a 35 day step that usually ends with an unsubscribe. You're putting in the work to get a coffee, chat with an AE or find a connection or send a gift that might take a week or two to arrive. But those are the things that you know, we've been seeing have been driving the best results. And to summarize it, it's doing the strategies that no one else is doing.

Yeah. Are you guys, I mean if you can't get into details on this. Okay, but do you guys have sort of thresholds in terms of account size when it comes to like direct mail and sort of those more either expensive or more time consuming tasks. Is that something that's sort of specific to you in the enterprise space?

We do at each segment but I think gifts don't need to be expensive nor does direct mail. I'll give you one example, Colin, but I found out a chief revenue officer about a year ago just by googling his name and going to the website in his bio it shared that he met the CEO playing ping pong. So really small detail. I thought that was Fascinating and cool and different. So we went to Etsy and we just put their company logo on three ping pong balls and it cost $8. We shipped it off, it took a week to arrive. And I put a message together kind of with an analogy back to ping pong and putting a spin on things and using a lot of puns of some of my research and why I thought they would be a good fit for, for GONG and our offering. And they don't need to be you know, sending somebody, you know, hundred dollar bottle of whiskey or you know, alcohol related things. It can be Those sub like 15, $20 items but has a little bit of like meaning, not just like a canned gift that like again that you're blasting out to 20 prospects like make it relevant for Colin and Colin only so much so that if anyone else got that gift it would be confusing and it just wouldn't make sense. And that should be.

So it sounds like what you're doing there and I've definitely had luck with this in the past is I think it creates, I'm curious if this rings a bell in your head is it almost creates like a sense of guilt if they don't reply. Right. If you had sort of sent something personal to them, do you find that that's sort of the, the effect that it tends to have?

I think it is getting at the concept of reciprocity in the fact that if you do something for them they're more likely to respond or do something for you.

Yeah.

My key to gifting personally is I'm not going to do that as like step seven in my process. It's not like I'm going to call Colin three times. First send through emails, then the gift almost sounds like a, it seems like a last ditch effort and like a quid pro quo. I'm also, when I send that gift, I'm not going to send an email after being like hey, because I sent you this, let's find an hour and let's, you know, let's book a meeting so you can walk through a full demo. I think prospects are smart enough in 2025 that they know a demo or a meeting is an option. So when I do follow up from that gift, I don't make my call to action meeting with them. I usually keep it more open ended like hey, have you used GONG in the past or have you ever had a colleague that's talked about us before? I make it more conversational because I just think the quid pro quo with gifting can come across the Wrong way as well.

Yeah, we had that experience. We tested, played around with a bunch of ideas in the past. One of the things we did actually can't even remember which company we did this at, but we would have custom Nikes created like a pair of Nikes and we would send them the box with only one shoe in it. And the idea was like, you want the other one? Like, give me a call. And like it actually worked like in a handful of scenarios. But it turned out that like people were clearly just taking the calls to get the sneakers anyway and some of them were a little sort of like annoyed that like we would hold it hostage and stuff. But. But yeah, I mean there's so many of those creative ways. I think you're thinking about it the right way, like you're not getting too nuanced with it, you're just thinking it's creating some awareness, it's creating some sense of familiarity and then when you do reach out, like they're just going to be more likely. And I think social media plays a big role in that as well. Obviously you're super active on social, so does that. I would imagine that that helps you a lot in sort of getting in touch with people, especially if you're networking in and looking for warm intros and stuff. Is that, has that been an obvious game changer for you as well?

It has. It wasn't the reason why I started sharing on LinkedIn about three years ago. I wasn't thinking about it as like, oh, this is going to be my weapon to generate more pipeline. It definitely has. Over the past year I've gotten quite a few responses that maybe they wouldn't have responded elsewise to an email or to a gift and you know, they're sharing something in that response like, oh, by the way, I've, you know, followed you on LinkedIn for the last 18 months or love your content or something like that. So it's always very cool to see in my realm and I think. I know, we'll talk about it later a little bit more in depth. But I think it's been eye opening for me how the sharing on LinkedIn and creation of closed one has helped my work at GONG and driving more awareness. But my work at GONG also helps Closed one and what I do on the side in terms of what I'm sharing because I'm able to share real things that I'm doing every single day. So it's been a real kind of multiplier effect with both.

Yeah, it definitely helps that you're selling to salespeople and you're creating content about sales. I mean it's the best niche to sort of have in that regard because it's just everything you're doing and talking about is all on the same topic. So look, I think we sort of jumped ahead into like what's working but is there anything else you want to add in there of like what's actually working today for outbound things that people should be thinking about or doing or maybe you want to highlight something that like, like stop doing that. Like big mistake people are making.

I would say that you got to think about your prospect at the end of the day and like every prospect is different. Like some people will respond to the gift on their doorstep, other people still pick up their phones for your random numbers. I don't personally. Others are really responsive over emails. I think in today's age, like just because I'm leaning into warm intros and gifting more, it doesn't mean there's not a place for all of those strategies. And I think you really have to mix up those mediums because you don't know how that prospect on the other end, what they're most likely to respond on. The key for me though is when I do find a prospect I want to reach out to and say I send that gift to Colin. All my messaging revolves around that like one point of view or that one piece of really strong research and then I repurpose it. So if I email the follow up, it's in relation to the gift I sent, right. And some of the research I did. If I give him a call it's me referencing the gift and some of the research I did. If I send him a message on LinkedIn, I'm usually copying and pasting the email I already wrote and making a couple tweaks to make it more LinkedIn friendly. So in this economy of attention is really hard to grab. There's a really good chance just because they didn't respond it doesn't mean they saw your previous note. So continue to repurpose your content and use that across a lot of different mediums. Voicemail, calling email, LinkedIn message so that you can be hopefully impossible to ignore.

Good stuff. Let me get your thoughts. Actually I'm going to just add in a little bonus question here while we're on the topic. Any thoughts on the new sort of Apple, you know, cold call screening functionality? I'm sure you've, you've seen this if you haven't, let me know. But any thoughts on that you Guys have any initial plans on how to sort of navigate that at Gong?

Yeah, I believe iOS 26 in September ish timeframe. I'm personally excited about it. I think anytime there's a major shift, it does present an opportunity again. I'm sure a lot of people think, oh, it's going to kill cold calling. Or I'll probably see 50 LinkedIn posts with that exact same hook and I'll scroll past them as normal. But I think it presents a really good opportunity because if they are going to see that kind of initial text, I think about it like a cold email. They see the subject line and they see the preview text as well. That's basically what you're able to get now in front of a prospect before they even decide to pick up your call. So it's going to be really important to make sure you have a punchy line where it's not just like hi, this is Brian Lamana following up as your new enterprise AE over at gong. Your prospect does not care that you're the new rep, I promise you. Instead, lead with that like observation or hook. The same way you'd write a really strong email where it's like, hey Colin, I saw the team just launched into manufacturing and med tech for the first time and your CEO Karen said, right, that's a really good hook where I'm going to be like, oh my gosh, like I might want to take this call. I don't think people are like allergic to cold calls in general. I think people are allergic to bad cold calls and raps that just pitch a script at them and won't leave them off the phone. So I think if you're a really good rep, I think it can further the distance between yourself and everybody else.

Yeah, I think the bottom up approach too will be really helpful there too because if you can sort of mention that you just got off the phone with so and so or you just spoke with, you know, a familiar name, I, I think that might, might help. But I also think that this sort of like public service announcement, like please don't do this, but it's going to happen anyway. It's going to be salespeople that are going to, they're going to trick people into, you know, answering that and I, that's going to give a bad name to it. Right. But it's also like you said earlier, it's like it's going to create opportunity for people to do it the right way and to stand out. So, so it's going to be interesting. But Yeah, I don't think it'll be as disruptive as people think, particularly because today it sounds like you have to enable that manually. You don't, like, your phone's not going to by default have that turned on. So for that one reason alone, I don't even think it's going to have a big impact. But if it does become a default thing, like, honestly, it's. It's not that different than people sending calls straight to voicemail and looking at a transcribed, you know, voice message or something.

So, yeah, and I would just call out with that. There will be some bad actors with it and, you know, it will not work for those people that do that. You might get them to pick up the phone, but.

Right. That's as far as you're gonna get.

If one of the 10 do, they'll probably no show you. So off of that vein, if you're a seller and you're gonna call out like, hey, I just spoke with Jimmy and xyz, call out specific company like Unique Verbiage that truly shows that you had that conversation. And like, it wasn't just online research. As an example, if you were selling to Gong, we just released a new product called, like, our AI Briefer. And we have a conference coming up called Celebrate. So if you're able to insert like, AI Briefer or Celebrate into that message someday at Gong's, like, okay, this guy knows what he's talking about. Like, he knows the new product name. He knows our conference name. Yes, you could research that as well, but put in some of that, like, really unique verbiage that isn't just generic, like all in one platform or streamline revenue, things like that.

Yeah, yeah, maybe we'll see some. Some of the sales tools sort of pick up a way to test and measure these different, you know, sort of scripts. But in the meantime, like, just copy and paste, Right? Just like keep something, or I guess you're saying it verbally, but just use the same thing for a week, test it, measure it, and then move on to the next one and sort of see what works. But, yeah, it's probably small numbers at this point today, but let's get your thought on AI. So this is a sensitive topic for some reason for so many people. People sort of get a bit emotional about it. And I'll give you my thoughts here because they've evolved quite a bit. As I've been doing more research on this, I've been partnering with some companies and just, you know, getting a look under the hood and kind of Seeing what's working and what's not and then just getting a lot of feedback from people through the podcast here. But I'm kind of seeing three groups for, for AI that seem relevant today and. And doesn't mean it's relevant for everyone, but sort of thing. Three areas that I think are worth looking at and considering. One is the obvious, and when I want to get your thoughts on this as well. One is the aisdr. Right. Like, if you can find a way to implement that and you have a, I don't know, a process that's repeatable and scalable enough that can make sense, doesn't mean it does for everyone. I think it was Jake Dunlap who put out a good post today breaking down the cost difference between an AI agent versus an SDR agent. Now, like, there are companies that just wouldn't make any sense for. Right. But then there are some where it totally does. And particularly when, like, cost is a problem or their production is so consistent that they're actually at the point where the only problem left would be to reduce cost. Right. And that can happen when things are actually just going so well with humans that you're at a point where you're just like, all right, we're just running this machine every day, like, how do we bring down the cost? And there's a lot of scenarios like that. But I know people get very emotional on this one because, you know, they, they tend to think that it's like either all SDRs are losing their job or not. And I just don't think that it's ever going to be like a black and white scenario like that. It's always going to be case by case by case. But so I see that as one sort of pillar. The other one that I see, which is arguably even more important because I think this applies to essentially everyone is CRM automation. And there's a bunch of tools doing this. Like, how do I just get off my call and have the CRM sort of get automatically filled out? There's momentum, there's some, some different tools there. So I think that those are big and the second one probably being the most relevant for the largest pool of people. And then the third one, I'm also interested to get your thoughts and you can go wherever you want on this topic. But this third one I'm seeing pop up more and I think that this is something that we need to pay a lot of attention to, which is demo automation or product guided tours. There's a company I've been looking at called Consensus. I think their website is go consensus.com and they, what they're doing is automating the demo portion, right. And they're kind of going off of. And I think you, you talk a bunch about Gardner and a lot of the stats about, you know, buyers want to get like 80 or 90% of the way through the buying journey before they get on a phone call with a salesperson. You know, they want to kind of come prepared and well equipped. And I suspect that it's not going to be the same for every type of product. But I think there's going to be a lot of instances now where buyers are just going to want to go through the demo on their own with an AI before they even decide to get on the phone with Brian or you know, start talking turkey. And I think that that's a good thing for us because it's where we probably are wasting a lot of time repeating the same product or product demo over and over. So I think AI is going to be very creative there and Consensys looks like they're on the right path with that. And I would check it out if someone needs if they're thinking about this. But what I noticed in the past is you would have these sort of automations where people can pick some topics they want to demo on and it'll cluster together like this weird video but it was never executed really well. But I think with AI it can be potentially smart enough. So those are kind of the three areas that I think are important today. No, I don't think salespeople are like all losing their jobs to, to AI or anything. But where do you want to go on that topic? I mean what comes to mind? What do you, what's hot for you there?

Yeah, no, great, great thoughts and I, I've seen all three of those two different degrees across our customer base and across our conversations. We have I'd say the big theme. I'll zoom out a little bit and I'll get a little bit more specific. The big kind of theme that I would say we see is that there's more of that AI opportunity for automation and potential replacement down market or when you're targeting like a very high volume of accounts and you have a lower average sale price or a really short sales cycle that is very predictable, repeatable. You know, you might show the exact same thing every demo or you talk about the same thing on every SDR cold call. There's only so many certain objections versus like an up market solution. Like if you're selling AWS or you're selling snowflake to an enterprise, it's a 12 to 18 month cycle. You have an internal buying committee of 20 people. There's so many different, if you think about like a decision tree, there's so many different variables in there and it's so, so nuanced in terms of who you're selling to and their specifics that it's really difficult and I think it will be for a very long time to do any like replacement there. But I still think AI can be used by those teams to be more efficient and more productive. I think the biggest area we've seen AI impact at GONG for our customers is making reps just more productive and efficient in general. Whether you're an sdr, an ae, a customer success manager, and thus you might have a larger deal capacity that you're able to work. So I'll give you an example. But deal capacity is just like the amount of opportunities or accounts each rep can work and be able to fully execute on without missing the mark. So a simple example would be if Acme as a company has a hundred deals that they're working at a time. If their deal capacity is typically 10, that means they would need 10 reps to work those 10 deals each to fill up capacity, right? Of 100 total opportunities. If AI is going to make all those sellers more efficient and productive and deal capacity accelerates to 20 instead, that means that company, they don't need 10 sellers to handle 100 opportunities, they only need five. Right? Because all five of those reps can handle 20 each. And that evolution is kind of slowly happening over time where deal capacity is continuing to increase and, and what CRO wouldn't want to be able to give their top 50% reps 100% of their accounts or 100% of their opportunities and be able to, you know, let go or not hire back maybe the bottom 10% or bottom 50% in this example and give them instead all of the best performers and the top reps. So those little things that are making those reps more productive. You mentioned a column like CRM Automation, but it's everything from like pre call. So it's maybe in the past it took them a half hour to prep for a call. Maybe with AI they can do it in five to 10 minutes after a call instead of having to update notes back to CRM and log their call and update medic if a solution can do that automatically for them. And it used to take them 20 minutes and now it takes them zero minutes, that's more time. Back in their day, they had to write a follow up email after that call that usually takes 15 minutes plus reviewing the call. If AI can write that and the seller can just make some edits and it takes a minute or two. Well over the course of a day, they're gonna have hours and hours back. And instead of taking, you know, maybe four or five calls per day, they can take six, seven or eight calls per day. And I think that's kind of the broader theme we're seeing where each rep is able to be more productive and efficient, which trickles through to a company's bottom line because they don't have to pay as many account executives. Right. 200, 300,000 on an annual basis because they're very expensive.

Yeah, you hit it out of the park, man. And the first distinction you made is a really good one. And I often forget to highlight that I come from a mostly SMB background, very transactional. And I completely agree with you when it comes to automating essentially anything other than backend work. If you're automating anything that is on the sales side, like the outreach or the demo or something like that, it's going to be significantly more valuable and more necessary for the SMB transactional world because you're just repeating the same thing so many times over and over and it just becomes a numbers game at a certain point in the enterprise space. I mean, you guys are excited when you finally have a demo, right? Because it's like it's a small volume. I mean, it's probably quite large for gong, but in certain companies it can be very small. Like your account list in total may not be that big. So the last thing you're really thinking about is like, how do I save some time and automate like part of that demo? It's just not the problem that is being focused on. So I think you hit the nail there. And then the piece about like how to actually measure it with capacity. That's the way to think about it right now. And that's actually how people should be thinking about what tools are relevant for us today. It's really, well, which ones can help you increase your capacity. Right. If at gong, you guys are running, you know, 50, I don't know, demos a day and you're spending the bulk of your time walking people through the product, it might be worth testing like a consensus, like do people go through the product first and then come to us with questions? But if that's not where you're spending the Bulk of your time, then it really doesn't even make a bunch of sense. Right. And it's the same thing with AI sdr. If these companies are, you know, spending the most of their time researching accounts and blasting out emails, and it's just like you have this huge bloated SDR team feeding like five AES that are, you know, like, it might make sense to try to automate that stuff, but. So that's the right way to think about it. You hit the nail on the head there. So let's jump into your playbook topic here. What's the key to successful discovery in modern sales? Is what I put here. But I forget differentiate or sorry. Modern discovery is the topic of your playbook there. What do you want to go through there? What's hot? What should people know?

I think that the general key that a lot of people might miss is you need to be able to build on it. Call after call after call. A lot of people think of discovery, and I blame sales ops probably a long time ago for naming it as a sales stage at most companies, but they think about it as that, like first or second stage where it's that we're in the discovery stage. So this is my chance and my time to run discovery. I think that poses a couple problems. One, it puts pressure on yourself as a seller to get everything you need during that stage, which can sometimes not lead to a great buyer experience if you're running them through medpic or.

It's the worst. It's the worst. Just sitting there answering those endless questions. Yeah. And there's no context wrapped around them.

Yeah. And in reality, that's a first or second call. Like, you want to get a couple those pieces you want to be able to identify, hey, that's a pain. And like that pain or challenge is. Is big enough of a problem that our solution can solve. And this makes sense. But the other goal is just to be able to drive and generate a little bit of excitement. Whether you do jump in product and showcase, maybe like a teaser and one thing or you just speak to it with a slide or even just face to face. You want to leave the buyer, like excited and wanting to come to that second call. And you want to make sure that you have the momentum there. So I think that's a big challenge. I see. And then the other is that if you're able to build on a call after call after call, it takes pressure off that first call.

Right.

You can focus on just having a more natural, fluid conversation versus going through a checklist of questions. But also you're just not going to accomplish everything you want in 30 minutes. I'm in a sales cycle right now that I've been working for about 12 months and had a call yesterday. I'm still asking discovery questions for five to 10 minutes at the beginning of the call because there's additional stakeholders and because it's continued to change. Right. Their business is different today than it was back in July of last year and their priorities and their outcomes are going to change along with that. So just taking that mindset change to hey, Discover is always a work in progress even when it's closed. One Discovery is not done. It has to be run by implementation and customer success and it's just a part of every conversation. So ensuring that you really go into it all with an open mind because the Mecca and every deal cycles when you're able to more concisely articulate their problems and challenges through the learning of a lot of conversations and even they can themselves.

I love it. Yeah, I think there's kind of two different high level schools of thought on, on Disco and I mean you're touching right on it. One is like you got to get all the information up front and then you sort of need to decide on what your plan of attack is. But I tend to think that like the alternative is that you're kind of running disco throughout the whole thing. Like there's a quite a bit up front to get some initial info. But you keep digging as you're going through it and you may get like, you know, ways down towards your bottom of your call and that may be where you find like that golden nugget. The real reason that they're going to buy like it may not be uncovered so early. I tend to find that like you more likely are to find that sort of valuable. I call them golden nuggets. I don't know if you have a name for it, but it's like those just those, those reasons, right? When they just are feeding you like the reason that they need to buy this product, it usually comes out in just one small little blurb and like it's mixed in somewhere and it maybe wasn't even a direct answer to a question, but you're like, that's it. Like that's the reason they need to buy this thing. And once you find that at least in like a, you know, again, I come from SMB where it's like relatively a straightforward decision for what we're selling. But like you generally only need one or two of those reasons. And then that's just it, you're going to pound that home, you know, all the way. So do you. I imagine that you've had similar experience where you realize that like if I kind of bake these questions like organically, you end up getting some better golden nuggets because it's like the juices are flowing in their brain because it becomes conversational rather than like they're just like giving you one answer or one word sort of answers to the questions. Right when there's too many in a row.

Exactly. And I'll give you an example of one. We had a couple conversations. Stage one, stage two, first call, second call. And the big focus they talked about was like improving their sales execution and eventually in call two were able to tie that to win rates. And you know, their win rate was around 20% and they wanted to grow it to 25 and that was worth you know, X amount of dollars. And thus with, with Gong, it was probably like a forty, fifty thousand dollar deal. And we had it kind of tied to those problems and priorities. And a lot of sellers I think would take that and be like awesome, I've got the metric they care about, I've quantified it. We're in a great spot. I would challenge you to continue to zoom out from that and get deeper and deeper and like why is that win rate of everything? They could focus on such a big priority if they don't get from 20 to 25%, like what happens and who set those targets? Why is that so critical of a bridge to gap? What we uncovered in conversations three through eight was they had a new competitor entering the market for the first time. They had previously been the leader. Their win rate was actually previously 25%. It was continuing to decline. It was actually sub 20% today and they were going to market later that year with a new product that was going to be able to better compete with that new competitor. And they weren't going to be able to reach their series C funding in Q1 of the following year if they weren't able to show that they were able to re accelerate growth and really stop this like greater churn problem that was happening as well as their new logo win rate problem. So you can see how that type of business case and understanding is way deeper and it's way more tied to like C suite. And what happens if they don't improve that win rate? It's like they won't get their funding and their company might not exist in the same way it looks today. They more than quadrupled their spend with Gong and looked at a way greater scope by the end of the cycle. Because they're like, hey, GONG isn't just for account executives to increase our win rate. We need to make sure the entire company is able to rally around this new product launch because it's our key for 2024. So they needed BDRs in on it. They needed customer success managers, they needed sales leaders, they needed revenue operations to take a look at the data. And when you're able to kind of zoom it out to that scope and better solution, solve, it'll create better outcomes for your customers and better candidate will create better outcomes for yourself as the seller as well.

I love it. And God, that was a perfect example of going back to what we said before about just how you are an expert on what you're selling and who you're selling to, because it's all the same world. I think a lot of sales scenarios, salespeople today are. They don't understand the business of who they're selling to well enough to be able to do what you just described. Like, to connect all of those dots. You know, they may say they need the increased win rate. Like, let's say you're talking to, I don't know, I'll go back to doctors because I used to sell marketing to doctors. But, you know, they may have a similar problem. But they may describe it to you like, yeah, you know, we, you know, patients call in to book appointments and they're, you know, they don't end up getting booked and like, they may not know to ask all those whys and to understand like, for you tied it back to, like they're trying to raise money or whatever. The specific example was. Like, I think that's one of the areas sales is falling short. And I think I spoke about this recently, but I'm noticing more and more as things are getting more technical, right? The products people are selling are more technical. Like if you just compared GONG to when you started working there to today, the product itself has to be harder to explain. There's more to it, right? And I think what's happened is we've seen products get more complex as AI, especially all this different stuff. But, but you haven't seen the average tenure of a salesperson go, go longer, which means their knowledge base isn't necessarily growing the way yours is because you've been there for, for four years, et cetera. So I do think, I'm just saying that not, not to you, but to the audience, like that's something people need to be looking out for right now is as we're sort of entering this world or we're in it now, we're submerged in a world where the things we're selling are becoming much more nuanced, much more complex. It used to be you sold a SaaS that like did one thing and it was like really easy to explain and you could, 5 minutes, 10 minutes, like do you want to buy it or not? Kind of convo. But everything's evolving to so much more complexity. I think we need to see the sales profession and the investment from the employer become a more long term strategic move simply because you need product experts on your team and they're not built in 90 days. So that's sort of what came to mind as you're going through that is like you're able to do what you're describing right now because you've been doing this for four years. Right. I think a lot of salespeople are being robbed of, of that opportunity, so to speak. But let's jump into the next one and, and I think I understand sort of where this is going, but the title of it is differentiated Selling. Are you talking about here like hey we're, there's lots of it's crowded market, right? Lots of noise, lots of people selling sort of the same stuff. And how do you differentiate yourself? How do you stand out sort of in that, that noisy space? Is that where you're, you're going with that topic?

Yeah. For me, differentiated selling, like you just share like it is hard to describe because it's almost a, a sum of all these little parts that you can do as a seller to differentiate how you are selling versus the competition. And that's, it's not just talking about like how you position your differentiators, but like the actual buyer experience that you're able to provide over a 3, 6, 9 month sales cycle in terms of how you prepare, in terms of how you follow up, in terms of how you share resources, connect with them offline. To me it's about all those little things that each individual one isn't going to be the difference between closed one and closed lost. But over the course of an evaluation, if you can come across as more of that trusted advisor and give them a way better experience. And company B, if your products look pretty similar but they have a way better experience with you versus the, the wrap that company B, they're probably going to choose you and they're going to want to work with you long term as well. So that, that's basically how I describe it.

Got it, got it. So what is, what is sort of a way to differentiate yourself in that regard? Do you have. Can you give me an example?

Yeah, but would love to. I think for me it's a lot about what you're doing when you're not just on the zoom call as you referenced earlier. I shared a post of it the other day. But like 80% plus of buying today happens offline versus online. But I think for us sellers, we think like it all comes down to how I execute on this demo or it all comes down to this big presentation. There is a lot happening in the background. So I think about selling in kind of two different motions. It's hey, what's our process as the seller? But also what's their process as the buyer and just doing all the little things, creating out one to one notes. If there's five people that join your demo, I'm going to send a group follow up and I'm also going to send one to one notes the following day to each individual person referencing what they shared in that conversation and trying to add a value add. So if Colin and four other people joined the demo yesterday and Colin asked a couple questions around like, hey, what does your Salesforce integration look like? Like I'm going to follow up with him one to one, two days later say hey Colin, really appreciate you taking the time again on Monday. It was great meeting you for the first time. Re listen to our call. I heard you ask about what the Salesforce integration looks like and I know we didn't have time to deep dive into it. Here's a resource on it and here's a two minute video I made. Let me know if you'd want to connect with a sales engineer on our team to dive into it further. So I'm really trying to think at each and every step, both before the call and after the call, how to continue to add value to every single stakeholder that we start to kind of pile up over the course of the evaluation.

I love that. Actually, I'm curious, do you, do you also CC the rest of the group or are you specifically like, hey, this was one question for one person. So I'm sort of intentionally just keeping this one to one or is it case by case? How do you think about that?

For those, it's one to one. So if we had the big demo on Monday, that same day, Monday afternoon, I'm going to send a group follow up to all those people and then on Tuesday I'm going to send the one to one notes with like a hyper specific note only that makes sense for Colin based off our conversation. And really the goal of that is to build up the group but also start to build the individual relationship. Some people aren't going to come off mute on the greater presentation and ask their question questions or share that they think it's an amazing idea or they think it's a horrible idea. So kind of giving them space to do that but trying to add value in a way so that even though that demo ended on Monday, maybe they watched that two minute video, they then start poking around on your website after it and they're like hey, you know, it was the first time I heard about it on Monday but now that I'm able to see for my question and started looking at the case studies on their site, they now have a favorable reaction to it also. I think that's what I'm trying to take into account is helping me sell even when I'm not directly on a call with them.

I like that and I like it for a few reasons. Because. For the reasons you said. But I also think it might actually accelerate the sales process. Right. Because what you're doing is you're avoiding giving too much information to people who didn't ask for it. Right. Like if you just cc the whole group on a question that only one person had. I mean now they may just ignore your emails because they're just feel like they're losing looped into too much stuff or they may just get buried in reading it and now they have more questions, more objections that didn't exist otherwise. So I like that. But does it I guess in the enterprise you've got the time like it makes sense to put that time in. I was going to say does it get too messy? Like you have just too many side conversations going on. But it's probably actually the opposite. It's probably more isolated. Right.

It does take a lot of time and it takes effort. But almost back to the prospecting example like that. That's why it's worth it is because they're going to be evaluating likely two or three other competitors as well and that sales rep is not going to be putting in the time or effort to do that. So yeah, I think it's totally worth it. It depends as well on like your segment and the product. Right. If you have 50 opportunities in your name and SMB, they're all worth $5,000. That level of effort isn't really possible across the breadth of it. But if you have, I'd say, 20 or less deals in your name. I think you can put in that level of attention to each one in those big moments that happen, like, hey, you had a group presentation and now you want to set up 30 minutes with all of them individually. And it's how you work to continue to keep that bigger group on the same page. I'll do that as well, where I'll just send kind of like no ask value touches throughout the cycle. So I'm in a cycle with a financial services company right now and the chief revenue officer wanted to make sure that somebody from Rev Ops and somebody in Enablement was able to see see these, like one on one demos. Well, after I ran those one on one demos, I'm going to send a note back to the CRO recapping both of those meetings, outlining like a key quote that each stakeholder said, like, in relation to our product. Because you're not going to get time with that chief revenue officer every single week or even sometimes, you know, more than once a month. But if I can get him to think about gong two weeks prior to our next meeting in a favorable light to be like, hey, those other team members, they're loving it. Oh, what? Wow, it sounds like those meetings went really well. He's going to continue to have that as his mindset for the next two weeks before we enter that call two weeks from now to maybe talk about next steps or pricing or, you know, moving forward with it. So it's about all those little things for me, and it's about creating different systems and how you look at your pipeline and kind of how you want it to flow, to separate yourself as a seller.

It makes a lot of sense. And I'm even thinking as you're going through this, like, it might even make sense in the SMB space too, because I actually think even though it might seem like you're spending more time, like if, let's say you have five questions that were asked on a call that you need to get back to, you know, the default might be to just answer all five questions in one email, include everyone on the email, but what happens after that is like, are they all going to respond to the same email? Probably not. Probably. Maybe one person will and then the rest, they feel like the thread's hijacked now, or maybe their boss responded so they're not comfortable responding. Like they don't want to take over the the thread. Because you can't hijack a thread. Right? Like, once it's like someone responded it's like, ah, now we're talking about that. And like, but they have a question about the other topic that it was all mixed in. So I actually think what you're doing is, is you're giving everyone sort of their own swimming lane to, to get the answers that they need without it getting mixed into everything else. And so you're probably more likely to get a real response on each of those points because it's just direct one to one and then you can get to the end of that conversation or objection or whatever. It ultimately is much faster because you're doing them all separately. So I really like that. I actually think that that might, that might make sense in scenarios that are not just enterprise, just simply for the fact that like the thread hijacking sort of conundrum that you end up in when you've got these big emails that address all these questions. Because that always is the issue is like, like they don't all respond and then you don't really know, you know, did Ted get the answer he needed? Like, I don't really know because Bob responded, you know, so I like that. But let's cover closed one. I mean, what's your, what's your elevator pitch? I know I covered it a little bit in the beginning, but you're selling playbooks, you're. You're doing newsletters. What's going on and who should get involved?

Yeah, it's been a, it's been a fun kind of slow evolution. It's at three years, but exactly. Actually it was July of 2022 is the first time I decided to start posting on LinkedIn. I just did it on a whim where I was like having to post once a week on what's working in my role, what's not working, some lessons along the way. And that accelerated about a year after that. I decided to launch a newsletter for the first time. Then from there I was like, hey, I could be sharing deeper content like templates I use or scripts for different objections and start to like, build out different resources that I can't just necessarily format in a LinkedIn post or in a newsletter. So I started creating all these different, what I call just like freebies or free resources. And then most recently there was additional demand and it was like, hey, this is all great, the freebies are great, the LinkedIn post, but like, I'm a new AE starting or hey, I've been stuck at 80% my last couple years and I want to be able to President's Club winner. I would love to Have a full detailed like playbook start to finish on like how you think about outbound or how you think about discovery. Everything from the first call to the second call, to your favorite questions in demo, to how you close out calls. So I built out these like 50 to 75 page playbooks on three different topics. Modern outbound, modern discovery, and differentiated selling as well. For those that have already found value with some of the free content or LinkedIn posts and formatted that way and want to get a little bit deeper into it all.

Awesome. Well, everyone should check that out at closed1xyz. That's the URL right?

Scratch.

Awesome. And follow Brian on LinkedIn. He's also on X. I've got his link down in the show notes. Anything else you want to plug in there? Are you doing Instagram? TikTok? Anything else?

Recently launched on TikTok. It's a work in progress. Feel free to roast me on that. Recently launched on YouTube as well.

Oh, nice.

Struggling to find time, but LinkedIn and X are my primary ones.

Awesome. Well, this is good stuff, man. Any last bits you want to add in there that we didn't cover?

No, it's been a blast. And Colin, I followed you for many, many years before I even started posting on LinkedIn and it's just a pleasure to get to meet you today and to get to hear some of your thoughts on these topics as well.

Likewise. It's another one that I feel like I know you. There's so many faces that I just see so much and I'm always reading. It's like kind of feels like we're co workers and then we get on these calls and it like feels. It's. It's like a weird thing. Like you feel like you already kind of know the person, but you don't. But yeah, this is another one of those. I'm glad we finally met. Keep in touch and let me know if I can be helpful to you in any way.

Awesome. Thank you so much.

Likewise, brother. Good stuff.