Maximizing Time Across Your Pipeline, With Jamie Shanks

The CRO Spotlight Podcast, powered by the Sales IQ Network. Hi and welcome to the CRO Spotlight Podcast. I'm Warren Zenna from the CRO Collective and I'm here with my co host, Lupe Feld. Hey, Lupe.

Hey, Warren. This is Lupe Feld and I'm glad to be here with you.

So this podcast is really for aspiring CROs and CEOs and current CROs whom are interested in learning from not only us, but the great guests that we're going to have.

We're here to tell you that there is other areas of the business that can drive revenue, and we're going to look and inspect and come up with some great ideas for us to bring in as much revenue as we can and drive some meaningful change for the business.

So tune in. We have some exciting opportunities coming up for really amazing conversations and any B2B leaders. I think you're really going to enjoy it. So thanks for tuning in and we look forward to seeing you. All right. Hello and welcome to today's episode of the Sierra Spotlight Podcast. Hey, Lupe, how are you doing?

Hi, Warren, how are you?

I'm really good. You know, Lupe, we were just talking about this post I put on LinkedIn, which was you can't find a quiet place in New York City. You know, it's like every venue store thinks they need to be a disco. Even my Uber driver. I get in the Uber driver and it's like the guy's blasting disco. What is this? Could you explain? I don't understand this.

Yeah, I actually experienced that when I went into Starbucks this morning. But I think if you're looking for a quiet place, your. Your mind is calling for a trip to Sedona, some red rock.

Well, I'm heading to Mexico on Sunday and it'll be quiet there. Anyway, it's good to see you.

Likewise.

And we have a really great guest with us today. His name is Jamie Shanks and I'm going to introduce him in a second. But what I wanted to share about this particular conversation is it relates specifically to sales enablement and the way in which technology can use to enhance the sales organizations better. And Jamie has a really unique perspective on this, particularly because of his background and his story is really fascinating. So I'm looking forward to this conversation.

I love it. I learned so much from our guests and it's just a unique journey for every single one. So I'm excited to hear Jamie's story.

Great.

So I'll introduce him. So, Jamie Shanks. Hi. Nice to have you Here.

Great pleasure meeting you.

All right, good. So Jamie is the CEO of Pipeline Signals. And Pipeline Signals is a pioneer in relationship signal intelligence, intelligence monitoring, which he'll explain what that means they monitor and mine your tam, which he'll explain as well. List of accounts for relationship connections, competitive intelligence and compelling events like job changes. Now, for 10 years Jamie ran Sales for Life, which is the world's largest social selling training program for mid market and enterprise companies, which I'm really interested in talking more about that now. Sales for Life has trained over 250,000 sales and marketing professionals in dozens of industries. And Jamie's workshops have been delivered across six continents for brands such as Microsoft, Thomson Reuters, Oracle, American Airlines and Intel. So Jamie, welcome and thanks for being here.

Thank you so much for having me.

So tell us a bit first about your background and when you and I first spoke, you gave me an interesting story about the evolution of how you arrived at this place and where you're at in your career right now.

Essentially, I was a VP of Sales at a SaaS software company who thought he knew everything there ever was to know about sales and wanted to roll out on my own and start a consulting company. And my ideas were no bigger than helping local Toronto, Canada. I'm a Canuck and I wanted to help local Toronto businesses with inside sales. That's about as big as I thought at the time. And about two years in I was failing miserably. I hadn't been building a sustainable sales pipeline and there's a whole backstory to it, but essentially I helped self discover and pioneer a topic called social selling. And it was because of me sitting in my global head office, which is a spare bedroom, reverse engineering LinkedIn in the middle of the night every night and identifying ways of using LinkedIn as a means of business development akin to the way you would use the telephone and email. I built a curriculum around it and started scaling it and got really lucky that I jumped from a local Toronto business to Oracle and Thomson Reuters and ADP within a year and kind of stayed in that global enterprise and global mid market space. My whole call it now 12 years, most of my career got it.

So how the evolve evolved into that community you discussed and then how did it evolve into this technology? I remember just briefly the way you kind of described this sort of aha moment that you had with a lot of these different things.

Yeah, actually it was a series of like a thousand razor blades actually. So Sales for Life has a global curriculum to teach social selling and to become certified in that Program. A seller would need to pick an account, plan it, create a real life oper like engage it, and create a real life opportunity, and then defend it in a video case study like the TV show Shark's Tank. Except we now have a quarter million of these certifications, over 600 customers. And what was happening is we were watching how sellers were booking meetings and creating opportunities, and they were talking about these triggers or compelling events that would happen. And of course, there's an entire category called buying intent. But then there was this other category based on our curriculum that didn't have a name yet, and they were reverse engineering their customers. We called it the sphere of influence. So you take a happy customer, you reverse engineer it, you then look for people that leave your happy customer into a process.

So it's like a lookalike audience.

Lookalike audience, exactly. So that was happening. So you start seeing this pattern. At the same time, sellers would write support tickets into sales for life and say, you've been showing me how to monitor my accounts and mine it for intelligence. That's a giant waste of time. I'm paid for outcomes, not to be a researcher. Can you do this for me? And I would turn down this opportunity for years. I would say, no, I am here to enable you. You need to learn the skills. Covid happens. Covid takes me off of an airplane. I was on 80 flights a year, five years in a row, all around the world. That's literally half of a year essentially on the road. Now I've bought back a lot of my time, and I turned to my business partner, Amar, and I said, you know, this idea that's been percolating in my head for a couple years, I think that there's an opportunity to start this company. It's a managed service SaaS software company that does what sales for life has been teaching, but does it now. For sellers, we take this intelligence. We find needles in a haystack from their past customers. We route it into their CRM as task notifications so that the seller wakes up, we've bought back their time, and they have the answers to the test ready to go for them in their CRM. And now they're not missing opportunities or threats in their accounts. It's just all there for them. That's how it was started. Okay, great.

So I guess another thing I'd be curious to look at this from is because I want to get into the pipeline signals in a second, but the audience of this podcast, as you know, are aspiring CROs. And CROs, how does this fit into the world of a chief revenue officer because it's obviously very sales focused, clearly. Right. But we can't deny the importance that the sales function plays in the role of a CRO. But what would the relationship like? Does a technology like this play in how a CRO plays in sandbox?

Yeah. So as a CRO, you look at your go to market and primarily one of the biggest challenges that a CRO is facing in almost every company in the world right now is pipeline creation. Specifically self generated pipeline creation. The bigger a company gets, the more difficult it is to fuel growth just from inbound marketing. So a lot of times companies will talk about their big giant inbound marketing strategies. That's great. From 0 to 10 million ARR when you can feast off of little fish. But the bigger you get, you get into the hundreds of millions and the billions of dollars. Now you need to be whale hunting, you need to be marlin hunting. And that requires an account based sales development model. So now you have sellers who need to focus on either a geographic territory, verticalized territory like industries, or a set of named accounts. The problem is that the sellers spend a disproportionate amount of their time doing what's called account selection and account prioritization. Most sellers are terrible time managers. So the problem is your sellers have a group of accounts or a market that they need to target and they can't discern why do I focus on account A over account B? Do I call account B today, not tomorrow. There's no rhyme or reason to their prospecting. So what pipeline signals is doing is it's telling you in order of operations, which accounts should you focus your attention on today, not tomorrow, and prioritize. Because the people that we're giving you these signals about are from your past customers. So you're not just calling A through Z through a phone book. You're now talking to your past customers. What that does is shorten sales cycle velocities and of course, much higher conversion to conversation and opportunity creation. So we're a piece to a puzzle as a CRO if the problem that you're trying to solve is I need more pipeline. Pipeline isn't just created by amping up the horsepower of actions and activities. It's also about finding more time in a day to be able to prospect and to relieve your sellers of the burden of the administrative it takes to get to a prospecting mode, which is account selection and prioritization. We're buying all that time back for you. So you just, you're calling past customers.

That's really interesting. If you think about the sales process, it's much easier when you know the prospect or you've had prior engagement with the prospect. And especially right now during, you know, our current work quake, people are moving from company to company and you are providing a pathway to keep those relationships connected and relevant and top of mind and top of funnel.

But you mentioned something important and this. If you were a CRO or a CCO chief Commercial officer who is in charge of both marketing and sales, this is another important piece to think about. A secondary use case that we've discovered. So an average CRM, because you talked about the migration of talent. Because that's essentially what we're doing, what we're watching. The migration of talent going into a business, up and promoted into a business and leave. Because they're the ultimate leading indicators to whether a priority just went into a business, up into a business or out the door. Because people are the ones that make decision. So as a CRO, you control marketing as well. And right now your database, your CRM database depletes at a rate of 3% on average every single month. Because since COVID that's actually accelerated past those original studies done by Gartner. That 3% might even be a small calculation to how fast your data VPs, CXOs and Directors are walking out of the door and moving companies. One of our customers, we've been measuring this, it's 3.96 per month. So over the course of one year, that is a third of your entire database is irrelevant, doesn't exist anymore. So now you've just invested as well in buying intent, sales intelligence, meaning you're tracking who goes on your website, who downloads ebooks and so forth. Well, ABM is only fueled when you know you have somebody in your CRM as a record as to who that CXO is or that vp. And then you can track through cookies who's landing on your site, who's who's downloading ebooks and so forth. So it becomes a self fulfilling prophecy that what we're doing is we're also enriching your database with all the new executives that keep taking jobs from your customers. And they don't even have to be your customers. It could be new promotions from non customers. But now when people are landing on your website, you actually figure out who they are because your database is growing faster than the speed it's depleting.

Interesting. So what you're saying here is, which I didn't realize this, I Mean, I know that migration occurs, but you're saying it occurs at a high enough rate that it depletes a significant portion of the investment you made in your database. And the second part is if you can identify the people that you already know, I think this is obviously very logical. You know, it's easier to sell it to someone you have a relationship with than someone that you don't. So that being said, you mentioned marketing. I'm fascinated to hear. So how does marketing benefit or how is the way that marketing utilizes this platform independently of sales or in concert with sales? What's the handoff or the way in which those two organizations can benefit from this as a collaborative function?

Yeah. First, we help marketing understand that their big investments that they've been making typically in buying intent is a piece to a puzzle. And we actually have a diagram on our website that looks like a puzzle piece. Buying intent is telling you who is touching your website, who's downloading ebooks. And that might be one or two key stakeholders amongst an entire buying committee in a big account. So I'm drinking out of a YETI water bottle right now. Buying intent might tell you that the Chief Digital Officer was reviewing a podcast on your website, but the Chief Digital Officer is one of 10 other people within YETI that need to come together to from a buying committee to make an informed decisions and purchase. But wouldn't you also want to know who walked in the door of that company in the last 90 days and are they a friend or a foe to your business? Who's walked out of the door, who's been promoted? Are they growing, you know, their UX department, are they shrinking their HR department? These are all leading indicators to where money is being spent in businesses. So we help you determine that information. And they're both pieces to a puzzle. And so now as a marketer, you're focused mostly on your buying intent, but at the same time, you've got this other piece of sales intelligence that allows you to, again, you can do more air cover with it. You can, you can do more paid media with it because you now are growing your database with more executives who are brand new to their job, that are more malleable to making change in a business. That's typically where we're seeing marketing get involved.

That's interesting. You know, a lot of what you're talking about happens organically. So you have salespeople who are on LinkedIn looking at new announcements, new people that have taken a new role and trying to kind of link back the circle of relationship to that individual. And so as you think about how you do that, how, how wide is the circle of influence and what I mean by that is if I'm a salesperson, can you see who is a friendly at the CRO level? That is a friendly to my CRO or CEO, does it have that circle of influence yet?

Yeah. So you as an individual seller can get that granular. We're taking more of a human capital migration approach at an base level. And ultimately what we're doing is if you think about that scenario you were describing, a seller, you're, you're paying your seller for outcomes to do $500 an hour value creation. Unfortunately, 11% of their week on average is spent doing administrivia is spent doing research and $5 an hour tasks. And so at scale, coming back to your chief revenue officer, you sit there and you go, my God, that 11% of a week, that's like half a day a week that they're spending being data miners. And that's not a great use of time. Now of course, yes, a seller with the power of LinkedIn can reverse engineer that. I and Warren are first degree connections. I can dive into Warren's social network and see who he's connected to and which accounts he has high social proximity to and introduce me to that other CRO. That's great use of time at the individual seller level. But Warren also trying to scale through 5,000 existing happy customers against my 75 named accounts that I'm working. That would take me eons as an individual seller to figure that out. And so instead of my valuable time, I'm going to pay a company $2,000 a month to be able to sift through all that data at scale and give me the answers to the test. That's essentially what we're covering.

So I'm curious, at what stage of a company is this problem start? Like when does this become a problem? Because you mentioned before there were like stages of a size and you know the complexity of a sales process and.

It becomes at the unruly stage when a company has a TAM that is greater than a thousand accounts and a tam. Because Warren, you said we'll define that in the call. A TAM means a total addressable market. So a total addressable market is how many accounts could I possibly sell into that meet my ideal customer profile. So typically customers come to us when they have a couple hundred active customers. They have a market of 1200 or 2000 or 10,000 prospects. There is no way that I could sift through all this intelligence to figure out and route who came from customers, who went to prospects, who got promoted last week, who took a new job last week, who's connected to my competitors, and that's one that we haven't even touched on. So that's where it starts to make sense. But if you are a company who you only sell to the fortune 25 or 50 and your whole world is, or as an example, your whole world is so niche that you can monitor it on your own, then have at it. It's more for scaled organizations, not even in that your company is big, but the market you are serving is too big for you to manage yourself.

Very interesting. I think the value of this could potentially extend beyond just sales. I mean I'm thinking customer experience as well as you're allocated a portfolio of accounts and the ability to have that insight of additional people that you may have worked with in the past that are friendly or people that have been promoted into a higher level position. So are you using that currently?

Yes. So essentially there's two departments that are achieving great use cases from this. Now my background is in business development and pipeline creation. So I naturally gravitate to the idea that watch people leave your customers and go into prospects. But of course our customers that have now started with us had that same inflection point and went oh, hold on a second, protecting my core customer and upselling and cross selling is equally or more valuable. So there's an entire cohort of their CSMs who are now we're monitoring all of their customers and again, who goes in, who goes up, who goes out and competitive intelligence then becomes the big play. So we can monitor did somebody leave employment from your top competitors and join one of these accounts because when they get in there there'll be a giant poison pill. Or is somebody already working in some of your customers who in their previous employment have skills or certifications or projects launched with your competitor? It's written all over their LinkedIn profile. Well, they're going to eat away and erode and potentially be a detractor over time and they'll convince people, well, maybe we should switch vendors because I used to use this other vendor, I'm certified in this other vendor at my previous company. And so this is a great way to protect the core customer. And of course when you watch who they hire, it's not offer upsell and cross sell opportunities.

Yeah, that's very interesting. You know, my mind starts kind of racing here and I think if you also applied it to former employees and where they've gone, if they were friendly, they could definitely be assets or allies to open.

Just turn that on for one of our customers who said, you know, this customer of ours has been around for 25 years. There's 22,000 past employees of this company. And so now they sell into IT and engineering. So let's reverse engineer. Where has every past employee gone? And if they're a director, a VP or CXO and they can influence decisions in the engineering and IT departments, let's call them and let's reacquaint them with the changes that we've had in our business and why they need to bring us back into the fold from their old brethren kind of thing.

How exciting. It's definitely a great use of technology in intelligent technology. You know, they're so often in sales, you know, and having led sales, you know, through my career and managed, you know, different levels of the sales process, it becomes very difficult to, to. And I think the term that you used with people doing administrative tasks, it's such a time vacuum in every seller's day. And so as I think about a CRO and a CEO, you're optimizing your talent's time and essentially giving them more time to develop and close deals. So that's definitely a win. Win.

Yeah. Because, you know, as a CRO, you're thinking about sales outcomes and then obviously quarterly milestones and objectives. But the only thing a seller can control is their actions and act. So you, you basically get to control the decisions you make and the actions you take. That's a whole seller's world. And unfortunately, the decision making has been a little bit subjective and flawed. So they'll just pull up a list, they'll call it A through Z. There's not really an order of operations that needs to change. That's where we're bringing objectivity. And at the same time, actions and activities. They only have so many hours in the day. So if the average seller was having 10 conversations in a day and you reverse engineered their calendars, you'd see a lot of misallocation of time. And then you'd say to yourself, well, if I took that away from them, hopefully they don't transfer it to the golf course. They actually transfer it to those extra actions and activities. And now they have 11 or 12 conversations a day. And at scale compounded over a year, that's very meaningful.

Wow. That's interesting as well. When you look at a solution like this, what is the complexity of integrating this into your current system or CRM what have you.

Yeah, it's very simple. We are as a new startup, we began with data uploaders. It's a simple CSV data uploader syncs with their customer CRM either on a weekly or monthly basis. We're in the midst of developing integrations like Zapier to connect to all the CRMs. So from a seller's perspective, we're middleware, we're plumbing, we don't exist. They never see the back end. They just see the answers of the test in their CRM of record and it can go into any tool and we do the heavy lifting for them.

That's great. I think everybody who is in a sales or related function is jumping up and down, you know, or will be jumping up and down when they hear this.

I hope so.

Yeah. So Jamie, this is really interesting. I have one more question kind of as a way to think about this more strategically. So it's kind of a two part question. One is this problem, obviously people are aware of the kind of optimizing time. Right? I mean salespeople are wasting time. And I understand that solving that problem and it's also making your, your prospecting more intelligent. But what is it that companies are currently doing about this? Like what's the ways that without a product or a service like yours, they just don't know about this because they must be aware of the fact that they're wasting time and that they're probably not getting great stuff. What's the sort of ways you're seeing companies tackle this issue now?

Yeah, in different order of operations. So companies that get it, and we notice it in our sales cycles where they're really short, they have already created internal campaigns called like we came up with a tagline for our business, follow your fans. Well, we've seen inside a bunch of our customers they had a campaign going on that had a different name for it. So they either tasked a junior resource to do this data mining themselves if they could, or what they've been doing is they've been asking their sellers to spend a portion of their time, whether it's a week or a month, to again find their past customers. Because when they looked at their win rates, you know, when they looked at their deal sources or opportunity source, they would realize, oh my God, a bunch of our customers come from past customers. So there's a cohort of customers of ours that have already gotten that. They've just been trying to mechanize it through like, you know, blunt force trauma kind of thing.

Right.

Then there's another group who recognizes that the sales intelligence that sits in LinkedIn is invaluable. So this is the more expensive, costly model is they load everybody up with sales navigator accounts thinking that that's automatically going to solve the problem. What you essentially did is you took a whole cohort of sellers and you handed them the keys to a Porsche 911. The only problem is some of them can't drive. Some of them live in New York City and no need to drive. Some of them can't drive stick shift. So what you did is you gave everybody 911 saying you're going to get from Manhattan to the beaches in Long island way faster. But there's a whole portion of sellers that have never driven, have no need to drive, no interest in driving. And so you have such waste shelfware of software that never gets used, poor seller utilization. And again, you didn't solve for the core problem. The core problem is missing opportunities and threats. Well, an individual seller with an individual LinkedIn account cannot possibly see and correlate all the people coming from past customers into current customers. So it can't be done. So you just bottom beautiful Porsches, but you didn't figure out how to get to Long Island.

Got it. Good. Great, great stuff. So I guess lastly, I would say, how do people learn more about this and how do they reach out to you and speak to you?

Connect with me on LinkedIn. My name is Jamie Shanks. I'm the guy that looks like this CEO of Pipeline Signals. And come to pipelinesignals.com and we'll be able to show you how we can do this for you at scale.

Oh, great. Look, this is really interesting and I think you're solving a really important problem. And I know that chief Revenue Officers are constantly under pressure to refine productivity, efficiency, and more importantly, the right people to speak to. So it's great to have more examples of technologies that can be rolled into the stack that help do this. So thank you so much for talking to us today.

Thank you for the invite.

Thanks, Jamie.