S3E39 - ROI is Dead and More with John Barrows

For it.

Here we go. All right. Hey, everybody. Matt and Monique, welcome to the session on roi. So we have a really interesting situation here. They start coming, we only have a few people here, so we're going to definitely talk about roi, but I also think that we're going to leave it open for people to ask questions and do some training and anything you want. So make it a live Q and A. Biggest request is people have their cameras on. Otherwise it's just John and I talking, which we're happy to do, but it gets a little bit boring when that happens. So with that being said, you know, I don't think John Barrows needs an introduction, but John, welcome. We're glad to have you on the surf and sales podcast. Good to be here, man. With you again.

It's always good to be here with you, Richard. Yeah, we might not be as argumentative as usual with this small group, but we'll still, I think, be able to.

Oh, I think we will chop it.

Up a little bit.

I think we will. So a couple things. Scott's not joining us today. He had a. Nothing major, but he had a situation come up that he needs to prioritize, unfortunately, and want to give a shout out to Outreach, Vidyard, Scratch Pad, and Sandoso for sponsoring us. We love it when they are able to sponsor us. And as you guys are looking for different tools and tactics and things, One, check them out. Two, check out their blogs. I think they all put out pretty good content about helping sales in the community and. And that's a big piece of what we do and why we're here. So that being said, the topic is supposed to be ROI is dead. Put your comments in the comment section. I'd love for the couple people here to go in and put in where you're dialing in from so we can see it. And again, remind folks to put your cameras on. So, Monique, I love that shirt. Where can I get one?

So.

All right, jc, good to see you. Good to hear from you.

So, hi.

So.

So we're going to talk a little bit about ROI and why I think that phrase is dead. But again, since it's a small, intimate group, you guys ask questions, jump in. You got two people here who love.

To help the sales community.

So we'll talk about anything you want.

So, yeah, career. I mean, we can kick it off with the ROI conversation and then go from there. But yeah, I think we. If we. I did a training this morning, we can go all the way from prospecting through to closing, plus career development. Any of that stuff. So if anybody's interested in leadership or anything there. So. But I think the roi, what sparked it was Richard and I, you know, kind of go back and forth on stuff and we share a lot of, hey, have you heard about this? What are you hearing out there? Those type of things. And for us it's always been a kind of a, you know, when somebody asks about ROI of sales training, at first I would always go through the exercise of like, okay, let me go put a spreadsheet together and I'm going to do this and I'm going to show you. But it never mattered. And what I find is, and I've been paying very close attention to this, that I never get that conversation or very rarely get that question from executives, like senior executives. I almost always get it from people below the power line, like non decision makers who are going through the evaluation.

Why do you think that is though? Like, I agree with you. I see it all the time, right? Oh, I think my boss is going to ask me to prove roi. But why do you think that is?

I think it's because if I were to look at it from a leadership standpoint, there is a leadership development component of this or management developed, because you have to put together if you are a leader of a department or a head of a department or in some way shape or form and you want budget that you are have not, that has not been allocated yet for whatever you want right now. Well, you as an internal employee have to show me a business case of why we need to do this. You know what I mean? So it's not necessarily the vendor that is that needs to justify the roi. It's the internal employee that needs to justify the ROI for the business case of why they want to go get budget for this. So I'm going to actually push down to my employees and say, hey, yeah, show me an ROI for this, making this investment. Why wouldn't I hire. You know, in our world, Richard, sales training, like you hire an SDR manager and then they ask for sale, then they ask for sales training and it's like, well, what did I hire you for? Like, can't you train the team? Like what? What? Like I'm spending 150, $200,000 on you. Now you're telling me you and another 50 grand from Richard and another 50 grand from so and so. Okay, well that wasn't in the budget. Help me justify that. And it's almost the exercise. So I can see how your brain works. Not necessarily that I need to Know the exact numbers of the roi?

That's what I wonder. Is it. Is it trying to teach them how to make good business decisions, which I think is important.

And, you know, I do, and I. But. But the problem is, is that they use it as a. As a. And you and I both know that numbers. I mean, look, I'm a big data guy, okay? But numbers can be used. However the numbers can be used. You can use.

You can use.

I mean, you can tell the exact opposite story with the exact same set of data. And so I actually look at it as a coaching moment for us and as sales reps, all of us, to flip that around and say, okay, roi, well, then what are the. And this is a qualification piece to it as well, which is, okay, well then what are the KPIs you're looking to impact? Okay, great. That's the baseline. Now what is the. What are the metrics right now that we can use as that baseline that we can show ROI from? And it has to be specific. Like, in our world is prospecting. Like, what's the ROI on prospecting training?

I don't know. Like, what are you trying to gauge here? Are you trying to gauge ACV conversion ratios of cold calls, cadence stuff? And they're like, well, and I'm like, and this is my pushback to everybody when they do. When they do ROI stuff, it's like, okay, fine, you want me to tell you roi? What's the. What's your current conversion ratios to your tier one executive accounts using email right now? Like, what's that number they have? No, because then I can show you roi. Because then we can tailor our training to. To really align with that.

Right.

But they never know that answer.

Yeah.

So I'm like, I go the Gary Vee route, which is, what's the ROI of your mom? Can. Can you tell me what the ROI of your mom is?

So it's kind of like I call BS in some ways. If it's happening at the executive level, at the bottom, below the power line, I actually use it as an education. And I do the challenger sale thing where I flip my hat around and I'm like, okay, if you really want to know roi, this is how you should look at it. And I coach them through how to really look at roi. Any questions? They need to go ask their executives for the data to be able to create a baseline that we can build off of that roi and then actually puts them in a position to learn something that puts them in position to, you know, really put position Themselves, well, within the organization, to their leadership and everything else.

So I have a question for the group, and you can put it in the chat if you want. How often. If someone brings. Even if you bring up ROI or your prospect or customer, how often do you think the other person believes the roi? Anybody?

Nod your head, shake your head, put it in the chat. Very little. Yeah, you know, check out the box then. Yeah, that. That's the thing, is that nobody believes the R. They only see the eye. Which is one of the reasons I hate the phrase, and I hate it profusely.

I used to put up, like, when. If. If somebody asked me for an ROI calculator, I would, okay, fine. And I'll do it with their numbers, totally transparent. And I will even put at the bottom, 85% bullshit factor, right? Because they won't put it. I will take 85% of that ROI number and say, let's discount it by that. The number's still ridiculous.

Totally, totally. And I. So it's interesting because I explain it as economic impact, right? And John knows this. And, you know, I talk about. And I do this as part of my discovery is. And I encourage people to do this, which is, you know, well, okay, well, what time are you saving? Okay, what's the hard cost of that? What's the soft cost of that? Meaning if you save that much time, what is your team going to do with that extra time? And what's the value of that revenue? And then what's the lifetime value of that revenue if they go get more revenue? And everybody loves it when I do that because that's what ROI is. But nobody's ever taught them what the phrase means. Nobody's ever taught anybody how to justify it. Nobody's taught them. These are the components to look at. And so I just reframe it of. That's the wrong term. And it's so interesting how often people are like, oh, my God, I love that. And then all my training is about driving the economic impact, which theoretically is roi, if someone were smart enough to look at it. The challenge is whether it's my economic impact exercise or an ROI calculator. People don't want to believe how bad they're doing. They don't want to admit the problem. And that's what I see a lot.

I'll give you a quick example of this. I have a know your equation spreadsheet where it talks about, you know, how many dials and all this other stuff, and then it kicks out based on your conversion ratios, how many dials you.

Should be doing right?

Or how many activities you need to be doing on a prospecting basis to hit your number. Right? When people really go through that exercise and use the spreadsheet, the numbers are frightening. I mean, frightening. Like 2,000 calls a week you would have to make type of frightening. You know what I mean? Not 50 dials a day. If you really look at the nuances of true ROI and true conversion ratios, you'd be horrified at what the numbers actually say. And so that's why I don't think the ROI conversation, unless they're really ready for a real conversation about it, is valid. And by the way, it also, the other point I'll make on this is. And this is backed up by data too, even using ROI metrics in our prospecting efforts is irrelevant anymore. I used to be the biggest person to say, hey, here's the easiest way to come up with messaging. Look at the bottom of a case study, what was the result, right? And then call everybody that fits that profile. Hey, we showed XYZ company in your industry how to drive these type of results. 33% increase in DA da da. That'd be interesting. Let's have a conversation. And that's where I went to Gong and I was like, hey, I'm a little, I'm curious, does, does ROI data help or hurt in today's prospecting efforts? And email and stuff like that. And they looked at it and it is, it's not a, it's not a neutral thing. It's not a positive thing. It is a negative. Like if you put numbers into your prospecting, oh, we showed, you know, up to 35% or ROI of 500, blah, blah, blah, blah. That actually significantly hurts. I forget what the number is, but it's over 1520. It significantly hurts your chances of them responding to you because no one believes it. I mean, think about how many companies are out there that say, oh, we have 92% of the Fortune 500 are clients of ours.

Why? Because they got one license of your stupid software that somebody downloaded as a trial. You're counting that as a, like, come on. No, you know, oh, 75. So great you picked the one massive ROI you did for the best possible scenario. But really the. So people just don't believe it. We've overused numbers, which is why I think people just roll their eyes. Now it's business case, now it's problem solving. Now it's, you know, the customer centric side of the house as opposed to what we can do for you.

Yeah, it's totally, totally agree. I am curious what. Folks, any questions from the group, like, come off mute. I think everybody has the ability to come off mute, but come off mute. Ask a question, put something in the chat if you want.

Are you struggling with this ROI conversation in your sales deals?

Yeah, I think so. I'm an SDR out of Austin, Texas.

What's your roi, Matt? What's your ROI as an sdr? I'm just kidding. The snark you get from John and I. Yeah.

Now I'm here to figure that out. But a lot of our. A lot of our messaging recently, um, and you know, John, you just mentioned that was we're calling out, you know, we're doing a lot of takedown campaigns. And so I feel like a lot of the messaging is targeting that, you know, we're highlighting certain pains that, you know, they've experienced. We've heard about our competitor and then we're, you know, calling out. I guess you call them the metrics, like the more some value statements from a case study. So I've been here for over a year and that's kind of. That's always how we've done it. But, you know, now that you're saying that, I'm also realizing that, yeah, like, we haven't gotten a ton of responses off that. But every, you know, even account executives I work with, that's typically the framework that they like to follow. Like, this company was struggling with this. We helped them. This was. This is the return they got. You know, could you experience, you know, what would this mean for your organization?

Yeah, I think that's what we all do. And we've all been taught that. And I think, you know, relevant. You know, John talks a lot about being relevant, and we try to use the use case as relevant, but I think we use it wrong. I don't think we paint the picture, the picture of pain the right way.

Yeah, I think the Matt that I've adjusted that slightly. You're with that approach. And I used to do it as well. You're telling them what the problem is.

Right.

As opposed to getting them to self discover the problem a little. So what I've flipped around to is I ask a lot of questions with. As part of my cadence. So I'm like, hey, are you. So, you know, like, for me it'd be like, hey, how are you keeping your reps motivated and engaged now that everybody's working from home? Right. So it's like, I know motivation and engagement is an issue.

Right.

And then I'll Say, well, the reason I ask, and the goal here is what I'm trying to do is, and I follow kind of the old school Glengarry Glen Ross, you know, Aida, not because I like the movie. I think it's a terrible sales movie, by the way. But Aida, attention, interest, desire, action. So if you look at an email, the subject line gets my attention. The first ten words right there tell me whether or not I'm interested. Okay?

And.

And that. And I can read those right there. So if I'm not interested, I'm not even going to open up that email. And so what happens is you can. How do you make it interesting? Like, the only thing people care about is themselves, right? So they don't care about us. So that's why I introduce. I'd like to introduce myself. Nobody cares. But how do I make it about you? Well, I can personalize it. Hey, Matt, I was on your website and I saw some stuff, whatever. Or I can ask a question that's relevant. Hey, Matt, how are you currently doing this, knowing that that is a gap in your competitor? And I'm going to ask that question and then I'm going to follow it up. Well, the reason I ask is because we're working a lot of clients, da, da, da. And you know, like, be interested. Now, I'm not going to put the case study there. My second touch is then going to be, by the way, here's a quick little case study that validates that point. So instead of leading with, hey, look at all this. Because another thing I learned is relatively recently is, and this makes a ton of sense, we focus as sales professionals, we focus a lot on the outcome. Okay? But look what we did for this company. The problem is if I don't think that my problem was the same as that company's was beforehand, I'm never going to believe the outcome of that result. And the result, or the example that I think Gong uses on this one too, is Alcoholics Anonymous. When you go to Alcoholics Anonymous website, you don't see somebody sitting there saying, hey, thanks, AA. I'm 10 years sober now, and my life is great because of it. You see somebody sitting there going, it started with one drink, and then I was drinking at work, and then I was missing my kid's soccer game. And then I was. And what the whole point is, you're getting somebody just like you're sucking people in to be like, man, that's me. Right? And if you can get them to say, that's me now you can convince Them on the outcome of it.

I call that. I talk about this all the time about painting a picture of pain. So I'll do a little exercise around that. And then, Matt, I'm going to ask you, did you have a question before John and I just took over and started diatribing all over you?

Which we do. We think we're pretty important.

But I talk about. If you think about a Tylenol commercial, think about a Tylenol commercial you've seen on TV or maybe in a magazine. What image pops in your head? Anybody. You can put it in chat and come off mute.

What image? Anybody?

Headache.

Headache. Yeah, but how do they describe that? How do they show that headache?

Pain?

Someone's going through it.

Yeah, they're doing this, right? And sometimes it's the. It's the. I wouldn't call it a cartoon, but it's some level of an animation. Like, you know, it's the head and head on hand, hand down, right? And then they show this bright red in the front of their head, which is also, by the way, the same color red as their Tylenol box, if you haven't figured that out. So they're painting a picture of pain. So, like, for John and I, one of my. I don't know if you use this one. It's like, how often do you sit at home on Sunday nights doing data work that's a picture of paying everybody in sales, you know, doesn't get right. People ask me what do I do? And I say, I teach people how to earn the right to ask questions, which questions to ask and when. Guess what? There's not a revenue person in the world who doesn't know exactly what that means because they know their team's not asking the right questions and they're afraid to do it. So, anyway, Matt, coming back to you bringing it up is, you know, are you bringing up contextually, Are you bringing it up because you're frustrated by it, or are you like, hey, what's a better way?

What's a better way?

I think we've been going about it the wrong way because a lot of frameworks that we've. Every cadence we've built kind of follows that. You know, it's one long email, and.

It'S not pretty to look at because.

It feels like, all right, John, jump in here. This is all John, don't nail on him.

Cut it up. So here's the deal. When you put everything that you do, like, a lot of us do this too, right? So, like, here's a quick Example, I do sales training, right? But I also do a couple of programs here. I got filling the funnel, driving to close, and in those I got meeting execution, you know, negotiations of all the messaging, all that stuff, right? And I could probably wrap a nice tight little message around that like, hey, here's all the things that we do. Bing, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom. Decent size, few scrolls on the iPhone type of thing. The problem with that, though, is if you don't respond to that. Matt, what's my next email? Hey, did you get my first one? Bubbling this one up to the top, right? That type of thing. And then it ends up being this, like, I'm hammering this nail that is just not going down. My suggestion is you carve up your value proposition and you start to think about it from a component standpoint. So, for instance, our little messaging equation starts with a Persona. So it's like say VPs of sales and SaaS or something like that.

Whose main priority or challenge is pick one, right? Leverage our component of our solution to do this type of result by doing that. Now I carve it up. And so now my first message to a VP of sales whose priority is motivation and engagement. Leverage this component of our solution to address that. Is that a challenge for you? Okay, you don't like that one? Whatever. Hey, what about this type of challenge that VPs of sales are going through? So I think it's an exercise of going through the Persona of like. Like, let's just try to boil it down. Like, obviously we want to be as personalized as possible, but as Richard said, look, the holy grail here is personalization and relevance. That's the holy grail, okay? But that takes a lot of time. If you force me to choose between personalization or relevance, I'm going relevance, right? Just because, you know, I went to University of Maryland does not buy anyone.

Give an example. Talk about relevance, right? And by the way, all this goes back to ROI, right? All this is 100% driving to proving that ROI sooner.

Exactly.

What's an example of relevance?

This goes to that question, right? Like you met you, Maryland. That's not relevant. Because what I get is, hey, John, I see you went to Umarland, go Terps. But then it's hard cuts to some value proposition that literally has nothing to do with what I'd be interested in, like software development or something dumb like that. I would so much rather you say, hey, John, as a CEO of a sales training organization, how have you made the switch from on site to remote delivery and retain your revenue Streams like, that's a very relevant question you can ask somebody like me. And guess what? You can send that out to 50 other CEOs of sales training organizations.

Yep.

Because it's. Because it's like, ooh, like, wait a minute. Why are you asking that question? Well, the reason I ask is. And then we can fill in the blanks. I'm not asking you that question, by the way, because I'm expecting an answer from you. I'm asking you that question to get you to open up the email, and then I'm going to answer it for you. I'm going to say, well, the reason I ask is because VPs of sales who have main priorities going through da da, da da, leverage our solution to be able to do this. Thought it'd be worth a conversation, and that gives me the ability to tell this story.

So, Matt, taking this feedback, how would you now try this? How would you shift the message? You're here. We can help you craft that new message. And anybody can come off and say, I want to do that, too, by the way. So.

I Definitely Pointing out the pains. It sounds weird, but that the AA reference you had, John.

Yeah.

Really?

You know, kind of pointing out the pains and seeing if that's relevant at the time, because.

So, like, give us a value prop you use right now. Pull up one of your emails without naming the name of your company, although I guess we see it.

Yeah.

And. And give us a wallet. Let's.

Let's.

Let's workshop it. Like, you're here. Like, we want to give value to you.

Let me see.

And who do you mostly, as you pull it out, who do you mostly sell to? What's the Persona you mostly sell to right now?

A lot of, like, VPs of IT or directors of PMOs.

I used to sell to it all day, every day. I didn't manage services. So.

Give me one sec.

All right.

Have connection to business.

What's.

Go ahead.

Sorry.

Yep. So, so now what does your current messaging sound like? Like, what's your one sentence? I call it an awareness statement. You call it something else.

What's the hook?

We can connect the gaps between how companies are doing their planning and then delivering on that work across the organization.

And so now my question is, what pain is that solving for me as an IT person?

Well, it's solving a lot of headaches for you if you're consolidating tools and keeping up with project statuses across the business.

And why do I care about keeping up with project statuses?

So you're Delivering on time, hitting revenue targets.

Yeah, I think you got a gate. I think with what you do in this space, man, it's such a big picture. Like you could get so kind of caught up in the big of like, hey, look at all this cool we make, you know, we connect your company and we get managed service and everybody on the same page. I think everybody would be exactly. It's like when I work with BI companies, like, you know, business intelligence, like I love BI and analytics companies. They crack me up, you know, because they all think they're special and, and every time I get in touch with them, they're like, oh no, no, no, we're special. I'm like, oh yeah, really? Let me, let me guess. You take desperate data sources, you put them in a graphical format so you don't have to involve it and you can answer questions you didn't even know you had. Is that what you do? And they're like, oh my God, yeah, that's James. Did you read our website? I'm like, no. Every one of you stupid BI companies does the exact same thing. And you think you're special. You not. So what you need to do is you need to figure out those really nuanced things, Matt, that the nuance pain point of that Persona because the broader message is just it's not going to land. Let's put it this way, this will probably resonate with you. And Richard Turmey said this multiple times before. I used to sell outsourced IT services to the SMB market and this was my pitch. And this was back 20 years ago. Ready? Hi, this is John Barrows with Thrive Networks. We do outsourced IT support for small and mid sized companies in the Boston area. We take a really unique approach to manage your IT infrastructure by combining the best of what people and technology have to offer. We tie our network operations center and our managed services to your environment so we can take care of all the small things on a proactive basis. So when the engineers come on site, they can take care of the higher levels, more strategic initiatives to help drive your business forward. I'd love to talk to you about your IT support needs. Does that sound kind of familiar? As far as giving you back time, allowing your managed services to do this right, that was. That sucked 20 years ago, you know what I mean? And that was actually good 20 years ago and today, but still. Yet every other company I talked to in the MSP space or any of that has a worse pitch than that and they're still using it to this Day. Instead, I'm going to talk to you about that problem that happened for that client that was super unique for that Persona because they were the ones responsible for it. And I'm going to carve that up, and I'm going to keep needling that. That issue, and I'm gonna be like, is this a problem? Is this a problem? Like, hey, what about this? Because it's not about that one email or that one voicemail anymore. It's about the contact strategy. It's about the story that we tell these people and how we kind of interweave our messaging and, you know, giving a little value, asking a question, sharing a story, and getting the whole. The whole point is them to get. Think differently, because that's what our job is. Our job is not to convince you to buy our stuff. Our job right now is to convince you that status quo is not okay.

Yep. And so the one thing, like, it's interesting, too, because I. By the way, did anybody hear what John said? And could you find a very small picture of pain that you could have snipped on that you could be like, oh, because I did. I heard one. And then I'll have John, what, out of that pitch? Yeah.

More strategic. No, you tell me.

I'm asking the group. Did anybody here. I'm curious. And you put it in the chat, if you don't want to come off mute.

By the way, I'd like to thank our special guest host Matt Weaver, for joining us live today and asking questions. The part I heard that for me would be when your IT people show up on site, they know which to prioritize first.

That's a picture of pain that someone can visualize. It may not be the right picture. It may not be painful enough. But that's the stuff I'm always kind of looking for, where they can go, oh, yeah, I know what that's like.

Keenan does a good job on this. He talks about. He gives an example about skiing and how if you're trying to sell somebody skis, you could talk about the length of the ski and all this. But then he gets into. If you're that subject matter expert in skiing, and you talk about, hey, have you ever been a little bit over your skis and you lose control and this happens and da, da, da, da, da. It's like, yeah, that happens a lot. Oh, okay. Well, I got a solution for it. Right. But it's so. It's so specific to the problem. And so, Matt, like, from a tech standpoint, what I might do is forget about the sales pitch here for a second. Forget about, you know, your marketing lingo and all that crap. Go talk to an engineer and just ask them straight up, hey, what was the last time you worked with a client that had a very specific challenge?

And is that something that you typically see a lot? And do we solve that problem and then build a campaign around that? Okay, you know what I mean? Like, go talk to your engineers, go talk to your customer support people and say, what are the problems that these people are actually having and solving with our solution? And then maybe go talk to some existing customers and hear it from their perspective. So you can either talk to your existing engineers or what I always recommend. And by the way, this is for everybody here. I beg you all to do this. The easiest way to come up with campaigns and go after after things is this is, and this is how you organize your whole organization as well. Go grab somebody from customer success, okay? And ask and say there's one type of Persona that you want to go after this month. Okay, with from like a campaign standpoint. So, you know, CIOs in healthcare, whatever that is. Okay, now go. I guarantee, obviously you have existing customers that are CIOs in healthcare, right? Ask them, would they mind coming on at the beginning of the month for an hour in this type of format where we're going to ask them questions. Okay? And the questions are going to be like this, hey, what is your day to day? Like, you know, like, like every day. Like, what is your, what does your day to day look like? What do you, what are you held responsible for? How have your priorities changed since COVID hit? Oh, and by the way, what type of, what forms of communication do you like, you know, do you respond to? Is it email, video? Have you ever gotten a video? Do you. Are you on LinkedIn? Like, so I'm going to extract as much information about these people who I'm about to go sell to these people, right? And they're going to be existing customers. So they're hopefully going to be open to giving you some feedback here because they want to see you win. Now, after that, I'm going to take that information. I'm then going to do a little bit of research. CIO's health care priorities challenges 2022.

Right.

2023, see what comes up, business acumen. I'm going to read a few articles. I'm going to learn some, some other language and that type of stuff, right? And then based on the information that I learned from the existing clients and some of the Research that I did online.

And.

And hopefully I have like a webinar or some content that is relevant to those people, too. With all those assets. I'm now going to put together a story and I'm going to say, okay, touch one, touch two, touch three, touch four, touch five, touch six. What is this going to look like? My first one, I'm going to ask a question. My second one, we're going to do research. My third one, we're going to share a case study. But it's all going to be based on what I just learned that these people really care about and what they really. What their real problems are. And then I'm gonna run 20 accounts through it, you know, per person. So let's say there's five people doing that as a team. 20 accounts. That's a hundred emails goes out touch one, 100 emails goes out touch two, touch three is a call. That's a call blitz. And now we're looking at that at the end to say, how did that work? And you fill that in. That connects business acumen, that connects marketing, that connects customer success. That, you know, and then we learn about what's working and what's not because we're doing it at a volume that we can actually get some data out of. Right. And then we just rinse, repeat every month. Rinse, repeat, pick a new Persona, go after it, have a new talk track. It makes it so much easier because now we're not making. Because, look, we make up. We make a lot of assumptions about what people care about, and a lot of it is based on what we think is important. We got to flip that around. We got to figure out what the client, what these people actually think is important, and then craft everything around that. And so what's the better way to do that? Go talk to people. Research is good, but going talking to the horse's mouth type of scenario is way better when it comes to coming up with their messaging.

By the way, who's responsible for getting this? Anyone. Who do you think on your team supposed to be doing this? Matt, how long have you been in sales?

A year and a half.

Year and a half. Right. You know who should be having these conversations? Product marketing. This is 1000% a product marketing process problem.

So I don't, you know, which is interesting, because at least, John, I don't know if you do this, but I do it like I come in and do an exercise on messaging. Like, we take this economic impact piece and we roll through, role play it, and they're like, Great. Let's come up with an awareness statement. And that's how you build this stuff out. And it's kind of like, why isn't product marketing doing this? And. And it's crazy because, you know, in six months, if you're not doing it as an sdr, you know, and you're. It's your first sales job, you can be let go. Product marketing's been there three years, and they haven't been let go ever.

So, you know, I mean, think about the initiative to just do that on your own. Like, I don't wait for anybody, right? I don't wait for product marketing. I don't wait for marketing. I don't. Like if you have an excuse of, well, marketing hasn't given me the. I'm. I don't want to listen to that. I also want. I don't want other people to be, you know, dictate my success. So I'm going to. If I don't have that in my own organization, guess what? I'm going to knock on some doors. I'm going to go make a friend with somebody in customer success and say, hey, who are a couple of clients that you don't think would mind me chatting with them for a little bit? And then I'm going to call them up and just say, hey, first of all, I want to thank you for being a client of ours. Means the world to us. I've heard great things about you. Can I get 20 minutes, 30 minutes to your time just to ask you some questions? I'm trying to represent us the best way I possibly can out there in the marketplace, and I would just love to hear from your perspective some of the things that you're faced with. Just help me learn. There's very few executives out there that would be open to that from an existing account. And then you'll be off and running, and you won't have to worry about waiting for product marketing or anybody like that.

I coached a guy yesterday interviewing for his first SDR job. And I said, well, what are you doing to prepare? And he's like, I picked up the phone and I called a bunch of prospects and said, what would you be interested in? I was like, I was blown away. I'm like, oh, my gosh, really? You did that? I would never have done it. And he's never had a sales job yet. He's just one of those people. And I'm like, you're getting hired so fast. Like, all you need to do is tell people in the interview that you did that give them the feedback and they'll be like, okay, yeah, you're shortlisted.

Yeah, go ahead. Ali, what's up?

Yeah, thank you both. It's great to see you again. Big fan. Obviously. Question is around platform based sale. If you're selling a platform based. Sapient's a platform that I offer, I sell to enterprise. So typical. 5 billion and up. Multiple stakeholders following the same process of doing any information we could find online. Trying to lead with deposit deposit rather than withdrawal. But getting high enough to confirm is this a real problem for them versus low enough to where they don't have the power to make that decision. I don't know if that's making any sense. Many thoughts and going through that process. So we're not spinning cycles because I go through a very similar monthly campaign cadence identifying the right problems with my BDR and going through that. But anything you guys might recommend on avoiding going after the wrong solution and maybe there's no magic pill for that till you have those conversations. But that, that's kind of my daily battle.

I got some thoughts on this. Have you ever read.

Naked Sales by Ashley Summer? Ashley. What the hell's her last name?

Naked Selling by. It's the whole thing here is because if you're going after major accounts, right, Major accounts.

Volume play is tough, right? Because it's like you're swinging, missing all over the place. So it's all about quality. You gotta be really thoughtful. But this is what we did during COVID because when Covid hit, you know what made me cringe was when organizations when pipelines dried up and they forced their SDRs to double down on their activity list. I was like, oh my God. Like, what are you doing? Like in a normal economy, people don't want to talk to SDRs, for crying out loud. Now, to down economy, you think a CEO or a vp, but yet they were like, no, no, no, keep going. I'm like, you are taking the exact opposite approach I would take.

That was a fun time.

Yeah, I'm sure it was, Matt.

Like that.

Like, I mean, because it's just insulting, right? So. Because what kind of value. And no disrespect, Matt, but what kind of value do you bring to the table? To an executive, it just. There's not a lot.

Talk to me about my priorities and how you can help me achieve my goals. Like, no, no, you can't. You can't help me achieve my goals. I'm sorry you don't have enough business acumen to be able to have that conversation with me. So, but what, what SDRs are really good at outside of getting meetings, they're really good at gathering information. So what we did, Ali, is we went bottom up. So I unleashed our SDRs on frontline people, okay. And had to have conversations with it. So what we did is like James and Morgan at the time were my kind of SDR AE combo. James was the sdr, Morgan was ae. And we would pick one account a week and James would do all the groundwork. So he would call into the accounts, he'd be talking to individual SDR, he'd be going on LinkedIn, he'd be doing research on the accounts, he'd be looking through 10k annual reports, and he would then bring that to Morgan at the end of the week and they would look at it and Morgan would be like, all right, what'd you learn? And James said, oh, man. I Talked to like 15 of their reps and this is what's going on and this has happened and these are the tools that they're in. These are some of the areas they're having challenges with, blah, blah, blah, blah. Then Morgan would then take that and basically put together a hypothesis and a business case to bring to the executives and say, look, we've been talking to 15, 20, 30 of your people. We were doing a ton of research and we noticed that this area you were having challenges with and we have a solution for it and this is how it's going to work. Would you be open to that call? Because at the executive level, if you're not bringing new ideas to the table for me and challenging the way I think, I'm not paying attention to you, you know what I mean? You got to get, it's almost like you got to get that obnoxious. Like, not obnoxious, but you need to kind of punch me right in the mouth for me to be like, pay attention to you. There's a blog you might want to listen or read, Ali. It's called.

Why you're.

It's gong.

It's why your reps cancel to the C suite. So if you go, actually, I think I might have it here. And it's a really cool way of like talking to the executive level. Because what it is, is there's, there's like a four step process. Sweet, I'll find it for you. But yeah, I might even save that one.

But I just took note of it as well, John.

Perfect. Because. And what it is, it's more presenting, but we'll get to prospecting. The idea is you come up with a Nexus. And your Nexus is basically something that's polarizing. So it's a statement like it doesn't matter what you sell, it matters how you sell. That's a nexus. I believe that. Now the point of that is if you're a product guy and you think that your product is better than everybody else and it doesn't matter how you sell it. Let's stop this conversation. You and I are so far off, so it's not even worth me continuing this. But you want to say something that most people would agree with, but it's kind of polarizing. It's like it sets that stage. But then the second step is you got to shake me off of that foundation again. You got to show me that status quo is not okay. So you got to come with some data. This is challenger sale ask right of lead with insights like, did you know, like I'll give you a quick example. I was working with a cybersecurity, a managed service cybersecurity group. And we found this article that talked about how moving forward in security cybersecurity, 100,000 jobs are going to be needed a year for the next 10 years to fill.

Right.

But only 60,000 people are going to be coming into.

The workforce that have those skills. So there's going to be a 40,000 person gap every year for the next 10 years of the skill that you need to do that. So. So they show that data. And the point there is whether you like it or not, you can keep fighting this fight for talent if you want to, but it's just going to get more expensive and it's going to be harder to find. Or our unique solution is pinpoint. Bam. So it's this combination I think of you challenging executives.

Kind of like the Bilal mic drop style statement on a call. I think he uses that one.

Right, right. Like hitting them in the mouth. But you got to have some data. This is why naked selling or naked sales or something like that by Ashley. It's all about applying design thinking to the sales process. Like if you want to sell to Walmart, go to Walmart, walk the floor, sign up for their newsletter, go to the self checkout, return something like basically become a customer.

Yeah. Real life data.

Exactly, exactly. And then come with your story to them about, hey, this is real world stuff, man. I'm not guessing here.

Just to make sure I'm hearing you. And then I want to be sensitive to everyone else's time. So, you know, go from going from the ground. I'm working on Mortgage underwriting use case right now with I think a lot of us have done that before. So we started with a loan agent and went all the way up, right? Booked a meeting with the vp, you know, a month out, confirming that pain and all that information. But we might get to the VP and she says we've already solved that problem where it's not budgeted this year, but at least we're having real conversations of real impact for that month versus just throwing spaghetti on the wall, making a guess based on a 10K. So okay, true.

But the other part of that little just added piece is what is the impact, right? Because if they're like, oh, we don't have budget for this right now.

Build a case. Yeah.

I might be able to say to.

You.

What do you mean you don't have budget for this right now? If you don't solve this problem, you're losing X amount of loans on a monthly basis because of it.

It.

And if I just do the math here, like one of mine is easy. I'm like, what's one hire? What's one new hire cost you to leave? Say one of your top reps left your organization. What does that cost you as an organization? And I don't just mean their salary. I mean the time it takes to ramp somebody new and all this other stuff. You know, how much, you know how that expense you guys post about that today?

I think it was like 2.6 million.

Or something like that. It's something ridiculous. So. And I can position training as a way to retain your top talent because if they don't feel like they're getting now, it's a little bit of a softer connection. But if you're talent, if you just lost two or three of your top reps and I come to you with some sales training that's really motivational and it's going to drive results and all this other stuff and you're like, well, we don't have budget for that. We'll budget for this in Q1 and I'll just push back and you'll be like, didn't you just lose two of your three of your top reps? What was the reason they left? Didn't they feel like they weren't being invested in as an organization? I'm going to tell you right now, hey, Monique.

But I'm going to tell you right now that respectfully, if you wait, you're just digging a deeper hole.

I do this all the time. I mean, this all goes back to economic impact. What's the Economic impact of that, which is the phrase of, oh, look at that, sweet.

Which is that whole thing about ROI versus economic impact. And they don't get it. I had this all. They're like, oh, well, this other project came up. I'm like, okay, but you're going to wait three months to do sales training. Well, how much bad pipeline are you going to create? How much, how, how, how bad is your team going to be at closing at that point? And they still create this justification in their head that it has more to. I think it ends up being more in their head, a cash flow issue. They think this other project is more important. But, and, and then in fairness, it could also mean I didn't deliver enough value in my pitch. I have to own that could. If I couldn't present it and they didn't want to believe me, then that part of that falls on me and I got to own that piece because it's as much as John and I love to blame the prospects and the customers, you know, we got to look at ourselves too.

Exactly.

I know. Monique, you had a question you wanted to ask. I don't know if you want to come off mute or you want me to ask it, but go ahead if you want to come off mute.

Oh, maybe it says I have to let you on mute. There you go.

Good. If not, I'll ask it because it was in the chat.

But definitely see if you can keep working. Oh, there's too much noise.

Okay.

Reentering the workforce after an eight year sabbatical, which I'm like, wow, how do I get an eight year sabbatical? I need a course from you, learning as much as you can from experts. To get herself up to speed, what sort of advice would you offer? I'm ready. And with it also like to be ready that I'll be ready to punch John Barrows in the mouth with my expertise. Wow, that's fantastic.

Question.

Okay. The fact that you even said that, Monique tells me you're ready. Yeah, you're there, you're good.

I think there are a couple of things. So one, you're never going to stop learning. And part of this in my mind is just starting to work out whether or not you're going to interview, getting the interviews. So you're entering the job forces. Just like a sales process. You're going to have to target your ideal companies, your icp, you're going to want to look at, well, what kind of managers have I had in the past and what was so bad about them? And then how Do I translate that into my interview questions to make sure I find the right manager? Can I find a product or service that I'm passionate about? And if you're coming in after eight years, you know, it may not be that this is the first, the sales job for the rest of your life. It could be the first one to get you to the second, which gets you to the third, which gets you to the fourth. So I think a lot of. So a lot of it, first of all, is just mindset.

Secondly, I think that, you know, the goal is to get you as many interviews as possible, because that's the fun part. And one of the things I suggest, whether it's your LinkedIn profile and. But specifically your resume, if people are asking you to upload resumes or if you're ever writing a note or whatever, look at the job description and figure out the words they're using and SEO your resume to that job description, because that's what the machine that they're applying to will actually look for. Also, if you're reaching out to someone on LinkedIn or whatever, I would try to say, hey, I noticed you are looking for these skills. I've done that here and here. So again, you're trying to really tie it in. It's the same thing I do. When I hear.

A prospect use a certain phrase, I'll repeat that phrase so they know I heard them, so that I know that subconsciously they hear that piece. So those are a couple of things.

I guess my question is, and you can put this in the chat and someone else can jump off me. And by the way, if other people have advice for Monique, you know, John and I haven't really been in the job market for a long time, so feel free to give her some advice. But my question for you, Monique, also is.

You know, what do you feel like you're not up to speed with, or is it just that you've been out for eight years?

And I think, you know, she types.

That or there you go, there she goes.

Sorry, she just. She just left the room. So thank you. Thank you for that. I appreciate that very much. I just feel like.

There'S the whole social media.

I'm the sort of person that I prefer to talk to clients, just like John was saying, speak to the clients, get to understand what's happening. So that's the one area I'm struggling with in terms of the technology aspect. And I'm scared that that might.

Obscure my chances for interviews. I don't know what your views are with regards to must I be really a techie to sell?

No.

No.

I think it depends on what you sell. I think it helps obviously to know how to leverage the technology money. But I'll throw a different perspective at you. I firmly believe that right now the predictable revenue model is broken and I think it needs to evolve. And the whole idea of SDRs with the inbound, BDRs with the outbound and then AES, I just don't think. I think the SDR model, quite honestly, is evolving to be under marketing and operations and not be the feeder system. What I might think of, especially just based on, I don't know much about you, but just based on what you just said there, instead of sales, go find a company that you believe in, that you think aligns with your values, all that stuff, and maybe think about customer success first.

The reason I say that is because I genuinely believe that the evolving model should look like sdr BDR getting your ass handed to you and learning that. All right, can you just make the phone calls? Can you take a bit of a beating? Okay, check. Good. But then instead of flipping that SDR to an AE and then all of a sudden having you have to close and learn 90% of the sales process, instead have that SDR go over to account management. Because then what you're going to learn is you're going to learn how to close, but it'll be.

Upsells, cross sells, renewals, that type of thing. But more importantly, you're going to learn the product, you're going to learn how they use it, you're going to learn the use cases and all that stuff. And then you take that leap into like full cycle sales and you'll be vast. You'll be so much further beyond anybody else because you'll be talking about real experience stuff. So I don't say like, don't think about sales. Obviously I'm a huge proponent of sales. I think it's the greatest profession in the world when done right. But. But there's another component of looking at it from a slightly different angle. To Richard's point. If it's going to get you from here to here to here to here to here, well then maybe if there's a company that you genuinely believe in, that you're like, I want to build my career here for at least the next three to five years or something like that, well, then maybe if sales isn't the angle, maybe customer success is because you love talking to people.

Yep.

Okay. Fantastic.

Just something to think about.

Thank you.

Thank you, thank You, Matt.

You'Re gonna now go out and try and go into customer success. Now that you've been doing this for a year and a half.

Just, just a new avenue I haven't heard.

It's good.

I'm telling you, Matt, if, if you don't go that direction, that's okay. Just, just be, just go talk to the customers though, you know what I mean? And don't ask for permission. Like go talk to them because they're going to give you all the messaging that you need. Need, you know what I mean? You're going to bring your. Here's a fun thing you can do. Take your existing cadence, whatever your fucking boss put in front of you, and then go grab lunch with an existing customer and put it in front of them and be like, would you ever respond to any of this crap and have them be like, are you serious? What the is this? Who wrote this crap? You know what I mean? And be like, okay, so then what would. Would. They'll tell you? The messaging, man. You won't have to make it up.

The funny thing too is like, you know what I. And I. John, I can't remember if you used to say it, but I think it may be part of this evolution is what would I respond to the email I just sent? Well, it's like, yeah, but you're not selling to you, so you're asking the wrong person. You're not your own icp.

And by the way, the answer, that's probably no. You know what I mean? Like the fact that people talk like, it cracks me up. Like sales is such a hysterical thing. Especially you could watch it in a bullpen, right? Like somebody like, you'll be talking to your like like bullpen mate and be like, hey man, what's up? You see the party last night? That was crazy. And then all of a sudden, cold call. Hello, sir, this is John Barrows and I'd like to talk to you. And you're like a completely different person. Or like you read somebody's email, you're like, that ain't you. You know what I mean? Why do I. My emails have misspellings in them. I don't capitalize the front. Like, you know, my grammar's terrible, but it's me. Like, you know, it's me when you're, you know what I mean? It's not some pre canned beautiful, like, you know, any of that stuff. I'm like, I'm misspelling stuff. Stuff I'm putting short, you know, I'm not capitalizing every Word. I'm run on sentences because I'm actually, I think that's the. Like, it used to get judged for that, you know, and some people still do, don't get me wrong. But now I'd rather see the mistakes. I'd rather see the video, the one cut video where you screwed up halfway through and didn't hit stop and record again. But when. I'm sorry, I'm a little nervous on my videos. My. One of my first videos here, but I'm really, really wanted. You know what I mean? Like, that's what I want to see. Yeah, you can stuff for the perfect stuff nobody cares about.

I have a. And I have a question. You know, do people, just by show of hands, you know, do you judge misspellings and typos and emails?

My wife does 100%. Like, Kim, my wife will literally. She's got one of those matrix eyes where, like, if she sees one misspelling on an entire page, it jumps out on her and she immediately judges you. So she's the exact opposite of me. Right.

And I know John's wife. She'll also talk to him. Like, she'll be like, john, how could you do that? So she will. Here's.

Here's a.

Here's a funny story. You know that the. The email that has gone around that says, and. And Monique, I'm not picking on your background, so I apologize. It's the. It's the one where it's like, oh, I'm the prince of something something, and I need to put $15 million into your this and, you know, and all that stuff. And you know how there's all those typos in it, like it's bad, bad, bad. That's actually a disqualifying tool, meaning they want to find the people who will respond to that, because the theory is they're not intelligent enough to know if they send it to someone like me and then I get on the phone with them, they're going to be really hard pressed to convince me that I'm the right guy. So there's a balance between what John's saying of the typo of be human and. And perfection. You know, I always used to put, you know, I always used to typo the word sincerely. I forget an e or. Or two Ls by accident, because then people would know that it was a human who sent it. But I think that's probably the biggest thing that's changed is that the humanity that I think came from COVID where we all sort of had to Start realizing like, it's like, Monique, we didn't care that it was loud. We didn't care that your kid was in the background. Like who cares? Like we all have been doing that and, and that humanity makes it real. And I think that's a really big piece.

So it's their personal. I mean look, it's the same thing as the face to face sales. It's like you dress, you dress the role in a sense that if I'm going to talk to a VC or financial services in downtown Boston, I'm wearing a suit. But if I'm doing a startup in San Francisco, I'm wearing something different. It's the same thing you got, I mean, goes back to mirroring. Right. You have to mirror your audience.

Yep.

So, so however somebody else types, I tend to adjust a little bit. So for instance, like if you and I are going back and forth on email, Monique, and usually it starts with hi Monique and you respond right back to me and just start the sentence. You don't say hi John.

Right.

You just like, you know, oh, thanks for, thanks for reaching out, blah, blah, blah. Well then my next email to you isn't going to be hi Monique, I'm just going to start talking in my sentence. You know what I mean? It's just those type of small, nuanced things get people familiar with you. Get, you know, and makes connections that are subconscious or conscious and that's why we have to pay attention to that stuff.

So hey, I know we're actually at time, so I want to say thank you to everybody for joining. Obviously a big shout out to our sponsors, Sendoso, Scratchpad, Vidyard and Outreach iO1. Please take a look at them if.

You'Re needing those tools.

Tools 2 definitely check out their content. Right. If you're talking about, you know, different things that can prove roi, we know video is working, working, you know, we know those things are working. We know that you do, you know, sales engagement, you know, that's a, it's a requirement now. I wouldn't take a job without it. I wouldn't even take a sales job without an outreach type tool. So, so please check them out for good content as well as, you know, helping you in your career job. And with that being said, we'll, we'll say thank you and we'll see you next time.

Yeah. And by the way, real quick, if anybody has any other questions, Richard, what's like just email for you?

Yeah, I mean, yeah, you can. Richard harris415.com I'll even put it in the chat real quick.

I'll throw it in here as far as Instagram. And tick tock for me. You guys want to see me get my ass handed to me on to me on TikTok. Come have. Have some fun. I got, you know, a thousand people telling me I'm a. Which is pretty funny because it's obviously a different audience, but I'm having some fun over there. If anybody wants to learn the business value of TikTok, who knows?

And by the way, that is my real cell phone number right here, so I will always take a text or an email. And, Monique, since you're away, I'm on WhatsApp, too, so you can find me there, too. So. All right, everybody, thank you.

All right, everybody, have a great day.