S6E18 - Shawn Sease Fixing Cold Calling in the SDR Industrial Complex

Foreign.

So.

Wow. Welcome back to the surf and sales podcast. Apparently Zoom doesn't tell us that they're recording anymore. I didn't notice that. That's. That's a new feature.

Are you sure you're recording, Richard?

It does say recording up in the top, and it gives me the little pause button, so just.

Okay, we're. We're all clear then? We're all clear.

Well, we think we're all clear. Like, that's what's. Let's assume that. So if we have to come back and do this, we'll have to apologize to our guest profusely for making him waste his two hours of time with him instead of just one hour. But how are you.

He can. He can invoice you. He can invoice you. I'm hanging in there. While you were off vacationing last week, I was sick. I was home. Were you? Yeah, with a head cold. It was terrible.

Oh, man, I'm sorry. I did not know that.

So, yeah, it made your. It made your Hawaiian vacation all the more frustrating.

Well, I do live to frustrate you. So we know this.

That's called winning in Richard's book.

Since I can't feature revenue games.

Take.

The win where you can get it.

Yes. So we have a super fun and special guest with us today, Sean Cease. Sean, what is the name of it? Never respond. What is the CEO, founder of. What is it called?

I. I never answer dot com.

I never Answer dot com. Which of course is the first question of what the. Does that mean?

Where did that come from? Yeah, well, we are a third party outbound agency, so we spend most of our time trying to get opportunities or build familiarity to gather info with people's next best community customers. And so the I never answer dot com was just a play on, you know, get rid of the people who never answer the phone and won't talk to you. So I never answer dot com. That's what it is.

Gotcha. Gotcha. So you're in the cold calling game then. Can we. Can we suffice it to that or is it more nuanced?

Fair enough, Fair enough. No, I'll take on the. I'm in the. The hated space of cold calling. It's what we do exclusively. Well, that might be a little bit of a stretch because we do. We do email and LinkedIn outreach for people, but in kind of a more structured or systematic way beyond just multi channel carpet bombing.

Got it. Okay, so what does that mean? Without giving away the secret sauce, what does it mean? Rather than Carpet bombing. Because I think that's all everybody knows how to do anyway. And they, they're afraid to try something else. Right. Like, yeah, what's the, what's the mistake? Aside from the obvious? There's.

I'd say probably, and I'm just going to call you out right here, is believing that there's a secret sauce is probably the biggest error that people make that causes them to do all kinds of stupid things.

So I would say this, the secret sauce, and this is just from experience of talking with founders or CEOs or people that come to us looking for help, is that they won't, they won't do the work. They just literally will not do the work. So one of, one of, one of my biggest challenges or what we made the company like, our objective, our North Star at our company is find good customers. And that comes from that belief that there's a secret sauce, that if you just build a list and call people, you'll get meetings and they'll turn into revenue. And it just, it doesn't work that way. And most of our people that come to us are pretty desperate and we spend most of our time.

Trying to do a really deep discovery to the extent that we're not saying it's a secret sauce, but people are saying, oh my God, I didn't even think of it that way. That's interesting. Nobody ever said that before. And then when I hear those words, I know, okay, we potentially have potential good customer here because they're not asking me, how many meetings do you guarantee? Because the guy I just talked to said that he can get 20 meetings a month for seven grand. Like, you should go work with him because he sounds like he's better than me. I can't do that. I don't know how that works. I, that I've never seen that work. So go ahead and do that.

You, you, you're working through phone primarily email a little bit. Social a little bit. Are you seeing any changes in the kind of conversion rates of those things? Because everybody, including me, seems to have belief and, or chatter like, well, the phone pickup rates are down, the email response rates are down. Do you see that universally? Is it very industry or kind of specific, Company specific, case by case, what do you, what do you see in terms of the data?

So just, just the raw, the raw data. You know, if we, if we, if we, if we removed all of the confounding variables and I mean on all sides like rep talent. And so I like take, take it. And if you take out what you sell, who you sell it to, the sales cycle, how much it costs, all that stuff. Connect connect rates, you know, are anywhere between 2 to 8%. It's pretty wide because that's a, that's a huge spread. But on the low side it's 30 people and a thousand answer the phone. On the high side it's 320 people, you know, answer the phone. So I would say it's like 2 to 8% dial to connect rate seems to be universally what's happening. I haven't seen a change in years. Conversion rates on first time connects, you know, when you first call someone to get a meeting is somewhere around 5% lower. 1 in, 1 in 20, which I haven't seen change much. I think it's, it's the confounding variables in there that really make the difference. You know, who you sell to, how you sell it, the sales cycle and so on. And then rep talent and then also leadership's kind of scope of what happens. The real.

I agree, I agree with you in terms of when you, when you chime in on LinkedIn about cold calling is somewhat dead. And you're in, you're saying it. I, I hear what you say. You're saying from my perspective, the people I'm talking to, what I'm hearing, like you're not, you're not hyperbolically hoping that cold calling doesn't work and being a smart ass, right? You're actually saying here's what's happened. And then when I see people stand up and say, well explain this, we did this the other day, right? You're like, well, you know, I'm not here to fight for my. Just saying this is what I heard, this is what I'm seeing. So for, for us, what we, what we see is an imperfect understanding of what happens during first time connects. And that's where all of the real problems start. When people over index on what they can get out of a first time connect and when, what I mean by that, what, what we kind of see and again this is just me with all the clients that we have and so on, is that there's kind of a, you could put people in two groups, there's a group of people who, who have it in their head that cold calling is a linear pipeline process that you build a list, you make calls, you get meetings, they turn into opportunities and you sell stuff and they're over indexing on what they can get out of first time connect. And then when that doesn't work, they go further upstream and start buying all kinds of other tools and gadgets and widgets. Whether it's intent, data, all these other things, they're making those decisions out of abject failure as opposed to getting things correct on a first time connect. And what I mean by that is saying that we're going to start curating our own rich set of contact data internally through the signals that we get when we talk to people and then making the pipeline about follow ups. And one statistic that I have that we've been able to prove over and over and over and I've done this with help from Chris Beale at Connect and Sell using their data set because they a lot of conversations over there that 2x to 12x more meetings, opportunities, qualified pipeline come from follow up calls compared to what happens during First Time Connects. And so that's kind of how we b, that's what we based our business on is basically changing the scope to what you can get out of a first time connect.

See, so that, that leads to the question of what is the expectation then of a first time connect? If it's, if it's not to try and set that meeting. Or maybe it is, but you know what I mean, if we're seeing that, if we're seeing a better result from the second connection, what are we just trying to do in the first connection? Aside from establish rapport?

I would say, I would say that you probably don't. For me, I don't think you have to look too much further than just regular human interaction with people where when you meet someone you want to say, excuse me, my name is Sean. You know, I wanted to introduce myself. I got a question for you, you got a second? You know, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's as simple as that. I don't know how or when we turn cold calling into some. Well, I, I actually, I suspect it's because of the SDR industrial complex that when you hire SDRs and you buy all these tools, when you buy tools you must get these outcomes because that's why you're doing it. And that's why I'm saying usually buying the tools in the role, the next thing you try to do comes from failure, not from success. And that just, it's like the Elon Musk quote. The worst thing an engineer can do is optimize something that shouldn't exist in the first place. And that's what's going on there. So again it go First Time Connects. I can't just say hey everybody, you should get this out of your first time connect. It depends on what you sell. And for example, I'll give you a real live example. We had a client come to us or prospect come to us who had reputation management software, which I just. By the quick analysis of what they do, it being, let's say it's $100 a month. So if you, if you pay for it for a year, it's a thousand bucks, right? You get 20% off because you paid for a year. Highly transactional, right? This person wanted meetings, and I just said, what do you want a meeting for? Like, you just told me that this thing will get rid of bad things or bad reviews on Google or Yelp or whatever in less than a day or two. So let me just give me a list of people. Let me put this together. What we did was we put together a campaign that said because this was super easy, right? We could find the targets because they got bad reviews. You could just scrape till the cows come home. There's a signal there, right? So we called up and said, hey, I'm calling from XYZ Reputation Management. And the reason why is we saw you got a couple of negative dings. We wanted to take a crack at getting those wiped out for you and then take a shot at earning your business. You mind any objection to me getting rid of two of those for you in the next five days? And then we'll get back here and sign you up and be like, wait, wait a second. What do you do? What's going on? So in my first connect, I create this curiosity. We're like, what? I'm like, you don't have to lift a finger, man. You know, I'm going to send you a link where you're giving me permission to get rid of these. I'm going to put another meeting on your calendar for this time next week. All goes well, I'm going to sign you up for a year. How's that sound? Of course I'm paraphrasing, but the idea is, is that the client came to me with, I need meetings because I got this really cool thing like, no, you don't. It's transactional and you don't even need authorization to pay for it. You need to prove it works and then get them signed up and get their credit card. What are you doing? You know? Yeah, which is a. Which is a lot different than we have a CRM and we're going after Salesforce, you know, that becomes like, okay, I'm not even interested in you being a client. But let's say that I was. What's your plan? You know, and to me that's enterprise strategics. Enterprise is the right word, but strategic selling. These people are all going to be in contracts. You need to verify they have Salesforce and so on. So Richard, to answer your question, in that scenario, what am I going to get? Hey, I. I'm calling from whatever, our new CRM. Everyone loves it. I was calling to get some time on your calendar where I could formally introduce myself, but I don't want to get ahead of myself. I got three quick questions for you and I'll get out of your hair. You ready? Yeah. You're currently using Salesforce? Yeah. How long have you had it? Don't tell me you just renewed it last week and I haven't been doing my job. Now we've had it for seven years or so. What does it renew? How many users are on it? Cool. Any questions for me? No. All right, thanks. You know, maybe if I get a conversation going but my objective for the first time call would be to verify that they're in my wheelhouse. They have Salesforce. How long have you had it for and what's the value of the contract? Because I know there's no way I'm going to get immediate. Why, that's. Why would I do that? Why would I waste your time?

The purpose of that is almost just to enrich the data that you've got.

Yeah, curating the contact. Curating the contact. Data forward.

Yeah, Next time, whenever. That next time is now I'd have a different objective.

It's almost like you're enriching the conversation a little bit more than the data.

Well, yeah, that's why, that's why I'm saying that all of the, all of the attitude about cold calling is dead or so on. It could be related to dial to connect. But when it comes to dial to connect, you may be missing your guests again, like trying to make the tools do too much stuff. In other words, if the CFO isn't answering the phone but we sell to the cfo.

The obvious answer to me is call the front desk. Call someone else. Call. Call somebody else. Quit. Quit calling. The targeted list that doesn't answer are you. Gets kind of. You want to. What are you stupid? You know, and I, I like.

Is that a rhetorical question, by the way?

Yeah.

Well, that's why I'm saying that my, my, my business has become. And I think everybody always says this, you're always looking for good customers. Qualify out, qualify out. And after being in third party outbound for the last eight years, I completely and totally understand the nuance and what that means, what that means to have good customers because you can grow a third party outbound because it's the, the, the, the pipeline's full of people who are failing. Right. And they have a few more bucks and what I call it, cash grab in the churn window. There's a lot of customers. We know we could get 5,000amonth or 10,000amonth out of for two or three months. But they're already done. They don't have the time and Runway to do it, to actually get the flywheel of follow ups at outbound really going for them. So we have to find.

This is probably part of the reason why the, the outsourced SDR industry has this like negative connotation around, you know, nine out of 10 people. I think it's like 92% of people who work with somebody have a bad experience. It's because of those types of things that, that you're talking about. But you mentioned something before about the, the talent level. And one of the things that I think has been painfully obvious for these outsourced kind of lead gen agencies, SDR agencies and what have you is the people actually making the calls are actually not very good.

No.

At all.

No.

And, and you know, the founder could be really good and have a good idea about prospecting and the process and data and they write good call scripts and all this stuff, but then they get out of the way because they don't have the bandwidth to make the calls. They've hired people from wherever, either domestically here or somewhere overseas and whatnot. And the talent level is this precipitous drop. So how do you think about maintaining quality control from you down to whoever else is making calls to service your, your customers?

Yeah, for us that falls under higher fast, fire fast. But the way that we mitigated that problem, because it is a real problem, and I would, I would actually say that in my experience, the most, the most reps that I've ever managed at one time was about 30, 30, 30 SDRs at one time. And in that group, what I, this is really weird. I always, I always want to say this isn't true, but it just, it was black and white that of the 30 people there were probably three people that were just, just complete assassins. You could count on them. It was servant leadership. They knew what, they knew the role, knew what they were doing, had all the talent in the world, then maybe two people who had that same, those same traits or characteristics but they had other problems like discipline or they were out somewhere else. The other 25 people are just on the churn wheel. Like they don't show up, they're not responsible. They' just clowns, you know. And so like I said, our solution to that was to keep the company small and say no to a lot of people. Because what happens for third party agency is the, the churn. It's capacity. Right. That you always hear what's our capacity? What's. We have new clients coming on. Right. But there are seven clients churning. Right. It's an accordion. It's almost impossible to size because the talent pool is so pitiful. You know, it's. Yeah, yeah.

Well it's not that much different that. That math is not that much different than the whole like 80, 20, you know.

Yeah.

Principle. I mean you're talking about 10 to, to 20ish of your 30 reps that you know were quite good or good or capable of being quite good. And the rest of the people are interchangeable parts.

Yeah. So yeah. So we actually, like I said, after having been focused on this model and struggling and staying in it and staying afloat, making a business go of it, what I've done is I've created some things around the stuff that we've talked about here, like the weak talent pool, what you can actually get out of first time connects, etc. And the way that I have the business set up now is we basically offer three products. I'm still materially involved in the coaching and training we do. Like I do a three session cold calling and messaging workshop where I am teaching reps or teams how to do cold calling correctly. With all the things that we said so far, like building a flywheel of follow ups, what you get out of first time connects, how to set up your follow ups and how to, how to, how to coach reps around objectives for calls and so on. So I do that. I'm materially involved with that because I actually run the sessions myself and they're one on one. On the third party outbound side of it, we have two solutions now. One is just blunt force cold calling for meetings. And the only way to come into our business that way is through what we call a lab. And that just kind of naturally evolved out of trying to find good customers. So Our baseline is 2,495 bucks. We'll do 20 hours of calling and the goal, the objective is to set metrics. How many people answer the phone does the message resonate Et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. Both sides, us and the customer get to look at that objectively, decide what to do next with all the other other variables, like, hey, Scott, you know, we appreciate the opportunity, but it turns out that, you know, sometimes you were hard to get a hold of. So we're going to pass, or it doesn't look like you guys are. Whatever it is, both sides get to decide whether or not to move forward. And then we put together a plan and then move forward. Which is basically my answer to people always asking me, how many meetings do you guarantee? Because your competitor does. And I said, well, go use them, because the only way through here is a lab. And I tell people I'm doing the lab so that we can find good clients. And the last thing I want to do is not be able to perform for you. So we do the lab first. If you're not interested, no problem. The third, the third solution that we offer is a way away from meeting, because I don't want to do that. I don't want to do blunt force meeting setting for people in third party outbound. What I want to do, because I know this is what the clients want, I want to get them in front of 10 or 40 people of their next best customers in the next 30 days. Like 10 to 40 people. Like, how does that sound? That'd be great. So we came up with this. We do roundtables and basically that was out. If you're following me, the roundtable is our way to get more out of first time connects. In other words, I'm not calling you Richard or Scott to get a meeting, to get you in my funnel because I have this quiver full of arrows with an antidote to a pain. I hope you have, you know, and just shooting that at everybody. What we do is we help the company come up. It's a CEO or founder would be best. But even a keynote speaker around a topic, around a problem or issue this germane to their clients. And we're inviting people to come together in a group to discuss it. Where are you with it? Have you implemented something? And then all of the goodies of Outbound fall out of that. Like we can follow up with the people who don't show up. We can nurture them. We get opportunities from the roundtable. And what I'm doing in my discovery is just, just nailing into the ground that first time connects are so hard to wring something out of.

If you need to get in front of people, we can, we can provision a roundtable in the next three to six weeks, we can get up to 40 to 50 people registered for it. 10 to 25 people will show up and then we have all these opportunities to follow up in a more practical sense. Hey Scott, I saw you weren't able to make it to the roundtable. I was calling to get some time on the calendar to go through what you missed. The conversations get better. Right. And so I'll stop there. You guys can ask me questions because that was a, what I just shared with you was my evolution of, I don't know, being a glutton for punishment by staying in the third party outbound industry and saying, hey, I, I don't lose, you know, I'm going to make this work for me, the people I work with and we're going to have a good business. So that's how we did that. We moved to the roundtable model and it's working.

I, I, I so appreciate the simple human aspect of everything you're talking about today.

Right.

Like I remember being in SDR pounding on my SDR team to, you know, follow up with everybody who didn't attend the webinar. Right.

And yeah.

And it was, and your, your response to that is so, so much more natural. Like, hey, I saw you couldn't make it. I just wanted to get some time to share what you might have missed. Like make it, make them curious about it. Like such a simple way to do it. I was, I, clearly I'm too complex to figured that part out. But not to mention that like also back to what you were saying earlier about it's not about the first meeting, you know, it's getting those three or four questions to, to have better data so that when you have a second meeting or a second conversation, I should say it becomes more relevant. So I just, I so appreciate this sort of human approach you're bringing to it. That as you again, back to what you said, the SDR industrial complexes completely obliterated, you know, in the last 10 to 12 years. So yeah.

It has, it, it's taken on that whole the good hearts thing that, the managing to a metric thing, you know, like even dial to connect. You know, just looking at all these individual metrics and it's like put all these, at some point you just have to put a list together, put them in a group, you know, put them in a group of 250 people and start with who answered the phone today. And we want to curate those forward again because data, I mean I could, the data is just, it's indisputable you could have to go back and say why is this happening for sure. But baseline 2x to 12x plus more meetings or even better pipeline. Better better opportunities. Better for everybody. Comes from follow ups. And this actually brings me to an another interesting topic. Some of my friends or competitors or whatever on LinkedIn, you know the vicious same thing like Scott publishing cold calling is not working for people. And then getting attacked like you know.

Yeah, 20, 20, 20 hyenas who are just trying to make people do it their way. Not not wanting to have a conversation. Just saying that you're.

Yeah.

That you're wrong. Is. Is the. Is the. Is. Let's talk about something precise. Right. The opening of a cold call. I get dragged into this debate all the time because people know I'm. I'm here for it. Of what I think about PBOs. Permission based openers. Right. To use a permission based. And then it's fun for me because I know what I'm going to do. I don't. It's not about the permission based opener. I have an objective in the beginning of the call for every one of my reps and they. I don't care how they do it as long as they get to the objective in the framework which is in the first seven to 15 seconds start a two way dialogue or exit the call and live to talk another day. And so because if we exit the call and live to talk another day, we may be creating the metric but it's showing that we're getting more meetings than when we stick around and try to bludgeon somebody into a meeting. Which is where the weak talent shows up. Right. Which is. It sounds like when you listen to recordings it sounds like sure, I could send you information. Why don't we put some time on the calendar for next week. That way I can answer your questions. And it's like hold on. Like let's be realistic. The person that said send me info, let's listen closer. Are they really asking for info or are they asking to. For a nice way to not hang up on you? Yeah, likely it's right. It's that one there. They don't want to hang up on you. And that's why the PB it's not to use a PBO or not. But there's a couple of things in it. I'll walk you through it real quick. Hey Scott, it's Sean over at. I never answer and you are not expecting my call at all today because it's the first time I've tried to reach you mind if I take half a minute? I'll share with you what I'm up to. Why I picked up the phone to call you today. Or do you just. Do you already regret it? You got too much on your plate, you know?

Yes.

And right. And so when someone says actually my, again, there's a talent component here because I can do that. Not, not give two shits about.

Yeah, yeah, you're, you're nailing the tone. Like if I heard that, I'd be like, all right, dude.

Yeah, you say what? Okay. What? Yeah, yeah, what is it?

Right?

Yeah. What are you. Yeah, what are you doing? I gotta hear this, right?

You can respect the ability.

Yeah. And then, and so what I'm. What I'm again underneath. And like in the cold calling and messaging workshop, that's where I start. Like let's, let's just stop right here and say. And remind people that if someone says I'm busy. Perfect. Because we know that 2x the 12x more comes from. You know, this person answers the phone, they'll talk to me. I'm going to put them on my follow up list. I'm going to have a disposition that says abrupt call ending so that I don't have to put a note in. I just put abrupt call ending. The database moves it over to my abrupt callback list and then when I call them, the database itself already put everything in there. Hey Scott, it's Sean. Over. And I never answer. I don't know if you remember, I called you yesterday around 2. You were kind enough to tell me that. Boy, I couldn't have caught you at a worse time. I don't know what you were doing, but you were just too busy. But together we decided to give it a try right? Now are you still working on that or do we do any better now? I'm not really probably having a conversation about somebody trying to get off the phone emotionally with me. They're going like, oh yeah, I kind of. Yeah. Hey, what's up man? But, but either way, again, going back to the permission based opener, I'm actually, actually trying to contrive follow ups, right. I'm trying, I'm trying to create the conditions to just make it. What's a good way to say that? What do we learn from customer success as a result of the specialization of roles is that it seems to me that good customer service means reduced effort, right? It's not about going over and beyond or whatever. It's about doing what you said so that the client doesn't even notice. That you exist. They're running their business. Right. They're going to renew. Right. It's when they didn't have to think.

About you very much.

Yeah. Right. And so I take that learning from what we learned about the specialization rules and customer or what's another way to say that when it comes to customer success, we people do prefer to self service, there's no doubt about it. But when you get to the point that the self service isn't working, it becomes, I just want a solution now. And if that means that somebody picked up the phone and helped you right now, that was better than your original want to self serve. It was really the desire to get something done and back to doing what you were done. And that to me should be what's happening at the top of the funnel too. Which actually brings up another topic. Multi shadow outreach. Yeah.

Do you, do you feel like.

Do.

You feel like you eat your own dog food in the sense of this is how Sean thinks about growing his agency? Like you execute things the exact same way or do you have a totally different program and process for how do I try to grow my business and my agency? It's very different than the clients and customers I serve.

No, I would say that we eat our own dog food from a, from a mindset and from an execution and a strategic, you know, strategically, tactically, we actually.

You're out. So you're out there as an agency owner and you and the team are cold calling and prospecting business owners out there every single day. That's how, that's your, Is that your primary driver to, to get business?

No, we do, we do do some, some out, some direct outbound calling. But at this point, you know, I'm not a big giant agency. We have a handful of callers. There's a couple people on the operations team. The majority of our business comes from inbound LinkedIn, from my content, and then, you know, referrals from guys like you or just, just being on LinkedIn. So we do do some cold calling. But honestly for us, you know, the, the, the environment's so rich on LinkedIn, we just, we're lucky that way that it's a haven for salespeople and even recruiters. Right. If you're in the recruiting business, LinkedIn's a haven for recruiting. So we get a lot of business from LinkedIn. What's interesting, what's interesting about LinkedIn, to me, one thing is that the inbound that we get, this is just like a testament, I think, to impressions or reach or whatever is that almost everybody that reaches out to me that says, hey, it was time to put time on your calendar to talk to you always says, I've been following you for a long time and appreciate your take.

Yeah, follower, first time caller.

Those messages never, never noticed them, they never commented, they never liked, they never did anything. But there they are, lurking away, you know, just waiting, just waiting. You know, how.

So if you, if you back up right in the time machine to when you first started the business and I can't remember if you started this, did you start this as a side hustle.

Or did you go, no. After around 2017, I, there was, I had a few years of kind of life adjustments from a divorce, raising kids myself, life, whatever. Right, right. I had always been a full cycle seller or business owner whatever whatever. In 2017, I joined a, a couple of guys who were doing third party outbound. And it was my first dipping my toe into the specialization of roles. Right. The SDR to AE handoff. After 25, 27 years of just inside sales, phone territory, sales, whatever, you know, being a, an old curmudgeon seller, you know. Yeah, yeah.

So, so my, so my question is.

At what point. And you know, I think the three of us, Scott as well, we all sort of got serious about this social thing in 2017, right? Scott, that sounds about right.

Like that's when, that's the exact year.

Right. The three of us really got, you know, focused on it. How long did it take you to get to the point of not having to do the outbound? Right. Where you're inbound from social selling is kind of like it is today.

Right.

Because it, it took a while for me. Right. Like, you know, it, you don't just all of a sudden, I mean, maybe you do. There's, you know, there's, there's one person I know with, you know, that Scott introduced me to with sub 500 contacts, he seems to be crushing it on LinkedIn these days for business. But you know, how long did it take for that wheel to actually consistently move versus you maybe having to eat your own dog food to figure this out to get to that point? Or was it pretty immediate? Was the pain already so great that people are like, yeah, I need this?

Yeah, I think it was pretty immediate. It was pretty, it was pretty immediate because what I did was I just started, I've had this board behind me forever. What I, what I did was I just put together a little, a little block of time on my calendar in the morning and for 15 minutes I'd shoot A video on a topic that I pretty much thought of while I was in the shower, you know, and then I, I did that every single day. And then people were saying, hey, interesting take, whatever. And I started building the following from there. And then I never stopped. I just, you know, I do that all the time. I get an idea in my head and I post about. I don't think about it, I don't curate it, I don't. Whatever. I just put it out there. But again, I, I think that, that it's not so much. Well, one thing would be that I was consistently posting like every single day, that I was just without worrying about what people thought or whatever. But we can't dism. Target rich. LinkedIn is for salespeople who are just dying to win. You know, it's just, there's so many people there that it targets target written for every environment for the work that we do. So that's an advantage. You know what I mean? It's like when people say, you got to get on LinkedIn and there's a, there's a simple. I always hate saying this because it's so simple. It's like if, if, if your market doesn't hang out on LinkedIn, it. You can't just say social selling is the new thing. Like, it doesn't make any sense.

Like, yeah, got, yeah, I've got a client right now who's selling to, selling edtech into universities. And the people that they're reaching out to, generally speaking, have no presence on LinkedIn whatsoever. And, and they've been trying to like, network and they're not getting responses. And I'm like, well, you're sending a connection request to somebody with 300 connections who probably hasn't logged in since 2017. So it's not surprising not working.

See, for me, like, for us, you know, not to just jump right ahead, but when you say ed tech and they're not on social and so on, I'd imagine that these are people who probably go to great lengths to make sure they've got pretty good solutions in place. They kind of are careful about their budgets and things like that. To me, that's a perfect target for a roundtable where you're trying to take a group of people and maybe educate them. And right now I don't. You can always say there's never been a better time. But honestly, for me right now, after being in sales and high tech for 30 years, I've seen so many times something new came out that was going to change the world. Forever. Right. And the world just seemed to go on no matter what. Like, it just continued to go on. But like AI being the big thing right now, to me, there's all these little three way things. Like if you're trying to get new customers, they're probably in three buckets. Right. They're either in market, they're open to change, or they're open to learn. Right. It's as simple as that. That's. That's all you have. And so for the roundtable, the messaging becomes easy. We're putting together an event that includes people of your title that are either. That are looking at AI as, you know, a stepping stone to get to the next level. I'm paraphrasing, of course. Right. And the people that are going to be at this are either kind of in market right now searching for a good AI solution, or they're open to it, or they're basically just trying to figure out what the hell is going on with AI. Want to get you registered for that. We'd like to hear what you guys are working on and you can talk to other people that may be ahead of you or so on. Again, it's perfect because really what we're trying to do is get you in our pipeline and sell it to you. But I'm not going to say it to you blatantly by saying, I call to be some time on your calendar to tell you why you're stupid. You know.

The Richard Harris approach.

Yeah.

You know, so you should be here, otherwise you're stupid.

That's really good. Again, just as always, Sean breaking it down.

That's why he's the professor of prospecting.

He is a professor of prospecting.

The professor of prospecting came from the beard and wearing cardigan sweaters. In my videos, people would literally say, you look like a professor, man. I'm like, okay, so Scott, all you need.

Scott's got the beard.

He just.

Yeah. Sean and I look like brothers. Yeah.

Yeah.

We can go on a whole. We go on a whole tour. Yeah, he's a little ahead of me in the hair game at the moment.

Yeah. So, yeah, it goes back and forth. I see. You clean up and you go back and forth.

Exactly.

Yeah, it does, it does. Well, dude, we gotta, we gotta move to wrapping this up. And as we always do, we always sort of like to turn it over to the guests to see if they have a question they'd like to ask us. Although, you know, I'm intimidated of what the professor might ask me. So, you know, we'll see if maybe you got a question you would love to get our opinion on.

My. My question directly for you guys is going to be, how do we start working together more?

Well, we've agreed.

We'Ll only work. We'll only work with people like you as long as they come to surf and sales to the event that's happening in October in Peniche in Portugal. That's my shameless plug. So we would always love to work.

With you, Sean, but that, that, that, that's literally. I, that is literally on my bucket list. I'm going to get there.

It's not going to be this year another bucket list. Put it on the list.

Hold on.

You know what? You know what?

Fourth page of people who say bucket list.

Thank you.

I was gonna say. I was gonna say, in my defense, it's the only thing I have on my bucket list.

How about that? But on. But on a sear. On a serious note, like our, you know, I will mention their name, but the, the f. We're talking to. That you did mention my name to. We. We had an aha moment in that call, which is what really tickles me to death. You know, when we started talking and when we wrapped up that call, they said, they told me that. They said, you know, is super. Your. Your take is super refreshing. We enjoyed this call. We didn't even think about doing something like that. But it doesn't just. They were saying, like, it doesn't just make sense to get the most out of top of funnel. It actually, I like it all. Like the, the roundtable. Like, it makes sense. Like that would appeal to our audience. We like it. It. This is going to be great. And that always. That always tickles me to death because it's not. I'm not over here trying to tell people cold calling isn't dead. You must do it. To me, it's more like cold calling isn't dead. But the way you go about it is probably what's killing you, you know.

And I get it. You know?

Yeah.

Yeah, I get it because there's. There's no, there's no other two ways to say it. That cold calling is hard in, you know, in, in my discovery calls, I guess you call them discovery calls with the, with our inbound or the people we get referred to as is is just that it's actually digging into what's really happening. And when you see the light bulbs start to go off, you feel like you're actually doing a service. And to me, it's. I have this weird thing where let's get together and see what we can shake out of the trees. Regardless of doing business together, we can shake hands and go our separate ways. You can take my ideas and implement them. I don't care. Like, I've set myself up in a way where my life's gonna go on. I don't need your business. I'd love to work with you if we can, if it makes sense for both of us, but for the most part, let's do things better that way. If you're out there cold calling, you're not making it harder on me when I cold call.

The question you asked was like, how do we, how do we do more? How do we work together and whatnot. And here's, here's an interesting thing for everybody to, to think about is that referrals and partnerships and things like that, I think they're meant to be a two way street.

Yeah.

And I think people forget about that a lot.

Yeah.

And people think, I think a lot of people think of it as, let me set up this partnership program so, so and so can send me business.

Yeah, I'll give them 1%, you know who I'm talking about?

And I'll. Yeah, exactly. And I'll pay them. And therefore they should keep coming because I'm paying them. And they, they should keep helping me because I'm paying them.

What.

But I can tell you from experience, that gets old and tedious and, you know, frustrating at some point in time. Like, I can think of people that I've sent referrals to for years, companies, let's say, not even an individual person for years. And then I sit and think, how many times have these people sent me a piece of business, sent me a referral? And at some point, if I think about it long enough, I start to get irritated and I start to think, okay, well, yeah, they pick me. But like, you know, shit, how hard is it to think of me and all that you're doing? So that's what I would say back to you is like, why send referrals? I can do, do more. At some point, the best relationships and partnerships become reciprocal. And so in your comings and goings, as you think of people who are asking questions about, you know, what's a good sales conference or who's a good sales trainer or who's a good, you know, fractional sort of CRO, it's like that stuff matters, the back and forth. It's not even so much about the, the money, it's about the, like helping each other out. And it's about that. That bond that.

That.

That fellowship and whatnot. And. And I don't know, maybe I'm just getting old and sentimental, but I started. I'm starting to care about that stuff and think about this. That stuff in ways that I never used to. So I would put. I would put that out there for everybody to think about.

Yeah, that's a. That's a good one. So I. I'm gonna. I'm gonna. I'm gonna say this to you and just ask you point blank, and you and I and Richard find a time on the calendar where we can spotlight you guys in a round table and let me and my team do the work to get, you know, 10, 20, 30 people that you guys might be targeting or your ICP or so heartbeat.

Done.

Okay, cool.

Easy.

Absolutely. Yeah. Yeah. Okay, good. So. So. So there. There you go. Because that. That is complete reciprocity. I'll actually. We'll actually do the work. And.

Yeah, 100. And those are the types of relationships that, in my experience, last, you know, a long time, Stand the test of time. They're mutually beneficial. And. Yeah, that's how you. That's how you strengthen existing relationships.

Yeah. And see, and that. And that's exactly how, like when you're asking, am I eating my own dog food? I'm going to put the resources, time, money, effort into having my callers get the people to this event, because I'm going to end up getting business out of it kind of indirectly. But see, I'm using. I'm using cold calling in a way that is benefiting everybody. The people, the attendees, you guys. Especially my callers. Especially my callers. They're not. Not sleeping last night because they're losing their will to live because they're under the gun to get meetings.

I'm going to give them a list of your guy of a 500 to a thousand people of your prospects. They're going to get. They're going to get 50 or 100 people registered. 20 people are going to show up, and we're all going to have a great time, and we're running a business, and we're happy. And again, I'll say my callers are happy. Right. They're not losing their will to live, and they love their job. Not to mention. Well, if we're going to wrap it up somewhere, I could say this to people. Listen to what I'm about to say. Making the SDR role a stepping stone to AE is probably one of the most egregious errors that is going on in sales today. That needs to be wiped off the face of the earth.

Preach.

Yeah, it needs to be wiped off. And I would say this, that people need to rewind back to 2017, rewind back to before that, and remember that the specialization of roles came out of companies who were bursting at the seams with pipeline and didn't know what to do with their demand. Not by founders who can't sell their nice to have to anyone who had no demand. Yeah, yeah, that's the. It's been turned on its head completely, you know, into. If you. If you build it, they will come. And it's. No. Yeah. One last thing. These are the. These are the clients that I have all the time. I get into these discovery calls, and guess what? There's a CEO or a CEO and a co founder and a CMO and CRO and a salesperson all interviewing me to get them meetings. And I'm like, so how many calls did you guys make last week? I don't have time for that. I can't do that. You're like, so I'm just gonna say you guys are not a good client if, as CEO, founder, you're not willing to hand your card to somebody like, I don't know, man. What are you guys doing over there? What's happening? What's really going on over there? What are you guys doing? This isn't real. You're not trying to. You know, you're not even trying. Yeah, anyway, yeah, cool. We got it. We got it. We. We got a date in the. In the back in the background here. We'll find a time on the calendar and we'll do it.

Say, that sounds like.

Love it. Love it, love it. How can people find you? Although if they can't figure it out by now, after listening for the last, you know, 35 minutes, you know, how can people get a hold of you, Sean? How do you want them to get.

A hold of you?

I never answer dot com. There's a link at the top of the website that just says, just book a consultation or whatever. LinkedIn. I'm Sean Cease, the professor of prospecting, and my link to my calendar is there. I'd say, hey, put some time on the calendar. Let's see what you could shake out of the trees. Regardless of doing business together or not.

I can't tell if you're a professor or a preacher or a preacher who professes or professor who preaches. I'm having a total conundrum about it. So we might have to have A roundtable to figure it out now. So I'm.

I'm here. I'm here for it. I'm here for it.

Sean, thank you so much, man. Really appreciate you coming on and dropping a ridiculous amount of wisdom for everybody, so.

You're welcome.

It was good.

It was my. My honor to be here with both you guys. I just personally have affection for Scott, probably because we have geography in common, Northern California. And Richard, I've always been a fan because you're so calm and mellow and it makes sense and so on. So thank you so much for having me. He says.

He says, well, no, I mean, you.

You have. You. You have, like that. That. I don't know for me sometimes. I'm always looking for people who I can actually just talk to. And you have that kind of. I don't know, wisdom, fatherly kind of. You just go to me, per. To Mer. To me personally, you just kind of command respect. And for Scott, I think he and I probably would maybe need supervision if we were alone together. We probably.

Yeah, that's right.

Yeah. We. Our judgment would probably.

The adult, Richard, you're the.

Yeah. Yeah. It's a compliment.

It's a compliment that. That's me, the adult, so.

But I'm. I'm honored. I'm honored to be here, and thank you so much for inviting me. I thank you guys very much from the bottom of my heart. I really appreciate it.

Thanks, everybody.

And.

And be sure to check out serpent sales on YouTube. Hit the like button, Give us a review on itunes, and definitely come hit us up in Portugal in October. See you next time, everybody.

Thanks, everyone. Talk soon.