Kevin "KD" Dorsey on why every VP Sales should love copywriting, understanding how people buy, how to interview your customers, and why he hates the sales deck

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Exit Exit.

My guest on this episode is Kevin Katie Dorsey. He's practice lead for sales leadership at Winning by Design. Kevin Dorsey kd, Good to see you. We were just catching up off the record. I want to do a podcast with you today because I want to just talk about something different and I think you have an interesting approach to B2B sales and we've kind of like jived on like a bunch of different things together. We've connected on a few ideas. But I also want to talk about LinkedIn and I want to talk about yourself and your story because I wrote a book, Founder Brand and you have totally done all this stuff since the beginning. So maybe just for people that might not know you because you're not a B2B CMO. Sorry, this is a sales gentleman over here. But just give some quick background on your story and what you're doing.

For sure. Man, it's been way too long. We need to catch up more because every time we do there's at least one million dollar idea and at least a couple brand ideas in there for sure. But Kevin Dorsey, everyone calls me kd have been building, you know, startup sales teams for the last 10ish years now. Been in sales for 15. If I wasn't in sales, I'd be in marketing. In fact, my favorite conference is a marketing conference. I was blessed to work with a very strong CMO early in my career and really forged a great partnership there. In fact, it wasn't until like my third VP job that I understood that like sales and marketing didn't always get along, you know, say I was like, this is just what we do. We work together, you know, and so I've been at patient pop service titan. So I got a couple unicorns now under the belt. And yeah, man, I just, I love the psychology of sales and marketing. They go hand in hand. And so I think that's why you and I vibe so well.

Yes. And I actually, I don't know if I've heard you tell me that before about that. If you weren't in sales, you would be in marketing. How has that, like, can you just like, define that? Like, what is it about the two roles that are similar? And then also how has that shaped.

Your approach to sales?

So they're all about changing behavior. Both marketing and sales are about changing behavior of a prospect or audience. Marketing, the behavior it's trying to get in B2B generally is to. To opt in, to be ready to talk to somebody.

Right.

You're trying to drive that behavior in, you know, B2C.

Right.

It's to get the purchase right. B2C marketers, man, like, they're miles ahead of most B2B marketers because they know each behavior that they're trying to drive. And so I just, I love the psychology behind it. I mean, like, on my bookshelf back here, I got Gary Keller, Dan Kennedy, Evan Pagan, like the og, like, direct marketers. Like, that's what I, you know, Ryan Dice Perry, Belcher, Frank Kern. Like, that's who I was studying eight, nine years ago. Shout out Andy Mackinson, because he's who got me into it. And so now what that let me do is one, it made me a better copywriter by far. Well, what needs to be written? DG scripts, emails.

Can we pause on this for a second? Because I want to make sure, like, make people at home don't gloss over. So. So what you just spouted off is Dan Kennedy, a couple other people that you mentioned are some of the best direct response marketers. And one of the keys to direct response marketing is copywriting. And I have this love for copywriting I've talked about. Katie, you do too. But I can't understand why if I'm in SaaS sales today, like, we talk so much about the process, the pitch, the discovery that, you know, running your whole framework. But, like, one of the reasons that I think that I could be decent at sales is because I'm a good copywriter and I would write good emails. And it's just like, one of the things that I can't understand is, like, at companies that I've been a part of, it's like, there's just like this disconnect, which is like, but who owns the emails? Like, marketing wants to write these emails for sales. But, like, I'm always like, why isn't the sales. Why aren't the sales reps at this company like, the best copywriters? And so if you're listening and you want to get better at selling, go and do all the framework stuff that you see online. But, like, why not become a better copywriter? Like, you can book a meeting off of six lines in an email. It's crazy.

There's so much out there. And like, truthfully though, I think the reason, you know, to the question kind of like, why salespeople aren't better at copy. Well, one, they were never taught, right? Like, they weren't taught. And guess who else wasn't taught? Their boss wasn't taught. So because their boss wasn't taught, there's nothing to, like, reinstill into them. And it is. It's kind of off in this corner even, like, let's be real, even amongst marketers.

Okay.

How many of them are in your mind? Strong copy, like, strong direct response copy.

Very, very, very, very few. And this is not like a flex on some. Like, this is. This is like, I thought I was a good writer until, like, I was at Drift and David Cancel's like, no, you're a marketing writer. Study copywriting. Study direct response. And then like, then. And one of the back to, like, the sales and marketing thing, like, one of the best early stage, like, things that we did at Drift at least was a couple of the sales reps, like, that I, that I sat really close to, they'd asked me to help write emails sometimes, and we would just sit at the table and like, jam on emails. And those emails, some of them would work and they'd be like, we want you to write more. And the best meeting that we had was once a month or so we would do this, like, copywriting session where I would literally, with 30 sales reps, I would sit up at the podium or whatever, and I would open a Google Doc on the projector and I would be like, let's work. Who's got emails? And like, okay, Mari, you got a question? She's like, I'm trying to. I'm trying to get in touch with this cmo. What would you say? And we're literally writing openers together. That was like, not even. Not just such, like, a impactful thing from like a. We got better emails out across the company. But just like, even from like a relationship building standpoint, I think that really went a long way.

Yeah. So like, funny enough, man, right before COVID I was looking into hiring a full time direct response marketer for the sales team to write copy.

Right?

Because it's that important to have someone that can do that skill.

Right.

Because those thing of like, you know, there's the website and all that.

Great.

But think about all the emails that go out, think about all the proposals that go out, think about all the follow up. And again, we'll get into scripting here in a second. But like you have to evoke emotion. To evoke emotion, you have to want to understand human emotion and understand how you tell a story, how you pull it out, how to be short and punchy. If this was a webinar and I've never shown this publicly, I would show you my email writing like framework. Like I have a whole framework that I go through that lists all the emotions, the 11 reasons why people buy, why the people don't buy, and then I write themes and craft around that to write sequences. Because that's what you have to do.

When like so much of like. And you and I are both in the B2B space, right? Like so much of B2B marketing today. B2B sales and marketing is about like segmentation and account identification, right? These are my target accounts. But like, we spend so much time on that part of it and like the whole company, this is our target account list. And then you're going to send them some terrible email.

It's so bad out there, man. It's so bad. And like it's getting worse and worse. And it's like what I have to remind my own team of and the companies I consult is if it was as easy as sending a templated email, we wouldn't need salespeople, right? Like point blank. If all I had to do was send a templated email, I wouldn't need salespeople. I just send it out and go.

Okay, so I'm going to improvise on the fly because this is going in a different direction than I thought, which is awesome. I don't want to make this dumping on sales email and BDRs and all that stuff because I see that I've done it on LinkedIn. But. And so like, let's rise up above that and okay, let's talk about like, let's actually help people write better emails. So I know this is your world, so where does it start? You are either working with let's say you got a five to $10 million SaaS company, early stage SaaS company sales team of 30 people, where do you start? What do you do? How do you get that team to become better copywriters? Obviously over this podcast, it's gonna be hard, but what do you got?

So you, you are gonna love this response. You know where I start, dude? In marketing. So I go to marketing and I ask for what are the highest search volume terms for our product. I ask what our highest click through rate ads are. I ask what our highest like paid ad click volume is. Because what I'm looking for, I want to know first of all, what are people searching for around this product without a human involved?

Because, because through marketing you're basically getting, it's not perfect, but you're getting like lick your finger like rough kind of early feedback and so you're trying to reach out to actual people. Well, these people are already going to Google. They're already seeing stuff. So maybe you might have no data, but you're saying like what do I got? Give me something that I can work with, right?

What are the search volume terms? What are the key long tail terms? What I'm looking for. Here are the themes for my emails. What are people searching for?

Right?

Because you mentioned the 5 to 10 mil. If you're a 5 to 10 mil. ARR, those search things are out there. You know what's driving right? When we take direct organic, I want to know what are the organic phrases that people are typing that find us and buy. I want to know the highest click through ads. Because also marketers are better tested than salespeople. You've tested those ads. And so if I know what the highest headline is, guess what my subject line start to look like right? Where I'm looking at what are the things that grab the eyes of my prospect. So I start in marketing, that gives me my foundation and then start writing for my team.

And you kind of like, I think if you do that you can kind of match up both sides of it, right? Because you got the more quantitative stuff that you're getting from places like Google and direct response. But then on your end your team are the ones actually having conversations and you're like, well yes, we say that on the website, but every single freaking call this comes up and so you're trying to match those things together.

So I start in marketing. Next I go to the customer. So I interview 30 to 40 customers and I ask them six very specific questions.

Hold on, how do you do that? As a VP of sales at a SaaS company, there's no way you're going to interview 40 customers. I call them and you say like you just. What do you mean? Like, are you setting up meetings or are you just calling straight up, calling these companies saying, hey, I'm Kevin, I'm the VP of sales at whatever. I just have a two second question.

It's the opposite of like, you're like, you can't do that. You're the vp. That's exactly why I can't.

Right.

I'm going to current customers and hey, name is Katie, just started here as the VP of sales. Want to get a better understanding of the industry and you know, kind of your day to day. You got 10 minutes to chat. So like six questions I'd love to ask you.

How often do people take you up on that meeting?

I mean well over 50% response rate and well over 30% take rate. Like this isn't hard.

Even if you get five to 10 quick calls with customers and you're looking for, it's not a sales call at all. It's straight up, like what's a day in your life? Like type stuff. Right.

So no, I don't even. I have six very specific questions.

Okay.

Here.

Okay. First one, why did you buy? Why did you buy?

Right.

Salespeople, we think we know why people buy. We don't really know why they bought.

The marketing funnel will tell you that they bought because of the Facebook ad.

Right.

But why did they actually buy?

Why did you buy? First question, Second question. What problem were you hoping to solve?

Nice.

What problem were you hoping to solve? And notice I say problem, not problems. And there's a reason for that. I'm trying to prioritize what's the thing that comes to their mind when I say what problem were you hoping to solve? Next question. What were you afraid of before buying? What were you afraid of before buying? Next question. What's your favorite part of the product? Your favorite part? Next question. What's changed the most since you've got the product? Last question. How would you describe what we do to another Persona?

This is a great.

I'm going to work back through these. Explain what I'm doing here. Okay. So why did you buy? Okay, well now I'm looking for the pattern on the value prop. What problems were you hoping to solve? This is where I'm now getting the problem based language and the problem based questions to actually discover the pain. What were you afraid of before buying? I'm getting the unspoken objections right A customer doesn't. Buyers and marketers, by the way, the prospect doesn't always tell you their real objections.

Right.

A buyer will. They're like, yeah, truthfully, I was afraid this shit wasn't going to work or that it was going to go down or that the load time was going to be long, whatever it is.

Or I didn't have three months to get onboarded with this thing.

Right.

I would do. I was afraid it was going to take too long. So now I'm getting the unspoken objections. What's your favorite part? This is. Now I know what to highlight in my email. In my email. So I'm not just saying like, oh, we have a groundbreaking. Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. I could say, like, if it's for, you know, your group, it's like you get in the trenches. Feedback versus what was written in a book three years ago.

Well, it's so smart because I got a bunch of questions I'm going to ask you. I'm going to try to shut up as you finish this, but I love the afraid of. I love that you're getting all this information because you can then just use it to try to smash all of the objective, all the objections up front. And so if you think it's going to take a lot to onboard, if you think it's expensive, easy, they blah, blah, blah. Okay, keep going, keep going.

Right, right.

So now I got the what's your favorite part? Okay, so I know what to highlight. What's changed the most? Now I'm getting micro stories and micro testimonials. Nobody believes the 5X case study. It's like, well done. That's the case study. I have now 30 quotes of dude, what's changed the most? They're like, just get it done faster. I was able to get a promotion. We cut our onboarding in half. Like, whatever. They're just short and punchy responses. And then finally, how would you describe what we do to someone else in your position? And this one's key because especially marketers. I can call you on this one. Y' all love to describe the product in a way that your prospect and customer never would. And here's why. Marketers generally, and I know what podcast I'm on, but I'll go here. Marketers like to differentiate. People like to compare. So you want a little bit of a brain puzzle for you as human beings, we cannot understand something without comparison. We have to compare to something. A lot of marketing speak tries to not compare, to be different, to stand out. You need it you got to compare it to something to understand it. So this last part, so I'll give a very, very personal example. At Patient Pop, when I joined Patient Pop, you know what we were saying a lot in our outbound Emails, messaging, proposals, an all in one practice growth platform. Dg, how many doctors do you think have ever said the words all in one practice growth platform in a sentence ever?

Never. And also, how many people listening to this? There's another joke you could make which is like the reality. How many people listening to this use the term all in one blank platform for whatever you do, finance, HR, payroll, marketing, sales. We've all been there. It's 100% right?

So now how do they describe it? And that's oftentimes when you're going to get some of the comparison words. You know, it's a lot like this, but better. It's a lot like this, but faster.

Also like what's really interesting, it's. It's like, it can also be a slap of reality that you might need. And so, for example, like, in the early days of trying to sell Drift, we were like, no, we're not. We don't want to talk about chat because we don't want to be bucketed as chat. We wanted to be like this new thing. But if you did these 10 calls, Katie, nine out of 10 people would tell you that they bought Drift because chat. And I think it's this. So what I was going to say to you is like, this is not just money stuff to get for my copywriting and product marketing standpoint, but I think like you as the sales leader or whoever has this information, this should also be like, for product. How important is this for product? Because products off trying to build some crazy sexy thing and then like, what problem do we solve? Well, you talk to 10 customers and they're all like, we just use you for this one, one feature. And you're like, okay. And so product is often kind of la la land, just like building stuff. And you as the VP of sales are like, are you kidding me? This is what people are buying. It can also, I bet, have some impact on churn because how many times have you maybe talked to a customer and when you ask them what's their favorite part of the product, they're like, the what? Or when was the last time you logged in? They're like, what? And so it can be an easy alert. But man, I think these are fantastic and I think it just gives you a look back into like how important copywriting and storytelling is Just from a marketing standpoint, but like as a, as a core. Ultimately, sales and marketing are both trying to get people to buy. And like when you. These are all things that you can use to your advantage to help, to help get you there.

And just bonus tip for all y', all, it may not apply to marketing as much. We definitely can. These are great for onboarding new people.

Right?

So dgg, you're the one, but you're the vp. Like how do you have time for this? Well, one, I control my calendar, I'm the vp. I knew whatever the hell I want. But second, I put this also on my team because you know who marketers and salespeople never talk to.

Who I don't know customers well, but aren't salespeople on the phone?

Like, aren't like they're on the phone with prospects?

Okay, so you think there's a difference, right? Because of the perspective that you're talking to them about.

Correct. Or the lens, again, the behavior change. We're trying to get someone to change their behavior to use the product. That's a different conversation than actually they use the product.

Right.

And what they do and how they go through it. Because you have like again, back to this theme of copy. You have to understand your prospect and your customer's language.

Right.

When people talk about building rapport, the number one builder of rapport is commonality in language. You can have every other thing similar with an individual, but if we speak different languages.

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Which is the ability to build rapport is gone. We pick up on accents at a subliminal level, not even a conscious level. We pick up on accents. Someone sounds different from us, the fear part of our brain lights up. So when you're sending these messages and you sound different than how your prospects talk, you are immediately pushing them away. When you describe yourself as never seen before. Innovative. You're actually scaring them away because it's too far out, it's too novel to understand.

I love this stuff. This is the stuff that they should be teaching inside of sales teams, right?

I'm still not done. I'm still notice who I haven't spoken to yet. Notice I haven't spoken to yet. When I'm getting crafting the language for scripting and copy. I still haven't spoken. Sales team, right?

Hold on, I got more questions. So Katie gave everybody those kind of six. Those six questions I might actually also because you're already making the call. If I was your marketing partner in this, I'd say, Katie, this is amazing. First of all, I'd be like, this is amazing. Some marketing people might be threatened by this. What's he doing? That's where you have dysfunction. That's dysfunction. But I'm like, wow, this is amazing. I'm working with this guy, Katie. And he does. These questions are gold. Great. Katie. I just one thing that I would love to ask. Let's make those six questions. Seven. While you're on the phone, can you also just ask them how did you hear about us? Because I think in that setting you will also get a different answer. And so you know the attribute, love, attribution, love, trying to get the funnel right. But it's also very different when you go talk to 10 customers and they're like, oh, I don't know, I used it at my last company or my boss told me to buy it. I think that can be another interesting data point.

Okay, keep going.

You got the mic. Go ahead, keep going.

No, and it's a great call out because also too, I hope you all understand one, these six questions can go fast but you're going to get people on the phone that are down to have a full blown conversation. So of course there's follow up questions. Of course there's like, oh, tell me a little bit more about that. Like you have the opportunity to do that.

Right?

And so now I'm going into call recordings. So now I'm going into call recordings. So all right, I spoke with marketing. What are people doing without us? I've spoken to customers and I do encourage to get to at least 20 over 10. 10. You can still like get skewed messaging because one conversation can sound louder, one idea can sound louder. So getting to 20 is actually important so you get enough data points. Right now I'm going to the calls, but same idea. I'm not listening to the salesperson, I'm listening to the prospect. What do they say? When do they like. You know my favorite things to search for like in that gong and chorus. Especially like when I'm starting a new role. Wow, Cool. I like that. I didn't know it could do that. Great. But I'm looking for it on the prospect side, not on the rep side. When do the prospects say that's cool. I like that. Oh, interesting. I like. You can type this in. I literally can just type it in and say wow and pull up all the calls where wow gets mentioned. I can see when are they saying it. I want to know where they are saying because same idea, right. I call it the long day after work test. You know, back to the practice growth platform. If you can't imagine your prospect sitting down after a long day of work, pouring a whiskey, feet up on the table and going, oh, I wish I had a if. What comes after that sentence? All in one, all in one practice growth platform. You know, you're in there, you're saying it wrong, but also what you pick up on. Again, I'm using. I want to try to give you all real world shit here. Cause this is not. I'm not making. This is great at patient pop. Another good example. We even have this on our website still to this day. And I actually did recommend to marketing changing it. But, you know, change scares marketers. Cause, you know, our conversion rates can go down. But we have on the website something called the competitive scanner. The competitive scanner, right. So you can put in, you know, your practice.

Right.

And see kind of how you rank against your competitors.

Right.

Like, do you outrank them? Your website, all that kind of fun stuff. Right. You know who never says competitor?

The actual company?

Who?

Doctors.

Oh, interesting.

I went through a thousand calls. We say competition, we say competitor. They don't talk that way. They don't describe another doctor as a competitor. They don't look across and go, oh, there's dg. Oh, man, that's not my number one competitor when it comes to bunion surgeries. That's not how they talk.

Right.

And so we had a lot of emails at the time that had competition in them. Without competition, we saw response rate go up.

Right.

So it's things like that where now I'm listening to the calls, then I get to the reps. Yeah.

I mean, the very silly example that I use a lot is. And I actually think this is in Dan Kennedy's ultimate sales letter. He has like these 10 questions to ask before writing. And one of them is like, is there some inside. Do they have their own language? And.

And of course.

And so one example of that is like, do we have our own language? Like, yeah. Do you? And me, If I said B2B SaaS, would you know what that meant? A hundred percent. If I try to explain to my mom what that means? Impossible. Because it's not relevant to her. She's not the customer. Or I remember when I first started traveling a lot for work, I'd be like, I'm going to San Fran. And people were like, dude, nobody calls it San Fran. Like, the easiest way to sound like an out. The easiest way to sound like an outsider is to use the wrong language. And so in your case, I'M trying to market to you. I'm in your inbox with something that is completely off base. That's like the instant. That's gotta be an instant, like loss of credibility and rapport.

Yeah.

So there's a really good book called Flip the Script by Oren Cloth. And what he talks about is he calls it a status alignment question. What's a question that if you asked, immediately puts you at the same level as the person you're talking to? You.

Right?

So if you, you know, say we're talking marketing and I ask you a question like, hey, like, ever since going remote, everyone's been noticing their cost per click skyrocketing because no one's spending money on in person events. So it's all going digital. What are you doing to keep your cost per click down so you have the same efficiency rates for your leads immediately, you're instantly.

And it also just signals that like, oh, you, you know this at a level of whatever verse. Like, if I'm out with my wife and we meet some person like, oh, you work in marketing. Yeah. So you doing like digital marketing stuff, right?

Like, what are your priorities, dude, immediately. Because again, we don't.

Oh my God, we don't. Is that the worst? Hey, Dave. Hey, Dave, I'm just curious, what are your priorities for this year? Sure, let me, let me share that deck with you, buddy.

And this is, by the way, like you said it a little bit earlier. I actually am like, nothing publicly, but I am okay speaking like this and saying, yo, salespeople, we got to step our shit up. Because we do. And I have no qualms saying that. But it's like, yo, but like, you need to invest in yourself. Why aren't you reading copy books? Why aren't you studying these people? Why aren't you taking these courses to learn it? We can do that and improve. We are writing garbage emails right now. So is marketing in a lot of places. Like, we can change that. But you have to.

But you know why? Because we're humans and it's much easier to do. It's much faster if I just take a template, even though I know it's not great. And I'm going to just, just schedule a bunch of sequences and they're all going to go out and hey, I booked a meeting. You probably might still book a meeting or two out of however many. But to sit there and be like, I really need to book. I need to get a meeting with Katie. What email would you send if you were like, if you just had to send one that one of one email. How am I going to book a meeting with you? I just feel like that mentality gets lost when you get in the. I got to make X number of things. So. So let's shift to talk about cadence and the actual. So all this research stuff is great. People will already get a ton of information and value from this podcast. But what do you do with that? So what's the funnel? What's the cadence? How do you take. Let's say you got this, you got the research, you turn it into copy. How do you do this other than just write eight? Do you write eight emails? You schedule them? What the heck do you actually do?

So I write anywhere from 20 to 30 emails, and I'm building a relatively. We'll call it anywhere from 12 to 18 touch sequence over, call it six to eight weeks. Part of the reason why I'm writing 20 to 30 emails is one, your first one's gonna suck. So if you only try to write eight, right? Oh, this is an eight email cadence. Your emails are gonna be horrible. You just gotta start writing, right? You gotta start writing and figuring things out, testing different language patterns. So I'm gonna write that, but it also gives me instant split tests. Now I have two emails available for each step in this sequence. So I'm getting more data points on what's working and what's not. But generally it's a little bit more condensed. In the beginning, I like a call in an email in the same day I like. And then moving towards an email, follow up the voicemails that you're leaving. And yes, salespeople, you should be leaving voicemails. You leave voicemails pointing them to an email. You don't leave a voicemail asking them to call you back.

You.

You get. Send them a voicemail saying, hey, I sent you an email. The subject line is DG likes whiskey. Give that a look, let me know what you think. Like, you drive them to that, right? You're trying to build truthfully, all cadences. What you're trying to build is familiarity where, like, they see the name one place, they see the name another place, right? Like, and so you're. You're building that awareness of you. Then if they're on social, you know, you can connect. Don't connect and pitch, just connect, right? Or start liking all of their stuff. But you're trying to build awareness to your face. Because the number one driver of open and response rate. You know what the number one driver of open response rate for email is?

DG yeah, from name 100% who's sending it, right? I talk about this because there's this, like, you can gimmick your way into opens. But like, if I am on Katie's email list and I like to get your stuff and I want to read your stuff every week, it doesn't matter if the subject line is a poop emoji or something funny. It's like, oh, Katie sent me an email. I'm going to open it.

Done.

Right?

Like, I've told the Ariana Huffington story publicly. I got an email from Ariana, this is now two years ago now, to be featured in Thrive Global. Did you ever. Did you see this story? You'll get a kick out of this.

No.

Okay, so she emails me, no subject line, right? Hey, Kevin, is Ariana. I'd like you like, feature you in this that are. So I get this email, I call my wife. I'm like, is this real? Like, is this here, like in all this stuff? I broke this down like in a LinkedIn post of like, okay, so first of all, all, no subject line gangster move. You don't got to put a subject line if you're a huff, right? You don't have to do that. You're the huff. You can do whatever the hell you want, right? But the who, the who is what matters. And so once I've seen your name a few times now it's there, right? And so that's how I'm building out. And I do. I'm heavy into video now. Heavy into video, like big time heavy into video for a lot of reasons and going through that of like, cause also too, personalization. I believe in personalization in at least four of the emails. Most reps only personalize if they do the first email.

And what does personalization mean? It doesn't just mean first name token. What does it mean?

So that's customization, right? So customization should be to the Persona, right? So there's customization to a Persona. Personalization. I think people forget what the word means. Personalization means only that person could read it and it makes sense.

So, so, so like you write a 12 to 18, you create a 12 to 18 touch sequence. Four to six of those things will be unique content, basically. And the others you can use for nurture. Whatever. Cause I was gonna ask you about, like, how do you ensure. We used to talk about this a lot. Like, we didn't just want the sales team to just like touch leads and like just. Yep, we got 20 touches on them. It was, it was about quality. And so is that's how you do it. You bake. You just like, hey, this is the sequence. But X of these have to be personalized.

So part of the SE sequence literally would be like insert personalization right into the brackets. So it couldn't send without it.

Right?

So like that's what built in. So the template is customized. The first sentence personalized. And I'm asking for one sentence of personalization. And also too, by the way, you brought this up earlier. I taught my teams how to do this. Like, we broke down copy. I had three sessions on email writing alone. We'd review them. We had something called the Shakespeare Award, like the best written email. Like, we focused on this, but also how to do research fast. Because reps, if there's reps listening, you know what I'm saying right now, Y' all procrastinate the action with research. Like, oh, I'm gonna spend 30 minutes researching this account so I can send this personalized email. Stop it. That's ridiculous. Okay, if you're gonna spend 30 minutes, you better get five pieces of personalization that you can use to send in all the other emails.

Right?

Like, it's just silliness. So. And again, I'm a salesperson. I get to talk this way. I get to talk this way.

No, I love it. I mean, it's. The chances that someone's going to open that email are pretty low, right?

And that's what's hilarious to me because then when they do open it, they're getting the non personalized email, right? I personalized the first one. They didn't open it. Then I said, send a bump, they don't open it. Then I send the third email and they open it and it's a garbage template. Goodbye.

Yeah, so how do. So what do you do though? I've always kind of wondered this. Like, I don't want. Especially if you believe that it's about like name and repetition and stuff. Like, I got three great emails. I kind of feel like I don't want to leave. I don't want to throw my fastball, like right out of the gate. Like, how do you structure that?

How many fastballs does it take to strike somebody out?

I don't know. That's a deep question. Sometimes none. You could throw them a change up, throw them two curveballs.

The point is it's at least three no matter what, right? Like to strike somebody out, someone else. Like, so what I'm trying to do is give it at least 3 to 4 qual. Everyone loves quality or quantity. Dude, check your inbox, man. Like, go ahead and look how many quality emails you've got.

Very few.

Like it's not even that hard anymore to stand out. Like it. But this is the key. It's hard to stand out if you only look different once. It's not hard to stand out if you look different multiple times. Yeah.

Also, you know what really makes a difference here? The company and the product and the fit. Because at the end of the day, if you're trying to write 18 email sequence cold emails and you're trying to struggle to find the use case first, like if you're in a hot market and customers are like, you have really great reasons for the why you buy, what problem are you solving stuff.

That's where this really takes off.

But I think that's why that stuff is so important that so much of that. This is the part that we don't talk about on LinkedIn a lot, which is so much of the sales and marketing success is due to the organizational health and how much everybody's on the same page. And are you selling the what product are you selling to who at what time in the market? I think all that stuff is very, maybe unsurprisingly underrated in the success of this stuff too.

Absolutely. Like, and that's something too where especially if you're doing these things, it gives you a feel for that. If you talk to 20 customers and you're not hearing things that help, you're not hearing things that are like, I guess positive. Right. Because also too by the way, so I got in trouble finding off at my laugh job because again, I just started calling and emailing. I did not get permission, I did not ask for the list from CS because I did not want the cherry pick. Like these are our happiest customers. Right. I just start going, going to work. All this lives in Salesforce.

Right.

But like those are the things where I wanted to talk to some of the unhappy people. I wanted to hear some of that.

Right.

Like, which is like such a slippery slope. Like you have a customer who's unhappy and so the key to their happiness is you not reaching out. You know, like.

Right.

You don't want to poke the bear.

You know, like kd, you could have caused some shirt churn. Okay, let's get one thing straight.

They're real quick.

I didn't cause any churn. They were churning anyway. I just gave you a three month heads up.

Right.

So let's not go there.

Okay. I got a bunch of random ones That I need to get. I want to try to ask you, what do you. And obviously we could talk about this sequence stuff forever, but this is great. Also a lot of marketing listeners will get other side of the table value from this. You believe in quality touches you talked about. What's your thinking about speed to lead? You know how that's like the hot. That was the hot story. Does that matter? Does it not matter? How does this fit?

Speed matters by channel. So speed delete on a demo request, I think is very important because they are expecting someone to reach out to them.

By the time I've reached out for a demo, that's the very last thing I do. I'm like, okay, I know I need this. I'm already way down the funnel, right? I want to demo because, like, I want to talk now.

I want to talk to someone. Someone right now. So demo request, speed delete. Yes. Because also oftentimes when you're, you know, filling out a demo request, you may be filling out from multiple vendors. And so oftentimes it is who gets to them first has the best opportunity. So speed to lead on demo request. Yes. Speed to lead on. Let's call it like a warm bucket. So, like, you know, they did. They did like a webinar. They, you know, opted in, like, for like a competitive scanner. Like, they did. Took some sort of action. Not information. We'll talk white papers and shit next. But like a warmer one. I believe speed to lead via email is very important. Like, here's what you were looking for, or here's a supplement to what you downloaded. But what we talked a lot about internally. You got littles, right? You got kids?

Yeah, five and three.

I don't know if you saw Frozen 2, but there's a whole song there called the Next best thing.

Come on. Have I seen it? Do you need every line from Take.

The next best thing? Like, that was. So it's like, what's the next best thing I want them to do? So, okay, they took this action. What's the next best thing that if I can get them to do, and most of that's via email. And if they engage, we call. But I don't believe in fast call. Speed to lead for someone who's like, in no way expecting it or wanting it. And then like, white paper leaves, like, pure. Just cold Facebook leads. Right? They don't even remember that they filled something out. Same idea. I think speed to lead via email is important. Not call.

Yeah, this is great. And this is. This is something that I think that Every marketing leader and sales leader should collaborate on, which is like, let's just have a session where it's just you and me at the whiteboard or whatever. Like, let's map out like what are the kind of four or five main lead sources and let's come up with the ideal funnel. I just think a lot of people don't do that. Like you gotta, you gotta do. You have to do. It's not marketing's job. But you need to do this together because marketing is bringing, ideally bringing these people in. Sales is going to be the one talking to them. So, okay, what's the flow for demo? What's the flow for. Because also you could also make the case that like sales shouldn't be working those webinar leads. They should be outreaches from marketing. And then if something happens, then maybe they might get bubbled up to a sales. But I think the mistake I made running marketing for the first time is like not sitting down and like I kind of did it on, on our own with marketing. But you gotta do that with your sales peer. And this has to be like the shared funnel because that's where the line blurs.

Right?

Right.

Absolutely.

Okay. I have more questions. Pricing on the website or not. And this can be different in healthcare and whatever else. But just would love your kind of your latest thinking on that.

I believe it should be and I understand why people don't do it, but I think it should be there or at least ranges of like here's roughly what it could be. But there's opportunities to customize. But yes, I do.

Yeah. Because you need some range.

Right.

I wasn't sure which way you were going to go on that because I've heard the flip side from the sales argument and you could even make the marketing argument to that you want the highest quality lead source, it's going to be the people who are requesting your pricing. What do you say to that?

So that's the wrong definition. People requesting pricing are not a high quality lead source. Someone who's seen pricing and still wants to talk is a high quality quality lead source. Those are two very different things. Duh. People want pricing that's not high quality. Everyone fucking wants pricing. Like that's consumerism 101. Like nobody here would go into a grocery store, have no pricing on the shelves, load up their cart and then go check out and hope for the best.

That's so good. Yeah, 100%. I agree. It's a completely different mindset. Katie, that was great.

Thanks.

Okay. You know, the shift in thinking in B2B marketing from high intent versus lead capture, what's your perspective on that as a sales leader? Because marketing is often incentivized a lot of times to fill the funnel with webinar leads, white papers leads, whatever. But on the other side of the coin, obviously, sales wants demo requests. What do you make of that conversation?

So y' all could hit up the marketing leaders I've worked with over the past, you know, three to four years and ask them what KD always wanted. And I told him I wanted RTBs and RTBs only. And RTB stands for Ready to buy. Those are the only leads I want from marketing. Everything else is a waste of time. I just want the ones that are ready to buy, right? And marketing never, like, delivered me a 100% bag of RTVs. I don't know what y' all do back there all day, but, like, really, that's all I'm waiting for. But, like, if I look at high intent versus call it, you know, just like general lead gen, I think there just needs to be agreement upon what we can capture up front. Or, like, what, like, because intent, too, by the way, is very hard to measure, right? Intent is. Is a feeling. Just because I've been googling marketing software doesn't mean I have intent. Just means I'm kind of out there googling around, right? Whereas, like, lead capture, I want to make sure this is back full circle. By the way, none of what we're talking about about works well in isolation, right? Because what you and I just talked about was the different buckets of leads and determining what that funnel should be. So, like a cold white paper lead, right? Okay. If all we got there was name and email, all we got was name and email, what's the next thing that we would want to get from them?

Right?

That would start to show either intent or interest, right? So I believe that's how the funnel should work. Because, like, high intent is tricky. Because also, too, and salespeople, you know this, and I bet marketers, you do too. A lot of high intent tends to not pass the authority need. But, you know, like, a lot of companies still use, like, a band or a medic, like, who researched a product, me or my team. Like, I'm sending that to my team. Like, yo, go take a look at this. So they're googling, they're looking, they're opting in, in. And then sales are like, oh, I don't want to talk to that, because it's a manager. Why do you think that manager was out looking. So that's a tough one for me of like, generally speaking, give me leads. But then here's the last part we'll wrap on. We need to have agreed upon SLAs and conversion rate expectations. So I know my white papers, what's my SLA and what should it convert at? Because if I'm meeting the SLA and they're not converting now, I can blame marketing. But sales, we were never allowed to complain if we weren't upholding our end of the bargain. You're not meeting the sla, you're not making the touches, you're not doing the personalization. We can't complain to marketing yet. Prove that it's a bad lead by working it, not by avoiding it.

Right.

And that's what allowed us to have those conversations.

This is all that Armin, who's a VP of sales at Drift, when I was working there, this is all he would talk about and care about is he'd be like dg, you can call them Blue Skittles, red Gatorade, I don't care the sources. I need to know conversion rates. Because what we're doing behind the scenes is I'm working with each individual rep on how are you going to hit your number this month. And so, okay, quota is, let's say 3K. How many meetings do you need? How many opportunities do you need? Where are those opportunities going to come from? If you have the conversion rates all wrong, then obviously that that funnel is going to be way off. And so it has to be rooted in that.

That's all I care. You can tell me how many leads you're going to produce. That's great. What's the historical conversion rate on it and do I think I can improve it? It, right. Cause if I think I can improve it. But if you show me. Okay, you're going to do a thousand leads. Cool. What's the conversion rate been? 3%. Awesome. I'm getting 30 demos. Is 30 demos going to produce the pipeline and revenue we're looking for? Well, no.

Yeah. This is why the demos is probably the best share like number for marketing to truly own in most of those B2B companies. Because it's the closest to like what you actually want. You want demos. Fantastic. So how many things and what things do we have to do to give you demos? And that's where you can create the get your sales math from. Okay, we got two more minutes. Quick philosophy on current state of the sales deck. What should it be? Is there a formula for it? How should it operate in this whole process.

So I believe a sales deck is there for the things that have to be covered. What are the things that you have to make sure gets said, like, what are the things you have to call out? Is where I believe the deck deck comes in. So I love having like some of the heavy discovery questions in A deck. We gotta ask this question.

Right.

But I do not believe in the founder story deck. I do not believe in like here's all the logos we have deck. I do not believe in any of that. But what are the things that I want to make sure occur in a demo? I love in the deck. And also stories and testimonials are great in a deck because those are things that people start to remember. So 10 to 12 slides at most. But I like deck to live. Deck to live. Deck to live. In terms of a demo flow.

Yeah, nice. I like that. I just put logos in it also because I think it's valuable to give like, hey, before we go into this demo and you're probably shopping and seeing three or four other companies right now, I just. I want to spend five to 10 minutes and I just want to give you a quick like, I just want to give you our perspective. I want to give you our point of view on how we see the market and how we see what's going on. I think that can be important in kind of like, I guess commanding that conversation with a customer. Especially if you're challenging current beliefs, you're creating something new. If you're just selling against a status quo, like, maybe not. But if you're doing something new, I think that part is important.

So we don't have enough time to go into full disagreement there. But the key on we can't tell them our perspective on the market. The only perspective that matters is theirs to start. What you're talking about I like throughout the demo.

Right.

So it's not. Not doing it. I like it throughout the demo. And here's why. Why did they show up to the call? Why did they show up to the call? Do they show up to the call to get your insights and your perspective on the market?

No. They got an itch that needs to.

Be scratched, so you flip it. You have to give people what they want, launch early. And that's true. Okay, you follow me here?

Yeah, because like a lot of times in that you can be like, boring, boring, boring. Lost me verse. Talk about me, get me right out of the gate. And then as you go through and you're like, well, the reason we do it this way is because our perspective is. Yeah, cool.

I heard the five to 10 minutes. I'm like, don't you dare, don't you dare spend five to 10 minutes at the beginning of the demo. Because you got to remember at the demo you've probably also asked discovery questions. So that took five to 10 minutes. Minutes. Then you open up with the founder story and the logos and you're small talk.

You had to do the small talk. Yes. It is cold here in Vermont. Yes, I know.

I'm long gone. I'm long gone.

All right, Katie, this was awesome. Better than advertised. Thank you. Well, better than advertise, at least in. In my head from what I thought I was going to ask you. It's always so much more fun to do a podcast with someone who has like lists and frameworks and thoughtful things. And so I took like a ton of notes during this.

Let's go.

Which is awes. So it's cool. So selfishly, an hour for me to learn from you and we're going to publish it and thousands of people will hear it. So quick, wrap up by plugging your stuff. Where can people connect with you if they want to do that?

So I'm on LinkedIn. That's where I put most of my content out. I have a podcast as well. Live better, sell better. So have that. And then I do have a Patreon, which is. But it's mostly sales focus and leadership focus. I don't know for the marketers out there, but like real head, like hour long trainings, you know, on scripting on my. How to write cadences is in the there. How to write emails is in there. How to handle objections is in there.

Right.

And so that's where I put a lot of the heavy stuff. So live better sell better Podcast inside Sales excellence is the patreon. But dg man, you know I talk to you whenever you know this.

Thank you.

Appreciate it.

All right, go follow kd. Kd. Thank you, man. Enjoy the rest of your day. I'll text with you soon.

You too, man.

Hey, thanks for listening to this episode of the Exit 5 pilot podcast. If you're in B2B marketing and you want to grow your career, you should also go and check out everything that we have over@exit5.com. We've got articles, we've got videos, we've got templates, plus we have a community, a community of over 4000 B2B marketing pros. Whether you're deep in your career and want to connect with your peers or just starting up and you want a place to go where you can see what people are talking about. Get smarter about B2B marketing in your own time to grow your career and help grow your company. Company. Go and check it out. It's exit5.com you can get on the email list there you can join the community. There's 4,000 marketers in the community. We have a job board. We're always adding new stuff. It's really becoming the number one place you can go if you want to grow your career and learn more about B2B marketing outside of what you're doing inside of your company every day. So check it out. Exit5.com and I also want to make sure I give a shout out to my friends at hatch. That's hatch.com they produce this podcast. It sounds amazing because of the work that they do and they work with B2B companies just like yours. They offer unlimited podcast editing and strategy for businesses. You can get unlimited podcast editing and on demand strategy for a low monthly cost. All you got to do is just upload your episode and they take care of the rest. Go and check them out. It's Hatch fm.

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