Inbound and Outbound Tips from Sales and Marketing Perspectives—with Arthur Castillo

Every company has breakdowns in their revenue process. Sure thing. Deals slip into next quarter, competitors creep in and swipe deals away at the last minute, and deals getting single threaded that don't get to power. These are just a few examples of revenue leak, but there are a ton more and they're preventing your team from reaching their sales targets. That's why I'm such a big fan of Clary's Revenue platform is the only tool that actually helps leaders take control of their revenue and thrive through any market conditions, especially when things get tough. You can't afford to miss a single detail, but you also can't be leading by gut. Clary combines the science and the art of sales and sales leadership. So go to clary.com if you want to answer the most important question in your business. Are you going to meet, beat or Miss on revenue? Welcome to the live Better Sell Better podcast with your host Kevin Dorsey of Inside Sales Excellence, the number one Patreon group and YouTube channel for tech sellers and tech sales leaders, where we dive in deep for tactical advice on how to book more meetings, close more deals faster, and lead sales teams to success. But we don't stop there. We also focus on the person in salesperson. We talk about mindset goals, time management and so much more. So thank you for listening and if you're interested, head on over to patreon.com InsideSalesExcellence now with that, grab a notepad, get ready and let's dive into the good stuff. What up everybody? Welcome to another episode of the live Better Sell Better podcast. This is your host Kevin Dorsey, AKA kd, and I'm about to talk with someone who left us. He left us. He left sales. He went to the dark side of marketing.

Yep, I said it. It happened.

It is what it is. We lost a good one from our world of selling, but it's also a great thing because I believe marketers can learn so much from from sales and sales can learn so much from marketing. Cause oftentimes I get hit up by companies to help them build out their outbound SDR and their outbound function. But every single time, the first thing I ask them is have you optimized your inbound channel first before you tackle the bear that is outbound prospecting? Is your inbound process dialed? Are you touching the leads as often as quickly at the right cadence with the right personalization to get the most out of it before you go down that route? And that's why I'm so pumped to have Arthur Castillo on the show today to talk about how to squeeze more out of the juice that is inbound marketing, but also help debunk some of the common things that come up from salespeople. Well, the leads are no good. They're not ready to buy. They're not qualified. We're gonna go through all of that today on how to get more out of your inbound leads, how to convert more of them to demo and to sell the way buyers are buying. So with that, my man Arthur. Welcome to the show. Let's do this. What?

What an intro, Katie, Man, I gotta say. Yeah, I got into sales kind of by chance. And along the way, I felt like a lot of the VPs of sales I had were all about activity metrics. I was like, okay, I get the law of averages. We gotta. The more you do something, the more success you'll have. But I felt like there's a better way to do sales. And you were actually the first guy I heard on a podcast where I was like, man, the way he described sales and like question based selling and making yourself the guide rather than the hero educating the buyer, I was like, this is exactly how I want to sell. But as you mentioned, I recently left for the dark side, but still carrying over everything I learned.

You'll be back. You'll be back. And so let's dive into this because like I said in the intro, I think many companies focus on outbound too early when there's still so much juice left on the inbound lead side. So let's talk about, like what you're seeing first of all. So industry wide, right? Because you're at Chili Piper, so y' all do a lot with these marketing teams, so you know how people are following up with leads. What are y' all seeing industry wide in terms of conversion rates on the end buy on side of the house.

Industry wide across B2B, we've never really seen somebody come in with more than 40% inbound conversion, meaning that when they're on your website requesting a demo or trying to speak to sales, 60% of that or more never actually gets on a demo or talks to sales. So we can get into a bunch of reasons as to why that happens, but you're absolutely right. I feel like people are not getting the most out of that and then thinking, okay, how do we do our outbound? Where really there's. There's so much more you can be doing in a variety of reasons and friction that exists that you can get into.

So let's touch on that, right? Like, because the. By the way, y' all we're not talking about like white paper downloads or things like that. We're talking demo requests, we're talking like trial activations, only getting 40% converted into a demo or opportunity. So what are you seeing? Like, what do you think is causing that? Because these are the hand raises, these are what the salespeople say they want, but then we book less than 50% of them. Why? What's happening?

Yeah, there's a. I think there's a few things at play here. And I know you're a huge fan of gap selling. You and Keenan over there. If we want to look at the technical root problem of the cause, really the lead capture happens within the marketing automation. Right. Marketing oversees that, but then the follow up happens within the sales CRM. So even from a system perspective, there's that latency of like, okay, we got this, we're creating the record, we're shifting it over to Salesforce. Here you go, sales rep. Go and find that somewhere and then go ahead and do your outbound outreach. That is one from like a technical perspective, the gap that exists between kind of the marketing and sales handoff there. I think the other thing we're seeing is just the speed at which you respond to some of these leads. And there's been a ton of crazy studies out there. I know they're pretty close with the folks over there at rep shop and they had some crazy B2B stats where it was like 42 hours before somebody reached out. So we got to be a lot better in terms of understanding, hey, this is somebody that wants to speak with us. How do we get them as quickly as possible into our sales funnel and talking to a sales rep. And what we found is another study. 50% of buyers choose the vendor that responds them first. Right? So a lot of the time I think they're not even. They know they're not buying the best product. It's just, hey, who can answer? Solve my problem in the quickest way possible at a fair price. I have other things to do. I have other fires to put out. So like they're really looking to solve that problem and move on. I think that's important because a lot of the time we think when we get a demo request, it's just coming to us, really. They probably have a short list of vendors. I mean, in the Martech space alone, what, 8,000 that they're going to check out. So whoever gets back to them quickest, like imagine if I reached out to you and we're on a call, ready, and you Tell me the price and somebody's like, hey, how about next week at Thursday at 4 o'? Clock? I'm good. Like I've already solved this problem. This is a good, like I need to focus on other things. And then I think what we can talk about too is the value of that first touch. So not only the latency of like how, how quickly we can reach out to them, but a lot of these companies now trying to hack speed to lead and they get an SDR to reach out within whatever five, 10 minutes. There's no value in that first call. Right. So yeah, a lot of, a lot of friction right at the top there that a lot of these high intent buyers aren't even able to get into speaking with the sales rep. And there's.

So much to be said for First Mover because whether they know it's a better product or not, if you're the first person I've spoken to, it means you're the first person I've built a relationship with. Which also means I can prepare you for if you're going to talk to these other people, right. Say ah, you probably to talk to them. Like we're all right, we're already in that process. You've already scheduled the next call like and it still boggles my mind like 42 hours to respond to someone who is asking to speak to. I don't, I don't know what they're, how I literally I still to this day, I don't know how that's possible but I know it's true because I've reached out to companies to get a demo and I don't hear back from someone for a day. And even when I do, I get one call, I miss it because I'm in a meeting and I never hear back again. Right. So like, so before we keep moving forward here, like what are some things that you can do to better improve that speed to lead? Right. Because like, you know, all the studies have come out, you know, like, oh, like under five minutes, you know, 90% higher conversion, all that stuff which is true to a certain extent. But like what are things teams could do to set themselves up to get in touch with the lead faster and then we'll talk value next. Cause I do think that's a really important thing you called out.

Yeah. I think the level one is getting that SLA in place. Right. Making sure that whether it's with your SDR team or if you have your A's responding that you have something in place. I don't necessarily Agree with this. But I've even heard companies penalizing sales reps for not getting in touch as quickly to kind of shift that motivation of, hey, we need to prioritize these. Right? I think that's level one. Level two is putting a. Just a calendar right after the form. Right? And I know you. You typically deal with this probably with physicians. And I sold a dentist in the past, where even if they're on your website or they submit a call request, I'm guessing they just put away their phone and say, okay, yeah, somebody will reach out to me. So even if you're reaching out within five minutes, like you said, maybe you're off to that next meeting. And they never cash them there. So I think putting a calendar at least gives them the peace of mind, saying, oh, cool, I'm going to be speaking with someone. It's on the calendar. We don't have to go back and forth and schedule that call. And what we found, too, is that if you're scheduling that within the first same day. Unreal. First two days, the show rate of that meeting increases three to five times. So the quicker you can get them into your sales funnel, that's. That's huge. And obviously it will accelerate everything. And what you just mentioned, right. Really shaping that buyer's journey of that decision that they're about to embark on.

And so say, you know, you got the calendar right afterwards, they don't fill it out, then what? Right? So then how can you then continue?

Right?

Because not everyone maybe has that. I mean, you should. If you're listening, you should have that, by the way, have a calendar right there. Chili Piper does that. I use it. It's perfect for inbound leads. But if you think about them, what comes next, that first call, Are there tips or things you have for teams like, well, how can you speed that up? Or what is a good sla? Because a lot of companies don't even have an SLA in place around this. Right? So, like, how would you approach that?

I think what we've seen for, like, base level, if you can get in touch with them within the hour, that's like a good level one, right? The closer you can get to that, the better. And then in terms of, like, are we talking about that first call or what they can do?

So let's move to that first call. Yes. Right. So, like, all right, they didn't book. Actually, no. I'm gonna take one step back. Cause that is important, because I didn't even work with my team on this just because they book on the calendar, should that mean you don't call?

No, that's a. That's a great point. Right. I think, like, there, it's. It's a great way to get to understanding maybe sending them that email and saying, hey, I'm really, really looking forward to it. I did a bit of research. Am I on the right path of, like, this is what you're focusing on or would love to hear a little bit more? I think anything that you can get prior to the meeting or have some sort of hypothesis there of, like, hey, I did my research. I'm thinking maybe this is what you're looking into and getting them to kind of commit, right? It's. What is that. That rule of two of, like, I'm seeing this? Is that what it is? It's like, no, actually, it's this. So getting them to respond in that fashion, I think could be helpful.

I think it's important to call out, like, consulting with a company right now where they do. People are booking on their calendars and they have a show rate of below 50% still. I was like, well, are you calling them? Well, no, they already booked. Do you think maybe you should be calling them just because they booked? It still doesn't mean you've spoken to someone. There's still no connection there. There's still no relationship. So it is important. Even if someone books on your calendar, call them, confirm it, introduce yourself, send them a text message, something that shows engagement, not just waiting for them to show up on the calendar, right? So now let's move to the next spot, right? Because there's a lot of people where it is like, all right, lead comes in. Bow sent to an SDR. Bow, SDR is on that phone with them 45 seconds. And the call sucks, right? Like, I opted in because I wanted to see the product, not talk to an sdr. So how can they make that first interaction valuable where it's actually not turning off the buyer? Because you can be as fast as you want, but if the call sucks, it doesn't matter. So how can you provide value in those early touches?

I think there's two options, really. The first, you can eliminate inbound SDRs completely. I feel like this is a larger issue of the over segmentation of sales, right? Where it's like, okay, we need our closers. Focus on closing now. We need somebody to prospect now. We're even dividing the prospect out of outbound and inbound to make sure we're getting to them. So I think there's a world where, I mean, really there. Maybe the good ones are better, but I think they're glorified appointment schedulers, right? Of like, hey, thanks for checking us out. Does this time work for you? So I think you can get rid of that and ideally route straight to the ae, right? And I know Chris Walker actually did a study on this where he looked at the win rates. If there wasn't an SDR handoff and it was just one rep all the way through, win rates actually increase three times. So I think there's something to be said about having one rep all the way through, taking care of you, having that first call and saying, okay, I understand your problem, not going to hand you off, dive a little bit more into that. But if you do need a bit of qualification, pink qualification is so interesting because often we only ask where they're at right now, right? We don't ask about where they're trying to get to. And it's funny because even back when I was an A at chili piper, the SDRs felt comfortable about coming to me with these leads that were like on the fringe of being qualified. Sometimes I would take these calls and I'd find out two weeks from now they're raising their Series A so they'd be qualified in two weeks. But if I didn't take that call, I would have never known. So I think there has to be on that first call, seeking to understand more than qualifying ourselves, right? What is it that brought them here? Who did they speak with that said, hey, maybe you should check this out. What was that trigger event? And I think using that rather than just going through our classic bands, right, like, okay, what's your timeline for this? If you show me the business impact of this and, and I tell you what I'm trying to solve, it doesn't really matter whether you have budget, authority or timeline or you can build that business case. So I think seeking to understand and really seeing, okay, this is where you're at now, but where are you heading to? Like, what's the growth plan? And different things like that. I think you can pull out a lot of good nuggets where at that time of qualification you might just say, hey, you know what? You don't meet our standards, talk to me next time.

I think that's important because I think so many times, you know, STRs, but also AES, even if it's sent directly to the AE, they approach that call from A, I'm getting something out of this. I'm going to confirm they have budget, I'm going to confirm they have authority. I'm going to confirm they have need, I'm going to confirm, confirm their timeline and then I'm going to qualify it versus thinking like, what does the buyer want in this process? Because what's interesting, and this is what's fun for you, making the move from sales into marketing is one. Oftentimes sales reps don't use their own product. So they don't actually understand what people are looking for. Right. They just, they went through the onboarding. It is what it is. But the other side of this, right, is like, salespeople don't know what it's like to buy. Salespeople don't buy things. VPs buy things. Salespeople don't. So they don't know what it's like to want some information on something and then not get it, you know, and not actually able to see it. So I think that's really, really important is to think about like, what does the buyer want in this process and then how do we approach it from there? So then let's keep going down this path.

Right?

So obviously, speed to lead increases conversion rate, value on those first touches, increases conversion rate. What else should they be focusing on before? Again, they're looking to go outbound before anything else. What are other best practices around inbound lead handling that can get that conversion rate from 40% to 50, 60, 70%?

Yeah, I think, making sure, I think along the way, like you said, that manual qualification piece, right? Whether you're reaching out to them with a quick call, an email, maybe you add them on LinkedIn. Hey, I'm excited about our chat moving forward. That's, that's all going to add a lot and they're going to start to make that emotional connection. I think getting that lead to the right person is going to be important, right? Especially if you have a complex territory or like, oh, by the way, after I talk to you, I realize you're better off talking to Katie over on the West End or he focuses on this specific product. So, yeah, the more you can get that, maybe even like ask some of those questions in the form. If you route by territory, if you route by product or anything like that, organization, size, revenue. I think understanding that and getting them to the right place at the right time, that helps. And what we've seen too, even like having a reminder cadence, right? Of just like, hey, by the way, we're meeting in a couple days, one that we loved and, and we've recommended to all of our clients. It's an automatic reminder one minute before the meeting starts and says, hey, kd, ready when you are. Here's my zoom link. Right? Because sure, we've all been there five minutes into the call being like, crap, do they have that zoom link? Like, I'm not sure. Right. So if you can even have that set up and have a process in place for yourself, knowing that, hey, I know it's going to be sent out. They have everything they need to hop on this call. I think that helps a lot.

I think that's huge. Right? It's like just reminders. Like we forget. Right? Okay. Someone booked a call, whether that was after you spoke to them or just through it. Reminding people of the appointment is one thing, but where this goes the next level and this is where actually changed a lot of even language within Chili Piper of the reminders is like reminding them why we should talk. That's also what's different is like not like, hey, I'm just looking forward to it. Like, can't wait to dive in and discuss some of the problems that you're probably facing. Or I can't wait to dive in and show you some of the things that I found about your business while researching. Remind them why you're talking. Not just remind them of the appointment coming up. Give them a little juice, tease them a little bit. Put something interesting in those reminders. They go, oh yeah, I do want to talk to this person.

Yeah, that's a huge point. Like even maybe not a full on agenda, but just a couple of items that you're looking forward to talking about or like giving them the handle on, hey, by the way, we're going to touch on these things. If you could bring them to the call, that's going to make our call so much better. Right. And it's going to give me a better understanding of how I can help your specific company. So yeah, even sending an agenda in there, being like, this is what I want to cover, anything else that I'm missing or what's important to you to give them that option and then you can reconfirm that on that first call. Like, hey, by the way, I don't, I don't know if you saw the agenda here, but this is what I was hoping to discuss and after doing some research, well, this was pretty valuable for you, but what are some things that you wanted to discuss today? So I think that's a, that's a great point you mentioned of like, yeah, kind of setting the agenda up front and saying, hey, these are a couple of things we typically talk about on these first Calls.

Yeah, it's just those, those little teasers, the little hints and reminding them. Right. Because when someone takes the time to Google something is because in that moment, that problem is real.

Yeah.

30 minutes later, I'm back into back to back meetings for the next four hours. I'm already like, ah, I can't remember. You need to bring those problems back up in the reminders in the email follow up as well. Which is another thing that actually shocks me. We can go down this path real quick. Right? Like so. All right. Phone calls seem to come late, but what always surprised me is for when I opt into something that the emails I get also are still templated, but they're not personalized at all. And like I opted in and I get the boilerplate. Hey, saw you requested a demo. Here's my calendar link.

Yeah.

And I'm like, oh no, that's not how this is going to play out. So like, what are some best practices in the email follow up as well? Y' all have seen.

Yeah, I think a lot of what we've talked about. Ideally you can avoid that, but even in like, yeah, getting, getting in touch, saying, hey, checked out the company, like this seems super interesting. Hey, you seem very similar to this. Maybe even linking a quick case study. Right. So they can start to see. Looks like they dealt with people like me in the past. Right. This is a very similar company size. So I think anything like that, maybe a quick video in there as well as like, hey, just to warm up, like if you want to share this around your team. Actually that's a really good one. Asking them, hey, by the way, typically we speak to these people in your team. Would you like to invite them on? Right. We know at least four to five people exist in that buying committee. So the earlier you can loop them in the process or even get them thinking about it based on the resources you share. I think that's, that's a really good way to kick off the relationship.

I think it's key. Like people just, they do. Like if you think about all the things and this is where you know we were joking about before, right? Like sales moves into marketing and like outbound versus inbound. There is so much that you do on outbound that if you also did on inbound would help skyrocket conversion rates, right? Oh, we got to do video outbound. Why wouldn't you use video tier inbound? We got a personalized outbound. Why wouldn't you personalize inbound? We got a multi thread outbound. Why wouldn't you Multi thread inbound. Like people just treat it like they're completely separate when they can both learn from each other. Which is kind of the next part in this I wanted to go from. Right, so you made the transition. Right, you went from sales to marketing. So this is a two sided question. One, what could salespeople learn from marketing? Right, like you've been in the seat for a little bit now. What could salespeople learn from marketing that would help them sell better? And then part two is the opposite. What could marketers learn from sales so that they could market better?

Okay, yeah, let's tackle the first one. What sales reps can learn from marketers. This is something I've even seen in past.

Roles where.

It feels like everything is very short term pipeline. And granted I've never worked in an enterprise sales organization, but even when that SDR passes off that lead to the ae, if they're not ready to buy in one or two calls like oh, this isn't qualified. And I think that's part of the reason why I wanted to switch over is to really start thinking like a marketer. We should have a short, medium and long term pipeline. The fact that they're not going to buy next month shouldn't mean that we close launch them. How do we keep them within the pipeline, keep giving them, staying top of mind, connecting with them on LinkedIn so that hey, when new quarter hits, by the way, I have budget and they don't get round robin to the next rep in that lead or something like that. So I think thinking more long term and having a pipeline and not looking at it as hey, this person isn't going to buy now, they're not qualified or this is a poor lead. I think that behavior they can change quite a bit because I know we were talking about this just before we started but really I think the future of a sales rep they really do have to think like a marketer and people are the way B2B buyers are buying doesn't adhere to the sales process today. So how do we really start to change our internal processes so that by the time they're buying lines up, I'm there ready as an ae, ready to strike and like I haven't forgot about them.

And so what, what do you think is changing there? Right? So we say like the buying process doesn't match the sales process. How so? And what do you think needs to change? And we'll come back to part two in what terms of what marketing can learn from sales? But like you touched on that briefly let's talk through that. Like, what are you seeing changing? How are they misaligned?

I think the days of willing yourself pure outbound to like 10 million ARR, it's gonna be tougher and tougher now and especially across like the past year and a half. The rise of communities and having access to your peers. That's the number one most trusted source now. Right. I'm going to go into a pavilion, a rep genius, Katie's Patreon, and say, hey, how are you guys solving this issue? This seems to be a bigger issue for me. You're going to get a lot of answers from your peers. Maybe they even give you a short list of vendors. That's now who I'm going to check out. I think I'm guessing it still happens, but gone are the days where it's like, capture my email and you're going to nurture me across 20 steps to the point where I'm like, huh, that's a really good point. Now I'm ready to buy. I think no longer are people going to buy that way. And that's kind of how we're going about doing outbound sales. Right. I think your organization is probably a lot different. Right. Because you're educating them, you're leading with value. Maybe something that they hadn't thought about, that's a lot different. But I think it's just like nurturing them and getting the touch points in place. That's not going to lead me any closer to approaching the purchasing decision. And that's what I saw changing. Right. Like this pure activity focus. Let's go and spray and pray. Maybe that worked in the past. I mean, I don't know if it ever worked. But that's really what I see being a lot different where they have the access to their peers. Right. I can hop on a zoom with you. Whereas before maybe we'd have to go to local meetup. Just getting that access to peers and communities and starting there first. I don't need to. Basically the demo is like the last step. Right. Where we're typically trying to make the demo the first step in sales. So that's what I see. I think gone are the days of nurturing people through email to point of purchase. Now buyers are looping like you mentioned, I think, yeah. Once they hear something enough times from their peers, that's when they're like, okay, I'm going to check this out. Or this problem became big enough that now I'm going to go out and do some research on my own to.

See What I can do, I think that's. It's key, right? And I think that's one of the things that's going to be very interesting over the next three to four years is like, I believe all those things are true. But what's going to make it hard for a lot of companies is you can't grow as fast that way. If you are just waiting for someone to have the idea to look on how to solve a problem, you're not driving that engagement. Right. It's like once they've decided, all those things work. But like, how do you help people decide? And it's getting harder and harder to get in front of people to plant that idea, to plant the ideas around, like, maybe I should try to fix it. So it's gonna be very interesting to watch how that plays out because for a lot of companies, they can't just sit back and wait on inbound. Right? Like, I wish I had more inbound. That would be great. I can't do that. You know, I've got 150 people on my team. I don't have enough inbound demo requests to support all of that. And so it'll be very interesting to watch how this changes over time. So let's come back to the other part of this. Right. So you talked about, you know, kind of like what, you know, sales could learn from marketing. What about marketing learning from sales? You know, you are a salesperson. What are you bringing over to the marketing side that's helping that marketing team support the sales team a little bit better? I think.

Yeah, for me, one of the huge benefits is like really understanding the funnel after they enter it. Right. And what it really takes to get someone from. Okay, there's a little bit of interest here all the way straight through their purchase, depending on the department. I find a lot of the time maybe if you're in like product marketing and you're talking to customers quite a bit, but there's not enough marketers talking to customers to really understand. And then typically sales playing the game of telephone and saying, hey, this, this is what matters most. And then marketing goes off and does a white paper on that, which could be true. I think there, there's really good feedback from sales, but I think there's something to be said about hearing it firsthand from the customer, understanding their, their, the problems that they're trying to solve or where they're trying to get to. I think that's a pretty key thing. And you know what? I think a lot of marketers are starting to do that. I've heard a lot of. I know Dave Gerhardt talks about, like, listening in on gong calls and things like that, right? So you can actually hear directly from the customer rather than gating it and having different people tell you, hey, this is what the customer said.

I think that's so huge. Right? So all my marketers listening, it's one step to then, you know, to at least listen to the sales calls. At least listen to some sales calls, but talk to some customers. Talk to them, understand how they use the product. Because that's the other side of this, too, is, like, we talk about salespeople not using the product. How many marketers use their product? Right. Like, it's even a smaller amount there that actually use it. They might benefit from it, but they don't necessarily use the product day in and day out. There's just such a gap there always. Right? And that's where, like, sales sees an email or a white paper and goes.

What is this about?

Like, who did you talk to to think this was a good idea? And so, like, what are some things that they should talk to the customers about? Let's give them, like, a little framework, an idea of like, okay, cool, I need to talk to customers. What do I ask them?

Yeah, man. And you have, like, great resources on your Patreon for this, by the way. I remember I was going through, like, your customer interview list. Let me see if I can rhyme some off the top. I think one that you had that was really great. How would you describe our product or service to somebody in your position? That right there should be, like, your positioning. Right. Hear how your end user is explaining your product or service to another end user. That's the. That's money right there, I think, trying to get what led them to that buying trigger. Right? What was it a report they ran? Was it a peer community? And if. Let's say it was a community. Okay, what community is that? So I can learn a little bit more. Because now you really want to understand where your buyers are getting information in order to trigger that buying journey. So any questions around that, I think is great. I think the value that they got from it. What can you do now that you couldn't before? That one's really huge. To get them to contrast. Right. Coming into this, there was no way I could do X, Y, and Z. Now I don't even think about that. It's not even an issue for them, for us. So those are the couple ones that come to mind. But I know you have a ton on this too. What do you typically ask?

Well, before I go down, what I would ask, I'm going to go one step further because you're the marketer, so you've asked those questions. How should you use them? Because that's the next level. Okay, so I talked, I asked those questions. What should marketers do with what they learned from those conversations?

Yeah, I mean, ideally, find a framework that you can feed that feedback back to sales and say, hey, by the way, I know we were talking about this being a huge thing. We just did 10 customer interviews and eight of them came in for this reason. So I think we should really start highlighting that in our demos. Right. Of like, this is what seems to happen. I know you do a great job of this too, where like when you're building your outbound program, you go to the marketing leader and you're like, what are the top things that they're clicking into? Right. So you can start to frame. It's almost a validation of like, okay, this seems to be what they care about. How do I now convert that to my outbound messaging? What else can they do? I think video testimonials are huge. Right. And especially if you cover that any. Like, if, if a buyer can learn from one of their peers over a sales rep, they have way more credibility than. Than a sales rep ever would. Right. Partly because we talked about as a sales rep, you probably never have done the job or you probably have never used the service that you're about to sell to the person that's doing the job. So I think any resources that you can equip your sales team with to say, hey, don't take it from me, take it from this expert in your industry. That's going to carry a lot more credibility. But to me, I don't know, I always found like the buying triggers fascinating to really get into that. That's probably more of a personal preference of like, what the heck got them to say, hey, I need to fix this problem.

And one quick tip for everyone too on this. In terms of what marketing can learn from sales, what are the real objections? Because your website copy should address the objections that, you know, people have. Your case studies and testimonials should address the objections. Right. So this is something I teamed up with a ton with Andy Mackensen at Snack Nation, the CMO and co founder there is. I would bring him. These are the top 12 objections we get. I need testimonials that address these. I don't need the testimonials to say we love it.

It's great.

Everything's fine and dandy. I need the testimonials that say it was worth the overhaul. I need the testimonials that say it was like. I meant I was afraid this wasn't going to have an roi, and it did. I was afraid I'd been burned in the past. And this didn't like getting those objections to marketing, because then that should be addressed in the website copy. And I think that oftentimes with marketers, marketers avoid objections. They just try to paint this perfect picture versus, like, yo, you're probably thinking right now, that'll never work for me. Here's why it will. Right. And having those things in there. So I think that's an area too. If marketers could learn from sales, the objections they're getting preceding that. Right. Get ahead of those things because then the leads that are coming in also will be better because they've already gotten some of those objections handled before speaking to someone. And so I think that's one area that I wish marketers learned a little bit more from sales as well. So I got a couple more questions for you here before we wrap. We're already at 40 minutes. This went way faster than I thought it was going to. So the last one is. Right, your title is field marketing, right? Well, the field has been pretty interesting over the last year, year and a half. So, like, what are you doing with field marketing now when a lot of things still, you know, events are kind of coming back, but they're not what they were. 2018, 2019.

Right.

Local events, same idea. So what are you doing in field marketing right now that you're seeing working? I think a lot of people are struggling with this. Like, we used to go to events. Events made up 30, 40% of our pipeline for the year, and now we don't have it. So are there things, what are you doing from a field aspect that you're seeing results from? Or is it something that's still shut down for y' all as well?

You know what? A little bit of the latter, I will say, in the sense of traditional field marketing. But I look at my role almost as like a little unique in that I try and sit in between demand gen and community. And I think with the rise of communities, how do I be more visible and add value within those communities? Right. So maybe even doing some events there, like doing some good branding. But I think it is a bit of a struggle still. And this is funny too, because I think gone are the days of these huge macro type of conferences, right? 10, 20,000. I know we just went to one in Lisbon, Portugal, 40,000 people, which is cool. But I think now we're going to start to see a lot more micro events, right? We saw it with the rise of communities and people wanting to be within, close to their peers, talking strategy, talking challenges, how they solve them. And that's really a focus of ours. In the new year we see this awesome opportunity to start hosting more of these micro events in some of these major cities where we're just bringing peer groups together and we're actually pulling them and saying, hey, you guys are all directors of Demand Gen. What's top of mind for you, right? Getting them involved in the programming and then having them discuss around that, I think that's going to be huge. I know this. A lot of people would argue that the value of these in person conferences is actually to capture that content, maybe have an expert speaker there and then redistribute it back online. Right? So I think that's another thing that we're going to see a lot within field marketing of not necessarily going to the event and saying, hey, we paid 50k, we need to see 50k or 100k back. But hey, we did 50k, but we actually built a really strong relationship with Kevin Dorsey and he's huge in terms of our ICP of where we want to get to, hey, we sat down and did an interview. We can chop this up into 20 different bits that we can use in ads, we can use on our social. Right. And start to educate people in that sense. So I don't know if I answer your question, Katie, but that's kind of some of the things that we're looking at.

I like it. I think we are going to see the rise of the Microsoft in a lot of places, right? Micro influencers, micro events, micro learning sessions. Right? All those things. Because the, because also too, generally speaking, up until, you know, 2020, the draw to these conferences, yes, it was meeting up people, but that was the only place you got to see some of quote unquote us speak live. That's the only place you got some of the content and the insights from, you know, us quote unquote experts. Well now there's a webinar every goddamn day, right? Like the access to information is no longer the challenge. Right, but that's where I think it'll be interesting of like, I also think events turn more into workshops. If people are really like, okay, it's not about getting told what to do anymore, it's leaving actually having Done it right. Whether that's, you know, we're building scripting or we're building a playbook or we're building. All right, marketers, open up. We are all going in. We're gonna build the dash, right? I think more and more is also to do that. And of course, that needs to be smaller. You can't do that with a thousand people in the crowd. You can only do that with 50 to 100. So it'd be very interesting. I'm very curious to see how it. How it plays out, because if someone hit me up right now, like, hey, kd, we want you to come speak at our event, I'm kind of like, do I really want to do that? Like, I don't. Don't get paid enough for this stuff. You know? Like, I don't. I don't need to do all that. So it'll be very interesting. So awesome. I got one last question for you here. We've been going through inbound, and I think this will really help people through it. But the name of this podcast is Live Better Sell Better. Right? So I have this weird idea that if we lived better, if we took better care of ourselves, we had more energy, more joy, more fulfillment in life, that the sales and probably even marketing would get better as well. What would your live better advice be for everyone listening?

Oh, man. You know what I think has been really great for me, especially as we're working from home, baking in either meditation breaks, or going outside. And I actually learned this from you, where even a highly trained mind, we can only stay concentrated for max 90 minutes. Typically, it's under 60. That's why the Pomodoro technique is so popular, right? So in order to live better, give yourself a chance to breathe, step away from the technology, meditate, 5, 10 minutes, clear your head, go outside for a walk. That's really helped me across the pandemic and working from home, and it just gives me that extra boost of energy where if I'm feeling slowed down, it's just like, okay, let's go for a walk, or let's go for a quick meditation. And that gets me right into the good energy levels that I need to keep going.

I love it. There's a quote. I think this came from Dan Gordon, but I'm not entirely sure. So I'll give him credit for now. And it might be wrong. I'll look it up. He said, your discipline is determined by your energy. If you're tired, you can't maintain discipline. Your willpower is gone. And that's when we mess up. Whereas if you can maintain that energy and do things that recoup energy. That's why I love your idea. Like meditation outside where you're getting energy back, not just spending it. That's how you can maintain. So this was great. My man. Arthur. Where can people get more of you? Follow you, get in touch with you to learn more about you and Chili Piper. Like where can they find you?

Yeah, right now I'm spending a ton of time on LinkedIn, so just find me there. Arthur Castillo. I'll have the chili pepper right in front of my name. Feel free to connect with me, DM me, whatever it is. Would love to hear your thoughts.

Oh yeah, my man. Well this is exciting. Long time coming. We've been connected for a long time. It's a fun to see you on the other side of this on the podcast, man. I appreciate your time, energy and insights today, my man and we will be in touch.

Thank you man. It was an honor for him.

Hell yeah.