Levelling Up the List!

I think we've got more people that are going to be funneling in in the next couple of minutes. Um, but we will kick things off here. Just like last week, we're going to start off with a little bit of positive focus. We're going to talk about just one thing in the last week that was a win, whether it's personal, professional. alien, you get to pick just anything that was a win for you. For me, I actually— my win is recovering from a mistake quickly. So I accidentally, because I'm super technologically savvy, switched the URL, the domain of my website. When I was making some edits to my website, I accidentally switched it to another domain that I own. And all my links weren't working. So I was getting messages from people like, hey, you're all like your normal links, they're all broken. I was like, oh no. So I spent 10 minutes on Sunday night on a date with my husband getting my domain back up and running so that my links were working. And I was just, I was proud of myself that one, I knew where the problem probably was, and two, I could fix it from my cell phone. Technology's come a long way, guys, where we can do almost everything from your cell phone. I don't know about you, but when I'm selling, I honestly— there's nothing I can't do from my phone. I can set a contract from my phone. I can use Salesforce or HubSpot from my phone, send emails, respond to Slack. It's incredible. Life is so remote now. Passing it forward to Mark.

Let's see. I am trying to recover from a mishap with an account that we're managing, and we're trying to leverage a couple of different technology partners. Trying to follow up on that, but at least communicating with the client what their needs are and trying to figure out what the solutions are going to be and being able to pivot or move around and be flexible. So more to come on that.

Awesome. Pass it forward.

How about you, Ralph?

Well, let's see. We've got folks, we've got folks coming into the office, the San Luis Obispo office this week. They are here. We've been trying to come up with interesting things for them to do. And we managed to, managed to get that pretty well lined up. We're going to see how that works out in the next 48 hours, but I think, I think they're going to be happy with what we've lined up for them.

Awesome. That sounds like a fun time. It's always good to get together with colleagues. Pass it forward, Ralph.

Uh, well, I see Mason there, so.

Um, no big sales progress for me, I'd say. Um, but just some personal stuff, uh, I guess just figuring out all my student loans. Um, I've got that all in order now, which I'm happy about. Um, and yeah, looking forward to moving forward. And then I'll pass it on to Tim. I apologize for being late. I had an unexpected Windows update, so I need to understand what we're doing. I'm sorry.

The worst. Um, so we're doing positive focus, which is how we kick off each week, and it's just one thing from the last week, personal, professional, anything you want that was a win for you.

Okay, cool. Sounds good. Uh, last week we got a verbal commitment for the Raiders on moving forward on a new project, so I'm very excited about that.

Love that. Yeah, I think, Michael, you're the only one left.

And that is my turn. And I think that student loans is definitely a business point, Mason. So kudos on that. I planned my vacation coming up in a little over a week, and I'm psyched. First one coming up this year.

Awesome. That sounds exciting. I hope you have a great time, get some time to completely unplug and relax.

Trip up north. Well, that— you know, we never do that in our world, but we're always tethered via the phone. But yes, I'm excited about that and learning California.

Awesome, awesome. And so this week I put together a course on building the list, and we actually have 4 or 5 other registered attendees who aren't here, but it's all StreamGuys present, so we can really focus on your business today. And they'll get to watch the recap and hopefully pick something out of it that's useful for them. And so when I say the list in this context, I don't mean your individual list. I mean the strategic list of accounts that StreamGuys says, these are the accounts that we think we're going to have an unfair advantage To close that align with our overall strategy and brand, so much so that like these are the accounts where we would put the logo up on the website. We'd be celebrating, everybody in the office gets lunch. That's the type of list we're talking about. Because this is really about everybody on the team aligning strategy. So think of it kind of like a key account list. But this should really align with your overall total marketing go-to-market strategy. Um, we're gonna kind of reverse engineer this a little bit, um, and talk about truly understanding your offering. And there will be some other steps in here that have to do with really understanding the go-to-market strategy that you have and your, your goals as an org. And I want to note one thing before we dive in, which is that there's no expectation that you guys are going to know all of this today, because this is one thing that historically at the majority of technology sales companies, salespeople don't get enough feedback on these things. So this is kind of almost a guidebook on the things that you need to take to senior leadership, your product people, And say, if we really want to get here, this is what I need to know. So when we're talking about— and you can also talk to customers. I don't know how open your, you know, your policies are on that. But if you don't have a marketing team working around the clock to create case studies for you, one of my favorite things to do when I'm sitting in a sales seat is just be like, I'm not waiting for marketing. I'm just gonna go talk to a customer and get the case study myself. Um, so first and foremost, it's what is the problem that your product is meant to alleviate? And sometimes there are a lot of problems, but really focus on which is the most important. Do you guys know what is the problem that you solve for most often that customers are coming to you and being like, oh, thank God, I don't want to deal with this anymore? Reach an audience. And presumably that audience was hard to reach before.

Well, assist in that, and in just piggybacking off what Tim just referenced with the Raiders, furthering the reach of theirs via another media.

Based on my understanding of StreamGuys products, there's also some interactivity, like making live video really live and interactive. Right? Because today it's not enough to just watch videos anymore. We want to interact with them. We want to engage. Is there something about your product that's causing you to lose deals historically? Is there something that like you get kind of far in the sales process, but when this one thing comes up, all of a sudden you're getting ghosted or you're getting a response that's like, actually, we found a better solution. Where are you losing your deals?

I think there's 2 places. I think UI and like the flash and shine is one thing that we get dogged on a little bit. And then also that kind of ties into reporting, which has really been lacking on the UI and shine. And then also that StreamGuys doesn't own our own ad insertion technology. We sell other companies that are also competitors of ours, so that puts clients in a situation where they could potentially buy those things directly from those vendors.

When we say reporting, do you mean that you don't have a good, like, analytic view, or do you mean that the API is available for them to create their own reports too? Both. Just wanted to make sure what I wrote down was true before I made an assumption. And on the other side, what specifically is helping you to close difficult leads? Where are you winning deals that otherwise maybe you couldn't have won?

In my opinion, flexibility, being able to piece together various features or solutions that other vendors can't do. And, uh, our excellent reputation for support.

24/7, 365.

Is that live?

Yes.

Yeah, that's the way to do it. Talk to a real human being any hour of the day. I'm sold.

That's one of my angles, to say call at 3 AM, please.

Yes.

No, I mean, that's for so many customers. Things break. And in your process, being honest about the fact that things break no matter what, like at some point somebody is going to fat finger something, whether it's on their side or yours. They want to be able to call and talk to a human being any hour of the day, and that person needs to be able to wake up the smartest person on your team. Um, so here's one, and this is one that I have historically struggled with. So much because I've been in B2B tech for like 12, 15 years now. And that is, could you explain your product to your grandparents or a young child if you didn't have it right in front of you and you couldn't show it to them? What words would you use to describe the value of what you do to someone who like does not have a point of reference?

Good generic tagline we use here. Is we are the— what are the— the internet, the broadcast or the internet tower, pardon me, the broadcast tower of the internet for our clients. It's like, that's an older tagline, but for older people, they think of—

You think your grandpa knows what a broadcast tower is?

Yeah, definitely ham radio and radios in general, like that generation.

My grandpa's probably like, what's that? Nope, that's good. Um, and what about somebody who's like just really young? If you were explaining it to like a 4-year-old?

I don't have a 4-year-old.

Okay. Uh, anybody got a take? Because if not, I'll give it a try. Okay.

We, we get the audio. On the internet to people. That's as simple as I can make it, I guess.

We make audio and video more fun, right? And it's— you gotta like, when you're thinking about things from a perspective of explaining to someone who doesn't have a point of reference, it's like the barest, most simple way you could possibly explain it is like We make something better, cooler, faster, whatever. Um, and you'd be surprised how often when you are talking to like a super technical decision maker, they have to go sell it internally to someone who doesn't have a point of reference. And you want to empower them to do that by already having it figured out, right? So it's like, here I am talking to a CTO and he understands it, right? He gets every Caveat and every piece of what we're talking about. He knows why the specific code that we're writing is important. He gets it, right? But he's got to go sell it to like a CFO or a CEO who's like, I don't know, why should I care that it's in that file? Why should I care about the encoder size? You know? And they need to be able to say, well, it just makes our video better, right? Like, it makes it cooler. Makes it more interactive, whatever that is. Got to slim it down so they can win internally. What would your top customers say is the most frustrating part of your product or service? If they were giving you product feedback, what would they be like could be improved?

I'd say reporting and UI, personally.

Is everybody agreeing on that one? What would those same customers say is the most helpful?

Our willingness to try and improve upon those things.

Yeah.

Yep. Flexibility and support.

Would you be comfortable using the product or service that you're selling in your day-to-day life?

If I was a broadcaster, yes.

Basically, if you had a need for it.

Yeah, exactly.

Okay. So these questions, when you add them together, is your unique service offering. If you have an excellent marketing team, they may have already wrapped it up and made it pretty for you. Having interacted with StreamGuys' marketing content, I would hazard a guess that you guys do not have prettified versions of this. But that's okay, because you have the ability to create things, create things on the fly. It's really easy to take this same information and just put it into a slide on a slide deck, right? One of the things that I talk about a lot When selling is radical transparency, which means just saying these things about our product, not great. And if those are your top priorities, we're, we're not the team for you. We're working on it, but I can't promise you that's going to be on the truck next week. But these are the things we're really great about, and this is what our customers say are our best features, right? Like, we have 24/7 support. somebody answers the phone, they are helpful, and they get you where you need to go internally to get your problem solved. You know, we're flexible in the solutions that we can provide for people. If we don't have it, we're willing to build it. And specifically, if you can get quotes from your customers, it goes a really long way to have someone's actual words and name in a slide deck. If you just have a slide that's like, This person said, you know, we have the best support team on the planet, whatever that may be. Um, you're also going to want to connect this when you're talking about building the list to the people who are going to appreciate what makes you great, because you have competitors and the companies that you are selling into have different priority sets. And one thing that can be really hard when you're in outbound is figuring this stuff out before you talk to somebody, right? Like, I don't know until I've talked to Disney what they really care about. But a little bit later on, we'll talk about like buyer personas and the different types of, you know, verticals there are. And you can sometimes find patterns in those where it's like, okay, well, everyone that's in sports broadcasting seems to care about these 3 things. Everybody that's doing OTT delivery of, you know, kids' content seems to care about these things. So if you want, you can go to hubspot.com/makemypersona, and that's a really cool tool to build it with prompts, and then you can download the file at the end to build different types of personas. Now, from my perspective, it's a very simple builder. But it'll get you started. And then you can like drill a little bit deeper later. The types of questions that they're covering are like your industry. Do your best customers work within a particular industry or set of industries? If I remember correctly from last week, you guys are doing really well with religious and sports. That's still accurate. Anything else we should add there? That's a vertical that you guys are just killing it.

Public media.

Public media. Are your best companies coming from companies that are like similar sizes? Enterprise, small business, mid-market, or are they all over the place?

I think we talked a little bit about this last Monday. I would say, I don't know definitively, but I'd say mid to small market. I don't think we're like in You know, S&P 500 territory of true enterprise level. We do call our biggest clients enterprise-level clients, but I don't, you know, they're not Fortune 500.

They're not Fortune 500.

Correct, correct.

Gotcha.

Okay.

And the buyers, I think we talked about this last week, and you guys are usually talking to like director and above. Digital, audio, sometimes business development and marketing. Anything else that's a really common title that you guys are talking to?

Engineering or operations sometimes.

And then like revenue-wise, How much money are your customers typically earning in any given year? And is there like a threshold that you'd really prefer your customers be past because those end up being your best customers?

Good question. I haven't done much research on how much money our customers make.

Likewise.

Yeah. All right, so here's your assignment. Take a look at your CRM. And I would just hone like top 10 customers. And look for similarities, right? Like, if you have 10 customers that are really good, what do they have in common?

Mm-hmm.

So then diving a little bit different, deeper, is what are their most substantial challenges and pain points? What issue do they use your product or service to solve? And are there multiple pain points they experience? And which ones can you solve for? So we said reach, interactivity, and engagement. Anything else you guys are solving for? People are coming to you with headaches, you give them Tylenol.

I think we do, we do get a lot of folks coming to us for analytics, honestly. I mean, you know, there, there are obvious gaps possibly that we have, but at least in my case, I am getting a lot of folks that, that are not happy with, with what they're seeing now. They're with some other, some other provider, and, and that's their, that's their major pain point is they just want to find out who's, who's watching or who's listening.

I think StreamGuys too is a managed hosting service provider. So, you know, what people come to us is to manage the service stack, the tool sets that they need. And then again, it's just a huge service that we provide in the management of that. And that's that 24/7 we fall back to, 365.

Yeah. So, from like a marketing and SDR perspective, I'm reaching out to new people, I'm definitely going to heavily talk about outsourcing the work, right? You're busy. You don't want to be worried about this stuff. You give it to us and you don't have to worry about it anymore. We're going to manage it for you. Because that's these levels of decision makers. That's probably what they care about, right? Like, I don't want to be looking to see what's wrong with my tech stack at 3 AM. I want to sleep. And I want to know that whoever I hand this to, they've got it. No, no more open book for me. I closed it. That belongs to somebody else now. Key success metrics and goals, which is just like, how are they measuring success? This is particularly like if you're doing a discovery call, always, always, always, always, always find out how they're going to decide If you guys pass the test, right? Never leave that open. What's the success metric? Um, and once you know that, you can build your list for customers that will measure you as successful. Do you guys have anything in particular that you think stands out to you as how customers are measuring you today?

I think response time and uptime are basic ones.

Some opportunities right now in front of me are based on revenue projections, and I'm not sure if that's really a value— it's not value propositioning, but that's like, you know, what revenue projections—

Are they going to get a return on their investment, right?

Yeah, exactly.

Probably some latency stats in there that they care about depending on the company. Um, what do your customers like the most about your products? What do they dislike? What are their must-haves when it comes to new purchases? We already covered that above. Um, technographics, which is like, what tools are they already using? What do you have to plug into, right? Are you coming across deals where you're losing because you can't plug and play with their tech stack? Or are you, you know, pretty cross-compatible with everything that's out there and you don't have to worry about it?

A couple of our enterprise— our biggest wins have been because we are— our technology, we've been able to actually develop custom— customize the framework of it, whether that's API integrations or other said types of things, our development team and engineers.

Awesome. Engagement partialities. This is actually, I think, one of the biggest indicators of overall sales success is willingness to engage with your prospects the way they like to engage. So do your best buyers prefer to engage by phone? Email, social media, in person, on Zoom? Is there a particular time of day when they're most available? And how many times does it typically take of reaching out before they start engaging with you? Now I know for Catchfly, email was up there. Is that true for you guys too? Your customers would kind of rather just have a couple emails back and forth, or are they super excited to jump on a Zoom with you?

Depends on the customer. I think we have some that prefer both. I don't think anyone prefers social media from what I could tell.

You know what's surprising is that it really depends on where they are in the sales cycle. Like, I don't think anybody, once they know you, is like, yes, please message me on LinkedIn. But in terms of initial engagement, social media can be really good for getting somebody to just respond.

4-year-old pitch. It's fun. Let's, let's connect.

Yeah, exactly. It's exactly like that. It's a psychology trick, basically. It's just like, I'm DMing you. That's way cooler than sending you an email or calling you. Uh, so, so your preferences for outreach vary. Um, so one thing that definitely can impact this is where your buyers sit. So obviously the time of day is going to be different for somebody living on the West Coast versus the East Coast versus being in APAC or Europe, because they probably more often than not want to engage with you during their working day. Um, and so finding flexibility for that, it can be difficult, but When it comes to closing deals, inconveniencing yourself to be present when the customer is working will definitely pay off for you in the long run. Communication styles. So this is kind of a listening thing, but I would encourage anybody on the sales team to spend a little bit of time looking at how people in your target market talk about the industry? Like, what, what terms are they using? Because one thing that we tend to do as tech salespeople is wrap things up in our own terminology, right? You have your own internal language that you use for referring to things. That matters not to your customers. They don't care what you call your products, your features, your services. They care what it means for them. So learning to talk to them in their own language is super important. Otherwise, you're going to be explaining a lot, and that's kind of a waste of a sales call. And then keep going deeper. I'm going to kind of fly through this because I think you probably need to spend some time thinking about it more than answering it right now, which is what are their key motivations and buying triggers? Like, there are different types of buyers out there. People who impulse buy, probably not for their tech stack, but who knows. People who are big-time researchers, they don't really want to talk to salespeople, they just want you to send the documentation. You've got people who buy from people, emotional buyers who want to buy from somebody that they like. People who are solution buyers, they're really looking to understand how you're solving their problem. So understanding what's motivating your buyers will really impact where you have opportunities in a list. Customer lifetime value. One thing that can be a productivity killer on sales teams is going after low-value customers with the same amount of effort as you go out after high-value customers, right? So really understanding the difference between like what, say, a Disney is worth to you versus what, you know, like XYZ Broadcasting that has one channel in Alaska is worth to you, right? And seeing how all these different KPIs and metrics funnel into customer lifetime value so you can prioritize your list. And then referral potential. So referral potential impacts customer lifetime value, but it doesn't go in the same slot, right? You've got what somebody's willing to pay you, but then there's this extra layer of all the other people they could convince to pay you. And so if you think somebody has massive referral potential, but they're kind of a small customer for you, they might rank higher on your list. You've got product use, which is just like Are they gonna buy more things? What, what could you do to motivate them to buy more? Advocacy, which is like, would they become a brand advocate? Would they be willing to do a press release talking about your partnership? And brand value, which is like adding credibility. We all know there's logos we put on our website that will bring us business purely by just saying— for you guys, probably like NFL is a customer, right? Has that closed deals for you?

We're not actually able to use their label or brand on our website, but yeah, we definitely reference the HECAT, drop that name in every email or every conversation that's in that ecosystem or ethos.

Yeah, absolutely. If I were talking to any sports company, I'd be like, hey, the NFL runs on us. So like, if we're supporting them, we can support you. And then understanding your company. So when we started, I mentioned my email. Diving into like what leadership is trying to do. So these are some questions that you kind of have to lean hard on your senior leadership, marketing, and product teams for. But it's like, where's the company trying to go? Are your probabilities? Are your priorities revenue, profit, logos? What's the goal? When's the timeline? So if you're saying like they're talking leadership and they're saying in a year we want to double revenue, that's a different priority than saying over the next six months we'd like to increase profit thirty percent. And a lot of companies make early mistakes. Not differentiating how these things fit into a long-term strategy. Because I know for sure I can go close revenue, no problem. But we might lose money on the deal. And sometimes that's a strategic decision that you want to make. Because you want to look, you want to put up big revenue numbers because it's something leadership's trying to do. Maybe they're trying to get acquired. Or go public, whatever. But more often than not, if you're privately owned, profit is a much bigger, more important number than revenue. But it's important to get that information. And like, if you have a marketing team, they may have some strategies that are like, you know, we'd really like to bring on 3 key logos, and I don't care if we have to lose money to do it, because I need those on the website. so that we can improve brand presence. What is the brand image you're trying to convey? So like if you guys are focusing on religion and sports, that's a different brand than if you're focusing on like e-learning and I don't know, like porn. Huge video user, right? So you kind of have to think like, what is our brand? What is our image? What are we trying to put out there? And what companies align with that? Um, are there specific industries that you're trying to grow your presence in strategically? Have you guys made a decision about which industries can get you to that top-level goal? So like, I know from having been in a similar space to you guys for years that like media companies, big logos, big spend, not always a ton of profit. Because they expect costs to be low. They've been driving it down for years and they don't want to pay— they don't want to overpay for the value of what they're getting. So while those deals can be great long term, they might not actually be the deal you need to get to profit goals. Where are the greatest opportunities for growth? What verticals have you been like ignoring that you could grow your footprint in? Is there a product roadmap you should be aware of? Which companies or indicators that companies might have do you have an unfair advantage of— advantage with? These are like the companies that if you could get them to talk to you, you know you could win because you can solve their problem. And the best way to kind of know for like solve for this one is just to be following specific keywords in Google News. Are you guys doing that today? Yes. Awesome. So if you're monitoring, if you're monitoring for things like downtime, like video outage, audio outage, then you'll get notifications once they like somebody's podcast goes down. If their podcast goes down, then you know you have an opportunity to actually help. That's the unfair advantage. And then step 4 is just organizing your intel and identifying your key players and accounts. So for this, you're going to want a shared document of some sort. I put in here further down the template that I use. You guys are welcome to click into that, make a copy, and use it for your own needs, or you can create your own because it really depends on what you're trying to track. Um, but you want to share it with everyone who's outbounding and give each other Relative feedback. So sometimes your CRM is set up perfectly for this, but more often than not, they're, they're just not. Like, you don't have a sale— a dedicated CRM person who's making sure that it fits perfectly your sales process. So sometimes this stuff has to live outside of your CRM. I don't know, what are you guys using for a CRM today?

We use Zoho. Okay. It has— it's all sales inputted from the sales reps, so we don't have things like company revenue.

Right, so there's not— it's not custom. I don't even— I used Zoho a little bit for my consulting company early on, and I don't think it even is particularly customizable the way that like a HubSpot or Salesforce is. Um, although it could be on like the higher level plans that I just never was subscribing to. But essentially, like, if it doesn't exist in the CRM, just make it yourself in a spreadsheet so that you're tracking the things you need to. I highly recommend creating a regular meeting that you have as a sales team where you're reviewing the list and you're taking companies off and putting companies on and meeting as a team to say things that you saw and share things across accounts. Because the best salespeople, we help each other win. It's not just about my deals, it's about everybody's deals. So if I'm talking to one company and I get some intel about another, that needs to go in that spreadsheet for, you know, the person who's going after that account to know. And this is particularly good for that SDR-AE, like, connection where you're sharing the information, you're sharing a strategy. I often say that the list is the strategy, right? So this— these are the companies that you've all sat down together and said, we agree, these are the ones that we have. Like, if we close, like, let's say 10% of these, we're doing a great time, doing a great job as a sales team. The other thing that I recommend sit underneath this is that you all individually have your own list of 50 accounts. This is just a tactic that I deploy, especially with SDRs, but any outbound salesperson. Where you have a 50 list of your own, and every week you're going to focus on 10. Then the next week you're going to rotate, focus on 10. Next week rotate and focus on 10, because that creates a natural cadence where every 5 weeks the companies you're focused on are hearing from you because you're, you're rotating through them. So your follow-up is automatically happening, um, and each week you're going to take companies off or put companies on based on the feedback they give you. So if somebody's like, screw you, leave me alone, I hate you, well, maybe, maybe I won't call you again. Let's add somebody else into that slot. And then it's really important that your lists track more than just like stats. You need to be putting in the motivators, especially as you find them out. If you have like a qualifying or a discovery call and you uncover more information, Put that in as you discover information through your research. Put that in. Use everything that you have available to you. I'm not sure exactly what StreamGuys tech stack looks like, but for sales and marketing, but use it all together to create as big of a picture as you can of the customers that you're looking at. And then Here's the bonus, right? And this is something that I did when I was at Cashfly that really helped us not waste our time. So one of the things that when I first came to Cashfly that I noticed was a problem was that we were— we had a lot of inbound leads coming in. I mean, a lot might be a bit much, but we were not doing a good job Of recognizing which leads were worth spending time on and which ones from the very beginning we should have just said, we're not the right fit for you. Um, salespeople's time is valuable. It shouldn't be wasted chasing things down that are never going to happen. So learning to say no, to filter things out as soon as possible, is really important. And so for this, I recommend you create a lead scoring spreadsheet with 5 key things that you're looking for in customers. Now, when I was at Cashfly, they aligned with our core values as well as our 5-year plan. So I built those 5 things from basically like, do they align with our core values? Are they going to be easy for us to work with? Are we going to like working with them? Are they going to be willing to pay us? well for what we're doing? Can they make recommendations and referrals for us? Like, how good is the logo? And I'm forgetting what the 5th one is right now, but I think you get the idea, which is like aligning it with your overall strategy. And then grade them, essentially. So at Cashfly, we had 5 things, each one of them rated on a scale from 0 to 5. Something that spit out a 25 was automatically a key account. All hands on deck, everybody look at it. We're gonna strategize on these accounts. Something that was a 15 was for SDRs. It was like, ask the AE if they even want it. And anything that ranked below a 15 was, you need to run the qualifying call and protect the AE's time. So that they're not wasting time chasing something that's no good for them. And then after the qualifying call, we'll update the spreadsheet and see if they're worth talking to. Anything that was below a 10, we just threw out and said, hey, we're not the best business for you. Saved us a lot of time. This is just a visual of kind of like how lead scoring can work. There's a lot of different methods for it, but if you don't have lead scoring built in today, I highly recommend implementing it so you don't end up wasting your time on crap. Especially, I know that you guys have incredible solutions engineers. I've brought them into my calls. Their time is even more valuable from my perspective, right? Like, you got SDR time, which is— it's not that SDRs aren't important, they are, but their time can be wasted by a customer. That's okay. AE time, I don't really want my time being wasted by customers, but sometimes it happens. And then you've got SE time, And solutions engineers are bridging this gap right between sales and engineering. And that means they're usually not quite as much extroverted as your salespeople are, and you're going to burn them out if you have them in customer-facing calls with people who cannot buy your product. And then they're not going to want to get on calls with you. So anybody that's sitting in an AE seat here, Buy your SEs like lunch, buy them coffee, thank them for being on your calls so that they come to your calls energetic and ready to do it because they'll help you close deals. Um, yeah, rank things from crap to incredible and have tiers in between. Um, anything else you guys want to talk about? Any questions you have? Other pain points that you're having in your sales process? This course is really set up for SDRs and BDRs. Um, But I've done full cycle sales and built processes from scratch, so I'm more than happy to answer your questions about other pieces of the sales process as well.

I think this is useful. It's not something I've thought much about before, so I appreciate that.

Always my goal. What about deals? Do you have anything you're working on that you specifically have questions about or want help on?

I need to think about it.

Right, cool. In terms of prioritizing for next week's class, I kind of have 2 things on the bus that we can work about or work on, but would be interested in hearing Because you guys make up, I think, half my class. So you basically have a voting majority here. Um, is there something in particular you want to be learning about? So the 2 I have prepped that we could do are prospecting and working events and cold calling. Is one of those higher priority for your team than another? I don't know.

I probably— I think right now they're probably focusing more on, on like the outbound cold calls. I think that's something that they're really They're really trying to get us to pump up those numbers.

Those are tricky numbers.

Yeah, I believe that's, that's something that they are. They're definitely wanting to, to expand the, the pool of potential customers.

Yep, absolutely. We can do cold calling. This is not my top strength, but I'm really good at coaching on it. Fun anecdotal piece. The first time I had to cold call was actually further in my career than you would expect it to be, and I was working B2B sales at Sprint, and I was working in like a call center in an office, and I'd never done it before. Like, I've been really lucky in my career that for the most part customers tend to come to me because I've done a good job on social media and building my personal brand. So I kind of just leverage the relationships that I already have. I'm very much a relationship salesperson. Um, but we just moved to Florida. I was kind of turning over a new prospective clientele. And so I've got this like 100-long list of potential customers I'm supposed to call. I literally threw up and had to go home. Had a panic attack, threw up, had to go home. First day cold calling on the sales floor. Day 2, I made 25 calls and set 6 meetings. And by my third week of cold calling, um, I was setting meetings with about a fourth of the companies I was connecting to. So, yeah, it's, it's doable. I hate it. Like, I still to this day, I've been in sales, like I said, B2B tech sales 15 years, and I still get physically uncomfortable when I have to dial. Like, I'm interrupting their day, it's so rude. You gotta do it, man.

But you're not. You're actually proposing a solution for them.

Yes, I have tried that brain trick many times. My skin just disagrees. And some of it comes from having been on the receiving end of bad sales calls. Have you guys experienced bad cold calls? You've got them, right?

Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah. So like every time I go to call, I have this whole process I have to put my brain through, which is like, is it going to be, you know, like all these bad ones that I've experienced, or can I really bring value to this person? And so for me, my trick is always like I do, I set a timer and I do 5 minutes of research before each call. So that I can have a unique value proposition already ready. Like, I, I know who you are, I know who your company is, I know what problems you're experiencing. Go, here's the pitch. Um, but I have to really hold myself like 5 minutes and then we're dialing, or I get lost in the rabbit hole and I'm like, you know, like 7 layers deep in a forum reading about Their tech stack on some teeny tiny little feature that they do. And I'm like, how did I get here? What have I done? My whole day's gone.

I understand that.

Uh, yeah. Time management is probably one of the hardest skill sets, especially how many of you are still remote? Hands. You're still remote. All right. So Ralph's in the office. Mark, are you in the office? All right, 2 of you in the office, 3 of you still remote. Um, when you're remote work in sales, it's like infinite possibilities, right? You could be doing anything. Could be calling, emailing, working through old leads in the CRM. Like, there's no guidance, just do whatever will close deals. So you have to really structure your day and say, hey, I'm going to spend 20 minutes cold calling. This is the time I'm going to spend sending email blasts. This is the time I'm going to set aside for qualifying and discovery calls. Otherwise, that your day just gets away from you. And again, you'll end 7 pages deep on some random forum learning about how they specifically solve for, I don't know, their VoIP phone service. All right, guys, any more questions, comments, concerns? Did you learn something? Raise a hand if you learned something, like Impractical Jokers. You guys watch Impractical Jokers?

Yes.

That's my husband and I's, like, go-to-sleep show. And I, every time I watch it, I don't know about you guys, I suffer from imposter syndrome terribly. Um, so I always am like, am I really even valid? Should I even be here? And then I watch Impractical Jokers and I'm like, if people will raise their hand and say these guys taught them something, I'm fine.

Yeah, those guys would be phenomenal sales guys.

They really would.

Q used to be a firefighter, a fireman, and that blows my mind every single time I think about it. I'm like, he used to like go into buildings that were on fire and save people's lives, and now he makes fun of his friends on public television. All right guys, it's been great having you. Uh, I look forward to seeing you guys next week. If anything comes up between now and then, you have questions, if there's a deal that you want my insight on, I'm here, I'm available. Let me know.

Thank you, Megan. Appreciate it.