Full Throttle Leaders Podcast - Mark Small

I'd like to welcome Mark Small here today. Mark, tell us a little bit what grabbed your attention to want to do a podcast with Full Throttle Leaders, which is my new podcast.

Just sort of the value that I'm getting out of attending the roundtables. So sharing is caring. And so I wanted to share my ideas and my thoughts with the community that you have.

So tell us a little bit what you do, what company you represent. I know, but they don't know. So yeah.

Yeah. So I spent about 30 years in sales leadership. Primarily in cybersecurity, though I started out in the early days with Oracle, 9 years at Oracle during the rocket ship years of the 1990s. And then for about the past 2 years, I've done fractional interim executive coaching, you know, those sorts of things. So I dabble and, you know, found that You know, in my space, there's 4,000 cybersecurity companies, right? And there's about 10 or 20 that are established and about 3,000 that are new. And a lot of founder-led sales. And typically they're product people, brilliant, you know, courageous, willing to go out on their own and build a company. But they really don't understand go-to-market. They don't understand sales, if you will. And so, you know, I found that niche as a place that I can house.

Your company is called MMC?

Yeah, MMC Ventures. It's just, you know, an LLC. So yeah.

And I was reading something that you help a lot of the UK-based investment companies enter the US market. Is that right or is that wrong background on you?

Yeah. So I took the name MMC about, uh, 15 or 20 years ago, um, in between jobs. I did, uh, some 1099 work, particularly over in Europe. And then about 10 years ago, a, uh, a UK, uh, investment company, uh, came up with the name MMC Ventures. And so I haven't changed my name, they haven't changed their names, but I'm not in investment bank or a capital company.

So awesome. So tell us a little bit about your particular model. Like, how do you help people? How do you get paid? What is your ICP and personas that you talk to?

Yeah, as I mentioned, and I don't have a website, I haven't had to, you know, go out and sort of brand myself that way in the noisy market of fractionals. I've got a couple of friends that have fractional networks, if you will, and occasionally do some business with them. But primarily it's word of mouth. And as I said, my ICP tends to be startups through Series B companies that for whatever reason have a gap. For example, one of my clients, I know the founder and the co-founder was a finance guy, brilliant, but he was first time running a sales organization. And, you know, my job was basically to get him up to speed as quickly as possible, not having to do the trial and error and answer questions about things like, you know, how do I design my comp plan and what do I do if my top rep wants to go on paternity leave? Is that in my comp plan and how do I address that? And then all the other things which I typically find, which is my marketing organization tells me that I have these MQLs and these are leads. They're not turning into pipeline and opportunities and they're certainly not closing. What am I doing right or wrong? You're probably not.

Full throttle, full auto leads to do your SQLs and MQLs, because that's, that's what we do.

Yeah. And, and as you know, qualified lead is not a contact and a badge scan.

No.

Um, and, um, you know, it's easy to get— and I don't want to be, uh, disparaging, but it's easy to get fooled and to think that, uh, you know, there's a numbers thing or gosh, somebody spent 20 minutes on my website, probably because they were getting a cup of coffee, and somehow the intent score went through the moon. And now everyone is calling the sales rep saying, why aren't you returning the phone call or following up on this lead? And nobody bothered to look to see that it was Joe Bob's Fish and Bait Tackle Store.

I look at intent data as someone registered for a roundtable, they're going to the event, they're connected to someone that I know on LinkedIn, like real data, signal data, the website data. And it depends on what they clicked on, but it's really sometimes hard to find out who that person really is. I'd rather someone be like, you know what, I don't care that I'm visible, I'm actually looking, or I want to talk about the subject.

Yeah. And you know, there's this thing, you know, the carpenter thing, right? So if I'm a carpenter and I have a hammer, everything is a nail, and so—

Sometimes you're the hammer, sometimes you're the nail. That's what I use. Yeah, go ahead. Sorry.

No, and so you want to make sure that, you know, that alignment is difficult, and, you know, part of the CRO's idea is that somehow or another, if you combine what used to be called BPS sales and marketing, that you're able to align those organizations. But I've been able to effectively work with, you know, up to about $50 million. I think a company should banish the word marketing and focus on lead generation or demand generation because that's really where, you know, the rubber hits the road. So, you know, spending time worrying about the color of your fonts, um, you know, you got to have—

revenue is king. That's how you're going to be based. That's how you're going to raise money. That's how you're going to be able to sell your company at one point. That's how you're going to be able to afford more salespeople. I mean, it's the marketing and salespeople never actually, actually are on the same channel, even in the same room. That's, that's what, that's what I've seen. And then you had SDRs with the CMOs. I'm like, SDRs are getting leads, put them with the CRO or the VP of sales. And I just didn't—

I never got that.

And I was part of a lot of companies where I was getting more leads as a regional VP of sales in my territory than the SDRs who are 22 years old out of another country or out of, uh, college in the US. I mean, they're not ready to do like high enterprise outreach. They're just going to be pressing buttons all day.

Yeah. And a lot of times all they're doing is sending emails.

Yeah.

You know, they're not even— they're not even ever engaging in a human-to-human interaction. And as you know, you know, today with automation tools and AI, you know, if I want to send sloppy emails to the wrong person with the wrong message, I can automate that and do that effectively without a 22-year-old former beer salesman.

People will take AI— I see that you work for this company and that you have a great background and a really think you're doing a great job. I'm like, what? This is AI. You don't know me. You're regurgitating my LinkedIn. What I do is to say, hey, I'm going to be at an event. I'm producing an event. I'm producing a roundtable. I see that. I want your opinion on this conference. What do you think? Just ask an open-ended question. Pretend like you're dating, like you're going to be the love of your life and be genuinely interested in getting to know them. That's going to work. But if you're just going to throw, hey, I got this Corvette, I got this, I got that, and I want to take care of you, I want to make a family, that's not the first date.

Well, you're triggering a whole bunch of things for me. So first of all, on the alignment, every company that I ever came in typically is the SVP of sales, something like that. I always set up—

came in to work with them or you were the SVP of sales?

I was hired, you know, the company was failing, whatever else. They brought me in, said, turn it around. One of the first things I did is I set up what I call a Smarketing call, sales and marketing. I like that.

Smarketing?

Smarketing. I think I stole that from Marc Barbeauget and HubSpot in the early days.

I've never heard that word. I love it. I guess I'm just in tune with that one.

And my daughter worked at HubSpot. You know, she said, oh yeah, we get these Smarketing calls. And so I just stole that idea because, you know, why not? Sharing is caring, as I mentioned. And almost invariably, sales and marketing had never been in the same room and never understood what each other did. And, you know, communication, shared experience builds trust, all those things. And then, you know, there's a couple other points that you touched upon. If you're going to do an SDR or an outbound outreach, have a call to action that's something different than, I'd like to set up a 15-minute interrogation, which is really going to be a half an hour interrogation where I'm going to ask you all these questions that I could easily just look up or Google. And we're going to call that a discovery call. And, you know, have a call to action like, you know, my CEO is in town and having a private dinner. And we'd like to invite you because some of your friends will be there and your colleagues. So that the key to align to something real that you touched upon beside this kind of slop is— what's that?

Experiential is the key word. Make it emotional, experiential, heart, mind. That's going to work. But you just— you say, I'm going to save you 50% You know, if you spend 15 minutes with me, like Geico or whatever it is, it's right.

You're not a commercial.

Not a commercial.

Yeah.

Um, what's, what's the, what's the best way to work with you? Like, do you want people to reach out to you through email or LinkedIn?

You know, email or LinkedIn work fine. I've got my email, I think, in my LinkedIn profile, and, you know, I check my LinkedIn messages frequently, and I, I do get outreach through that. And then I get referrals, obviously, from people I know. And occasionally I reach out and say, you know, I see that you're doing this or doing that and, you know, can I help you?

How many clients do you work with at a time? And is it a retainer base or retainer?

Usually I prefer that because I don't like to count hours. But, you know, there's different assignments. I had an assignment last year as an expert witness, and like an attorney, I got paid by the hour.

Yeah, um, I got away from that like within 2 months of starting the Full Throttle 5 years ago. I'm like, uh-uh, KPIs. Here's what I'm going to do, here's what it costs. You're going to rent this and you're going to rent this, but you're not going to rent me by the hour. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

And so that's an unusual, you know, circumstance. It was really a full-time, uh, opportunity over a couple of months, um, but yeah. Yeah, but typically, and I bring that up right front, is I don't want to count hours and I'm not selling myself. It's not transactional. I'm going to share my knowledge with you. I'm going to share my experience with you. I'm going to guide you. And I'm not going to say, okay, well, we only have 15 minutes left.

Yeah. Or how about the guys like, it took you 2 minutes to turn that wrench. And you're charging me $400. It took me 25 years to know where to— what not to turn. Exactly.

I love that.

I love that example because it's like you're not paying for someone just to turn something. It's, to me, you lose and you learn, or you, you win and you learn. You know, it's like you can hire an SDR, great, but they're going to fail a lot, and they're going to either be really good and you're going to want to be an AE, or they're going to be really bad, you're going to want to fire them. So you want to hire like Mark Small or Michael Falato or whatever that is going to stabilize and bring knowledge, whether it's go-to-market, whether it's consulting, whatever it is. But don't hire and compare Mark or Michael or anyone else to someone else because that's like saying like we're all men are the same and all people are the same or all companies are the same. It's not. No, no.

And I understand, you know, conserving cash, all that sort of thing. I don't, I don't ask for a particularly high retainer, but I want some meat You know, I want around— yeah, I want some skin in the game.

What's your average retainer, just out of curiosity?

Uh, it really depends upon the size of the company, but if it's a small company, let's say, you know, pre-, uh, you know, seed round, that sort of thing, typically $25 to $5K a month, uh, depending on the circumstance, usually 90 days.

What if I had $100, not $25?

Right. Yeah. And then, you know, for the bigger companies, it might be $10K and then some additional milestone payments based upon, you know, how much of my time and effort that you need and what the results are. So I can be pretty flexible. I mean, I designed comp plans and incentive and go-to-market for years and years. So, you know, I kind of— I look for the fair sniff test. You know, I'm providing you value and I want to be compensated fairly, equitably.

So how do people reach you? What's the phone number and email address? And then we'll, uh, we'll hopefully, uh, see each other again next week.

That sounds good.