Outcomes Not Actions - Darryl Praill - Revenue Today - Episode # 009

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Sales, marketing, and RevOps. It's sink or swim out there, and yesterday's strategies and tactics won't help you today. This is Revenue Today, and I'm your host, Jared Robin. Join me as we interview revenue leaders in our community to learn what steps we could take right now to help you scale yourself and your company. Revenue Today is sponsored by Rev Genius, and we're on a mission to bring inspiration and creativity to all revenue professionals in the world. Want to shout out our sponsor Demandbase. Demandbase is smarter GTM for B2B brands. They help marketing and sales teams spot the juiciest opportunities earlier and progress them faster. By injecting account intelligence into every step of the buyer journey and orchestrating every action. For more information about Demandbase, visit demandbase.com. So today's guest, I'm so excited to have on this show. This is somebody that I've known since early days at Rev Genius. He's funny, high-energy, in-demand event host and a panel moderator, as well as an accomplished award-winning marketer A SalesWorld top 50 keynote speaker and multi-time gold medalist content creator, the host of the Inside Sales Podcast. Here's the CMO of AgoraPulse, Darryl Praill. Welcome.

Dude, you did awesome. Yeah, I know the hardest thing there was saying Praill, wasn't it? Even though it rhymes with sale. Admit it, you struggled with that one, didn't you?

Totally, totally.

Yeah, everybody does. I always laugh because I always get the question, Okay, before we go live, right? Okay, so just so I'm clear, how do you say your last name? And it's always on a sales show. And it's like, Prell, like sale, like what we do for a living. You've got it. It can't be any easier. Like, okay, great. And then they still like, Prell. It was like, it's a whole process. So hey, brother, that was a great intro. Thank you so much.

Yeah, of course. And Darryl, it's been— we've known each other for, geez, maybe a couple years now.

Yeah,

it's, it's, it's an honor to have you on. And, um, you know, I've learned from you throughout the, uh, your journey and my journey, and looking forward to, to diving in here right now. So jumping right into it, debunk a myth about generating revenue today.

A myth about generating revenue. Oh my goodness, there's so many places I can— and ways I can go with this one. I'm pondering. Let's go with this one. Okay. Sales 101. If you're a sales rep, you've been trained this 1,000 times. You need to do multichannel outreach, phone, email, social, etc. Multiple channels. The myth though, is that social doesn't work For me, doesn't work for me because I don't have a following. And when I do content, I get no engagement. It's just, it's a desert. It's a ghost town. The biggest myth you will ever tell yourself is that you are not able to be successful on social for those excuses and others excuses you can think of. It's bullshit. Absolute utter bullshit. That myth is a game that's taking place in your head that's stopping you from the success that you damn well deserve. So that's the myth that you can't be successful on social because you don't have a following or you don't get engagement.

Geez. But, but I could hit my numbers with just cold calling, Darryl. I don't need social.

I would argue most people say I can hit my numbers using just email because the phone is scary. But that's a whole different conversation. Um, I mean, we talk about it. Most sales reps do. I mean, there's another myth. The phone is dead. We won't get into that one. But I love that. And the whole multichannel outreach, the only one people truly like is email because it's safe. It's safe. I don't have to firsthand experience the rejection. They just, you know, I just never hear from them again. But yeah, it's social. I can say, and the part that blows me away, and the reason I know this is a myth, is because when people finally commit to it, It's amazing to watch over and over again how they'll come back and they'll go, holy smokes, like, wow, the activity I'm getting now, my pipeline's getting full. I'm getting so many meetings. How you doing that? I'm on social. Well, you were always on social. Well, yeah, kind of. Well, what are you doing differently now? Well, I'm posting some content and I'm really personalizing it and I'm researching it and I'm making it relevant and contextual. And I'm like, wait a minute. You weren't doing that before? Like, that's, that's like, that's in the first 5 minutes of every single course they teach you on social selling. Every single thought leader influencer out there, whether you're talking to Brent Tillman, you're talking to Show Me and Only Sam McKenna, you're talking to Daniel Disney, you're talking to Mario Martinez Jr., or Vivekananda Von Rosen, the list goes on. They all tell you to do this. And that you don't do it because it doesn't work for you, because you don't have a following and no one reads your content and you get no engagement. Bullshit, my friend.

So there's, there's really 2 ways people could sell on social. One is producing content that you're not doing a direct outbound. And the second is doing email, but you're just using LinkedIn or another medium, right? Like Right, just direct messaging. So where is the frustration? Is it on creating content?

The frustration is on both, right? So, so, and you have to understand, at the end of the day, what this really truly is, is this is an excuse to not do social because it's not comfortable for you. That's what it is at the end of the day. All right, so it applies to everything. But the rationale is that I don't get any content. If I, if I do content, it gets no engagement, and then I look like a moron. I look like a fool. And, and what's the point? Whereas the fact of the matter is you don't understand how the process works. So let me explain how the process works. How the process works, if you do it properly, I'm going to tell you which— I'm going to tell you what you already know. You've heard all those other experts tell you. I'm going to tell you again. You're gonna identify your ICP and the key personas within an account. All right, there you go. Once you know those key personas, let's say for example, I was selling vanilla software. I used to work. I would target the head of sales. I would target the head of ops. I would target the head of marketing. I might target the CFO, and I might target a user, an active user on a sales team. That's 5 people right there. So I'm gonna go and I'm gonna go try to connect with all those people. Mistake number 1 people make is that they physically go and they do the pitch right away. Either they do this, they send the connection request with no personal message, or they send the personalized message that says, my company does blah, blah, blah. Can I have 10 minutes? Both of those are what's in it for you, not what's in it for them. And why should they care? And you're adding no value to my network. And of course they ignore you. And then you say, well, see, this is why I don't do it. Social doesn't work. I get no response. I get no engagement. Whether I'm getting no engagement on my content that I post or I'm getting no engagement on my connection requests I send, I'm getting no engagement. Social doesn't work. What changes is when you actually send a connection request that's personalized. Hey, I heard you on the show with Jared and you were epic. I really liked when you said A, B, or C. Wanna connect? Notice there's no ask there. There's not my company does. It's not all about me, me, me, the rap. It's just, it's just we're, we're dudes, we're people, you know, we're, we're whether you, it's, we're, I said we're dudes. I'm a person, you're a person. Let's go with that, genders aside. And we're just connecting. And there's a reason why, and this is why I reached out. People will respond to that. All right, but before they do that, this is what goes down. They go, who's this person that's reaching out to me? They kind of seem interesting. And they click on your name and they go to your profile, and then they go to your experience, and then they go to your content. Your posts, and what they're really looking for is: Does this person? Hey, is he in the same tribe I'm in? He's looking for he or she are looking for indicators that you are, and that those posts that get no engagement, they don't look at the engagement numbers. They just look at the posts and the topics, and like, wow, this person has a take. This person seems to add value. I can learn from this person, and then they accept. the connection request. So now when you follow up with an email or a phone call and you say, hey, it's Darryl, I just sent you a connection request on LinkedIn. I, I was the guy who said I loved what you're doing with Jared. I just wanted to follow up. Uh, I wanted to say, hey, I just wrote this piece of content. It's on LinkedIn. I know you hang out there. Maybe you missed it, but this might be of some value to you. Again, no ask. Now they're engaged. Now they're hooked so that you finally do the ask. they're gonna say, hey, yes or no, but they're not gonna ignore you. They're not gonna ghost you. That's how content works. That's how engagement works. And you pace yourself. Too many people are looking for shortcuts. They want to just go and they want to spam people to death. And then they say it doesn't work. And then they bail on the channel. And that's why it's a myth.

Do you— so do you think that that's the biggest gap, like in terms of outreach that people are missing?

Yes. I think they don't want to put in And sometimes, by the way, this isn't— this is not the rep's fault. Sometimes this is the sales leader's fault and what they're being told to do. I'll be really clear on this, okay? They're being told to do X number of activities a day, and they're being measured by their activities— 50 phone calls, you know, 50 social touches, whatever the hell the numbers are that are always difficult to work if you work backwards and do the math. And therefore, the argument is, is that you have no time to actually do the research on the individuals and actually contextualize it and make it relevant to them and meaningful. That's the process. Therefore, they're more focused on the activity numbers so they don't get fired by their boss than they are actual outcomes. Whereas you take the time to focus on the outcomes, maybe I only do 30 calls a day, not 50 calls a day. And maybe I only do 30 social touches a day, not 50 social touches a day, but they're all relevant and they're adding value. And I've done a little bit of research, say 5 minutes of research per contact as an example. You can do that pretty quick and dirty. Then the results change dramatically. But the other problem is too many reps are impatient, right? So they're trying to hit a— I always laugh— they're trying to hit a home run first time at bat. Here's the connection request, here's what I do, and can I have an appointment? You know, let's look at home run, everything in one fell swoop, as opposed to saying I'm going to hit single, single, single, single, so to speak, until I finally get a run, which is hit Here's the connection request, highly personalized. That's a single.

Now—

Followed by another channel. Here's another outreach cross-referencing the first outreach. That's another single. Followed by, hey, I was looking at your post the other day, or I was looking at what your CEO said or whatever, and I think I may be able to help you. I just did this for your competition. You want to talk for 10 or 15 minutes? Sure, I'll give you that. Boom, there's the run. You got the run in. It took you 3 singles or 4 singles as opposed to 1 home run. But it wasn't the objective the whole time to get that meeting. Why would you burn that person?

You know, I, I, I don't want to open this up into a much bigger conversation, but I do think you touched on sales enablement there, right? Like, and leadership coming in. Darryl, 5 years ago, maybe 3 years ago, leaders wouldn't let you social sell. That was time away from work. Maybe 2 years ago. Times have changed, but those leaders didn't retire. They're still maybe in the same company. They're not in the same company because people switch companies every other year, but

right,

they're still there. Do you think that's the, you know—

Oh my God, Jared, do you— so for those who don't know, I was the Chief Revenue Officer before this. This is relevant at VanillaSoft. VanillaSoft is a sales engagement platform. That's the sum total that you now have contacts. So they do the same thing as Outreach, Or Salesloft. Okay, with that as the background, I had more calls as a CRO when my rep would get a decent customer or maybe a second meeting, and I would get on the call with their VP of sales. And I— and the conversation went like this. And, and I don't— I'm not, I'm not disparaging any products here. I just want you guys to understand how the conversation went down because you understand where I'm coming from. I would say this, uh, they would ask me the classic question, how do you differentiate? And I would say, well, here's the first thing we do. I said VanillaSoft requires every single person to physically touch the contact. In other words, it brings up the next contact you're supposed to do an outreach to, and, and it doesn't happen automatically. You have to do something. The point is, we're intentionally trying to force you to look, assess, Maybe you're gonna say if that's a touch as an email, you'll get the template and you'll personalize it. If it's a phone call, you have enough information that you can call it, you can personalize it. If it's social touch, you can personalize it. I had so many VPs saying, that's bullshit. That's not what my rep's doing. I don't— I do not want my reps touching every single contact like they're trained monkeys. They'll get bored. I only want my reps to respond when there's a response. And I'm like, well, the only way you can do that Dude, is if you're just letting your system send out generic emails nonstop, generic social touches that are template nonstop. I said, it's the only way you can do it. That's it. And I said, you'll have shit results. Your conversion rates will be in the tanks. You don't understand. That's not how we work. That's bad sales. This is how we do it. And I would say then we're not a good fit for you. I had that discussion all the time because they were hung up on activities and they thought the reps were too good, too good, too important to actually do a little bit of research.

Yeah, I want to bring up the point you, you mentioned email is safe earlier, and I want to agree with that from a rep's perspective and disagree wholeheartedly from an organization's perspective. Email is the least safe because if you burn your domain Let's talk about burned domains. And reps just, yeah, no problem. I'm talking to a CMO now. Isn't that an interesting, you know, perspective there? Like, shouldn't you align with what's good for the company?

It's huge. And people don't understand this. And they don't hold the reps accountable. I'll give you an example. I have been at multiple companies now where We may be trying to do cold outreach via email. So that would mostly be maybe targeting countries like the US, where the email laws are a little more relaxed, say, than they are in Europe, where I can do a cold email outreach. And, you know, we would go to great lengths. We would get the lists that we had developed, whether we built them ourselves, we use ZoomInfo, or what have you. We would use a tool like Neverbounce to make sure we got rid of all the ones that were on bounce. And then we would actually use a third-party email tool, not, not my HubSpot or my Marketo or my salesforce.com, a third-party email tool to send the initial email out and, and to see who was gonna unsubscribe automatically or blacklist us or whatever. And when you're spamming, oh my God, it's, it's, it's through the roof because then they start, because then what ends up happening is reps come back to, to, to marketing and because usually marketing owns RevOps or they'll go to directly to RevOps, if it's a separate team, and they'll say, you guys have messed up because all of our emails are going into people's spam accounts. Well, why are they going to people's spam accounts? Because you guys were spamming them non-freaking-stop.

Yeah, I mean, um, it's funny you say that. Rotating inboxes is a thing. Um, Jared at GetRevGenius may or may not exist out there, uh, for—

exactly,

for, for a reason. So you

say that,

you know, I just got an email from them yesterday. But anyway, um, You know, you kept talking on personalization, and there's this idea of personalization versus relevancy. And I'd argue, as I was literally before this call got screenshotted on LinkedIn saying, my team's friends with Jared Robin, who's holding an event. I'm like, wow, like this could burn all sorts of ways. Relevancy is the idea that You know, you look at, and I'll give a poor reference for like social. You sell a social media product, and you're able to just scrape all of this data and say, okay, these companies have 30 people. 80% of them haven't been active on LinkedIn in the last 30 days because you can get that right, and and 100% of them. in the last 10 posts had under 5 engage, or whatever metric you want. And then you just like send that out and now all of a sudden your email's, hi Darryl, you already know this, but in case you don't, this is this, this is where we come in. Versus, hey Darryl, I noticed you live here. I know that you're a fan of this team. I know that, uh, you did a podcast last week. Is there an argument to be made with relevancy over personalization? We're getting into it. I'm laughing.

No. So yes, short answer, there is. And too many people are lazy. Again, no disparagement intended. I'm just calling a spade a spade. Relevancy versus personalization. relevancy takes more work. All right. So let me, let me give you a different example that worked really well for us when we were at VanillaSoft. All right. So if I were to send an email out, and so Jared, he's, you know, one of the co-founders of RepGenius. And as a co-founder, as much as he's a big fan of the community, and all that he's doing there, and all the great stuff that they're innovating and the content they're making, the connections they're making, at the end of the day, still has to make sure that the, the, the community, Rep Genius, financially survives, thrives, and grows. So he has a vested interest in the revenue creation for the company. All right, so we would send an email to someone like Jared, the head of a company, or head of, you know, head of sales, and we'd personalize it. Hey Jared, I know you're responsible for all the revenue, probably keeps you up at night. Let me tell you what we can do. And that would get deleted every single time because I'm stating the obvious. I personalized it. He owns revenue. I talked about revenue. Isn't that personalized? Whereas I would then send the next email and I would say, hey, Jared, are you as frustrated as I am at your rep's lack of ability to do proper sales discovery following the framework you've put in place for them, having trained them over and over again, yet you still watch them continually screw it up.

I hate that.

Now it's— I hate it. See, and I'm watching you nod your head because now it's relevant. And so think of relevancy as this, all right? Personalization is when you kind of state the obvious. It's specific to the individual, but it's kind of high level, all right? It's no different than saying, hey, Daryl, I saw you went to this school. It's personalized.

I got a GIF of Penn State Stadium.

Here we go.

So the first thing I did was I said, this is corny, but if I go to his profile and he went to Penn State, I'm going to write back, right? Like, he went to Georgia, Darryl. I'm like, what is going on?

So I got a video email. Yesterday. And you know, I will give them full credits for the video email. I really will. But here's— okay, so here's another thing you don't think about, reps, when it comes to trying to make things personal or even relevant, because this one was pretty good on relevancy. But I'll tell you where they dropped the ball. It was a video email. Hey, Darryl, I'm calling to you on behalf of my boss, insert big influencer you will all know. here, who was shared with me the podcast you did recently with Person A, where you talked about topic 1, and Person B, where you talked about topic 2. And he really thinks he would be a great fit for your show. You know, you know, can we talk about getting him on your show? So very relevant, you would think. Right? You would think it's very relevant. Here's where they dropped the ball, which shows you it doesn't— relevancy can be in words and what you say, but also gonna be in your body language and what you do.

Mm-hmm.

The whole time this person was talking, would look at the camera, and then when he had to be relevant to me, you could see his eyes move off screen to reference the speaker that was on my podcast and what we talked about. Then his eyes would come back and he'd carry on his blurb. Then he'd go back to the second one and then he'd come back. And it's like, okay, you know what you're doing? This is all just bullshit. You're trying really hard to make it relevant, but you're not delivering it with any kind of genuine sincerity. From my point of view, if I can't remember Jared Robbins' name and, and somebody else's name and the topics— like, those are 2 things. Jared spoke on X and Billy spoke on Y, and look at the camera the whole time. If you can't do that, then you're screaming transaction. But if you— if he would have done that That would've been a highly relevant outreach, very good use of video. Now, to make matters worse, in this particular case, his CEO had already been on my show, which was just proof that they didn't— that I was just part of a mass mail, you know, outreach efforts.

I would, I would say, Darryl, are you wearing your, um, to watch this video, are you wearing your glasses for podcasts? Or not? I am. Because if you are, I want you on mine again.

Right? See, that's— and that's— that would tell me— and for those who don't know, Jared and I were talking about how— we're talking about how he's got his distinctive, you know, beautiful mane of hair. And I've got my, you know, so we call it my distinctive white spiky hair, my blue glasses. And I was sharing with him before we went live,

silver

fox. I only— I like super fox.

Silver fox, right? Yeah. Silver fox.

I'll take super fox. Even silver fox. I'll take them both. Super fox. I was sharing that I only wear these glasses literally when I'm on a production. I don't wear them any other time of the day, and it's because it's a distinctive look. Now, the fact that Jared just mentioned that in his personalized, hottie, relevant outreach says that he's heard me say that elsewhere, and now he's got my attention. Now he's got my attention, right? So relevancy is speaking— I always describe it this way when I'm training my reps. Relevancy speaks to a personal pain or challenge that is very immediate to me. So going back to my original analysis where I said, hey, you own revenue. Well, that's not immediate. That's a constant. But are you, you know, are you tired of your reps, you know, screwing up discovery even though you've trained them, you've given them the framework? Maybe it's SPICED or MedPic or something else. Who the hell knows that?

M. I just fought with them, you know, this week, and I fought last week, and I'm living this, and it's pissing me off. That's a pain that they're going through right now. You got my attention, Dara. Let's let's let's let's add some KPIs to things. Okay? So like understand where your head's at. But but what KPIs are important to you today? For me as a marketer, or me as a sales guy? You you you in your current role. Me in my current role. As a chief marketing officer, what are your KPIs? With your company, hot items, whatever, what, what are you looking at?

So KPIs that are relevant to me— this is good, by the way, guys, if you're, if you're selling to marketers, pay up, pay attention. Um, critical KPIs for me, I'll start with the obvious ones, that'll get more specific. Uh, MQL volume— how many MQLs I've generated this week, this month, this year, right? And with the definition, the emphasis being there on qualified— they're marketing qualified leads. Others, they may go by sales qualified leads depending on your organization. But anyway, the MQL count is huge. That's my number one target. All right, because we've done backwards math that says for how many MQLs I generate, that generates so many opportunities that, you know, so many deals will close, average sales price, blah, blah, blah. So MQLs, number one. Number 2, return on marketing spend. If they give me $1 million in program budget, how much revenue have I created for them? Right? Return. And that's, that's an umbrella return on marketing spend. And then it gets down to a little more granular, but these are equally important. What is my cost per lead? What is my cost per lead per channel? What is my actual customer acquisition costs? What is my customer acquisition cost per channel? That's very important. What is the lifetime value of a marketing-generated lead as opposed to a sales-generated lead? I could go on. Those are the big ones. But the biggest stuff for me, when I emphasize per channel, so you understand why that matters to a marketer, is because when you look at any marketer, they're going to tell you number one is probably going to be a source of new leads. It's probably going to be organic search. Number 2 is probably going to be direct traffic. Number 3 would probably be paid search. If you're at a company where paid search is number 1, stay away from them. Either they're spending way too much on paid search, or, or they've done a shit job on their content and their actual self-promotion and their thought leadership, and therefore paid search is overwhelming their organic search because nobody knows who the hell they are.

Or they're a 2-person— or they're, or they're a 1 to 2 person e-commerce team.

Exactly.

Doing direct-to-consumer, just blowing it out, getting to That's the exception. I think

that's the exception. The other part is, is most marketers understand what the cost per lead per channel is for channels like pay-per-click, or channels like events, trade shows. But if you really want to mess with them, ask them a question like, so what's your cost per lead for all social media, for organic social? What's your cost per lead? And 98% of them will stare at you like they're blank in the face, which is bizarre. When you think about the world we live in today, the big rage these days— which has been around for years, but now everybody's talking about it finally— is dark social. And for those who don't know, dark social is the aspect of a lead comes in that you cannot attribute the source. In other words, it's dark. I don't know where that lead come. Usually it's because the lead got a piece of content or got a digital referral. Hey, you should check out the guys at Rev Genius. All right. Therefore, you don't know where it came from, but they got a piece of content from somewhere, they got an endorsement from somehow, and that's how they came in. So understanding that dark social is driven often by reputation and awareness, which is social media and content, podcasts, webinars, videos, live streams. If you don't know your cost per lead for social, if you can't measure your social ROI, you're in trouble. And 98%, over 98% of marketers have no idea, no idea what the cost is on social. Yeah, it's crazy.

Is that, is that keeping you up at night, or is the, the 24 core KPIs you have to deal with, or is there something else?

No, no. You know what keeps me up at night? Honestly, I can tell you exactly what keeps me up at night because we actually have a session every single week. I meet with my CEO and we have a session called What's Keeping You Up at Night.

Really?

This really— I'm not making this up. And there's only a handful of things that keep me up at night. One is the well-being of my team. And I don't mean, are they, are they, are they healthy? No, I don't mean that. I know if I'm doing my job, I'm stressing the hell out of them. I'm pushing them to the absolute edge before they collapse. If I'm doing my job right, I'm doing my job wrong. I pushed them too far. Now their mental well-being is at stake, or their, uh, propensity to leave the company and go elsewhere is at stake. And that— both of those we don't want. So it's a balancing act. So am I pushing my team hard enough? Am I pushing them too hard? That keeps me up at night, that constant, constant, ugh. Um, second is, am I going hard enough, fast enough? In other words, am I producing enough content? I mean, look at my little team right now. My little team right now, we produce I said, it's just a little team. It's actually, it's a fair-sized marketing team. We're about 30-odd marketers, ballpark. And we produce on a monthly basis, 2 webinars. We produce 12 blog posts. We produce, this is per region, by the way. We produce 1 ebook, 1 case study. We produce 8 live streams. We produce 4 podcasts. And all of those pieces are repurposed. That's a shitload of work that we're doing. We are a glorified media publishing house. And so that's what keeps me up at night is is physically, am I stressing them too hard? Are we making enough noise? Because if I am, I'm getting enough leads, enough MQLs, which is the number one stat. And if I'm not, then I'm losing to the competition. That's what keeps me up at night.

Other people that are facing this, right? You're not the only one. Um, what, what advice can you give them?

Okay. Um, Couple things, no particular order. If you've got a really amazing employee tenure— the average person on my team has been here 3 years, 4 years, more— you're not pushing your team hard enough. So that's number one. All right, you're gonna have turnover if you push them really hard. Number 2, you can't expect your team to perform to the levels you desire or require if you're not doing it yourself. So, you know, for me, I am constantly on podcasts, webinars, videos, nonstop, plus doing my day job. So you need to do that and teach them. That's the advice. If you do that and you show them it's a lot easier than they think, then it's amazing. You will watch them bloom. Number 3 is you can't micromanage them. You have to delegate. If you don't delegate, you will leave with a mental stress, burnout, call it what you will. So delegating means mistakes will happen. You have to know mistakes will happen, accept before they happen that they're going to happen, and communicate up and across what's going on and that mistakes might happen. So that when the mistakes finally do happen, you can say, told you it was going to happen, but it's okay. That means we're learning and make sure it never happens a second time. So that's You know, you're going fast enough on that side. Finally, the last thing is talk to your staff nonstop. The vast majority of my every single day, every single week, I bet you 3 quarters of my time is me talking to people on my team. How's it going? And if I'm looking to do a personnel change, so for example, then, you know, obviously they don't know that. So I'm going to call every single person who reports to them saying, what you doing? How's it going? So I'm going to do a skip interview. But then I get an idea of what's going on. I just, I better understand what they're working on. So when I let that person, their boss go, I can immediately go back to all of them and I can assure them what's going on. And then I can include them in the replacement process. Those are like a gazillion calls right there, right? So if you don't always talk to your people, if you just let them go and you're totally oblivious to what's going on, you're, you're screwed again. So they want you to lead from the front. They want you to do a vision If you— if I went to any— anybody in your team and I said, what's your vision? And I don't get the same damn answer from every single person without hesitation, you've not done your job as a leader. Everybody needs to know the vision. And then finally, what you need to do is you need to hold them accountable. In other words, if they're doing stuff that isn't core to supporting the vision, you stop that shit and you say, I love it, great idea, but we're not doing that. We're over here. So there we go, Management 101 from Darryl.

I love that. I just did a lot of those exercises myself. When you hear somebody saying the mission and it's not your actual mission, Rob, it rubs a founder a certain way, but you have to quickly realize that it's on you and you need to— you need to— That's just it.

And that's why you talk to your people all the time. And that's why we never have enough time. And people say, what do you do all day? I spend my day on the phone. My kids, you know, my kids thought I did growing up. They thought I sent a lot of emails and told people what to do. Stop. That was it. But they had no idea what I actually did. Dad just tells people what to do, which actually is not true. So,

so what excites you the most about the future?

Oh, oh, I got a good answer here. For years, we've talked about sales and marketing and how are we going to get them aligned. That's been a long— and I've had so many conversations about this. What excites me now, my friend, about the future is that I think we are aligned. I think now we are just revenue, just revenue. And I think sales is no more saying, without us, this company's nowhere. That's the exception. You know, sales is not disparaging marketing like they used to do. They, in fact, they come to marketing and say, how can you help? Marketing is getting better at saying, oh, you guys have a really shitty job. I don't know how you do it. And you've earned your commission. Or you're not earning your commission. How can I help you? Do you want me to help you with those sequences? Want me to go over and help you make some great content? I think for the first time ever, we are starting to become aligned that we have a shared vision, shared goal, and we're one team. We just play different roles. And that is epic. And it's getting more and more pronounced. But it's confusing as hell to me as well. Because I don't know now, do I market myself as a marketer? Do I market myself as a salesperson or do I market myself as a revenue person? So we're at that awkward stage right now, but that, that is what excites me, is that we're rallying around a shared vision of revenue.

I love that and couldn't agree more. When you see full departments such as sales development being aligned different ways in different organizations, you really see people optimizing and not caring about the silos anymore. So,

and you know what's driving that? Our communities like it. But I'm bummed. Rev Genius, because we're aligning around revenue. You guys were so ahead of the game.

Stop it. Just, uh, we're, we're just seeing what's coming and figuring it out along the way. But so the first half of this, we learned from you, Darryl, and learning from a chief marketing officer that's been a chief revenue officer, that's been a chief marketing officer and many other roles along the way is exciting and super helpful in my— and I'm sure the listener's journey. The second half of this, let's learn about you. We learned from you, let's learn about you.

So

who are you?

I was asked to give myself a 3-word bio recently on the livestream with the folks at Airmeet. And I said, I am an opinionated, energetic marketer. And then Mark, the CMO at Airmeet, said, I am a marketing father and husband. And I'm like, son of a bitch, I want 5 words. So I'm an opinionated, energetic father, husband, marketer. That's who I am. Emphasis on opinionated, emphasis on energetic. But more than anything, You know, I'm just a dude like everybody else here. I didn't know— not know what I wanted to be when I grew up. I went to school to be a computer programmer. I got tired of doing that. I got my— after I got my degree, my first job was in sales, not in coding. I was selling copiers door-to-door. It sucked. Rejection was high. I hated it. Went back to coding for 5 years and then slowly went to product management, to product marketing, to marketing, and back into sales. It took me a long time to get to sales. But at the end of the day, that's the journey. I'm a guy who's comfortable in his own skin. I know what I'm good at and what I'm not good at. And I'm just really blessed to have amazing people in my life, um, and, and to be surrounded by a tribe I love. And Rev Genius, not to blow any smoke up Jared's ass here, is a good example of that. That's a tribe I love. We have, we have shared passions, we have shared commitments. You know, at the end of the day, we're trying to feed the family, but we're also trying to make our customers happy and successful. And for me, I'm all about integrity and morals and ethics, and I love that. I love that. So that's what I'm all about. I'm not sure I answered the question, but I ran before.

No, that is perfect. You, you named 5 words. You were missing Canada in there. Canadian.

Yes, Canadian. A Canadian opinionated energetic. That's right.

Let's, let's break it down. How'd you, how'd you go from computer programmer to door-to-door copy salesman? That does not seem

common,

normal, but I know you're not that. Tell me that story. Like,

I mean, so school finished, you know, 3-year program, got my degree, and I'd been coding for years before that too. So I'd probably been coding for maybe 8 years, you know, casually as a hobby or whatnot. And I'd watched so many friends go from like really cool people to like total computer nerds. And I say that like it's a bad thing. In those days, it was very different than it is today. Um, and I'm like, that's not— that's not who I am. That's not how I— that's who I want to be. I want to have a life. So what do I do? I don't want to turn into that. And I had no idea what to do. And I went and asked a lot of people, which is what we should do, you know, what do you see me as? And I had so many people say to me, Darrell, you need to go in sales. Now, when I was at the time, I was 21, 22. I had no idea what the hell that meant. As I went looking for sales jobs, I applied to more jobs than you can shake a stick at. I had the classic— I went to a plumbing wholesaler where they sold valves and fittings and copper pipe. And the guy literally— and of course, I was completely unaware of this at the time. Now I look back and I'm going, what a moron I was. Said, here's a pen, sell it to me. And I, oh, here's a pen. It sells. It's in blue ink and it's got a great button. And look at the body. It feels so good. I mean, so, you know, it was awful. It was awful. So the job I got was selling copiers because you learn at the time, that's all I was qualified for. It was like they just churned through people. That was their business model. I was too young to know any differently. So I went in blindly and stupidly. Now, the upside of that is I learned a lot about— I've learned a lot in so many ways. I learned about rejection. I learned about perseverance. I learned about building the pipeline. I learned about the consequences of not doing that. Now, the problem with those environments is that they don't teach you shit. They want— here's a binder, that's what it was, that's all our products, there's the— and go, this is your territory, go work it, go knock on doors. And there was no training, no development, because that was their model. They had no money for that. So I learned what not to do when I became a sales leader. But how did I do that? I did it simply because I didn't know any better. And sales is the world's best profession for saying, come, everybody who's lost and wandering and not sure what you want to do, we'll bring you in and we'll teach you our craft and you can become one of us. And that's why I have a soft spot for sales to this day. But I was smart enough to realize after 6 months that I wasn't ready for sales. I wasn't ready for it. I wasn't mentally ready for it. I didn't have— there was too much in that game. There was too much screwing of the customers going on to maximize their commissions, and that did not settle, settle well with me. And that's why I had to leave sales for a few years to come back to it, to be a little wiser, to know that what I experienced was not typical. So

Well, I empathize greatly. And, you know, just a funny note that's going in my head, you ask people around you what you should be, that picture, if you lived in Kansas, or like away from the city, there would be different answers. And it's so interesting how we all get here. And then certain part along the way, something clicks that we want to all go to technology sales. And that's like kind of an equalizer. Ish. Like, like we all get into the same space a dozen ways.

For me, I mean, again, I was a programmer, right? So the secret sauce I had was I was technical. So in my early days when I was doing sales or marketing, I was selling products like a database, right? Not the most exciting thing to sell, but it was a technical thing. And because I was technical and because I had the degree I was credible. And so people would believe me when I would say certain things about features or functions or benefits, and they would get technical on me, then I can get technical on them. That's what allowed me to sustain. So what does that mean? That means if you're gonna be in sales, you're gonna be far more successful selling something you're passionate about. I was passionate about technology, therefore sales and marketing around technology. My passion came through, which is why today I can say I'm an opinionated energetic, my passion and my energy.

What do you do outside of work? Like, what are the passions outside of this whole marketing game?

I'm the most boring guy going. My wife laughs at me because I work long, stupid hours. So when it's the weekend time, I don't talk. And she's like, everybody gets you all week long. You get nothing left for me. Like, I'm talked out, sister. Like, this is it. I need to recover. So, in the summertime, I have a cottage. It's a small little cottage on some water. We have a dock. We have a boat. My wife and I go there. Kids are now in their 20s. So, they visit, but they're not with us all the time. And I sit on my deck. I read. I putter. And I putter on a variety of things. I have a small problem with anything called gadgets. Or gear. So, you know, if there's a cool new set of headphones, I probably have to have it and play with it. If there's a new drone, I probably have to have it and play with it. If there's a new camera or video, I probably have to have it and play with it. So, I'm always selling and flipping stuff because my mind, I love that kind of technology. I'm still a technologist at heart. So, any chance to do that's great. The other thing is I'm an utter and complete news junkie, not just like news, like politics. It could be entertainment, can be sports, can be whatever. Which again, though, comes back full circle to making me a better salesperson and a better marketer because I'm aware of what's going on in society. I putter and I consume news. I know, boring. Jared's going, how the hell did he get past our screening?

I, uh, every day, fun fact, I go on Twitter and I just look up New York Jets and Knicks. And I'm an offseason fan because during the season, those are 2 of the worst teams. So, I'm just waiting on them improving. Twitter seems to be the quickest news and something I could catch something from a reporter that might not be published yet.

You talk about your sports teams. I'm a huge Detroit Lions fan. And you talk about, you know,

I could, I could tell you all about Jameson, Jameson Williams that they just drafted from Alabama. I got Lions.

That's awesome.

You know, right? Like, yeah, 11th pick, or they traded up for him from the 20th or whatever. They had 2 there. Megatron, probably the best receiver in my life. I get it. And how your quarterback won it all with a different team, that's gotta—

Yeah, he finally had his staffer had to leave to go to a whole nother team. Everybody is successful once they leave the Lions.

Well, this banter, like how much I know about that, you probably could talk to my teams in a certain way, and that is sales. But time is flying here, Darryl, and I want to, I want to give you a chance to, to let everybody know where they could get a hold of you, how best to connect?

Best way, LinkedIn. Just LinkedIn, Darryl Prahl. If you really want to have some fun, go to darrylprahl.com. But Twitter, it's— handle is @Opinionated, O-H-P-I-N-I-O-N, the number 8, T-E-D. So phonetically, Opinionated.

This has been awesome. I— we need to, we need to chat through some events soon. with us. And, and I'm not blowing smoke. I think that we could have some of those debates that we talked about, uh, earlier. I think that would be wild. And yeah, so thank you again, Darryl. It means the world to have you here.

Anytime, brother.

Thank you, audience. If you learned something today or laughed, tell somebody about this podcast. And thanks again. It's been so exciting, uh, to have you on this episode of Revenue Today. Whoa, another great episode of Revenue Today. For show notes, links, and mentions, visit revenue today dot live. For all my friends in the Rev Genius community, thank you. It's been awesome to spend this time with you. Please DM me any feedback and ideas in our Slack channel or on LinkedIn. If you're not in Rev Genius, join us at revgenius.com. It's free and it only takes like 2 seconds and you'll be joining a group of 27,000 revenue professionals strong. We've got it all. Looking forward to seeing you there. Catch you on the flip side. Thank you.