B2B Lead gen Strategies

Today's guest needs no introduction. He's someone who has revolutionized the top of the funnel forever. His recent book, Tech Powered Sales is a number one sales book on Amazon right now. The book will change all in the status quo, make you uncomfortable and make you a pro if you're responsible the top of the funnel for your organization. So do give it a read. I can vouch for his practices and methodologies that have done what he preaches. At the same time, my team and I both have benefited from it. I welcome Justin Michael on the show. Thank you so much again, Justin, for coming on the show. Truly, truly appreciate it. It's an honor to have you here. You know, I have a lot of SDRs in India. A lot of salespeople in India, you know, kind of are connected with me. So I'm not sure if everybody would know you. Could you give us like, could you give the audience your background? Like, what do you do?

Yeah, so I do sales development, but I automate it. That's been the key. So for 20 years I've been in sales, worked for companies like Salesforce and LinkedIn and ran large teams. My biggest team was actually a thousand. And then I worked for a company where I ran operations and we did sales development for 100 startups at once. And that's where I tested millions of emails and sent from 80 sequencers and cadences and, you know, intent data. And so I wrote a book called Tech Powered Sales based on these experiences. And I've been one of the foremost experts in the world for rev ops and tech stack automation.

Yeah, Yeah, I definitely read your book, Justin. You know, I think the book has taken the Internet and sales community all by storm. I think I've read the back book and the first time I read it, I'll be honest, it kind of made me feel uncomfortable a lot because I, for a moment I thought, you know what? This is something which I have not done. And when I kind of think about the future, as you have published in the book, it's kind of scary. Some of the parts are scary, scary good, I would say. And I can't stop asking my candidates today if bots will replace human being. And I get very interesting answers based on that. I think your book is leaps and bound ahead of what people currently think of sales. And you mentioned in the book how sales development or top of the funnel deserve the same respect and pay. Do you want to talk more about that?

Yeah. So, I mean, opening is the new closing. People are getting thousands of messaging now. It's so hard to break through. And it's really all about how do you personalize, how do you make your messaging stick out? It's very hard to automate and send hundreds of emails a day while at the same token making it relevant. So I've been talking about relevance at scale, which is the concept of a relevant data point that is not necessarily personal, like they love kayaking or sports or hiking. But this is something business related. And there's ways to use intent data or technographics or elements of research at scale where you can send messages that are automated that look more like personalized text messages that actually break through. Because if you think at this point people are downloading HubSpot templates and sending them en masse and so you're really going against the last 999 messages.

Agreed. Why was there a need for a book like yours? I mean, you've disrupted a whole model since predictable revenue. Right. I mean, why do you think, you know, nobody ever thought about it, nobody ever worked on it like for good, nine, 10 years.

Yeah. See, no one was thinking about the tech stack explosion, but the VCs are about 5 billion is being poured into tech. And because of the pandemic, everyone thought, well, it's all about virtual selling. But the real story here is about the convergence of tech stacks and sub specialization. When you take predictable revenue forward, you look at the Henry Ford model of machines on people on the assembly line and it goes to machines on an assembly line. And that's, that's really the power. It just follows the machine revolution.

Right. But I think if I, when you know, and maybe I'm talking about, you know, just the view world, you know, I have right now, for example, in India, I think people are still doing that. Right. So. And I'm pretty sure that will be the case for other countries as well, including us. So how long do you think, for example, companies will take to accept the model, which you have? I'm sure a lot of companies have already done it to a large extent, but I'm sure you were talking about like a world where like things are automated. And I can totally see what you're saying because if I were to give an example, so I applied some of the principles, you know, which you taught in the book, which I've read, which I kind of heard from you and Patrick, I was able to deploy all of that, booked like 12 meetings in three days, which is like more which is like equivalent to a target of, you might say, one SDR per month.

Yeah. So the Speed. How did you achieve this new speed? That's what I'm curious because what I normally find is people are sending something like 50 emails a day and in the book you can get up to 150 emails a day or 300 emails a day, 2 emails or even 450 emails a day vastly increase the quality of these emails. And so you can do quantity and quality and that hasn't been done before.

Yep. So for what I did is I of course use like an automation tool but of course my audience was very specific because I knew this is the audience I want to reach and I will. So this is like a tool called Connected, which is LinkedIn automation tool.

We have this startup and we're doing go to market games now and we're not just having people cold call train but they're doing marketers are teaching storytelling to sellers or top sellers are teaching B2B cold email to marketers.

Yeah, I think I was. I actually did not know how to pronounce that because I thought that's probably an acronym or something. I attended one of the DDM games along with my team. We loved it. I think there was one email tear down. I think that's tonight, right?

Yes, today for your night, 10:30am Pacific. For those that convert the time, I'm not sure when it is on your time zone but if you go to hypecycle.com and register, you're gonna see Josh Braun teaching email tactics to marketers. It should be really exciting.

Yeah, I think we definitely signed up for all of them. I think we have already gone through one where Bilal was actually teaching the tips. So we attended that one. That was pretty dope.

Yeah, Law has awesome theories around getting the focus off yourself as a seller and putting it on how you help the prospect. It's a basic idea but you'd be amazed how much self focused presentation and email is about the company. All the logos, what's in it for the company, not the prospect.

Again I understand, you know becoming Justin Michael would probably take years. But let's say someone to someone were to, let's say think like you, start thinking like you, where would they start?

Yeah, so to get to the level of competency of what you're doing is a lot of AB testing. One it's embracing technology, learning about the platforms, embracing rev ops, doing a series of tests if you can't afford it or they won't pay for it. In both of these books it talks about ways to master outbound. I have syllabus entries get A mentor apprentice under someone who has, you know, been in the field for 10 or 20 years. I have mentors who are both on the technical level who are very technical sellers or sales engineers, even ran CSM teams for different companies. And then I have mentors that taught me a lot of the tradition of Miller Hyman and strategic selling, you know, Taz, things that transition into the challenger sale and spin. So yeah, I would recommend just forming a comprehensive approach to sales. Not all that glitters is gold, especially everything in the LinkedIn feed now it's a lot of analysts, it's a lot of LinkedIn marketing, a lot of the really successful sales techniques like enterprise Sandler techniques or Jim Holden with E Fox method and new power based selling stuff like Jeff Toll T H U L L Mastering the Complex Sale, Mahan Khalsa not play. A lot of these books have fallen away, faded away. But they're absolutely incredible. And it's still human behavior, politics, persuasion. It's worth studying.

Awesome. Yeah, this was, this was a lot of fun. Justin, I do have the last piece which is sort of a rapid fire. Are you okay if I ask that?

Yeah, whatever you want to ask. It's all good.

Okay, thank you. So one piece of advice you would give to your 16 year old self.

You know, I think that it's, you know, read, read and apply. First 10 years of sales. I never read books on sales. I didn't really realize that was a thing. I think I read Jill Conrad's Snap Selling and that got me inspired. But the truth of the matter is you have to read and you have to apply, Gosh, to my 16 year old self. Just say you never know what you can accomplish. I mean, I was told 10 years old that I would write a book and I didn't actually write a book till I was 40 and I got a publishing deal and I did it right. It took hundreds of hours, but I. Why did I wait 30 years? Also entrepreneurism and working for yourself. If you have a dream, if you have an idea. In this case, Julia had this idea and invited me in. But you can spend tens of years of your life making other people millions of dollars. You can make it for yourself. But you might think, oh, I can't do that. I need five more years, I need 10 more years. It's a lot like the wizard of Oz. You don't need as much time as you think you might have a great idea like seize the day, go for it now. You'll regret the time. I could have been doing this at like my late 20s. But I, I waited a decade and I did get confidence and I did get good experience, but I think I waited too long. That's my advice to myself.

No, that is, that is a brilliant advice. Thank you. Let's say if you were to choose a career path, you know, that has nothing to do with sales or marketing. I know you're doing the GDM games. What would that be?

Wow, that's a great question. I think I might like be like, you know, take people on guided tours of hiking trails in Costa Rica or something. I don't know, nature. Getting out in front of my computer and being in the outdoors more. Really? That's the reaction right now to the pandemic and just being cooped up.

Okay. If it's not too spicy to ask two early stage companies you would bet on today.

Oh, wow. You know, I think a lot of the tools in the book are really predicted. You know, look at gong and it's got a $7 billion valuation. Just raised 250 million. I think conversational intelligence as a category is really powerful because it's going to get to a point where as you're talking can predict what to say next. So artificial intelligence as sales assistance. While we're on calls like this giving us, you know, telling me more about Rahul, your intent, your emotions bringing up. Right. Like imagine if I had an AI right now giving me intel into hey, mention Rahul just had funding or just did this with this company. But right now I'd have to kind of multitask and be researching at the same time. But if the AI could serve that information, I think technologies that don't replace selling but assist sellers is looking into that area.

Totally. Yeah. I mean if I could find out, hey, Justin is really enjoying the show or not. I mean, yeah, I could probably ask better questions.

Yeah.

Okay, so two piece, last question. Okay. Two piece of technologies every leader, founder. Every leader or founder you think should invest in while building their top of the funnel.

I think it's absolute table stakes now to have a sales engagement platform. Look on G2 Crowd, there's 125 Sales Loft Outreach Ring DNA Groove Xant. These are some of the famous ones. Also critically important to have a parallel assisted dialer. Not just a dialer. I'm talking about connect and sell Aurum. Some of these technologies allow you to dial the phone at once, multiple calls at once and then hot switch. Because there's no reason you should be spending eight hours a day making calls if you can make 200 dials 100 to 200 dials in two hours. It just makes you extremely efficient. You need to be automating everything possible. You mean automating your calls? Automating your emails. It's semi automated though. Those are the two really big ones. And then intent data. Not just having the emails and calls, but having some way to prioritize the accounts and the people inside your your target addressable market. And there's companies like six Sense and Bombora and Alba Cross that do that. Other one is chat, having something on the front of the site that you can interact with. My buddy Terry in Australia has something called Chat Metrics which is conversation as a service cast for SaaS. Whether it's actual chat bots or humans in the bots, something on the front of site in real time. There's zero moment of intent and truth. Interacting with inbounds, that's really powerful. These are GTM recommendations of the GTM games, but some of that is sales related.

That was awesome. Yeah. Thank you so much Justin again for coming on the show.

Thank you for having me. A lot of fun. I hope it was exciting.

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