How to help SDRs build Business Acumen?- Sam Griffard

Oh, Truth is, I just like to geek out on SDR best practices and I'm willing to share what I've experienced, what I'm working on, what's worked, what's not worked. A CFO who's been in finance for 25 years at multiple companies, global companies, very complex day to day. But you as a sales rep who's maybe worked in the finance space for six months, can still go toe to toe in a conversation with that cfo, Bo Johnson of the Lovemakers. Any one of their songs from their tiny desk NPR session. I really don't think I have one for the cast.

I am excited for this podcast. Our guest today is Sam, a two times top 25 SDR leader and a self proclaimed self sales nerd. With over 14 years of experience, 2 degrees in sales, and a passion for blending science, art and math to create those effective sales strategies, Sam has helped organizations drive hundreds of millions in revenue. Today we will dive into his unique approach to business acumen and crafting sales processes that both teams and prospects enjoy. Without further ado, let's welcome Sam. Welcome Sam to the show. Thank you so much for being here.

Yeah, pleasure to. Pleasure to join you, Rahul.

Pleasure is all mine. I mean, not every day you get to speak to somebody who is a top 25 SDR leader in the world. Right? Tell us about that story. I mean, I'm always intrigued how you became top 25 SDR leader in the world.

Truth is, I just like to geek out on STR best practices and I'm willing to share what I've experienced, what I'm working on, what's worked, what's not worked, what I'm focused on. So I'm just helping out as much as I possibly can with my peers.

Awesome. That's great to know. Please, please give us a quick intro about you, Sam.

Okay, so Sam Griffard. I'm in Boise, Idaho, the potato state. I've got two degrees in sales. I knew fairly young that I was going to be in sales. If you look back at my life, no one probably could have predicted I'm a very introverted, quiet person. But I've learned, you know, the ins and outs of human psychology and when I can turn things on and when I can turn things off and shut down for the day and relax and crawl into my hole, if you will.

That sounds usual. I've never heard of salespeople, you know, typically don't do not even have one degree. Right. Most of us are actually, most of us actually here because of serendipity so tell us more about that. Like did you, did you, you said you pursued it consciously that you want to be in sales.

Yeah, I don't have anybody in my family that's in sales. It wasn't anything like that that drew me to it. Simply knew of the profession from people I'd run into, went off to a school in Utah and found out that they had a degree, an associate degree in professional sales. Learning from former CROs CEO that started as sales reps, eventually took over companies. They were my professors, all things sales from them and then transferred to Weber State in northern Utah where I got a bachelor degree in technical sales. And again professors were sales professionals that later in their career started teaching at university. We would have guest speakers come in and share what they'd learned from the program, how they were applying it in their jobs, getting glimpses into like different industries that people were working, how they were using the principles. And that was, that was an absolute accelerator for my learning. And while I was going to school, I was working for a tech company as an AE and applying everything that I was learning in my classes in my day to day job. And that gave me a pretty big boost.

Yeah, that could have definitely come in handy. I can, I can now, now can see that how you applied sales degree to, you know, your actual job because typically when people go get out of the business school, they have forgotten most of the stuff and I don't know if they actually teach the way we do sales in the business school or not. So quite, quite a journey. Sam, thank you so much for being here. I think one of the question I had is you said you're an introvert and then you went on to becoming that person who shares the knowledge.

You know, how did that happen naturally? I don't know, it wasn't a conscious effort. If I look back at all of the different companies that I worked for, being an individual contributor, I was just trying to be the most effective, most efficient. I was constantly dissecting own process and going, okay, why did this work? Why didn't this work? Why did it work with this one but didn't work with this one? If I do this, how did that affect, you know, my efficiency ratios? And next thing you know it, I'm talking to my friends who are sitting right next to me and going, hey, I've tried this or hey, what you're doing right now? Just want to give you a heads up. I was doing that a couple months ago. Here's what I learned. Here were the hard knocks that I went through. Here were my aha moments. Next thing you know, I got people tapping me on the shoulder going, hey, you're top of the leaderboard. Can I do a call session with you? Can I sit in on a discovery call with you? Pick your brain. Why are emails converting to meetings? And why are you putting deals from stage to stage so quickly? And so it was just kind of a natural occurrence. And I've always had this mindset, you know, others don't have to fail for me to succeed.

I like that.

Success breeds success. I can learn from others. In fact, when they were coming and tapping me on the shoulder and asking me, I was asking this, okay, here's my perspective. What's yours? Why have you been doing what you've been doing and what are you thinking about doing next? And oh, tell me more about that. So even in those moments where, you know, they were coming for my secret sauce, I was still asking them questions, trying to find out. Because the more data I gathered, the more insights, the more, you know, different practices that people tried, the better I understood the full process. I could connect dots and go, okay, this best practice here sounds a whole lot like this scenario over here. I learned this here. Maybe I could apply that same learning to something completely different, but, you know, somewhat similar and turns out it would work.

So that's amazing.

Yeah, just natural.

Yeah, I'm going to remember that for a long time that how other people don't have to fail. I know what you just said sounds so common, but, you know, I think we don't think about this. I like where you're coming from, Sam. I think today we agreed upon, you know, talking about business acumen and I'll tell you where I'm coming. One of the challenge I've always had is I've always, you know, kind of hired 20, 25 year olds. Most of the companies kind of go for those. Those people are hungry. You know, there's a different debate, debate about whether they can perform or not, you know, but we have always been training these 20, 25 year old to speak, to speak the language of buyers. Probably have 20 to 25 years of experience alone. I was at a company called Chargebee where we were working with CFOs and some of the CFOs were 50 plus. I'm like, I don't even have total. I'm not even that old. I cannot speak the language they have. Like, you can only stuff in. You can only talk about so much product. But there is something called business acumen and My boss will always ask me, hey, teach them business acum. Acumen, you know, but I would not even know how to do it. So today's discussion is about how do we, first of all, what is business acumen? And for a layman, please break it down.

Yeah, the way that I break it down, honestly, is to your point. You're Talking to a CFO who's been in finance for 25 years at multiple companies, global companies, very complex day to day. But you as a sales rep who's maybe worked in the finance space for six months, can still go toe to toe in a convers with that cfo. You can hang in that conversation. The CFO goes, huh, Kind of actually knows what he's talking about. He knows my day to day. He knows how business works. He knows how my department functions with other departments, how my department is crucial to the success of my company. Interesting. You know, this, this young kid, if you will, and have a conversation with me and not just be run over.

Wow. And how do you propose, you know, somebody teaches somebody to have a conversation like this? So first of all, while all this sounds great, when you said that, you know, somebody with six months of experience talking to somebody with 50 years of experience, but how do we do that?

I had a stint in sales enablement a few years ago because of the success that I had in growing an SDR or globally and increasing our success year over year. Leadership came to me and said, hey, can you do this for other sales roles? How do we give you more resources? How do we give you more money, tools, people? This seems to be working. Can we do more with this and can we do it with more than just the sd? And I was like, that's called sales enablement. And they were like, we don't care what it's called, just do it. And it really came down to, okay, we have to figure out where we need learning and experience and how do we, how do we give that type of information that is often gained over a four year degree or a tenure in a career as quickly as possible. Learning management systems, role plays, I mean, all of the things that anybody is going to be familiar with. I'd say the one or two aha moments for me in helping reps really accelerate their learning to be able to hang in those conversations with, you know, the target Personas, their professionals in the topic you know, at hand, number one, was getting time with those prospects, finding out what their life was like and then teaching that information to the reps themselves. And so I had the, you Know privilege of working with client success, product marketing, where we were able to interview prospects, we were able to interview clients and find out, you know, what was your life before we met you? When it comes to this topic and maybe that's another learning is we don't have to know everything in their career. We need to know what's pertinent to our value proposition, where we fit into their day to day. It's important to know where we fit in. In fact, at this organization, when I was, you know, trying to get as much information as possible to help the team, I figured out that we were just a tiny little sliver when it came to their day to day. They had a laundry list of responsibilities and we were just one of the many. However, we were one that took a lot of time and was very crucial to their org and the success of their company. Although we were just a sliver, we were very important sliver of their day to day. So spent time interviewing clients and prospects. What is your life like? What was it before you met us? When it comes to this, where do we fit in? How important is this to you? How much time do you spend on it? What tools do you use? How many people on your team work on this project? When this group finishes, who reviews it, who does it go to next? Is there, you know, a chain of symbol, if you will, where you do this and you hand it off to the next person, they do the next piece, they hand it off to the next person who's then the person who signs off. Where does it go from there? Who is involved at random times of the year? What are the crucial moments of the year? Do you have specific deadlines, crunch time specifically, you know, you've got to do these financial filings quarterly, you've got to do year end, those types of things. So just digging, peeling back the onion layers and getting as deep as we possibly could, finding out what was going on in their life.

That's fantastic. I mean are you referring more towards the jobs to be done exercise or are we going deeper?

Deeper and sideways? Right? You've got to find out again where you fit. There's going to be things that are adjacent to you that maybe to get the job done, the thing that your company can help with is step three in the process. So you got to understand what's step one and two before you get involved and then you got to understand what are the steps afterwards. So you really got to you, you've got to figure out where you fit into their day to day. So that's you know, kind of what I would say. The, the, the linear, going both directions, figuring out where you fit. And then once you figure out, okay, this is where we fit, let's see how deep we can go.

Got it. I have a follow up question, and this is something which always itches me. This seems like an important concept. You just broke it down as to how you did it. My question is, why don't most companies do it? We do realize that everybody has the same business acumen and obviously every SDR leader has the best intent. Every company has the best intent. And I'm sure why companies don't do it. So do you have any idea why they want to do it?

I've worked with a lot of companies. I've done some consulting where I'm working with a sales leader or even a founder who's just starting out their organization, trying to capture their first few clients. Oftentimes they're drinking their own Kool Aid. They're so excited about their product and offering and their value prop. They have a viewpoint of where they fit into the world and why they're needed, why they're valuable. And they just get too ingrained in that. They get too excited. Like, this is awesome. And it's awesome because of this. And the way that I see that is you go into these conversations with the prospect and you're having that value prop conversation. This is why we're amazing. This is why you should be using us. And the prospect goes, it sounds cool, but I don't really think I need it or there's some level of I don't know if I get it. I don't see that. That cool. And then you walk away from that call and you hear the sales rep, the sales leader, the CEO, and they go, oh, they just didn't get it. It's like, well, maybe we don't understand them. It's not that they don't understand us, maybe we don't understand them. There's, there's so many podcasts, books seen. So many people talk about this concept of like a go to market strategy. I have this idea, I build it and then I bring it to market and I find people who believe in it. That's pretty standard. But what everything else suggests, these, these, you know, these books, these experts, is that you have an idea, you go to your target market, those target Personas, you go, I have this idea, help me build it. Then you test it, then you redesign it. And it's just this constant iterative process before you ever even go to market. And so, yeah, you get, you get these sales reps at a brand new company, they're excited and they go, okay, I've got to take this value prop and I've got to show it to as many people as possible and hope that people can connect the dots themselves, see the value for their life. And hopefully I can get a few sales off of that versus I understand them. I know where I fit in. I know how I can position in proportion to all the things they have going on. Then I can actually be consultative and going, hey, consider this, or have you considered this? What if, what if this piece of your day to day or your quarterly or your annual whatever was slightly different? What would that do for you? Why would that be good? What would be the best way to make this process better? A lot of people that we're selling to have this mindset of as cliche as it sounds like it gets the job done. This is how we've always done it. A lot of the times they've not thought about or even considered that there's even a possibility or improvement. It is their job. In fact, when you go and you talk to them, this is one of the things I strongly believe, if you're going in and you're asking them, what are your challenges? What are the problems that you have? Where are your issues? It is their job to make sure that this is successful. They're probably not going to admit to you that there's problems and challenges and issues because then they're admitting that they're not perfect in their job and they.

Were not doing anything about it. Right?

Yeah, I knew it was broken, but I wasn't doing anything about it. I'm not, I'm not going to admit to that. So there's, there's so much human psychology wrapped around just that concept alone. We could, we could go on forever.

Yeah, I like where this is going and I'm learning a lot already then. Now I'm going to put on my hat of an SDR leader. Okay. Who is, let's say, who has realized that this is the problem and this is a big thing where I want to develop the business acumen. Do you have like a step by step process, maybe three or four things they can do today to take, take the first step in the direction of building the business acumen? I mean, like you said, this could go on forever. I mean, you can't teach somebody business acumen overnight. It'll probably take, you know, a few months, few days, I don't know, depending on you know, way where everybody is in the journey. But if you were to teach somebody, let's say you are an SDR manager, but don't assume Sam, with 2 degrees and human psychology and all the background, let's say if you were to teach somebody how to go about inculcating this business acumen for the team, how would you go about it?

Okay, so best case, your organization has some level of product marketing, sales, collaboration with marketing sales collaboration with client success. They have stories, they have the best case before and after story, the prospect or client's life life with your product and service. That's best case. Let's pretend you don't though. You are brand new to an industry and let's just say it's finance. Brand new to a company who sells within finance. You don't have finance degree, you don't have an accounting degree, you're brand new. Where do you start? Your company's not handing this over to you. The few things that I could say you could do right now, you can go to the person in your org who holds the title of your target Persona. Go to them, ask them for a meeting, take them out to lunch, ask them to pick their brain, whatever it is, get time with them and ask them what's important to you. So then go through that process of okay, what is your day to day? Where do we fit into it? Okay, then let's go deeper. That's step one. That's something anybody and everybody can do because you're going to have that Persona at your organization. The other one you can do, let's say you get time with prospects, whether that's just on the phone, cold calling, you get people to respond to your emails, respond to your LinkedIn messages. Be curious, just be curious. Find out from them, ask them before you jump down their throat with your value prop. Don't go in just pitching, here's what we got and here's what we're going to do. Ask them. Then you can start to connect some dots. Then you can say, well, it sounds like we might be able to fit in here. So that's, that's a simple one. You're doing day to day. Be curious, just talk to people, ask them. From there, let's say you get time with them face to face. You get to go to conferences. Let's say you're at a conference, you get to man the booth again, you got FaceTime with them. There's lunch, there's speaking sessions. You can go and sit in and listen to when you're talking to them at the booth, Ask them, have conversations with them. Most of the companies that I've worked for, we've done happy hours, and we've done dinners and we've done special events. Ask your leaders if you can be there, and then just ask the people. Some of the most breakthrough moments I've had at my current company. At the very beginning, I got to go to a dinner where I sat down with Chros and chief people officers, and I just asked them, what's important to you? What's going on in your life today for the next year? Like, what are your priorities? When you sit down with your C suite, there's got to be a list of, like, here's how we're, you know, gonna hit these strategies for this year. We're already looking at one year down the road. Yeah, absolutely. What keeps you up at night? What's going on? So get set. Get some FaceTime with them from there. I didn't have this when I was a rep. It's AI. We've got it. We've got it at our fingertips now. You can go on simple things like chat GPT, and you can say, here's my target Personas. Title, title, title, title, seniority. These types of organizations. Here's a little bit about my company. You can just fill ChatGPT with as much information about your company, and then you can ask ChatGPT, okay, if I'm talking to a CFO, what is their life like? And ChatGPT can say, here. You know, the common things for a CFO. Here's their life, here's their responsibilities, here's their KPIs, here's their OKRs. This is what they are measured on for their performance reviews. That. That right there is gold. You can find out what they're meas on for their performance reviews and possibly have any kind of influence to help them be more successful in their KPIs than their OKRs. You've got yourself a golden nugget there. But using ChatGPT to just ask questions, okay, if I'm talking to them and I was talking about this, what do you think they would find interesting? Here's my value prop. Here's everything about my company, and you can just keep going down that rabbit hole just asking more and more questions. So I guess to sum it all up, it really comes down to just asking questions. Whether that's asking internal resources, whether that's the actual target Persona at your company, or just asking other sales reps. Hey, you've been here a few years can you tell me the story of their before and after? What were your aha moments from there? It's okay. I'm talking to prospects. I'm going to be curious. I'm going to ask questions more than I pitch. I've got FaceTime at a conference or a dinner or a happy hour. I'm going to ask questions. I am not going to push my agenda. I am simply going to be curious and find out more about them. And then I'm going to go to ChatGPT and I'm going to ask as many questions as I possibly can about my target Persona, their day to day, their life, where we fit in, everything that goes on around their company and where they fit into that.

You know what, when you, when you said all that I can I could totally see that is exactly what I did unconsciously. You know, I think I am, I've been probably lucky where I work with multiple companies and I've attended like 17 events in the last five years. I don't say this out loud but I think that's one of the reason I feel that, you know, I, I acquired a lot of knowledge about, you know, what's happening with different industries. I was in a company where we were selling to E commerce and I had absolutely no idea what to do. I went to trade shows, I went to trade shows where we were completely a misfit. And I got to learn just by doing this what you said, you know, sitting with random people over lunch like hey, what do you do when you know you're in commerce? Okay, how do you sell things digitally? And I remember in one of the parties I was actually spoke to one of the C level at Typeform. This was a party hosted by us in a happy hour. And typically I would never have got the guts at that time because I was an SDR at the same time. I would have never got a chance to speak to a C level anyways. Right. And now that you have a C level who's holding a drink and you have two hours with him where you can ask him any question and I did. And I think some of the things that you mentioned quite easy now to do because now you don't need to even go to their intervention if you can. Great. But not everybody would get to. So you have chatgpt right? Where you can actually do this reasoning where the way I use ChatGPT to what you said actually make Chat GPT, you know, their life living hell. You know, in the sense when I asked them a tough question, I'd Be like, hey, give me five questions I can sam on a call. And it gives me the five question. I said, can you rate these questions on a scale of 1 to 10? And when it rate and typically it comes back with a response of seven or eight, they said, why don't you make it 10 and tell me what did you miss? So now I know that this was the initial reasoning of Chat GPT. This is how. Because Chat GPT does not operate at a 10 on 10 level all the time now I'm able to one see what was missed and that gives me more ideas. And I think one of the things which I did unconsciously is I started this podcast right, years ago and I spoke to about 40 people and some of those people would have never talked to me if they were my prospect, for example, including you, right? If I were selling you, you'll be like, hey, I'm busy, I'm not going to talk to you. But now I'm able to get into a, you know, psyche of an SDR leader as to how they're thinking about it, how they will coach, which would have not been possible. I think there's so many things, things. And while I'm thinking about life loud, can you think of anything else let's say which we have not covered so far? And just like the way I would ask ChatGPT, consider this is a 9 response so far, 9 on 10 for this chat. What is one thing which will make it 10?

You touched on something that. Let's unpack a little bit more. Your idea of targeting your target Persona and asking them to come onto a podcast. It's not any different from us going up to that, you know, C suite executive at a happy hour, holding a drink drink and asking them questions. Because people love to talk about their passions. They love to talk about how much they know. We all have egos. Some we have bigger than others and some we can kind of put aside for a moment. But people love to talk about, you know, what they've accomplished, things that they're proud of. Tap into that. So you could go to ChatGPT and say, hey, let's say you have the biggest ego as a cfo. Pretend to be a CFO with a huge ego. What are you proud of? What are your biggest accomplishments that you would gladly speak on a podcast or go to a stage at a conference and talk about? What are you going to talk about? Then you go, okay, knowing who I am as a sales rep representing this company and, you know, about our company, if I were to Go up to that CFO after that event and they were talking about all this. Where could I kind of plug in? Is there anything about my company that I could say, hey, I really appreciated your speech today. I love how you talked about A, B and C. It makes me think about other CFOs that we've worked with that are dealing with X, Y or Z. Tell me more about this. Just get them to open up more. Then you're slowly getting them to give you more information while you're also implanting little tiny seeds of what you've done with other people like them. Next thing you know, they're asking you, so who are you? What do you do? Tell me about your company versus you coming to them and being like, can I tell you about my company? In fact, many years ago when I was in sdr, I came across this, this concept and I was like, I've got to test it. I went to the C suite executive at a Target organization on LinkedIn and just started following them. Didn't even send a connection request. Started following them, liking their posts, commenting on their posts, like, oh, this was super valuable. Oh, I love this part about it. I put a little bit more into it than just a, like, and this is cool. I was like, I love this idea. It really makes me think about or wow, I've never thought about it that way. And then there was even times where I was sharing it. It would post something and I was sharing it or I was tagging people on their post and going, hey, this reminded me of our conversation the other day. Next thing you know, I'm getting a connection request from that C suite executive. They sent me a connection request and they said, hey, thanks for all the support on LinkedIn. I'm somewhat familiar with your company. I thought it made sense that we connect and you know, I'd love to hear more about what your company does. They were asking for me to pitch to them versus me going in with the pitch and trying to get them to just give me 10 seconds. They were asking me for it because I was leaning into their expertise.

That's amazing. Yeah, that's, that's a strategy I'm definitely gonna stick to.

It's universal human psychology.

I think you're about right about that. And this actually reminds me when you said about the human psychology. So my wife was watching Egyptian Series Day and it was about a, you know, middle aged women finding her life after she get divorced. Okay. It's a. And it was like a three season series. I'm like, you Know, they could have actually wrapped this in one anyways. And I actually happened to catch a glimpse, you know, while having dinner and whatnot. What I realized is it is the exact same thing, which I have probably seen in 10 other movies. Like, probably. It's a replica of all the Harmar movies. I'm like, okay, so people, people, whether they're in Egypt and they had French culture as well, so whether they're in France or area, people are all the same. I mean, they have the same desires. We recognize. Like you said, I think you recognize human psychology. So I'm a huge admirer of bringing in the human psychology. I think I spent two years just reading one book, Laws of Human Nature by Dr. Robert Greene. I think that's my only PhD. Okay. In human psychology. So, yeah, I totally get what you're saying. So this was super helpful, Sam, and I'm pretty sure we're going to learn a lot. Now, towards the end, I have a quick, rapid fire for you. That's okay.

Okay, let's get it.

Now, the rule is you cannot take more than a second to think about it. All right, all right, let's. Let's start with the easy ones. Okay? Just to warm you up, right? Let's say if your name was not Sam, what would you name yourself?

Seth.

All right. One sales tool you cannot live without.

Oh, a sales engagement tool.

Right. One sales tool you absolutely hate. You have to name the tool.

I don't know. I really don't think I have one.

All right, let's move on. One sales leader you truly, truly admire.

Ooh, Greg Whipple.

All right, what's your guilty pleasure song that you'd hate for your co workers to know that you love?

Ooh, Hobo Johnson and the Lovemakers. Any one of their songs from their tiny desk NPR sessions doing really well.

If animals could talk. What one thing do you think? Which one do you think would be the rudest? Yes. All right, last one. I promise you have one wish from a genie, and you can only use it to fix your SDR process. How would you use it?

Ooh, dang. Fix the success rate of emails, because phones are amazing emails. No matter how much you put into customization, sometimes people still just ignore you.

All right. You did, I think, exceptionally well. Five out of six. Six. Not too bad.

I'm really going to have to think about a sales tool that I hate.

I'm sure you have one. You're just being shy right now not to disclose that. It's okay. All right, so you did really well Sam, thank you so much. Have a good one. Okay, Bye.

You, too. See you.