[Sales] Misconceptions and learnings about outbound and AI with Jess Evans

I think in the past I've been so conscious of telling myself and telling my team and we've been kind of like qualifying lists who to reach out to and be like, no, no, we can't, we can't reach out to them. Like, they're not relevant. And the amount of time that actually goes into being like, no, we can't talk to them. But it's like the tiny little details like, oh, well, they might not do this specifically, but you know, they could be interested. And you go back and forth and before you know it, you've wasted half a day when really you could have sent those emails out to that list. And the worst case scenario you get a handful of people who reply and go, this isn't relevant, not fit, whatever it might be. And that's. I always used to worry so much about people coming back and being angry or damaging reputation. But if you've got that messaging right, if you're actually adding value with your message and it doesn't just look like spam that's constantly in people's inboxes, no one's going to be annoyed that you maybe didn't hit exactly the right person because their job title actually sounds like someone on your list. But actually in that company it's something slightly different. So I think as long as you've done as much as you can with choosing the right job titles, the right company looking for the right keywords and filtering based on that, then you can't really go wrong. And I think, yeah, don't worry about it too much.

Hey, welcome to Sal's DNA podcast. Another episode today you're stuck with just me. Nick Harrison's off doing other stuff today, but we've got a great guest. We got Jessica. She told me not to call it Jessica and I never do. Jess Evans. So for anyone listening, always call Jesse. She is a customer success and Operations manager at Succession. So she's a new employee of ours, been with us couple of weeks and this is a really great episode because she talks about all of the things that she thought she knew and she's learned when coming on board or, or new tactics and tips. So there's lots of great pieces of information in here about accuracy of list building, how to write great emails, what we should do and should stop doing when we think about writing campaigns and what holds us back with the main take home message of use AI via great messaging and just do it. Oh, seeing as Harrison's not here, I'm just going to say it. Let's dive right In. Hey, Jess, it's exciting to have you on the podcast. I know we speak to each other most of the time at the moment, but this is a little different. So I'm looking forward to it.

Yeah, looking forward to it too. I think I've spent the last, like, year listening to these podcasts on walks, and now it feels really strange to listen to you guys all day and then have you in my ears at night. It might be getting a little bit too much, but, yeah, I get to listen to myself. So a little bit of a change.

Exactly. And at least we don't have Harrison on this one, so it should be pretty good.

Yeah, I do feel like I should have shown up with like an American accent and like a fake mustache.

Just so like it's 100% British, this one.

Yeah. Great.

Well, let's kick it off. We. We're going to dive into a few good topics today. A lot of bit of it around how what your sort of preconceptions were about using automations and AI and messaging and all these things and all of the stuff you learned before coming on with Succession. But for anyone listening that doesn't know, Jess has joined Succession as our. One of our new team members and they work in my wheels on our clients and our messaging projects and lead generation and everything. All the good stuff. So to get her views in her first couple of weeks and what she's maybe learned, discovered made us better at, that's what we're doing. But we're going to start with our first question. We start with everyone. Tell us a funny or crazy story that you've got.

Yeah, so I had a. I had to think about this and there's far too many that are not appropriate for a podcast that will probably get me in trouble. So I had to sort of narrow it down, which meant that it's probably less exciting than it could be. But I was thinking back to the first conference that I went to with my last company and I was still doing my masters at the time. And basically they booked me a hotel. It was in London, I think. I've not been in London since I was like 15 Dean, because I'm a. I'm a northerner. And it was some like sort of quite junior person that was helping out with some marketing that booked it. And I arrived and it was basically this like neon sign hotel above like a kebab shop. It had some sort of like comical, like some of the neon bit was broken, so it spelled some kind of like weird comical word that I can't remember, there was people sat outside like dodgy looking characters. And I was like, okay, cool, like, whatever. Like, I'm not gonna complain. Like, it's my first time at a conference. Went in, checked in. All I could hear was, like, the overgrowd. It was like shaking, like, glasses on the side. But I just kind of stayed there. And the girl that was meant to be staying with me in this hotel, who'd been at the company for a little bit longer, just like, called me up as I was coming out. I'd gone to see like a West End show, called me up. She was like, I'm not staying there, Jess. She was like, I've booked myself a new hotel. And I was like, well, I'll be fine. Like, I'll be, you know, I was going to be with her. We were going to do it together. And then I was like, on my own. And I just remember, like, sitting there, I remember pushing, like the fridge, like up against the door in the night. And I was happy. Like, I'm, you know, I'm tough. And you know what? It wasn't even like the hotel that put me off. It was the noise. So the night afterwards, I booked myself a new hotel. But it was just this whole thing for, like, weeks afterwards. And I had, like, management, like, calling me up and apologizing because no one had, like, looked at it. And then on the train back, I remember looking through, like, the reviews and it was just, someone should have checked them. But it helped in a sense that, like, everything was up from there. All the hotels after that were great.

But, yeah, we've all got these stories from traveling loads, right, where we're out and about and these strange things go on. There's a guy who may or may not listen to this, who I've traveled with before, Joe Carpentino. And we was in. I won't give too much away. I'll tell the name of the barber. Know where we are? We was in a place and there was a bar across the street from the hotel. It was the only one open. Well, that looks kind of cool. Looks like it's going to be a fun, like, tiki bar with a neon sign, right? It was called Acapulco's. We're like, cool, let's go grab a beer. We walked in and it was pretty clear that it was a front for a brothel. And we were now standing in a bar that is a brothel and maybe even dealing substances. And we were just like. And Joe was like, we're going to sit down we're going to have two beers so it doesn't look like we're running away and then. But we're gonna drink them quickly and then we're out. And we just sat down and we.

Drunk it and make eye contact. Don't talk to anyone.

Look, once again, I can't tell you all the stories on this podcast, but anyone wants to ask me if they see me out and about it. It was crazy.

I hope you expense that.

It's not the weirdest bar name I've had to expense. So I went to a bar where Harris and I used to work before we went to a bar and we were out with all of the managers, so it didn't matter. And it was just a normal bar in Nashville, but it's called Nudies. So when you were. Your expense receipts are saying Nudies as you put them in. It's. You expect to get questions.

Questions. Yeah.

Cool. Okay, so I'm gonna start the question probably quite open because as I said, you've. I know you've been a great salesperson, you've got experience in sales and experience in science, but in some of our conversations recently, you've said that there's things that you didn't realize they were going to be how they were and things that were easier and harder. So maybe we could dive into some of that and you give us some of the stuff you've learned since coming on board.

Yeah, yeah, definitely. So I think, like, obviously I've got a technical background in biology, so I kind of understand that side of things and being sales, but something that I've shied away from quite a lot, I think kind of in my career in life is anything you would describe as like, techie, right? Like computers, like coding, automation. It's always something that I've wanted to try, but always been kind of a little bit apprehensive, a little bit scared, doubting myself of whether it's something that I could do. And I've got a partner who is a physicist and codes all day, so that doesn't help either. But I think one of the things that sort of was quite eye opening, starting with succession over the past couple of weeks was just how far AI and automation and different platforms that you can use have come. This view of code where it all looks like the Matrix and it's all sort of moving along. You don't understand whatever it means is not the way that it is right now. Obviously there's some complex things that you can build where there is an advantage to having that Expertise. But really what you can do now is just type in stuff in like plain English. You can be like, I want to do this, I want it to look like this. Here's the things you shouldn't do, here's things you should do. And it will give you an output which will build something which looks exactly what you envisioned. And if it doesn't, then you can tweak it and it'll give you something else. And that's crazy because I don't think people realize that, you know, they're familiar with ChatGPT that you can talk to like a normal person. But when it comes to actually implementing different types of automation, it's easier than it was before. Like anyone can do it. I think the advice that I would give is like, put some time into it so you know, what you put in is what you get out. So you need to have that thought process and framework in place. But yeah, it's a lot more straightforward than I imagined. And so there's probably a lot of other people in the same boat. Really?

Yeah, I think it's even similar for me, but I'm probably a little bit further down that journey because of having to dive into this and use it. But what I found was, is I didn't consider myself techie, but I think I actually am. What I wasn't was willing to learn code. Right. So the, the, the ideas about input and output and what I wanted to do and now what systems I want to talk to each other, that was always there. I just didn't have the language to do it. It's like going into a shop where you, you know, the things you want to buy and get, but the, the people speak Portuguese and you don't. Right. That's literally it. We now have a translator in the middle and all you do is you speak how you want and it connects these things. And I think that, yeah, just do it. Basically dive in and just start, pick, pick one tool, start using it.

Yeah, and I think there's a line to that as well. Like have a chat with the team that you have and see what works best. Like what makes the most sense to build. Like, don't just, you know, go crazy, be like, oh my God, we can do this now. We can build everything and just build stuff for the sake of it. I think it works when you've got a few choice automations that really work well and make your team more efficient. But that looks different for us as it does for someone else and someone in a slightly different industry. So like.

I remember one of the first things I built was to help the sales team because when you're on a call and you get lots of questions about protocols, if you've got a company that's got 25 protocols, you're never going to memorize them all. So I literally created a tool in chat GPT where I uploaded all of those customer facing protocols and now while on a call you could be like, how many wells in a night? How many cells are put in? 96 or blade bow. Straight answer, so simple, but people don't even need to do it. So basically we created a question tech expert for the sales team in, in minutes.

Yeah, exactly. Like a kind of example. Something that like immediate sort of adds value. Like you're not having to think about it, it's just an immediate answer that's there and it's, you know, fairly straightforward to build and you don't have to spend like hours and hours on it. So it's just weighing up that how long is this going to take me to build and how much time does it actually save in the long run? But I think even still people get caught up about it because they've seen what AI can do six months ago or 12 months ago and they had one bad experience where it gave them a bad output or the reasoning was off or it referenced a paper that doesn't actually exist, but it's constantly evolving. And I found that in the past couple of weeks looking at me like, wow, this looks so different to when I used it for this thing six months ago. So I think get over any sort of like past bad experiences because you know, when I first started being used like there were there was issues and there still is issues. But I think if you're, you know, using it intuitively and kind of have your own background in there as well, it works really well.

I think that's a key point is about your background. I think a lot of people think, well how can I use AI? I'm going to use it to do the things I don't know how to do. And I think that's wrong because if you don't know how to do them, you can't spot the mistakes. And AI does make mistakes. People always overly worry about the mistakes because people make mistakes too. It's just that you feel more confident when you're one writing something. But yeah, if you are, if you start with something that you understand but you want to create a shortcut, that's a better place to be. Like I should not be doing random Tasks for like HR or something in there, necessarily, because I have no understanding of that. And normally I'm a problem for HR people, so we definitely shouldn't be doing that. But if I'm doing it in terms of like, oh, what's the latest stem cell differentiation to neuronal protocol? My background, I can work with that.

I think that's exactly right. I think it kind of takes us on to chatting a little bit about messaging because I think if you're using AI to support your messaging and you don't really know what you're talking about, you don't have that background, you don't know if it's giving you something that is like incorrect, like if it's referencing the wrong sort of like pipeline stage or the wrong modality. But if you already have that base knowledge, it's, it's a tool which helps you, not something which is to be kind of scared of really.

Let's take a quick break from the podcast to talk about what we have going on over here at Succession. We work with 40 plus life science sales companies to help them find more opportunities and close more deals. We provide a range of services to support your sales growth. So whether it's increasing top of funnel opportunities with done for you lead generation in person or virtual sales training reinforced by personalized training plans, recruiting top sales talent, or just building custom AI workflows to help make your team more efficient focused on selling. So if you're ready to transform your sales strategy, visit Succession Bio and schedule a call with Nick and I and see how we can support you.

Maybe we change gears a bit into that. We talk a lot about AI on this podcast, but we also like the tactical stuff that you've learned that, that people can use in their daily, daily lives right now when they're doing messaging. So a lot of the tasks you come on board to do is working with our clients on our lead generation service. So it's building lists, building messaging, setting this up and getting these campaigns delivered and driving leads for people. Right. So in terms of the, let's start with the messaging. In terms of the messaging piece, what is it that you, you would do differently now if you left Succession and went back and worked in one of your previous companies?

Yeah. So I think with messaging, like, I'm such a perfectionist sometimes when it comes to everything. Like, I want every detail to be right. But I think it's similar to what you guys said in the podcast the other day of like, not sacrificing like progress for perfection, but one of the things we used to say is like, don't sacrifice. Good for perfect. And when you're writing your messaging, as long as you've got that focus on your potential client's problem, you're talking more about them. You're giving them something engaging, some new insight, something that adds value. And your call to action is a little bit softer than just kind of asking for a call. And you've got that framework right. The actual minute details probably don't matter quite as much because, you know, what worked for a subset of clients, you know, a few months ago might not land now. It might be that your opinion on a way that a message is. Is very different to the person that it's going to and that. And that changes, you know, across different sort of segments and across timelines. And, you know, there could be something like some sort of shift in the industry, whether that be funding or regulatory, and that all of a sudden something that didn't work now works or vice versa. And I think the only way to know what is working is to test it, not agonize too much, get something out the door if you're, you know, quite happy with it and the structure of it, and then test a few different variations. Like, I think I haven't done that so much in the past where I've thought more about getting the perfect message and be like, right, this is the one. We're going to send this out. Whereas over the past couple of weeks, like, I've seen how many different styles of messaging we can use, whether that's like, you know, different frameworks or focused on, you know, changing up the first line or the last line. I think doing that, testing that in a few different variations of different people and then reviewing it after like a week and being like, okay, this is working better. People are resonating more with this. And then sort of iterating from there is such a better approach than wasting that week anyway trying to get the perfect message, not knowing any way whether it's going to land. You don't know what is and what isn't until you try it.

I think that's some really good points, and I think it's a good takeaway for many people. And I believe we've mentioned it on the podcast before, but it's a perfect time to say this again. And one of my. One of our challenges, working with clients, by the way, our clients are great. Anyone listening? It's just something we have to get across to people often is that this message may not be what you like but we're not writing only to you. We're writing to many different people with different backgrounds, different experiences, different lives, objectives, right? So if you are even writing the perfect message, you are writing the perfect message for you, and you're not the one who you want to answer it, right? So especially if you're a sales rep and you're writing a perfect message, what you think a sales rep would want, that's definitely not who we're going after, right? So by writing variations of length, style, whether it's a challenger approach, whether it's a problem or outcome solution approach, you know, whatever these may be, and you have these variants, you can then start to see statistically which ones are resonating better with this audience. And I'll be honest, we work with regulatory companies, we work with like building manufacturing for biologics, we work with reagent companies, and all of those audiences are slightly different and will want different things. As you can imagine, regulatory like a lot of information, whereas bench scientists tend to want to get to the point.

Yeah, I think it's exactly that. It's like thinking like a scientist, you know, with salespeople. But a lot of us come from a scientific background. It's just shifting that mindset both in terms of the messaging but also in terms of looking at the data. Like all we, all we talk about is, you know, people are interested in data providing insights, like actually apply that to your own work and like listen to the data and what it's telling you and kind of make amendments based on that.

I also think another thing you mentioned there that reminds me of sort of a tip we can give people. When you're trying to write the message, most people want to write one message, but include some kind of personalization and be able to send it to 20,000 people, because that's the easiest approach. However, the best way to personalize any message is personalize your list. So just to give an example, I'm writing to people in neuroscience, right? I always use neuroscience as my background, but writing to people in neuroscience and I want to write a message to all of those people without any personalization, just for the sake of an argument, that would be very generic. Whereas if I narrowed that down and found out which of my lists are in pain, which of my lists are in Alzheimer's, which of my lists are in frontend dementia, we just started across that one. But ftd, right now I have a pain point for each of those and things that they challenge with the generic message, that audience will actually be actually specific. So there's different ways of looking at personalization, and I don't think people often think about that.

Yeah, I don't think they do. And I think it's. They just want to go through as many people as possible as quick as they can. But I think that's still possible with the way that you can build lists now as well. Right. Like, you can still go to that many people. You're still hitting a couple of thousand people, but now they're in separate groups.

Right.

And you're tailoring your messaging to that. And I think there's a similar sort of thing that I've realized around sort of building that list, which again is don't sacrifice. Good for perfect. Don't worry about the details too much. Like, make sure you've got your fundamentals right. Because I think in the past I've been so conscious of telling myself and telling my team, and we've been kind of like qualifying lists who to reach out to be like, no, no, we can't. We can't reach out to them. Like, they're not relevant. And the amount of time that actually goes into being, like, no, we can't talk to them. But it's like the tiny little details like, oh, well, they might not do this specifically, but, you know, they could be interested. And you go back and forth and before you know it, you've wasted half a day when really you could have sent those emails out to that list. And the worst case scenario, you get a handful of people who reply and go, this isn't relevant, not fit, whatever it might be, and that's it. Like, I always used to worry so much about, like, people coming back and, like, being angry or like, damaging, like, reputation. But if you've got that messaging right, like, if you're actually adding value with your message and it doesn't just look like spam that's constantly in people's inboxes. No one's going to be annoyed that you maybe didn't hit exactly the right person because their job title actually sounds like someone on your list, but actually in that company, it's something slightly different. So I think, yeah, as long as you've done as much as you can with choosing the right job titles, the right company looking for the right keywords and filtering based on that, then you can't really go wrong. And I think, yeah, don't worry about it too much. That's why I told myself six months ago if I could, like, don't worry about it too much. Like, it's not it's not worth the time. You're better just getting stuff out there.

I think you're right. There's definitely a point at which you need to be targeted. Right. Because we don't want to be just sending it to people that are completely outside of it. However, if it's a slight nuance and they're just in an offshoot of something, the two weeks you spent worrying about that, trying to tailor that that tightly, actually stops you starting and being two weeks further forward in understanding the data of who is the right icp. And often, actually we believe we understand our ideal customer profile and our message market fit. And what we tend to find out is that when we start down this process and we start expanding out our campaigns and we're writing to various different orders is clients will learn that actually they've either got an additional ICP or their current ICP wasn't what they thought. And that's quite common because we don't do the numbers enough to get the data generally as salespeople.

Yeah, exactly. It might be that you find that there's, you know, someone out there who you should be targeting. Right. Because it's landed really well. And, you know, you find that out during that process. But as long as you're not doing something, you know, ridiculous like, oh, that's there's HR or finance people in here, when you're clearly talking about something really technical, then I think you're. You're fine. But I think another thing that people get concerned about, and by people, I mean me, and we've just talked about how not everyone is the same, but I think there's probably people that have experienced the same thing, which is thinking about, like, who goes on your kind of do not contact lift, like, who is immediately disqualified because they're a customer. You've talked to them before. But I think the key thing is you're doing cold outreach. Don't put current customers on there. Don't put people that are in late stages of a discussion because you're already talking to them. You don't need to, unless it's a huge company and you want to talk to someone in a different department. But I used to just kind of essentially blacklist a bunch of companies, like, oh, I spoke to this person at a conference at this time, or I had a conversation with them on LinkedIn like six months ago, or they were in the pipeline x months ago, so you don't want to annoy them. Or it might not look very professional if you do it. But I think Again, worst case scenario is you reach out to someone and they come back to you and go, oh, I've already spoken to this person about this. Or actually you've hit them at the right time when it wasn't the right time before and you've reminded them that you exist and they go, actually, I've got this project on right now which you can help with. So I think there's more to be gained from not being too rigid with what that list looks like.

Also, there is some data out there and depending on which time point in a process and what you consider a touch point, essentially it takes between seven and 15 touch points before somebody will engage with you. So you chatting with them at conference was touch point one, them seeing a post of your LinkedIn was touch point two. It could just be that that email is the eighth touch point and they're like, actually, I should listen to what Jess has got to say. So we, I think as a rep, I've always said to all of my teams, activity breeds results. Right? Just purely doing work, obviously keep the work high quality, but just doing more will get you more results is one of those jobs that, that is just a fact. Every company I've worked in, when you look at like if they had a leaderboard, which a lot of American companies do, have top performing reps, it was on par with number of emails sent, it was on par with number of conferences attended. It was never that the top performing rep was bottom on metrics for output. Never.

Yeah, exactly. And I think people argue a lot. You know, you've got your quality camp and you've got your quantity camp, but I think the truth is that it has to be both. You can't just send out thousands and thousands of emails that are like just templated, same thing, no personalization. But at the same time you can't just pick like a tiny little list of like 10 to 20 people and really, really personalize it. You can do both with the tools that are out there and the knowledge that you have and those types of people that argue with each other a lot. And there was a lot of internal discussions in my last company where people like, oh, we should do this, we should do this. And it's like, well, why don't we try both? Let's figure out how to do both in a smart way and kind of see what happens.

This is sort of a shameless plug, however it's relevant, so I'm going to forgive myself and do it. Harrison and I and Jess, we've recently decided that we're going to start talking to some clients that have got at least 5, 10, maybe more reps and actually helping them with what their internal efficiencies are. Because when you say just do it, we need to get the list build right, we need to get the message right, but we need to do volume. A lot of the time you find people, I haven't got time, I'm out, I'm out of time. And then you look at what they're actually doing and that could have been automated by AI or it wasn't revenue generating activities. And like reps are expensive, so they need to be doing revenue generating activities or they're not doing what they should be. So yeah, that's something we're investigating now is actually helping people identify where those bottlenecks are, what they can streamline, what they can automate. So all of their reps are out selling more of the time. And I think that's key. So when people say, oh, it takes time, I can't specify the list. Even if this is an internal monologue, you're wrong. That's your job. You have to do that or your pipeline will suffer. And I think that's more about what people need to think.

Yeah, and that's a really good point. And I think that a really simple way to kind of start looking at that, if you're looking at that internally, is just make a list of like sort of weekly activities. What do you do on a weekly basis as a salesperson? Categorize them into what is actually revenue generating activity and what isn't. But then also look at the time that you spend on each of them and if there's a few that stand out, that it's like I'm spending loads of time on this, but it's not actually directly contributing to, you know, my target, like company revenue, whatever it is that you want to measure yourself on that usually ends with a pound sign. Start thinking about ways that that can be automated, that like stuff can be taken off your plate by some sort of tool and focus on that. When you're thinking about what you prioritize to automate, that's probably a kind of good way forward. And then come and speak to us. Right?

We'll do it for you.

We'll do it for you. You know.

Shameless plug number two, this is a good one. This is great. We're really excited to have you on board, Jess. And some of the things you're learning already are really interesting and helping us as well for the out having a new Outside perspective is great, but we're coming up on time here for the end of the podcast, I think. And we always ask at the end to every person, what is one thing you would tell reps to stop doing?

So it's completely off topic. Right. But that's fine. And it's less about stop doing. And it's kind of a stop doing and a start doing in the same sentence. Right. It's like, stop just talking to scientists. That's part of your job. That's great. But I think the one thing that I didn't do until recently, which I found really useful, is talking to more reps. Like building a network outside of just, you know, who your customers are, because everyone's got different pieces of advice, things that have worked for them, things that haven't, different ways of doing things. And also, it's just like a nice group to be friends with because you're experiencing the same pain. And it's nice to be able to sit and sort of share those stories and laugh about it and cry about it. I think that's really important, especially if you're like, work from home or in a different country to what your company's in. Like, build that network. And don't just think, oh, I can't sell to these people, so I'm not going to connect with them. Yeah. And see where that takes. You might build the connections that open something up for you. You never know. Or you just have a chat over a beer and you have a good time.

Exactly. Network is everything. I think I've written a post about before, which is network aimlessly. If you're networking with a specific goal of generating revenue, you're not networking. Right. You're prospecting. Networking is about building your network of what could happen potentially in the future, what could be beneficial mutually. So I think that's a great tip. Network aimlessly and look for connection, not prospects.

Yeah, absolutely.