conversation with Justin Michaels, best selling author on using the tech stack

Welcome to the Global Sales Mentor Podcast for conversations that drive growth. When you are ready to grow your international sales, join the conversation with your host, Zach Selch.

Welcome back to another episode of Conversations That Drive Global Sales. I have here with me Justin Michael, who wrote a book that I read over the weekend. One of these things where I came across it and I read it over one day while I was waiting for my daughter while she was at the convention and I had some time to kill, and I really enjoyed it. It was very interesting to me because it wasn't the type of thing that I normally deal with in sales. I don't do as much top-of-the-funnel kind of stuff, and frankly, I'm not the most technically savvy person, and it was very educational to me. So Justin, thanks for coming. Why don't you introduce yourself and talk a little bit about what you do and maybe talk a little bit about your book?

Yeah, thank you so much, Zach. I'm Justin Michael, and I wrote a book with Tony Hughes called Tech-Powered Sales. The initial title of the book was Technology Quotient because we were trying to write a book on using technology to sell more efficiently. So automation, artificial intelligence, and machine learning. But then we ran into this problem. How would we make it relevant in 2025, 2030, 2035? Because there's so much new technology being released all the time and the skills keep on changing. So we came up with this concept of technology quotient, which is the fusion of human and machine. And this is important whether you're flying a 747, selling globally using technology, you're cracking top funnel, you're doing revenue operations. And so I've been a seller for about 20 years. I'm 41. I run a variety of businesses around sales consulting. And writing the book was a lot of fun. We interviewed hundreds of sales leaders and we talked to a lot of the tool vendors. Which there's been an explosion of solutions.

There has been an explosion of solutions. Yeah.

The goal here is to go from a Henry Ford mentality, which has been the prevailing way for the last 20 years in software, to a Tesla or Iron Man with a Jarvis suit. So believe it or not, if you're on this phone call, you're using technology to sell, 70% of what you're doing could be automated, could be automated. Now, if you're being strategic and creating solutions and you're scoping, there's a lot of elements that are possible to automate with AI, but unlikely. So you really wanna be sticking to that and then using the practical ideas and software platforms in this book to free up your time.

Right.

Set it and forget it. So that's kind of the goal.

Yeah.

So I gotta tell you, and I like to say this, do you have any idea what a telex machine is?

I do, I do. It was like a fax machine in the— all the way back to the '50s or the '70s?

How far back does it go? Well, it started probably in the '40s or '50s. It essentially allowed you to text. That's what you did. You texted, but it was the size of a refrigerator. And I am probably the youngest person in the world who ever used one for work because when I started selling, the fax machine was the big thing, but there were countries where faxes were illegal. A lot of African and Arab countries, faxes were illegal, so you had to use a telex. The reason they liked using telexes was everything went through the government, so the government could keep track of what— of all your communications, right? So if you were doing business with Nigeria, for instance, in 1989, you had to use a telex. You couldn't use anything else. So the reason I just mentioned that is I've gone through all sorts of different technology that people had to use, right? I remember, you know, faxes. I remember when, when it wasn't common to have a personal computer on your desk, right? You'd have an assistant who had a personal computer, and then you got a personal computer. And I learned how to use Excel, and I've been learning how to use all sorts of other stuff, but I'm way behind the curve. Some of the tools you talk about in your book I use, But some of them I don't, right? And I've actually— I'll tell you this. I've put out 4 posts on LinkedIn in the past year asking sales leaders to tell me what they had on their desktop in terms of apps and software tools to help them sell better. And I haven't had a single person give me a good answer. And I found that really interesting. People who sell really well, and I would say to them, "But aren't you using this? Aren't you using that?" And they'd be like, "No, you know, I really am not right yet." So I think you're way ahead of the curve. But again, you know, when you take a look at this and you think about the very basics of it, if the tool is going to save you eight hours a week or twelve hours a week or twenty hours a week, and you can apply that time available for selling, that's our business, right? We want our salespeople to have more time available for selling, right?

Totally. So just like anything, if you're great at sales and you decide to automate a quality process, it's powerful. Yeah, there's been a risk here is that there's generations that it's basically like, it's kind of like Photoshop. Like we all know what Photoshop is, right? Well, people that have never used a darkroom or done photography on an old school SLR, They're gonna go in, in an anesthetized, you know, Photoshop only, use the rubber stamp, unsharp mask. They're not gonna know what it means, right? They're not gonna really understand f-stops or— I'm just sure there's a lot of photographers and amateur photographers. We all took a photography class in school. Well, the same thing's happening with tech stacks. And the perfect metaphor is, I'm not a golfer. I play other sports, but if I get Tiger Woods golf clubs and I go, I will never hit par. Ever. Doesn't matter how good the tooling is. So for the folks listening to this podcast who are confident they're selling and they feel like, ah, I don't need it, I'm good, there's a variety of tools that are just, you know, incredible. You can automate your email.

Yep.

In advance, you can schedule all your emails for the next month. You can automate calls, meaning you can make more than one call at a time. You can drop voicemails automatically.

Right.

You, you can do a lot with LinkedIn, with Sales Navigator, with you know, purpose-built B2B business tools.

Right.

You can get anybody's cell phone at this point.

Right.

In a GDPR-compliant way. And I can explain how and why that exists. Obviously, you're not gonna do that in Germany or, you know, Canada with CASL. This is an international show. You have to be careful of your locality. But for US folks and Europe folks, there are companies like ZoomInfo and Cognizant that provide, you know, if it's a corporation, maybe direct lines, even for small businesses. I think ZoomInfo has 200 million In the dataset, right? You know, for your folks in APAC and Australia and Europe and the US. So what starts to happen is you get efficiency. You're not hunting around for switchboards, right? Um, there's technologies to change your area code on your phone number. So for every state you call, the, the number changes. Now, it calls into question the ethics and integrity of using these, uh, technologies, and we can talk about that.

Right.

But overall, there's so many of them. There's like 500 of them and I think 1,000. You know, why wouldn't you see if there's something there that could help you?

And that's exactly it, the way I look at something like this. So I took your book and I read it and I made myself notes. And I bet you have a number in your head, but let's say you have 500 tools you're talking about, right? I'm not gonna use those 500 tools. I'm gonna use 12 of them maybe. And here's what I've discovered in my time in selling. If each one of those tools puts another $15K or $20K in my pocket over the course of my career, right? That $10 I spent on your book, that suddenly becomes maybe $150K return on investment over the next 20, 25 years, right? And I can't guarantee people themselves. My experience is every time I take up a tool like that, I see revenue from it, right, over the course because I'm making more time. I'm making more time available to sell. I'm, you know, getting a little bit more efficiency in my sales process and I don't need all 500 tools. I need 8, 10, 12 good tools from a book like that, right? That's the way I look at it.

Yeah, that'd be a great endorsement. I appreciate that. I mean, the return on investment, I mean, they're really, how many returns are there? There's make money, save money, reduce risk and satisfy government regulation. There's definitely an investment case here for make money faster and create efficiency because you can personalize very quickly. There are tools that read the annual report, the 10-K, the 10-Q, pull snippets out of it. There's even a tool right now that can listen to all of your blogs, Zach, and just pull snippets for me. So when I'm approaching you as a business developer, I've got that intel. It's not gonna take me all those hours to listen to it all.

That's, that's really interesting. Yeah. So I'm gonna talk a little bit more about the specific Yeah. The specifics of what my listeners typically do is we typically work in channel sales internationally. And the way I typically look at this, if you can think, I don't know how much you've interacted with channel sales, but most of the time we're dividing up the sales process between what I would call headquarters, our regional sales manager who's in the field, but an employee, And then my distributor, right? And most of the time I'm gonna say that typically the top of the funnel is handled by the distributor, with the exception of things coming into our website or things coming into us at trade shows, or we put out a press release from headquarters and somebody reaches out and we get that lead and then we send that to the distributor. But that's, let's say, 5% of the leads, right? Mm-hmm. Most of the top of the funnel we are giving to the distributor. And what I came— what I was thinking all day while I was reading that book was I was thinking, okay, so what would happen if I put a couple of people working, filling the top of the funnel? Now let's say I expect from the distributor to put in 100 leads a year, and I can put in another 25 for him.

Right.

And I can do that in a centralized location. And I believe the way I'm thinking about this, if I had 3 people working on that solidly from a centralized location and they were working on my 50 distributors, putting in, say, a week a year for each country, right, those 3 people could probably add 25% of leads to each one of those distributors. So the distributor, if I expected from him 100 leads and my team was giving him an additional 25 leads, my expectation was each one of those distributors is gonna increase his sales by 25%, right? At a very reasonable investment for me. So I'm looking at that and I'm thinking, this is doable. And I had never in my life thought about doing it before, right? But after I read this, I was like, this is really doable. I could put together a team like that. And I could, I could add to the top of the funnel of each one of my distributors. And it also makes me more sticky to my distributors because if I'm doing this, I'm giving them something that no other manufacturer is giving them, right? I'm helping them on the top of the funnel and nobody else is doing that, right? So there are some big advantages to shifting the paradigm of how we work with our channels for the top of the funnel.

Right.

And we couldn't do this. I couldn't do this without the automation, right? It wouldn't be cost effective to do it. So that was, that was one of the things I picked up. And here I am interviewing you, but I'm talking way more than you are. So I'm gonna throw the ball back in your court. What do you think of that, Justin?

Yeah, it's a great idea. I mean, anywhere where you need to build business from thin air, you'll need a list, you need the ability to target. So you'll need to take, you know, what is the lead source? What is the ideal customer profile? What are the personas within that customer profile? You can very rapidly build lists of companies with this technology. You can use intent data to see where these prospects are searching in advance, which gives you the ability to cut the lists. So you're working, you know, if you have a target addressable market of 10,000 entities, Right. could you find the 10 or 20% that have a higher propensity to be a suspect to be in the buying window. Then you can go out in this motion where you can start calling, you know, you can make 200 dials in an hour.

Right.

You're connecting live every, every 3 minutes instead of an 8-hour day where you talk to 4 receptionists.

Right.

So imagine you could work one country to the next country quite rapidly, or one, you know, locality, especially with the automations of emails. You could have different sequences for different verticals and regions, and you could set stuff up that kind of runs on different time zones. And you don't necessarily have to spray and pray. The stuff can be highly targeted. You customize to the first name. There can be custom fields of the company growth or some signals in it.

Right.

There's ways to make the automated emails seem handwritten and personal, which I go into in the book. And then you have really a sales development effort. They're called SDR teams or sales development reps, and they're very common in Silicon Valley and software, but it's just a team of humans that are using automation. Think about it, they're sitting in the self-driving Uber, they're helping to program these weapons. So it's not necessarily a term of war, but anytime you think of machines and automation, you kind of think of industrialization. Well, So I'll tell you how I was talking about this to somebody today.

I don't know how much you're familiar with the early Industrial Revolution, but when they started spinning cotton thread in the late 18th century, right, you took— it used to be it would take a woman about a year to make thread from 30 pounds of cotton. Once you had a spinning wheel, an automated water-powered spinning wheel, You could do that in about 3 minutes. So you could go from a year-long work to about 3 minutes, and then you could set up 20 or 30 or 50 of those spinners going. But you still needed a couple of people to watch them to make sure they didn't jam and feed the cotton into them and all of that. And that's the way I'm looking at this technology. You need people to run it, but they're going to be able to do much more work than was able to be done, you know, without the technology. Does that jive with what you're saying, Justin?

Yes. So I actually kind of talk about the first industrial revolution, and I talk about the concept of trying to improve horses by getting faster horses— there's a Henry Ford quote, right— versus the automobile. And now we have Tesla. And so every time there's been a technology, there's been a resistance to it, whether that was radio, TV, Yeah. You think about just medicine and antibiotics in the Old West. Someone got an ear infection, would die. So, this stuff is looked at as sort of this sorcery and black magic. But the truth is there are inherent caps with Gmail. There's certain throttles. You can't really go wild with it. It is regulated. And we have things like GDPR. So, there's regulations that you do the work. As you read the book, there's a whole creed and a code. What I'm saying is you automate If 70% of what a salesperson does can be automated, it's actually a humanitarian crisis because you're going to work and 70% of what you're doing is a $3 an hour task that can be sent offshore. So why, why are you doing that? So why don't you free up to have more time? Now, even if it's simply you can get a 50-hour week of work done in 25 hours, your productivity and revenue might be the same and it gives you your life back.

Exactly. And you think about your typical high-performing salesperson in their 20s or 30s, right? And the joke is they're not seeing their kids, right? They're, you know, they're, they're coming home after a long day at work and then they're putting in 3 or 4 hours of work. They're doing a little work on the weekends. Good high-performing salespeople, we think of them as killing themselves. And if 70% of that or 50% of that isn't work they need to be doing, why should they be killing themselves? Could they get back to being a high-performing salesperson and still spend time with their kids, right? Still have a hobby, get to the gym, that kind of thing. So yeah, I think you're exactly right on that, right?

It's strange. I mean, I was able to— I was working full-time. I was able to get my hours down to 5 hours a day and then 3 hours a day, then 1 hour a day. Now my funnel got really full, so then I was spending all my time on the mid-funnel because I had full-cycle roles. So I was doing more contract work, I had more time to make my proposals nicer, I could go deeper on them, do more research instead of being frantic and frazzled of trying to prospect, throw together the proposal, get into the RFP.

What things that I've done before dealing with like how do you make it easier to put together a proposal quicker, right? And that's, you know, that's again, you know, if you have to put together a 100-page proposal, can you make that work easily, more easily, right? Can you do things to make that easier, right? And stuff like that. So all of these issues, we should be doing exactly what we're good at with our time and not necessarily the busy work, right? And that all helps.

Yep, I'm with you. So it's really 4th Industrial Revolution. Like, we're not sitting in the meatpacking industry with horrible conditions. Question is, what do you want to automate and what shouldn't you automate? Anything that is a low-level manual task, anything that is repetitive. Now, there are certain very high-level strategic prospects where you might want to not automate and do manual touches, but there are pieces of automation that can go pull information to help you do the research. That can improve the data quality to help you pick your targets.

Right.

To help you figure out in advance who in that organizational chart has bought before or have intel on the competitors. So there's a bunch that comes down to targeting data and research in the book that could be applicable as you're looking at territories or data systems. And then there's a, there's a lot of different enabling technologies around recording remotely. So for managers who have distributed teams, that they can listen to calls, whether you're listening to Channel BD calls Or you're listening to Zoom calls or discovery calls or the actual presentation, how are you coaching your teams remotely?

You know what was my biggest tool that I took up using in the past year was asynchronous video communication, right? Voxer. And what I found was I could coach people in much less time at my convenience On a 24-hour cycle. So if I was working with somebody in Pakistan, I could do a 90-second coaching call every day with them, send it to them. They would get it in their morning, answer me back, and we didn't have to— it didn't have to be me in the middle of the night and him in the middle of the night talking over something. Those type of things. And 2, 3 years ago, I didn't know anybody who was using them. People— I'm sure people were, but I wasn't. So, you know, even little things like that help out a lot, right?

Yeah, this has been a revolution in remote recording. There's these companies called Gong and Chorus. They record everything, all the calls. So imagine having, you know, this repository of all the calls of all the reps, the distributors, the channel, everything that's within your purview, then running analytics over it. What are the listen-to-talk times? Having printouts of sort of emotional sentiment, and it goes through and it uses natural language processing to read the call. Then it can benchmark the call to other data. It can improve your forecast. There's also these really cool forecasting tools, process mining tools. They run into your CRM system and analyze your deals and analyze past deal flow and benchmarks.

Right.

There's all this interesting predictive analytics and big data crunching that you can apply to help improve the accuracy of your forecast. And then you have this thing running over the top, which is algorithmic guided selling, where it's looking at your entire funnel, all the motions that you're doing, And it's basically like once you have a lot of deals in your pipe, even from business development, the channel, if you have 20 deals, 50 deals, you start to lose track of that one's 45 days old, that's 110 days old. I forgot to send that PDF. I forgot to follow up. Oh, that deal, it analyzed the email, the stakeholder rolled over, that person's not there. It checked. So you don't even know that your 6th deal, there's a bad email address in it.

Right.

You should have multi-threaded to multiple people. So you have, you can have technology watching the watchers, which is really interesting.

That's fascinating. So I got it. I'll ask you a very specific question. One of the things that I consider a big part of what I do is keep track of conversion rate of stages of my sales process for sales reps, right? And in some jobs, I've had 200 different— 200 people from various distributors Working on like a 13-stage sales process, and I'm watching their conversion rate from stage to stage because it gives me a good feel of how they are at the different stages. And I've always done that manually, and it probably was one of those things that took up the most of my time. And I'm guessing, you know, you're smiling now. I'm guessing there's a software that would do that for me on a daily basis. Yeah.

The tricky piece is you have to, like, there are so many different right now. So we're in this crazy explosion, Cambrian explosion time where you start to talk to sales leaders in these tech companies and they're saying, well, I'm paying $2,000 per rep per month. It's like astronomical or $5,000 per rep per month. It gets crazy. I can't even say it out loud. Marbles in my mouth. The thing is though, someone somewhere along the way, it's a smart sales leader like you, they've done the return on investment. So you wonder why they're buying it. Sales leaders especially are not buying this because it's vaporware. They're seeing a return. So something about it is, you know, so you need to test it. You need to, you know, trial it in your organization, see if it works. Like you said, don't buy it all.

Right.

Try to get a tool that consolidates several of the things that you need, because what's happening now is there are so many point solutions, just, you just—

They're really—

75 of each. So And then you start buying them up and it's just like anything, like a budget, like your burn rate, you're just spending too much, your margin's gone. So the key is to start— so what they're starting to do is a bunch of M&A and there's a bunch of merging and what I call technology consolidation.

Right.

So there's 2 forces. There's subspecialization, which is breaking up the revenue supply chain of what sellers do. And then there's vendor tool consolidation. And we saw this with CRM, right? Salesforce, what doesn't it do now?

But I'll tell you what, here's the thing with Salesforce, and I don't wanna dump on Salesforce, but it is very expensive for what most people need. I was a Salesforce guy for 15 years. Now I use HubSpot because HubSpot is about an eighth of the price and it gives me what I need. It doesn't give me everything that I get from Salesforce, but I found I wasn't using everything. So the question's gonna be, a lot of people are gonna find that Some of these packages are too expensive and they're not using all the features, I think.

Yeah. So what's been really interesting is I've worked with a— I have this expression called MacGyver your Frankenstack. So everybody has a Frankenstack, right? The truth is, even with an unlimited budget, there's no way to string together all the tooling without it looking like a bit of a Rube Goldberg machine. Not all the platforms talk, the integrations are not all made. It's kind of like Steve Jobs and Apple. He didn't want it to integrate, so there's LinkedIn Sales Navigator does not have an open API, basically application programming interface. These are the pipes to be able to push data in and out. They don't want the executive data going out and it's a decision. So there's also all these little tools that have sprung up. It's an exciting time, especially the last 2 years. 5 years ago, 6 years ago, it was really enterprise-grade tools and there was some fast-moving tech companies that could afford it. Just like, you know, the cell phone in the original Wall Street, the giant cell phone.

Yeah.

StarTech, that was $1,000. What's funny now, cell phones are $1,000 too, but, um, it became smaller and smaller and more affordable. So what we have is we have better tech, faster tech, and nearly free per every category. You know, if you need cell phones, you can try them out. You can pay for cell phone. If you need to automate emails, there's nearly free tools to do it. If you need to automate calls.

Yeah. So yeah, I'm using 8 or 10 things that are virtually free stuff.

Yeah.

You know, $5 or $8 or $10 a month. For really getting good value and a couple of things I'm using that are totally free, right?

That's the way to go depending on the size of your business or how valuable the tool is. Now, if you find, if you have a really big pain that you're just never getting the calls, get cell phone data, get Lucia, get LeadIQ, get a specialist in that because it'll save you so much time. It'll make you real money. I mean, some people are poking around for hours every day just to get phone numbers or you just can't. You frankly cannot. And the value of having a voicemail and actually having a live human on the other side, yeah, it's invaluable.

Yeah. Yep. And that's actually one of the first things I spent money on last year was getting telephone numbers with good information. And there are a lot of good vendors. I probably tried out 10 or 12 different vendors over a period of a few months. Yeah.

So what I want to stress to the listeners, test everything. The vast majority of these vendors, if you read the book, they'll let you test it. And then based on that, understand the ROI, check with your friends, see what they're using, look in affiliated industries, other channel sellers, what are they using? And then try to make a judgment call on what you really need. And if you don't need something, look for it nearly for free. So that's like—

Those are all great pieces of advice, Justin. Thanks.

Yeah, for sure. Because I want to help, I want to help your tribe be successful with this. I just, Can't believe that there's any type of selling on this earth that wouldn't be susceptible to some tech stack optimization.

I'll tell you what, I, I would say that a lot of the people I work with have a long way to go on their tech stack optimization. Because one thing that I've seen with distributors, you know, you get distributors all over the world, and they are small shops that have built everything up themselves. And they're learning a lot of this themselves. And very often they don't know, know how to do it. So Again, I'm gonna say this aimed at international sales managers. If you can help your distributors get more tech savvy, you're going to be more sticky. You're going to be the guy who gave them tools to sell more, and that's really valuable. Thanks a lot, Justin. Anything else you want to tell us about what you do and where we can find you and how we can interact with you and so on?

Yeah, thanks, Zach. I mean, at this point, I think it's really cool if you have any aspirations to use technology to power your sales. That's the book, Tech-Powered Sales. It's on Amazon. I have a bunch of websites and communities and masterminds to get deeper into it. But if that's, you know, triggers your fancy, if you wanna do some top funnel, if you wanna do some automation around the channel or direct, this is the way to go. If you just wanna explore the subject matter, it's called Tech-Powered Sales. And I'm Justin Michael, no relation to George Michael, and I don't sing as well.

So there you go. And yeah, and I'll just say really this, I review a lot of sales books. This is a very niche book, but you will definitely, you know, and not to diminish it at all, but I finished it in a day, right? I sat down and read it. It's doable. You can read it in a day. You can make yourself notes. I'm gonna be going back to this book probably for the next couple of years to the notes I made. It's a really good way to invest $10 into getting return on investment. Anyway, thank you very much for your time, Justin. We appreciate it. And everybody, you've been listening to Conversations That Grow Global Sales. I hope you enjoyed this podcast. I appreciate Justin's time. Thank you very much.

Thank you.