152: Trish Bertuzzi On The Future Of SDR Teams

What's up, everybody? Thank you so much for joining us for another episode of Make It Happen Mondays with your host, John Barrows. This episode is brought to you by our partners, Gong, Vanilla Soft, Vidyard, and Sales Loft. Today, our very special guest is the one and only Trish Bertuzzi, founder and CEO of The Bridge Group. Let's get into it as John and Trish talk about what it is to be successful in the sales development space today. Thanks a lot for joining us, everybody. We hope you enjoy the show. Let's get in and make it happen. Good afternoon, everybody. This is John Barrows to Make It Happen Mondays, and I am sitting here with one of my favorite people on the planet. Somebody who actually needs no introduction is a great friend of mine, Trish Bertuzzi.

What's up, Trish? Well, you know, the usual, working for a living. Try still, right? Meaning of life. Same old, same old. I was going to say, I thought you were tired. We had talked a while back and you were like, you're moving down to Florida, you're kicking back a little bit, but you're back, you're grinding harder than ever right now, aren't you? I pretty much am, yeah. You know, things change. Shit happens. Talk about things changing daily. And that's what we want to chat about. So for everybody who doesn't know, Trish, right? What's your actual title now with The Bridge Group? I don't even know. I'm actually an SDR, but my title is CEO. Okay, so you're still CEO. I did because I know. All right, cool.

But founder and CEO of The Bridge Group who do some fantastic work specifically and legitimately, we always say this, wrote the book on sales development, right? I did. Sales development playbook. Available on Amazon. And I highly recommend you go check that out because I think right now, I actually proactively, for everybody listening here, I proactively reached out to Trish because I need somebody who's smarter than me to talk me off the ledge here a little bit to help me understand where this SDR community is going and how we can figure it out right now. So I'm going to briefly set the stage with what I'm seeing and then I want Trish to beat the shit out of it and come up with some ideas on how we can help people figure it out both from a management standpoint, but also from a rep standpoint.

Is that all right, Trish? Perfect. All right, cool. So here's what prompted the conversation. I'm seeing SDR, like tons of organizations that I'm working with are just hacking their SDR teams, like literally just firing all of them. And I mean like good SDRs too. I mean, the Glassdoor, there was one rep who was the rep of the year last year and he posted on LinkedIn his award and he's like, I was the rep of the year last year and now I'm looking for a job. And my thought process here, at least what I'm seeing is in a growth economy, the SDR model makes all those sense in the world. To a certain degree, it's a cost of sale, but there's a growth component to it. You bring a kid in, you get them, you know, their teeth kicked in a little bit, you help educate them, they grow into a nice AE, and you got this growth engine that kind of churns.

Predictable revenue, fantastic. Down economy. I think a lot of people are questioning, all of a sudden CFOs are starting to look at cost of sale a lot closer, right? Usually VPs kind of have the autonomy to do whatever the hell they want to do as long as they're hitting their numbers. Now CFOs are looking at everything and they're looking at SDR communities going, wait a minute, what's the value out of this, right? Where am I getting value out of this group? Not only in normal times, but also in times like this. I mean, there's SDR teams right now that are throwing up goose eggs, right? I mean, goose eggs. So let's talk about that perception and the actual reality from your standpoint. Okay, I'm going to start with the term value of SDRs.

Yep. Right? Please. Because I have seen people do battle CFOs versus CMOs versus CROs. What's the value of this SDR team? And the challenge is people really have their head up their asses when it came to understanding exactly how much value in SDR can add. So let me tell you what I'm talking about. Please. SDRs are, when people think about value, they think about revenue, right? Closed one, it's in the books, it's revenue. In reality, we're only going to win 25% of the deals where we launch a sales process. 50% of the time, you lose to no decision or status quo. 25% of the time, you lose to your competition. And 25% of the time, you win. Been tracking that number for 30 years. It's the truth.

So you're setting your SDRs up to fail the value game by not just looking at that 25%, right? What they do is look at all of the meetings and say, we are not getting an ROI here because we're only getting that 25% number. Gotcha. That has made me crazy since the beginning of time because in my mind, if your SDR puts you in front of the right guy at the right company and the meeting happens, game over. Right. I'll tell you what part of the problem is. Our salespeople, and I'm sorry, salespeople, but this is the truth, have lost the ability to launch a sales process off an introductory meeting. Okay. So let me make sure I'm hearing this right. Two pieces on this. One is, instead of looking, like you're saying that they're looking at the whole picture and saying whatever, but you say that of those 25%, which one have been generated by SDRs?

Is that the metric that we should be looking at? Yes. Okay. So that's piece one because I agree with you. It's like, hey, we're not getting enough meetings and revenue, but they don't look at, okay, of the 25% that closed, how much of that was generated by SDRs compared to everything else? Right. They're looking at the whole thing when you know you're not going to get 75% of it anyway. So your SDRs are setting out with a 75% value deficit, for lack of a better term. So why don't the, so I'm going to table that other part that you just point there, because I want to dig into that as far as I'm met, because what we've turned into, like, and shame on me, and I think this is the, you know, growth economies hide a lot of warts type of thing.

We track stuff, but we haven't, we've never been like maniacal at where leads are coming from, what channels are working, what our conversion ratios. I mean, I have a general sense, you know, okay, whatever, but now we are going back and we are saying, okay, what channels are working and, and are, do you see with all the work that you do with SDR teams, is that, do they not track that? Do they not track the, the closed revenue and what percentage of closed revenue comes from what channel? They track it by channel. So they know exactly how much closed one business came from the SDR team. The problem is the measuring stick they're comparing it to is highly inflated because they're not saying we're only going to win 25% of the deals anyway.

So they're saying our close rate with our SDR team is 25%, but when they're doing the ROI, they're going against 100%. Ah, okay. Ah, that makes more sense. Okay. And then what you're saying, what was the, what the other part of what you were saying right there, because they don't, the AEs or the, the sales professionals have lost the ability to, to, to take that initial meeting with the right person and then, and start a real sales cycle with it. Is that because, and let's just call it what it is. Cause I, I think it is just pure fucking laziness with a, with an AE. Cause I've seen that I've seen the, the, the predictable revenue model create laziness in AEs. And then like, and let's go very basic here with band qualification.

I know so many AEs that if a deal isn't basically handed to them on a silver fucking platter that they, they throw it back and say, this is an unqualified lead. And where for me, all I give a shit about when it comes to qualification is, is there a need there? Is there a need for what I have? Right. Because if there's a real need, I can get to power. I can expedite a timeline. I can find budget if I'm a good AE. So is that the problem? Is it they've gotten lazy for the most, and obviously we're talking in general, out generalities here, but is that the problem or is it the skills problem? So certainly not throwing AEs under the bus. Let me just make sure I'm perfectly clear on that. Because if they don't have the skills, I'm blaming their management teams.

That's a whole nother issue, but it's, it's not laziness. It's, they don't know how to have the conversations, unless they've been through your training, of course, John, that allow them to uncover need. Like they can ask, does that hurt? Does that hurt? Does that hurt? And if it's no, no, no, no, they don't know how to then spin it or evolve the conversation. Well, why doesn't that, why isn't that a problem for you? How are you currently addressing that? And are you really happy with the result? You know what I mean? They just like, oh, you said no. Okay. And I think that's exasperated in a time like we are right now, because the ultimate, the ultimate objection right now is COVID-19 budget freeze, right?

And it's so, it's like, I can't tell you how many reps I've worked with in the past, you know, three months at this point, that literally, or managers who are telling me that as soon as the rep here is COVID-19 budget freeze, they throw up their arms and say, okay, nevermind, you know, and they run away from that. They don't, they don't dig into it. They don't try to understand what the real situation is, what that business is, but people are looking much more short term right now. So I think it is pain oriented in a lot of cases, right? So if that pain isn't there, or if the pain is real, and it can't be solved, I think people are flaking because they're always looking for that easy road to who's making decisions right now, what industries are better than others.

So I'm going to avoid the crap as opposed to try to dig into it. Right. So, so with that, with, because I think there's a perception reality component to a lot of this, as far as the SDR role specifically. Yeah. How, what do you, what are you suggesting to teams right now who, where you have an SDR leader, like panicking, saying we're not throwing up the, we're like, yes, it was, it was, we were, we were kind of, I don't want to say ignored for a while now in a growth economy and everybody's kind of happy. We're getting meetings and we're having fun with this. Now everybody's looking at us. Our numbers are down. Nobody's picking up the phone. Like I I'm, I'm worried my whole team's going to get hacked and myself, I'm going to get hacked here.

So what, let's start with the SDR leadership and what they need to be doing right now internally to position themselves and their teams in the right. And then I want to go to the reps. Okay. It depends on what you mean by SDR leadership, right? So there's leadership manager, director, and then there's VP who hopefully has a seat at the table. This isn't an SDR question or answer. It's a question and answer for the executive leadership team of the company in that, have you pivoted your strategy, your message, and maybe even your solution to reflect the new reality? Yeah. Right. SDRs can only do so much. Yeah. If you're still focusing them at massively impacted industries with the same growth strategy messages, or we can save you time, or whatever the case may be, yeah, you're going to end up getting rid of them because they're not going to be successful.

If you've taken the time to think through your go-to-market strategy and pivot to an industry that maybe is not so impacted and changed your message and developed new content that addresses problems of the now, then maybe you can save your team, generate pipeline, generate some revenue, can sail through this. Yeah, and it's funny, you know, I've been beating this drum now for about two to three weeks. I firmly believe that moving forward here, okay, look, things aren't going to get less weird, okay? This isn't going to be the less pandemic that we face. This isn't going to be the less massively disruptive thing, right? Oh, no, you just told me the locusts are coming. Yeah, I mean, legitimately, the locusts, after 17 years, in 2020, the fucking locusts are going to, billions of locusts are going to wake up and, like, are you shitting me right now?

I was kidding. I'm like, what next? Locusts? You're like, yep. Yep. As a matter of fact. So, thank God they're not up here in Massachusetts. You know, I think they're a little bit further down south. But the thing is this, is I genuinely believe that agility is the number one competitive differentiator moving forward. And that is companies, like companies who are agile, to your point, that can adjust and pivot to say, okay, because the ones who are going to die right now are the ones who are literally like, nope, we're just going to wait this out. Like, we're going to keep our offering the way it is, we're going to, you know, hunker down and just wait. And I love people who say, oh, I can't wait for the economy to turn back on.

Or I can't wait for things to go back to normal. It's like, shut the fuck up. Like, normal? What the hell is normal at this point, right? So, agility, from a business standpoint, right? Yes. To your point, to reshape your offering, to reshape your value proposition, to find out who your new ICP is, to find out the priorities of the new persona. And I think that is incumbent upon leadership to do that. So, you can give your team a chance and restructure it. But now let's talk about, let's lower it down from the organization standpoint, because I firmly believe that. And shame on any leader right now that is not reshaping their value proposition, reshaping their offerings to be able to hit the new value, right?

I'm going to take that one step further. Please. Shame on any leader who's not on the phone making calls to see what it's like. Make calls. Talk to your buyers. How, in God's name, are you going to understand what's going on in the market if you're sitting in your ivory tower? So, the big recommendation I make for everyone, because everybody's asking me, and I'm sure they're asking you, hey, Joe, what works right now? What messaging? What's the right tone to take? And I'm like, I don't know. I'm like, shit. Like, you know who does know? Our customers. Yeah. So, if a leader right now, and it's almost funny, like, when I do these trainings, and I have the leaders on the phone, and I make this recommendation, you can see their head pop up like, oh, that's a good idea.

And I'm like, this isn't, I'm not a rocket scientist here. Like, I drank my way through four years of college. Like, you don't have to be that bright to figure this out. But, but it's like, hey, your personas, they're arguably right now, you have customers that get value out of what you do, right? Or else you wouldn't be in business. So, if you go out of business, then they get, they lose the value that they get from you. So, we're all, the whole, we're all in this together. Why not go to your customers? And this is what we're doing. We have three personas, VPs of sales, CROs, VPs of enable, just like you. So, let's talk to three, let's do a Zoom session, where I bring one of them on from an existing customer who's doing well, and say, I'm going to interview you in front of my team.

How have your decision process has changed? What value do you get out of my solution? If somebody were to call you right now, what would you respond to? What are you being held, how have your priority, you know, all that stuff, and extract that to then go give the team that insight so that they can go make phone calls, and you also make phone calls to those prospects and translate that new norm, right? Yeah. It's an easy thing to do. So, this is where customer success and sales can really align with that, right? If customer success will let sales in. Yeah, well, that's a whole other. And that's a whole other, that's a whole other podcast. Yeah. It is. You know, talking about pivoting, like, so sales development, we've always got this major chubby out of new logos, right?

For lack of a better term. Yeah. You know, new logo, new logo, new logo, new logo. Okay. Well, retention is the new acquisition. 100%. If you're smart. Yeah. So, if you have a sales development team, and they're posting goose eggs on the new logo side, but you have a nice customer base, why not focus them there? Yeah. Right? Why not focus them there? Cross-sell, up-sell, customer-sat. Yep. You know, what's the guy from Clary's name? Kyle Cameron? Clary. Oh, yeah. Yeah, yeah. I think it's Kyle Cameron. Anyway, he's incredibly prolific on LinkedIn. He had his team, right, call into the customer base and ask them to write G2 crowd reviews. Gosh, you can get value out of a team that can communicate with your customers and buyers creatively.

You just have to invest the time in it. And that's actually one of the things that I've been thinking about this for about a month just because what I was noticing a couple months ago was decision makers were all of a sudden disappearing, right? And they didn't want to take any conversations with new. And Jeff Hoffman is the one who kind of put this, really got me to solidify this mindset, which is, you know, what he says is in a growth economy, the top, all normal rules apply in sales. Top-down approach. You go after, you do some homework. You align yourself with the initiatives of the business. The executive says, cool, I want to do this. And they can make the decision almost autonomously, like without a lot of fanfare, right?

They can make what would might be or might be considered an unpopular decision. Because look, as an executive, you and I both know, I mean, even though we work with small teams, we see a vision that we try to articulate and translate to our organization. But you and I have a different view of our organization than the people on the ground floor, right? And so I can make that decision, even though they might not think it's the best one, but I have insights that they might not have. Now, in a down economy, he says, like nobody's willing to make an unpopular decision, right? So what happens here, instead of the top-down approach, the bottom-up approach is actually a really valid approach. Because what happens is you gather insights, real insights.

We guess all the time on what we think is the right message, what we think a good value, you know, we find a trigger and we make an assumption that because that thing happened, hey, you might need my stuff, right? Yep. I'd say we stop guessing. And so what we've done is we've unleashed, you know, James, who's our SDR, basically, we've unleashed him to say, him and Morgan now are working together as an SDR AE. And what they're doing is once a week, they're picking one tier one account. And what James is doing, his mandate is not to get meetings with the executives. His mandate is to call into the frontline sales reps and ask a list of five or six questions and also do research on them to gather insights and create a Google Doc that has all the insights, all the triggers, all the information, and the information from the SDRs.

And the end of the week, him and Morgan get together to talk about what, all right, now what's the strategy? Now, the next week, Morgan uses that to go top up to the executives and say, hey, we've gathered all this real insight into your business and we have a real hypothesis of how we can help. Where James then picks another account and goes after it. While Morgan's going up here, James is now going, again, bottom up on the next week. So it's week after week after week. So again, shifting the approach here to relax some of the qualification criteria on the SDRs and say, go get insights. So welcome to the 80s and 90s. Okay. Really? Okay. So that was called team selling. Back in the 80s and 90s, people would use, they still called it inside sales, but it was called team selling.

And your inside rep was responsible for doing exactly that. And did you ever read a book selling DeVito? Of course. Yeah. Okay. DeVito letter. Yeah. Right? Yep. That's what that is. Well, it's the insights that they gained that puts into that letter, right? Exactly. So that used to be called team selling. People didn't like it because they couldn't tie those specific numbers to it. Are we getting our value here? Are we getting our ROI from these people? And, you know, you have to have a process, a methodology, be well-trained AEs to be able to tell the story, to take the information, craft the story, and deliver it well. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I think that's the next step of the challenge, right?

Because, well, I think, and this is where I think there's real value, but that's the hard part of this is how do you measure that? That, and I don't want to say subjective value, but how do you measure that? Because I think, I go back to this, like, we are lazy. We're in this transition world right now where I think, like, when we grew up in sales, it was definitely a numbers game, right? Yeah. And whatever. Now everybody understands quality is the answer. But the problem is, is quality is super hard to coach to. You know what's easy for me to coach to as a manager? Make 50 dials a day. I know. Hit your numbers. Like, get 13 meetings this month or whatever that is. And if you don't do it, what's wrong with you?

So I think everybody fundamentally understands account-based marketing and quality, but nobody knows how to track the subjective to tie it to value. Any suggestions on how to look at things today outside of the qualified meetings? What are some other metrics that organizations should be looking at or gearing their SDRs towards that they can point to to say, okay, it might not be direct line of sight to revenue here, but it's more of, like, a marketing function. Like, you know, marketing is always a little bit of a hard ROI, too, because, like, brand, like, how does that help? Like, no, we want how many leads did you generate? And if we talk to them about brand, it's like, yeah, you talk to a CF about, well, no, we have a good brand out there.

It's like, I don't give a shit about brand. How much money did you generate, right? So how do we back out from that? And what are some of those things that we should be looking at? So I think now is the time to look at trends in our conversations. Like, who has more conversations with customers than SDRs, right? I mean, people are picking up the phone again. You know that. I know that. I think we're having more conversations than we've ever had before. So if you structure the conversation appropriately so you can gather insights, analyze those insights, and report on those insights, that can lead you to a more successful outcome than if you're just saying, oh, yeah, call to connect ratio to conversion ratio.

So what happened in the conversation? Yeah, I love that. Because you know what that does is, and it's what we're doing. Like, when I went to Agile, so I told my team, no, no, no, now we are going to track. I want, we started a spreadsheet just to see what I wanted to track, and now we're putting it in Salesforce. And it's every single conversation. Where did it come from? Who did you talk to? What level of power were they at? What level of interest were they? Where are they on their continuum of decision-making and all that other stuff? And then we're looking at that data on a weekly basis on dashboards now to say, where are those trends so that we can make adjustments next week? And you can't do that unless you actually value that information and have a way to capture it and analyze it.

And I think we've always put value on the hard, like, the meeting, the conversion, when really the value was in the conversation, but we're ignoring that. And that's why, I mean, that's why tools like Chorus and Gong and those type of things are actually invaluable, right? I could not live without conversational intelligence. Like, every conversation I have is recorded. The value there in so many things, in bringing someone else into my sales process that's on my team. If I have a conversation with you and you're part of a committee, I send you the recording of our conversation so you don't have to kind of repeat everything we talked about. It can be shared when it comes to writing a proposal.

You can use their own, oh, please don't get me going. Yeah. Well, and I, but I think I love that mentality in general of turning your SDR into more of a, well, not more of, but like a data intelligence team. Well, like a market, because what I fear all the time is, yeah, an analyst, right? Because what I fear is, I love data, I love Gong, I love Chorus, I love the data that they produce. But I always tell people, use that as a baseline to compare yours against. Don't take that as gospel, okay? Because people say, well, what's the best cadence? I don't know. The best cadence, I don't know. Do you sell to CIOs? Do you sell to VPs of sales? Do you sell to directors of whatever? What industry are you in, right?

Because it's going to be different. No matter what you sell, you're going to be different than whatever the baseline is. But at least use that baseline and then unleash your SDRs to figure out the data points to compare against that so you can see if those trends are the same as yours. And if not, create your own trends. You know, you talk about A-B testing all the time. All the time, yeah. A-B testing is the keys to the kingdom. Absolute keys to the kingdom. So, Gong came out with research that said that the hottest call to action nowadays is… Yeah, is the soft one. Yeah. The soft one. Is the let me know or hey, you know… Are you interested in having a conversation on this topic? Yeah. Not… Are you interested in… Not let's talk.

Not give me 15 minutes of your time and are you free tomorrow at 3 o'clock? You know that's… So, now we're embedding that in some of the sequences we're writing for our clients to A-B test it. Because it works with some buyers, but it might not work with all buyers. Right. So, you know, A-B testing, keys to the kingdom. So, all right. So, let's talk now about that rep who is… Because I think we've addressed the wholeheartedly and violent agreement here as far as… The organization needs to be agile. They need to adjust their approach to the new normal, new offering, new… Right? So, the reps have the better tools. Management needs to start looking at data in a different way so that we can start collecting it and analyzing it and making better decisions.

Yep. Now, that's all well and good. But I would… I don't want to put a percentage on it, but I would guess that the vast majority of sales teams are not doing either one of those things. So, you're a rep right now. Yeah. You're in an organization where your boss is, makes… Hey, you know what? Instead of 50 dials, Trish, you got to make 75. We got to turn up the volume here. Right? And you're looking at this and you're now at home. And this is the other… Just the thing that kills me about this pandemic thing, right? Is the SDR role… You've seen this. I've wrote it before. And you and I are in agreement. It is the hardest job in sales. Yes. Period. To get an ass whooping. And what made it somewhat tolerable was that you were in a bullpen with a bunch of other SDRs, getting your ass kicked just like all the rest of them.

Right. And when you got crushed on a call, you could like turn around to your friend and be like, Whoa, that was terrible. You know what I mean? And like have some fun around it. So there was camaraderie and all that other stuff. But now you are sitting in your house, in your apartment, by yourself, getting your ass… With a cat. With a cat. Getting your ass handed to you right now. It's hard. Demoralized. Your boss isn't giving you support. What do you do to have some level of sanity and put yourself in a position to be successful, not just now, but also to where things are moving towards? What do you give that… What do you tell that rep? Because like usually I would say, hey, if you don't have an organization that's supporting you, fuck off, go find another job.

Right now, unemployment's 18, whatever it is, 17%, 16%, good numbers just came out recently, which I was actually encouraged about today. But still, it's a shit show out there as far as jobs are concerned. So I can't sit there and say, go find another job. What do you do? What do you do? I drink, but you know. Yeah, I smoke a shitload of weed, so. Yeah, yeah. To each his own. It depends on the rep. You know, not every SDR became an SDR because it was their passion to get into sales, right? I would say 80% just kind of landed there through someone where you can make a lot of money, whatever the case may be. But nobody owns your… Here's what I would say to them. Nobody owns your success except for you.

If you're going to… You can't sit and wait for your management team to figure out how to make you successful if you're not working for that kind of management team. So self-educate as much as you can. And with the constraints of what you're given, don't be afraid to experiment. I love it. See, and that's where I go back to be a scientist. Yeah. Like, you hear me talk art science all the time. Art, okay, good for you. Like, if you're that good of an artist, keep going, right? But I think most of us aren't. I'm not. I'm a scientist. Like, I look at Jeff Hoffman. Jeff Hoffman is an artist. That dude, like, I watch him work. I'm like, holy shit. Like, what comes out of your mouth, I could never sell the way you sell.

Because he just has that. He's literally one of the natural-born sales reps in all the positive ways. Like, not just a sleazy sales rep. I'm not that guy. Like, I have to work my ass off. I'm a sleazy sales rep. Yeah, thanks. But I say, like, be a scientist right now. Because if you're getting beat over the head, to your point, don't be afraid to experiment. If you're getting beat over the head, make $50, make $50. Go ahead, make those $50. But track every single one of them. What happened, that type of thing. And your conversion ratios. But then take one day and do something different. Or take, go from, you know, off hours. Start to prospect in a different way. Send videos. Be personalized.

Whatever that might be. And come to your boss and say, hey, boss, I've been doing it your way for the past month right now. And I am literally got a 0.035% conversion ratio. I've done it this way. And I'm actually getting a 4% to 5% conversion ratio. Which one would you rather me do? Yeah, don't be afraid to experiment. What are some experiments? Like, give me some examples of experiment. So we're experimenting with some of our clients with not leaving phone numbers anymore. So, nobody's going to call you back anyway. So, why do that? So, we're also experimenting with, here's my mobile. You know, it depends on company policies. But here's my mobile. Feel free to call or text me back. We're experimenting with leaving response.

We're playing with LinkedIn voicemail. You have to be a first degree connection, obviously. We're experimenting with how you ask for that connection and what people get for making that connection with you. And when I say we, I mean our clients. Yeah, yeah. We need a big enough data set to validate this stuff. I'm a huge fan of your strategy, the purpose of my call. So, you're talking like, almost like micro things, too. It's not like, don't try some holistic experiment. It's just tweak something to see if something changes, right? Absolutely. And one thing at a time. Right. And don't mean jerk and say it didn't work or it did work until you have a statistically valid sampling. What would that be?

I always say I'm not a math major, so I make it 100. So, I can do the easy math here, but is there a number that you look at that says, okay, that's statistically relevant enough. So, here's an example. A rep is told to make 50 dials a day, right? Or 100 calls or whatever it is. What is, like, for me to go back to my boss and say, boss, I've done this and here are my conversion ratios so that I can articulate the problem here. What does that number look like to be, for an individual? Because I think we can get there with companies, right? You can have, and I recommend this all the time, as a team, grab one persona once a month, create a cadence, and then everybody run 30 or 40 people through that cadence, right?

So, we can get four, five, 600 data points there, right? That's where you can look at it. But as an individual, if you're not in that team environment, if you're getting your beat down, right? I now need to come up with statistically, like, what's a number that you start to look at and say, that's enough data for me to say that works or that doesn't work? Individually, I would say 50, not 100. Okay. 50 is a lot. Yeah, it is. It is. Yeah. And so, like, 50 videos, right? So, like, 50 LinkedIn videos. Like, how many responses did you get from that? Right. 50 non-calls to action. How many did I get from that? Right. Okay. Right. So, you know, it's just time to get creative. It really is. And I think that, you know, it's funny.

I talk about death of the average sales rep. You know, I was inherently worried about sales professionals because of the going, the average ones, the ones who are going through the motions and that type. But I thought technology was going to be the, you know, 10 years, it was going to slowly chip away, right? And we were going to evolve or whatever. Remember these conversations. Right? And now COVID comes and punches us all square in the mouth and it is forcing us. And there's a lot of people that are, and I'm going to, people will probably get mad at me for this. But a lot of people out there obviously got laid off for no fault of their own. They were good at what they did. They cared about their job.

And because of the organization, for whatever reason, they got fired. But there's a whole host of other ones right now that have gotten laid off because they were fucking lazy throughout the entire process and going through the motions. And literally, like, just, again, pushing play on cadences and not really trying to better themselves on a daily basis. And those are the ones I want to listen to this and say, do what we're talking about here. Become that scientist. Educate yourself. Because once the job market starts to come back, if I'm interviewing a rep and I ask them, hey, what have you been doing? Oh, you've been laid off? Yeah, that sucks. Most reps were. What have you been doing with the past month or two of your time?

And if your answer is binge watching Netflix, you know what I mean? I ain't hiring you. But if you're like, you know what? I've been following Trish Bertuzzi. I've been listening to her podcast. I've read the sales development book. I came to the Jay Barrows training. You know, 99 bucks I put out of my own pocket type of stuff. Like, those are the reps that I want to say, wake up. Yeah. What percentage of reps do you think fall into that category of ones that didn't give a shit and just got hacked because they were going through the motions? 60. I was about to say the same number. Right? So they just, but, and that's not. Let me clarify that. Yep. I'm not sure if it was because they were lazy or if it was because we plugged them into a flawed system.

That's a, that's a great point. That's a great point. Into a, yeah. And, and like the definition of insanity, you know, like doing the same thing over and over again and not being, I mean, I think that's what's happening right now is that a lot of those organizations that are making those layoffs. The reason that they're making those layoffs is because they didn't have the right infrastructure in place and they weren't using that team for the right reasons in the first place. Right. And now with, like, like I said, growth economy hides a lot of warts. Now those warts are being uncovered and those, those leaders don't have the answer to the CFO that's coming in and saying, how can you, you know what I mean?

Like prove to me some ROI on this and, and the, the, the CFO is going to go directly to meetings that lead to revenue. Like that's the metric that they're going to look at. So we, as, as SDR leaders need to say, yeah, but look at all this other shit. Like, this is how we're measuring. This is how we're adjusting. Here's the data and the insights we're gathering. So that us as an organization can actually make better decisions moving forward about where the market is going. Like for me right now, for CEOs and CFOs to not be looking at their SDR team as a, as a live data collection team to make better decisions of what my strategy is going to be moving forward. Like shame on you. You have a resource right now that is dying to add value to your organization, including product direction.

Yeah, totally. Like people could, they could make, like come up with a survey of like five or six questions that they could ask every single customer and unleash them on that and figure out where value, who cares about this stuff anymore? What components of our solution do you use? And all that other stuff and come back with the data that says, look, nobody gives a shit about this component of what we do. No, like 95% of our customers don't use this. Well, cause here's the whole thing. We're always looking to make our solutions bigger. No. Okay. What about if you stripped out 60% of the crap that nobody uses anyway, repackaged, rebranded it and sold it at a easier, more palatable price point.

This is what I keep saying to my team. I'm going for base hits. Yep. No more home runs. Nope. Not trying to hit it out of the park with huge deals. Base hit, base hit, base hit, base hit. And I think I know what that means. Well, and guess what? Those base hits will lead to home runs because eventually there will be that, that, Ooh, you know, we found the one that's doing something. And, and by the way, going back to the ground up approach, right? If you do that the right way. And this is where I talked to, you know, um, uh, Ashley over at, uh, Somersault, right. With the, with the, um, design thinking approach to selling where it's like you get into the business and you walk the floor, if you will, of, of, of, of Walmart before you sell to Walmart, right.

You sign up for their newsletter before you go after them to, to see what the experience is. So you can then bring a, a genuine insight to the business because that's what C-levels, that's what executives want right now. They need somebody to come to them with something that they don't know or a viewpoint that is, that is different than what they are seeing with their tunnel vision of where they're going. Yes. Yep. Well, shit. Cool. Um, what else, uh, what else? Is there anything else that SDRs and SDR teams that you're, that you're working with right now should be paying attention to that, that I'm not, that we're not, that you're, that you're, that you're seeing as a gap right now to say, be careful, make sure.

Right. Cause I, cause I think a lot of people are scrambling and I, and we're, there's, there's blind spots all over the place for a lot of people right now. I mean, outside of any ridiculous new piece of shit thing that happens as far as locusts and that type of thing is concerned, but, uh, like what, like the things that are within our control. Is there anything that there are gaps that you're seeing, like, make sure. Make sure you're not tone deaf. Okay. What does that mean to you? It means, first of all, it doesn't mean saying in these difficult times or whatever. I hope you're doing well today. Tone deaf means don't position yourself as a vitamin when nobody's taking vitamins right now, but they might be looking for an aspirin.

So really take a hard look at your strategy, your message, your tone, how you deliver it and make sure everything you do is aspirin focused. Yeah. Or if it is, I think if, if it is vitamin, then I think your tone going back to the gong data of call to action, shift your approach, make it be more conversational as opposed to action oriented. Like, Hey, here's, you know, based on what I know about you, it seems like this might be able to help. Is that something of interest to you? Are you already using something like that? Would you be open to a conversation about that? And just kind of, I'm telling people to use their cadences as almost like a one-way conversation. Yeah. Like, like I, I, you know me, I've always never, I've never been a big fan of like asking close ended questions in the qualification or in prospecting.

Right. You always want to say, Hey, when are you free? Not, are you free? Right. Do you have, I think actually now you can switch back to that to say, Hey, do you have something in place like this? Are you interested in having this conversation? Right. And give them the, give them these people to say, no, I'm not like, this isn't something. So you can stop wasting your time going after people that don't really care about what you do. Yeah. I read something the other day. It was that great. Openers are, do you know, are you aware of, you know, things that get people to think that you have a piece of information that maybe. Well, you know what we're having success with right now for volume cadences, right?

Obviously cadences from a personalization standpoint, you got to, you know, that's the ideal euphoric state, but again, we got to hit our numbers. So what we're doing is we're actually starting, we're doing persona driven cadences and we're like carving up the five to six priorities of that persona in that industry. And we're actually coming, yes, we're coming up with messages, but we're coming up with questions and we're actually starting all of our emails with, so Trish, you know, VP of sales. Hey, Trish, are you currently having issues getting, keeping your sales reps motivated and engaged as they're working from home through this thing? The reason I ask is because our sales training right now, from a remote delivery standpoint, is giving reps not only stuff to do from a skill standpoint, but it's actually keeping them very motivated and engaged because of the approach.

I'd love to have that conversation with you. And guess what? You can send that out to 50 VPs of sales because the idea there is you want to get the question. I kind of go out, you know, old school, right? I go to AIDA, attention, interest, desire, action, and the subject line gets my attention. The first sentence tells me whether or not I'm interested or not. And what am I interested in? Me. So either you personalize it, John, it was on your blog or that type of thing, or you ask me a question that gets me to pause for a second and go, huh, funny, that's a good question. Yeah, I just wrote that down. Thanks, John. Try it. It's cool. It works, right? Because then, and by the way, by coming up with those questions based on the personas, not only does that help, you know, you can start to, you know, do that, but also now qualification.

Yeah. When a rep gets somebody on the phone, they have this list of questions that they could ask that persona that get that persona to pause for two seconds and think. Because that's, I always say this, it's our job to get people to think right now. Like, it's not our job to feature function dump on people. They never, you know what I mean? It's to get you to go pause and go, shit, I didn't think about that. So here's my favorite question. Yeah. And I try to get us to use it. You're talking to someone, they're like, nope, nope, nope, nope, nope, nope, nope. Just ask, what about my message did not resonate with you? Yeah. You are going to learn so much. Sometimes they're going to go, you know what?

I actually wasn't paying attention. This is just a really bad time. You caught me unaware. And then you can ask for time in the future. But other times they're going to go, you know what? We're already addressing that. And here's how we're doing. You're going to learn so much. Don't be afraid to ask in the conversation, what am I missing here? See, I love that. That's, yeah. And that's like the default value, right? Because I, because the way I look at it and I, so I'll put that as a, as a, I don't know, after tertiary, whatever the next one is, primary, secondary, tertiary and quadruple area. I don't know, but it's like the primary goal right now is revenue, obviously for any business. Secondary goal is meetings that lead to revenue.

Tertiary goal is, is insights. So going back to bottom up approach and then, and then fourth is for a sales rep insights for themselves. How can I get better at this? Right? So it's like, Hey, okay, if that, if I swung and missed there, but you were willing to engage in this conversation, what about it missed? I love that. And you know what, John, we're talking a lot about SDR self-educating and trying and experimenting that goes across the entire spectrum from eight SDRs, AEs, executive leadership teams, you, me, every entrepreneur out there. Now the game has changed. And if you don't relearn the game, you're not going to be in it. So that's funny you say that. So guess what? I'm going back to school, but not school.

I think school is a joke. I'm going back to my school because the way I learn, I don't, you know me, I don't read books, you know, that type of stuff. I'm going back to school with Jeff Hoffman. I'm starting a webinar series because I learned, I remember, so, you know, like both of us, like we were on a lot of webinars, but you know, every once in a while we attend one. I don't know about you. Almost 99% of webinars I attend, it's in the background while I'm checking my emails, right? Yeah. The other day I was like, Hoffman was having, cause he's now he's in a, talk about a new norm. He, a hundred percent of his revenue was onsite. He had no remote. So he's trying to figure out how to get to the masses.

So he's doing these free webinars, but he's not recording them. It's one in one time only. And I sat there and I listened to one of them and I was like, God damn, I got a lot to learn about sales. So we're starting a series. I'm going back to school with my mentor and I'm just going to, and I'm going to ask, and I'm just going to be like, Jeff, what the fuck, man, teach me what's going on right now. Cause like the insights that when I say artists, like I sat there and I listened to him, I'm like my level of sales intellect is so, is so far below where his is that I need to up my game right now by talking to him on a consistent basis. And we're going to do a whole series around it. That's amazing.

I'll, I'll, I'll watch, you know, it's so funny because you never know where inspiration will come from. So Casey Jones, you know, we love her. She did a webinar the other day on how to become, how to start your way to becoming a thought leader on LinkedIn. Right. I don't need to talk to you about that. You still have 160 more thousand more followers than I have. Oh, you're up to, what are you up to? 200? 267. Ooh, look at you. Nice. There you go. So I wanted to tune in just to see like, because I've lost my way on LinkedIn. Yeah. Because the platform has changed. It's now a personal branding site on an information sharing site. So whatever. So I listened to Casey's webinar. I'm like, oh my God, she is so incredible.

So I called her and I said, will you do a coaching session with me? Yesterday we did a half hour call. I would say 20 minutes. We talked about business and then 10 minutes. We're talking about what's going on in the world. She gave me book referrals. I left so inspired. So one of the things I'm going to say to SDRs is if you're inspired by someone, reach out to them, ask them for some time. I am going to almost guarantee that they will give it to you and see what you can learn. Yeah. And, and, and, and I love that, but make sure it is specific with what you want to learn. Because you and like, I get it all the time. Hey, John, I'd like to just grab coffee with you. Pick your brain for 30 minutes.

Like, come on. Like, like, I don't have that many hours in the day. But if you're specific and saying, John, based on what you said here, I need to know about that. I need, I want to learn about this specific thing. Because first of all, and by the way, first of all, do your homework first. You know what I mean? Like, go out and do some research on that person as far as what they've already put out there. Because nine times out of 10, I'll send you a link to a webinar podcast that I did that addresses the exact thing you're talking about. But after you consume that, then reaching out to somebody and saying, hey, I see you've been doing this stuff. I was actually reading some of your things and I need some clarity on this.

And if you could help me out on that, I don't know one thought leader out there that wouldn't be open to that as far as helping that out. I mean, that's how I met Jill Conrad. Yeah. I read her book. I think it was one of her first ones, Selling to Big Companies. And it impacted me so much that I picked up the phone, I called her, and now I consider her one of my best friends. Absolutely. That's how I got to, what's his name, from Never Split the Difference, Chris Voss. I read Chris Voss's, I don't read books. I read that book and I was like, oh my God, I need to talk to this guy. Reached out to him. And you think Chris Voss, like that guy's baller. You know what I mean? He's on, I tell people, if you got 15 bucks, go take Chris Voss's masterclass, right?

You know, the masterclass series. It's 15 bucks a month for a year. It's worth the entire investment just to watch his masterclass. And I reached out to him. I said, hey, Chris, I read your book. I'm a huge fan. I have a ton of questions around these specific things as they relate to sales of what you talked about. And can we get on the, and he got on my podcast. And when I tell you that was one of the best podcasts I've ever had, I like, I sat there and just, I could have gone on for a week asking him questions. Oh yeah. It's like, I mean, you see me like, I'm just the whole time going, holy shit, this guy's way smarter than I am. I'm like, oh my God, can I bring you in on half of my negotiations, please?

Like, so, but, but that's, I mean, people are, everybody's looking to help right now. You know what I mean? Like you hear it all over the place, whether it's, you know, the, the current situation we're in with, you know, the, unfortunately all the black lives matter and all that other stuff, like people want to help. How do I help pandemic? How do I help? So there is this overwhelming, we are in this together type of thing, but nobody quite knows how to do it. If you reach out to them specifically and say, this is what I need your help with, then that's like a, that's like a, yes, I can do that. I also think John, and I can say this to you that some of us who achieved thought leader status on LinkedIn and there's a whole new crop of people that are building their brand.

You don't help when you pontificate. No, like, you know, it's not about you and what you know, it's about what does the community want to know? And can I provide that to them? And, and, and one, and this is why Morgan hit my radar because there was a bunch of people like pretending like they knew what they were talking about and there's, there's now a lot of them, right? Saying, oh, this is what you should do. Don't you dare tell me what I should be doing in this scenario? Cause you don't know. I don't know. Were you, were you alive during the black plague? I sure as shit wasn't right. So don't tell me what I should be doing right now. But if you share your journey, that's like, people don't understand that enough.

Like talk about, instead of telling people, Hey, here's what you do telling people, Hey, here's what I did. Here's what I did today. I tried this approach. I listened to John and Trish on the podcast and they said, Hey, change my call to action, do this. And so I did that today and I get 50 data points and guess what I learned? Boom. I don't know if that's going to work for you, but that's what I learned. That's what people will respect. And that's how you can build your brand in an authentic way without, because right now there's a lot of players who have, who have led with brands, but have no skills to back it up. Well, timing and lighting is everything. Sometimes the right person ends up, well, a person ends up at the right place at the right time.

Anyway, we digress. Yeah, exactly. We could go on. That's a whole nother conversation. All right. Well, look, we, as always, I could talk to you for, for a week. Uh, you're one of those people that I look to, to, to learn from. Um, so thank you for this as always. Where, um, what are some of the cool things you're working on right now? Where can people find out more information? What, who are you looking to work with right now? Like, so give me that person that's listening to this. If you're a sales team and you're an SDR, like what's that, what's that profile for you and where, where can they find you? So we're focused on the B2B tech space primarily, though, not exclusively. I'd actually love, um, to, uh, work with some different verticals.

So don't let that stop you. Um, you know, I think the best place to learn about us, Matt's been doing some incredible research on our blog. Um, just really good work. Everything he does is super data driven. You know what a geeky is. So yeah, in all the right ways too. Yeah. So lots of data driven research there. I mean, I still am active on LinkedIn. Um, hopefully I'll have an announcement in the foreseeable future about another platform I'll be participating in. Um, I'm going to share with the community, but you know, I'm willing to brainstorm with leadership of these companies. If you're struggling with how to pivot, if you're struggling with, you know, your SDR sequence, like one of the things I've been using in my outreach, um, cause I still do two hours of outbound every day.

Nice. I love it. Love it. But, um, one of the things I've been saying is if you're struggling, send me your sequence and I'll tell you what I think of it. Just copy, cut and paste it into word. And I'll tell you what I think of it. So I'm hoping, um, that people hear this. Maybe they'll take me up on that offer and, um, you know, easy to reach. Yeah. Easy. Love it. Trish. Well, thank you, uh, for, for continuing to kind of beat the drum on, on the doing things the right way. Uh, cause I think that's you and I, you know, we agree on a lot of stuff, uh, but I think fundamentally it's doing sales right and, and, and putting the right structure in place and putting these kids in a position where they can be successful and just trying to get better every day.

Absolutely. So awesome. Well, everybody, I hope you all got some, uh, as much value out of this as I did as usual. Um, as I always say here, uh, on the way out the door, you know, no matter how bad your day went, uh, if you had a good day, if you'll, if you can make somebody else smile today, you know, you had a good day. So no matter how shitty things are right now, try to spread kindness, try to make somebody smile because at the end of the day, that's what matters most. All right. Enjoy the rest of the week, everybody have a great one and we will see you later. Make it happen. Thank you.