153: Greg Segall On Prospecting Personalization

What's poppin' y'all, thanks for joining us for another episode of Make It Happen Mondays brought to you by Sales Loft, Vanilla Soft, Gong, and Vidyard. Today, we are joined by Greg Siegel, CEO and founder of Alice. And he's gonna talk to John about the role of personal experience in driving enterprise sales. This is an action-packed episode. We're gonna learn a lot. We appreciate you guys joining us. We hope everyone's strapped in and ready to make it happen. Let's join John and the conversation. Take it away, John. Good afternoon, everybody. This is John Barrels with Make It Happen Mondays. Hopefully, you had a weekend that you didn't go batshit crazy in today's fucked-up world. I am here with a very interesting individual who I'm really looking forward to have this conversation because it's all around what I think is super important right now is recentering on what's important and how to be personalized and using the personal experience.

So, Greg Segal, is it Segal, right? That's how you pronounce it? Seagull, sorry, there it is. All right, CEO over at Alice. So, what's going on, my friend? How are you doing? How's it going, man? Very good. I'm doing. So, Greg, I always ask, give us your journey because you're CEO, right? I always love to hear how and why people got to the level of executive role or starting businesses. So, quick journey here of how you got to where you are and what Alice is all about so we can put some context to this conversation. Yeah, I think this is like a two-hour podcast, right? So, I started my first company when I was back in 19 years old. Always knew I wanted to start my own thing and ended up growing a large e-commerce agency for about 12 years.

Ended up selling that company back in 2012 and then was looking for what to do next. And instead of being in the professional services world, I really wanted to be in the product world, having had many different product ideas like that. And, you know, came across this whole concept and just watched how much money was being wasted and spent in terms of gifts, rewards, swag, meals, trips, tickets, and whatnot. And, you know, looked at how that money was being spent. Like, I don't need a chocolate feed to get my foot in the door campaign. Like, I don't eat chocolates. I'm a gym rat, you know, as you can see if you've seen the video and stuff. You know, and, you know, I don't golf, which I know you're gonna like, you know, shit on me on that one, but that's okay.

But don't invite me to golfing stuff. I haven't golfed in about six years, man. So, there you go. You know, and then, you know, I don't need any more crappy water bottles and stuff. And so, just there's this proliferation of all this money that's being spent across all those different categories. And when you looked at it, when I looked at it, it was all about me spend, or they're spending it on about themselves, not about me. So, I'm like, why are you not actually allowing me to actually have the power to choose what I want and, you know, give me the opportunity to do that because that's a much better way for me to, you know, for you to be spending your money on something I'm actually gonna utilize that's there.

So, we built the whole entire business, you know, Alice, which is the company now, around how do we create and build personal bonds by using these investment dollars to actually learn who this person is, be able to understand who they are, and actually use that as a way to drive the conversations and, you know, the relationship as you move forward too. I love it. Yeah, and I think this is, it's interesting, right? It's kind of gone back to that real personalization and not the fake personalization, which is really what I wanted to kind of dive into here because, you know, Morgan and I, I've said this a few times on the podcast, it was interesting. We were having a conversation about kind of where we are today and what COVID did to, has done to business.

And what he said was interesting. He goes, John, you know, we've grown up in, like my generation, millennials, have grown up in pretty much a point and click world. You know what I mean? Like, if we want to catch up on a series, we just go to Netflix, download the whole thing, binge it over the weekend, we're done, right? We don't have to wait until next week. And oh my God, if we missed it, we had to call our friends and talk about what happened. You know, if we want our favorite meal, Uber Eats, have it delivered from our favorite restaurant. If we want to hit our numbers, we have a cadence tool now that I can blast out a million emails to and hit it, right? He goes, but we've forgotten, but we don't look at the person on the other end of that phone or the other end of that, we look at them as a number.

We don't look at them as a person. And he's like, I think this is a time, and I agreed with him, that this is a time to recenter on what's important and reset how we approach things. Because I think we've gotten a little bit out of control, right, up until this point. I think, yeah, I mean, we can have a much more broader society conversation about this, which is helping us all recenter. But let's, you know, obviously focus on sales here. So talk to me about this role of personal experience from your perspective and how it works in the sales process of, you know, in any type of sale. But when we're reaching out to people to try to build that trust, to try to earn that right, to have that conversation, how do you look at the personal experience part of that?

Yeah, this whole concept of personal experience is something we've been playing with for, you know, about six months right now and has really allowed us to create this approach, the one you're talking about. We'll come back to the whole personalization versus being personal, and I can sort of roll that into this. But a personal experience, you have to think about right now when you're a sales rep or you're in sales, you're thinking about the company as an account. But inside of that company, you have this buyer group that you're always going after, right? Whether it's the decision maker, the buyer, you know, the budget holders, you know, the influencers on the deal, the users, whoever it might be.

And you always have to remember that on one side, you have you as the vendor and maybe you're just thinking about this as a sales rep, but you're building a relationship with all these individual people on the other side. But if you only think about them as an account and how much penetration I get into that account rather than thinking about them as individual people, then you're missing out on the ability to actually drive to, you know, to getting to know who they are and actually building loyalty and building trust, you know, through the whole entire process that's there. And as you get into the whole customer journey, then it's like many people on your side are actually building a relationship, you know, up here.

So what they think about as AVM or they think about it as, you know, customer experience, you know, you got to get to that one-to-one, you know, level with them. And the way to do that is you have to say, well, I, first of all, and you speak about this all the time, you have to be relevant with them, right? So that we call it the three R's in terms of this approach, which you call personal experience approach. The first one is relevancy. It's like the nine to five. Who are they? What's their goals? What are they trying to accomplish? You know, it's here. What's the impact that you're going to make for them? You know, how do you tie your value to what they're actually trying to solve there? You have the second R, which is relatability, which is their, what do you call the five to nine, right?

This is where you build emotional resonance. This is how you relate to them. This is how you actually go from like, okay, hey, I can solve this problem. And I'm just this person trying to make a sale to, hey, this is who I am as an individual human being. And the final thing is what we call the final R is respect, which is how do you be respectful with every single one of those specific, you know, points of outreach that you're actually making to them as well right now. And when we're talking about this in terms of the outreach, everyone always thinks about it, especially on the marketing side or even in sales, you just mentioned cadences, you know, sequences. Like those are touches, right? You know, it's like the most creepy, annoying word in the entire world.

I actually use that word too often and I wish I didn't because it's too ingrained. Like, hey, how many touches? And every time I say it, I'm like, that's just freaking creepy as shit. So yeah, dude, think about it, right? You know, you've got, if I'm touching somebody, first of all, it's a creepy word in general, right? Except in a marketing or sales context, which is crazy. I'm pushing something one way. It's not actually reciprocation. There's no reciprocation back on that. If you get reciprocation back on that touch, it's an interaction. But if you build emotional resonance, meaning you actually are connecting to them on that five to nine, you're connecting to them as a human being and relating to them, then you actually have this as a moment.

So you're taking it from a touch to a moment. That is the key thing that allows you to say, if I'm driving in the personal experience, I'm able to go from, you know, building rapport to building trust to actually getting them to be a loyal follower, you know, and a champion of mine inside this organization. So, so I, how do you do that without being, going back to creepy, how do you do that without being creepy, right? Or, or like personal, like, so let's get to that personalization versus personal, right? Yep. Because, you know, I don't want, what I don't want is, I don't want some kids following me on Facebook and all of a sudden making comments about what I'm doing in my house, right? Like that to me is like, fuck off, kid.

Like you are way creeping me out. So, how do you be, how do you connect to the, to the, to the person, if you will, from the five to nine and, and, and make it relevant and make it genuinely connected to why you're reaching out as opposed, because what bothers me about fake personalization right now, I'm seeing a lot of, it's like fake empathy when the COVID hit, right? Totally. You know, at first it generally, genuinely was, hey, I hope you and your family are doing well, but then it got overused and then it was like, hey, I hope you and your family are doing well. You know, I got this great software tool to sell you. It's like, what? Or John, hey, I see you went to University of Maryland, you know, go Terps and here's a fucking, and it's like, dude, I could give a shit about University of Maryland at this point and that adds no value.

It's not relevant. So how do you find out about that five to nine stuff without being overly creepy and what are you looking for? Yeah. Let's start off taking a step back to what we were saying before, which is the difference between personalization versus being personal. I think there's a very clear delineation that people have to understand, you know, as to what the differences are between both of those. Personalization is all about data that you're actually using to drive somebody through a buyer's journey. Consumer, B2C, gets this totally. You think of Amazon, you think of Netflix, like Facebook, any of these, they know exactly what the next action you're going to take and they're going to guide you to that next point in the buyer's journey, whether it's delivering more value or getting you to a place to actually buy a product, right?

You know, you think about any of these customization boxes or anything in e-commerce, you know, as a good example of that. The problem is, in B2B, there's not enough data in most cases for you to actually have true, you know, ability to drive somebody through a buyer's journey. You can start getting some of that data and you have like intent data and other things that will actually give you some good insights, you know, and good intel as to like who this customer is. But you use that in terms of the relevancy. You do not use that in terms of the relatability to somebody. Being relatable is all about how you take, you know, this from this data mindset of personalization to how do you actually be personal where you are actually generating true emotional resonance.

very, very different approach that you need to take in order to be able to drive that. If I'm trying to build emotional resonance, it has to be something like if you just say, if I was like, oh yeah, go Terps. Like, I don't have any connection to you about that. That's total fake personalization. It doesn't mean anything. And also, if you're just taking a template and just using that and not really understanding how do you connect from yourself to the relatable thing to the other person, it's always going to be fake every single time. It's fake empathy, whether you're trying to say like, what's the problem I'm trying to solve here? If you don't really understand how to sell to the CFO and what they're trying to do, like you're not going to get in there, right?

And if you also don't understand who the CFO is and what they're actually caring about even outside of the work there, you can't actually build an emotional resonance to that specific person. So the way we do it at Alice, you know, specifically is we obviously have our own platform and it is very, very difficult because it is, you know, Alice is able to actually uncover those Facebook, you know, interests, right? What is this person interested in? Where'd they go to school? What's all that information that's there? But we're very, very mindful of in the journey that you're building a relationship with somebody, especially as a sales rep, you know, you're going through this, like you get super creepy if you start going to like, I know your dog's name and I know what your kid's name is.

So what we do with Alice and the way that it works is we want to send something more general that's around, maybe around their interests or something that I can relate to there. And then as part of Alice, they can actually exchange, you know, as part of this big marketplace we've created that's connected to interests. When that person accepts that gift, they just hold you that if they accepted BarkBox, they have a dog. Now you can just talk about dogs if you have a dog or hey, I grew up with four Shelties, you know what I mean? As I grew up, blah, blah, blah. Now we can have that conversation around it. So the holy key is around fake personal being personal is around how you can connect to the relatability, you know, factor to that specific person.

So let's keep going on that because I still like wonder when we're giving guidance. So I think let's take Alice out of the equation here. Let's say we don't have a tool like Alice. I'm a sales rep. I'm going after you, Greg. I look on your website and well, you're probably a bad example because Alice is, you know, I would probably want to do something very personalized to you, right? So that I could actually make a connection there because of what you do. But what would I be looking for on the personal side of the house to make a connection and how do I connect that to the relevance? So it's not went to Maryland, got the software product. It's John and look, like, but even if you went to University of Maryland, I still don't see that as I don't give a shit.

I genuinely do not give a shit just because you're a Patriots fan. Like, I don't give a shit when it comes. Look, I always looked at, you know, you know, the old school rapport building, right? When you did face-to-face selling and they always thought like the frigging guy with the suit that's three, you know, three sizes too big telling you what to do. And you walk into somebody's office and you look around their office and you see a fisherman picture and you say, hey, oh, I see you're a fisherman and so am I. And even though you've maybe fished once in your fucking life, you know, you're sitting there and pretend, but even if you were a fisherman, like to somebody like me, I look at that as you're wasting my fucking time here, my friend.

Like time is of the essence. So you trying to bullshit with me for the first 10 to 15 minutes of this conversation, it's the exact, now other people are different, right? And I think you look at this profiles, you look at, you know, you can use stuff like crystal nose to get insights into that stuff. But how do you, how do you make sure that you're not swinging and missing when you come after somebody like me with these personalized stuff? Because I could give a shit about that stuff. I care more about relevance to my business and what I'm doing. So how do you approach it if you're a rep trying to be that with me? Yeah, so I think there's different levels of that, right? Like you're more of the Darth Vader, right?

Which is like, you know, the Darth Vader personality where you're much more on the nine to five. Like just if you're going to give me value, I want to know value. I don't want to be like connecting with you as an individual. There's many other folks though that you can actually connect with on that personal five to nine level because you can just figure out something about them, right? I do care about that other stuff and I mean, I got my book with my daughter and I got all these other things. But it's just about more about I'd rather let's get to business and then let's be let's connect because now you earn the right for me to then do that versus start with that and then go the other direction.

Yeah, and I think that's something you have to suss out, right? So when I'm saying the Darth Vader personality, it's like you're much more caring about enter with relevance as to what are you doing to actually solve my problems versus other people buy more emotionally and they're actually more about that connection to the person. Do I trust the sales rep is more about can this person does this person really care about me not just care about making the sale and there's a difference on how you actually you know, you actually lead into that. So take Alice out of the equation. All you have to be thinking about here is you have to be able to enter with specific questions and as you're getting to know the person you can start to figure out and actually ask like entry-level questions to say like what are you interested in?

What did you do last weekend? Blah, blah, blah, you know and obviously you want to get away from you know what's the weather like but you can typically find something about most folks that are out there whether it's like you lead in with what are they talking about you know, in terms of some of their initiatives and you talk about that and it leads into like you trying to figure out some way of telling you know, getting to a personal story that's there. I mean, it's very hard for a 21-year-old sales rep to like be able to connect with like a 55-year-old you know, CFO who doesn't really give two craps about whatever it is. You know, so you have to you have to fish for those things. So, yes, that is harder but it is easier as you get deeper into the relationship right, as you're going from that portion you know, from the beginning portions, you know, on that's there but it just all comes down to how you're asking those questions and the outset you know, of who that person is and like those first initial things as you get away from the weather you know, and you start talking about like oh, you know, you know like about kids or dogs or like, you know people will have some sort of a soft spot like with you with your daughter and you know, the book that you, you know that you guys wrote together so like there are things that you can find out about most people and it's funny you bring that up because I was actually about to do a post on this a video on how to use COVID right now or the world scenario as small talk but for a purpose right, because like there's certain things where, you know like, hey, whatever I'm sick of listening I'm sick of talking about this at this point so let's just get to business, right but, but if you but if you do the there's like this optimistic what I'm noticing there's an optimistic a point of view and a pessimistic point of view of what's going on right now and those are in direct relationship to who's actually doing business at this point and how I'm going to sell to them so I'm using small talk right now on all my calls so hey Greg hey man how you holding up through this man you going crazy like everybody else like hey what do you just out of curiosity where do you see this thing going you see this like keeping you know and if I get you to say you know what John like my mentality you know what I think this is a recentering I think ultimately as bad as all this shit is it's going to be a good thing because it's going to help us refocus on what's important and ultimately we're going to come out of this stronger as a unity as a blah blah blah that optimistic view I can sell to I can sell the future to I can sell I can sell bigger picture goals to and usually bigger bigger issues that I can solve like we can work together so I call pleasure right I'm selling to pleasure in that scenario whereas if you're like dude this is fucking miserable I don't you know what I mean like the world is going to hell right now like I don't see this getting any better I know immediately I have to focus on pain that with you as a personality that now we are talking about short term things that I can solve whatever your pain is right now and I legitimately change my whole approach based on that initial five minute conversation with you to kind of intro the call and it's a very clear and I'm noticing that people who are making decisions right now are mostly the optimistic ones right it's the same thing so that that's on the so you're taking it in terms of the like the positive negative approach like what am I trying to do and how am I trying to frame the problem and how do I know I get to go after this person am I going after like the visionary side of things or am I going right after the pain to be like let me just you know you start that you take the same approach on the personal side right which is like you can start asking questions that pry into it and you can understand like how much they want to talk about those specific things that are there the beauty about COVID right now and where everybody's working from home is you have more ability to understand in the background and of course you've got the plain background but I know enough about you now there you know to be able to figure that out you know right I've seen enough there you go right there you go so here you go Brady right you know unfortunately he's you know the Bucks won that one but that's okay we got two teams to root for now my friend we do exactly yeah that's it you know so you know but that's now seeing this you have more ability as a sales rep right now to be able to get to the personal side of things to see like what's their style you know what are they interested in what things do they have in the background like it's we literally have the ability to go back to what you just said before where I was a door-to-door salesperson I walk in and I look to see or if I get I get you know brought to an office like this is the ultimate time for you to be able to talk to the five to nine and be able to actually strike up the ability to actually ask questions that show you care because again it goes back to how do you care both about their problems that they're having but also about them as a person and you just got to figure out which of those directions you go and again that's very much at the beginning of the sales cycle as soon as you get through that and you break through with one of those two directions it very much allows you to get into either hey now we've connected as a person now you're allowing them to open up more to you because they feel like there's an emotional connection there or if you've actually like hit upon the pain point for them now they're willing to actually have more of that small talk with you and actually get into this where you can actually you know start to relate to them you know on that side of things and I think it's that breaking through that barrier of okay I've earned the right now to look at and I think it goes back to just seeing you as a person as opposed to a number right and so let's back into let's go all the way back without any of the benefits because a quick story on like for instance your background you got those books right and I learned this at an early age in sales about the importance of knowing enough to be dangerous but not knowing everything right and it was when I was doing a I used to do face-to-face selling all over Massachusetts here right and we sold IT services it was my first company that I started I know nothing about computers so every single every single call I had my engineer right and so what would happen and I was supposed to be the relationship guy and so I would set the stage and then hand it over to my engineer and then whatever and they'd be the smart kid and whatever they weren't supposed to be developing relationships that was my job right but I remember vividly we walked into some huge VC firm here in Massachusetts and CEO right the whole thing partner and we walk in and on the guy's bookshelf and this was back remember Freakonomics oh yeah right so this is right when Freakonomics came out right and what happened was my CTO had read he was an avid reader read almost everything and he saw Freakonomics on the guy's bookshelf and he goes hey have you read Freakonomics yet and the guy lit up like a Christmas tree and he was like yeah absolutely and he started asking him questions about that and I'm sitting there on the sideline and you could when I tell you you could feel the rapport being built right there like I'm sitting there on the sideline going what the you know and I'm the idiot going Freakonomics you know it's kind of it's a funny book right and so you know like that kind of was like holy shit I gotta start reading books that CEOs read just for nothing else than to be able to relate to them and have a and hold a conversation like you said about golf right you know why I play golf I don't play golf because I like golf I play golf at least I used to because I don't want to miss out on the opportunity of that executive saying hey you want to go play golf and me embarrassing myself on on the golf you know I can I shoot about a hundred you know what I mean so I'm not going to embarrass myself on on the golf course I'm also not good enough to beat them which is a good thing right so yeah so even if you were you'd let them win anyway right totally right so so with that so that that's great with we got a conversation you've agreed to a conversation I'm meeting with you we're meeting together I'm developing that rapport I'm picking up on cues but I'm an SDR and a BDR I gotta make some cold calls here I have no idea I can't see you on your zoom screen right now I can kind of socially stalk you in a in a limited way how do I introduce that into my prospecting approach yeah so I think you you know you know what the person's daily jobs are right you know you know who they are as like a general and again this is going back to the other thing I always talk about it's like you're trying to move from a persona to a person how do I get from a generality is like I generally know what a CFO wants or a CIO wants to a like how am I talking to this person as a as a human being you know that's there too and again these are the probing questions the same thing like when you go through and you're in your training on like how to find the pain the same thing with how do you find an ability to be for you to be able to relate right but you can start asking different things like if you're interested in specific things you can start asking those types of questions like hey you know what instead of me starting off by just asking this I just love to know like you know since you're at home now you know you're reading a lot of books you've been watching a lot of movies you know what I mean like there's ways where you'd actually break into this where you can start start to probe them and see what are they actually interested in having those conversations you know around that and being like let me just talk to you as a person first and then let me get back to the actual pain and you see which way they go same way that you just said around the positive negative you know the small talk side of things you can do the same exact thing on the personal side or the five to nine side of things as well so it's just training on both of those aspects but remember the five to nine is the emotional side the nine to five is I'm going to get into a pain and let me see how fast I can get this to an opportunity creation you know you know side of things so you can merge those two things together to also be able to you know drive more emotional loyalty you know around the brand because remember this too it's like we're talking very much about cold calls right now but that emotional resonance you create at the beginning of that sales cycle will actually when you get into a competitive lens a competitive you know bid later on down the road if it's a very commoditized field like analytics platforms or something like that most of the time they're going to go after who emotionally do they feel more connected to rather than what features are actually going to be you know you're going to be sold so you have to remember that that those seeds you're planting earlier on in the sales cycle will play very heavily especially if you're really smart BDR SDR to AE transition where you can actually transition that personal connection to the AE like that's the thing people miss out on too is like the BDR might start to actually be able to do this but the best BDRs will actually be able to help the AE be able to say like well I know my AE likes these types of things let me tee them up to some of those things as well right that's how you can start getting to that five to nine versus the nine to five side too yeah can I so let me ask you this because you hit on it early as far as asking those questions and caring right and like actually giving a shit about the answers and not asking them just to ask can in your opinion I ask a lot of people this because in your opinion can you train genuine curiosity I mean you have to you have to care right you know if so there's two things fighting against you think about it in the sales world you have one which is you have specific numbers you've got to just hit in terms of number of activities which is also something I think because of this whole entire COVID situation and also a lot of these companies that were very like heavy outbound you know going to inbounds I think that it's going to force folks to actually rethink the activities because it's going to have to be going from scaling quantity to scaling quality right because of the because of the nature of how much noise there is that's out there because the person in the rep that cares more about me and is going to take the time to do the due diligence and understand who I am is going to be the one that wins I talk about this all the time if you're going to be if somebody's going to feel like you care about them you're going to have to be investing in them and you have two things to invest in either time to that or investment in dollars to that person right and so for us at Alice we're always talking about like if you're going to be investing dollars you've got to show that you put the time behind that as well don't just go sending some random crap to somebody and being like oh yeah I went to you know love the Terps here's a you know a you know mug from there I get so much BU crap you know Boston University and I could care less like I don't care like stop I'll never wear it I'll never for anybody listening to this podcast right now I will never wear anything from University of Maryland ever at this point in my in my life you should say what you really do want though because you'll probably get about 20 of those yeah right Dunkin Donuts gift cards send them over there you go there you go you know so like but that's that's the thing you have to understand here is that that's you know people have to understand that the the investment in time shows you care as long as you're actually going in and you're actually putting the due diligence behind behind this and then how you tee up those questions and how you actually are genuinely understanding what they are that's the key of it that's you know this whole empathy thing like people talk about this all the time and it's like the big buzzword of the world you can't have empathy means you actually are able to truly feel what it is like to be in the other person's shoes and if you truly don't give a shit about what it's going to be like to be in the other person's shoes you're going to be a shitty salesperson no matter what right that's just the reality of it and that's either you don't care about their pain or you don't care about them as a person the one that cares about them as a person and also about their pain and can do a really good job of identifying that pain and just hand that off like they're going to be successful but you can be more successful and know that you're going to have an effect further down the sales funnel and be able to get to your numbers if you're actually connecting with the person themselves as well that's just it's just a missing piece right now and that's the big thing that people have to understand that's why we call it personal experience like how do you drive the personal experience and drive them from rapport to trust to loyalty as they become a customer as they go through that process and loyalty even beforehand they might love you and just say like I love that sales process holy crap like I feel indebted to them because they did more for me you know yeah I think that's the big the big challenge right now is that that push pull between hitting our numbers and doing it the right way right because because if it was up to me I'd have a half an hour to do research on every single person I reached out to you know what I mean but unfortunately I think we're in this weird transition world right now where like guys like you and I I don't know how old are you if you don't mind me 41 40 yeah so I'm 44 right so we grow up and you know in a volume pretty much when it came to sales it was a volume game right it was like you make you know 100 dials or whatever we've evolved to understand with ABM and all this other stuff that personalization matters that quality matters right all that stuff but we're still in this position where managers like us leaders like us it is very hard to coach on quality it is extremely hard for me to take time you know like we use gong right to do call recording right and I love the tool it's fantastic the problem is is every time I have to you know as a leader and I am a player coach here I'm selling I'm doing my thing every half hour call that Morgan has I have to take a half an hour out of my schedule I have to then sit down I have to listen to that not only listen to that but then so it's probably not a half an hour it's like 45 minutes because I need to do the coaching as part of that right so it's really hard for me to do you know what's easy to manage to hit your fucking 50 dials a day and if you didn't hit those 50 dials I'm now going to smack you over the head so what advice do you have to kids right now who who are in that world of managers like us who are and I'm not saying you and I are lazy but in general lazy management of hit your numbers 50 dials and unfortunately right now in some cases actually ratcheting up the activities because the results are worse right what do you get what advice do you give that kid that says look Greg John I love what you're saying here man I think it's fantastic but I don't I can't do that or I don't have time to do that and if I don't hit my 50 dials I'll get more I'll get yelled at more if I don't hit my 50 dials than if I don't get my meetings yeah right so what do I do yeah I always think about how do you hack the system so let's go in terms of like like superstructure like if I don't do this I get fired you know like to the point where you have some more flexibility let's get very tactical around this which is I think is you know even good for the listeners here so like if I'm like struck stuck in a in a in a in a very hard structure where I got to do 100 dials a day and 100 emails a day or whatever the heck the activity you know structure that you might be you know be built around is hack the system so what I've seen other folks do and I mean this is from my friends who are in in some larger companies is they'll hire somebody on Upwork to actually do all the research for them like find the stuff for me you know and pay them four bucks an hour or whatever it might be you know which is great for them you know they're getting paid well and it's like now you've got some value now you can actually walk into these places now you're actually able to scale scale the ability to find out more about that about those those folks that are there too the second thing is you have to be thinking about the quality like go back to what I said before the investment caring is about the investment in time in our money if it's money it has to also be matched with time you know that's there too if you show that you've put some time behind the call and you're not just calling to be like hey let me run through my script and basically that's it like you're going to you're going to have you know decrement you know decreasing you know what's it called missing the words here but whatever it's like decreasing amount of results as you go on further and even because everybody is yeah diminishing results yeah you know diminishing return like that's the key thing is like you have to understand that even with everybody ratcheting that up you have to be thinking about how do you do that so again this is on this side I would just hack the system and figure out how can I show that my value of time is there by understanding more about who these folks are and whatever it is and I do just to jump in on that real quick and I say the same thing and some people and I like I feel it's weird that I feel bad saying this these days because I can't believe that you know to telling you to work hard right is something that oh you can't tell me to work past five o'clock I don't know a single successful person that doesn't work past five o'clock so do your nine to five go let let's go back to five to nine nine to five right do your five nine to five like the way that you're being told to do it and I would recommend measure those damn results become a scientist and so that you can go back to your boss and say boss I've been making hundred dials a day for fucking five you know eight days ten days in a row and I haven't gotten shit right but then off hours instead of binge watching Netflix instead of doing that stuff do some homework on some accounts fire off some personalized emails stay up until holy shit maybe ten o'clock at night doing work instead of actually eating ice cream and then and come back to your boss with data that says look I've been doing it your way and then I did it this way and this way I've gotten this conversion ratios and those type of things and that way I'm doing this which one would you rather me do and I will tell you right now if your boss then leans in on you like jackass Grant Cardone type of thing of no you hit the fucking list you know what I mean instead of that then go find another job because you're never going to be successful in that scenario yeah you're going to see this very like especially over the next year to two years there's going to be a very very big shift away from there's still going to be the tracking of the numbers but the quality thing is going to become more you see this in like customer success where they're starting to actually do like qualitative reporting like you can still get quantitative from qualitative how likely are they to renew what's their happiness level right now you know etc etc you're going to start seeing those things in terms of the sales reps too in terms of like when you're on these calls how are you feeling that they are you know what I mean like I think there's going to be some tools and other things that will come out that will help to actually judge some of the qualitative things but again going back to like just finalize on the tactical side like go and hack the system like you said either it's your five to nine that becomes your ability to actually say like my next dials you know next time I need to understand these things or these you know the personal emails I'm going to send to these folks and again there's a difference between personalized and personal personalized means I'm in a cadence and I just enter in a variable like no one gives a shit I know when the person has not invested the time in me I immediately delete or I hit spam now at this point where I'm just like I'm just going to forget it I'm going to make it even worse for you and harder for you to ever talk to me again and I get that all the time as a CEO you get further down the line here and now you have to say is like well let me just take a different approach take half my list you know and let me spread that out and let me do the work you know here and figure out how can I actually like understand who these people are actually start to you know test with different approaches you know or asking those questions up front and testing half of them where I'm actually going on the personal side the five to nine side versus the nine to five side you know and actually doing that to the other side which is like in the case of Alice like we do not track activities for example inside of Alice right now like it is the ultimate way for us to go go for that but we're tracking the quality of the opportunities and the depth of the opportunities and the speed of where we're going from one stage to the next inside of that you know and that's with our whole entire sales team as we're looking at that we are looking at dials and we're looking at emails that are going off and we do track you know with our BDRs we see those things but we're not saying oh my god you didn't hit your numbers on that we're just trying to make sure that we see like how many of those accounts were actually actually actively you know communicated with right and more importantly how many of those have we actually created a moment with right that's the thing because the more moments you create again going back to that the further you're able to actually build emotional depth into the connection with those accounts versus not the more positive moments right because I think because I think it's like going back to touches like we're in we're in an impression world right and that's why we get that's why Facebook and Amazon are so good at what they do because all of a sudden I see the ad over here and I see an article that's very similar to what I'm thinking about here and all of a sudden you know what I mean and this ad pops up and all of a sudden by the time I'm now I can want you know now it's like boom and because they're all positive right they're not just spamming me with a bunch of like hey what's up let's talk let's talk let's talk and it's the same thing with sales reps I talk about sales reps need to become much more like marketers in the sense that it's about impressions it's about positive impressions right I comment on a link on Facebook or a comment on a link on LinkedIn I share one of your posts I retweet something that you tweeted I send you something I you know like I call you I email you but all of those things need to be in line with you as a person or you from a relevant standpoint to make that impression I'm actually even saying now you know what's interesting I'm noticing is that a lot of I don't know if you guys use call like auto dialers and stuff like that but you know how like they can spoof the number right 617 like I actually think now that's the it's hurting people because I will like 617 here in Boston if I see a 617 I don't even come close to opening it I'd rather open a 650 over in California right that said all of a sudden now companies are putting their name on the dot on the dialer so so like when so if you were to call me it would say Alice it would show up as Alice and I'm noticing that going huh and I don't I don't open it but what that does is that subconsciously or consciously there's an impression right there it's like I just saw Alice on my phone wait a minute what was that email that I got from that kid I think I got an email from a kid a few days ago from Alice never mind and then all of a sudden I get an email from Alice hey John here's a gift card from Dunkin Donuts I'd love to grab some coffee with you someday it's like shit oh okay so it's like these positive impressions is what we're looking think about it in advertising right so I was in advertising for a long time in marketing in advertising in a long time it's the common saying that you have to see something seven times before it actually sits into your brain so the more they see something and the more they talk to you that's why when someone even with dialing it's like the folks that don't leave voicemails like as long as you see a voicemail like I have my phone you know I pick it up and it has a transcription I never listen to the voicemail but I'll still like quickly be able to like you know see who's on there and you're right very much just going back to the moments it's you can very easily create a negative moment a negative emotional reaction because I noticed you didn't put any time and effort behind you know following up with me you didn't make me laugh you didn't like connect with me in any specific way and there was no time invested every one of those are touches every one of those are negative impressions the same thing with investments in like direct mail or you know gifting or any of this other stuff like if you don't actually show and care about me and that's where the Alice approach you know where you can you can exchange or donate like I would send you Starbucks you'd be like freaking awesome cool but send me Dunkin Donuts or allow you to exchange for Dunkin Donuts now there's a difference there it's about it's about the psychological difference about you caring and every outreach and every moment that you're actually trying to create with somebody is about them everything everything if I'm going to be emailing and I'm going to read this email am I actually going to want to get this email right now if you as a rep are saying no then you need to make a modification to that thing you need to think about different sequences and also the last thing is you can get anyone's attention going to the impressions thing you can get anyone's attention you can take a dump on someone's desk and get their attention right that's a negative moment I can also do the same thing in terms of like really like sneaking being sneaky around you opening this email by saying like alert your account's been hacked you know or RE or whatever yeah like you can go as whatever it is it's like those are immediate things that actually move me backwards in the trust factor and not forwards in the trust factor so you've got to you know and this is a hard thing to do but you've got to be genuinely caring about these specific individual people and you've got to figure out how to even infuse that at the littlest bit even if you're locked into specific activities of which you should really get out of that job but like you can still hack that a bit you know to the extent to at least increase some of the percentages there and then try and really move towards the you know the balancing of the of the five to nine with the nine to five definitely yeah I think it's it's that constant battle that I face of like I then that's again what I hope I hope the mark I hope that the work that the average SDR and the BDRs are doing today with companies treating them as marketing spam engines I do genuinely hope that gets taken over by marketing spam engines and that the people are leveraged for people things right because I I've always said I fundamentally do not understand the difference between a sales rep taking a sales loft cadence tool like sales loft which I absolutely love they're a sponsor they're I'm a huge I'm a huge proponent of their customer bar too they're awesome right and but and then taking marketing templates that marketing creates putting them into a cadence and pressing play I do not understand why like I always say if I was a VP of sales if I was a brand new VP of sales walking into an organization legitimately the first thing that I would do is I would say can I see every email that goes out from all the BDRs and SDRs right now and if they were all templated bullshit emails I would say I'm going to save this company a whole shitload of money I'm going to fire every SDR and BDR I'm going to hire a marketing ops person I'm going to double down on Marketo and I'm going to go to the boards with something like that I'm going to save myself a shitload and probably get way better results so how do we take those group and turn them into people that care about people and stop treating them as robots as you're thinking about the outreach and you're thinking about the cadences and the sequences and stuff the biggest fundamental thing that I think people are going to understand and this is like an overarching trend in the industry is that it's not going to be about automating activities it's going to be about automating intelligence if you can automate the intelligence it makes the activities a hell of a lot better and if you can automate the intelligence and the activities now you've just made the whole thing personalization fails right now because you're trying to do fake personal you're trying to be fake personal personalization has the word personal in it which means emotive there's nothing about being personal you know personalization that's actually emotive right now it's just not right so you have to be thinking about this as I'm in SDR and BDR it's like how do I automate the intelligence which is what I was saying like hack the system figure out more about those companies figure out what you can do to be able to learn more about them to be able to actually drive you know drive through there's one little cool example of one of my friend's companies what he uses the BDR and SDR function and I think he's got like 30 or 40 BDRs or so they are calling on companies not to the buying group but to an adjunct person inside of the company to understand and learn what are the big problems that the company's having right now right and then using that as a way to actually talk much more directly to the pains that are there but you can do the same thing in the five to nine like what does some of these people just tell me like I'm just curious to know you know whatever it is half the time you're creepy or whatever it is but I'm like hack the system flip the dynamic of this stuff you know what I mean and that's I mean I've been preaching that now for about a month and a half or two months which is in a down economy all the all all like up economy growth you can latch into an executive like yours initiatives and you can make you're willing you and I as CEOs of our little companies here are willing to make decisions that aren't necessarily as popular at you know getting everybody's bought into them right because we see the vision and I don't know about you right now though I can't see more than a few months out at this point you know what I mean like I look at the end of June as that's the end of PPP so now I got to make a decision as a business owner what do I do now then after that I look at maybe the next six months of the year to see what we're doing at the end of the year but my plans for next year I don't fucking know so that type of thing so I'm not willing to make new decisions on stuff that I'm not aware of but bottom up approach now is a far more interest because we guess a lot in sales I guess about you I find a trigger on your you know and I say hey Greg you know that happened so I you know and I've seen that happen before in our solution but that's a hypothesis I don't know right I guess that hey you're the CEO of a SaaS cool company you tend to care about these things so here's my message well let's actually learn let's actually unleash our and Trish Bertuzzi and I had this conversation the other day let's unleash our SDRs because there's a lot of organizations that are having a hard time justifying the value of SDRs and BDRs right now because it's their results are so low and it's just like and they're a cost of sale period right and so why not unleash them to gain market insights and market intelligence that's exactly and so what we're doing right now like James and Morgan James is our SDR Morgan's our AE we're picking one account once a month one tier one account James that that no I'm sorry once a week James that week is calling literally frontline sales reps and asking a group of questions to say okay this is what we're doing you know what are you like and then and then also doing research like picking up trigger you know whatever those things are and collecting all that stuff and then the end of the month him or at the end of that week Morgan and James get together and talk about what do we learn what you know what's going on there then the following week Morgan uses that to prospect into the executive level to tell a really good story hey we've been talking to 10 15 20 of your individual reps this is and during while Morgan's doing that James is picking another account right week over week over week so there's a great SDR BDR or AE combo there but what that does is that gives us like the executive when I reach out to you and say hey Greg I've been talking to a lot of your reps man and I've been noticing some of the challenges and we got a solution now you turn back to your reps and you're like hey is this something you guys really need yeah we need that oh hey now it's a popular decision way easier for somebody like you and I to make right so awesome yeah cool man well look let's wrap this up I think we're coming up on time here but I appreciate the conversation here any last things that you want to make sure that people are paying attention to right now no I just think that the concept around quality over quantity and caring in reality when you think of personal experience and what that looks like end to end and how you're building rapport and trust and loyalty throughout the whole sales and it's a customer process there it's just about caring it's just about understanding who those people are and again it's those three R's like you've got to understand what you just said it's like I'm calling in to find out what the actual true pains are and what's at the ground right that's that the five to nine like again the emotional resonance is the piece that I think people have not figured out how to scale yet how to actually do that that's really really important because that is a place where you can actually it makes up for so many mistakes you know previous on and the last thing is just being respectful like do I want to actually get the you know the emails or the calls or LinkedIn messages or you know the gifts or whatever I might be sending you know to you is that the way I would actually want this to be to be for myself so like that is the fundamentals you know of this is that it's going to go to a one-to-one like think of the other person on the other line not the account like very different if you go from an account perspective to a people perspective and put the person at the center of what you're trying to accomplish there that will solve and that will get you so much further than just the account side definitely awesome man I appreciate it how can people find out a little bit more about what you're doing what's the best way to connect with you and Alice and that type of stuff because I do love what you guys are doing with that you one of the things that struck me was like oh we're sending gifts to people but I'm like now in this weird world how can you find somebody's address and that talk about creepy like all of a sudden I get a home email right but you're sending them the option of something that you think would be good for them so it's still electronic but it's still personalized so talk to me about how people can find out more about Alice and how they can connect with you go to alice.com my email is greg at alice.com greg not two at alice.com just people for some reason screw that up so I have that alias too just in case you guys want to joke about that as well awesome well cool yeah exactly so all right cool well look everybody hope you all got as much value out as I got out of this and it got you to think a little bit about what to do and how to stay relevant here in today's world because we all got to keep evolving right now because things are evolving faster than ever and if you want to get replaced keep doing the same shit that you've been doing before so look I always say this at the end of my podcast no matter how bad your day goes if you can make somebody smile today you know you had a good day so and in this fucked up world that we're in right now we need a lot more of that going on a lot more positivity so go out make somebody happy today all right thank you very much everybody for listening as always appreciate it and we'll talk to you soon cheers