154: Darryl Praill On Becoming A Master Of Follow-Up

What's going on, everybody? Thanks for joining us for another episode of the Make It Happen Mondays podcast with your host, John Barrows. This episode is brought to you by our partners, SalesLoft, Gong, VanillaSoft, Vidyard, Proposify, and Owler. We appreciate everything that they do for the sales community. Today, we have a very special guest. We are talking with the one and only Daryl Prail from VanillaSoft. Daryl is a phenom. He's a lot of fun to talk with, and we look forward to hearing what he has to say about what makes an effective cadence today. We're looking forward to it. I hope everybody's jazzed up. Let's make it happen. Good afternoon, everybody. This is John Barrows with Make It Happen Mondays.

Hopefully, you all had a fantastic weekend here. I am sitting here with a very interesting guest who I've collaborated with a lot recently, and I've been very happy to do so and learned a lot from, and hopefully, you all learned some from him as well. So, Daryl Prail, how's it going? CMO over it. VanillaSoft, how's it going, my friend? It's going well, Mr. Barrows. How is it going with you on this fine Monday of ours? Oh, it's fantastic, man. You know, it's always interesting these days because I'm constantly being introduced to new stuff and constantly being reminded of, you know, if we're not staying on top of things, we're getting replaced. And I actually just did a nice little video for a client where they talked about this.

They wanted me to talk about the rule of 1%, which is getting 1% better every day. And I am constantly focused on that right now because of what's happening right now in the sales world, right? And all the technology and the tools that are available to us. So, could you give us a little bit of a background on yourself on VanillaSoft? Because I think it's going to lead to this conversation about where does sales fit into this whole world of automation and everything else? So, give the audience a little background on where you're coming from. Sounds good. So, as John has shared, I am the Chief Marketing Officer at VanillaSoft. But don't let that fool you because I have carried a bag. I have done that sales shtick.

I have been, you know, my first job was selling photocopiers door to door. And, you know, it is a thankless job. You learn a lot. You also get beaten up something fierce, which is all part of the growth process, right? You either survive or you move on to the next career. Take note that I'm in marketing now. Total sci-fi. But over the years, even though my actual education is coding. So, I went from selling photocopiers fresh out of school because I was tired of the whole high-tech thing to realizing that, you know what, coding is not so bad. I went back to do some coding for a while. It was a nice, safe job. And then I got bored after a handful of years. And then I went off and I became a sales engineer.

And then I got into sales and got into marketing. I've been a VP of sales. I've been a VP of marketing, CMO multiple times over. So, that's my gig. I come from both worlds. Which is probably a really nice segue to why I'm at VanillaSoft. So, true story. I actually had my own marketing agency for almost a decade. Talk about, again, sales. It was a marketing agency, but we only managed to actually close the business that I closed. And if you don't, there's no employer there giving you a paycheck. So, that's the beauty of that. John, you know that very, very well. So, there's nothing motivational like a wife saying to you, are we going to eat this month? So, there you go. That is very motivational, yes.

But VanillaSoft came, actually, the recruiter came knocking on my door one day and said, I've got this cool company I think you should go talk to. And I told him to bugger off, to just hit the road four times. Now, after the fourth time, he popped on me and I should qualify. Why did a recruiter yell at me? The recruiter yelled at me because the recruiter actually knows me. He placed me about 20 years ago. And finally, he popped and he said, Prail, take the effing interview. Trust me. I know what I'm doing. Get your ass in there. And I'm like, ugh. Okay, fine. And I did it because of a relationship. And that's what we always do things, right? Yep. Go to the job, interview. First thing I do when we're in there, I've got a room full of all the executives.

It's, you know, it's what you hate, right? You're auditioning, basically, like a Broadway musical. And they're, do I like you or not? Are you pretty? I don't know. And right away, I get into this discussion. Let's call it a discussion. Actually, it was an argument. It was a fight with the CEO where I disagreed with his positioning. And I said, what the hell are you doing? I leave the interview. 20 minutes later, I get a call. And the recruiter says, what'd you think? And I said, they'll never call me again. And he said, they loved you. You're the first one to push back on them. And right away, and that's the culture. So what does Vanilla Soft do? And that was appealing. Why do we have this fight?

Vanilla Soft is a sales engagement platform. I love asking this question. Everybody who's listening right now, put your hand up. Have you heard of Vanilla Soft? If your hand is up, God bless you. If your hand is not up, you're not alone. That's my job. I'm trying to fix it. Let me give you context. We compete occasionally, once in a blue moon, with vendors like Sales Loft and Outreach. So in the simplest sense, we do what they do. Of course, we're different. Ask me how sometimes. Do that offline. Love to share that with you. But that's the whole context of why I came here. Because sales engagement, it's just like marketing. But you get paid commissions if you do it right. So it's kind of cool.

And I love the multi-channel engagement using social, using email, using phone, using whatever tactic you have available to you to just relentlessly pursue in a professional way your prospects. So it appealed to me, it appealed to my background, it appealed to what I was all about. And I've been having a blast doing it ever since. I love it. And this is kind of where my curiosity comes from, which is with these tools. I think these tools are fantastic if used the right way. If sales reps use them as the true sales efficiency slash engagement tools that they should be used as, I think they're great. Because it is about contact strategies. It's about cadences, if you will. It's not about that one email, that one voicemail anymore.

But I'm seeing reps over-automate, right? So they're using them as spam engines. They're using them as Marketo, Eloqua, that type of thing. So talk to me, because what I'm seeing right now is I'm seeing marketing come closer and closer into sales with all the automation and the artificial intelligence. And I'm seeing sales become more and more automated. So what's the line, do you believe? Let's start here. What's the line between sales and marketing these days when reaching out to customers, right? What's marketing's role in reaching out to the customer and what's sales role? And how do we differentiate so that as sales reps, we are not seen as generic marketing templates and that type of stuff?

Because that's what I'm seeing right now. I'm seeing sales reps basically saying, screw it. I'm a spam engine. What's the difference? Okay. So I'm going to give you an answer. This is the world according to Daryl. And therefore, I reserve the right that you may have a different approach as long as you have an approach that's defined. That's all that matters. And before I answer the question, I want to share how excited I am because I candidly, John, I'm going to shoot straight. I see too many young SDRs who don't really get the world yet. All they know is sales. That's all they've been exposed to. And in their world, marketing does jack shit. And we're the ones who do it all. And you guys run through the parties and you do the trade shows and that's it.

They don't even have a comprehension. They wouldn't know to ask the question where does marketing and sales begin when it relates to nurturers and engagement. So this is what we do at VanillaSoft after much debate. And it was much debate. Marketing owns the initial nurture. Let me qualify that. If you come to my site and you say, I want a free trial, I want to talk to somebody, I want a demo, boom, marketing is not involved. That immediately goes over to sales. That's a clear, you know, I'm raising my hand and I'm self-qualifying and there is no marketing nurture whatsoever that takes place. Now it's with the sales rep. They'll either have a conversation, but they start the nurture. They own the cadence.

Now, in this case, that's going to be kind of a post-conversation cadence. It's information from me to you, a one-on-one connection. If you don't do that, marketing here, you come, you watch a webinar, you sign up for a webinar, you download a piece of content, you fill out a form. We say, if you have the right job title, if you're in the right industry, if you're in the right industry, and if you're in my right target audience, vertical, size, etc. Again, marketing doesn't nurture. It goes over to the SDR, they start the cadence. It's a one-on-one. It's personalized. You download this paper, boom, that kicks off the cadence. If it's none of the above, then physically we nurture until you hit a certain score, and then we flip it over.

My point being, every time marketing flips it over, we stop, full, hard stop in marketing. Because the last thing I want you getting is nurture content from marketing and nurture content from a sales rep. That is bad. I'm spamming you, and you're going to get PO'd at me. So that's the line. I'm not sure I answered your question, but it's a brilliant question. Well, so how do you, like, so sales reps, though, right? You say, yes, the case is somebody downloaded, somebody did whatever, and now it flips over to me, and now it should be personalized, right? But here's an example. Like, let's talk about the white paper email, right? Yeah. The fucking white paper. Every fucking company has the same bullshit white paper email.

It's like, once you download the white paper, an email goes out that says, hey, so you downloaded the white paper, I'd like to talk to you about your 2020 initiatives and how we can help you achieve your goals, you know? And it's like, and a sales rep sends that out. And I'm like, why the fuck does a sales rep send that out? When that, to me, is actually a marketing function where it's like, I can easily click, you just did this, so therefore you can go into this sequence until you actually respond to say, hey, yeah, now I want to talk to somebody, right? But why do people have sales reps following up on bullshit marketing leads that are scored? Because I let, you know, the whole scored thing, right?

To me, I can't tell you how many websites I've been on where I've downloaded the white paper, you know, and I have zero interest in reaching out to that, in that product, right? I just thought it was a good white paper. I thought it was a good ebook, right? So I'm not a, you know, I might come across as I was on your website for a bunch of, you know, poking around, whatever, I clicked on this. So I might get a high score, but I'm a shitty lead. So why does that get dumped over to sales when I really haven't shown an interest in it yet? I'm like, there's no intent, right? Because you hear a lot about intent data now about, you know, I'm actively searching for that solution. That's a different thing, like G2 Crowd, that type of stuff.

But if I'm on your website just poking around, that doesn't mean I'm interested in your stuff. So why should that go to sales if somebody's been scored to a certain level? I mean, do you still believe in that? Let me introduce some marketing vernacular here, because we all are familiar with the concept of scoring. I even use the word scoring. I should have been more specific. So you, great point here. There's scoring and there's grading and there's a difference. And marketers will know this. Well, actually, a lot don't. That's a whole different problem. But sales reps need to know this, okay? To John's point exactly, you can have a high score and be a college student doing research for a paper.

But you've been all over my site and physically bombarded me with downloads and site business and content and everything else. That doesn't mean you're qualified. That just means you've got a high score. Then there's a grade. A grade says, oh, wait, title, industry, company size. In our case, my sales team is actually organized by vertical. So I want to know when someone comes in from the insurance vertical, the healthcare vertical, the finance vertical, the high-tech vertical, the manufacturing vertical, and flip them to the right SDR and route the lead accordingly. So grade versus lead, two different things. And when I thought about it, I said, you know, if you're in the right industry and title and company size, because we're cleansing our data all the time.

You fill out a form, we are cleansing it in marketing. We're using things like Zoom Info or Clearbit or others to get all that data and appending it to you. And then we make that decision. Is this a leader? This is a grade. If it's a grade, we'll route it. To your point, 100% agree with you. That marketing paper, that bullshit paper that you're getting because you just had a curiosity, it was an interesting one. That's why we don't flip it over. Because here's the reality. What happens, and we've learned this the hard way, and this is what we do. I mean, we're sales engaged. We're cadence. This is what we do for a living. We were getting so many leads that we flipped over to the sales teams that even though they might have had, say, a nine-step cadence or a 12-step cadence, they couldn't get past step four because I was overwhelming them with leads.

So the whole point there is the answer to your question, why does that shit happen at all? It happens because of a couple reasons. One, this is the biggest reason at all. Most people don't get marketing. There's too many CEOs out there who don't get marketing. There's too many heads of marketing who come from a comms background or they trade shows, and they don't get demand gen, and they don't understand. And neither one of those people, the CEO or the head of marketing, have any sales experience to understand what the salespeople are going through. So that's the biggest reason why that happens. The other reason it happens is because, honestly, John, you've got strong sales leaders who just impose their will and say, I want every lead.

My team will blow it up. Marketing is going to F it up. I don't want it. Gotcha. Gotcha. And I could easily see that. So let's talk about that nurture, the sales nurture versus the marketing nurture, right? Because I wrote a blog post a while ago called Let's Sales Sell and Let Marketing Market, right? And please make sure that there's a line between the two. And maybe you can, I don't know if you agree or disagree with this on this, but when it comes to marketing emails, right, where it's like the webinars, you know, hey, we got a webinar coming up. Hey, we got an event coming up or whatever it is. I don't want it to come from me as a sales rep. I don't want that email to come from John Barrows because say you get 10 emails from John Barrows when it's obviously not John Barrows.

You know what I mean? Like you look at it as a template, whatever it is. And then one day I decide to go on your website, do some homework, and actually send you a thoughtful email. I'm probably already in the spam filter, right? So I actually want those emails to come from my CMO and my VPS, whatever, right? And then I want to be, you know, learn about like, hey, when is my audience being hit by that stuff? So then I can take those emails and maybe put some context around them and maybe forward them back to an executive and say, hey, not sure if you just saw this marketing email that just came out about this webinar that we have coming up. The reason I think you should go to it is because, right?

So the context over content that I talk about all the time. But I'm seeing sales, you know, use these cadences like marketing. So what's the right way to use a cadence? And how do you think about it? The automation component from an efficiency standpoint, but personalization, right? Because I think I'm doing a lot of thinking about this. You heard me at the workshop that we did. You know, I don't think it's necessarily as much about personalization anymore as I think it's about relevance, right? So because you could be the most, you could write the most personalized email you've ever written in your life to me. But if it's not relevant, I don't care. So for a sales rep, what's the line of efficiencies without over automation?

So statistically, you're going to, okay, a couple, so there's a couple ways I can go on this. You're going to want to personalize your outreach, your email outreach, specifically in this case, because even though cadences are phone and social and email, let's just focus on email for a second. You're going to personalize probably 20% of that. But here's the mistake people are making. And here's what I think you should be doing instead. It's a bit of a mindset. It's a bit of an approach. And it's a bit of an effort versus laziness. Sales engagement, no matter what tool you use, ours or somebody else's, it's essentially there to prompt you. Think of it this way. It's no different than a calendar reminder you get that says you have a meeting coming up.

It's there to prompt you, but at scale, to say, okay, it's time for you to send another email. It's time for you to call somebody. It's not there to do your job for you. And too many reps are treating that way. And that's why it's becoming bullshit. You see the same effing template over and over again, no matter what the organization is. Because I know, got to have 15 minutes on your calendar. I know if I get that one more time, I'm going to scream. Because you guys are being the sales reps or the sales leadership who implemented the system are just being freaking lazy. They view that as just a way to achieve sales nirvana. And when I call them out on that, many of them are actually, they're fully aware of what they're doing.

They're saying, yeah, it's a numbers game, dude. We know we're going to have a high bounce rate or what have you, or a spam. But it's a numbers game. And we'll get our numbers just by the sheer volume. And the problem is, is they're burning so many bridges behind them when they do that. It's just freaking stupid. The numbers may work for you for a month or two or three. After that, you're going to tank like there's no tomorrow because you've burned too many bridges. So personalize 20% of your outreach. And that's easy. I mean, this is not rocket science. How do you personalize something? It's that opening line or two. So, for example, use your example of the webinar, right? And there was a corporate nurture going on by marketing.

And eventually, you jump in because of something's going on. Maybe there's another piece of content. You can say, I'll use an example here from the school of chatbots. How many times have you been on chatbot on a website? All of a sudden, you see, hey, Daryl, real person here. And you go, okay, cool. I know. Context, right? And you can do the same thing. You know, hey, John, real person here, Daryl. Saw you downloaded this paper. I'm going to jump in here because, right? And so there's some personalization. Because I saw you were, you know, focused on this. Because I saw you post on that. Because I know in your role, you're probably challenged with the coronavirus that's rampant right now. And it's having an impact on you.

It's all relevance. It's funny you use the word relevance. Because one of the things I wrote down on what did I want to cover on today's thing, my second bullet I made was relevance. And so one of the things that, you know, I can speak as a CMO of a sales engagement platform, but let me park that for a minute. As a CMO, I'm the target of many of your outreaches because I have a big-ass budget. So I'm as much in a position to tell you what you're doing wrong. And this is what you're doing wrong with your cadences. You are not personalizing it for me. Bottom line, why do I care? Tell me what's in it for me. Because what you don't maybe fully appreciate is that I'm literally deleting three-quarters of your emails based solely on your subject line.

Yep. I just get up in the morning. I've got, you know, 2,000 emails. And I go delete, delete, delete, delete, delete. And whoever goes past that initial filter, I'll have a look-see. And then my second filter is what's in your first sentence or two. And then I delete. So don't waste time. Don't dick around. Don't try to be cheesy. Don't try to be folksy. Just get to the bottom line. Tell me why I care. Short emails, short subject lines, skimmable. I will love you for it. I may not respond now. That's for you to keep on reaching out to me. And then eventually you're going to wear me down. But if I see a personality, I see a sense of style, I see relevance, I see knowledge, I see context. I see that it's not about your transaction, but about my pain.

I will eventually respond to you on the 6th, 8th, 12th time. And I think that's the personalization piece that I think a lot, and this is why I used to freak out about artificial intelligence, right? Because I saw some artificial intelligence doing some crazy shit and making connections here. But now I'm not as worried because they're doing personalization at scale, but they're doing it in such a manufactured way, it's blatantly obvious, right? They'll go, they'll grab something personal. It's like, hey, John, I see you're in Boston, you know, go Patriots or something stupid like that. But then they'll hard shift into like this hardcore value proposition. And it's like, wait a minute. It's kind of like back, you know, back in the, you know, early 2000s.

Like if you reached out to me in the early 2000s and referenced something on LinkedIn, like, hey, John, I went, I see you went to University of Maryland, you know, go Terps, like that type of stuff. Like, you know, back then that was, that was okay. Hey, good job. Like you actually did the extra homework here. This isn't just a generic pitch. Like there's a connection there. Great. But now, like if you do that shit to me, I'm like, dude, whatever. First of all, if anybody ever references college for me, I'm like, dude, that was 24 years ago. I could give a shit about college at this point. So, but are you seeing a lot of like the fake personalization out there versus the relevance? We're seeing fake personalization.

We're actually seeing a lot of fake accounts too, like a boatload of fake Twitter accounts that are completely contrived, trying to get at you from various angles. And while the marketer in me can smile at that and go, that's kind of interesting. I respect your tenacity, although it's maybe morally questionable. But yeah, we're seeing a ton of fakeness come through because everybody's looking for a shortcut. Well, that's the thing. Like, why is everybody looking for a shortcut, right? Because I think these tools are great, but everybody's looking for the perfect fucking template, the perfect thing to say, the one email that's going to go out there that's going to make it rain for them. Is it we've lost the, well, I don't know.

I'll take that back. Am I being an old man here and saying back in the day, you know, like my dad. Get off my grass. Yeah. Like, well, back, you know, I walked, you know, I went to school, walked both, you know, both ways uphill, you know, and too free to snow type of thing. Or are we really getting less patient and less thoughtful and really trying to lean too much on technology if we cross that chasm? Okay. So I can answer the question. Kind of. And here's my answer. No, the, we are turning into a bottom line society. Just, you know, just shoot straight with me. No bullshit. Here we go. And I'll respect that because you're honoring my time. But, but here's where it gets interesting. That's only true in certain industries and certain geographies.

So that is a hundred percent true in the U S less so in Canada, even less so in Europe where it's far more relational and there's just an etiquette involved. So, uh, that's true in high tech, high tech, you know, we're fast. We're making it happen. Boom, boom, boom. It's about the next round. We're going to raise. We're going to go have a massive IPO, whatever it might be. That's we're on fire, but manufacturing not so much. So it's really about knowing your audience. That's why I understand your persona is so critical. And if you're going to do some research, you want to connect with these people. You have to know these people anyway. So you're going to frame the conversation, understanding your audience, understanding your marketplace with too many people.

Again, looking for that shortcut that says, I don't want to be bothered. I want one nurture template, one script. And this, this is as true on email as it is on phone, as it is on social. Um, and they're, they're, they're lacking patience. But look at the social thing, which is part of your cadence. Often the first pitch is a, Hey, it's an in-mail. Hi, how are you? No one cares. My company does this feature pitch, feature pitch, feature pitch. No actual ability to connect it to why that matters to me. And it's all about you, not about me. And I just go, yeah, you know, dude, I'm just a fricking transaction to you. You don't give two shits about me. And, uh, and I don't have time for you. And you may have the best products out there, but I don't care because you pissed me off.

So how do you help reps under, like have empathy, right? How, how do you, how do you have like the give a shit factor, right? Of John, how did you teach your kids to have empathy? Uh, it's, you know, she's nine years old and, and, um, and, um, it's been, you know, since she was born, you know what I mean? To, to really, that's right there is it comes down to coaching, right? So with my kids, and this is no different with my kids, my kids are now 24 and 25, almost nine. And, uh, it was always the same. It was, uh, they'd come home crying and Johnny hurt my feelings and we'd have to stop and say, well, what's going on in Johnny's life? Why might Johnny have done that? Why do you think he lashed out to you?

You know, how do you think that makes him feel? If he's had got a bad rough life, uh, home life, um, and all of a sudden, you know, over time and repetition, they would start to go, oh, I get it. So teaching somebody empathy is not an overnight thing. It is a coaching thing. It is part of your weekly one-on-ones. It's part of your weekly meetings. It's part of role modeling. Um, but empathy, man, I think empathy starts with not making it about you. Here's what you need to know, guys. If you make it about your prospect, you will get what you want to achieve. Stop making it about you. Yeah. And I think that's the switch that, uh, you know, I always kind of use the example, like catching your sales group, right?

There's, there's one day where you just wake up as a sales rep and it's a little bit easier than it was the day before. Right. And it, and it's, it's when you stop pitching your solutions and you start having conversations about your solutions. It's funny because there was that one day when all of a sudden it just got easier and all of a sudden you knew you're in your group. And I was thought, that's awesome. My wife reminds me constantly, cause I can be an impatient person, which is not unlike what you're talking about. Yeah. Um, because of this, she, I would say, why don't they just get this? This is so obvious to me. And she'll say, honey, they don't have your experience. They don't have your know-how.

They don't have your life lessons or your mistakes. Learn what's so obvious to you is not obvious to them. Honey, it's your job to teach them. So to all you sales leaders out there, it's your job to teach them. Yeah. And that's the, that's kind of the tough part. Cause it does come with experience. It's like, this is all wrapped into like business acumen and, you know, empathy and all that other stuff. It's like, it does take a while to, to have a different perspective because in your twenties, you're just doing what you're told to do, right? Like you're just hitting the numbers. You're, but it's like, I want to try to shortcut that. I want to, I want to figure out a way even without management and coaching and that type of stuff to, to empower reps, to, to think about a little bit more, you know, uh, it's kind of like, you know, if you think about a kid coming out of school, like the last thing I was thinking about was life insurance, you know, when I was 22 years old, right?

It's like life insurance, dude, I'm going to live forever. Like who gives a shit? But if you invest in life insurance early in your career, it's way, way cheaper, right? So, and if you start saving earlier in your career, you know, it's exponentially more valuable to you longterm, but most people don't really start taking savings and life insurance and that type of shit seriously until they're kind of close to their thirties and they start having responsibilities and stuff like that, right? Like the house and the kids and the wife and all that other shit. It's the same thing with business acumen. I don't think a lot of us, I don't think it really clicks, um, of how important it is until we either get punched in the face by somebody who calls us out.

Right. And that's what happened to me. I mean, that's what happened to me. My business acumen, um, I, it was a wake up call for me. Cause I remember I was, I was remember having a conversation with a CTO and, uh, and I was trying to pretend like I knew what the fuck I was talking about. And, uh, this guy stopped me mid sentence and he goes, can I ask you a question? He's like, do you have any idea what the difference between a CTO and a CIO is? And I was like, fuck, uh, nope. And he goes, uh, you fucking sales reps come in here spewing your shit all the time, thinking that you fucking know what you're talking about. And you don't even know the difference. You don't even know what I do. And that was a, that to me was a wake up call.

And I do believe that everybody needs to get punched in the face a couple of times to wake up, you know, to just be like, Ooh, all right. I won't do that again. But can you, as a, and say you don't have a good coach, say you don't have a good manager. What were some of the, what are some of the shortcuts that, that you, you might suggest for a kid to, to learn how to gen, truly give a shit about the people that they're talking to and have that business acumen and have empathy. Is there any shortcut to that outside of just experience there? Well, I'm not sure it's a shortcut, but there is something you can do. That's pretty straightforward. Um, and what that is, uh, a handful of options for you to evaluate, um, start calling customers and just say, Hey, it's Daryl from Vanilla Soft.

Um, I just want to understand, you know, how you're using the tool, what problems that solve them for you, you know, and, and along the way you can say, is there anything I can do for you? You know, and, and you will be shocked how much your customers will share with you. Um, the thing you can do, sound stupid. If you had a chance, go to some trade shows. When you get a, just a ton of people coming to you on the floor, you can literally sit there and qualify them because it's a different, it's a completely different world at a trade show than it is on a phone or an email because it's face to face and they're willing to give you so much more time. So you can actually start asking, you know, what is it you do?

You know, what's your pain? Why is that a pain? What other solutions have you tried? And you're not asking, this is too many of you are asking because you're already thinking about what your next line is. You're trying to close this deal. Park that shit. Just ask to get to know them. Uh, last thing, it sounds stupid. Read periodicals. I know John, you're a huge advocate of Feedly and, and not only of individuals you follow, but issues that are related to certain industries or topics all over that. You have to invest in yourself. I'm a big fan. I've done a number of podcasts on my inside, inside sales podcasts, where we talk about, uh, learning is earning, which is not just learning about your skill sets, which you can do, uh, by, you know, if you're, for example, if you're listening to this podcast right now, congratulations, you're learning, you're making that time.

You can do the same thing in YouTube, you can do the same thing in, uh, in video and eBooks, et cetera, or just book books. Um, but if you do that, you'll make a point of also learning about the industry, the challenges. Here's another thing you can do. You can hyper segment. If you have this authority, you can say, I'm only going to focus on, I'll make this up. Like for example, vanilla stuff, I target, you know, people in sales roles and people in marketing roles. So I can say, for example, I'm only going to, uh, target and test your target for the next week or two marketing CMOs, VPs, uh, directors of marketing. That's it. And then I'm going to go, you know, and I'm going to ask a lot of questions along the way around that persona.

And then I'm going to do it around, you know, a marketing manager or an ops manager and get there my head around that. And then I'll do it around a head of sales. So in other words, I'm so all in that I can now literally learn what I took from the first call where I talked to somebody and apply it to the very next call. And after a week or two of doing that, you're going to have your spiel down on why they care, what's relevant to them, how you help them. So hyper focus is another way you can do it on the job. Yeah. I actually recommend that a lot, especially when it comes to cadences and those types of things. It's like just pick one. And this is where marketing and sales can align, where if you pick one persona, so call it CMOs and SaaS, right?

Have the marketing team come in and do a little bit of a lunch and learn about, all right, what do these people care about? Okay. Like today and everybody do a little exercise. Everybody open up their laptops and go CMOs, tech, SaaS, priorities, challenges, 2020. See what comes up, right? And first of all, by doing that, just looking at those, you know, articles and reading some of that stuff, again, business acumen there. But then you outline the top priorities and challenges, and then you break it up and say, okay, you come up with a message for that one. You come up with a message for that one. You come up with a message for that one. So you come up with six or seven different messages to that persona.

And then you, because you've been doing the research, you actually come up with content that you can share throughout that cadence, if you will. And then everybody sends out their cadence, right? So 20 or 30 emails go out, touch one, touch two, touch three, touch three becomes a call. That becomes a call blitz. And now we're calling into the same persona with the same message. And to your point, we're learning, right? And we're getting better and better and better because you're hyper-focused on that one. If you just did that once a month, I mean, 12 months, you got 12 personas. You should be pretty legit with some business acumen after that, right? There's a couple of things you can do to your point.

One thing, you talked about, you know, like cadence, you know, touch one, touch two, touch three call. You can also do A-B testing. So you're learning all this information. And then you can go one step further. You're going to have an A-B test of each of those touches. You know, just email one, email two, social three. You know, what message works better and gets a higher conversion rate? That's where sales starts to become like marketing. You're always looking for the, to your point about, you know, marginal gains on what's better. That's the first thing. Second thing sales folks don't fully understand is the access that your marketers have that they're, they will willingly share with you, but you got to ask them for it.

Marketers often are briefing industry analysts, Gartner, Forrester, IDC, et cetera. And these industry analysts talk to the very people you want to, they're talking to the CMOs. And so the analyst becomes is a go-between on what the issues are and the pains are that your industry and your persona are facing. And the marketers, when they're briefing them on your solution, have already worked with the analyst to map the persona and their needs with your solution and its benefits to see, you know, what the value prop is. Go talk to your marketers and say, you know, tell me what the analysts are saying or, or better yet, I do this all the time. We, can you record an analyst call and let us listen to it so we can hear the pushback and the objections and the big picture, big ticket items.

That's massive. So the analyst conversations are huge. One last thing is too, many, many sales reps, um, you're being foolish a little bit when I say that with all love and respect and you're not reading your own content, your marketers are making money. You're going to say, my marketers make shit content. It's awful. I hate it. It's bullshit. I never use it. And you know what? You're probably right. A lot of the marketing content is bullshit, but a lot of them are substantial stuff. They're eBooks, they're white papers. There's a lot of research that they've done that goes into that and they've distilled it down into a five things you need to know. These are the 10 best practices you need to follow.

Read that shit and use it. I'm always blown away when my sales folks, um, don't know stuff. And like, for example, I literally had, I'm, I'm, I'm, I'm sharing our dirty laundry here, folks. Don't yell at me yesterday on Slack. One of my sales reps shared on our, one of the Slack channels. Hey, uh, I've been in, you know, this vertical for so long where I don't see sales loft and outreach, but now I'm over in this vertical for a period of time and I'm running into them a little bit. How are we different? And I wanted to freaking pull my hair out because we have all that. Content, document it. Um, now the good news was they asked, but the bad news of us, they didn't, they didn't do their own research.

They wanted to be spoon fed and go to someplace and say, tell me the answer. That's exactly the problem. Take some ownership. That's exactly the problem now. Now. And I agree on the sales side of the house, but on the marketing side of the house, I flip that over to, and shame on marketing for, I think, I think you have a unique perspective because you've carried a bag, right? Most marketers have not. No, you're right. So how do you get marketers to have a genuine appreciation for the shit that the sales reps go through? Because that's where, like, you know, I, that's why I don't think that they, like they throw these leads. So you, you brought it up earlier, like trade shows and those types of things.

And I can't tell you how many times I've had some marketer tell me these are great leads or these scored leads. And I'm calling some Joe Schmo in his garage who wanted the squishy ball at the fucking trade show. And so he put his card in there and now all of a sudden I got to, I got, I have to follow up on them because if I don't, I'm going to get in trouble. So now, you know, I have to follow up on this shit lead and I have to send three, four, five emails to them just to follow up on them. So, so where's the empathy on that side of how, how do you build the empathy on the marketing side of the house for sales and what we have to go through and why sales has that, that disdain a lot of times for marketing and why we don't use a lot of the marketing shit because we've been so beat up so frequently about all the shit that they're asking us to do or all the stuff that we're asking, they're asking us to follow up on.

And then it's not, and it's not legit. So there's many ways they're going to answer this question in no particular order. One marketing needs to be comped as part of their overall OTE in corporate revenues and certain financial goals, whether it be customer acquisition, market penetration, revenues, margins, whatever. Not just on MQLs, right? Not just an MQLs. MQLs is bullshit because they're going to freaking bake the books in that total bullshit. All right. They need to be in a revenue. Number two, now I'm going to get on my perch for a second, guys. I apologize. For all you marketers listening, get off your ass, pick up the effing phone and make some freaking calls. Yeah. All right. Take a batch of the very leads that you're giving to sales, pull it aside, 5% of the leads.

And those are yours. Work them. You do your own A-B test. You do your outreach. When it gets hairy because they respond, I'll instantly pass it over to John and say, John, okay, man, shit, they bid, you know, over to you. But step up. You cannot be a senior marketing. If you have any aspirations of being a senior marketer, if you don't understand the world sales live in, you need to know the stress they're in. You need to know the anxiety they face. You need to understand the rejection they experience. You need to stop hiding behind your corporate freaking email addresses. You need to know your product and your solution. And it's really simple. If you're scared shitless and you're avoiding it, you don't want to do this.

I get it. Walk over to the all-star sales rep, whoever that might be. Sit your ass down for a couple hours over a couple weeks or months and just freaking watch them do it. Or even more crazy, you're using refract, you're using chorus, you're using gong. Go listen to some damn recordings and listen to what they say and how the conversations go. It is incumbent upon the marketers in this world to understand sales. And if they don't, they shouldn't be marketers. Thank you very much. Because that's where I, you know, and look, I graduated with a marketing degree. I have a healthy respect for marketing, but obviously now I'm biased. To me, the most successful organizations I've ever come across are all aligned towards sales, right?

Everything to help sales sell. And it's, and it's, let's, let's build it around that. And that's why I see a lot of product-based companies fail because they have an engineer who started the company who is super smart and thinks that the product is just going to solve its problem. Right. Whereas it doesn't, you know what I mean? Like the number one thing, reason I see most companies fail is not because product market fit. It's not because their product's bad. It's because they can't fucking sell it. Yep. And, and marketing will only get you so far, right? I mean, look, most companies will, will kind of let me, I might, they might have a kick-ass product, right? And so they do some SEO and some optimization, whatever it is.

And all of a sudden those inbound leads flow, but then there's always that wall that they hit, right? And it kind of levels off. And that's where the investors start to look at it and say, okay, you need to now go from here to here. Now that's where sales really has to come into play. And it's almost like this by-product of, oh shit, we got to invest in sales. But if you really understand and truly appreciate and empathize with sales, because we were talking, we've talked a lot about empathizing with a customer, right? From a sales standpoint, I have to empathize. But if you empathize from a sales rep and you realize that elevator pitch that you just gave me, which is fucking a minute and a half long, if I didn't take a breath, like that shit ain't going to land when I make that cold call.

You know what I mean? Like, I always tell people, like, you know, you ever been given your pitch and about halfway through your pitch, like you're boring yourself? Yeah. You know what I mean? Like, you're like, oh fuck, this is stupid. Like that, I guarantee you that's around 15 seconds and no elevator pitch I've ever come across in my life that marketing has developed for us has ever been less than 15 seconds. It's always this paragraph long piece of shit that if I tried to say it over the phone, I'd get hung up on within the first 10 seconds of me saying it. So, so to John's point, I'll give you, I love John's point. So this is what, this is our opening pitch. I'm talking to somebody in sales.

I just ask a question. My opening pitch is, you know, hey, whatever, blah, blah, blah, quick question for you. Sure. What is it? Are you tired of your sales reps cherry picking leads? There you go. All right. And they go, fuck. Yeah. Okay. And if I'm talking to a marketing person, my comment, it's the same thing. Are you tired of sales either not following up on your leads, taking too long to follow up on your leads or making like one or two max, three attempts and giving up on your leads? Yeah. Oh yeah. I get it. Let me tell you about Vanilla Soft and how we can make that pain go away. Right. And that's it. That's it. I just need to grab their attention. You get seven to 12 seconds max. That's it.

I use that same line with an analyst. I use that same line on trade show floor. The one thing I'll say is that sales and marketing need to have a weekly ops meeting and sales needs to fear marketing. Hear me out in this because it goes both directions, by the way. They need to fear that marketing is just grilling the analytics. What's my conversion ratio from lead to MQL to SQL to win loss, blah, blah, blah. What channel is pulling better for me? How come it's taking you so long to follow up on your leads? How come you're not hitting all your cadences? Expect to be grilled by marketing. That's because the CEO, the CFO, the COO are going to come to me and say, Daryl, we gave you a million dollars.

What's the ROI? And I need to be able to say to your point, I hit that plateau and the reason I can't go any further is because sales sucks or marketing sucks. Either way, as a leader, I need that answer. Similarly, though, marketing needs to fear sales. Sales needs to be doing exactly what you just said. These leads suck. I don't care that Jimmy wanted a squishy ball. Why the F are you wasting my time? I'm an expensive resource and you're pissing away and I can't pursue the real opportunities because of this. You got to actually be able to quantify why my leads suck. Tell me why. Don't make a generalization. Too many of you are too lazy. Stop freaking generalizing. Tell me why they suck. And then we will have an agreement.

Okay, so if I stop giving you these leads, you will start calling them promptly. We have a deal. It's a negotiation. Yes. Okay. Next week, we're going to review how this deal is working. Yeah. And just free up from the bullshit because I think that's the biggest frustration on the sales side of the house. It's like, you know, and look, I got empathy on both sides in the sense that sales is like, oh, this is a waste of my time, but yet they're not, a lot of times they're using it as an excuse to not do their job. Right. On the other hand, you know, the marketing is saying, don't, you know, follow up with these, but they're shitty. You know, so I think there's both sides that have to come to that agreement, right?

Because if I was a marketer and you said, John and his squishy ball, you know, pain in the ass, I'm going to say, well, wait a minute. Well, John's in the right industry. John's in the right company size. John's got the right title. Is it because he had a squishy ball or it's because you didn't, you didn't create a context around value. Right. You know, it's a hard conversation, but if you don't have that, neither one of you hits your measurable goals and gets that bonus, your commissions, and you're both out on the market looking for your next gig six months later. Right. I mean, that's why I kind of joke. That's why I think the, uh, the whole advent of the CRO, the chief revenue officer came, came about, uh, and I think the reason, the main reason CROs, uh, you know, in the past 10 years started to sprout up is because sales and marketing can't get along, can't get along.

And even then, but I'll, I'll, I'll, I'll even challenge that. Right. Because today, you know, many companies that had a marketing, had a sales reporter, the CEO or the COO, right. The leader, whomever that is, whether it's a CRO or a CEO, they're still going to bias towards their own comfort levels. So yeah, a CRO by definition, coming from sales, right? Uh, so I, I love the premise. I agree with you. It's there to kind of be the peacekeeper, but you really do need a talented CRO who understands the bigger picture. Yeah. I love it. Awesome, man. Well, let's, let's tie this up. What, what other, anything else that we should be thinking about from a, from a cadence standpoint, from a leveraging technology standpoint, from a sales and marketing alignment, any, any kind of last, uh, things to, to lead the audience to think about before they walk up, before we get out the door?

No, the one thing about cadence is, is they're evolving. So they're evolving with things like AI. We talked a bit about that and how it can help you with some of your messaging and whatnot. And that's cool. But AI is not going to be the panacea. It's not going to make your job any better. You still have to use common sense. So just kind of be buyer aware, beware. A lot of the AI is also bullshit. You know, I'm just being candid with you. It's, it's, it's, they say AI, that's guys like me because it's hot and it's getting trended. It's, it's not even machine learning in half the time. All right. So, so I'm going to make this comment only because, uh, this, this gentleman who I'm, I'm friends with, uh, he actually said it and he's Indian.

So I'm, I'm, I'm translating this from him. He said, you know what AI is, John? He's like, it's also in India. He's like, it's really most AI is a bunch of people from some other country cramming away on something and then producing a result that looks like the machines did it. But really it's people working for five bucks an hour on the back end doing it. He goes, that's the majority of what AI is. He's like, it is a bullshit term. It's a catch all to sound sexy from a marketing standpoint, but would you really look at it? True AI? Yeah. Watson analytics. That's AI. Okay, fine. But most of these tools that are out there, they're at best machine learning. And, and at worst, you know, also an India type of thing.

It's you, you nailed it. It's the, it's the offshoring aspect. Um, and a lot of this, you know, they're, they're kick-ass algorithms, you know, that may help you prioritize or make some recommendations based on some observations, but there is not a shred of learning going on there, especially artificial, other than maybe what the offshore folks said. Oh, look what we've learned. Right. Um, so factor that in a little bit of bullshit in the marketing hype. Second thing is cadences. A lot of the established vendors are, what they have is they have static cadences. So I, I just counsel you, you know, seven touches to seven days is great. But if step four, some shit happens, you know, you need to be able to react.

If, if, if you're working through your cadence and in, in the process of doing that, you're ignoring real-time triggers, like someone filled out a web form. There's a buyer intent signal coming down real-time in G2. There's somebody on your website right now from a named account. And if you're ignoring those, because you're so fixated on getting through your cadence, cadence is becoming, is working against you. So you want, you know, they're moving to more dynamic cadences. You want to make sure you can kind of like interrupt those cadence for a moment to handle to this little issue. And then when that's resolved, go back to the cadence. So that's the only thing I would say on that. You know, talk to your vendor.

If you're looking at a solution, talk to your vendor about, about that. Uh, last thing on cadence, and this applies to anything. Um, you know, everybody, everybody is evolving. This morning, I canceled my contract with the chat vendor that we have used on our website to go to another vendor. Why? Well, in the end, they both chat. But that other vendor, I think is innovating more and has got a better solution today than, you know, a year and a year and a half ago when I signed up with the original vendor. And there's nothing to do with the original vendor. So in other words, always look at new innovations that are, that you can take advantage of. And that means you got to jump ship, you got to change vendors, you got to shift your ops a little bit and your, and your processes do it because you know what is exactly what John said.

You're always looking to be marginally better than before. So you can keep on hitting bigger numbers. That's kind of it. That's all I got for you. Awesome. My friend. Well, thank you very much. Uh, how can people find out more about what you're doing over at Vanilla Soft and get in touch with you? You know, I like to say I'm not active on social, but that would be a lie. So just follow me on LinkedIn and Twitter. And if you do that, you will know what's going on. Follow the, the company, follow actual Vanilla Soft, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, same thing, man. We've got so many followers. It's crazy. The YouTube channel, awesome content on there. If you're into, you know, you want to into learning, learning is earning.

Check out the YouTube channel. Love it. And it's D-A-R-R-Y-L, Prail, P-R-A-I-L-L for everybody listening on the podcast. Uh, definitely check them out on, on LinkedIn and, and I agree. Check out their YouTube page because there's some real cool fire shit on there. So awesome. Thank you, Daryl. I appreciate it. Hopefully everybody all enjoyed this as much as I did and got some stuff out of this. It'll make your day a little bit better. Um, and, uh, yeah, just like I say all the time, uh, at the end of the day, even if you had a shitty day, if you made somebody smile, you had a good day. Let's try to spread a little bit more positivity out there. So, uh, thank you all very much for listening and have a great day.

Thanks, Daryl.