16: Evolve Or Die

good to see you all again it's been a while um just getting back yeah there's my home studio stuff so you're gonna see a little bit of background stuff whatever but anyways it's been a while i just got back sorry for those of you who've been expecting make it happen mondays hopefully you got the communications but um i was uh i was in italy for the past uh two and a half weeks which was fucking fantastic um i really don't know i had a whole bunch of um uh you know thoughts about italy and and everything else and and i heard a bunch of people tell me how incredible italy was it didn't matter what anybody said it blew all those expectations out of the water if you ever have a chance to go over to italy please do um one of the things that really struck me outside of how beautiful it was and everything else was just the mentality that those people have it's a totally different mentality than we have here in the states um here we work to live uh i'm sorry here we live to work there um they work to live there's no question about it that um here we're you know always focused on working our asses off and doing all sorts of crazy stuff and and i think the stats on americans taking um taking vacations is like we we unused the majority of our vacation time right um because we're always go go go go go and there it's totally different they are like yeah whatever work i i just want to do whatever i can so i can live the lifestyle that i want and i think there's a lot that we can be uh that we can take from that so i took advantage of this one this was a baller vacation i mean i went from my wife my daughter my nanny um we went to rome we went up and down the amalfi coast on a yacht which was bananas um and then uh we hit sicily which was incredible so if you want to go take a look at some of the pictures go to the instagram page john and barrows um like i said pictures can't even do it justice but um it'll give you a little glimpse of what i was up to and also actually on this facebook page if you scroll down a little bit on this facebook page i posted two videos one of the yacht and then the other of the castle that we stayed in in sicily and so yeah exactly literally make it happen in italy uh i might be moving there it was rough to come back but um but anyways you know it got me thinking about why we do what we do right and why you work so hard and if you're not enjoying it if you're not enjoying life something's off all right there's two things you you gotta do what you love right because if you do what you love then it's not like work so like i was having a conversation with a buddy of mine this weekend about um you know hobbies he's like i don't have any hobbies you know i guess my hobbies are x y and z i'm like well my hobby's working you know why because i absolutely love what i do and i'm super passionate about it so that's why staying up till two o'clock in the morning working on some shit it it doesn't really bother me all that much because i absolutely love it so if you don't love what you do right now go find something else to do um or go at least do that work to be able to support that next step in your career and i've talked a lot in facebook live about uh goal setting and bigger picture stuff right make sure you set those goals and you start doing what you love or at least work and then enjoy what you're working for i mean this was a ridiculous vacation that i took spent a decent amount of money on it but my opinion is you know once my daughter's taken care of as far as school and stuff like that um we got decent amount in our retirement after that you should pay for experiences experiences uh i know i know you millennials out there know what i'm talking about so instead of buying things buy experiences because that was an experience i am not going to forget anytime soon so anyways it was a good kind of reboot recharge but i am ready to get back after it and i got a shitload of stuff to get back after um one of the things coming up here is i have a sales machine so sales force and sales hacker have come up with a conference it's called sales machine sales machine 17 it's this wednesday in new york city and i'm gonna be presenting at it i think i got the 10 20 slide and i'm gonna be doing a presentation i've done before it's actually it's what i train it's how sales force sells it's it's the training i do for all these companies like sales force linkedin box all that stuff and um it you know it's but i only got 30 minutes so i'm gonna be taking a full day and just cramming it into 30 minutes and giving people a little taste but one of the things that i'm starting to realize and that's why i labeled this make it happen monday um evolve or die because i got back on thursday and i had 700 emails to catch up on and i just finally caught up this because i went out and had a few drinks this weekend whatever i finally caught up this morning but there was at least four new technologies that i was introduced to that are getting me more and more my head wrapped more and more around holy shit sales reps are are really in a tough spot right now i mean there's a lot of cool things going on that we can leverage that makes it easier but then there's a lot of shit going on right now that if you're not paying attention you're going to get replaced fast and a lot of it has to do with the artificial intelligence thing so one of the things i'm going to be sharing as an example of this and i've talked about this on other facebook live sessions is um this shakespeare app this go take a look at it i'm actually working with them it's um i think it's just shakespeare.ai um and they had sent me an email that that was through an through their artificial intelligence right right definitely connor every industry absolutely every industry but i think people think that sales is a little bit of mean because hey sales is about people bullshit man there's so many things that artificial intelligence can take over in sales it's bananas so this one shakespeare it's uh it writes emails for you so you take it you take the the bot and you point it at an article or something like that and within 30 45 seconds it comes back with a super highly customized tailored email to the person better than even i could write i'm going to say that right out the gate and so i'm looking at this going shit well my training three four five years ago was very focused on this email it was hey how to write a really compelling thoughtful email to an executive that's customized and tailored and and it'll get your response back and three four five years ago it worked i've done right it worked because you it was that customization helped you stand out above all the mass you know templates and everything else that was sending out there um that's just not the case anymore like the the customization is still it's still better right it still gets a better response rate five percent but it's no no longer near the 15 to 20 percent range and because the noise is just getting louder and now with artificial intelligence stuff like this i started asking myself if a computer can do that what in the world is a sales what's what value does a sales rep bring from an email standpoint okay and i know so many of you out there are are focused on emails on sending emails and cranking out emails and that type of thing um and i just i'm telling you right now that i guarantee you in three years and mark my words is why it's facebook live it's going to stay on this channel so we go back and show them right i guarantee you within three years um you're not going to be able to tell the difference between a customized email from a rep versus a customized email from a computer you're just not going to so people are going to inherently lose trust in email as far as they're you know whether they're responding to in a person or a bot and so what does that mean right well the two tools that i'm going to be playing around with was is shakespeare and also uh sales loft right because sales loft they got the cadence where you can schedule it out where it's all right i want i want to call i want to email and all this other stuff now the problem with those tools is that all these sales efficiency tools sales reps are using them as sales replacement tools right so they're they're they're just you know putting together a list of template crap emails and letting sales and pressing play and letting sales loft do it or any one of the others outreach yes where to name one um so you know if done right sales loft is great but it has to be used as sales efficiency instead of sales replacement or sales automation tool so you got those two pieces though you got this cadence tool that can kind of schedule it all out and give you some insight so you're supposedly customizing it right and that's the value that a sales rep brings to a tool like that is that a sales rep can is the one that has to customize that messaging that's the way it should work go ask kyle porter he preaches personalization at scale but too many people are misusing the tool but if you take sales loft and you tie it to artificial intelligence shakespeare and now you have shakespeare going out there and finding thoughtful things to put into a cadence sales rep what are you doing that's why i said phone a while back is going to come is going to be the the part that is going to be where sales reps can add value which is why i think it's actually kind of come back pretty strong because it's the one thing a computer doesn't can't do right at this point right it doesn't have the the the ability to really really engage with people over the phone it can answer questions and stuff but from a prospecting standpoint i think the phone is going to come back huge which is why i think phone skills are something if you're not on the phones right now if you're afraid of the phones get on the phones do something just to get out get comfortable with it to be able to have that conversation it's what's going to help us stay ahead of this okay but my vision of where things are going is is more as a if you think about the um the the old school pictures of of people who were um phone dispatchers right the ones who like when you called into the operator they took plug that put this one out plug that one in right and plug this one plug that one that to me is where we're going and and that's where i think sales rep skills are going to be valuable is to take all the tools take all the technology take all the messaging out there and be able to put it together in a way that tells a story that gets people's attention in a more thoughtful way and maybe put some um you know some context around that content that i keep talking about so i guess the point of this specific one right this specific facebook live session here is is to pay attention to every tool that is coming out there i used to avoid the sales calls from sales reps trying to sell me tools and stuff like that now i welcome every single one of them because i want to see what's happening i want to know what the tool is and i want to know how to leverage it because during that gary vaynerchuk when i did his deep dive 4d thing which i highly recommend you check out if you have the money to do it do it um uh you know i brought up artificial intelligence and how i was like nervous about it and he goes don't be nervous about it he goes leverage it he goes uh be the guy that edits the content that the artificial intelligent thing produces all right so so learn how to take all that and and add your special sauce to it um or clean it up a little bit and and give it that extra five percent that's going to get you that better response rate which brings up another topic that i think is that i'm going to i think i'm going to do a whole facebook live session on this with mark birch over at enterprise sales meetup um because he posted something recently about how just how to write email people have lost the ability to actually like grammar and spelling i'm getting so many requests from managers you know they're talking about the prospect john that's great you're going to show my team how to prospect but do you have anything on uh how to write like how to write emails like proper grammar proper that type of thing and i'm like what like isn't that what they go to school for but the problem is right now a lot of people coming out of college you know that we're used to the the the text world right and lol and all that other stuff and so writing thoughtful well-written emails and in business specifically business emails is a challenge just from a structural standpoint and so we're going to talk about that because i think that is one of those things if if you're not good at writing get good at writing um because it's rather embarrassing to send an email that has misspellings and uh just your grammar's off those type of things even if your email is good if that gets picked up on a lot of times people will be like all right i'm not even going to pay this person any attention so um so pay attention to that as well some of the fundamental things here but man please i'm begging y'all to to do more than just crank out emails i know we're in this middle zone here of still being told as reps to send out 50 dials a day or you know a certain amount of activities but you know but still you got to do quality and so we're getting a mixed message from management um but i think very soon we're going to shift to the quantity game is going to be absolutely taken over um by by technology by computers by artificial intelligence and those type of things and our ability to evolve as sales reps is going to have to come in the form of phone it's going to have to come in the form of context of of writing skills of of making the connections like i said and and leveraging these tools to be more effective and and again i keep going back to this analogy which is um iron man right is be iron man right you'd be a human right but but have the tools to leverage so that you can go out and fight this fight in sales because otherwise we're going to get our asses kicked and so um there's a few tools i also wanted to share with you today the ones that came up um that i thought were super cool and um you know they might not be the artificial intelligence ones but they're the ones that um are going to make our lives easier and we're going to learn how to leverage so one of them i brought up before one of them is called siftery s-i-f-t-e-r-y go check that one out because siftery is um it's crowdsourced information on anybody's tech stack so you can put in information on any company in there it tells you what their devops stack is what their sales stack is what their marketing stack is and if you have something that you sell that ties into one of those technologies you can come up with a message around that and it's free uh another one that i thought was super cool and actually a buddy of mine just started at this company i didn't even know that he did until i found out about it um and it's called grobots so g-r-o-w-b-o-t-s by the way i'll put i put a lot of these in the um in the comment section so you can click to these links but grobots it actually answers the question um if you go to grobots.com optimizer so o-p-t-i-m-i-z-e-r this actually answers the question of when you should send emails so for instance and it takes artificial intelligence into play for this so for instance i've always called bullshit on um sorry i've always called bullshit on all those studies that say what's the best time to send an email to somebody whatever um because they're all super generally i've always said well who's who's the target and what's the industry uh you know what is that and um so that's why i've always disregarded those but this tool now you can go in and say i want to i want to go after ceos in the technology industry founded between the years of 2000 you know 2000 and 2009 company size mid-market and pacific time and it runs a report that shows you exactly what the highest likelihood of time that those people specifically in those regions in those industries will open up their emails so take a look at that one is pretty badass um connor question here do you think this there's a new tool where we are going to use like when email come out and it had a super high response rate no god i i don't connor i i really think it's going to be um it's going to be a lot of a little you know and i really do think and it's all and it's also to me email was like it right i mean that was phone that was it that was the only way there wasn't eight billion ways to communicate with people when phone came out same thing with email when email came out it was phone and email and that was it now we have eight million different things i mean you know i think people are still playing around with text um i'm still a little uncomfortable getting unsolicited text but i totally i could see where that's going to come into play pretty soon um slack is crushing it right now as far as i know people who are prospecting through slack um i just got a somebody hit me up who wants to show me how they're prospecting through dms on facebook um and also on instagram i mean gary vaynerchuk talks a lot about dming people on instagram so i think as the decision makers shift um you know from from gen xers like me right now who are more phone and email oriented to more millennials i think you're going to see a shift in in what works more and what works less but i absolutely do not think there's going to be one killer thing because as soon as there's a killer thing five the technology is moving so fast right now that as soon as something else something comes out there that works there's going to be 50 other things that come in and replicate it and and so it'll immediately water it down it might spike for a little bit but you know you think of uh what was it um periscope right i mean periscope came out and a whole load of people but then died right so you know and i'm just using that as a social media format um when it comes to prospecting or outreach i don't think there's going to be one i think it's going to be everything i've made this comment before and i really recommend you take a look at this post it's i think i called it um it was a it was a blog post i wrote about focus the movie focus will smith where he he goes in and my point to it was you know he he surrounded this guy this guy was a mark and he was surrounded him by so everywhere he looked and saw he saw the number 55 so when will bet him um the guy didn't even know it he chose the number 55 and it was because he was everywhere it was like almost like subliminal messaging and uh and that's really where i think we need to be so that's why cadence wise you know i talk a lot about email versus phone you know and that's kind of the the basic stuff but that's my contact strategy for email phone is six touches in 30 days email call email call email call email call my contact strategy is actually different because it's more like 10 to 12 touches because it's email link with you on linkedin follow you on twitter call uh and i'm i'm trying to hone in on what that is from my target audience i'm playing around with a lot of tools to do that so that's why sales loft is helping me out but i think that's really where you start to really get across okay adding value right so so i'm gonna i'm gonna retweet you every once in a while i'm gonna i'm gonna join a linkedin group that you're in i'm gonna email you i'm gonna phone you i'm gonna hit you up on social on another channel uh you know all these different pieces so everywhere you look you see me but you're also seeing value and so that's why i think it's it's gonna be a little bit of a lot versus any one in particular thing with a caveat that says it's where they are be where they are so as an example i i've said this before you know i'm a i'm a 41 year old man on snapchat right so i you know i i don't know what i'm doing on snapchat i'm having fun with it but the reason i'm on snapchat is because a huge demographic for me kids between the ages of 22 and 28 years old are on snapchat so if i want to connect with my audience where do i got to be right thanks god i'm killing it on snapchat i'm just you'll see some random shit from me on snapchat that you that's where you get that i love the reason i like it is because you get to see the behind the scenes like smoke weed and stuff like that whatever not be too professional but but also answer questions um which is easier for me to answer questions where you just snap me a question and i'll snap you right back as i'm traveling through the airport right but it's a great medium for me to do that but i wouldn't be on it if i was selling to um you know baby boomers you know baby boomers are on snapchat so i'm not gonna be on snap if that's my target audience and so that's really where i think we need to really think through that profile i keep going back to i think the one of the more important exercises that we any of us can go through is to really get into the details of what the profile client looks like like who where where are they where do they talk where do they um what types of communication channels do they use and then really focusing our efforts on those areas because otherwise um you know you could be doing crazy awesome emails but if your audience isn't opening up your you know isn't reading emails it's probably not a good medium for you to go crazy on um you could be doing fantastic stuff on facebook i mean one of the challenges i have right now is trying to figure out facebook on and saying okay well you know i don't get a lot of engagement you know it's like 16e all online right now and i really appreciate you online but the facebook huge audience how do i drive more traffic to facebook well millennials really aren't on facebook all that much right because their parents are on facebook so maybe that's a reason but you know that's why i think trying out a bunch of different things that's why you saw me launch snap uh instagram right before i left for italy because instagram you know is coming up now that they got stories and all those other things there's more people on instagram and there's more engagement on instagram and there's more opportunity there so i'm going over there you know i'm a big believer that um you got to try out all the new shit just to see if it works i mean i i definitely agree with gary vaynerchuk that you try everything because if you're an early adopter to whatever that platform is if that platform pops all of a sudden your exposure is is crazy on it right if you become an influencer early on on any platform you're you're gonna be in a really good position moving forward and if it dies it dies whatever try something new if and that's why i keep coming back to you if you are not evolving you are dying right now um and and you won't be able to live that lifestyle you want to live right and so that's how this all ties together right look at that lifestyle that you want to live i'm going to go back to my original you know comment on on italy and work to live live to work whatever um look at that lifestyle what does that look like in five years for you i'll get to your question in a minute jack gavin um but um look at look at that lifestyle what do you want to live and and i mean that like not how much money you want to make literally the lifestyle you want to live because the money then supports that lifestyle and then based on that then you figure out how much money you have to live to live that lifestyle or make to live that lifestyle and then you can back into what you need to do to make that money and sometimes it's a lot of money so you have to put in the work to get there so that you can reach that goal and then therefore you got to try out a bunch of stuff other times it's not a lot of money so you can kind of chill but still stay steadily evolving as you go i know for me if i don't evolve i'm going to be irrelevant in a few years at best like if i don't evolve my training right now my training is a stopgap i know it is it still works that's why i focus more on contact strategies as opposed to the email that it was usually all based on right now it's about contact strategies about the story you tell it's about touching them in different ways those type of things right but but i got to take this now and move to the next level to say okay well how am i going to now integrate artificial intelligence and all these different tools into what i'm doing and how are people engaged moving forward to your point gavin how do people prospect on slack i don't know um i've seen people in slack groups so you get into a slack i mean the the preliminary things that i've seen is i've seen people get into slack groups and listen just like linkedin groups you know you join a slack channel or something like that because there's a whole ton of them out there you know sales you know whatever a lot of people are starting to come out with their channels you got to get invited to it whatever and then all of a sudden you're invited and now you start listening to people right again i don't think it's necessarily about hey i want to sell you something when somebody asks a question i think it's about listening to them and then saying all right that person's talking about this or this person has that issue now how can i add value to that you know how maybe answer the question so that they can look at you or and then go out and follow them on twitter and and go out and look at their website and see if you can make a connection to that and send them an email so um that's what i'm seeing people play around with just like facebook live groups um you know you see people in there who make the comments and ask the questions you know there could be a lot of people right now for instance uh sales trainers who could jump on facebook live on this facebook live session or you know like me on facebook and then um you know and troll for leads and just look at that hey you know what say there's somebody out there that knows that does training on how to how to um prospect through slack well gavin they're probably going to figure out a way to reach out to you you know what i mean so yeah exactly like linkedin groups i i think it's the i think it's the same that's how i've seen it start to start to get out there but there's other people out there who are better at it than i am that i gotta go learn from i gotta go figure out um so anyways you know thanks for the questions both of you guys we got a bail here it's one o'clock um as always hit me up on oh and by the way um i got four free tickets to a sales machine coming up in new york i know it's last minute but it's um it's this it's just uh wednesday uh the 14th in new york city i got four free tickets so if you hit me up on this uh channel right here if you put a comment in there you follow me on facebook live or facebook and you put a comment in there that you want it i'm i'm more than happy to give it to you all right so um and do me a favor just keep help spreading the word if you like what i got going on really appreciate it um if you could help spread the word on this one and help me build up this following so i can have as much value as i can everybody else out there all right all right everybody make it a great week let's make it happen later you you