163: Daniel Frohnen On Account Based Marketing

What's going on, everybody? Welcome to another episode of Make It Happen Mondays with your host, John Barrows. This episode is brought to you by our partners, SalesLoft, Gong, Vanilla Soft, Vidyard, Proposify, Owler, Sendoso, Out of the Box, and ZoomInfo. Today, we're talking with Sendoso's chief marketing officer, Daniel Fronin, who's going to speak with us about ABM, that's account-based marketing, and what it looks like when that particular model is in the weeds. He'll cover a bit about direct mail and how it complements the ABM model, and he's also going to talk about watching ABM turn to ABX and what that means for the sales space and why. Don't forget to check us out at JBSalesOnDemand.

That website is ondemand.jbarrows.com. Now, let's pass it over to John and Daniel to make it happen today. You got it, John. Good afternoon, everybody. This is John Barrows with Make It Happen Monday. Hopefully, you had a fantastic weekend and you have not gone batshit crazy yet, like some people I know, but I haven't, so I'm still holding on. And I'm actually looking forward to this conversation because I think it's going to be enlightening as far as where things are going here. So, Dan Fronin, what's going on? CMO from Sendoso, what's going on, my friend? Not a whole lot. I'm also trying to keep from going crazy, but I appreciate you having me on today, and I'm looking forward to the conversation.

Yeah, this is going to be a fun one, Dan, because we're going to talk about account-based, right? Everything, which is where things are going. But before that, give people a little context of where you're coming from, a little bit of background and then what you're doing over, what you're doing at Sendoso and what Sendoso is all about, because I think that does wrap into this conversation quite a bit. Sure. So, as you mentioned, I'm Dan Fronin, CMO at Sendoso. My background is predominantly marketing sales, a little bit of trade marketing, which is actually marketing on behalf of sales. So, definitely love, I love revenue. I love storytelling. So, I'm kind of a VP of sales or a CRO's best friend because I always think about that.

But yeah, in terms of Sendoso, I've been here for about a year and really our mission is to help as many people as possible create those meaningful connections through direct mail and gifting and doing it alongside what they do on the regular. So, if you're an SDR, we plug into Outreach, Sales Loft, Zant. If you're a seller, we're integrated into Salesforce and all of your tools there. And then on the CX side, same thing. To really get those physical touch points in this really super pronounced digital world that we're in. Yeah. And doing something to stand out, right? I think you've been trying to do anything these days. Cool. Look, one of the things that has been kind of on my mind with this account-based, like, I don't know when account-based marketing hit, right?

But it was a couple, few years back. And then it was like, holy, you know, everything was account-based. And then it's kind of died down a little bit. And now it's starting to come back because I think people are understanding what it actually is and isn't. One of the things that kind of bothered me, though, when it first came out was like this account, well, you know what, actually, I'll take it back. Account-based marketing didn't bother me, but account-based selling did because I'm like, wait a minute, that's not new. Like, that's been around forever. Like, in the whole give a shit, like, to me, it's just about giving a shit about your customer and actually being relevant to them when you reach out to them.

You know, and we've gotten into this point and click world where everybody's sending out a million things to try to hit their number, right? So explain to me your view of what's old is new now and whatever and where we are today with the adoption of real, let's talk about what your definition of true account-based marketing is and where are we on that evolution for companies to get there? Because I want to use that as kind of a baseline for the rest of the conversation. Yeah. So, I mean, the first thing that I'll throw out is I agree with you a hundred percent, like account-based selling has always been there. And like, I talk about the fact that I was in trade marketing where I was marketing on behalf of the sales team.

If I wasn't hitting the 5,000 accounts that they cared about, then I shouldn't be their marketer, right? So I'm with you a hundred percent on that. So, you know, account-based marketing in itself, all it really was, was marketers kind of waking up and going like, oh, instead of spray and pray, instead of just like going out and being like the creative team that just kind of happens to catch some leads here and there and then let sales kind of use this, like what if we were to align our efforts? And to me, all it was, was marketing kind of waking up and saying like, oh, we need to be more strategically aligned and kind of up-level our game and be more targeted like sales already is quite frankly.

All right. Thank you. Because I think that that's really where I went. Like, it's like, it's a realization, like we got all, we all got, because my background's marketing, right? And when like content marketing hit, it was like, it was almost like marketers are like, right? And it was like, and that was like blasting everything out there. Look at all this stuff. And it just got way overboard. And now I think we're kind of coming back to center here saying, all right, problem is, is what I see is that sales reps are now taking the, that approach, right? It used to be, I think, you know, you know, Hey, let me be targeted, thoughtful, at least with my enterprise accounts, you know, SMB, you know, still a volume game, whatever.

But now with these tools that you mentioned, and I'm a big fan of all of them, you know, the outreach, the sales loft, I mean, we're huge sales loft partners and send those of partners, right? And so we're, we're believers in this when used, right. But these reps are using them to blast out, spray and pay just like marketers. And I, and I tell, I'm like, I don't fundamentally understand the difference of a, of a sales or of a marketer using Marketo to send out a billion emails and a sales rep sending sale, using sales off to send out a billion emails. So, yeah. And I've told my SDRs repeatedly at every company I've been at, if you're blasting, like, then I guess I don't need you because I've got a Marketo that can do that for me.

So, so be the curator in the, in the actual like human in this thing. Right. So what does that look like? What does good look like from your perspective of, of real teamwork? Cause you know, I've been in sales for 20 something years. I don't even know at this point, but you know, and I, my bar, my macro background was marketing. And when I came out, I heard about the sales and marketing divide. 24 years later, I'm still hearing about the sales and marketing divide. Right. And all this other shit. So let's, what does good look like as it relates? And sorry, one more piece of context. I, is it fair to say that account-based marketing isn't for everybody or account-based everything, you know, account-based sales and marketing isn't for everybody.

It's, you know, SMB is still somewhat of a volume game, but the bigger you get with your like mid-market enterprise, that's really where, uh, ABM or ABX comes into play. Totally. And I, so, I mean, I think of, you know, the reason that I think it's more than account-based marketing, whether it's account-based everything or whether it's just account-based is it's actually a go-to-market strategy. Okay. And in order to actually get it to work the way that it's intended, your entire organization from, you know, the way that we approach it at Sendoso is like our ops team, our COO cares about, uh, account segmentation and cutting up the market in different segments. Because we know that when we bring in the right customer, we also bring in a successful one that's, that's good for our company and we're also good for them.

Right. So holistically from what marketing is going out and attracting to what sales is selling, to what the customer success organization is taking care of, we're all on the same page with what that looks like from an ideal customer profile. And that's kind of the impetus for it all. Do you, uh, so thank you. Uh, do you find that most companies do not put enough effort into really understanding their true ICP and their true personas? Do you find that they kind of just go through the motions on that with like, so that they can run a list off of whatever list service it is and start making some phone calls? I think so. Cause I think, um, a lot of times what will happen is like, in theory, it's like, Hey, we've got these 20,000 accounts and we've cut them up this way and here's how we're going to prioritize.

But then reality sets in and people's natural tendencies set in, which is, Hey, like, this is hard. Like I got to go after these tier ones and it's, it's less volume, but it's successful, but man, like, I feel like I don't have enough. And then it becomes that churn and burn game. And, you know, I equate it to quicksand where the faster you move in quicksand, the faster you're sinking, you think you're helping yourself, but you're actually kind of tanking yourself. So it's really a discipline game. Is this a leadership problem or a rep problem? Uh, it's a, it's a leadership problem. Um, I, I fully believe that, um, the best reps are, are, you know, trying to help their companies and they're trying to help themselves, um, equally.

Um, and it's, it's management's, uh, job to create a framework and a way for them to be successful within it that, that meets what the business needs and meets what they need. We're, we need to take care of them. Yeah. I actually, I fully agree as far as the management, I think it's a leadership thing all day long because, and, and my, I don't know, I could be wrong on this, but I look at from a macro standpoint, you know, I I'm guessing you're around similar age to me. I'm like 44 or something like that, give or take. Right. So we grew up in, in somewhat of a volume world, right? Where it was like, you know, hit the list and you make 50 dials and you get people on the phone. And it was really kind of pre internet to a certain degree where people didn't have as much information.

So when we made a call and I gave you a pitch, it genuinely, you could be like, Holy shit, I've never heard of that before. That sounds interesting. Let's have that conversation. Right. But now everybody knows almost everything about everything. So, but the problem is, is that as we've evolved Gen Xers, we are now management, right? And I think we fundamentally understand what, uh, that, that the answer is quality. I think we all look at that and say, okay, we understand that quality is the answer. We like being tailored to I'm on Amazon. I get shown this Facebook shows me an ad. That's exactly what I want. I enjoy that experience. I understand that's important, but it's really hard for me to coach quality.

You know, what's easy for me to manage to a number hit 50 dials, hit a hundred. And I'm seeing that laziness factor, if you will get ratcheted up now in a bad time of COVID when results are down, I'm seeing some organizations actually double down on their activity, which I think is the exact opposite direction we need to go in. Right. Yeah. And do you, do you agree with that? Yeah. It's, it's interesting. I think, um, I think quantity only works if it's used positively to kind of create momentum and energy. Um, if it's, if it's used to just hit a number, then it's going to fail because it's going to go back to that quicksand thing and it's going to make people feel desperate. I think that's why, you know, when I think about account-based, it's what you should really be diving into like, okay, activity metrics matter because you want to make sure people are fired up and they're, you know, hustling for their, for their dollars.

Right. But you know, the next level deeper is, uh, what does that messaging look like? Um, are you, uh, are you reaching out to the right accounts or those accounts? Like if you have a tech stack, are they showing intent? Are they in any kind of buying stage and really prioritizing and going after the right thing? So that you don't get the bad behavior of, you know, a hundred dials and 5,000 emails. Right. Yeah. I just, I just cringe when I hear it again, you know, if you're a, you know, SMB, you got one call closed, two call closed type of thing. Okay. Um, but, uh, but okay. So let's paint up what this looks like, right? Let's say ideal case. We really dive into our ideal customer profile. We've segmented out our, our territory.

I have a list as a, as a mid to senior level account executive. I have a list of a hundred counts that are in my patch. They all, and there are, let's, let's even say, let's even paint the best case scenario where they're all in a specific industry. Well, I say best case as far as focus is concerned. Um, but they're all in a certain industry. I have an SDR with me, right. Who can make some calls. I'm the senior AE on the account and I got marketing as a resource. Okay. So those are the components of the scenario. What does like literally tactically, what does good look like for us to give us the best chances of getting it? Who does what, how do we collaborate? What messaging do we, who sends what and when and how?

Yeah. So I think about it. I mean, there's like your, there's your starting point and then it's what it looks like when it's actually, um, become a flywheel. Um, so to me, the, the starting point is, okay, you've got your hundred accounts you've identified, um, for this example, that it's all in the same industry. What is the best performing content that's already out there that your audiences are resonating with? How can you take that content and start to humanize it and make it relevant, um, in more of a one-to-one fashion. And then to me, marketing's responsibility is to help that SDR and that AE craft some, some decent baseline content, um, that they can be going out with, but then letting them own it because they're the ones that day-to-day are using it.

They're the ones day-to-day that are seeing the response rates. Marketing should be checking in every once in a while to make sure that we didn't give you content that was three months ago when people are talking about something completely different. So that's when you get the flywheel. Um, the other thing is marketing should be developing, uh, programs that engage with those, uh, accounts. So obviously you should be providing digital air cover, um, things like, uh, our event out of the box. Um, you should be inviting, um, target accounts to those things. You should be doing field level activities, uh, virtual wine tastings or something really popular for us right now to those target accounts.

And then you should be coordinating, um, sending both, um, kind of brand play sort of sends that you put in the reps hands, uh, but then also allowing them to use sending as well. Uh, but the magic here for me, when you're coordinating between sales, marketing, and SDR is what does it look like when you're done with those hundred accounts? Like, cause you know that they're not all going to act at the same time. So do you have a mechanism to recycle those accounts and let marketing go and like educate them and for them to come back when they're, they might be ready to have a conversation. If you can, if you can think of that entire journey and a way for them to exit and enter, you can actually get a nice flywheel going.

So it didn't sound in that, it didn't sound like you're, you're talking about marketing, sending a whole bunch of kind of marketing emails. Right. So like, you know, and, and, and it's like the, you know, the events coming up or, Hey, we got this great white paper, you know, you're not talking about flooding those accounts with that content and then letting the sales reps kind of pick up the pieces. Because that's what I see a lot that, that disconnect is marketing is like, Hey, I got to hit our numbers, our MQLs, our intent information. So we have to, we have to go after these accounts with this material. Cause that's what we got to do. And then the sales reps are sitting there and be like, Jesus, man, they've gotten like, that person's gotten 15 emails from us in the past month.

I think our domain is even on their spam list right now. I don't have a shot because we pissed them off. So, so what's that balance? Because I do agree that like we need marketing air cover, right? We need that brand, you know, the impression game, right? They see Sendoso, they hear Sendoso, they, you know, that type of stuff. And there's a familiarity with it. And if it's all positive, eventually it leads to this, Hey, you know what? I do need that right now. But what, what's the line of, and I know it's the answer is always, it depends, but what is that line of, of too much for marketing to be going after my accounts without my involvement? And then one more piece to that, do you ever send emails on sales behalf?

Like, so if I was on your sale, if I was a sales team and I had my hundred accounts, John Barrows, would you as a marketer ever send out an email from John Barrows, but it wasn't for me? So those two pieces. Okay. So I mean, I'll answer the, the, the second question first, cause it's top of mind only if I've asked and only if it's a strategic reason to do it. Okay. So thank you. I do believe that, um, like certain things like to back to our point around marketing automation can do that for you. Right. If, if we're promoting an event and the SDR has done their part to get it into their cadences and they need a, they need some help and I'll do a forward style email, like, and that helps them hit their goals.

And it's my goal too. Right. Um, but I think the, the bigger question around, like, how do you keep marketing from having conflicting goals and caring about the things that really ultimately just kind of piss off your, your, your target accounts, your customers and, and I, and I would say one of my customers is my sellers too. Right. So not only the sellers, but our customers, um, is to have the same goals. So, uh, at the board level, at the variable comp level, uh, wherever possible, like I'm gold on pipeline and revenue. And if MQLs are something that actually gets us to that pipeline number in a meaningful way with the target accounts that we're after, then yeah, that's in the measurement way down below as a health metric, but I'm not, I'm not hitting send on the database just to hit an MQL number at the end of the quarter.

That's insane. Uh, and anyone that's listening, that's doing that, please stop it. Please. I'm begging you. It's a, it's like the, I kind of joke about the CRO role, right? Chief revenue officer, like, you know, and it, and it really only popped probably like five or six years ago, the CRO role. And I kind of joked that the only reason the CRO is in that position is because it's because the VP of sales and the CMO just kept yelling at each other. And the CEO was sick of hearing their shit and said, would you just figure this stupid, you know what I mean? Like I need a babysitter for my VP of sales and my CMO right now to make sure that they're actually working together here as opposed to yelling at each other all day long about MQL versus SQL and what leads are, you know, good and bad and everything else.

Um, so cool. So, so let's talk about like the different components now of account-based marketing. Cause I think there's, you know, one of the small tips that I, that I give to reps as far as well, the alignment between sales and marketing that I always talk about is the, I think the best thing I've come up with, which I stole from Gary Vaynerchuk is, you know, he talks about content is King content is King. He said, fine, if content is King, then context is God. And that to me is sales and marketing, right? Marketing is content sales is context. And if sales professionals are not putting any context around the content, we're no different than marketing. And I don't know why we're getting paid to do what we do.

So as an example, like Mark, right? So here's here, tell me if this is a, is a good approach from an ABM, ABX approach, which is webinars coming out. Ideally I coordinate with the team from a marketing and sales standpoint and say, Hey, we're doing this webinar on the third week of the month. So we should create a campaign from a sales standpoint that includes that, or like a cadence that is, I'm going to send you an email about this. I'm going to make a phone call. I'm going to send it. I'm going to send something in the mail. And then my six touch is going to be to invite you to this webinar, right? But it's not going to be this blast email. Um, it's actually going to be, it's going to come from marketing.

And then what I do is I say as a sales rep, I want to be on the list. I don't want the named, I don't want the email to come from me. I want, I, but I want to be on the list. So I know when my accounts get hit by that, then what I'm going to do is I'm going to take that email from marketing, forward it to the executive and say, Hey, I'm not sure if you saw this email that just came out recently about this webinar that we have coming up here. But the reason I think you should go to it is because, yep. Is that kind of in line with account base, everything? Oh, I love that play. And that's exactly right. It's like, you're, you're going after a similar set of accounts. You know, that you want them at the webinar marketing's in that context, providing the air cover.

The individual is to your point, filling it in, making it human. Here's the air cover or here's the context. And then, uh, driving people. That's, that to me is like the, the most pure example of, of the coordinated effort there. What are some more examples? Cause I, cause I, that's the one I keep leaning in on. I like, and I dovetail it with like, even after they go, uh, and say they don't attend. Cause you and I both know, like, you know, a thousand people sign up for a webinar, 300 people show up at best, right? If you get a 30% show rate, you're psyched. So, but then, and the reason is because everybody knows that right afterwards, they're going to get the email. Hey, sorry, you missed the webinar.

Here it is. Here's the link. Nobody's going to look at it. But if I, but what I then do is I say, Hey, Dan, I saw you signed up for the webinar. I noticed you missed it based on what I know about you. If you start listening to this webinar around minute 15 and go from minute 15 to 26, like there's some really, really interesting tactical things that I think you might be able to get value out of. There you go. Right. But that's kind of one of my only examples of, of sit, like of, of tactical sales examples of how to work together from an, from a sales and marketing standpoint and coordinated effort. What are some other examples that we could share with the audience of, of how a rep can work with marketing in that context?

Yeah. I'll give you, I'll give you two quick examples. One, uh, top of funnel and one like actually within a sales process. So top of funnel, uh, recently we, we got number one designation from G2 crowd for account-based execution. So we thought like there's a group, thank you. There's a great way to go out to market and have fun with that. Right. It's to talk about like account-based execution isn't just about personalization. So we created this cool direct mail piece where it said high first name, basically kind of making fun of that being personalization, a can of spam in there, as well as like some literature on what we do. Nice. But the coordination here was, Hey, uh, Hey, SDRs, particularly at our comm too, like give us your list of ABM practitioners that you want to be having conversations with.

And then CMO myself would record a video. We went out with the offer of, Hey, this just happened. We'd love to send you some information on us. And then that popped. People got the package, people took the meetings and then it created pipeline. Right. So that's a really good example of just a coordinated, uh, effort to just drive the original pipeline. Uh, another one that was super interesting is, uh, when COVID first hit, I think like a lot of companies had, uh, a moment in time where your pipeline froze because people were trying to figure out what the heck was going on. Um, and we, we spent a ton of time around that and, uh, created a, a project actually called project pipeline thought, where, uh, we coordinated with our AEs and anything that was a high value account that was in stage two, three, um, that just had gone silent.

Um, they nominated them. We, uh, ran digital air cover on them. Uh, we gave the sales team, uh, email templates to go out and personally outreach. We did a bunch of work on ROI case studies, but then we also provided them with a send, uh, which was fortune cookies. And when the fortune cookies landed on their desk, um, you pop it open and it has an ROI metric on like why they should be using us. And, uh, that unthought a lot of, uh, pipeline and generated a lot of, uh, closed one revenue. So there's so many different ways that you can coordinate your efforts, um, all over the funnel. I mean, we do the same thing on the CX side with, um, with customer surprise and delight as well. So, so, cause it, it seems to me like that, and this is why I like the ABX everything is, is the, the whole communication, like, you know, in a euphoric world, I'm a sales rep.

I have these 10, 10 executives that I want. I then go to you. Let's figure out like, what do these people care about? How do we coordinate this? Right. But I think there's a lot of organizations that, you know, I think if you're a relatively small organization, right. With a relatively small sales team and a relatively small marketing team, there's that like real, like I can go to your desk, Dan, you know, I can walk, I mean, not anymore, but you know what I mean? Like I can walk down the hallway and be like, Hey Dan, I, you know, I'm trying to get into Coca-Cola here and, or whatever it is, right? Like, can we put down, like bounce around some ideas and what we, you know, but the larger the organization gets, the harder that is as, and I'm going to take it from a sales rep standpoint, right?

Because I think the dream would be almost like I have, I personally have a weekly meeting with marketing and say, this is what I'm trying to do. What do we have in the coffers here? How do we coordinate this? Cool. But you know, when you got 500 sales reps, that's impossible for marketing to have those types of conversations. So how do you, I guess, scale ABX and also me as a sales rep, what ownership do I have on how proactive do I need to be? Because I think a lot of steps are, a lot of reps are reactive when it comes to this stuff. It's like, all right, marketing is running their campaign again. Let me figure out how I can work on this. You know what I mean? But I should own my territory here.

So, so what would you suggest in that scenario where you got one of thousand AEs working? They conceptually understand ABM. They're kind of annoyed at marketing for doing a bunch of shit in their territory that, that they don't like, or they don't, they don't, they don't think is valuable. Yep. And I want to do this, but like, what's the approach here? Yeah. I mean, so you gave me like flashbacks on my entire career of annoying sales teams so much. I was only trying to help. Yeah. I mean, you get it right. But it, but it does get to that point where it's just like, damn it. Like, totally. So I, you know, from an, from an account based standpoint, uh, I break it up into there's one-to-one plays where, you know, maybe your organization is choosing like 50 accounts a quarter where you're just going hard on it.

Right. And there's the one-to-few where, you know, marketing might be, uh, creating like a kit that you can actually go out and, uh, do something that's next level. Maybe that's like, you know, in the good old days, that's a field event or now it's a virtual field event. You know, we've created a send that you can, um, that you can deploy at your discretion. It's like marketing funded and like higher end. And then there's that one-to-many where it's like, Hey, these programs are just constantly running and like, you can tap into them. You'll benefit from it with like a lead that'll bubble up or, or, you know, maybe you've got a sendoso budget and you can do whatever you want with it every quarter, um, as you're at your discretion.

So with like the, the one-to-one I think is, is where you can actually be somewhat meaningful in these, in these bigger organizations. Cause 50 fortune, uh, 500 companies, like if you can go take down three, four or five of them a quarter, right. Um, and you can put some of your effort behind it, then that, that moves the needle in a big way. And that's, that's worth the time. So that's, that means you might want to create a personalized web experience where when they land on the webpage, you're calling them out as a logo, you've curated content for them. You're running digital that speaks directly to them. Uh, you're doing higher level, um, you know, maybe even pulling the execs in and having the CEO send a message.

Uh, and maybe you are doing like some, like, you know, more expensive acquisition strategy there and in a coordinated effort. What's up everybody. I hope you're enjoying the episode. Send your sales wins to me, james@jbarrows.com so that I can highlight you in our mid role every single episode of make it happen Monday. Today we are highlighting Tom Alemo who invested in JB sales on demand before he started his new sales gig to prepare and get JB sales certified. Congrats on the new role, Tom. We've got your back. Do you have specific plays that reps can choose that include sales? So for instance, I think that there's a decent amount of stuff of, oh, you want to, you want to send that box to the client?

Sure. You know, click on this. We'll send them a box, right? But you and I both know if it's not part of a narrative, if it's not part of a story, it tends to fall flat. Like one of the most frustrating things I see is when a sales rep sends one thing and then follows up. Like I had this one kid who was like, I was doing a call blitz with him and he's like, he goes, John, could you, I need your advice on something. I ran this, you know, campaign. It just didn't, I got no, so well, yeah, sure. What's up. And he, what he did was he took books, like a FedEx books, right? So a book to a C-level executive, right? He's like, I sent 25 books, 25 books, FedEx them overnight. He's like, I didn't get a single response.

And I was like, okay, well, first of all, let me ask you, did you read the book? The answer was no, right? So I'm like, first of all, like just that in and of itself tells me you're just doing shit to do it, right? Because like, you know how many stupid books I have on my bookshelf that I haven't even cracked the binding on. I don't need some dumb ass sales rep sending me a book because it's somewhat relevant to my industry without having context, right? Now, if you want to take that level and read the book and then say, hey, John, did you read that book I sent you out? As a matter of fact, chapter four talks about how blah, blah, blah. And I remember you said on a podcast, boom, like, holy shit.

Now you've gone to the next level. But that was step one. But the bigger problem was I said, well, what was the story here? What was the, what was the approach? Like, did you have a narrative? Was it like a multi-touch thing or whatever it is? Or did you just send the book and say, hey, did you get the book? And that's pretty much what he did. I'm like, well, and you fucking wasted 25 books and 25 FedEx things right there. So, so do you have it set up when, from an ABX standpoint that I'm a sales rep, I'm going after this persona. Here's a play I can run that includes marketing, but there's points, like if you, if we do the cadence scenario here, there's points where it's absolute that sales has to do something here.

Right. Is that, do you have that? Absolutely. So, I mean, we, you know, within the Sendoso platform in, and I'll take sending as an example here is like, we usually quarterly will set up different plays. So there's, you know, an example of one is like a money tree that we, that you can send to the CFO. If, you know, you have some paper out for signature and, and hey, like you're about to make a good investment, like just like this money tree. Right. And, and give their attention that way. But then also setting up sending so that the AEs can do what the AEs do really well, which is know their prospects, know their, their future customers. And you know, like an Amazon integration and a budget to go and say like, Hey, last time I was on the phone, Sally was talking about how she was supposed to be in Hawaii.

Like I'm going to, I'm going to send her, you know, this, this box of postcards that I saw on Amazon and say like, Hey, I know you're missing Hawaii, but you know, here it is for you. That, that sort of stuff, I think goes a long way. And then when you think about the stuff that's like earlier around like SDRs and stuff, that's where we, we really, if you want to get someone's attention and you've been educating them that's when you step in and say like, Hey, I know that this Sendoso platform is going to work with you, uh, work for you. So, um, click here so I could just show you, right? Like get bold that way. Or if you're going to be getting into a calm to sort of account and you're going to be sending a book to your point, read it or, and know that the person's interested in the first place, because maybe they wrote a blog on it or they mentioned it in their LinkedIn feed.

But the more, the more that you've actually taken the time to personalize it, the better off it's going to land. For sure. Agreed. And, and you brought up SDRs, right? What role do they really play in this world? Right? Because, you know, if you think about it, right, we got this, we, we got the AE who should be, and I'm putting quotation marks around should, um, very knowledgeable about the account, knowledgeable about the people and, and should be able to reach out directly and say, Hey, Dan, man, I've been following you for a little while here, blah, blah, blah. We should talk because, right. And then you got marketing, doing events, doing things like that, and kind of providing the air cover, sending out kind of some marketing emails, newsletters, whatever it is.

And then you got this SDR, right? How, what does good look like with the SDR in that equation? Because I think people are, are really struggling right now with the value of SDRs in that world, because they're, they're not getting the meetings with the senior level executives anymore. They, I think in a, in a, in a growth economy, that was acceptable. You know what I mean? All right, kid, whatever. Yeah, we've got some cool stuff. Hey, go talk to my, you know, whatever it is. But now no senior level executive wants to take a phone call from some 22 year old wet behind the ears kid who's going to ask them BANT questions. You know what I mean? It's just not going to like, there, there's no interest in it.

So the, the, their success, this SDR success has dropped dramatically. It, when it comes to tier one, senior level, high quality meetings, right? Yeah. So with that, where does that, where do SDRs fit here? And should we, do we have to relook at the, the, their, their, their, the value, their approach, their, their, their, where they fit in the equation? Yeah. I mean, so, I mean, I, I would, I would argue that even in the best of times SDRs had a heck of a time getting C-level meetings. Um, and then, and then this is just even more pronounced, right? So to me, it's, uh, to me, it's more important than ever to make sure that you have a, first of all, a data framework for your SDRs. So knowledge is power.

So if you, if you haven't funneled in like relevant information on what that company might be surging on from intent topics, if you haven't given them the information on what the, the latest news is on that account and just LinkedIn sales navigator to go and poke around and see what those people are talking about. And then you're not giving them knowledge, which equals power. So they're going to be that much worse. Uh, but I think the other thing here too, is, um, you know, obviously there's the strategy of going in layers deeper and kind of creating that surge. And I think that that's more valuable than ever, but then to your point around the coordination between sales marketing and SDR, to me, that's where the AE should really be spending their time is like, Hey, you loosen up the ground here with, um, XYZ, uh, direct reports.

And then let me lob over, uh, this message and this LinkedIn connection to, to kind of close this thing, because I bet you they're starting to talk and starting to coordinate that way. Yeah. My mentor, Jeff Hoffman, Hoffman calls that like creating heat. You know what I mean? Like you're creating groundswell momentum and you're gathering insights. I think right now, obviously meetings with qualified people who are in the buying cycle, that's the Holy grail at this point. Um, but, but the real strong second value that an SDR can bring to the organization is insights into what's happening from a ground floor standpoint, right? Not only to, to try to get into the accounts, but also to feedback to leadership to say, Hey, we've talked to X amount of people, and this is what we're seeing here.

And this bottom up approach, which I've never been a fan of in general, like again, pre COVID, you know, economy is doing great top down. I'm always top down, right? But now the flip side is actually more effective because you can, instead of guessing, right? You had said earlier, like, Hey, I know we can help. Well, that's still a guess. I'm assuming based on your scenario, based on a few triggers that I looked out on your website and your persona that you're having these challenges. And therefore here's my solution. That's still an assumption, though. But I think we can take the assumption out of the equation by unleashing the SDRs to talk to frontline people, right? Like we're doing like Morgan and James on my team, uh, SDR, AE combo, uh, James is the SDR, Morgan's the AE, picking an account once a week.

And they're actually like James as the SDR. He's legit calling into frontline sales reps being like, what are your challenges? What's going on here? Hitting them up on LinkedIn, whatever. And doing research on the account itself, right? Looking for triggers and whatever else. And at the end of the week, they sit down and they talk and there's, and Morgan's like, all right, what'd you learn? James is like, well, this, you know, like here's some trends and here's what's going on. And then the following week, Morgan takes that information and goes hunting with it to say, Hey, we've been talking to 15, 20, 30 of your employees, and they're telling us that their challenges are this and whatever it is.

And now I don't think I have a solution that can solve that problem. My friend, I know I have a solution that can solve that problem, right? Is that kind of the essence of ABM, ABX? Absolutely. I mean, that's definitely a big part of it. And that's something that we, that's something that we use personally as part of our strategy to bubble up meetings too, um, is, it's not uncommon for me to see an SDR reaching into an account, having multiple conversations for like a good, like 15, 20 days. And then all of a sudden they're hitting the CMO and the CMO forwards the email over to one of the people that they've already talked to and boom meetings on the books, and it includes your CMO, like that, that stuff, it works.

Um, how do you track that though? So how do you track the effectiveness of that from an SDR standpoint, right? Because going back to lazy, you know, Gen Xers who look at numbers, right? Um, I think that there's a challenge there, right? Because I'll give you a quick example, you know, early days, Morgan, when he was, you know, doing a lot of activity, right? Making calls, sending emails, whatever, all of a sudden we get an inbound lead. And I would look at that inbound lead and I would say, and I would look at Salesforce and I would see all of Morgan's activity and it would have, but it wasn't for that person. It was for all these other people. And there is no doubt in my mind, all that activity is what drove that conversation internally to have somebody else then reach out to us the way they wanted to, right?

But how do you, there, there's, there's some, there's some gray area right there with who gets credit for that. How much did Morgan have to do with it? You know what I mean? Uh, if I'm a CMO, I mean, I'm, I'm kind of our CMO or was at the time, right? So, well, I could take credit for that. Well, no, no, no, no. That's because of our marketing efforts, right? So how, how do you, how do you measure the impact of all this activity that, that the SDRs are doing that is, that is doing those impressions and potentially is triggering that. Hmm. We should go look at this. Yeah. So I have a core belief. Um, and I call it outbound equals inbound and inbound equals outbound. Okay. If, uh, if in our SDRs are assigned to accounts and if you're working that account and then you release it and then it inbounds, like I'm going to give you the, and it's really good outreach, there's no question.

Like it was your job to seed the market there. It was marketing's job to continue talking to them, uh, and run that digital air cover. And if we land it, then we landed it together and you're going to get your credit. And that's how you create the flywheel. And quite frankly, like, you know, let's say that you get really good at inbound outbound, um, then guess what? You get to raise quotas a little bit because they can do more. So it's a win for everyone. Right. Exactly. Cool. Uh, a couple of tactical things here. Uh, do you believe that inbound and outbound should be the same role? Uh, that's one of those depends on the company, but I think, I think fundamentally, if you, if you have enough inbound, um, you should split it out so that your, uh, outbound team is, is really focused on hunting.

Do you think SDRs should, and I agree with you, by the way, um, do you think SDRs should report to marketing or sales? I believe that it should be whoever is the most passionate about, um, the success of that organization. Um, for me, it's always been, I mean, it's been marketing since I got into the Silicon Valley and, um, I've kind of, I, I really built my demand gen teams around, um, the SDR alignment piece. Cause I think that, um, when you can get the two machines going together, it's just like nothing else. Right. Cool. Um, I see, I, I, I think it like that one's a depends for me because I think it also has to do with a company strategy of growth. And in the sense that of, if you're looking at SDRs as a feeder system for your sales teams to grow your own sales reps, then there's a strong argument.

I should say, Hey, no, they got to go over to sales because marketing doesn't know how to manage sales reps. You know what I mean? We're a different breed. So you kind of have to have that sales manager to manage a sales professional if that's the track, but I see a lot of organizations saying, Hmm, not so much. Yeah. Yeah. Maybe some of these SDRs are going to go to sales, but we're like more marketing and operations and working with these tools and looking at insights so we can farm up information. And then, you know, that's where marketing should be under. Yep. And then one more question. I think this is, this is the question that most people are going to ask. And I've seen asked before for Sendoso specifically, right?

Cause we're talking about direct mail. It's part of a story. Um, it's works best when it's coordinated with a campaign, no question about it. Um, but everybody's working from home right now and it's creepy as shit for somebody to get me at my home address and send me a package. So how are you dealing that with your team right now? And what are some of the things that you're doing to get creative to address? I mean, I think we're coming back now. You know what I mean? We're starting to see people come back to work and you know, offices opening up. So I think we're starting to get there, but you know, you don't want to have something that I think the worst is to send something to somebody as part of a campaign that sits in an office for three weeks because nobody's there, but yet you're still billing, you're still banging on that as you thought it was, they got it at this date, right?

So how is actually Sendoso specifically dealing with the lack of ability to connect with people for like from a sending on something physical in the mail to them? Yeah. So, I mean, very early on in COVID, like I think a week or two into when everyone started to shelter in place, we released, uh, uh, a, uh, product enhancement called address confirmation. And really, um, what it is is before you're about to send someone something, an email goes out and it says, Hey, um, you know, I'm about to send you something. This is the address I have on file. Um, do you want me to send it there or do you want to confirm a different address? And then by the way, if you confirm this other address, um, I'm not going to see it as it's not going to go into my CRM.

It's going to go into Sendoso, they're going to send it, then they're going to delete it. So to keep that kind of consumer side and business separate. And then, you know, that's evolved quite a bit too, to where we actually see a lot of that strategy, but then we also see a lot of like e-gifts and, you know, more down funnel sending where, you know, people are trying to create more experiences. Like I keep talking about virtual wine tastings because they're just like, they replace like so much of what you can't get in the field anymore. So those sorts of things resonate really well. And, um, yeah, dress confirmation works really well. And I think ultimately in a way it's created this world where you can be a lot more targeted.

Um, you can be a lot more, um, you know, in line with, um, not wasting resources, both, uh, from like an environmental standpoint, plus, yeah. Yeah. Plus I'm just money resources too. So, you know, I think I always try to find silver lining and I think that that's a cool development out of all of this. I thank you. I mean, my wife's an environmental scientist. I am, I am deeply, and I will tell you right now, and I'm going to ask people who are listening to this, don't, please don't just arbitrarily send swag. I can't fucking, I can't stand it when I get a bag of shit. You know what I mean? Where it's just, it's another t-shirt. It's another Yeti thing. It's another, you know what I mean? Like, cause for me, it's actually a negative because all I'm looking at that, first of all, I'm looking at that as like, holy shit, that's like $50 worth of stuff that you could have donated to homeless to whatever it is.

And it's not relevant to me. It's got your logo on it, which, you know, for me, it's like, I get it. You want me to wear it so I can put it on my blog. And you know what I mean? Or you could catch a video of me wearing your shirt. I understand that I'm not going to do it, but like, I'm just begging people to make sure that what they send is relevant to me and not just because it has your logo on it. Now, don't get me wrong. I don't mind your logo on it if it's relevant to me. Right. I mean, if you see me, if you see me on this podcast, for instance, drinking a, you know, a Red Bull, right. I'm drinking right now. Right. And, and I'm in it or like a Dunkin' Donuts coffee, which I always drink.

Right. And it's always sweating and I'm always dripping. And you send me a, Hey, John, I was watching a recent podcast with Dan. I noticed your, you know, your, your Dunkin' Donuts coffee was dripping all over you. Here's a little koozie that might solve that problem for you. Okay, cool. You nailed it. Right. But please don't just send out arbitrary crap. Do you, do you find that, that, I mean, it's kind of a rhetorical question, I guess that the more thoughtful the gift and, and, and less about us, the better. Absolutely. Yeah. I mean, that's just, um, that's just life in general. And I think even more pronounced now with, with everything that's going on in the world is like, people, people want to do business and, and, and interact with people that are thoughtful.

There is no shortage of people that are asking me for my time in email on my phone. Uh, but it's the people who really, who stand out that, that are just that one step above thoughtful. It's like, yes, I will take 20 minutes. I will take 30 minutes because you, you, you nailed it. And, and I would be quite frankly, I'd be a jerk if I didn't do it. Right. And that's, that's a great place for a rep to be. It's like, you made him feel like you earned the right for that meeting. So, and I don't think enough reps appreciate that, that there is even at the executive level of somebody like you who gets hammered all the time, somebody like me who gets hammered all the time, some CEO of a fortune F company, there's a certain point where after like, if you take that thoughtful of an approach and it's like a multi touch fourth, after like the fourth or fifth time, you almost feel an obligation to get back to that kid being like, look, I don't know if I need your stuff, man, but yes, I'll take the phone call because of, because of your approach.

Right. We're because we're human beings. We're parents. We're we care. So you got to tap into that human side. It's now more than ever. Yeah, it is. It is weird. I don't know if you saw the post that I did recently, but I took a two week vacation and you know, and I look, I, sometimes I feel like I'm, I'm a little, uh, you know, I'm talking, I'm beating the same drum, like personalization matters and all this other stuff. And I've been doing it for 10 years and whatever. So, but I know I'm not beating the drum too bad because I took two weeks off, shut my, um, email off for the first time in my professional career. I legitimately did not check emails for two weeks. Okay. Didn't even have the urge to, oddly enough.

Um, came back 2000 emails in my inbox. All right. No problem. So I, I'm like, let me, let me categorize these though. Right. Bucket. Right. So there's a lot of LinkedIn alerts and newsletters and marketing emails and whatever. And then there was sales, sales emails, 2040 emails. I got 78 that I considered sales, like trying to pitch me something, whatever. Zero personalized. Wow. That's sad. One. Inmails, 356 inmails. Okay. Well, some more invites, templated, whatever. I don't care about that, but the ones that were pitching me sales, there was 12 of them. Two of them were personalized. One of them was video. Guess which one I got back to. I would say video. I said, thanks, but no thanks to the personalized one.

The video one though was, I was like, you, you, Hey, out of the 5,000 things that I just went through, you're literally the only person that put a video together and made it personalized, like genuinely personalized to me. And I could tell you were an actual real person doing this. You, you win the jackpot, my friend. All right. And it's just, it's, it, I, why do you think that the last question I'm going to ask is why do you think we're in this world where the, the, I think the logical brain says quality matters, but yet I'm still going to blast out a thousand emails. I'm still going to just try to hammer it. Why do you think we're in this position where we are right now? It's fight or flight and it's, and it becomes desperation.

So I think people's natural mind is this doesn't work, but if I don't do it, I'm screwed. And, and to me it becomes this discipline thing, right? Where you just have to tell yourself like, no, like I'm spending my day differently and I'm going to measure how I spend my day. And if I see it, move the needle. And I'm going to try that approach again and I'm going to, I'm going to fine tune what works for me versus just like getting desperate. It's hands down a discipline. Yeah. And it's, and again, I think it goes back to what we said earlier about a leadership problem, right? Leaders are, are pushing their teams to do that. And I said this, that, that people didn't like it, but it, you know, cause everybody was bitching about leadership.

I go, look, if you're going to bitch about leadership, you better have some data to back up while you're bitching, right? Cause if you just come down and say, oh, this doesn't work, but yet you have no data to support it or you haven't done what I'm asking you to do. I'm just going to keep telling you to work harder. Right? So I said, Hey, treat it at, you know, everybody has a side hustle, right? Like, Oh, whatever it is. I'm like, treat your job as a side hustle. Like do your 50 dials a day. Like your boss is asking you, but then at like five o'clock at night, stay a couple of, maybe an hour or two later or whatever, work a little bit longer. Heaven forbid we ask people to fucking do that these days.

Um, and, uh, and you know, take 10 accounts, sit down, do research, come up with thoughtful content, send them something in the mail as a side. And then a month later, come to your boss and say, Hey boss, look, I've been doing your 50 dials a day thing, managing my numbers. I've noticed here's my conversion ratio for those. Okay. I've taken 10 accounts every night, been thoughtful, researched them, done this approach, whatever. And it's taken me a couple of hours to do it every single night, but look at the fucking results that I've got. And hopefully they're night and day. Hopefully it's like, I'm getting a 1% response right here. And I'm getting a five, six, seven, eight, 10% response right here, where I've gotten two meetings with your approach.

And I've gotten 15 meetings with my approach, present the data and then say, what do you want me to do here? And if your boss still says, go do that 50 dials, then quit, then absolutely quit, go to another job. Cause you're never going to win that battle. But if you've got a reasonable manager, they should be able to look at that and say, Oh shit. Yes. Stop all the 50 dials do that. Yeah. And then the good manager is going to say, how can I, how can I actually change the process for my entire team to make them more like this shining example, right? Exactly. Um, that's a different podcast. Yes, it is. Yes, it is. Awesome. Well, you got, we got some cool stuff coming up here with you guys. You're doing this.

Talk to me about the, uh, out of the box thing that you guys are doing. Yeah. So we have an event coming up on September 17th called out of the box. And it's, it's really a lot of what we've been talking about today. It's how to orchestrate account based across, um, marketing sales and CX and really get that coordination across your, uh, your company. And we have some killer speakers such as yourself. I know Morgan will be there. Uh, we've got Latin from six cents. We've got Lila from a survey monkey. So it's going to be great. Um, we've have a ton of different content that's both visionary, but then we realized that visionary only goes so far. So we actually have a whole track of, um, really tactical stuff that you can actually take away, uh, and go implement at your own company, um, to, to hit goals in these crazy times.

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And I'm going to do my best to kind of bring some, some, a little bit of both, right? Like a little bit of the kind of visionary where things are going, but also like super like, all right, tactical, what do I do? Right. Cause I think one of the one things I want to, I always try to get across is how can you do this on the cheap? You know what I mean? Like, so it, you know, in the, in the best world, we have Sandoso, we have sales loft, we have, you know, intent data. We have all these wonderful things at our disposal to be able to run this, but let's be honest, most companies, you know, they don't have all that tech stack to be able to do that. So how can we do this in kind of a, I don't say a hack way, but in a, like, what, what can we do to, to do this ourselves if we don't have those resources?

And that's what I usually try to boil it down to, to say, Hey, look, here's how you can do it with an Excel spreadsheet for crying out loud. Okay. Now, if you have tools that just amplifies how to do that more effectively. Yeah. Which I'm a huge fan of. I mean, a lot of, some of my best programs started with a framework in an Excel document and then you prove it and then you go, okay, now I'm going to go scale this thing with technology. There you go. Awesome, Dan. Well, look, how can people find out more about you? Sandoso, what do you want to point them? Yeah. Sandoso.com for a slash out of the box for or anything about our event. And then for me, I'm on LinkedIn as Daniel Fronin. I'm on Twitter as Daniel Fronin.

I love connecting with people, love talking shop, whether it's sales or marketing or life in general, man, hit me up. Cool, man. And just for everybody listening, it is F-R-O-H-N-E-N. So Daniel Fronin. All right. So look him up on LinkedIn, follow him, reach out to him and definitely join us for the outside the box. That's going to be a fun one. I'm looking forward to that. Awesome. Awesome. Well, thank you, Dan, for everything. I appreciate the time here. Yeah, absolutely. And everybody else, hopefully you got something out of this as much as I did here. And it got you to think at least a little bit, whether you're a leader out there trying to figure out what the hell to do with your team on this or a sales rep struggling to figure out how you can get better.

Hopefully you pulled something out of this. And like I say all the time, even if you're having a shitty day, go out there and make somebody smile today. Because even if in your worst day, if you made somebody smile, you know you had a good day. And so again, we need a lot more of that right now. So thanks, Dan, for your time, man. I'll talk to you soon. All right. Absolutely. Thank you. All right. Cheers. All right, everyone. That was a fire episode. Thanks, John and Daniel. So don't forget to send us your wins. We want to hear from you. And remember that you can get world-class training at on-demand.jbarrows.com. Check us out on Facebook by joining the Make It Happen with JB Sales Facebook group.

And we'd appreciate a review from you. Don't forget to subscribe so that you can get the latest sales tactics and inspiration sent directly to you every week. Let's make it happen, y'all. Transcription by CastingWords