31: Live From Dreamforce

Hey everybody, it's John Barrows with Make It Happen Monday. Super excited to be here at Dreamforce. I'm going to come down and give you guys a little preview of what's going on and show you what's happening here. I'm here at actually the Marriott Marquis, where a lot of the breakout sessions. Today is the Sales Summit here at Dreamforce, which I'm actually speaking at with my good friend Doug Landis and Trish Bertuzzi. And here's all the conference rooms that people are piling into. They've got a session starting right here at 9.30, so that's why the hallways are a little bit emptier than they usually are. Usually they're bananas packed here. But anyways, what I thought I'd do is kind of just share with you the experience here at Dreamforce.

Give you guys some insights on what happens here. If you've never been here before, it's pretty crazy. If you've been, you know what I'm talking about. Today isn't really Dreamforce, Dreamforce. Today is the Sales Summit. And so I'll be taking questions, by the way, if you have any questions about Dreamforce or anything. Again, as you know, Make It Happen Mondays is all about giving you insights and answering questions that you have, but also sharing some stuff that I'm seeing these days. And this is Morgan. So for a lot of you who've been following, you know, Morgan has joined me, right? And this is a big first event for him. And so I try to prep him for the insanity of what is to come with Dreamforce.

And, but last night kind of got screwed up because my flight was delayed about an hour and a half and there was no Wi-Fi on, on United. Thanks. I'm getting, by the way, I'm so done with United. No Wi-Fi for six hours. How can that be possible in today's world? But anyways, so I didn't get shit done yesterday, which I thought I was going to do. I thought I was going to have six hours to bang out a whole bunch of stuff and also get prepped and all that other stuff. So, but I didn't get back to the hotel until about one o'clock in the morning. And so I didn't really have enough time to prep Morgan for what we were going to be doing today outside of the basics. So I'm hopefully going to be doing that tonight.

But one of the basics, basics, apparently I forgot to, I forgot to address with him is to bring your wallet to Dreamforce. I mean, he brought it to, obviously, because he had to fly here and all, but he brought it to register today. Or so he forgot it this morning when it came to registering. So we registered. I got in there all the way up to the front of the line. And they were like, oh, hey, bring your, all your IDs. And he's like, oh, damn, I don't have my ID. So anyways, fail number one from Morgan, but that's all right. This one doesn't really count for him. Next year, it'll be his time to shine, right, and really find prospects and all that other stuff. But this is really just for him to get his feet wet here and basically follow me around just to kind of see what it's all about and make some introductions, practice his pitch a little bit, those type of things.

So I'm not going to hold this one against him, but I am going to give him shit for it. So anyways, so yeah, so today is, I'm going to be speaking at 11 o'clock here at Buena Vista. Down at the Marriott Marquis here. So if you're here in town at Dreamforce, come check us out. Me, Doug Landis, and Trish Bertuzzi are going to be talking about artificial intelligence and its role in sales and its impact in sales. And, you know, it's actually a really good topic for me because I've always been freaking out about artificial intelligence. You know, I've kind of been, all right, you know, artificial intelligence is going to replace all our jobs and everything else. But the more research I do, the more calm I get when it comes to artificial intelligence and how I think it's actually, I do think it's going to replace a lot of jobs, but I think it's going to replace a lot of the average sales rep jobs.

And for those of you who've been through my presentations before, you know, I talk a lot about the death of the average sales rep. And that's really key, right, because if you're an average sales rep going through the motions, I think artificial intelligence is going to kill you. But if you're a good sales rep, I think artificial intelligence has a chance to make you great. And also great sales reps just unstoppable because it does all the bullshit work for you that you don't want to do and puts you in a position to have much better conversations. So that's the conversation we're going to be having with Doug. Doug Landis works at Emergence Capital, who only invests in artificial intelligence companies.

And so he knows a lot about it. And then Trish Bertuzzi, who is a good colleague and friend of mine, who actually uses a lot of artificial intelligence with Chorus and that type of thing in her sales process. So that conversation is coming up here at 11. Then I've scheduled out my meetings today with about three or four key contacts. So for those of you who have been paying attention, you know, I shared out a little while ago my networking guide. And I'll put my networking guide in this just to make sure that if you haven't seen it, you're going to see it. Because it's a guide on how to get the most out of networking events. And the whole idea here is to go in with a plan, right? Go in with a plan.

Make sure that you know who you want to talk to. What are your goals? You know, how do you schedule out your day and map it out? Because without a plan, you end up wasting a lot of time here at Dreamforce. And you end up being really busy. It's kind of like day-to-day sales, right? If you've ever mapped out a plan prior to a day, so the day before you spend 15, 20 minutes, I always do this. I spend 15, 20 minutes thinking about what I'm going to be doing for tomorrow. And, you know, when I come in tomorrow, my days are so much more effective when I have that plan mapped out. It's the same thing here at Dreamforce. If you don't have a plan here at Dreamforce, you're going to be really busy. You're going to be running around like a chicken with your head cut off.

But you're ultimately not going to get much done. So part of this, for me, is just a bigger brand exposure thing. So I want to get my face out there to my target audience and to my contacts. You know, almost all of my customers here, all my key contacts are here as well, a lot of prospects. So, obviously, just from a brand recognition standpoint, get to the Jay Barrow's brand out there. And also to get Morgan out there, too, just to introduce him to the audience, get that buzz going. And, you know, so those are kind of the bigger pitches, but those aren't very smart, right? Again, if you want to set goals, you want specific, measurable, attainable, realistic, and timely. We've got to map those out.

So I have one main goal for today is to drive at least 200 people into this presentation that Doug and Trisha and I are doing, right? The room holds 300 or 400 or something like that. We only had a certain amount of people sign up beforehand, so I'm trying to drive as many people with that through social. And then to get at least 10 leads out of that session. So afterwards, I'm going to be hanging out, answering questions, stuff like that. And so that's today. And then I have two meetings with clients. So I'm trying to accelerate the sales cycle with both of those, trying to make sure that I get to the next step and it's not just a good conversation. And what else? And then I got an event tonight where a lot of my partners are going to be at, so I want to make connections with some partners here because I got some strategy sessions that I'm doing with them to figure out how to get the channel sales stuff going.

I got some strategic partnerships that I'm trying to figure out how I can get the most out of. So, again, getting to find next steps with those and really solidifying those partnerships to see what we're going to do there. So that's today's plan. And then just have some fun, right? I got about 50 business cards that I want to hand out to selected people. So if I can get rid of those, that would be fantastic. And also just create some buzz and have some fun here with Morgan like we're already doing and forgetting his fucking ID. That's just brutal. So anyways, so with that, Dreamforce. I'm going to be chronicling Dreamforce throughout the rest of the week here, all right, through Snapchat and through Instagram and everything else.

And really trying to, you know, give you a perspective of what Dreamforce is. I do think that this year it's going to be ratcheted back because I think a couple of years ago they jumped the shark. There was about 150,000 people here a couple of years ago. And they had two cruise ships in here for people because there was not enough hotel rooms here in San Francisco to house as many people as there were here. And it was just bananas. Like you couldn't go anywhere. You couldn't do anything. You couldn't get to a bar. You couldn't get to a, you know, you couldn't have a drink. You couldn't even find a seat for crying out loud. Sorry. And then last year was noticeably different. I think they ratcheted back and they realized that.

And then this year I think is going to be noticeably different because this year you couldn't even get early bird discounts on your tickets. All tickets were $1,700. They cut back on the amount of tickets they gave away. And I couldn't get any discounts even with all my connections here at Salesforce. So I was, I ended up getting a free ticket. And that's why I'm speaking at this sales summit here, which is great. But I almost guarantee this year is not going to be as crazy as it is, which I think is good because hopefully quality over quantity is the, is the name of the game this week at Dreamforce, which should be the name of the game in sales, right? Quality over quantity. It's way better to go after very targeted accounts with very specific messaging and get the right accounts than to go after anybody and everybody that will even listen to you.

And I've been honing in on that. That's also a topic I wanted to kind of touch on here because with Morgan coming on board here, you know, one of the exercises I had him doing was that ideal customer profile. Just to really hone in on that. And we had two sessions that he followed me at. One was Marketo and then another was Alterix. And they were at that perfect spot. Not only did they fit the ideal customer profile, but they fit the exact point where this training adds the highest value. So, for instance, I talk about the inflection point, which is where inbound marketing and inside sales generates leads for field sales to go and close. And they do that and it gets a company usually, and it's a lot of times the seed and grow approach where, you know, you get a couple of people using it and then you bubble it upstream to the executive and say, hey, you got 15 people using this.

We'd love to talk to you about an enterprise solution. And that a lot of times gets companies to a certain point. But then that levels off. And then there's that inflection point where, you know, marketing and inbound lead generation levels off, but yet projections go up, territories get smaller, quotas go up. And now all of a sudden you're looking at sales reps who haven't really prospected a long time and you're asking them to do some prospecting. So AEs, you know, they're saying, hey, you know, you 100% of your book used to be given to you by inside sales and marketing. Now it's probably going to be more like 75 or 80 or the inflection point where you have to start going top down to get bigger deals.

That I call the inflection point and that is when my prospecting training is a home run. So the feedback this week from the, or these past two weeks from the training has been off the charts because it was the perfect scenario. The client was at the right spot at the right time for this training. And so that's where it's just, it makes the sale so much easier when you can find that ideal customer profile and the person that is at that position to really need your solution, even though if they don't, they might not know they need it because then you can push a little bit. And then also when you deliver your solution, you get feedback on from everybody saying, wow, that was incredible. And that leads to case studies, that leads to referrals, that leads to testimonials, that leads to everything else.

So again, pulling off of the quality versus quantity approach here. Oh, looks like somebody's opening up the door here. You know, I really encourage you to, if you haven't done it already as a sales rep, sit down with your managers and really dive into that ideal customer profile. And figure out what really makes it, not just the industry and size and all that other stuff, but, you know, what are the nuances there? What are, what's, what's their situation? What's their, you know, what technology do they use? Who's the competition in there? Where are they in their business life cycle? Those type of things. Because that makes a huge, huge, huge difference with the value your solution can provide.

So, anyways, with that, I don't even know if the Make It Happen Monday thing is working right now because I know the Wi-Fi is pretty shitty. But it does say live here. So, hopefully, if you do have questions, feel free to pop them in. I'm not going to spend too much more time on this, though, because I'm going to be chronicling the entire week over Snapchat and Instagram. And it doesn't look like there's any questions coming in here today, but feel free to hit me up on any one of those channels. So, it's John M. Barrows on Instagram and Snapchat. And then follow Morgan, too. I'll put his handle in here. I forget what it is, but I'll put his handle in here in the Facebook thing. And ask questions along the way.

So, if you've got questions over Snap, hit me up on Snap. That's the easiest way for me to answer questions about the experience here. Or if you're here and you want to connect with me, Snap is actually going to be the best way to connect with me. And Instagram will be fun. We're going to be posting a lot of stuff on there and doing Instagram stories. Morgan and I are going to be taking over each other's Instagram accounts, having some fun with that. And going to try to project as much, share as much insights as possible throughout this entire journey of ours here. Because it is going to be a crazy journey this week. It's going to be fast-paced. There's going to be a lot of people. I want to introduce you to a lot of people in my network, too.

I'm trying to make some connections for everybody else out there. All right? So, with that, I'm going to sign off here. It's been 15 minutes. I'm going to see if I can find Morgan. See if he's got his ID yet. And see if I can go make some connections around here and find out where I'm presenting. So, I can get ready for my presentation. So, anyways. See you on the other side. Thanks, everybody, for joining me. Thanks for all your support. I really appreciate it. I'm late. I'm late.