57: Cold Calling with Chris Orlob from Gong

one good afternoon everybody it's john barrows with make it happen monday hopefully y'all had a fantastic weekend we actually didn't have a podcast last week or make it happen session to recognize memorial day but did want to pause here for a second and just say thanks to all those men and women who go overseas who are kicking ass for us and letting us live this incredible lifestyle of ours and just as a reminder everybody um the the j barrows store where you see all this make it happen gear 100 of profits and proceeds goes to veterans in the arts so if you're looking to support veterans and get some cool gear to motivate yourself please join uh check out the store and we write that big fat check at the end of the year for all the profits that you guys so i want to thank everybody for the support on that and also thank you for support on the podcast because we hit a hundred thousand downloads recently which blows my mind really appreciate all the feedback and insights and with that i am actually super excited for today's not that i'm not excited for other ones but i'm really excited for this one first of all we had to reschedule it once uh so we're back on track and this is one that i i have a lot of questions about so i wanted to introduce it and welcome a friend of mine chris orla from uh gong chris say hi to everybody give a little background your little 30 second about what you where you're coming from and what gong is all about yeah super excited to be here um it's been too long time of a coming i think but my name's chris i run product marketing over here at gong um short story is previously i was co-founding a company that was competing with gong or probably attempting to compete with gong that's probably the the more accurate uh situation we ended up joining forces uh but before that i was a regional sales manager over at inside sales.com in provo utah uh started off as an sdr worked my way as an account executive ended up in that last position and uh that's my background super excited to talk about what we have on the table here i love it and and by the way i gotta give you guys kudos first of all you said the new branding's coming out today so yeah new brands no more gong blue it's like the vintage stuff that's hopefully going to be like sold on ebay for thousands of dollars 20 years from now or something like that i'm sure you got cabinets of it too so keep it closed but but so your new brand new website looks awesome uh and one of the things that i just want for everybody out there listening right now uh i get asked all the time john what um what podcast should i listen to what blogs should i read to educate myself and the number one that i almost always recommend is gongs because you guys put out some incredible content it's not just about somebody's opinion or whatever but really is backed up with data so i wanted to give you huge kudos on that we're going to dive into some of those um but i wanted to i wanted to start with kind of a bigger picture right um and this is the whole this cold calling dead i i hate that question but i'm going to put a little bit of a different spin because i think it's absolute bullshit i think cold calling is still alive and well if done right and if it's part of the package right um you know it's no longer 100 dials a day and just blindly making cold calls but the phone is not dead um but something shook me a little while ago and this is why i'm really interested in your perspective on this i wrote a blog post probably i don't want i want to say a year ago that said i think the phone is going to make a raging comeback right because i saw a couple of emails written by these artificial intelligence bots that were highly personalized and better than a sales rep could ever write so i'm like well shit in a year or two none of us are going to trust a single email it's like email that's in our inbox because it's all suspect right so with that i was like well phone that's the final frontier that like that's the part that robots and technology is not going to be able to take away from us because of empathy because of listening to tone and that type of stuff but then i saw the fucking google home thing call up and make a hair appointment and then the hair appointment was like holy shit but when it ordered chinese food from somebody who could barely speak english and was able to navigate that conversation and do some like and be able to understand what that person was saying i was like uh-oh so i guess my question for you is with your background with inside sales.com with now you know and starting another company and i mean you guys are all in on phone that's it right i mean that's that's what your focus is so you've met your entire business and there's a huge amount of money going into this space too so so there's obviously something that says phone is still going to be around but where do you see the future of phone going um based with the google and all that other stuff and ai stuff going on so the first part of it is whether cold calling is dead or not there's still going to be a phone interaction that's required to close a deal like usually over a web conference but let's just narrow the conversation for the sake of having like an uh you know this argument about google um is ai going to kill that stuff and if you think about those google home demonstrations and you think about the person who was on the receiving end of that phone call they're literally paid to take that call they're not going to hang up on you and so ai yes it's very impressive that it was able to navigate the various paths that that conversation could have come down although i would argue there's probably only three to five paths so it's not that complicated but cold calling is a little different because you're pushing a boulder up a hill the person on the other line is in constant threat of hanging up on you because they generally don't want to be hearing from you and so when people come to the conclusion well google home you know booked a hair appointment for me and so cold calling is dead it's totally a different scenario it's the same medium which is a phone call but world's different scenarios one of them somebody is literally paid no matter how bad of a conversationalist you are they're not hanging up on you the other one you could say the same words just with the wrong tone or you could change one word from a sentence and they'll hang up on you it's much more sensitive with all of that said so my prediction is ai is not going to replace professional sellers making calls but humans are also horrible at predicting the future in 2001 we all thought nobody's going to be writing code in 10 years in 2011 and it's 2018 so people are writing codes well shit we all thought the world was going to end in 1999 because all of a sudden there was poison tentative right yeah in 2012 even me in 2012 i was like looking out the window see if the mayans were right on december 21st or whatever that was my birthday so i threw a bender that's so december 21st is my birthday on 2012 23rd represent december there you go so i'm like hey if i'm going out i'm going out strong so fuck it let's party um but i i agree with you so so well then let's take another little bit of a because i i i think that context is perfect in the sense that you know when it's somewhat of a predictable path and you're talking to somebody who's paid to take your call i think yeah ai and google take care of that for me my assistant hey google make me a hair appointment hey google you know make me a reservation at a restaurant cold call different when it could go a million different tracks um you know although you know you see you see the intersection to a certain degree because people have tried to script out like when you go do an outsource cold calling company they try to script out hey if they say this then do this if they say that then do this so i can see where somebody's going to try to do it whether it's going to be successful or not is the other story the other layer to this though is the generational divide right in the sense that one of the things i tell kids when i make you know when i'm doing my training is one of the big reasons i recommend you make phone calls well there's two and i'll get to the second one but the first one is gen xers i'm a gen xer 42 we're now the decision makers right so and i grew up on the phone so there are people and you bring in neurolinguistic programming and there's different types of communicators so you know if you send all emails you're reducing your chances of connecting with a decent part of the population but do you think that cold calling when when millennials take over right really take over decision making when they hit their 40s and that type of stuff how where do you see phone fitting into that because because millennials didn't grow up with a phone like this they grew up with it like this do you think that that's going to have a big impact on the actual usage of phone in the future so here's what i would say first of all if the phone dies in the most literal sense of the word meaning it is no longer a communication platform then obviously cold calling is going to be dead but that's you know very uncertain as to whether that could happen the second thing i would say is part of the effectiveness of a communication channel is its novelty not necessarily its newness but how infrequent are people bombarded on that channel and right now very few people are getting hit with the phone because either people think cold calling is dead or most millennials are frankly the really the real underlying reason is they're scared to make a cold call it's a terrifying thing to do and so it's kind of like linkedin in mail when linkedin like first became popular if you got an in mail it was like oh goody right i got a message from somebody i never get messages from and so you would like respond and it was super effective and now you're spammed to sunday on linkedin you don't respond and so that's really long way of me saying if nobody is making calls but people still have phones you have you have the opportunity of a lifetime to bring novelty back to the phone now they're bombarded in email and social media and they're getting tweeted at and so when they get a phone call again i'm a human could be horrible at predicting the future but you know the one phone call they get a week it's a novelty so they're going to answer and it's going to be an effective conversation i said i love that because there was a i was i was at a conference a little while ago and this was actually two years ago when you know same questions cold calling dead bullshit whatever and and one of the like somebody asked this panel of executives who said hey what's the newest coolest app you know to get in front of you your executives like what's the newest thing that gets your attention and all of them in unison said phone see and i i think the app thing it's just a way for us to avoid our fears yeah of doing something difficult and scary and looking for instant gratification what app can i go download that's going to suddenly help me book a bunch of meetings it's it's the wrong question to ask it's just fear i couldn't agree more that's why i just get on the damn phones and like that's what i took is like look what's the absolute worst thing that can happen when you get on a phone with a co-call like i mean unless you're blatantly disrespectful and doing something super unethical and shady then you know you do that and they might call your boss and get you fired like that's okay but that's you being a douche but if you're taking a legitimate approach and you're making a phone call and you might get a little bit more aggressive or whatever it is the absolute worst thing they could do is hang up on you like you know that's why i don't understand that i mean i get the fear but if you have some fun with it then you can you can flip it around pretty easy well i think the fear comes from this lizard brain concept like as humans i won't get into like brain science but we have this uh amygdala and that part of the brain developed in a time where humans lived in very small tribes and the reason we're scared of getting rejected on the phone in today's day and age when we don't live in tribes is our brain is built for the day and age when we did live in these small tribes and if we got rejected from a tribe a million years ago it literally meant we were going to die because we were ostracized from the tribe we were kicked out into the wilderness you know getting rejected was actually a big deal a million years ago now we live in these big metropolitan cities where our survival is not dependent on being accepted by one specific tribe but our brain's evolution has not caught up so that if we get rejected it's going to mean death in one way or another so it's i mean cold calling success is really simple i mean it's not it's not easy but it's really simple you just have to go against your brain's natural wiring like you're going to be scared eventually you'll do it enough you won't be scared anymore but initially um what separates successful people from unsuccessful people is can they take action in the face of fear i love that because again and actually that leads to to that's a great segue here for us as far as the data because you look at data and science and those type of things and they intend to you know debunk a lot of stuff that our perception of is right people say cold calling is dead but i look at the data and i say look the kids who make cold calls actually have much higher conversion ratios than the kids that don't right people who are on the phones likewise so we're going to start with out of all the posts that you've done because i want to dig into a couple of them but of all the posts you've done has has data shown you something has there been kind of like for you personally based on your experiences and str and those type of things has there been something where data has shown you like whoa my perception was wrong because the data says this is there is there something that kind of stands out that we could learn from from that yeah so we analyze all different types of calls discovery calls demo closing calls cold calls and i there's actually a lot of counterintuitive insights but i'll just talk about one since it it's kind of thematic and addresses what we've already been talking about which is cold calling in every type of sales call we've analyzed discovery calls demos etc there's been a strong correlation between talking less and success right eventually closing the deal or moving it to the next step except for cold calling so what we found in cold calling and this is correlation not necessarily causation i would like you know make sure that point is well understood is that successful cold calls actually involve higher talk to listen ratios on the reps part longer monologues where it's like the rep was talking for a very long time uninterrupted and very little talking from the customer's end and again how you interpret that data is important and probably many people have different interpretations of that data which means correlation and causation are different things but what that means to me is that cold calling is not about discovery if you open a cold call and say john what are your biggest strategic priorities coming into this year you're probably gonna laugh in my face or hang up on me cold calling is about making a highly targeted and resonant pitch to sell the meeting and the best way you can do that is knowing your buyers part of that is research and that's going to be on the shoulders of the rep or the sdr but i mean maybe i'm biased a lot of that comes down to product marketing is product marketing helping you understand your buyer personas their pain points are they doing research into the market to arm you to speak resonantly or are you going in and guessing i i absolutely love that um because i i preach that so one of the things i use to to train reps on is you know the old school glengar glengar glen ross right which whatever terrible like great movie bad but depressing as shit awesome um but but in there you know alec when he does is always be closing whatever but he talks about aida right attention interest desire action and i looked that up 1898 a guy by the name of saint elma lewis came up with he said these are the four mental stages right we have to go through before buy something first something needs to get our attention then we have to be interested and we have to have a desire so what i say you know you have five to 15 seconds to get someone's attention that earns you a couple of minutes where you can create interest and that's what you're selling when you're making cold calls you are not selling your solution you are selling time you are selling interest you are selling the next step yeah so that makes total sense to me on a cold call day because you're i i couldn't agree more where some kid calls me up out of nowhere and so so john tell me about your priorities for the year and what are you and i'm like like who are you right but if somebody comes at me says hey john thanks for taking my call real quick the reason for my call today is we're showing vps of sales like you and your industry how to drive these type of results with our solution and i just wanted to see if that was worth having a deeper dive conversation into yeah good cold calling follows the same rule as really good writing so like if you've ever studied writing there is a rule that says the purpose of every sentence you write is to compel the reader to read the next sentence and cold callings should be exactly the same you should be economical with your words not frivolous every word and every sentence you say should design be designed to prolong the conversation whether it's getting them talking or getting them listening to your next sentence which in turn it is designed to get them to linger yeah that that's awesome man because i i think that's what a lot of people uh make the mistake of when cold calling or leaving voicemail messages is they're literally trying to sell their product or service during that call so they treat it as a quick discovery or something let me ask you 15 questions before you know throw up on you or you know let me just tell you literally everything about what we do to see if you're interested in buying from it but if you segment that down into five that's why i love the aida because it's the same thing with uh emails right the subject line gets my attention the first sentence tells me whether i'm not i'm interested in having this conversation like in reading the rest of it the next part is your value proposition to create my desire to say oh i want that and then there's your call to action right it's the same thing with calls literally the first few words that come out of my mouth make a difference so go ahead no well i was just gonna say um what i was thinking the entire time are selling does not come down to knowing what tactics it doesn't come down to knowing the tactics and strategies it comes down to knowing which tactics and strategies apply to which situation because ada you know if you took that as a generalized strategy to apply to all of your sales calls you'd fail miserably you know if you enter a discovery call and you're thinking in terms of ada not going to work but when you apply ada to your cold call and you know i won't be attached to the methodology here but spin or solution selling to your discovery and challenge your sale to your presentation that's where like super successful people or that's where people become super successful at selling they know which tactics apply to which parts of the sales cycle i love it and that and that it's actually interesting because that going back to the a right attention you put out a post a little while ago that that helped and hurt me based on data right because you've heard me you know everybody who learns one of my favorite nuggets is and i say this like when you introduce yourself it matters right so when you call up and say hi blah blah blah this is john barrows from so-and-so that actually automatically puts the the buyer in a mindset of oh this is a sales rep let me figure out how i can get off this call so you want to disrupt that a little bit so so we talk about powerful and weak introductions and one of my favorite powerful introductions and i'm psyched it was on your list um is the reason for my call is right so it gets right to the point but you brought up another one that i rail against as like the shittiest way to introduce yourself but you said it was like the number one way and i've stopped shitting on it as much but it's that hey how you doing today or the better one which was how have you been how have you been was so so here's a couple things i would say about this first i have two number one you can't compare how have you been to the reason for my call because they are different openers that can be used in conjunction they serve different purposes so one is not better than the other um in fact i would say like just you know based on my own intuition not data the reason for my call is actually a better opener opener because it's timeless right it's built on like human psychology humans crave reasons whereas how have you been is going to have a shelf life i can't ever since i published that article i've probably gotten 30 cold calls where somebody thought it was clever and cheesy to open with hey chris how have you been the first time i thought it was funny the second time i was already past it i was like i need to write a new post already because this one's already dead so that that's one point i would make is uh the timeless stuff like stating the reason for the call is what you really need to master this other stuff has shelf lives like did i catch you at a bad time at one point it was probably successful we found out that it's 40 less successful than our baseline which goes to show a lot of these techniques have shelf lives and you need to be on the cutting edge of your profession and that's why i talk about split testing and trying new things all the time because what what what worked last year is not working anymore you know that i rail on that that uh that shitty uh breakup email of one two three stuck under a rock or getting chased by a hippo right yeah three years ago when sales loft came up with that it worked like a charm yeah because you know the first i thought it was hilarious yeah and now i'm like as annoyed by it as you are like no because the first time you get that you're like oh no i'm not stuck under a rock right but then the very next time you get that you're like oh shit this is a technique right so so that's why i think what you guys are doing with the data uh and brian carbell asked like brian just go to gong.io uh and go to their blog we'll post it in the in the uh questions here but um he said hey how can i get to that um and looks like we just posted it there so um but that's why like gaining insights out of that data uh is invaluable right now to keep reps on top of what is that what's working now even um subject lines like i i tell reps and here's a tip for everybody listening but you know people ask me john what's a good subject line i'm like i don't know because again it changes so frequently so just go on literally go on google and type in best subject lines 2018 and somebody like gong on the email side of the house is doing research and reports of high open rates low open rates those type of things and you just have to follow those trends yeah because there are some fundamentals and i think a lot of the fundamentals and i appreciate you kind of bringing this stuff up is based on the psychology of humans and and how we are wired so i don't think i think that is is going to be that's why when people ask me john what books do you recommend i don't usually recommend sales books i recommend psychology books like influence by robert cialdini or selling with nlp you know the unfair advantage those type of things because human psychology is a science that is historic and has lots of data points whereas sales has minimal data points and changes on a regular basis right yeah and speaking of uh you know it just reminded me of it of it because you said influenced by robert cialdini um stating the reason for your call they did like this research you're probably familiar with this if you read the book but they yeah they had a bunch of people go up and ask if they could cut in line to make a xerox copy and like 43 percent of the people said sure and then they said hey can i cut in line because i have to make a copy a reason that is not valid it's like obvious but because they said the word because and then stated a reason there was 94 percent compliance i think that's the right number and that hasn't changed so just like you're saying like 80 percent of your studying and self-development should be on this timeless stuff psychology behavioral economics understanding like how the human brain makes decisions and then spend the rest of your time experimenting with new techniques and evolving your approach love it yeah that's uh it's so important to stay it's it that's why i think psychology majors a lot of times make the best sales reps because they understand how human interaction works as opposed to just using a technique because i was told to use a technique they understand fundamentally why and and that reason by the way translates into one of the next questions i'll ask is questioning um i actually think i have found that by giving people the reason for my question they're way more open to giving me the answer so for instance a lot of times when you ask the question right it's the the person on the the client or the prospect is kind of like all right sales rep why triggers defensiveness right because in the back of their head they're like why are you asking that question and what are you going to do with it right so what i do is i tell them why i'm asking that question so i'll say hey you know could you help me understand what are the priorities when your ceo stood up in the beginning of the year and said these are the three things like what what were those three things the reason i ask is because if i can't impact those then it's not worth us having this conversation i love that i i wish i have tried that in my career and like had that insight to that that you just had but uh that's new to me that and i think it's amazing i want to i want to go test it out try it out it's it's a game changer because you'll literally hear the person be like oh okay you know what i mean like oh well okay i love it and so as that relates to questioning you know one of the things that the most recent one and then you know we've got about three minutes left here but um the the closing one you said closing techniques are dead um now i train closing techniques though obviously you know we can have a debate on this for a whole other show but what was the big takeaway because i think the takeaway here was was more important than the than the title um but what did you find with the data about closing and the success of closing as it relates to the closing call versus the discovery call yeah and in hindsight um i probably could have chosen a better title for that article because yeah exactly um what we found is that we analyzed all of the calls throughout a sales cycle and i went to my data science team and said hey we haven't analyzed closing calls yet let's look at the difference between a successful closing call one that leads to a closed deal and one that leads to a lost deal and they poured over the data and i poured over the data for weeks and there was literally not a single difference that we could find except for one which i'll direct the listeners to the article to find out but the point is there was no difference between these closing calls that led to success or not success and there were wild stark differences between calls that happen earlier in the sales cycle and so long story short the takeaway is the things you do early on set the trajectory more so than the things you do late in the game if you had a shitty discovery call and a shitty demo and then you get on a closing call and i don't care how much conviction you uh you know exude through your tonality or whatever the hell people are saying these days if you didn't do the front end of the sales cycle right no slick line is going to help you close no amount of belief in your product and you know vision none of that's going to help you but if you set the stage right early on and then at the end you simply exercise decisiveness which is really what closing is i hate the i don't hate the word closing but i don't think it's an accurate word i think the right word i can see why this is not adopted because it's clunky it's exercising decisiveness on behalf of your prospect now that comes into play so uh i feel like that was a very roundabout way of me trying to explain i think the closing so i think the big misperception that people have on closing is that it happens at the end what what you reinforce which is what i train which makes me feel better about training the techniques is that closing happens at every single stage of the sales process to get a next step to close on um them getting you know you getting more information or whatever it is and so understanding the assumptive close the trial close those type of things but how to apply them early and ask better questions and layer and stuff like that sets up the close now i never agree that closing just happens i do believe you have to just ask the question and but sometimes it can be as simple as so when are you going to sign that contract and when when should i expect the signature i mean that that's as simple as it could be at that point but early on yeah exactly early on is is making sure you're doing all those right things because ultimately that's why i disagree with a lot of you know i'm not going to name any names but there are some sales trainers some sales training orgs out there that still are wolf of wall street stuff it down your throat what you don't want to make money blah blah blah i don't know what like dude like fuck you if if some if some rep i mean maybe that's good for used car salesmen still but in the world of b2b selling hardcore closing techniques at the end of the sale are are about as old school as it gets and data shows are absolute bullshit so yeah awesome chris well i look i i think we can have this conversation we could go all day with this conversation because i got so many questions around the data but i'm going to recommend everybody because a lot of the questions that i guarantee you have about cold calling you know uh clarissa for instance she asked what today's busy busy world and cold calling really effective yes it is if done right clarissa and if your audience under you know if your audience is on the phone there are some audiences that don't have phone or whatever it is so yeah that so understand your icp understand your personas but get better on the phone we didn't even talk about all the other stuff that we said before this chris as far as where where voice is going with alexa and google home and that type of stuff all you have to do follow up we have to have another one of these we absolutely have a follow-up because i'm all i'm going to say to those those skeptics out there is look at the data that gong is putting out there and all you got to do is follow the money amazon google microsoft like literally the biggest companies in the world are putting all of their money into voice so if you're not into voice in some way shape or form there's a strong possibility you are going to miss out on a massive opportunity coming up here in the near future so with that chris tell everybody where they can find out more information about gong and you and everything else and if they got questions that they can ask yeah i i would say just i would say with me on linkedin chris or lrb as in boy as in boy and take a look at the posts we've put on linkedin not just our blog they're going to be the same content but linkedin has the benefit of hundreds and hundreds of comments and they're always really interested to or interesting to read through so connect with me on linkedin chris or lob if you're interested in gong check out our website gong.io the new beautiful gong website yeah awesome chris well thank you so much we're definitely going to have you back on here uh in a month or two but i really appreciate your time and uh everybody keep the questions coming keep crushing it out there get on the phones but do it right and have some fun with it ladies and gentlemen have a great week and make it happen later Bye-bye.

Bye-bye. Bye-bye. Bye-bye.