62: Armen Zildjian from Drift

this is john barrows j barrows consulting i'll make it happen monday hopefully all had a fantastic weekend and awesome week last week i know it was somewhat of a down week but hopefully you either got shit done or you got your head mentally right to go crush it for the second half here and i am telling you right now this is one of the podcasts i've been looking forward to the most because armin from drift said something a little while ago that blew my mind and i've been trying to figure it out ever since and so we're going to dive into that today but armin you want to say hi to everybody and give them a little bit of background of where you're from and what you're all up to these days sure sure hi everybody how's it going i'm armin zildjian i'm the vp of sales here at drift normally my beard does not look like this but my sales team crushed it at the end of the quarter and i let them do what they will with it so they picked this nice color orange that makes me look like a little bit of a arminian irishman or something like that um so i've been in been in tech sales 22 years i've been leading sales teams at companies like um log me in uh dine uh grab cad and uh and now at drift and uh and a little bit at sofos as well and uh really just love being part of the boston scene love being part of the sass scene uh growing up and cutting my teeth and learning from some of the best in the business in the boston scene uh of leading and running sales organizations for the last 20 years so glad to be here love it man and thanks and i love the beard too we were talking about it beforehand just to let everybody know go look at armin's uh linkedin photo he does not look like it's it's just like you gotta have commitment yeah and how many how many times did you have to diet to even get to that point then this this was three bleach jobs and it got to this color so uh a little bit a little bit of pain yeah so well first of all congrats to your team man and yeah thanks and like i said anything to do you know to get them motivated whatever um but here's here's the premise of today's conversation because like i said i think this was probably six or nine months ago almost when we first met um where you said something that got my mind really churning in a lot of ways and it was that we do things as sales reps that automatically trigger the buyer to go into a certain mode where they stop engaging with us and they start just okay now i'm at this stage of the sales process so this is what my response should be like and i you know the the easy example here is sales rep face to face in a meeting having a good conversation setting the stage blah blah blah and then after all the little qualifications niceties the laptop comes open the presentation goes up and the client immediately goes from engaged and having a conversation to okay it's now my time to consume content and not engage right which is not what you want in a demo so i know drift in general is is trying to change marketing so do you want to kind of first of all give a little bit of an overview of what drift is trying to do from a marketing standpoint but then lead that into what are some of the areas that you see us as sales reps doing and things that we're doing that are automatically triggering that buyer response that we need to shake up a little bit sure sure so uh drift is a is a platform that's bringing conversations back to sales and marketing and so we've created the world's first conversational marketing platform and what that means is a lot of people think we're just chat and we do use chat as part of our functionality to engage with customers but at the end of the day um most of uh most of the history of buying has always been facilitated by uh an end user or a customer having a conversation with a salesperson from the beginning of time right and in the last 20 years or so it's changed in in in a way that probably hasn't changed much prior to prior to the last 15 20 years and that's we've increased all this automation and all this process in between the customer who wants some information and the sales rep uh and and the challenge right now as customers through the consumerization of it and a lot of uh available apps and things on these devices can get whatever they want both answers to questions and buy things pretty quickly now so the behavior as a human of buying is changing right and so if you think about it when they come into work they don't stop being human um they come in and they have those tendencies and we believe in our placing a bet on the conversations have to come back into the into the fray in a really weird really real and human way and that um uh buyers are no longer gonna uh going to gravitate towards uh businesses that choose to continue to keep them at arm's length give me all your information and then i'll engage with you or answer all the questions i have for you and then i'll give you what you want right and so for us uh getting the conversation going uh between the buyer and the seller is is a premier importance now and what we started to notice was uh and where it started was hey people come to your site right now and the traditional way is they fill out a form and then a bdr qualifies them and then gets qualified over to a salesperson that process can take a couple of hours or it can take a couple of weeks we've seen uh in really poor cases and what we say is hey listen buyers coming to your site no matter where they are in the buying process from early stage sort of research to hey i got a fistful of dollars in my hand and i'm trying to spend them with you most of the time they get the exact same experience which is fill out this form and someone will get back in touch with you and what we say is if you're putting the buyer first uh and saying hey you've taken the time out of your day to come to my site and get information i should do the courtesy of being there and giving you information a lot of companies are apprehensive about that because i got a support question or it's it's not a really good fit and therefore they're not qualified and it's not worth the salesperson's time and we have ai and some and some uh discovery process built into um the machine learning of drift to be able to screen some of that stuff out and really get to the the heart of what leads come to your site and so that brings me to this subject which is if you put the customer first and you say i'm willing to engage with you and answer questions as you come to the site the last thing you want to do is go into a traditional sales process because if you've triggered in the mind oh the company cares about answering my questions and are putting me first and then the first human contact when somebody arrives is hey tell me who you are what you're doing here and um why should i spend more time with you right um it immediately triggers in the mind of the buyer oh i'm going into i thought this was like this new way right of like i don't have to fill out forms anymore and i go right into the uh the old way of buying which is i'm going to play this role of being evasive and not answering your questions because i don't want to be chased by you for the next you know three weeks in either an email cadence or or a bunch of calls um that puts that sort of gate up right right away and what we want to do is say hey listen we want to spend time with you because it's important for us to be able to give you the information as you need as a buyer by the way what we've been taught over the last probably 10 15 years no matter what sales process you follow i don't care if it's barrow spin you know back to the old basho days uh uh sandler or anything else buyers are used to now what we teach as sales leaders to our teams the qualification questions whether it's bent whether it's medic or any other any other qualification and they intuitively know when they've been put into that process by the salesperson um and i think what most companies are afraid of is that they can't train either a large swath of reps to be curious and ask the right questions in a normal conversation or um or they're worried that you know the rep will get off the phone and do a bad job and they won't get the answers to the question they're going to do another call but i think what we need to teach as salespeople is we need to teach conversations again which is kind of strange in the at the end of the day because you know salespeople that's kind of how we make our living especially over the phone sass telesales folks right um but we need to start teaching them i think the the sort of human skills of just having a conversation letting somebody take the lead and in the back of your mind knowing what the triggers are to ask a question that's important to the business that you represent and to the sales process that you're trying to drive rather than having the sales process drive the conversation so i'll stop there i said that's fantastic because i think the you know the challenge is what you just said there was like how do you how do you teach that right because we were talking before this where look i'm 42 i've been in this industry for a while now i built a lot of the training that i do so my qualification calls are they're comp they're literally conversations it's okay what's the priority and i'd actually try to get all that that pre-qual stuff out of the way i and this is a tip for everybody listening here i call it the meeting efficiency survey so what happens is we still we have drift and we actually have the forms too when somebody actually fills out a form on the landing page they get a hey thanks for your interest in jay barrels and it's the basic information like that type of thing but then what i'll do is i'll send them hey here's a link to my calendar and by the way here's a quick little meeting efficiency survey that if you just take two seconds to fill this out it'll really help us stay focused on the conversation and what it is is it's a survey monkey thing where it's just drop down checkbox stuff so i don't want to you know they don't need to type anything it'll take them two minutes but i'll save about 10-15 minutes on the call and if they fill that out now i have all the information i need to literally just be like okay cool so let's talk like what are you trying to give what are the priorities here and now morgan uh who i hired you know about nine months ago you know he's only been doing this for nine months he's also 25 years old and you know and i told him okay we need to find out this information and i've listened to some of his calls and he's doing a great job asking the right questions and those type of things but i can tell because i do this so often that he's going you know he's asking the questions and he's actually better than most in the sense that if somebody says something he'll circle in and kind of highlight a component of our solution that'll address what they just said but you can tell he's like he's he's reading he's asking the questions that he's supposed to be asking so i guess my question to you is how can we expedite the process of of 22 years of experience being able to know exactly when to shut down the conversation and say okay you just said something right there that is a home run for me to stop the presses and go in on because that's the reason you're gonna buy for me from me um versus a 22 23 25 year old kid who's given their band given their medic told to do this stuff and and might not necessarily be as uh experienced with the business or the product or any of that stuff how can we teach the conversation how can we teach them to be curious and to literally have it while still getting the information we need yeah yeah i don't know you and i talked a little bit about this i don't know if you can teach curiosity i think it's innate in in people and there's a there's obviously uh some sort of band that everybody falls in of being super curious versus not curious at all and i think you need to screen for that um in in your hiring process because i think it's essential to be a really good salesperson because i can't be on every call and and point out every road sign um but what i can do is for curious people to tell them to inspect more especially the good news right i think um the way i think we can teach it and again it's teaching a new way so i it's not all proven and i don't i don't have all the answers but my uh the way i do it here at drift is i teach it through use cases and so i think about patterns a lot and so with uh with sales people what i'm asking them to look is rather than know every nuance about either somebody's marketing tech stack or how many how many leads and what the what the conversion rates are what i can do is paint them a picture of like where successful companies have uh have or where companies have had success with drift and here are the different patterns of three or four different groupings and listen for uh similarities or patterns in what the customer is saying about their business and recognize that and be able to actually reference it too because i think a lot of companies um when they're being sold a product want to feel like hey is it who who has been before me in this product journey and what success have they had because it mitigates a little bit of the risk if you've got um companies that look like me smell like me and have had success with your product right and so that's something that i think from a pattern matching perspective is easy to teach rather than right now what we teach is you have to have answers to these questions so a person like morgan who god bless him he's brand new and he doesn't have 22 years of experience so what he's trying to do when he's a sales rep doing a really good job is in the back of his mind the whole time of that conversation is i gotta remember that where can i fit this question i gotta get an answer to this question meanwhile the customer has given him all this information much of which might be really good but he's not hearing that he's he's waiting for his next opening to ask the next question that's what a lot i did it to as a sales rep when i was inexperienced and young and stupid and i didn't know any better and i was trying to do a good job and i just tried to hammer all the questions and i was like a bull in a china shop just trying to get the answers to all the questions and i'm sure the person on the other line was like who is this salesperson that's not listening to me at all um and so and it's because as really aggressive good sales people we're trying to get we're trying to do a good job trying to get the answers to the questions we're not listening at all to the conversation i use that all the time when i was selling outsourced it services right i used to think the pitch was the answer i was 25 right i was a vp of sales and marketing which is why titles are a joke but you know but uh but uh you know and so and somebody told me early in my career that make sure the client speaks more than you right because two years off that whole thing right so no joke i did face-to-face meetings right and they were hour-long meetings and i would go in and i would ask my 35 minutes worth of questions oh my god honestly all right it didn't matter what you said in those 35 hours there were 35 minutes as long as you had computers you were getting my pitch and about 35 minutes in i'd be like thank you so much for that i really appreciate it so anyways we were founded in june of 2000 with three founders one finance one strategy and one technical guide that really puts us in a unique position as an it servant and i would just go on and on and on and on and on and i always say this if people have been paying attention i wrote this blog a little while ago i used to be so proud when this happened but now it is literally the kiss of death word if you ever hear this word anybody listen to this podcast or online right now if you ever hear this word you know you've done a miserable job it's the word digest right so wow i used to get this wow john that that was really impressive you know what i'm gonna need a little time to digest what you just told me there uh why don't you circle back in a couple weeks and we'll take it from there does that sound fair and i'd be like yup oh and i walked out of a meeting with my sales engineer one time and in these words legit came out of my mouth i said i was so happy and proud of myself for crushing that presentation i was like that dude didn't even know what to do with the information i put in front of them precisely and i was proud of that right and the engineer being a god bless him engineer right none not a sales guy in any way shape or form even he knew that was asinine like yeah on his face when i said that was like what did you just say no what to do and i'm like oh my god so now and this kind of gets to the point here which is i wrote a post called sell to the 20 percent right which is nobody gives a shit about the whole slide deck they only care about components that are relevant to their priorities and what they're trying to accomplish right so going back to teaching this um and and well actually i'm gonna shift a little bit what are some of the other areas because we talk about okay they fill out the form they get this they go through bank qualification now i know i'm in the sales process so i then you know answer as little as i can and i tell you to send me information what are some of the other areas that you see as sales reps that we are triggering people to go into a certain mode that we really don't want them to go into that mode um probably when you're trying to sell too much to a customer so all sales reps are trying to hit a number and and god bless them for trying to squeeze every little penny out of every opportunity that they can but when you try to sell too much uh or stack a bunch of other stuff in there that potentially doesn't um doesn't uh provide value at least potentially in that moment in time for that customer you trigger the discount conversation most of the time and what happens normally is hey mr customer you can do this and then by the way we have this feature we have this function and you can buy this package and and this service package and and you're trying to like optimize it you're like oh i nailed this i got him he's thinking about all this stuff and what happens is when you try to sell too much their perceived their perception of of what's valuable to them was this small chunk here and then you stacked a bunch of other stuff on it now the equation of value in the in their head is thrown off and they go i gotta get i gotta get less for this now because i don't even see the value of all this other stuff that was stacked on it and you trigger the discount conversation and what often happens is you'll either lose the deal or um you'll not only peel away all the stuff that you tried to stack onto it you'll probably get less for the core service that they saw value in at the end of the day because you went so hard in that direction um so i tried to we at drift really try to say hey listen what we're trying to do is just get people to start with the the consumable amount of value that they can have at that moment in time rather than stuff the whole cheeseburger in their mouth and say you should eat all of it because you're hungry right now you take this in one bite right so so let's make this let's take this to bottom up versus top down selling right because i think you know the inbound stuff that hits us whether it's on the website or or you know they're a form that they fill out or drift that they come in nine times out of ten that's not a ceo saying hey i'm interested in this right yeah that's right it's a you know user it's a it's somebody manager something like that looking for it so that's that's super you know that that's evident um how do you here's i guess the question is is like there's all there's always this we gotta get to power right and there's always that super awkward point in the conversation with a non-power person where you effectively have to say i know you're not power yeah i have to get to your boss right right yeah so i think the way i coach that uh there's two things first obviously if you're outbound always start as high as you can that's easy um that's pretty obvious also when you're inbound um i challenge my reps to not call the lead um first and i'm what i mean by that is not the person that came to you take three minutes take three minutes do the research in linkedin and find out who it is you're talking to and then do a quick outreach to uh as high up as you can find in the organization c-level executive whoever might that report that person report up to and just introduce yourself and say hey i'm armin from drift i see that your company is starting to show some interest in drift i'm not sure quite yet what the interest where the interest is coming from i just wanted to introduce myself let you know that i'll be working on your account if you ever need anything from me i'm happy to make myself available to you i'm going to be following up with those with with this other person and now what that does is and it doesn't matter if they ever replied to you what that does is it opened up the channel of communication communication and typically i guess this is a little bit of human nature if if you've already opened up that channel of communication if you have to use that channel of communication again even though that person might not have replied to you it's it's perceived as stepping on the person's toes less if you did that communication first then if you did it after i reached out to you i like that so that's what we start with so it's really just a hey what's up we're doing some cool stuff yeah let you know yeah and you may or may not be involved in the process i mean as much or as little as you want to put into that but it's an introduction it's like hey i'm going to be i'm going to be the contact for your company and drift if you ever need me i'm here if you're part of the process great if you're not i'm going to be working with this person and so you always have that ability to go back and use that card in your pocket now you put that in your back pocket and you work the deal and if you've got to go above it's not like hey you've never reached out to anybody else in the organization before i love that because i i'd coach the same stuff not necessarily using drift specific but if somebody comes to like a lot of reps follow up on inbound leads that you know the scored lead or whatever and i say you know tear them out you don't want to do this for everybody get your tier ones tier twos tier threes those tier ones that come in with a legit ip address like a legit email you know whatever take two seconds look at their website because something happened in that business to drive that inbound thing okay and and and you know yeah obviously respond to this person but if you can look for that trigger and say hey uh and then almost treat them as two separate conversations to say hey i was doing some research and i noticed this happens which is why i wanted to reach out to you executive while this is happening now you've increased your chances of engagement at least right that's right that's right um so i think what we were talking earlier before this is like these we're going back to the triggers right and so i think what you need to do as a sales as a salesperson in in this day and age is we've got to give up a little bit of power right we want to hold all the power but at the end of the day that's not happening anymore with the buyers they people that buy today use their phones all day to buy stuff without having to talk to anybody and that buyer behavior translates they don't stop being that person when they come to work and so they expect to have a little bit more power than they've had in the past and we as salespeople what we have to do is still get the things we need to get out of that conversation but still giving the control to the consumer and in that if you can do that in a in a very tactful way you're going to have a much better sales process with somebody what we were talking about is like so when do you kind of like enforce a little bit of the sales process on the visitor while still giving the power away and i think it's like if you think about your sales process as in as in gate stepping from one part one step to another like you as a salesperson need to collect enough information prior to showing your product so that it's a valuable uh amount of time that that person spends with you otherwise you can wander all over your product and services or give them the generic pitch so i always say like listen i'm happy i'm glad you came by i'm super excited to talk to you about it but i wanted to stop and just understand a where the interest came from or b where did you want what did you want to see so i can really we only have x amount of time on our call today i want to make sure that i spend um the most of that time focused on what you want to see right and so there's gates along the way that you can sort of enforce getting information from people but still giving them the power yeah and i think that's the the we talk about the difference between quid pro quo and rule of reciprocity right like when somebody asks you something they they feel obligated to give you something it's a human condition psychology all that stuff they feel obligated to give you something in return and if you ask for it right then and there it's easy but most people are like i can't give you a demo unless you give me this information and then it becomes contentious right if you phrase it and this is the phrase i try to help reps connect with which is look i'm thrilled to give you a demo i i actually want to give you the exact thing you're looking for and in order for me to do that this is the information that i need from you yep absolutely doing this in your best interest if you give me this this is going to be i'm going to give you something way better than just this if you don't give me any information right right right um one more question that i have uh is is you've changed again change the game when it comes to uh prospecting and engagement those type of things by using zoom for all your reps calls don't tell me a little while ago you mandate zoom and you mandate the video part of zoom right that's right that's fine for the rep every single time could you walk me through why and how your reps do that so that it's not super weird and awkward yeah it sometimes is weird and awkward like we've had some people like turn on the camera and like still not look at the camera and still be like on their phone over here like this one we're doing a demo but like whatever i can't control all all the events right so um but the reason behind it is back to the point of like we're trying to make that human connection and and and extend uh ourselves as a as a servant to the to the customer coming through the front door it's just like you would if you were in a retail store you wouldn't turn your back on somebody or you wouldn't look them in the eye you wouldn't walk up to them you wouldn't not walk up to them and ask them what they're looking for right and we believe that if we can make that human connection a lot of the barriers that usually are sprung up in a telephone conversation get dropped a little bit when when i'm looking you in the face and you're looking at me in the face unfortunately you gotta look at the view today but um but you're but you're looking but you're looking at each other and and and you can show that genuine interest and you know and you see the business behind me we're real people it's a real business not like a sterile environment where everybody's acting their formal role because i think when that formality comes in is when everybody kind of shifts into whatever their perceived role should be and if you're a salesperson and you don't think that buyers don't uh understand how we're trained as salespeople to sell uh you got something else coming to you i've seen it over and over again they take sales classes to learn about um how salespeople are selling these days so that they get better manage the conversation because they don't get what they need from salespeople most often and so what we try to do is break the barrier down of formality and have a human conversation so that i can see if i can help you or not right and um so we force people and we say if even if people don't have their camera on turn your camera on and show your face yeah um and we believe that it makes a material impact on how our sales calls go so wait you say that to the customer even if they're not software you say that to the rep i tell the reps that and the reps sometimes say it on the calls where they'll be like hey uh i don't know if your camera's broken if you got one of those security things on usually we like to to see who we're talking to but if that's not if that's uncomfortable for you we're cool too right and it also now you know you're they're paying attention nine times out of ten when you're on i'm gonna tell you you're not gonna like to hear it nine times out of ten when you're on a telephone sales call with somebody they're probably doing something else they're probably answering an email and they're half listening to you when they're when they're exactly and when they're when the screen is on they can't get away with doing that you have their undivided attention for whatever period of time you got them for yeah i love that because again it brings a human and you know this right the way that we communicate 8 35 57 8 is words 35 is tonality and 57 is language yeah it's all about right everybody knows right uh actually we got three minutes i got one more quick question i'm very curious about when drift started compared to where you are now yeah i think um when you started with the chatbot right yep you pretend to be human at first and then realize that was a bad thing and then switch to not like letting people know look i'm not a human because i know some chatbots i know some chatbots trying to get away with hey let me help and it was like oh look at this person they're super responsive to me and then midway through blatantly obvious that i'm talking to a computer would actually piss me off and turn me off you guys the opposite approach you're like hey i'm a computer i'm not gonna do what i mean so but we'll get somebody like did was that a conscious decision or i'm sorry that happened to you it was a conscious decision and we didn't we never approached it uh the the call center way a lot of that was from call center efficiency right we have a bunch of agents in a call center they got to be able to reply so we're going to use ai or or or this bot technology to pretend like the humans already started the conversation so that we can get the response times down so people don't feel like they're holding for so long and what we learned was that um we took a chance and said no we're going to say it's a bot and what we learned was people don't mind talking to a bot if a they know they're talking to a bot and b they know that there's going to be only a short period of time that they're going to uh talk to that bot before they get what they need and getting what they need could be talking to a human it could be just going to reroute into a different part of the site or it could be giving them a piece of content that they're looking for um and so over time using this technology you can learn like what's on the mind of the visitor and what you should serve to them and how long they can tolerate talking to the bot it could be just two or three questions it could be five or six the wrong thing to do is try to replace your sales process with a bot because it will not work and people try it and it's we always advise not to and then it goes really bad quickly it's the same thing with everything else right the email cadence tools the the phone messaging that the auto dialers the auto scripts all of that stuff like there's the human element of sales that will never go away we just figure out what that is um and so with that i really appreciate this conversation because again you got me thinking about a lot of different things here uh i'm actually going to go and kind of one of these days when i have time take this whiteboard and map out every single stage of the sales process and see if we can really identify like absolutely every nuance that we do as sales reps and then how to address that because i love what you're doing with changing the conversation the marketing and also changing the sales process so i really appreciate you coming on over here how can people find out more information about you and drift and all that stuff what's the best way to get it yeah just come come to drift.com uh if you want to connect with me um uh armen a-r-m-e-n at drift.com and if you want to connect on my calendar it's team.drift.com slash armen awesome actually last quick question you had card this is more of a personal thing you had cardone at your recent event right oh no he's going to be at our september event yeah he's go so i thought he wasn't at the i thought he came for zoom when he was here for zoom uh oh he he spoke it yeah he spoke just last weekend or two weekends ago yeah that's right and that and he was at the zoom conference you're right all right i want to talk to you later about uh how that landed because i have my own percent i have my own opinions about everybody does i did it you know what i did uh just to kind of clear the air is i went to a boot camp of his just to see for myself i would recommend uh if people are interested enough to go check it out so that might be that might be another topic for another day that's absolutely another topic because my perception is one thing and i i hope it's different i hope if like if i went to his boot camp i'd be like oh this is actually some valuable shit um but yeah we'll catch up and then we'll do another session on cardo i lost all right everybody well thank you again for listening for the engagement and everybody on the podcast please go check out drift they are one of the hottest fastest coolest companies specifically here in boston so near and dear to my heart um but again i'd love that we're changing the game here so go check out drift everybody again make somebody happy this week do something cool get out of the ordinary shit and you know i don't know try to make somebody smile because there's too much negative shit going on these days and uh we will see you all next week all right thanks again thanks john we'll see you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you