Bonus Episode: SalesHacker AMA Session at Dreamforce

What we're going to talk about now are five most important things you can do to build a repeatable pipeline. This is a little bit of the blocking and tackling that needs to happen, along with some thought leadership around it, and along with some exterior things. So we're going to really talk about five things today, which are very specifically your data, your ideal customer profile, execution, AI, that's the buzzword for 2018, right? It's all about AI, right? Two years ago, it was the word algorithm. Now it's turned into an AI algorithm. And then the last thing we're going to talk about is just, I want to get these guys' opinions on what tools they're liking, what are the things that they're seeing, and also what books they're reading.

I always think it's interesting to hear what books people are reading these days. So we'll sort of make it personal. John, you have what it's now? I don't read, so. That's going to say, yeah. It's above your daughter's age level, right? Charlotte's Web, right? So a topic on data, you know, I think the, where do you even start, right? Like that's kind of the big piece, right? Which is, how do you start? Where do you start? And John, I don't know if you sort of have some thoughts about what do you do with this data? Yeah, so from a sales leader's perspective, I think the first thing you want to do is analyze your data. There are specifically for Salesforce, there are applications that are free that you can go in and run some analysis and see what the health of your database is.

It's one of them I like to use. It wasn't built for this purpose, but I use it for it. It's called Field Trip. Michael Farrington, great sales force guy who built an app, one of the most installed applications on the App Exchange. Field Trip will basically give you an analysis of what percentage of every field is populated. So before you go out and do scoring and modeling on why account, what kind of accounts and what kind of people, what kind of people are you going to do with it? Are you communicating with in your pipeline? It's important to know if you can run those reports, right? And so Field Trip will give you a good idea of how full your information is. And if you don't have, you know, fields like industry, employee size, revenue, geography, if you sell the people you can run those reports.

So you don't have what technologies they're using populated in your database, then it's really hard to grab insights from it. So, you know, I wanted to give you guys a free tool to use for this process. It's called Field Trip. Um, once you understand that you're missing a lot of data, then you got to fill it in. So, um, can I ask a question on that one? Um, curiosity, cause I agree. Start with like, what do you have? But what if it's all shit? Um, because my experience is most companies get lists from whatever it is and they just keep dumping it in, dumping it in, dumping it in. And now all of a sudden you have a bunch of crap in there. So what's the next step of cleaning this shit out to figure out how we can profile?

That's a good point. I think, you know, the next step in analyzing after you know your population rate is what your validation rate is, but let's break it off even a little bit further. You don't have to analyze your whole database at the beginning, right? What you want to do is analyze your customers and your lost opportunities, right? Because in those cases, most people will have, you know, anywhere from a hundred to a hundred thousand client accounts, right? And usually they do a decent job of like filling that information in. Um, but basically you look at the account object, you seclude it, you identify like what you fill the information in first. And then because you, you just anticipate really that it's all going to be incorrect.

Like a business, if it's been in your database for 10 years, um, you know, it's the revenue figures change every year. Right. So you basically to, to lower the cost of your initial analysis, you just look at closed one accounts. Um, and then I would say past, uh, lost opportunities, trend those over about a year. Uh, and then you have, you know, a block of manageable information and you figure out like why or what types of accounts are closing the, the accounts that have the highest ACV, the lowest amount of activity, the least amount of support cases. Yeah. And like find groups of, of customers that make, make a profile based on, you know, how easy they are, they are to sell, how big the deals are, how often they purchase and how little amount of support that they cause.

Yeah. Cause I mean, I think that's cause like Doug and I actually, we're on a panel talking about artificial intelligence and we're going to go there next, but you know, and the buzzword that it is, but almost none of it matters. None of that artificial intelligence matters if you have bad data. Right. And so, and that ideal customer profile with account based marketing and all that other stuff, um, you can't really do account based marketing. And so until you start to hone in on what that account, what that ideal customer profile is and without the right data. So it kind of all, it all starts with data is I guess the, the bigger point here of if you have crap in there, none of this AI, none of this account based, none of this anything, it's all going to be a waste of money in my opinion.

So early forget about my opinion and my experience. So I want to jump in a little bit. Um, what do you guys think that, you know, sales ops for the last few years has really sort of taken on this life of its own? Um, and the thing that I've seen is that sales ops is, I think, and, and, you know, if there are people in the room who want to, you know, throw tomatoes at me, feel free. There's some bananas over there, I think. Um, but you know, that's good for sort of gathering the data, but what we really need now is like an analyst. Like you all look like a professional sales analyst is now going to be the next piece of the sales ops team, in my opinion, because I'm good at crunching data. Like I can, I love Excel, right?

Like I'm all about the pivot table. I love it. But then sometimes I'm so exhausted by the time that's done, I can't quickly analyze that stuff, right? Yeah. It's the brain drain. So are you seeing that? Are you experiencing it? What do you see? I think some of the best companies that I work with, um, they have a data steward, right? The person who not, they're not necessarily running the tools, but they analyze the information. They, they manage the team that, that gives insights to the sales and marketing leaders. And, you know, if you want to align sales and marketing, you're going to have to bring a little bit more than an opinion, right? Like bring me a graph that tells me why you think this segment is something that we should spend development dollars, sales dollars, and marketing dollars and, you know, try to get those results.

Yeah, I hear, you know, one of my new favorite buzzwords coming out of, out of lots of people's mouth is the word cohort. Like three years ago, nobody talked about a hiring, you know, this hiring cohort. This is our group. This is our group. And, and I think people got excited about that word. And the thought you meant, you understood what you were talking about. And then I would talk to people and they're like, okay, so don't use a word that you don't, you know, you can't really back it up. Yeah. Just, can I chime in on one thing? I actually think my opinion of where things are going right now is with data. And because I think the sales, the sales marketing disconnect is still alive and well.

And I think data is a huge part of that. And I actually think, you know how we have kind of the, the team of SDR or BDR to two or three AEs or whatever it is. I think a nice, what I would love to see is almost this pod approach where you hire a low level marketing. almost admin that sits with that team. And so they're the ones, cause the sales reps suck at collecting data. They suck at tracking everything. And so I could envision hiring some right out of school kid who's got data oriented in marketing, sitting with the sales team in this pod and, and running the reports and seeing what the data, the gaps are in the data. And then feeding that back to the bigger marketing team to say, Hey, this is what, so going back to account based marketing, Hey, this is what my team needs.

Forget about all the teams out there. This is what my team needs based on our data and our subset and our target audience. And then that provides a path also from a growth standpoint to have that marketing person, maybe go into sales if they want to, and be the data driven analyst or go further into marketing and kind of move upstream. So I'm hoping what you brought up there is actually going to happen, but I actually think it doesn't necessarily have to be an analyst. I think it just has to be a little bit more of a data driven marketing, uh, lower level person that can add a shitload of value at that level and, and be, and, and have a career path that doesn't just put them in. Okay. Now you have to two years, two years, two years, two years, two years.

So what do you, um, you know, the interesting thing is, you know, in some of these instances, it's really easy when it's, you know, you got a bigger company, you have the resources, right? You're, you know, you guys are getting bigger, right? But you're, I still bet your resource constrained, right? How do you make that approach when you're, you feel like you've got a good amount of data and now you really do want to start analyzing it? Like where would you even start? Would you hire a data analyst? Would you hire a consultant to come in and help you do it? And I don't mean McKenzie or Gartner and those kinds of consultants, but just someone who's a smart person. Well, I think that I'm lucky cause I work at a company full of people that work on data all the time.

And so for me personally, what I would do is I'd get VP of sales, VP of marketing in a room with the Salesforce admin. Salesforce admin, Salesforce admin runs the reports. And then it's pretty easy to, you know, you trend data based on the first phase, which we're going to get into the three phase of ideal customer profile. But the first phase is like, what industry are my top customers from? What, what is their revenue? Where are they located? And you know, you build out little heat maps of reports that say, you know, your customers that have the highest value have these top three attributes. Your, your customers that are submitting the least amount of support case have these three attributes.

And then, you know, when you have those four or five reports and you layer them on top of each other, you've got the two or three, you know, segments that really stick out to you. So do you real quick, cause I know we're going to jump into ICP, but so you brought up a really great thing is, you know, these are the customers who are your biggest and they're going to have different deal sizes. These are the ones who have the least, you know, amount of handholding. Um, then these are the people who are, you know, um, you know, the, the medium size, but the high maintenance people, right? Right. High usage. Do you have to go into that knowing that those are the kinds of things that you want to look for?

Or do you have to be smart and like, this is that part where the analysis needs to come in. Like someone's got to be able to step back and look at this data and go, did you realize this? Did you realize this? Or should we be now at the stage where we would know to come in to look for those kinds of things? I was going to say, I think you can solve it with just the people. So instead of, in addition to the VP of sales and the VP of marketing, and you brought it up, have the VP or the head of customer success in the room and have the head of finance in the room. Yeah. Those four, those four people, because then you'll be able to say, cause a sales rep will say, Hey, this client spending the most money with us.

But the finance person says, yeah, but they're the least profitable. And the customer success person says, yeah, they're the biggest pain in the ass. Right. And so that, as it translates to ideal customer profile, I mean, I think, yeah, the reports and everything like that. But I think if you bring those four department heads together, that pretty much gives you the picture. So sales, marketing, customer success, customer service, success, and finance. And finance. Those are the four. Those are the four I would put in the room. The four horsemen? Yes. Of the ICP? Yeah. All right. So let's, let's shift over to ICP and talk about this. And I know, John, in our pre-call, John, you sort of have this, what I think is a great definition of, of how you see the ICP.

Yeah. You just, I mean, I think everybody looks at, and John said this, you know, where everybody looks at the kind of the tier one information, like, okay, they're in these industries, they're in the, you know, they have this many employees and whatever, which is all well and good. And those are all the stuff you have to start with, and those are the tools that you can use, the data.coms, the zoom infos, whatever. But I don't think it gives you the true picture. I look at the tier two information, which takes a little bit more digging, but is actually not that hard to get. And I think you just need to identify these, but some common ones are, like, the existing technologies that the company uses, right?

Like, there are some technologies that are a trigger. Like, for me, Salesforce. Salesforce is my biggest client. I train all their sales reps. If I can tell you're using Salesforce, I got a great story to tell there. And so I use tools like, here's another free one for you. Anybody use Siftery by any chance? Anybody use Siftery? Write this one down, S-I-F-T-E-R-Y. It's a free tool. It's crowdsourced intel on anybody's tech stack. So when you go into Siftery, it's going to ask you, hey, who do you work for? And you'll say whatever company your name is, and then it'll ask you, what kind of technologies do you use? And you'll say, I use Salesforce, I use, you know, whatever, whatever. And then once you check off five or six boxes, it opens up the whole database to every other company out there.

And then what you can do is you say, okay, I'm targeting this account. So, like, as an example, I'm going up to train Tableau tomorrow. They're one of my clients. I can go into Siftery and I can type in Tableau, and it'll tell me everybody who's using Tableau, so all their customers. And there's the other side, so that's product. Then there's this company where I can type in company, and it'll show me their entire tech stack. So there's DevOps stack, there's Sales and BD stack, there's HR stack. And so now I can go in there and say, okay, you know, for me also, like, Salesforce is a perfect one. But then any one of the sales efficiency tools, specifically like Sales Loft, right? When I work with a company called Sales Loft, like, a lot of these companies are using these sales efficiency tools as sales automation tools, and they're just blasting out.

Where, when my training comes in, I show them how to do the real customization at scale, so I can now have a great story to tell against these. And that really hones in on that profile. Like, existing technologies, who's the competition in there, right? Sometimes you go up and you find a competition that you're like, yeah, I got a great story to tell against them. Other times you're like, oh, shit, they're using them. It's kind of not worth me. You know what I mean? It's like, it's not even worth trying at this point. So, you know, I think it's worth a brainstorm exercise to go through and say, what are all those indicators? Who are their customers? There's another one. So, you know, like, when you're going after not just who's your ideal customer, but who's your customer's ideal customer profile?

Because if you can have them tell a better story to them, all of a sudden you can have a significant impact on their, you know, on their results. So that type of stuff is the stuff I hunt for. And that really helps me hone in so I can tier out my accounts. And I got my tier ones, tier twos, and tier threes. Tier ones, those are the ones you follow on all the social listening tools and take very thoughtful, detailed contact strategies around. And that's kind of your quality approach. Tier twos, that's a little bit more your quantity approach where you're like, all right, you know, I want to run a list of every VP of sales in the SaaS industry that use Salesforce under 25 million. And I can come up with one contact strategy that has five or six value propositions and send that out to 50 or 60 of them, see what happens.

And my tier threes, you know, I used to throw those away, but now I love them for one very specific reason. And it's practice. Anytime you're trying something new, you run a list of your tier threes, you throw up all over yourself. Who cares, doesn't matter, right? So you just like pricing. By the way, if you ever want to get your reps comfortable with not discounting, run a list of your tier threes. And when the pricing conversation comes up, just be like straight up, here's our price. It's 30 grand. We don't discount. And see, and let them know it's okay. Like if the client hangs up on you, who gives a shit? Because you're probably a bad customer anyway. So that type of exercise to go through is an important one for the business.

And then I'll add one more caveat to this, which is I also think it's very important to go through. If I was an AE working with a couple of BDRs or SDRs or whatever, I would actually do that for my territory as well. Because if you're selling into San Francisco and your main territory is tech companies and SaaS, and somebody else in your same company is Texas oil and gas, different ideal customer profiles, different use cases, different technologies. So I recommend every rep actually go through the process of their own territory looking at that. And the way you can do that is, to your point, looking at existing customers. And the beauty of this is the cycle around this, by the way, is once you identify that ideal customer profile and then you find customers that you do business with that have case studies around that, then you take those case studies and then you tell everybody that fits that ideal customer profile, the results we're driving.

Hey, you know, you fit a very similar profile to some companies that we're doing some incredible work with. The results we're driving are X. I don't know if we can do it for you, but you fit the profile. Let's have that conversation. So it feeds the loop of prospecting and everything else. Anything else you'd add to the ideal customer profile? Yeah, I think, you know, the tier one is easy stuff. Tier two is proprietary to your business. What are those criteria? I don't know. It could be technology. It could be whatever. But the more that you layer these things on top of each other, for me as a sales rep, I don't want to ever look at a list that's like more than 50 to 100 people or companies at a time.

I mean, I want my goal is to zero in on the best companies and people to spend my time because once you have the stories, you have those case studies, the conversation, the breadth of it becomes so much deeper, right? You have something to talk about with those people. And if you have new employees that, you know, maybe it's going to take them a year to really understand what the product and service does. But you have this niche that you've developed for them. You explain it. You have this storyboard, you know, content pieces, offers for those types of people. I just think it becomes easier. So for me, micro ABM approach is it's the best if there can be science behind it that says this is why you should be speaking in these companies.

So, you know, this is all great advice in this bubble, right? You got a nice view, nice gentleman in the pool. You haven't noticed. It was very funny. But, you know, doing this does take time, right? Yeah. At the company level and even at the rep level. What's your experience or advice to everybody about you do need to cut some time out. If you're spending this kind of time, something's not right. That's too much time. But if you're only spending this much time, well, you've got to invest a little bit more, right? Yeah. Because time is our most precious commodity, right? Sure. It's the one thing we lose all the time. Yeah. I mean, I think the way I look at it, and I'm going to butcher this quote, but I think it was like Abraham Lincoln or somebody who said, you know, if I had four hours to cut down a tree, I'd spend three hours sharpening my axe, right?

Whatever that is, right? But the point there is, is the more time you spend up front cleaning this stuff out, the far more effective you can be with your marketing and sales efforts. And so, but also it shouldn't be an event. I think that a lot of people make the mistake of, okay, let's go through this process and do this thing. And exercise. And then not look at it again. Right. It's kind of like putting a business plan together. It's like, yeah, yeah, I went through all this work and putting a business plan together. And it goes up on the shelf and nobody ever looks at it again. It's this iteration process of constant and figuring out a way to constantly cleanse. I'll give you an example. You know, I, I tear out my accounts.

I got my top 25. Okay. And those are the ones I follow. And here's some more tools. If nobody knows these, you know, Owler, you guys all use Owler. If you're not using Owler, please use Owler. It's a, it's like, it's like Google alerts on steroids. You take your top 25 accounts, you put them on Owler. They give you an alert once a week or once a day that says, hey, here's all the triggers that are going on in there. So I put them on Owler, Sales Navigator, all these different listening tools. And I use Evernote, right? And so Evernote, you can have these workbooks and then folders within each one of them. So I have a workbook for my clients and a workbook for my prospects and a folder for each one of my top accounts and a folder for each one of my top prospects.

Those are the ones I listen to. Once a quarter, I go through those folders in Evernote and I say, are these still my top prospects? Are these still my top clients? And I clean those folders up and then I go into my data feeds and I flush all of them out and I resubmit. I'm like, okay, now these are the new ones I'm following and these. So you don't have that hygiene. Eventually it becomes a mess. Perfect example that I'm sure most of you are familiar with, which is Google alerts. Anybody ever set up Google alerts? All right. Google alerts is great, right? Your friends are like, oh, this is fantastic. Then all of a sudden your inbox starts to get annihilated with Google alerts. And then you create that rule of like, hey, I'm going to just create a folder over here and all of my Google alerts go in there.

And then you have to look at that folder again, right? Because like, there's a bunch of shit in there. So if you're not cleaning that up, you subconsciously or consciously start to disregard the information that's in there. So I think my biggest advice is create a process where you're on a consistent basis cleansing and dumping and refreshing and that type of thing. And that way it doesn't have to be that much of a time investment. Carve off, you know, an hour a week or something. But what if we're not as OCD as you where we're, you know, like, that's a great process. Go find somebody who is. Right, exactly. Go find somebody who is. That's an amazing process. I've been blessed and cursed with OCD.

Yeah. But I'll tell you right now, it makes everything so much easier for me. I think, you know, I would even add that it's, you know, I say this all the time, nothing that we really ever do in life is really hard. The hardest part is the discipline to be consistent. Yeah. And we all lack discipline. It's like working out. Whatever that weakness is, we just, it's discipline. Like I suck, that's why I suck at working out. I need an event to work out, right? Right. Like if I'm going on vacation, like a couple months before going on vacation, I'm at the gym, I'm like, blah, right? I'm hitting it from eating good and all that other stuff. And then after a vacation, I'm like, oh, pizza, beer, fuck.

I mean, oh, shit, I don't get it. But if you just do it, you know that if you just wake up every morning and do a few sit-ups, a few push-ups, a little bit of cardio, half hour, something like that, you maintain and you're legit, right? That's why I don't work out because I suck at it. But yeah, the consistency is huge. I would agree. And the routine is huge. Yeah. What do you guys use as, you know, you guys are truly, you know, data-driven. That's one of my other favorite new buzzwords. We're a data-driven company, you know, as long as the exercise is this month, right? Like the next month, we don't focus on it. How do you see it from truly being a data-driven company? I think that you just, you end up creating a mentality in your sales and marketing because everybody's always got a great idea.

Like, yeah, I think we should do this event, you know, in San Francisco and all these types of companies are going to be there. And the mentality is prove it. Like, come to me and prove to me why you think we should go there. And you don't just let them blindly prove it. You give them the four criteria. You're like, okay, you go into the, you know, we provide this information. It explains why these are the best types of companies and people. Now, where are they? Where, you know, can you get them all in a room? What do you expect out of the event? Because if you break it down to the science that we're talking about here, people should be able to come in and prove their decisions before they do it.

You know, they're not always going to, it's not always going to happen. But they should have data behind every single request that comes in. You know, want to spend money? Prove it. Now, this is one word I'll tell everybody to start using is the word hypothesis. It's all a hypothesis, right? Every, our first sales process, it's a hypothesis, right? How we're doing our data analysis, it's a hypothesis. And our goal is to either prove that information right or our hypothesis either right or wrong. And if it's wrong, that is equally, if not more valuable than if you got it right. And I think particularly in a sales organization where it's all about winning and ranking and your ego that gets in the way.

That's overlooked. So that's one word I'd like people to start using more. I agree. Is their hypothesis. And just to layer one more thing on top of what you talked about is there's, there's structure. I talk a lot about structure versus scripts. I think as leadership within organizations, we need to provide the structure of how you should look at this. So how you could present your hypothesis and then let them fill in the blanks of the details. But you don't want to give them the script that says this is exactly what I'm looking for. Right. Because then you get the information. It's like asking leading questions. You get the answers you're expecting. Right. I don't want the answers I'm expecting.

I'd rather have the answers I'm not expecting. And so I think we need to do a better job as leadership within organizations of providing structure to these, you know, to the younger generations, to the new kids on, you know, to help teach them how to think a little bit, but then let them think. Yeah. So. Cool. So we talked about data and we talked about ideal cost customer profile. Now we're going to obviously move into execution. Right. We've done our homework. Now we need to execute on it. You know, where do you start as you start to connect with people upon this data. Right. With the, is it an account based strategy? How do you measure that in your current system? Are you going to switch to account based?

Because again, that's the new rage. AI and account based. That's what's going to solve our problems. Right. Yeah. Well, I think at that point you, when you have your ideal customer profile, you know the story. Right. So you can, it really is at that point easier to have marketing and sales align around a set of accounts. Right. You have marketing set up an event. You have a webinar. You have, you know, the outreach or sales loft campaigns dialed in. Right. You have the retarget, account based retargeting like a terminus. Right. You've got, um, your marketing automation set up so that when you drive those people back through your inbound channels, through your outbound efforts, they get synced up to your target accounts and those people that are notified.

Um, so once you have the, the, the, the profile, then you get guys like you guys help me divide, decide like the story. Yeah. What am I going to say to these people? How am I going to get them to respond? What events am I going to run? Um, and you get the technology behind it. You get the technology behind it. But now you've got two departments zeroing in. Um, you're not spending too much money because you're focusing on a small group of people and companies. And, um, it, it, it just, again, makes the sales reps job easier. You're not writing the script for them, but hey, did you, did you get that email I sent about the event down the street for me next week? If you can't make it, we're running a webinar, you know, and you're, we're going to go over the 10 reasons that, you know, this or that.

And so you, you give that rep a story so that they can go and, and have an effective conversation without really knowing too much about anything. Yeah. That comes back to you, John, and sort of humanizing all of this in the execution method, right? Yeah. I mean, I think that, you know, people talk about personalization at scale. I'm going to, I'm going to ask people to take that damn phrase out of the equation because it's really hard to do personalization at scale. Yeah. You can do personalization at scale, if you want to call it that, where it's like, okay, you fit a persona. So I'm going to go after you with, you know, some priorities. But personalization at scale, that's almost an oxymoron, right?

I mean, because if you really are genuinely trying to be personal, it's not scalable. So, so, but you can segment it out where you have a certain amount that you can be personalized to, and that can scale because it's only a certain amount. And then you can have everybody do that. And then your, your tier two is like I was talking about, but you do also need to know where these people live and breathe and, and where they are. And first of all, whether account based marketing is even valid for you. Cause if you're selling to the SMB market and you're selling to something that has like a $5,000 ACV and a, you know, a less than a 30 day sales cycle, nah, count based marketing ain't for you. All right.

Go marketing. Okay. And be persona based stuff. But when you really start to be personalized, I think it, it, it comes down to really figuring out where these people are. And, you know, cause I get asked all the time, John, is it emails? Is it phone? Is it social? Is it, is it LinkedIn? And it's, it's not any one of those things. It's all of them. And it, and it really is, is also dependent on where they are. So for instance, should I send them an email? I don't know. Do they have 500 plus connections on LinkedIn and are really active and look like they're pretty, you know, got a good presence there. Then sure. Send them an email, but if they got 50 connections, a weak ass profile and no activity, probably not, you know, um, like, you know, I kind of joke on this one.

I'm a, I'm a 41 year old man on Snapchat. Like I have no idea what the hell I'm doing on Snapchat, but the reason I'm on Snapchat is because Gary Vaynerchuk, a couple of years back, he said, Hey Snapchat. And I started paying attention to it. I was like, really? I thought that was just for sending inappropriate pictures to people and not getting in trouble for it. Like, um, like I swear if I had Snapchat in high school, I'd be arrested. But, um, but it's so much shit I would have done. But, but, um, but the point is like, I looked at it later, but I looked at it and I said, and I, so I started researching it and I said, all right, well the number one social channel, and this was about a year and a half ago before Instagram stories started really taking off about a year and a half ago.

Um, snap, I looked at the number one social media channel for kids under the age of 26 years old was Snapchat. And it, by the way, it wasn't even a close second. It was Snapchat, Instagram, everybody else. A huge demographic for me and what I train are kids between the ages of 22 and 26 years old. So if my number one audience is on the number one social media channel Snapchat, then where do I need to be? So I think it's about, you know, to your point, is it an event? Do they even go to events? Yeah. Is it LinkedIn? Do they, do, are they here at Dreamforce? You know what I mean? I think that if you don't understand your ideal customer profile, you can't understand where they live. And if you don't understand where they live, then you can't connect and communicate with them appropriately.

So that's where I think it's an important structure to flow, go through as far as identifying your data, cleaning your data, honing in on that ideal customer profile, tearing them out, figuring out where they live, and then developing your story around that. So one of the things in our pre-call session, you know, you talked about reverse engineering the case study. Absolutely. I'd love you to share that with the team. Yeah, I mean, well, I mean, for those of us that are fortunate enough to have marketing departments that actually do legit case studies, I'll say that. That's another conversation. But I will say, if you are going, I think case studies, if there's any investment that I would make in marketing, it would be case studies.

Case studies, case studies, case studies, case studies. I don't really care about anything else. Because what we say about us, nobody gives a shit. Leading provider of, I got a challenge for everybody here, go on a hundred websites and find me one company that's not a leading provider of something, right? And so, and you know what Gartner says about us being the fourth quadrant, yay. But what our clients say about us is hands down the best that we got. And not just our clients, but the results we drive for our clients. And so I think if you have a marketing department focused on case studies and the results you drive, and as sales professionals, by the way, we should be setting that up through the process of qualifying with our clients and closing them.

So you ask qualifying questions on metrics, you then use those metrics to then help negotiate and close those deals. And then if you're going to give away a discount, for instance, you get in return a case study that you set your marketing department up with those baseline metrics so they can come back in three months later, create that case study, then you can create that message to go find everybody else that speaks to that. So I think that's where if, now that's the best case scenario. So if we are fortunate enough to look at, to have case studies that have results in them, then we bring in the customer success, finance, sales, you know, sales VP and marketing VP and say, why is that a really good customer?

And then you go, like I said, find a profile, everybody that fits that profile, and then it becomes an easy story because now you're not pitching anything. Now you're saying, hey, again, I don't know whether we can support you, but you fit a very similar profile to some other clients that we're crushing it for. And as a matter of fact, we showed this company how to drive these type of results. And the difference between sales and marketing language, by the way, marketing language is typically, on average, our clients see a 32% increase or up to a whatever. Uh-uh. I want sales ready language that says, no, no, no. We showed this client in your industry how to do this. And I have actually a case study I'd love to share with you.

Give me a call back here. If they don't call you back, well, hey, by the way, here's that case study I was talking about. Why don't you take a look at it? Right? And it gives you another reason to reach out to them, by the way. And so I think that you can reverse engineer it if you have the right data in place to be able to show that. If you don't, then I think you do everything, especially as a new company, to hone in on that and then over-service that account. And if you're going to give away discounts or whatever it is, then you're going to get that case study, you know, you'll get that case study that you can then use to go self-promote. Yeah. I think, especially in our industry, selling SaaS software, it's so solution-based that having case studies is the best outreach strategy.

What are the criteria? You mentioned, like, not everybody does a case study right. Yeah. So what would you focus on in a case study? Results. I see too many case studies that are fluffy, like, oh, we improved, oh, we really liked the software. We significantly improved our retention rates. Significantly, again, that's marketing language. I'm going to go back to it again. What I would recommend, tactical things here, by the way, I would recommend everybody put into their sales qualification process some metric-driven questions that are obvious questions that seem like you're doing it. So for me, what's your average, what's your conversion ratios at this stage of the sales process? What's your sales cycle length?

What's your average deal size? So those are obvious things for me to ask a VP of sales when I'm trying to sell them sales training, okay? Now what happens is when it comes time to negotiate and it comes up with price, so for me, easy negotiation for me is, say I'm going to charge them 20 grand for training, whatever, right? And they tell me earlier on that their sales, that their average, their ACV is 50 grand, right? And then it comes to the negotiation and they say, all right, John, how much is this going to cost? And I say, $20,000. And they're like, holy shit, that's, wow, for training, that's ridiculous, wow, I was not expecting that. And it's like, yeah, no, I understand. Pricing is always an issue.

You know, let me ask you, let me ask, you had said earlier that your average contract was about 50,000, right? Cool. How many people are you going to put in this training? Like 20 or 30? Let's use 20. All right, because I'm not a math major here. And so I'm going to set a very low bar here that lets everybody know, I'm going to give you one technique that's going to drive one extra piece of business into the pipeline that will close by the end of the year for each rep, right? Low bar. Cool. So I'm not a math major here, but you said you have 50,000 times 20, some million dollars in revenue, give or take. Sign the contract. But then, you know, and everybody has to feel like they get something out of it.

So then it's like, okay, fine. Well, if I'm going to give you a little bit of a discount to get over the hurdle here, then great. Why don't we set the stage for a case study? Because nothing would make me happier than to come back in here three months later and to see your ACV go from 50 to 70, for your conversion ratio go from 2% to 5%, because then I can tell that story. So I would really recommend you look at your sales process and say, where can we put some quantifiable things in there that you can ask that you can then use to negotiate with, but then use as a baseline for a case study that you can develop metrics around. Because too many case studies are fluff. I want to throw one thing in there, and it's by default in every contract I send, is a case study.

It needs to be in there, because they will ask for it to be taken out, and you can then leverage the discount versus the case study. Sure. And so many times, people won't even read it. They don't even know that that's in there. It doesn't mean I'm going to show up and make them do it, but it does allow that leverage, and it's not something you have to add back in to the language. When a rep ever has to go add language back in, it's terrible, right? Then you've got legal go and all that stuff, so make it by default, please. I also think you need to make it a formal process, though, because it's usually an afterthought. After sales closes the deal, it's like, yeah, I'm out of here, right? And now marketing's like, eh, and it's almost damn near impossible to get them.

So I think it should be part of the transition process to customer success, where you bring marketing in at a certain point. There's an introduction point there. Then we lay the foundation again, and it's in the customer's best interest to say, like, look, if we can't move the dial here in three to six months, then something's wrong here, and we need to adjust. So we want to be able to measure those metrics. What's up? Just to add on this here, you might get there, but when you found out your ICP figured out, they're your ICP because they were in it, right? Yeah. And so you're talking about case studies to acquire. Yep. This is just as important to make sure your customers are successful. Absolutely.

Yeah. There's no question about that. What matters, feed it back to them, so that when you're in that normal cycle, that's the evidence to demonstrate that. Absolutely. It's huge. And to add on to that, you know, we talk about objection handling, right? Objection handling, I'm going to go back to case studies. Case studies are a great way to handle objections. Everybody know that, you know, objection handling techniques, right? There's the feel-felt-found approach. Totally understand how you feel about that. Other people felt the same way what they found was. My only recommendation, by the way, is you ever use that. Don't use the words feel-felt-found. When I was like 23 years old, I learned that.

I busted out on a VP. I was like, I totally understand how you feel about it. Everybody else felt it. As soon as the word felt came out of my mouth, he was like, look, kid, don't try the feel-felt-found approach, all right? It's like, but I just learned it. But anyways, but case studies are feel-felt-found. Look, I understand you're not willing to renew. We had another customer that was at the exact same solution, and they made these tweaks to the process, whatever it is, and they found this, and that's why they actually renew. So instead of beating me up and waiting for day 364, let's preempt that with some conversations. And you're spot on. It's not just new customers. It's existing and renewals and everybody else.

How do you figure out, we sell sales as well. Yep. How do you figure out, you know, after three months, 12 months, what the ROI actually was? Like, are you looking at their sales force environment? Are you having to put in stuff there? We did it with LogMeIn. Yep. And it was great because we're so data-driven. Sure. But we're going to do it with other customers and, like, let's make a case of what we don't really know. Well, I think, real quick on this, and then I think it's, what are you trying to impact? You know what I mean? Like, at the end of the day, if the VP of sales, for me, when I do training, I ask the VP of sales all the time, what's the result you're looking for out of this training?

Is this just, like, a good feeling thing that you want to get your team motivated? Or is there some specific metric you're looking to move the dial on? And hone in on that. Because you're not going to be able to do analysis on 50 different things. It's like, okay, for me it's average contract value. Let's focus on that so we can go after bigger accounts. Or it's conversion ratios at the front end of the sales process. So, because we're only getting a 1%, we're looking for a 5%. So, okay, let's hone in on that. And that helps you tell your story. I wrote a post a while ago that, you know, said sell to the 20%, which means that I firmly believe that most people, think about any product or service any of you use.

I almost guarantee you only use about 20% of the functionality, whatever that product or service is, right? So, think about it. Your iPhone. This thing has more power in it than we used to send somebody to the moon. But yet, most people check their emails, you know, Facebook, Snapchat, whatever. Or Excel. You know what an insanely powerful tool Excel is? Pivot tables, all this great. You know what 99% of the world does with Excel? Add some. Right? I was sitting at a Starbucks with my Buzz on the other day. And this woman, I'm not even joking here. She's on an Excel sheet and she had a calculator next to her. And I'm doing my thing and I'm looking over at her. I'm like, what is she? And she's taking numbers and adding them and putting them into this.

And I'm like, whew. I'm like, ah, I'm sorry. I'm like, I don't need to be, could you mind? I'm about to triple your productivity right here. Watch. She's like, oh my God. So, because most people only use 10 to 20% of what they buy, that's how I believe people buy. And so what I do is I try to hunt for what that 10 to 20% is of what's going to get them to buy. They don't care about the whole presentation. They don't care about the whole slide deck. They care about the stuff that's going to align with their priorities and that's going to move the dial for them. So I think it's incumbent upon us early in the sales process, which just helps with selling and closing, to help figure out what that is and then identify that metric that we can measure so three months later we can come in and see what the impact was.

Last question. Are you actually setting up a report under the sales course? Whatever it takes. But I think that I do this a lot too, is what's the baseline? Tell me, before I even show up, tell me where we're starting. That's a good point. Again, because I do the same thing, is what's your average deal size? What's your sales cycle? And my question that I ask everybody in every business, and anyone can do this, is to say, at the end of sales training you expect the reps to be better at blank, blank, and blank. And I have them fill in those blanks. And then I go, well, what do you mean when you said this, this, and this? Because whatever they tell me the first time, they don't know. And you can do the same thing with what your service is.

If you were going to use our service, what are the three things you would want it to do? We're going to be better at blank, blank, and blank. Oh, well, when you say more efficient, well, what do you mean? Because everybody wants to be more efficient, but that's not a value differentiator, right? So that's my advice on that one. I mean, you guys hit right on the nail. You just have to ask the question. And a lot of reps will race through. If you don't have, you know, that information clearly defined, what questions should be asked. But it's an easy question. It's, you know, what do you expect to get out of this? And then you continue pushing them to elaborate, elaborate. And you'll find two, three things in every one.

You have them fill it into Salesforce so that, you know, once you close the deal, you say, here are the three things you wanted us to do. And hopefully you can articulate how that, you know, in an ROI sense translates into percentages or revenue. But you have to ask. I have a rule called the three wise men. Just ask why three times. Why do you want that? Why is that important? Why does that matter? Just keep asking. And you'll get there. If they don't have the answers, I think it's a fantastic consulting/coaching moment that you can use with the client. They're going to trust you. Because if you say, well, if they have vague answers to your questions, well, let me give you an example of how most of our customers measure the ROI of our programs.

And here's how to set up your systems to be able to do that. And now all of a sudden you flip the script, right? Now you're giving them massive amounts of value to help them do better at their whatever they're trying to accomplish. You know what I mean? And helping them understand how your customers really use your product. I know we need to sort of jump around to the next couple things. But do you want to take a minute or two about training and coaching? And I think we have two different perspectives. You're the one sort of running the team, building the team, and how you see training and coaching. John and I are actually trainers and coaches. So that's what we do. So I'd love to hear, like, maybe just in your org, how do you guys handle training?

And how do you differentiate training from coaching? And do you talk about it that way? You know, we don't really differentiate training and coaching. I say we do training all the time. We built -- one of the biggest things for us was building an educational portal for internal customers or internal employees and then customers on the other side. And so we've been -- you know, we've got -- for a new employee, they start -- they've got, you know, a 10-step process. And they go to step one, there's grammar skills. And they're -- literally, like, you teach them how to write an email better. And where are the case studies? For me, training somebody new, just brand new at my organization, the first thing I have to train them on is my system.

Like, if you can't use the 35 different technologies that I've plugged in, like, I'm just going to get frustrated with you. I can't track you. You're not getting enabled. So, I mean, that for me is the biggest thing from the start is getting them trained on my technology. You know, are you using Google calendars for everything that, you know, in your life? Here's how you see everybody else in the organization's calendar. And then we do have, you know, sent the team to Tony Robbins one time. Like, events where you go and you do coaching. You try to, you know, enable them just on a personal level. And then, you know, I don't think we've ever worked with either of you. But, you know, we bring people into the office, you know, rally them up, document everything, put it in a format that they can easily access.

The only thing I'll add is just don't make it an event, right? It's like, it pains me to know that, you know, when I come in to do a one-day on-site training where the managers are in the back of the room, they're checking their iPhones, they're not paying attention. And we're looked at, and you back me up on this, we're looked at almost like a pill to kind of say, as a sales leader says, "Oh, I've invested in you, now go." That's the exact wrong way to look at training. It needs to be part of a consistent, continuous reinforcement program, coaching. And the front-line managers are the key to training and coaching in every way, shape, and form. If the front-line managers aren't bought into it, if leadership isn't bought into it, it's a waste of money.

I say that a lot. It's like, you know, look, I'm the trainer. I will come in and train after I leave, and it's sticky, our stuff works. I know his works. But if the managers aren't coaching on it, that's the difference, right? We train, that's coaching. And that's where the line is. And so I make it part of my discussions with them. So when I'm done, who's going to own this? Right? It's a simple question. And they're like, "Oh, I don't know." And please lead by example, too. Right. Managers, if you're managing an SDR team and your manager isn't making cold calls, if I was an executive, I would make that part. I would actually, if as a VP even layers down, I would get on the calls every once in a while just to see what the ground floor is doing.

Because if you're not leading by example, nobody's going to follow. There's a guy on LinkedIn right now who's the CEO of a company, and he's like doing 30 days as an SDR. Love it. And he's chronicling every single thing and posting on it. I bet you the retention rate of his SDRs is going to be bananas. Yeah. Bananas. Yep. And he's going to be able to talk to them in a way that no other executive will ever talk to them. So it's really, if you can find me and connect with us, and it's on there. I can't remember the guy's name. Adam Stilfield. What's that? Adam Stilfield. Yeah. Adam Stilfield. Adam Stilfield. Oh, that's who it was. Yeah, yeah. So anyway. All right. We've got two more quick questions.

So we're going to have to go quick. So, John, you're going to have to, you know. That's easy for me. Yeah. Really? Talk fast-wise. That part. Just not as long. AI. What's happening in AI? Fuck that. What do you guys think? Actually, I don't think we should even dive into that. I think that's such a gross topic. I mean, we should, but it just... We'll just post our talk. Yeah, just post our talk. Right. I don't know. You want to chime in? I just think on the topic of ideal customer profile, if you're a company that can invest in it and, you know, it's not going to harm you in your budget, it's nice to be able to take a human element and analyze a data set and compare it against a tool like, you know, what, Mintego or Node.io is a new one where I think my best customers are these and this thinks they're these.

And usually those artificial systems will give some sort of insight. They're like, hey, we look at 10,000 different data points and then they like contextualize them. And if you get both opinions and you give, you enable your reps to see that, you know, you're on Owler, you're reading about your accounts, you're over here and your artificial intelligence is telling you why, you know, or maybe they're finding compelling events that you didn't think about, then I think it's a good combination. But you should never just have the modeling done with the AI tool and not do your own. That's my main opinion. It's like your opinion. Watch Fox News and CNN and somewhere in the middle, you know. Exactly.

Right? So I will say, I will make one comment. I think AI is going to make good reps great, great reps exceptional and average reps obsolete. So I think the automation of all this stuff out there, all your reps who are just going like, I'm going to pick on sales loft here. You know, the sales loft when used right is a fantastic tool. But when sales reps just crank out template cadence emails, there's no difference between that and Marketo, Eloqua, pick one of those. And those reps who are doing that are going to get replaced by AI. And it's actually not even AI, marketing automation. Yeah, exactly. It's like money. It's just going to magnify who you are. Exactly. Yeah. An asshole, you get a lot of money.

Yeah, exactly. You're an asshole. Right? Exactly. That's where I see AI is. I'm impressed. Max said that out loud. I had a shot there. I love it. All right. Just give everybody one book you're reading, you know, another tool. I've mentioned a ton of tools. Yeah. But what's a book you guys like to read these days? I will say, I joke, I don't read it. I read a few. Influence by Robert Cialdini. Read that one. It's a book on, it's not a book on sales. It's a book on psychology and why we do the things the way we do them. And everything's directly related to sales. Rule of reciprocity, all these different things. So Cialdini, C-I-A-L-D-I-N-I, go into Amazon, type in influence. There's a red cover version and a white cover version.

I don't, I read the red cover version. I don't know what the difference is. That's the one I would read. And then the tools, I said Sifteri. I like Feedly, F-E-E-D-L-Y if you're not using that. That's a RSS aggregator that I use to, that's my morning paper. And I follow trends like AI and those type of things just to pay attention. Owler's one of my favorites. And those, and I just want to talk about those free ones because the paid ones everybody knows about. So. What do you use? Well, first the book that I always recommend, and it does have kind of a cheesy name, but it's The Ultimate Sales Machine, Chet Holmes. It was written a long time ago, but if you want to build a scalable business, you're not, you know, you're a leader at the company.

Create training guides, a core story, understand what channels and how to go out and put your story in front of people and then track and monitor it. I think that The Ultimate Sales Machine is something you should read like at least once a year. It's honestly, it's amazing. Changed my life. But tools for me, I think, you know, obviously on the data side, Ringlead, I've been with Ringlead forever and everybody has dirty data. So, so Ringlead is a tool everybody should check out. Capture is a tool for, you know, SDRs. I love Sales Loft, the guys over there. Node.io, I heard is a pretty cool new scoring application. And, and one that, because we had a transition recently where, you know, it went from, in the last seven years while we've been at Ringlead, I've seen the company completely change.

Double, triple, double, triple. And we all, we did it internally. We, you know, hired from within. We grew the company. And we have recently had Russ Arts, who founded CA Technologies, join as our chairman and head of technology. And seeing a transition from a true startup mentality to a guy who, you know, feasted on the Fortune 5000 and built a billion dollar company based on processes, from, you know, expectations. The, the, the culture that he's brought to our company. It, it's been amazing. So, you've got to check out the ultimate sales machine and check out some of the tools. That field trip tool, it's free. So, you know, it's a nice analogy. So my, my tools, I'm a big fan of Grammarly because I suck at Grammarly.

It's worth the, it's, it's worth the investment in my opinion. So that's my favorite. The other thing that, the book that I've been reading and talking about the most lately is Chris Voss' book, Never Split the Difference, former head of hostage negotiations at FBI. You know, he can't split the difference. If it's two hostages and they want 50,000, he can't just sort of, I'll trade you one. Kill Warren and I'll give you 25. Yeah, kill one and give me 25. We'll give you 25. Great stuff. He's, he's taken it and applied a whole business application. He's teaching at Harvard now. He's actually touring the country. Yeah. That's my new favorite book. I also read recently, Shoe Dog, which is the Phil Knight story, which I think is not a sales book, but it's just about life and how to, how he built this business literally out of his parents' garage and what he had to go through in the, in the sixties.

And it's just, it's just a fun, good business book, but it almost reads like fiction. Like it's just written really, really well. So it's a fun book. So those are my, those are my things. One more thing on that, on that note, for the people that don't really like to read, there's an app that I found and I didn't find it huge. It's called Blinkist. And Blinkist is like an audio cliff note book app. And you can listen on your phone, listen to 10 minutes snippets of, you know, whatever book you hear is in the news. Like Bill Gates said these 20 books are must read. I use read it for me. Okay. There's one called read it for me where it sends you a, a one pager and then it reads it for you. And then it actually, there's a video on it too.

So you can, that's my way. Cool. Well, thank you both. I know we've gone over a little bit. Um, by the way, big thanks to Max and Sales Hacker for doing this this week. We really appreciate it. Thanks everybody. Thanks for listening to the make it happen podcast. Make sure to subscribe. So you never miss an episode. And if you enjoyed the show, let me know by leaving a review or sharing your favorite episode with your team. If you have any topics or questions you want me to cover in future episodes, hit me up on social at John M Barrows. That's John M as in Michael Barrows. Make it happen.