Encore: How to Prospect Like Salesforce

John Barrows, I've been training Salesforce specifically now for the past six years on prospecting techniques, helping them drive this massive growth engine that they have here. And so what I wanted to do today when given the opportunity to share some of this and step up on stage, instead of talking about theory or hey, where's sales going and all that stuff, I thought I'd do a little bit of training here. So what I'm going to do is give you a very abridged version of what I train Salesforce on every single year and all their reps. And then also bring up Paul Fish who runs enablement over at EMEA to talk a little bit about what Salesforce does, how enablement has evolved for them and where things are going.

And then it'll open up for Q&A. So at any point in this training or any point in this conversation, if you want to live tweet this stuff, I'm actually giving away some consulting. So I'm giving away a couple hours of my time. So if you live tweet this and put my handle on there, hashtag DF16, I'll pick some names out of that and I'll give you some free consulting, whether it's for your business or you personally, I'll happily take, you know, two, three hours, hang out with you a little bit. And then on the way out the door, there's a couple of postcards on the back there with an offer and a giveaway that we're going to be doing at the end here. Okay. So with that, I'm going to start in and talk about where things are going right now.

I mean, so this is, I told you I've been training this. I'm a one man show. I do my own training. These are all my clients. Most of them I've gotten by using the techniques that I'm going to share with you today. And most of them have standardized on them in some way, shape or form. And so you'll notice actually, I got into Salesforce by using a very specific email technique that I'll go through. And so just having some fun out there, training Salesforce. And the reason I love working with Salesforce is because they push the envelope really fast as far as where they're going and how they're getting there. So it's been forcing me to evolve. And because I really do, you know, we've talked about this, you heard this in some other sessions.

I really do think the average sales rep is, is going to die a pretty painful death. I'm sorry, is dying a painful death right now because marketing automation, I know, I don't know the keynote. I don't know the details of it, but I know artificial intelligence is going to be a huge part of what Benioff talks about this week. And, you know, you see that marketing automation and the artificial intelligence coming in and those messages are starting to become very, very specific and consumers are having far more access information than they've ever had before in their lives. And so you have those two things happening and you have sales reps sitting in the middle, just getting lazier and lazier and lazier, using a lot of these sales efficiency tools to effectively become mini marketers.

And I just don't understand why I would pay a sales rep commission to crank out the download. I saw you download the white paper email, you know what I mean? Which is just absolutely horrible. So with that, how do we evolve? And I think the answer is to treat sales way more scientifically than artistically as a sales professional, but not over science it so we become robots. Because sales, you know, art is each one of us. It's our personality, it's the way we do things. Science is the structure, the structure that we put in place so that we can figure out what works and what doesn't work. So I'm going to share with you the structure of what I walk Salesforce through. Okay. One of the things that you'll see, but if you go to jbarrels.com/dreamforce and the resources are on the back again, I'm going to use a spreadsheet.

You can actually do this in Salesforce. You can do this in a couple of different tools, but I wanted to give a spreadsheet for those of us that don't have access to all the wonderful things that Salesforce does. And the first step in any process, and you'll hear this a ton this week about account based marketing and account based selling, is the ideal customer profile. Like really, you'll hear this a ton this week about account based marketing and account based selling is the ideal customer profile. Like really, you'll hear this a ton this week about account based marketing and account based selling. What is the ideal customer profile? Like really figuring out what that ideal customer profile is and not just the basic demographic stuff.

You'll notice the level one stuff up there. That's information that you can get through data.com or whatever else, which is industry, size, number of employees, revenues, those type of things, which are all pretty good stuff. And there's good, average, and poor. But the level two stuff is what I tend to try to focus on, which is the stuff you might have to do a little bit more digging for. So for instance, what current technology technologies is that company using? Who's the competition? Who are their customers? What's their social media presence? All these different things are little things that we can look for to gather so we can better qualify them even before we make that phone call. And so with this, actually as a part of the technology thing, anybody heard of Sifteri by any chance?

Sifteri, S-I-F-T-E-R-Y. It's a free resource. It's a crowdsourced way of finding out whatever any technology any company uses. So I can go on to Sifteri and type in salesforce.com and it'll tell me all the customers that are using salesforce.com. So then I can run a campaign coming up with my message to salesforce.com customers and go out there. Right? Free of charge. It's crowdsourced. When you log in, it's going to ask you what company do you work for and what technologies do you use? And after you check off like four or five of them, it'll give you access to every other company out there. So there's a tip for you to use that one. It's a fantastic resource that I've been using a lot of. Because once you figure out the tier one, tier two, tier three, now this dictates your approach.

Quality, quantity, practice. We should all have a mix of accounts. Most reps, unfortunately, take their territory and they start at A and they go all the way through and treat every prospect the same. Obviously, that's not the case. That shouldn't be the case. Some clients are worth way more time than others. And so I really want to figure out who are my tier ones. Because this is the one, these are the ones, and I'm going to recommend, by the way, everybody have a top 25 list. Top 25 list of your tier one accounts. Because those are the ones I'm going to listen to and I'm going to think through what my contact strategy is for them. And I'm going to be very thoughtful with that. Whereas my tier twos, that's my quantity approach, where I'm going to run a report of every VP of sales in the SaaS industry that uses Salesforce, and come up with a message that speaks to that group, that persona, and send out 40 or 50 emails at the same time.

My tier threes are practice. Those are the ones I'm going to try new things or whatever it is, all right? But those tier ones are what I'm going to focus on here and what I talked to the sales reps at Salesforce about, which is making sure that you know who your target audience is and then focusing your efforts on going after them without blasting out template emails or any of that stuff. Because I think one of the biggest challenges that any sales rep faces in today's world right now is that time management, first of all, but that balance between quantity and quality. You know, how do I hit my numbers? Because our companies are still asking us to make 40, 50 dials a day or whatever it is, even though I tend to disagree with some of that.

But it is what it is. I can't fight that. So I have to do the quantity, but I got to do some quality here because we're being forced to. So this is the first part of any process, okay? After that, oh, and actually here's the spreadsheet I was talking about. I walk them through, okay, identify your top 25. Now pick five. And I got this five accounts once a month. Where I have five accounts once a month, I go deep on them. I go do research. I come up with a very detailed contact strategy. And I have this nice little rolling top five where every month I pick five accounts, spend two hours at the beginning of every single month, do research on them, come up with a contact strategy. And then 25, I listen to with all the social listening tools out there.

Like, you guys heard of Owler by any chance? O-W-L-E-R. Highly recommend that one too, by the way. By the way, anything I mentioned up here, it's all free, so I'm not trying to sell anything here. But Owler, O-W-L-E-R, it's Google Alerts on steroids. You can put your top 25 accounts on Owler. It gives you an email once a day of everything that's going on with them, and it has this dashboard that gives you deep insights into that company, their funding rounds, their competition, all that stuff. So those are the ones that are going to follow on those type of tools as well. So pick five. Then we got to figure out once we understand who the company and the profile is, now who within that company do I want to go after?

Top down, bottom up, I don't really care. I'm a big fan of the top down approach just because I think it's easier. But a lot of us have products and services that can be the seed and grow approach, right, moving on upstream. Regardless of the approach, you have to know the persona of who you're going after, right? Because for instance, CIOs in the healthcare industry have different priorities than CIOs in the manufacturing industry. If I can understand how to speak that language, I can craft a message to them and ask better questions, come up with better messaging, and everything else. So one other thing, business acumen, is something that is really lacking, I think, in today's sales education, if you will.

We're teaching these kids, we're giving them techniques, and we're giving them all these tools, but we're not teaching them normal business acumen stuff, right? Like what does a CIO in the healthcare industry care about? What do they think about? What are their priorities? And so, there's another resource that I'm giving away today. Anybody ever heard of Hourly Nerd? There's another one. Hourly Nerd is one of my favorite resources. It's crowdsourced MBA kids. So what you can do without Hourly Nerd is you can post a project on Hourly Nerd, so you want a market analysis of this type of product in this type of region for this type of whatever, and I'll pay up to $1,000 for it or something like that.

What happens is you get all these nerds, self-proclaimed nerds, bidding on it, saying I'll do it for $500, I'll do it for $700. And these kids are like Stanford, MIT, Harvard, so they're way smarter than I'll ever be. And they intern for Bain and McKenzie and all these ridiculous places, so they have way more access to information than I'll ever have. So I put a project on Hourly Nerd. I said, I want to see the top priorities of the top executives in the top industries in 2016. And what they came back to me was pretty impressive stuff. So now I have broken down hardware, SaaS, retail, manufacturing, oil and gas, healthcare, CEO priority 1-2-3, CFO priority 1-2-3, CIO priority 1-2-3. And so now, again, working with the team at Salesforce, getting these kids to understand what are these people caring about, what do they think about, so we can have better conversations, we can craft better messaging.

And again, this is available to you a little bit later if you go to that site. And this is the next stage of that spreadsheet I was talking about. Once you identify your top five, then you figure out who within your top five do you want to go after and what are their priorities. Because we talk a lot about contact strategies, you hear cadence. It is absolutely 100% about the contact strategy, not about that single email or single voicemail, right? The studies are 5, 10, 15, 30 touches, whatever. And so you've got to figure out how to round out that contact strategy. You can't just say, touch and base, did you get my first five emails? Did you get my first five emails? That's a disaster, right?

So with that, I've got three priorities, and then we're going to go for three triggers. Like, what's going on with your business? And so we talk about, what are we looking for? Hopefully you've heard a lot about trigger-based selling. You're looking for things that happen within an organization that you can tie your solution to. So they opened up a new office, they launched a new product, they went through a merger and acquisition, there was a quote from an executive. They even have simple things like, how many locations do they have, right? A lot of people spend so much time doing research to send that one perfect email, and it's just not worth it. It's worth to do some research and be somewhat customized, but it's just not worth it to spend a half an hour doing research on an account, because the likelihood of that one email getting response is not high.

The contact strategy is. So, do they have a strong social media presence? Can I add value to that? That takes seconds to find on somebody's website. How many locations do they have? That takes seconds to find out. Look for the easy stuff. I recommend sales reps and you all, think of four main triggers that you add value to that happen in businesses, and you can listen for with the social listening tools. Okay? Because then, you add those triggers. So now we have the companies that we want to go after, the executive within those companies that we want to go after, what are their priorities, and then what are the triggers that are happening in their business? So now you have six things, at minimum, that we can use to reach out as part of our cadence and our contact strategy.

And then you've got to come up with the messaging. So the messaging, elevator pitches are absolutely horrible. I don't know one person in here that is thrilled with their elevator pitch. Go around. It's a funny little experiment to do here at Dreamforce. It's to walk around being like, "Hey, what do you do?" And see whose elevator pitch you like. I'll put money on it. There's not going to be one that you're going to be like, "Wow, that was super impressive. That 30 seconds I wish I had back, but good for you for trying, kid." And so, you know, because they're always super cheesy, they're all about us, you know, the leading provider of, please do me a favor, take leading provider out of any of your marketing materials.

I've got a challenge for you. Go to a hundred websites and find me one company that's not the leading provider of something. All right? Take touching base and checking in out of everything. There's all sorts of pet peeves I have. But regardless, elevator pitches are terrible, usually because they're way too long and super cheesy. So instead, I call them attention grabbers. What can you say in the first five to 15 seconds of a conversation to get somebody to say, "Tell me more. How do you do that?" And if you go old school AIDA, anybody seen Glengarry Glen Ross? If you haven't seen Glengarry Glen Ross, don't watch the movie. It's a depressing-ass movie. But just go on YouTube and watch the best eight minutes of Alec Baldwin's entire career, right?

Because in there he talks about ABC always be closing, but he also talks about AIDA. And this is the fundamental process of sales. These are the four mental stages you need to go through before you buy anything. First something needs to get our attention, then we have to be interested, then we have to have a desire, and then we have to move to act. So if you think about it, how long do we have to get someone's attention today? Seconds, right? This is why subject lines are so important. This is why the first few words that come out of your mouth when you introduce yourself to somebody is so important. So that's why, you know, so we got five to fifteen seconds to get someone's attention. That earns us an extra couple of minutes where we can talk a little bit more.

That's where the typical elevator pitch falls in. But the A is where it fails miserably. And that's what I think I need the most help with as a sales rep, is literally when somebody picks up the phone, what comes out of my mouth? So we talk about attention grabbers, short, specific, targeted. You know what mine is here? Yeah, Dreamforce, right? So I'm walking around, VPs of sales in the SaaS industry. Yeah, Dreamforce, my number one client, when somebody says, "John, what do you do?" I don't do sales training consulting for Fortune 500 companies. It guarantees you the results you're looking for at every stage of the sales process. Right? I mean, you're, "Oh, crap." Okay. No, when somebody says, "John, what do you do?" And here at Dreamforce, I train Salesforce how to sell.

What do you think I get a hundred percent of the time when I say this at Dreamforce? When somebody says, "John, what do you do?" And I say, "I train Salesforce how to sell." Excuse me? How do you do that? Well, I've trained about 6,000 of their sales professionals on prospecting techniques to drive a media business into the pipeline. It's all about doing a little bit of research on somebody. Crafting a message, firing off to an executive, getting a referral down. We get about a, you know, 15, 20% response rate on that. Interesting. Tell me more. Actually, you know what? Now that I got your attention, I know you're interested. Why don't we take a step back and learn a little bit more about your situation?

You know, it's a mess around here. This is Dreamforce. You're probably not even going to remember what goes on after this. Why don't we schedule a call next week? You got your iPhone on you? I know you do. Why don't you take it out? Because how many of y'all at your marketing departments ask you to come in here and scan badges? Beep, beep, beep, beep, beep, beep, beep. And how many of y'all are going to send that? It was great meeting you at Dreamforce. Blast email to everybody that you got on that scanner. And how many of you are going to respond to any of them? None. Right? But yet we're all doing it. Right? I walk around with a scanner, yeah, because marketing will kill me if I don't. But I also walk around with my iPhone.

I'm like, why don't we schedule some time next week? All right? My calendar will be littered next week. Guaranteed. Short, specific, targeted CIOs in the healthcare. Different priorities in CIOs in the manufacturing. Curiosity. What you're looking for after you say whatever you say is a what or a tell me more. Versus an O. Results driven. And what others say about you is so much better than what you say about you. If there's one thing I can recommend for everybody in this room about messaging, it's don't come up with it yourself. Go to your customers and ask them what you do for them. That's why I love Dreamforce. Dreamforce is my favorite marketing department. You know why? Because this whole city is covered in Dreamforce.

Covered in Salesforce. But what is it covered with? What are the billboards all about? Customers. It's about the customer. Right? It's not Benioff standing up there saying we've been the most innovative company in the world for five years in a row or whatever it is now. You know the CEO of Burberry saying this is what we did with Salesforce. Your customers, the results you drive for your customers are the number one competitive differentiator you have when it relates to marketing. And it's the easiest way to come up with messaging. If you can call up somebody and say I showed this client in your industry how to drive these type of results and I'd like to talk to you about it. You call everybody that fits that persona and you just make it rain.

Alright? Conversational positive message and energy. I don't believe we all need to be Tony Robbins here but we do have to have some sort of enthusiasm for what you do. Alright? If you don't care why should I? What's in it for me and unique? What's competitive advantage? Again, your uniqueness when it comes to prospecting. All of your competitors can say the same thing when it comes to prospecting. When it comes to the meeting is where you differentiate but we got to break through all that noise. And the one thing they have a hard time lying about is the results you drive for your customers. Okay? So come up with that. And then you put it together. So you'll notice in the spreadsheet the triggers come over and the priorities come over and then you come up with messages like say mergers and acquisitions is a trigger.

Well, I work with a lot of companies who add new services through acquisition. You get the prospecting engine to fill the funnel with no services immediately. That now becomes my merger and acquisition message. So now I listen for mergers and acquisitions and every time I come up with that, when every time I hear that, like Owler, right? I can go on Owler and I can say I just want to see mergers and acquisitions. Gives me a whole list of all my target accounts that I'm following on mergers and acquisitions. Come up with an email like this. Fire it off. Put it into a tool. Split test it. See if it works. Or say ramp time is a priority for a VP of sales in the SaaS industry or for a COO is from an operational standpoint.

Companies like Salesforce plug my online training portal with my filling the funnel program into their onboarding process. So the reps get ramped and producing results immediately out of boot camp. So now I can call every VP of sales in the SaaS industry that has that priority and say the same thing. Get my volume up there if I want to. All right. So now if you'll notice three, three, three, three. You come up with these messages and you have six touches that you can go after, put into a cadence and just let it ride. And then you can use tools like Salesforce, like there's a million tools that you'll see here on the expo floor that you can use to create a cadence. My biggest recommendation for you with any of these tools is don't over automate them.

Don't turn your sales reps into mini marketers, please. Sales is context. Sales has to put context around the content that we're putting out there. And if you're not, you're no different than marketing. And so that's why that template email is crap. Put some flavor on top of it. Put your insights into it. All right. And so here's some examples. Steve, I saw your recent acquisition of KBS Information Systems and read the press release where you said, Hey, this is a great opportunity to strengthen our national presence and competitors in regional markets. That's the reason I'm reaching out to you. By the way, this format of this email, it's the YUYUNOW email developed by Jeff Hoffman, my mentor.

Actually, I would highly recommend checking out Jeff. It's MJHoffman.com or handle MJ Hoffman. Take a look at it. But hey, there's the reason. You got to start with you. Right? Don't start with them, not you. Nobody cares about us. What's the number one thing everybody loves talking about? Themselves. So that's why introducing yourself on an email is ridiculous. I'd like to introduce myself. I don't care who you are. Right? We're the leading provider. The only thing I care about is me. That's it. All right? So start with me. That's the only thing that's going to get my attention. All right? Then the reason it's prompted me to reach out to you is I work with a lot of companies. That's the attention grabber.

That's the value I bring to companies who go through mergers and acquisitions. Right? So I send that to an executive, get referred down. Hey, John, don't know if we're currently looking for help with lead generation. Bert's your guy. What's up, Bert? How you doing? I got the internal referral. I can take it from there. And then I can create a template and I'm going to say template in a very specific way, not to be blasted out to a million people, but to be used from an efficiency standpoint. Because now every time I see a merger and acquisition, I can kind of say the same thing. Right? So I can put this into Salesforce as a template into Salesforce, repurpose it, and then track it to see how many times I sent it out and how many responses I got back.

If it works, it works. If it doesn't, it doesn't. And then voicemail, same thing. So a little technique here. This, again, is called the winning call. Jeff Hoffman, again, came up with this one. I got to give him credit where credit's due. And it's about, for instance, leaving your voicemail, your contact information at the end of a voicemail. It's one of the hardest things I train on. We don't start voicemails with, hi, this is John Barrows from. Right? Because what do you think happens right after you hear, hi, this is John Barrows from. Right? Click 90% of the time. So instead, hey, Sarah, the reason for my call today is one of the VPs of sales I recently worked with told me that they ran a call blitz after my prospecting training and improved their conversion ratio from 5 to 15% and drove 25 meetings using my techniques.

I'd love to talk to you about this and see if this is something that aligned with your priorities. Could you call me back at 617-529-7271? By the way, this is John Barrows with Jay Barrows Consulting, 617-529-7271. Because there were two benefits there. It forces them to listen to the value. Everybody wants to know who it is before they hang up. Everybody does. So it forces them to listen to the value proposition. And you might actually get there, oh, I didn't even know you guys did that. Right? And then the other benefit of this is if you screw up halfway through, you can hang up and they have no idea who you are. So have some fun with it. All right? So now, again, real fast, that spreadsheet, top five, five a month.

You can pick more than that if you want. I encourage the sales reps at Salesforce to do this to try to make it digestible so they're not trying to boil the ocean here. Five accounts once a month where you go deep on them and you sit down and you think through that contact strategy, priorities and triggers. Then 25 accounts, drink your coffee in your morning. Set them up on tools like Sales Navigator, on Owler, follow them on Facebook, their pages and Twitter, all those free resources, and set up your cadence where literally, instead of checking your fantasy leagues or any of that stuff, you're just scanning through data feeds on your customers looking for those triggers and be opportunistic every day where you send out three or four every day.

That's how I keep my pipeline nice and full. You know why? Because I found one solution to every other problem at every other stage of the sales process. Negotiating, objection handling, discounting, all of it gets solved by one very basic thing, which is a big fat pipeline. You got a big fat pipeline, you don't have to try too hard when it comes to that other stuff. Because I want to put myself in a position where I want your business, I don't need your business. And if I want your business, I sell the right way. If I need your business, I do some shady stuff. All right? So fill that pipeline up. Be structured with your approach. Look for triggers. I'm now going to bring up Paul Fish here, who runs Enablement over in EMEA.

And we've been working pretty closely together here, specifically recently, on the evolution of sales and enablement here. So thanks for coming up, Paul. I appreciate it. Hey Joe, how are you? Fantastic. I'm sure a question we all want to know is what exactly did you say? Six years ago, 6,000 reps. What was your prospecting technique? How the heck did you get in here? Yeah. So it was that. The YUIU Now email that I was mentioning about going high and asking for a referral down. We went after George and Frank. So George, Hugh, and Frank sent two emails. It got all the way down to this individual, Doug Landis. And he was pretty much forced to take a meeting with us. And then from there, my question to Doug was, Doug, how do I make you look good?

And if anybody knows Doug Landis, that was a fantastic question to ask Doug. That's the right question. And so after that, it's six years later. But I will say the evolution, and I'd love to talk to you about this, is it was easier six years ago to fire off an email to an executive because they weren't really getting inundated too much with targeted emails. But now, unfortunately, it's been watered down. The top down approach has been watered down because now there's some approaches out there, and I don't want to name any names, but they effectively blast out an email to the C-suite saying, hey, this is what we do. Here's three clients that we work with. Who can I talk to about this? And it's a generic template email, and they wait for the referral down.

And that's where they focus their efforts. And I was actually doing a training like this one time in front of 300, it was a public company, 300 bigger than this. And I'm talking about the top down, and the CEO of the company was sitting right there, stands up, he's like, I'm calling bullshit on the top down approach. And I'm like, uh-oh, this is going to be awkward. And he's like, I get 40 to 50 emails like that a day from kids saying, hey, who could I talk to about this, blah, blah, blah. And I don't respond to one of them. And I was like, okay, let me ask you, is it a pretty generic message that says, this is what we do, here's three customers, who can I talk to about this? He's like, yeah, every one of them.

I go, okay, if somebody went on your 10K annual report, actually read through it and came up with a very specific message about what they saw and how you can help them, would you respond to that? He goes, absolutely. I go, okay, so that's the problem, is that people are, again, trying to over-automate the process. And you can't over-automate being genuine. You can't over-automate caring about why you're making a connection to somebody. I'm sorry. There's only so much technology can do. All right? What we need to ask ourselves right now is, what can you do that a computer can't? Because if a computer can do it, you just have to ask yourself, how much longer are they going to pay me to do this?

And so that's the question I keep asking myself working with Salesforce is, I mean, Salesforce has got a lot of systems, a lot of process, a lot of technology, right? How do we stop that happening? How do we stop that happening? How do we stop that happening? How do we stop that automation? You know, we're putting a lot of pressure on our reps to do more. Yeah. How do we stop that automation? And, you know, John is fantastic. And one of the great benefits of working with you over the years is that you collaborate on a one-to-one basis, on a regular basis, with all those kids, with those 6,000 kids, and a lot more than those 6,000 kids, and not just by standard channels, not just by emails, but by chatter, by telephone calls late at night.

You know, you're speaking to these people. You're learning as much as, you know, you're learning things from them as well. But you see things that happen that aren't quite right. How do you stop people going down the easy route? I think the collaboration is key. So chatter, we have a chatter group where I'm in there seeing examples and all that other stuff. I think one of the things, though, is the proof is in the pudding. You know, we're being asked to make 50 dials a day. I encourage reps to actually one week, don't do what your boss tells you to do. And actually go with a more quality approach and then come back with data and say, "Boss, you know, I made 50 dials a day for the past, you know, two months or whatever it is, and this is what my numbers look like.

I took a step back here, focused on some key accounts and took a very strategic approach, and this is my results. What would you rather me do?" And I think that's that proof of sharing what works and trying to identify where people are trying to creep into that over-automation. I mean, one of the things on the chatter group I constantly see, bless you, what I constantly see on the chatter group is, "Hey, does anybody have a really good," and it's called the YU, or it used to be called the Basho email. You know, does anybody have any really good YU, now email for the financial services industry? And what they're asking there is, "Does anybody have a template email that I can blast out to all my financial services clients so I can make this easy on myself that's worked in the past?" And I'm like, "Ugh." And so I'm on this chat read and I, you know, and I'm an outsider, right?

So I have to be very kind of cool with the way I address that. It's like, "Well, you know, there's some templates that you can use, but that's not the YU, now approach." The YU, now approach is going on their website, being thoughtful with your approach. And so I think with light, you know, suggestions on a forum like that, with sharing when you get a really solid one and you see it works, when executives share what works, that's where you see it. You know, when you have the top brass saying, "Hey, check out this email that so-and-so just sent out," or when somebody gets a response sharing that out there and being like, "Look at this huge account that I just cracked into using this email," that's where people start to make that, "Okay, maybe I should stop going through the motions here." Your measured responses to those on the chatter group are admirable and commendable.

He usually sends me a sweary email at the same time going, "WTF, what's happening here?" I mean, what changes have you seen? What have you seen change in the past six years amongst the kids, as you refer to them, that you're training? And actually, it leads to this discussion today. It's, you know, everybody talks about millennials and all the challenges and all that other stuff. I think it's just like any other generation old. I sound more and more like my dad the older I get. But I think structure is the key, because it used to be about a specific technique or something and saying something, and the buyers are just getting too smart for techniques anymore. You know, you say something there, so you do something there.

Like, you might get away with it every once in a while, but you get caught on that pretty quick these days, because it's just, as soon as a technique that comes out that works, all of a sudden somebody writes a blog about it, and it goes out there and poof, you know, a million people are using it and it doesn't work anymore. And so what I've seen is a move from a very specific, and this is how I've evolved the training working with you guys, is moving from very specific technique. I mean, really, the training I used to give, it was a bunch of stuff, but it was really, here's how to send an email. I couldn't believe people paid me to do it, but it worked, right? It worked for a really long period of time, but now that, I was saying, you know, it's kind of got watered down and that type of stuff, I've shifted from techniques to structure, so that that structure, we can learn what works by using that structure.

I think split testing, as an example, is the number one thing I would recommend my 22-year-old self. I'm 40 years old right now, if you asked me, John, what's the one thing you could go back and tell yourself at 22 years old to help you out? It'd be A, B, split test everything you do, right? If you're going after CIOs in the healthcare industry, come up with two different approaches to CIOs in the healthcare industry. Go make 50 dials with this approach and 50 dials with that approach and see what happens, right? And just keep iterating, objection handling. Write down the objection, come up with two different ways of handling it, go after it, right? So, I think of that shift of structure, but then the problem with over-automation, and that's that middle ground there.

But this is reflected in the way that we train now, right? Yes. Because we're no longer just doing the, okay, you guys are coming on board, let's put you through bootcamp, let's send you on an onboarding journey, let's teach you how to prospect, and then, bye. Come back in, you know, come back in three or four years' time when you're successful. We don't do that anymore. That collaboration now, the use of trailhead, building a prospecting trail. We've got people who are genuinely really interested in becoming prospecting trailblazers. And, you know, having you as a resource and having you to fall back on and offer that advice and guidance is really critical for these people. It helps. And, you know, your evolution from an organization.

I've seen Salesforce go from, here's bootcamp, we're going to stuff as much information down your throat as we possibly can, good luck, to, okay. This is more of a journey. Let's be a bit more grown up about this, right? Yeah. This is more of a journey, reinforcement, you know, refreshers and all that other stuff, which I think is absolutely critical for success. And it's no longer just an onboarding journey, is it? No. It's a continuous education and development. And as you've pointed out, no one's ever an expert at prospecting. Maybe you are. Maybe you're not. You always say you're not. Everybody can always get better. So it's really important that we carry on learning and we carry on reinforcing and we carry on collaborating and driving that collaboration throughout the business.

Awesome. So we got about 12 minutes left here. Anybody got any questions for me or Paul here? I mean, Paul, the reason I wanted Paul to come up here is to literally talk about how Salesforce actually integrates a lot of this stuff and the results that they see. And then, you know, I'll share anything you guys want. So any questions or things that you guys got top of your mind right now? I can keep talking. Yeah. John can keep talking, but please do ask questions to this guy. Sure. What's up? What's your main piece of advice for a really small company and a really small company to help you better job? Yeah. So the question is, what's your advice to very small companies and how do you focus, right?

I think it's all about goes back to that ideal customer profile. I would be hyper focused on a select few accounts getting logos because then you can then get case studies from those logos and your messaging becomes that much easier. So I really would identify what is that real, you know, really take some time going through the exercise of what are all the nuances about your business that add value to who? And what is that? Get a list of them and then give each rep a group of them and say, okay, you're taught you're for this quarter. I need you to at least get into X percentage of these and you have to be thoughtful. And so, you know, I mean, there's all these other channels that you can look at as far as networking events and those type of things.

I look at outbound as a as a channel, especially for a sales. I mean, my first sales organization was a startup. You know, we were self-funded IT services. I was the only sales guy for five years. I made $400 a week, got eight meetings a month, wrote four proposals, closed two pieces of closed business for five years. Because I thought the numbers game was the way it was supposed to be. And by the way, I'll prove it to you. Remember I talked about how crappy elevator pitches are? Here's my elevator pitch. Here's the voicemail that I left 399 times a week for five years. It went something like this. I'm sorry, it went exactly like this. Hi, this is John Barrows with Thrive Networks. We do outsourced IT support for small to mid-sized companies in the Boston area.

We take a really unique approach to manage your IT infrastructure by combining the best of what people and technology have to offer. We tie our network operations center and our managed services to your environment so we can take care of all the small things on a proactive basis. So when the engineers come on site, they can take care of the higher level, more strategic initiatives that help drive your business forward. I'd love to talk to you about some of your IT support needs. If you could call me back at 617-529-7271, I'd really appreciate it. And oh, I was proud of that. I would leave that voicemail and be like, "What's up?" Nailed it again, right? And the response rate was? 0.5%. 0.5%. I got more callbacks when I would screw up a voicemail than when I would nail the perfect one every time.

I did this one by mistake once. I was like, "Hi, this is John Barrows with Thrive Networks. We do outsourced IT support for some..." Oh, crap. Look, I'm sorry. That was a new pitch. I was trying something. Look, we fix computers. If you've got problems with your computers, call me back. I got more callbacks with that approach. Hands down. So my point is the numbers game didn't work then, and it sure isn't going to work now. The noise right now is deafening. So asking your reps to make 50, 70, 500 dials a day I think is just a fool's errand. I think you force them to go after that ideal customer profile because the benefits of that are huge once you get those customers. Because then you can tell everybody else, "I trained Salesforce how to sell." And then it makes it a lot easier.

Other questions? What do we got? I think if you have a question so everybody can hear, can you walk up to the mic in the center? If you want to stand up, I mean, I'll repeat them. We've got mics in the center row if you want to just ask the question, then everybody can hear. Yeah, or I can pick you. Hello. Hey. So working with a SaaS company outside of the U.S., we work with a lot of oil and gas industry and kind of have a lot of the larger size clients there. Oftentimes, the issue is branching into other industries. Yeah. And you're mentioning quoting a couple of clients that you have in the marketplace. But if you don't have them, how would you approach it? Because typically it is, well, you have client A, B, and C, but that's not relevant to me.

Right. How can you prospect towards new industries, new frontier? That's a great question. And I'll give it a little bit and then ask Paul to chime in. But my thought on that is really go back after the persona and educate yourself on that persona of that industry so that you can speak that language. And then it isn't necessarily about the other clients you work with. It's more about your intelligence about them as a business. I mean, there's actually a group that I work with called Summersault here where they advocate taking it to the next level, not just doing research on their website and really customizing your message there to make that connection, but they recommend going and experiencing that account.

You know, so for instance, if you're going to go into, you know, CVS or something, you know, pharmacies, like go to CVS, learn how that business works and then craft a message up to the executive. So I would think you would have to force yourself more into the quality of understanding the challenges and all that other stuff and how your solution aligns with those and ask better questions to uncover that information. So that would be more of the persona based stuff. Yeah, and I completely agree. It is about that persona. It's about understanding and deeply understanding what really matters and what sensible questions you're going to ask. Don't forget, lots of people are asking generic questions.

Yeah. We all ask generic questions. Yep. You know, discovery is something that's been going on for years. We all do discovery. We all ask it generally in the same way. So finding out a little bit more, delving a little bit deeper, being a little bit creative in how you do that discovery. And actually, we've been doing a customer-centric discovery course in Salesforce recently that, you know, we've been piloting. And it is all about exactly what you said. It's about experiencing going into a hotel, buying a product, going into a store, finding out a little bit more about it and experiencing that, relaying that back to, you know, basically color your questions. And I'll give you a couple of tips.

If anybody's not using Feedly right now, F-E-E-D-L-Y, it's an RSS aggregator, it's free. So if I'm going into a new industry, for instance, I'm going to, you know, so say you're following four or five different sales blogs. Usually you have to go to four or five different sales websites or get four or five different emails. With Feedly, you can create a sales blog folder and dump all your sales blogs in there. So when you open that up, all you see is the headlines. So for instance, if I'm going into a new market or a new industry, I'm going to set up a folder for whatever that is, healthcare, and go follow the thought leaders in healthcare so I can figure out what they're talking about. I'm going to go join groups on LinkedIn of healthcare CIOs or whatever it is and just kind of see what language they're using, what questions and challenges, not troll for leads, troll for knowledge, and then craft that knowledge in my message about the value that we can bring to that.

Yeah. And just to reinforce that as well. So Feedly and all the other resources, they're all on your portal, right? Yes. Because all our folks, all our 6,000 guys use your portal regularly. It's not just Chatter. It's not just our own internal systems. It's not just face-to-face training, but it's also using your portal. And access to that and constant reinforcement and development is critical. That helps. Thank you. What else? Our next and then. What's up? Any other tips for a field sales organization? Tips for a field sales? A lot of them. No, but I really, I'm going to go back to the, you know, if we, you know, with Salesforce, you got SDRs, you got BDRs, you got AEs. And there was a question in the panel before this of, you know, should AEs prospect?

And the answer to that one is absolutely yes. Everybody should prospect in my opinion, because if you're not, if you're relying on somebody else to make your quota, you're out of your mind. And so from a field sales standpoint, I think you should, I think that morning routine thing that I mentioned of that's, let's put it this way. I'm busier now than I've ever been in my entire life. I, I, those are all the customers. I'm a one man show. I do all my own training, all my own sales, all my own prospecting, everything. So I'm busier now than I've ever been, but I still prospect almost every day because I want that pipeline filled. So I don't have to discount. I don't have to negotiate that much.

So I would really recommend going back to that ideal customer profile piece, having each rep have a certain group of them telling them that they need to circle, you know, learn what those businesses are. I'll follow them on Twitter, follow them on Facebook, get to know their businesses, surround them everywhere they are. Cause it's not about the one email. It's not about the, it's not about in mail, email, voicemail, Twitter. Like it's not about any one of those things these days. It's about all of it. We have to be where our customers are. Like I'm not going to send somebody an email if they have 25 connections on LinkedIn and a piss poor LinkedIn profile. Like that doesn't make any sense. Or I'm not going to retweet somebody that hasn't tweeted something in, you know, six months.

Like that doesn't make any sense either. So I think I would really go back to that. I account, you know, if I would go to some sessions, go to some of the sessions about account based marketing, account based selling specifically. And what are some of those strategies? Cause that's what I would recommend to a field sales organization. Anything else on that, Paul? No, no more. No more on that. I think that's not, I think that pretty much covers it. All right. Thanks. We're going to go here and then it's up. There you go. Free Brady. Free Brady. Yeah. Yeah. So what are your recommendations or tips for engaging and getting buy-in from Mexico and currently and handling it right now? What do you need to really move out of that?

Yeah. So just for everybody else moving from, you know, template emails to this more thoughtful, too much change. How do you get buy-in? I'm going to actually, Paul's a bigger expert on this one than me. So Paul, you want to talk a little bit about it? Well, I think you should, I think start off, start off and answer what you think. And then I'm going to respond. All right. Fair enough. So, you know, I think it's, it's, it's doing, it's, it's doing things in bite-sized chunks. So introducing a little bit of structure first. So something like, you know, here's 25 accounts that I want you to think about as opposed to saying, okay, now instead of doing all this, what you're used to doing, do this now and making that hard shift.

I really do think it's like introducing small bits. Or as an example, taking a few people who like that, that shift, you know what I mean? There's people that are just going to do what they're going to do. They were hired at the company and they're just the, you know, and that's fine. But, you know, they have to realize that that puts them in this box. And so what you could do is take a group of people that are eager to take this next level and almost create a strike force or a SWAT team and let them go after and see the results there. Because when you see some top tier 1A players driving results with this new approach, everybody else is either going to say, I want to do that or I don't want to do that.

And the ones who don't want to do that, you should get rid of. Exactly. And it's evolution rather than just revolution. You know, you can't just flip. You can't just switch it off and go down a completely different route. But to what John was saying, I was hoping he was going to say it, was it's all about those thought leaders. There are people who are great prospectors. There are people who think outside the box. There are people who share what works. And I don't mean by that share their templates and just bang it out to everybody. People who are great. People who want to learn. People who want to develop. Hang your hat on those people. Make sure you capture what works. You share it around the organization.

You drive that community, that collaboration. That's what works really well at Salesforce. It's not everyone's the same. Not everyone's great at picking up new techniques. Not everyone adapts and picks up information in the same way. Not everybody took the prospecting trail and instantly, like that, became great at prospecting. Doesn't work like that. So you've got to hang your hat on those people who are good. Share. Collaborate. And that'll start to build things out. And those people who don't get it. Gotta go. You know what happens. It really is. And the other thing I'll comment on that is just the teamwork piece of it too. Because some people, you know, strengths and weaknesses, right? Some people are really good at doing research and that type of stuff but not crafting messages.

Pair up a couple of people, right? Have a buddy system where, hey, you're the volume person and you're going to go after the tier twos in this territory. I'm the quality person. I'm going to go after the tier ones in this territory. And we'll work together. So that's what we talk a lot about at Salesforce with the SDR, the BDR specifically, teaming with the AE. And the most successful, and you can attest to this, the most successful AEs are the ones that literally work with their BDR with a strategy. To say, how are we going to attack my territory? What are you going to do? What am I going to do? What's the partnership here? As opposed to just give me some leads. Those are the ones that fail hard.

So, yeah. No problem. He was standing. Then you're next. What's up? Mine's quick because she asked my question. But I just want to say go Socks, go Pats. Yeah, yeah. Go free Brady. He's back, ladies and gentlemen. Watch out. What's up? Hi. Hi. I wanted to, this is going to be a broad question. So we launched a new onboarding program in 2016. Work very well. Most of our reps are 8% online for execution. Great. But now the older reps are not doing so well. And we want to start with your pressures and onboarding training. Yeah. But we don't know where to start from. So we do a lot of random acts of, okay, they need cost training. How do you figure out that problem? That's you. Random acts of enablement.

I love it. I love it. And we all do them. It's a tricky question. It's a tricky question to answer. For us, you know, we've moved away a lot from the day zero. Let's go through your onboarding. Go through boot camp. Do your prospecting training. In fact, we used to just fly you around the world, basically, John. And just come and do some prospecting training. Yeah. And that was great. It really has to be a multi-layered solution to a particular problem. It's important, as we talked about, getting people who are exhibitors of best practice. It's important to get managers involved. You know, there are multiple facets involved in creating an enablement strategy, leveraging different vehicles for different people.

Not everybody learns exactly the same way. So creating a structure and creating a program is what we have been doing. And, you know, my colleague and various of my colleagues are in the audience here today. It's all about creating that learning journey. And that learning journey never stops. Yep. It should never, ever stop. It should be continuous. Even for those people who have been great. Even for those people who have blown their numbers out of the water. Learning does not stop. But, you know, we're more than happy to have a conversation post this. And I'm aware of time here. More than happy to have a conversation one-to-one. Let's talk more about this topic because it's in-depth and detailed.

Yeah. And the last thing I'll add to that is, going back to specialties, everybody's really good at something. Put the ownership on them. As a manager, I mean, I was made of a smaller company. I only had six reps. But we would, once a week, pick a topic. Like, what are we having problems with? Objection handling, discounting, messaging, whatever it is. And be like, alright, who's the best at this? Okay. You are. Fantastic. You know what? I want next week, could you come in and teach us how to do what you do? And then you have, then you don't ostracize anybody who's, you know what I mean? Because everybody's good at something. And so you can have them come in. And then as a manager, you can delegate a lot.

So you're not always having to do it yourself. So I had this, with my team, this continuous learning of every month, every week, we would pick a new topic that we would try to figure out. And then we would come up with, again, going back to split testing, two different approaches to address that challenge. And then I'd say, okay, you know, you guys do it this way. You guys do it this way this week. And then let's come back at the end of the week and see what worked, right? So it's just, I put the ownership on them. And that's very much playing to that collaboration message as well. It's all about collaboration. It's about sharing. It's not just about coming up and doing a bit of face-to-face stand and delivery enablement.

Exactly. So I apologize. I got to bail from this. If you want to Snapchat me, although I am happy to actually spend some time with you. I'm here all week. So if you want to hit me up on Snapchat or Twitter or something like that and grab some coffee, I will happily do that. I'm also, again, going to give away a couple hours of my time. Happy to talk to anybody about anything. On the way out the door, make sure you grab one of the little postcards because we're giving away this new little, you ever have a problem with your drink sweating, right? And you don't want to take a coaster. Well, these things, little free things here. So anyways, there's a little jbarrels.com/dreamforce and a little cup thing there so that you can have on your way out.

And I appreciate all you guys have. All right. Thank you all very much. Thanks, Mike. Appreciate it. Well done, Mike. Cheers. Cheers. Cheers. Cheers. Cheers.