Encore: Interview with Intercom

Hey there, and welcome to another edition of Inside Intercom. On this show, we focus on what it takes to build better products. And at the root of that have been conversations with leaders in product management, design, marketing, support, and engineering. All of those components are, of course, vital to your startup survival. But eventually, if you're going to reach your long-term goals, you've got to embrace and build out another core business function, sales. A lot of founders are, of course, salespeople by default, and many of the founders we've spoken to on this show have said selling is one of the hardest skills to learn. So when is it time to bring in a sales leader, and what does a sales culture really look like?

To dig further and adjust that, this week our VP of sales, LB Harvey, sits down with John Barros. John's a renowned software sales trainer who's helped sharpen the skills at a who's who of tech companies, including the likes of Dropbox, LinkedIn, Twilio, Salesforce, Bitly, New Relic, and yes, even us here at Intercom. His mission really boils down to this, bucking the sleazy sales stereotype and making the sales experience, like any other customer interaction, personal. In his chat with LB, John talks about the role of sales in what's becoming a predominantly self-serve industry. You know, sales is a critical part of that to make sure it goes right. There's only so much you can automate and educate people before they need to talk, want to talk to somebody.

How a sales team should fit into your larger organization if it's going to succeed. Respect and have that culture that respects sales and everybody supports it. You know, obviously sales has to support everybody else too. And why, if you're passionate about your startup, you too can become an effective salesperson. I could take the most technical person on the planet who doesn't have any customer interaction at all, but then you put them in a scenario where they start talking about something that they did, like they developed. You know, if you ever talk to an engineer about something they created, like they literally light up like a Christmas tree. If you like what you hear, want to check out more Inside Intercom episodes, you can subscribe to our show over iTunes or your favorite podcast app.

But now, let's hand things over to LB, who's in the studio with John Barrows. John, welcome to the show. Thank you so much for taking the time to speak with us today. I thought it was a way to get started. I'd love to kind of understand how you got originally into sales, software, and ultimately found your way into the training role you're in today. Thanks, LB, for having me. I appreciate it. Yeah, I mean, it's kind of a similar story, I think, to most sales professionals, since sales is the most undereducated profession on the planet. And I mean that by, you know, there's about 4,000 colleges in the United States, and you can get your degree in less than 30 of them in sales. And so I fell into it just like everybody else.

I started with marketing, and then realized, well, that was my degree. And then I realized that I didn't really want to do that, and I couldn't make nearly as much money as I wanted to. So I got into sales by selling power tools with DeWalt. DeWalt was the first job out of college, and it was more of an event marketing. It was positioned as sales, but it was really more event marketing. And I drove around a Dodge Ram pickup truck, giving away free tools to construction workers, and then got up to Home Depot, where they promoted me to Home Depot, where I had to – Home Depot had to buy DeWalt, but my job was to upsell them. So it was to take them from a $10,000 order that they had to spend anyways to a $50,000, $100,000 order, so that was a little bit more sales.

Then I got into Xerox about a year and a half after I left Black & Decker. I got into Xerox, and that's really where I got my full sales training and education, right, because selling copiers is about as brutal as it gets. And Xerox had a really good training program as well. And then after that, I didn't like doing that, so I started a company with a few buddies of mine from high school, and we did outsourced IT services. So I did outsourced IT support for the SMB market, and 23, 24 years old, not knowing what I was doing. So I took every training there was, you know, Sandler, Miller, Hyman, TAS, all of the main sales methodologies, and I came across one called Basho. Really liked it because it was tactical, and it wasn't this theory or anything like that.

Used it, grew ThriveUp, sold us off to Staples, got fired from Staples because apparently I'm not a corporate guy. And then when I joined Basho, not because I wanted to be a trainer, but because I really loved the training and I knew it made a difference. And then to make a very long story short, they screwed it all up, and I took it over and went off on my own. And so now I'm working with companies like Salesforce, LinkedIn, Box, Dropbox, all these wonderful, fun companies, Intercom, and, you know, teaching techniques and skills and process around how to do sales right and really how to buck the trend of the sleazy sales rep out there just trying to sell anything to anybody. I'm a big believer.

Sales, when done right, is one of the best professions on the planet. When done wrong, it's one of the worst. Wow, quite the journey, John. And I know we at Intercom have hugely benefited from your training and have loved the way that you approach sales in a really personal way. You've worked with a number of really interesting companies. And I'm curious, whether it's Dropbox or Bitly or New Relic, all of these companies have their own cultures and unique ways of working. What have you learned just from observing the way these sales teams work that's really kind of pushed your own thinking? Well, I mean, one of the reasons I love working in the SaaS world is for that reason alone. You know, most of the companies I do work with are in SaaS.

Not that this is SaaS-based training, but I just enjoy SaaS because typically SaaS tends to push the envelope when it comes to technology, obviously, but it also pushes the envelope when it comes to sales. And, you know, for me, like with Salesforce as an example, if I'm training Salesforce on the same stuff I was training them on two years ago, like they're not renewing my contract. You know, I have to stay up to date on what's happening because these companies push so hard and so fast to grow. And so, you know, I've learned a lot by being in this world and by being around sales professionals, sales leadership, and organizations who are trying to figure out sales. And it's opened my eyes to a lot of different things.

I mean, I think some things never change in sales. The fundamentals, I think, are always there. And actually, I think that's a lot of what's lacking right now is the fundamentals. I think a lot of people are looking for too many quick fixes through technology to solve the sales problem. I'm also seeing, you know, people trying to, you know, avoid sales altogether because they think marketing automation can do it with customer success on the other end. And to a certain degree, some of these companies, yeah, they can do it depending on what the product is. But at a certain point, you know, you have to involve sales. And there has to be that engagement factor that guides the customer through the right process and asks the right questions and helps them make decisions.

And that's why I said, you know, when sales done right, it's the best professional on the planet. When done wrong, it's the worst. And when you see companies who are, you know, just volume-oriented, trying to cram stuff down people's throats, it only works to a certain point. When you have a true sales professional that has the customer's best interest in mind, that's where the whole thing really works well. So, you know, I've learned a lot through automation, through what works and what doesn't work inbound and outbound, and it's kind of a constant journey to stay on top of this stuff. Absolutely. And I couldn't agree more on the value of sales when done right. Let me ask, since you've had such a broad purview, how has the role of sales and the skill sets that's needed changed in a business that is increasingly more self-serve?

And where do you think sales should play and kind of not play in that world? Yeah, I mean, again, I think it goes back to what we sell, right? I think if you're selling something that has a super low ACV, you know, average contract value, and, you know, it's like a, you know, a thousand bucks or something like that for the year or whatever, it's hard to justify having sales in that equation whatsoever. But if you're in somewhat of a complex sale that involves a sales cycle that it's, you know, more than 20, 30 days, and maybe at least two or three calls with multiple people, you know, sales is a critical part of that to make sure it goes right. There's only so much you can automate and educate people before they need to talk, want to talk to somebody.

And I think that's, you know, I think you can do that, you know, maybe say five, $10,000 is when people are getting more and more comfortable putting their credit card online and buying things without talking to people. But there's still a threshold there where somebody's like, yeah, I just, I need to talk to somebody. And the question is, is, you know, is that a customer support person or is that a salesperson? And a while back, I remember there was a LinkedIn post by a CEO who, and the quote was, or the title was, I'm never going to hire another sales professional as long as I live, as long as I'm in business. And his point was, he said that sales reps are incented for all the wrong reasons, right?

It's monthly quotas and all these things, which really forces it to be about the company and the sales rep, not about the client. And so what he was saying was that what he's going to do is really do marketing automation, educate the market as much as possible, and then have that, that, you know, when that person, whoever it is, raises their hand, then have them talk to customer service instead of sales. And, you know, I mean, it was probably one of the biggest LinkedIn posts I've seen. I mean, it exploded with people's opinions on it. And it was half, you know, half people saying, yeah, right on, I totally get you. And the other half were sales reps saying, you know, screw you, you're pissing on our profession.

And my point to him was, like I commented, my point was, look, everything that you just described about sales reps, if you will, that's what a bad sales rep does. You know, the bad sales rep pushes to get their commission check, you know, hit the end of the month quota, you know, convinces clients to do things that they're not interested in doing. But everything he described about customer service is actually what good sales professionals should do. And so my point to him was, look, you haven't, you know, it's not that sales is the problem. It's just you've hired crappy sales reps. And so, you know, I'd put it more on you that you haven't hired, right? John, on that note, so you mentioned marketing in the equation.

What's your advice when it comes to how a sales org should work or align with marketing? I think it's, you know, still can be a common belief that salespeople should just sell and marketers should just market. But how do you think about the right relationship between those two functions that should be so closely partnered and aligned? Yeah, it's funny you bring this up. I literally just did a Zoom Info had a conference here in Boston and I just spoke on it as one of the keynotes and talked about the alignment or misalignment between sales and marketing and how, you know, I got into this field 20 years ago in sales and I've been hearing about the misalignment between sales and marketing for 21 years.

And, you know, everybody's trying to come with this technical solution and, you know, I talked about some very tactical things that we can do to work together as a team because without the team approach, it ends up, we end up doing more harm than good. And we've, you know, right now we're hearing a huge trend of account-based marketing or account-based selling or account-based revenue or whatever people want to call it right now. And from what I can tell, that's just a realization that we got to stop spamming people both on the sales and the marketing side. So two pieces here. Again, I think it depends on what you're selling. But if you're selling to, you know, mid-market and above, right, you know, the account-based approach is a very valid approach where sales and marketing work together to come up with a strategy around very specific accounts.

And, you know, marketing might do a little bit of a broader message to try to just get, you know, mind share, if you will, where sales is a little bit more of a direct message, but they tie together. The challenge right now is, you know, I see a lot of marketing pretending to be sales and sales reps doing nothing more than marketing. So I'll give you an example, you know, marketing sends out blast emails with a sales rep's name on it. And they say stuff like, hey, I was researching your company and I noticed you'd be a really good fit for our services. And, you know, here's all the wonderful things that we do. And when you read the email, it's, it's obviously not a sales rep because if they did look on your website, you did realize you probably weren't a good fit, but then you have sales rep cranking out template emails as if they're marketing.

And that's even worse in my opinion. So, you know, you have all these sales efficiency tools like, you know, sales loft or outreach IO or, you know, tout app, yes, where like whatever. And, you know, these are supposed to be sales efficiency tools, but sales reps are using them as sales automation tools and they're legitimately just taking template emails and cranking them out. And I fundamentally do not understand what the difference between that and like a Marketo or an Eloqua, you know, pick one of the marketing automation tools. I can actually do that better as a marketer. You know why? Because I'm going to come up with that message and I'm going to split test it and measure the results that a sales rep never will.

So, you know, I beg sales reps right now. I start off most of my trainings and presentations with this whole death of the average sales rep routine, which is really about, you know, the, and I say average for a reason, you know, the reps who are going to be blasting out template emails, making generic cold calls, you know, asking, you know, generic qualification questions and pressing play on their demos. Like that's, there's no difference between that and marketing. And therefore I have no idea why we're getting paid to do what we do. Just one final point to make. And I think this, this hopefully will resonate with everybody who's listening to this is, you know, I follow this guy, Gary Vaynerchuk, who's, who's pretty crazy, but he's top of his game when it comes to branding and social and all that other stuff.

And one of the things he said is, you know, everybody talks about content, right? Content is King. Content is King. He said, fine. If content is King, then context is God. And that really resonated with me because that got me thinking about sales and marketing, right? Marketing is content. Sales is context. If we as sales professionals are not putting any context around our content, then again, we're no different than marketing. And I have no idea why we're getting paid to do what we do. So that, that right there is how I believe that sales and marketing should work together is that marketing should come up with relevant, good content that sales then uses to engage with the clients and puts their context around it to show why it's valuable to that, that account or why they're reaching out to that account for what reason.

Hey there, Adam from Intercom here. We'll be back with LB and John Barrows in just a moment, but I wanted to quickly tell you about Intercom's new live chat solution for sales teams. This collection of 15 new features makes Intercom the quickest way to generate more leads from your website and then turn more of those folks into customers at scale. You can learn more about what we built at intercom.com forward slash live dash chat. Switching gears a bit. A lot of the folks listening to this podcast are earlier stage startups who might have been able to get by on word of mouth very early in sort of their revenue trajectory. What's your view on when a startup needs to bring in a dedicated salesperson or team and why?

It's a great question. You know, I was a startup founder and, you know, we had no money, no funding. So it's not even like I could go out there and just blow a bunch of cash and try a few things. It was, you know, every dollar we spent was important. So I think the, you know, I talked a while ago about the, what I call the founder's dilemma and it's where it's the perception of sales and that a lot of it comes with the engineering mindset. Now, mind you, I was in my first company, I was one sales guy within 50 engineers. So I'm very well aware of, of working with engineers in a different way. And, but I see a lot of engineering founders, for instance, they start a company and to your point, word of mouth, right?

And it's funny because everybody says, you know, oh, I'm not in sales when everybody's in sales. I could take the most technical person on the planet who doesn't have any customer interaction at all, who you would never think was, was a salesperson, but then you put them in a scenario where they start talking about something that they did, like they developed, you know, if you ever talked to an engineer about something they created, like they literally light up like a Christmas tree. They're like, oh yeah, check out this thing and whatever. And right there, they're selling, whether they look at it that way or not, because somebody told me this once a long time ago, which I thought was great, which is a sales is the transfer of enthusiasm, right?

Is that I believe that strongly in what I do that, you know, I'm transferring my enthusiasm and that's what engineers tend to do, right? So founders inherently, they, they developed their product, right? Or their service or whatever it is. So what do they do? The first thing they do is they go out and talk to friends, families, and fools, right? So people in their circle and they're explaining what they're developing to a rather friendly audience, if you will. And so they're inherently going to get positive feedback from that, right? Because it's not, again, friendly audience plus their passion equals, wow, yeah, that's really interesting. And so their first few customers, they're like, oh yeah, this is great.

And there's this perception that, well, sales is kind of easy, right? Because this product's great. People give me good feedback for it. So now let me hire a sales rep and just go, right? Did you go? Would you sell it? And inherently they bring in a sales rep who doesn't believe in the company as much as the founder does, that is really just trying to sell and can't transfer the enthusiasm. And there's no process around it. And so they inherently fail. And then, you know, kind of founders look and say, oh, sales reps are such a pain in the ass. I hate sales. I can't figure out sales. And it's this, you know, and then let me try marketing. And then they'll dump a bunch of money into inbound marketing.

And then they'll realize they need sales anyways. And it's just this mess as it tries to grow. So my answer to your question as far as when should you bring in sales, I think it's after the founder goes out and takes a very thoughtful approach to who they're selling, who their target audience is, at least, you know, get a good understanding of what that ideal customer profile looks like. And then bringing somebody along to help them, you know, at least outlining somewhat of a sales process, even though they might not know how to do it. But, you know, what are the questions that you need to ask to somebody? You know, first of all, back up. What's the ideal customer profile look like? OK, who's the persona within this that buys what we do?

You know, is it a CIO? Is it a CFO? Is it a director of whatever? You know, is this a bottom up sale or a top down sale? And how long would a sale take? You know, how many meetings do you have to have with these people? You know, what are their common objections? Who's the competition out there? You don't have to be all that detailed with that stuff, but I think you have to have some type of an understanding of that before you can put somebody in a position to be successful in doing it. And then when you bring somebody on board, you know, the question is, do you bring in a senior sales rep who's been there, done that? And, you know, I'll tell you right now, it's rare for a startup to find that perfect senior executive sales rep that they can, A, afford, or B, is going to be able to come in and execute, right?

Because usually that's what most small businesses need or startups need is, yeah, big theory and big strategy, great, thanks, but, you know, we need to sell. So I personally like finding that, you know, and if you would ask me to go back to my startup days and say, what's the profile of the sales rep that I want to bring on board without a ton of money, it's usually that 24 to 28, nine-year-old kid who's already gone through sales training like at a bigger company, maybe like a sales force or something like that and has, you know, but wants to move a little bit faster and has that entrepreneurial spirit and you can give them a little bit of structure. You can bring them along with you to the meetings, right?

So that the CEO or whoever would be selling and the sales rep would be there learning and then eventually that sales rep is, you know, going to make cold calls and set the CEO up on meetings and learn a little bit more and then grow into somebody who could take over those meetings and then ideally grow into a director or manager, you know, as the company scales. That would be my best case scenario approach. But again, that's coming from somebody that, you know, we didn't have any money. We didn't have multi-millions in funding. If you have tons of funding out there, then, you know, go get that senior, you know, more experienced sales executive who's been there, done that, has a process to implement and have them run the show and tell you what to do.

But the one thing I will beg of any organization, and I say this not because it's my industry, not because it's my profession, but you have to have a sales culture. You cannot look at sales as a necessary evil. It will not be successful. I know too many companies that have like an engineer driven, they think their product is so awesome. And I will tell you right now, ask founder after founder, go ask VC company after VC company. Companies do not fail because their product sucks. They don't fail because they, you know, it's not, not the right mix. They fail because they can't sell it. Like the majority of companies that I come across have good products. They have a good market fit. They have good people on their team, but they can't sell it for shit.

And, and, and that is what fails. So if you don't have a top down culture as it relates to sales of, look, we respect sales. We, we know that sales is what drives us as a business, you know, instead you look at it as this, Oh God, you know, we have to have sales and let's put them in that other room while we do our cool fun stuff over here on the engineering side, you'll fail miserably. So that, that would be my biggest recommendation is, is respect, uh, and have that culture that respects sales and, and, and everybody supports it. You know, obviously sales has to support everybody else too, but if, if sales isn't supported from the top down, it doesn't tend to work very well. Yep, absolutely.

It's so, so important that, uh, there's mutual respect across R and D and go-to market functions, uh, in order to make a culture and a company work. Couldn't agree more. Last question for you, John, uh, you mentioned, you know, hiring in those first couple of sales folks, you kind of mentioned the experience level you look for. What are some of the most intangible elements or characteristics that you look for in top sales folks? Yeah, I'll tell you the, the passion, uh, passion and work ethic. Those are two things you cannot train. The number one characteristic I look for, and I learned this from Jack Welsh. So I, I, um, I worked for Jack Welsh, the GE Jack Welsh for a couple of months to get his online MBA program off the ground.

And when I had started my first company way back in the day, you know, Jack came to Boston to do one of his conferences and his conferences, the way he does it, he's just a pure Q and a, right? So there was about a thousand people in this seminar that he was doing and, and, you know, it was just Q and a. So I stood up and I asked him and, and at the time my company, we were 50 employees and I was kind of frustrated because I stood up and I said, Jack, look, you talk a lot about passion and all this other stuff. And, you know, I got a question for you because when we were five people starting this company, like we were all super passionate, right? And it was like, all right, everybody's on the same page.

And, you know, 20 people, yep. Everybody's still crushing it and super passionate, you know, 30, 40. And, you know, and I got, we kind of got to 50 people and I said, you know, now at around like the 51st person that we're bringing in, it just doesn't seem that they have the same passion that, that we do for the business. And I said, so how do you instill? And this was my question. And I was, you know, 25 years old when I asked this, I said, you know, how do you instill your passion on somebody else? And in front of a thousand people, you know, he told me I basically was an idiot. He was like, no, he's like, you can't do that. He's like, you're looking at it all wrong. He goes, you can't instill your passion on somebody else.

You have to hire passion. And that right there flipped my, my, my hiring persona upside down. Cause now instead of hiring for skills and cause I can teach skill, I can teach technique. I can teach, I can teach product knowledge. I can teach all that stuff to somebody who's willing to learn, but I can't teach drive. I can't teach passion. I can't teach, you know, grit. You know, sales is a brutal profession. You literally get told no 99 times and you have to keep coming back asking for more. So you can get that one that says yes in the hundred. And if you don't have somebody that has that drive and that passion for, for what you do, which is why, you know, for instance, one of my favorite interview questions is what are you passionate about?

And it's not because by the way, I don't care what you're passionate about. It's just, I care how you describe what you're passionate about. For instance, you know, if I asked you that question, say, what are you passionate about? You're like, Oh, I really like customers and I really want to do right by them and, you know, make sure our products a good fit and whatever. Or you say, Holy crap, Tom, like, did you see what happened on Thursday night with the Patriots? Like they got absolutely smoked. I'm rip roaring pissed off, but I think it's a good thing because you know what? They needed to get knocked down a notch here. And I still think they're going to go 17 and one this year and smoke it and put six on the ring and Brady's going to get out of here.

Like if you start, I don't care if football had nothing to do with what you and I were talking about. If you described it in a passionate way, that means you have some sort of fire in you. And now my job as a leader is to try to take that passion and connect it to my business so that you could bring a fraction of that to the table when you come work for me. So, you know, that, and then the last one is obviously coachability. Like you need somebody who is coachable. If you're hiring, you know, a leader should still be coachable, but if you're hiring somebody who's, who you're, you know, maybe a little bit lower on the totem pole than a VP or something like that, you got to have somebody who's open and willing and wants feedback.

I think a lot of people are a little bit too sensitive these days. And, you know, when they get feedback, they clam up and they're like, Oh, you know, and get really sensitive about it. I, you know, you got to have somebody with a thick skin and who wants feedback so that they can get better. So those are the things I'd look for. John, I was just waiting for the Boston to come out on the American football theme, but great, great insights. You hit on some of the most important intangibles for sales reps. Thank you. This has been amazing. So appreciative of the time. Where can our listeners go out to find more about your work and thinking generally on software sales? Yeah, I appreciate it. My website has almost everything.

So my website's jbarrows. So the letter jbarrows.com on there, I have a resource library that has a ton of free stuff, videos, blogs, all that stuff. And again, I try to focus not just on sales. This is, you know, business and I take a much more structured approach than most to sales in the sense that I focus on the science than the art. So even engineers tend to resonate with a lot of the stuff that I put out there. And then you can hit me up on any of the social channels like LinkedIn or, you know, my Twitter, Snapchat and Instagram handle is all John M as in Michael Barrows, all one word. And I tend to, you know, answer whatever questions people have through any of those channels. Fantastic.

Thanks again, John. All right. Thanks, I'll be. You've been listening to the Inside Intercom podcast. For more episodes, visit soundcloud.com slash intercom. If you'd like to subscribe, search for Inside Intercom in iTunes or Stitcher. And for even more great content, check out blog.intercom.com.