Encore - Kevin Micalizzi from Quotable

So, John, one of the things I've been dying to ask you is, with all the technology changes and especially with AI, how has that changed the prospecting world? It's changing it drastically I think, you know, I think the tools and so it was technology came out where it would help with cadence tools, right, where it was like, okay, it helped me automate the process of reaching out to people, which was good, but unfortunately I think a lot of these tools that reps are using that are supposed to be sales efficiency tools are being used as sales automation tools, which is removing the need for a sales rep because if you think about any one of the tools that are out there, name one of them, you know, the outreach, the sales office, whatever, they're supposed to be efficiency, but if all reps are doing is putting template emails in there and cranking out templates, what's the difference between Pardot and, you know, the marketing automation tools?

So I think it's actually making reps lazy with this technology, which is actually a huge danger, because now with the advent of artificial intelligence, what you're seeing is, and we were just having this conversation, you know, I had this, these two kids that came out of Salesforce and they started a company called Shakespeare and it's an artificial intelligence thing and they were like, John, check out this email. And it's this email that I've been training for 10 years, by the way, I've been training, it's called the YUI, you know, email, Jeff Hoffman came out, it was fantastic. And you know what, three or four years ago, it really worked well because it was all about going on somebody's website, doing research and being thoughtful with the connection, short, sweet, to the point, sending it to an executive.

And it stood out compared to all the template crap that was going out there, but they sent me an email. And I was like, all right, fine, let me see this artificial intelligence thing. I'm not really bought into it, but whatever. And they sent me an example and I was like, the email was so customized and so well written that my immediate response to them was there was no human involvement in this. And their response was no human involvement other than us pointing that the tool at the article we wanted them to use. And it took 70 seconds to write the email. And I'm sitting there, I honestly, I don't think I could have written a better email. And I've been doing, I've been training this for 10 years.

And so now that's, and that's here. That's not some futuristic thing. Like I saw it, they sent it to me. You can actually go online right now, download it and use it yourself. So if that's here already and you add, you know, the fact that you now have these cadence tools that can automate a sequence of contacts, including social stuff like retweet, you know, follow you on Twitter, hit you up on LinkedIn, those type of things. So you have that and then you add this artificial intelligence piece to it that can go put context around this stuff and it's not just template emails. You got to ask yourselves at this point, you know, specifically the SDR role, what, what's the value of that SDR role going to be in the future if technology is going to be able to do all of it.

And so I think that's why I think SDRs, and I'm going to have an interesting conversation with Trish Bertuzzi about this after this, which is, you know, what's her vision of where SDRs are going? Because Jamie Shanks put out an article recently, so is the SDR role killing sales? And the premise was, you know, it used to be you did SDR, BDR, and then you moved into a closing role, right, like an AE role. But now what's happening is kids get to be an SDR and then they get to a certain level and it's either SDR manager or BDR, or I'm sorry, or AE, closing role. Now, if you're 25 years old and you get that opportunity to be a manager or a field sales rep, what are you more proud to call home and tell mom about?

Right. I'm a manager. Hey, mom, look, I'm a manager. So all these kids are taking this SDR. But what's happening is they're not rounding out their skills as sales reps. And really the front end of the sales process isn't truly sales. It's process-oriented type stuff. It's, you know, looking for the needle in the haystack. Right. You've got to learn how to sell, go through the sales cycle, negotiate, close in order to really be a true sales professional. And so I actually think that Jamie's right. And I think the SDR role is actually going to become its own profession. It's no, I don't think it's going to be a stepping stone anymore. I think it's going to be SDRs are going to, but it's not going to be sales.

It's going to be more operations, marketing type stuff that is lead gen that hands it over to sales reps. But then the question is, is how do we develop the sales rep now? Right. Because the SDR role was the preface to get to the next level. Right. And that's predictable revenue. You know what I mean? But I, you know, when, when I was, you know, I'm 41. So, you know, when I was really, this was before predictable revenue when I came into sales, it was go. It's like, here's your territory, go. And I had to prospect network, meet, close everything. So my development into a rounded sales rep was, was expedited. Right. Now the danger of that back in the day was a lot more people got out of sales a lot faster because they got in there.

Like, I can't do all this stuff. This is crazy. Like I'm out of here. Right. But, but, and so now it's a little bit easier entree into sales, but I also think it's not, we're not really exposing kids to sales really until later on in the sales process. Or later on in their careers. So it, it's interesting right now to me because I think the ones who are good at operational stuff and all these kids who are coming out of school, the millennials and that type of thing, they're good with technology. They're good with video games. I think the, there was a stat that said by the time kids graduate college these days, they'll do well over 10,000 hours of video game stuff. So with gamification, with all these different things, like you have people that have skills to play, you know, to play this game, to get meetings, to then have other people go on them.

So I do think it's going to become a profession. Um, but I just think that people need to pay attention. Um, because if they're just right now going through the motions of clicking template emails, pushing cadences and not putting any thought into it, or not analyzing the results and tweaking it based on the feedback, then they're just going to get, what they're doing is they're training these tools to replace them eventually. Right. And I think there's going to be a huge group of sales professionals that are going to be looking for jobs here in the next three, four years. So, so technology's changing, the SDR role is changing. Mm-hmm. But with the whole shift to, to more account focused selling, like how do you see prospecting changing even more?

Yeah, I mean, I think the, it's interesting because a lot of people talk about account base and, and just to put some context around this, account base is really only relevant in mid market and enterprise. It's not relevant in SMB. It's just not. I mean, I'd like it to be, and I think maybe technology will help because I think technology will help us do mass appeal. But really when we're coming to a enterprise is where account base makes sense because that's dedicating the resources as a team. It's changing. I like it because what it is, is account base market, account base selling. I roll my eyes at account base selling because that's been around forever. Target account, Taz, Miller, Hyman, like those companies have been around for years.

That's account base selling. Account base marketing is a, my opinion here, and I might piss off some marketers here. My background's marketing by the way. It's my degree. Account base marketing is a, I think a realization from marketing that blasting out millions of emails just doesn't work anymore. You know what I mean? It's, it's kind of them waving the white flag going, okay, we flooded the market with way too much content. We played that little numbers game there for a while and now we've pissed a lot of people off. We should probably start focusing more about what people care about, which I think is great. So I, you know, my, my thought process on where I think account base marketing will be going is actually at the alignment.

It's, I talk a lot about the alignment between sales and marketing. Um, you know, with all this stuff that I graduated 20 years ago, uh, in marketing, I heard about the divide between sales and marketing back then. It's just as big now as same problems. There's no technologies that really fixed it. Um, but I think the, the idea of with account base marketing, you now have this team of people that go into an account and they thought, right? So think about you have like a BDR or two BDRs to one AE, right? And that's their, they, Hey, we're going after this group. And now you have marketing giving that content. There's a little bit of a missing piece there in my opinion that, that is, that is the feedback loop between sales and marketing.

So actually my opinion, I, I call it kind of a pod approach where I think it'd be great to have like a marketing intern or like a really low level mark first year marketing person team up with a pod of BDRs and AEs to go after an account based strategy and then have that marketing person do the one run, run the reports, uh, listen to the sales team about what they actually need and then translate that back to the big marketing team and say, Hey, my team needs this and be the conduit between the two and, and run the reports, do the analytics that the sales team will never do. Um, and I think that'll, that would be a really nice little account based true account based approach with genuinely tailored content for the right people.

Um, and that's the human answer to it. Right. The other answer to it is artificial intelligence. I think artificial intelligence is going to penetrate account based. I mean, you guys just launched that sales push. Just launched it, right? The account based AI with Einstein. Um, I'm very curious about how that's work. You know how that's going to work. And I actually reached out to the, the, the team that I work with. I'm like, look, I need to learn Einstein's account based because I want to integrate that into my training with the sales reps, right? Cause I don't want to be training, you know, old school techniques for a company that's selling new school stuff without using the new school stuff.

And so I'm, I'm, I'm personally fascinated with where account based is going and I'm fascinated with what artificial intelligence is going to do it because it'll just give us better. Hopefully it'll give us better insights. I mean, I think the, the challenge, if you look at, uh, IBM Watson and all these different AIs is, you know, everybody's all afraid that they're going to take, yeah, they're going to take away a lot of the mundane crap job or the, the, but lawyers, uh, um, uh, healthcare, it's not going to take away the doctor. What it's going to do is empower the doctor to have a conversation with the person. So instead of the, the doctor being the one to try to figure out, okay, let me look at this entire person's history.

Let me look at this person's, um, okay, then what are all the drugs out there that might be better fit and which ones? And I'm not, I don't know that. Well, with a click of a button, Watson will be like, no, no, no, no, no, no, no. Here's their whole history. Here's all the drugs that are out there. Here's the perfect mix. And then the doctor is going to be able to use that information to then communicate with the patient. I look at the same thing for sales reps. Sales reps are going to be artificial intelligence is going to be able to give us all this really accurate, insightful, valuable information, but it's still going to be on the on the sales rep to, to translate that to the customer, to, to help guide them through the process, to, to make those decisions.

Um, so that's why I think it's, we're in a pretty cool spot right now, but if, if you're not paying attention, you're just going to get run over. And so I think the, the ones, the reps that are paying attention and, and leveraging the tools are going to be the ones that are, are going to survive. The ones that are using the tools just to automate what they're doing are effectively teaching the machines to take over their jobs. Right. Understood. So, so what would you suggest for sales leaders, um, what they, what should sales leaders be doing right now to, to either get ready for or, or catch up with, with, uh, where things are going? Yeah. I mean, sales leaders, uh, it's a, it's a, I think they need to leverage their team, um, to, to be able to pay attention.

So, uh, you know, the one thing that technology is not going to be able to address is culture and a culture of learning and a culture of evolution. Okay. So I think sales leaders right now should be empowering their sales teams to play around with all the tools, to leverage all the tools and then, but, but then provide feedback and really get, uh, very, uh, data focused on what's working and what's not working. And don't be afraid of it, right? Use it. Use it. I mean, you can either fight it or you can leverage it. Right. Uh, you know, but it's happening, you know, every industry is getting disrupted right now. Uh, I use the dummy example of Uber, you know, do you think that taxi industry had any idea that Uber was coming?

No. And now they're trying to fight it through legal and that's a loser's battle. I mean, they're doing okay here in New York, but that's only cause there's a trillion taxis here in New York. But I mean, why not? And there are, and finally some taxi companies have come around to it is like, okay, well, Hey Uber, can we be on your app so we can have the Uber taxi? Okay. Let's, let's leverage that technology as opposed to pretend like it's not like we can fight it. You can't fight it. You're not going to be able to fight artificial intelligence. You're not going to be. So you better be able to figure out a way to use it. And that's kind of where I feel a little bit more comfortable with, you know, I was freaking out a little while ago about the machines are here.

We're all screwed. I don't know what we're like, what are we going to do? And somebody was like, calm down. Everybody talks about artificial intelligence as it compared to a human intelligence. He's like, but you combine them. So think of like a human with like an artificial intelligence thing plugged in where I'm still a human, but now I have access to all this insight and information that artificial intelligence give me. Now you got, and I, and I always use this example of Iron Man, you know, the Iron Man example of, you know, you got Tony plus the suit and you can go out there and whoop some past, if it's just Tony, he's in trouble. If it's just the suit and it's a drone, you can't really control it.

So, but you got the best of those both worlds. So my, my feedback to leadership would be to embrace it all. But, but try to, you know, don't go crazy with all the different tools. I think that's one of the other things right now. I'm seeing a lot of fatigue, technology fatigue. It's like we've 8 million different technologies and every single reps using something different. Standardize on something, play around with it for a while, six months, have everybody on the team using it and, and providing feedback. And then six months in analyze the results, see what's working, see if it, then maybe try something different. So it's kind of that, one of the things I tell kids all the time, you know, science, art, sales, treat it more as a science.

The number one recommendation I give to anybody right now is split test everything you do. Maybe split test. Cause that way you can start to, you know, if you have that mentality, you can start to figure things out faster. It's like, okay, this just came out. I'm trying to deal with this objection, I'm trying to deal with this gatekeeper, whatever. Let me come up with two different approaches, try it 10 times this way, 10 times that way. And now I can iterate, you know what I mean? I'm going to use this technology for this. I'm going to use this, which one does a better job. All right, we're going to go in on this one instead of that one. So, you know, it's, it's, it's a conscious effort to, to leverage, but learn from the technology that I would suggest to sales leaders right now.

And if you can be iron man, be iron man, if you can be, if anybody else can be iron man, man, put me on the list. I want to be Tony Stark. I have one more question for you. What is the best sales advice either you've received or you feel you have to pass on? The split testing thing is mine. The one I would pass on, that I would like to pass on to people is, you know, is, is split test everything you do again. Cause it's a way you can start to figure things out faster. I did too much act. We all do the activities. So the sales reps do a lot of activities, but the problem is, is we rarely learn from those activities. So I really recommend being very thoughtful with your approach to things and structure stuff.

They're not, not script things out, but structure it and say, okay, I'm going to consciously try to figure this thing out and then, you know, put together a process, figure out where the process is not strong, come up with a solution for that piece of it, come up with two solutions for it, try it 10 times this way, 10 times that way. So that way you can start to be conscious about your development. You know, I think the, the best advice I got in sales, you know, I got a lot, but it was, it was to, I'll go back to this one, which is just believe in what you do. I mean, I think that's the, the, the essence of sales is, is helping people and believing that what you have actually makes a difference because then it's not sales.

That's why I talked to a lot of people like, I'm not in sales. Yeah, you are. Yeah, you are. Like engineers, you're, you're, you're in sales. But well, I could never sell anything. Okay. What, what are you working on right now? What's, what's your, what's the new technology thing that you've made or developed? And then all of a sudden you see them light up and they get very passionate about what they do. And somebody told me this once that sales is the transfer of enthusiasm, which I love because, because I believe that strongly in what I do that if you even kind of come close to fit in the mold, ooh, my job is just to transfer a little bit of my enthusiasm over to you. So it's, it's, if you don't believe it, I mean, the, the reason sales reps get a bad rap is because there's a ton of sales reps out there selling stuff they don't believe in.

Right. And so they're just doing it for a commission check. They're just doing it to get their, you know, quota or whatever it is. And I beg those sales reps to get out of this profession. I beg them to. Um, but if you believe in it, man, I'm not saying sales is easy, but who is it easier? So. Excellent. Cool. Awesome. Thank you. No problem. Thank you. Thanks guys. Cool. All right. Yep.