Encore: Rainmaker2017

Good morning everybody. Thanks for coming in today. Who all went out to the bar crawl last night? I did. I know you did. Everybody know you did, Frank. But everybody. Oh, cool. But you guys stopped by SDK. Yeah, thanks for coming out. I actually agreed to or decided to host that bar crawl last night before I knew what time I was hosting or the time I was presenting this morning. When I found out I had the 8 o'clock slot, I was like, fantastic. I'm going to get everybody hammered drunk and then have to deal with the hangovers in the morning, including my own. Needless to say, we're going to kind of ease into this morning a little bit here. We're not going to be too loud. I'm going to kind of set things up here for my boy Steve Richard and then hand you over to Jacko.

He'll be the one who wakes you up a little bit later. But with that, I want to talk today about the missing link between sales and marketing. And for those of you who don't know me, I'm John Barrows. I do sales training for companies like LinkedIn, Salesforce, Box, Dropbox, all these cool companies. And I always say to people, I'm not a trainer. I'm just a sales guy that came across some pretty good stuff and I happen to be all right sharing it with people. Because right now, if you're not staying up to date on what's happening, if you're not on the front lines right now, you're going to get passed up real quick. I mean, things are moving so fast right now with all the different tools, all the different technologies.

It's ridiculous. I mean, y'all paying attention to what's happening to artificial intelligence right now? That stuff's bananas. I mean, seriously. So IBM Watson's a client of mine. All right. You know how IBM Watson's a client of mine? I wrote a blog post about him. No joke. Early 2016, I wrote a blog post about my predictions of what's going to happen in 2016, whatever it is. And I wrote, you know, about how artificial intelligence is going to start to creep into our world in sales. And all I wrote, decent sized blog posts. And all I wrote, one line in that, I said, have you been watching those IBM Watson commercials? That thing's getting scary smart. That's all I said, right? One line. I posted on LinkedIn.

Less than 30 seconds later, I had an email in my inbox from a VP of sales over at IBM Watson saying, hey, John, I'd like to talk to you about your sales training. I was like, ooh, okay. I'm like, all right. I get it. You're listening. All right. Snowden told us. But so I'm like, all right. And so he said, hey, could you coordinate your schedule with my assistant, Sarah? I was like, all right, cool. So he gave me Sarah's email address. And I still use Outlook. So I took a screenshot of my email and I sent it out to Sarah in Outlook because I want to be the dirtbag sales guy. Oh, your VP told me to talk to you. So I sort of like, look, you know, he told me to talk to you. And I use, you know, those calendar sharing tools.

You know, I use time trades. So I sent her my link. I was like, hey, could you just, you know, pick a time on the calendar that works for Kevin? And she hits me back almost immediately. Sorry, John, I'm not in a position right now where I can click on links or attachments. Could you please just suggest some times? I was like, well, that's kind of weird. Like, where are you that you can't click on a link or an attachment? Whatever. And so I just, you know, I suggested some times, whatever. And she hits me back. And long story short, it took me three emails back and forth with Sarah to realize that Sarah wasn't an actual human being. She was a fully automated, artificially intelligent assistant.

And by the way, the only reason I realized it because it was IBM Watson. If it wasn't Watson, I would have been like, oh, hey, what's up, Sarah? So I get on the phone with Kevin. I was like, Kevin, thanks for reaching out, man. I appreciate it. Before we get started here, I got a question for you. Who's Sarah? And he was like, oh, she's my assistant. I said, is Sarah real? He goes, it depends on what your definition of real is. I was like, ooh. I'm like, all right. I'm like, part of me was like, that's super cool. But part of me is like, holy shit. Like, so, so that's why, like, if you, like I said, if you're not paying attention, if you're not staying on the front lines about what's happening right now, you're going to get passed up fast.

So that's why I love sales. Sales is my passion. Training is just a vehicle, right? So, so today I'm going to, I'm going to do a little bit of training. Hopefully you walk away with something you can do today, right? Because everybody's talking about these predictions, right? About their predictions of where things are going. I don't think anybody has a clue. I honestly, I don't think anybody has a clue where things are going, okay? It's all this and that. You don't know. Tomorrow something could shift in this market. They could disrupt everything, okay? And so, but there's things that we can do today without technology, with all that other stuff. And so that's what my hope today is that you all can walk away with something that you can do without having to invest in one more piece of technology or some new huge sales process to, to, to make an impact and to help connect that sales and marketing divide that is still there.

I, it's still there. Like I, I've been selling for 20 years. My degree's in marketing. That was my first degree, right? And I've been selling for 20 years and I've been hearing about the, the, the divide between sales and marketing for 20 years. And it's like funny, you know, when Craig was sitting up here yesterday, when they were talking about, Hey, what pisses you off about, you know, sales and stuff like that with Ralph and Doug. Um, and what he says, Oh, nothing, no, everything's great. But, but what he said was, you know, things are still broken. And, you know, he, he took the optimistic view of it. He was like, you know, it means there's a lot of opportunity there, but it's true. Like things are still broken.

And so, um, there's, but like I said, there's some stuff that we can do here. All right. So with that, I want to kind of talk about how we got to where we are right now and then what we can do about it. And it doesn't matter by the way, because I know that we got a diverse crowd here. We got, you know, small companies, big companies, we got individual contributors, we got marketers, we got sales reps here. And so hopefully this is something that everybody can do, um, to, like I said, move the dial, right? Cause how we got to where we are. I mean, if you look at like inside sales, obviously inside sales over the past 10 years has come on strong, right? It's no longer this nice little, yeah. Okay.

It's kind of annoying little reps we need to cultivate and to build into our AEs, right? No, these are like, this is a big part of most organizations and as it should be. And, you know, with that influx of inside sales, whether it's SDRs or BDRs or whatever, you know, now all of a sudden they're out there just flooding the marketplace. Okay. Like, and you know, I heard about phone, you know, people called phone cocoa coins dead. I'm so sick of that. But, um, it's, I mean, yeah, blasting through a list of calls and making generic cocoa, that's dead. And I don't think that was ever alive though, right? It's the same thing with blasting out template emails. I don't understand why people, well, I don't understand why sales reps blast out template emails, by the way.

If you do me a favor, if your team is blasting out template emails, please, you know, personalization, personalization at scale, like that's the key here. But all these sales, all these sales efficiency tools, everybody's talking about, everybody's using the sales automation tools and it's really pissing me off. I actually, I'm going to, I usually scare a lot of the SDRs that I train because I walk in, I'm like, if I was a, if somebody hired me as a VP of sales right now and said, Hey John, you know, you're coming in and, um, you know, what's your first job? Decent sized organization. The first thing I would do it, I was like, Hey, can I see all the SDR emails for a second? I see all of them.

I just want to see every single one of them. And if they were all template, you know, just template emails, I'd be like, you know what, I'm going to save this company a whole boatload of money. I'm going to fire every single one of the SDRs in here. I'm going to optimize the hell out of Marketo or Pardart or whatever it is. And we're going to go roll with this. All right. Cause what's the point? Seriously, what's the point? It's the same thing with making cold calls and generic cold calls. So, so, but the ones who do it right, the ones who use these tools as efficiency tools are the ones that are winning, the ones that are cracking through the noise, right? But the thing is, is they're, they're, they're, they're flooding the marketplace because there's so many of them right now.

And phone is, I understand why phone has, um, stopped being as effective. Um, but I will tell you, it is still part of the puzzle here. Okay. I'm going to talk about this and it's going to be a nice transition to Steve, who's going to talk about this later as well. Um, but you know, email, email is obviously taken over and then there's the whole social thing, right? Everybody's kind of tweeting and posting stuff. And you got inside sales who are doing brand building, not only sharing content out there, but also building their own personal brands. Like if you're paying attention to Morgan, who was up here yesterday, that kid's crushing it, you know, as an SDR, talk about brand building. And it's about, you know, putting context around that content you're sharing out there.

You guys call it, you guys follow Gary V, right? You saw him. If you were here last year, you saw Gary V, right? I love him. He's a total crack. But, um, one of the things he says in there, which I genuinely, one of the things he really said that got my attention was he said that, um, every time everybody, everybody talks about content, right? Content is king. Content is king. Content is king. He said, all right, fine. If content is king, then context is God. And that got me thinking about sales versus marketing, right? Marketing is content. Sales is context. If you are not putting any context around your content, then we're no different than marketing. And I have no idea why we're getting paid to do what we do.

I really don't. It's like, it drives me nuts when people just retweet stuff. Like, I hit a really good 39-page e-book here. You know how many 39-page e-books I have? Anybody got a things-to-read folder? I got a things-to-read folder. It's the largest folder in my entire inbox. I haven't read a damn thing in there, right? It's like, I don't need a 39-page, but if you were to take a 39-page e-book here, if you're a VP of sales in the SaaS industry trying to integrate social selling into your routine, if you take a look at pages 15 to 22, that's really where the core content here, and this is why you should pay attention to it. It's like, ooh, all right, cool. Or webinars. You know how many webinars I sign up for?

I sign up for hundreds of webinars. You know how many I attend? Zero. You know why? Because I know right afterwards, I'm going to get that email that says, saw you missed the webinar, here's the link, and it's going to go in my things-to-read folder, and I'm never going to look at it again, right? It's funny because it's true, but if a rep would ever, ever, ever, ever, ever take that webinar and say, hey, John, I saw you sign up for that webinar, and I noticed you missed it. Based on what I know about you, if you start listening to this webinar around minute 22 and go from minute 22 to 35, that's really where they talk about the core value of this webinar, I immediately start looking at you differently.

Immediately start looking at you differently. Like context, content. Demos. I hate demos. I hate demos. You know why? Because every demo is exactly the same. Every demo is exactly the same. I go through probably four or five demos on a weekly basis, right? Because I'm not a good lead for anybody. I'm a pain in the ass. I'm a one-man show, but I work with some decent clients, right? So a lot of these sales efficiency tools want to help get me to sell their stuff. So anyways, I go through these demos, and every single one is exactly the same. They start off, well, thanks, John. Is this still a good time? By the way, don't ask that question, right? If I pick up the phone for a meeting that is scheduled, do not ask me, why would you give me that out?

It's like, you know what? I got a little bathroom right now. You know what? Why don't we reschedule this, right? But they'll say, is this still a good time? Okay. Well, John, I've got about a 30 minute demo here that I'd like to go through with you here. And if you have any questions as we go through it, just let me know, okay? And then they, and then they just drone through it, right? And go through every slide like they were, you know, bootcamp and got their badge for. And then all of a sudden, and they pause intermittently throughout, and they go, does that make sense? Does that make sense? Does that, you know, ask that question, right? I used to ask that question all the time. Anybody ever said no to that question?

By the way, everybody's like, shit, man, I have no idea what you just said there. Like, and by the way, if they say yes, does that tell you whether or not that made sense? No, right? And then at the end, they go, so thank you very much for your time. And do you have any questions? And then, and then, and then what's the parting gift our clients give us at the end of one of those canned demos, what they always say at the end? Yeah, it looks interesting. You know, why don't you send me some information and follow me a couple weeks, all right? Or by the way, here's a word, because I like training in nuggets and stuff like that. Here's a word. If you ever hear this word after the one, the end of one of your demos, you know, you've done a miserable job and it's the word digest.

You ever get that, right? Like at the end, you're like, Ooh, wow, that was really impressive. You know, I'm gonna need a little time to digest what you just told me there. If you ever hear that word, stop and apologize to the person that you just wasted their time. If they walk out of that meeting more confused than they were walking into that meeting, you have done a miserable job. As a sales rep, all right? It is our job to help them digest the information. All right? That context. So, so what you do instead of going through, you know, the drone and through the presentation, I sat through Doug's presentation yesterday. It was fantastic about how you present, right? Almost every corporate slide deck's exactly the same.

It starts with the, the three slides are always exactly the same. It's the company backgrounds, uh, their awards and their history and their client list. Well, and they start with, Oh, we were founded in June of 2000 and they go through and drone through it. Well, flip that over and start with them, right? I mean, you start with them, you talk about the challenge and get them thinking about stuff, right? And then take, they take those 30 slides or whatever the hell you're supposed to have there and cut that down to the 10 to 15 that are most relevant to the people that you're talking to, right? So that you can actually have a conversation. So I always start with the first 10 minutes of any presentation.

Hey, what do you want to get out of this? You know, what are your priorities? What are you trying to achieve here? Cool. Because I want to take this. And then as we go through this presentation, by the way, I'm going to pause at certain points and ask for your feedback. So you got to let them know what's coming. And then as you go through and you cut through and you start to highlight, Hey, this is the part of the presentation that actually you spoke about early, what your priority was. And, um, you know, so, and instead of saying, does that make sense? You say, you know, let me ask you, how does that compare to what you do? Could you explain to me how that compares to how you're doing it now?

Could you give me an example? Could you explain to me how you see that fitting into your existing workflow or something like that? Like the, cause the way you explain to me how this fits into your existing workflow or how you, this compares to what you're doing now tells me everything I need to know on whether or not this makes sense. All right. So that context, that's what I'm going to just for the, for the sales reps out there who are just blasting out template emails, going through the motions, asking banned questions, pressing play on demos. I'm begging you, I'm begging you to actually wake up a little bit because you're going to wake up one day. And if you don't wake up a little bit one day and put that context around that content, you're going to get replaced.

You're going to get replaced. Right. And that's where this artificial intelligence, that that's where it's really scary to me. All right. So, but the good news is for those sales reps that are crushing it, inside sales is a fantastic position. It's way more efficient. Right. And that those deal sizes are getting bigger, but you notice, you notice that inside sales are getting bigger and bigger and bigger and bigger because inside sales allowed to sell bigger and bigger and bigger deals. Take it all the way to closure. It's no longer, they just cold call. They're actually closing stuff. Right. And people are willing to pay without actually seeing people more and more and more. So, but that's flooding, right?

That's flooding the marketplace on that end. And then we got content marketing. I mean, content marketing, I mean, talk about a mature market right now. I mean, everything's like, it is the amount of content out there is deafening, deafening, but content market marketing is getting real good at what they do, right? Because it's no longer, they blast out a million emails about what's going on right now. They now know because you just did this and this and this and this. Now you need this information and that information is becoming pretty damn accurate, right? I mean, I don't know, but so I got, I got, I live in Boston. I got an outdoor kitchen. I use it like five times a year. I don't know why I have it, but whatever.

But I got this, whatever. And I got this big, I got this big Vermont casting grill. I love this thing, right? And, but I need a grill cover for it a little while ago. So I go on Google, I type in Vermont casting grill cover. I go to Vermont casting site, I buy my grill cover. I'm all happy about it, right? Whatever. And now every time I log into Google or Facebook, what am I seeing on the right hand side? Yeah, not grill covers. No, no, no. Cause I already got a grill cover and not just general grill accessories. Oh, no, no, no, no, no. Grill accessories from my exact grill. And then they throw a Patriots logo. I want all of it. I'm like, shit, I'll buy that. I didn't even know that was a thing, but yeah, sure.

Right? Whatever. So, and that, that B2C games over, over, over, over, right? B2B game, it's coming upstream fast, right? And, and so again, so now you have inside sales coming up. You have marketing automation and marketing content, you know, content just flooding the marketplace. And what you have is just the client just being like, yeah, like I, like the noise right now is so deafening. It is damn near impossible to crack through it. Okay. I don't know about you guys. I look for anything to delete a voicemail or specifically an email, right? Anything. Like if I have to, if I have to right click on an email to read it, I delete it. If I can tell in the first line of that sentence, if I, like, if I open up the, if your, if your subject line happens to get my attention to get this thing open, that first sentence, if it's not crystal clear that you put some effort into actually doing some homework on me, nope.

No, you know, you know how a lot of times people come out with reports or like Gartner comes out with a study or something like that, say, hey, recent studies say blah, blah, blah, and then it gets customized. I don't even get to that customized part, right? What's the number one thing on the planet everybody loves talking about? What's the biggest problem in sales? We all keep talking, we all love talking about ourselves, right? We love to, we keep talking. They don't care. I'd like to introduce myself to you. I don't care. Leading provider of, please, right? The only thing people care about is themselves. So that's why we have to start with them, right? Because it, and it's also not about that one thing.

I will say the one thing I'm, I'm, I'm really honing in on these days, it's not about the one email. It's not about the one voicemail these days. It's about the contact strategy, all right? It's about the cadence. It's about how you come after somebody with thoughtful, well thought out. I'm asking executives all the time, right? I'm doing a kind of a little soft survey. I'm like, hey, when was the last time a sales rep reached out to you more than once or twice with a thoughtful, customized approach? When was the last time that happened? And no joke, every CEO, every executive that I talked to is like, I can't remember the last time. I can't remember the last time. And I'm like, if somebody does reach out to you more than four or five, six times with a thoughtful, like multi-touch, but also has value for each different thing and not saying the same damn thing over and over again, do you almost after the fourth or fifth one, don't you almost feel obligated to get back to that person?

Almost every executive is like, yes. You know what I mean? If they're, if they take a thoughtful approach, right? But the one thing you don't want to do is just say, you know, the same damn thing over and over and over and over again, right? Like that's what, that's what drives me nuts is that you send maybe one good email and then it's, hey, did you get my first email? Bubbling this one up to the top and here's another one. And then the ultimate breakup email, right? One, two or three, you're stuck under a rock bullshit, right? Whatever. Please stop sending that fucking email, by the way. Please stop sending that breakup email. Drives me nuts. And by the way, well, backtrack. I don't want to rip on it too much.

But that is a point of, of, of the difference between a technique and an approach. Okay. A technique is something that is, is like, if you do it, it's a very specific thing to say. And that, that breakup email that stuck under a rock one, that worked three, four years ago. Okay. Because the first time you get that breakup email, you're like, oh no, I'm not stuck under a rock. You know, haha. But the very next time you get that, you will never respond to it again in your lives. Right. I got a new version of it, by the way, here's another nugget for you. I actually had a couple of people tell me that this one's probably one of the favorite things out of my training, which is kind of sad, but it's cool.

Uh, but it works. You ever have somebody that goes dark on you? Like straight up goes dark on you, right? Well, do this one. After you try to follow up your typical follow up a couple of times, take that same email, keep replying all to it, whatever. And then, um, probably after like four or five emails over the course of a couple of weeks after, and this isn't just after you've sent them information. This is like once you're engaged in the process and whatever, and they just literally disappear on you. Reply on that email one more time, erase the original subject line and just put, did I lose you in the original subject line with a question mark. I got like a 90% response rate on this one. It's crazy.

I don't know why it's 40. It's like 42 for 48 positive response rates on this one. It's bananas. I don't even know why, like it actually came from a really genuine spot with me when I did it. Cause I was like, I was, I was in this sales cycle with this dude. I thought I was really in it and he legit disappears. And I was like, man, I was going to over script some smart sound and email, whatever. And then I just was like, man, did I lose you? I put it in the subject line. He pops me back like five minutes. And he's like, oh no, man, I've been super busy. I'm sorry. I'm like, oh shit. Did I lose you? How about you? Right? I'm like, damn. All right. This thing works. But that's, that's another example of a technique.

Like I'm going to say, did I lose you? Right. And next year I'm going to come back and be like, that's terrible. Stop saying that stupid email. Cause that's a technique. Right. But it's working right now. So go ahead and use it. Um, um, but, but you know, but that's a technique versus an approach where it's like, there's a structure to it. All right. And cause we have to figure out a way to crack through this noise. And that's where account-based is coming from. Right. Account-based, I think whatever you want to call it, account-based sales, account-based marketing, account-based everything, account-based revenue. I don't, whatever the damn new acronym is. I don't give a shit what it is. What it is, is it's a realization that we got to stop mass blasting the marketplace.

That's what it actually is saying. It's like, we got to start paying attention. We have to be customized to our clients and start giving them information that's relevant to them. All right. And so that's, you know, that's why you're hearing all this stuff. And the thing is, is with this approach, you know, and, and take a step back one more time on this one too, just to make sure that people are clear, account-based isn't for everybody. If you're selling to the SMB market, it's not for you. Okay. You know, mid-market, maybe enterprise, definitely. Okay. But you know, if you're, if you, if your territories, you know, the Northeast and you have 7,000 accounts in your territory, you're not doing account-based.

Okay. Like you shouldn't be at least. It's going to take you way too much time. You should have maybe a targeted list of clients that you do that for, but not for everybody. All right. But the problem is, is sales and marketing, although they should be more aligned than ever, there's still a massive divide. There's still a massive divide. It's usually marketing's on one side of the house. They create a bunch of content, throw it over the fence to sales. Sales does or doesn't use it and says, oh, that was crap. The leads are weak or that material is crap. And marketing's like, oh, why? I don't know. I didn't like it. It's like, there's no feedback loop there or anything like that. And this just happens over and over and over again.

And so, you know, how do we fix this, right? There's, there's, there's technologies to do this, right? There's, there's approaches and all this other stuff. But I, the way I look at it is I, I go old school. I want to go old school with, with this whole AIDA, right? You all seen Glenn Gary, Glenn Ross, right? If you haven't seen Glenn Gary, Glenn Ross, don't watch the movie. It's a depressing ass movie, but, but 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 this AIDA, which is, and I looked this up, I thought he made this up, but I looked it up. 1898, a guy by the name of St.

Elmo Lewis came up, came up with this. This is the first thing that put any structure, any process into sales whatsoever. He said, these are the four mental stages we all need to go through before we buy something. First, something needs to get our attention. Then we have to be interested in it. Then we have to have a desire for it. And then we have to move to act. So let me ask you, how, how long do we have to get someone's attention in today's world? Seconds, right? And, and there's easy proof on this. Like, like you scroll through your iPhone, right? You look, or your, whatever, your smartphone, and you, you see the name of the person and you see the subject line. If you don't know the name of the person, you don't like the subject line, what do you do?

Delete, right? Anybody getting those calls from the auto dialers where you have to say hello twice these days? Who hangs up after you have to say hello the second time? Everybody. That tells us that you literally have seconds, right? That pause where you say hello, hello, right? And there's the, the other auto dialers that where you just dial, but there's the ones that like you actually have to, you know, the auto dialer ones. That tells, we literally have seconds to get someone's attention. And then that's why subject lines are so important, by the way. That's a, by the way, here's a tip for you. People always ask me, John, what do you put in subject lines? Don't ask me, follow the data. Do a Google search on best subject lines.

Somebody comes out with a new report at least once a month on what are the best things to put in subject line, high open rates, low open rates, what words to put them in, all that other stuff. There's all sorts of reports out there. Follow the data. Cause you have to, because what's happening right now is sales comes up with a decent subject line. It starts to work and then marketing gets ahold of it, blasts out to a million people. It doesn't work anymore. So like, you know, that's why once a quarter, I just do best subject lines. And so, so that's why subject lines, and that's why, you know, that gets our attention. That's why the first few words that come out of our mouth are so important when we're making that phone call, right?

And that earns us an extra couple of minutes where we can drive some interest, right? Maybe ask a question or two or whatever it is. And that earns us a meeting, whether it's 15 minutes over the phone or 16 minutes a person doesn't really matter all that much. And by the way, here's another nugget. Don't sell meetings. When you're reaching out to people, I don't care if it's an existing account, a new account, whatever, don't sell meetings. How long is a meeting to everybody in this room? Yeah, half hour, you know, at least, usually an hour. Anybody got any good feelings about meetings? Y'all skipping through the hallways internally? Like, yeah, I can't wait for that internal meeting. It's going to be such a great use of my time.

Most meetings are a drastic waste of time, all right? And so when you say to somebody, I'd like to meet with you, effectively what you're saying is, I want to take an hour of your time, flush it down the toilet, and you're probably going to want to back at the end. Are we good? Interested in this? So instead of that, sell time. Hey, what's the best way to get 10 minutes on your calendar? What's the best way to get 30 minutes on your calendar? Whatever it is, quantify it. You know when you're making your calls and somebody picks up the phone, it's like, I'm super busy right now. Call me back next week, right? Or like, I love this one. Like, I'm in a meeting right now. No, you're not. I mean, shut up.

You're in a meeting. You're either the rudest person on the planet that picks up random ass phone calls in the middle of meetings, or you picked up a phone, you realized it was a sales rep, and you didn't really, and you didn't want to talk to me. Please, you're in a meeting, my ass, right? So, but you know why they do that? They do that because they do have time. They do, they picked up the phone. They have time. They just don't have this much time, and it's because they, and because I don't know who you are, I don't know how long this is going to take, and so I'm going to preempt it. Like, I learned something recently from Seth Godin. I was watching one of his videos, and he talks about how we allow people to lie to us based on the way that we ask questions, right?

Because if I were to say to you, hey, you know, does that answer your questions, right? You could say to me, yeah, that answers my questions, right? That's kind of a lie, right? Like, you're okay with that. Like, just a little white lie right there, but if I were to say, does that answer all of your questions? Oh, shit, not all of them, right? Like, people are uncomfortable lying all the way up to that point, right? It's the same thing with, that's why they preempt, and they lie to us early on when we pick up the phone, and they say, I'm super busy right now, because that's like a little white lie. Yeah, hey, you're busy. Okay, cool, but they, what they don't, or they don't mind being rude a little bit, but they hate being rude once they get into that.

You know what I mean? Like, we've all been there, we've gotten into that conversation, and we're like two, three minutes deep in, we're like, oh, damn. Like, how do I get out of this conversation? Like, shit, now I got to be the asshole, right? And, you know, and like, I've gotten to the point where I just like, you know, because I'm trying to, like, and they won't even take a breath, and I'm like, yeah, click. You know what I mean? Like, I'm just gonna let that one sit there, because I don't even, I don't even want to deal with that. Like, and nobody likes to be that guy, right? So that's why I don't mind lying a little bit up front. So that's why I'm super busy. But so when somebody says that, again, going back to quantifying what you're asking, say, you know what?

Look, I got two questions. I need two minutes of your time. At the end of that, you can tell me to go away if you want. All right, what? You know what I mean? Like, that's what I usually get. Like, all right, what? Now I got to come strong in those two minutes. Don't get me wrong. But, but you like, again, quantify what you're asking, right? Don't sell, you can't sell your companies on a 30-second pitch. You can't sell your solutions in a one-page email. So we got to stop trying, all right? So I think that is actually the missing link between sales and marketing. I really do. Because I think marketing, and again, my background's marketing. I agree in marketing, healthy respect for it. I think marketing does a fantastic job, usually, in the air cover, okay?

Like, giving the air cover, driving those inbound leads and all that other stuff. And I think they do a pretty good job on the other stages. Like, once I get to talk to you, they usually give me a pretty solid, you know, content, like case studies and those type of things. But where I think marketing misses sometimes, and where I think we need the most help as sales professionals is that, is the attention. Is literally, when I pick up the phone, what do I say? Like, what are the words that are coming out of my mouth? Because a typical elevator pitch is crap. I mean, crap. It doesn't work on a cold call, right? Anybody love their elevator pitch? Please, stand up if you do. I'd be impressed, right?

I mean, I used to think the elevator pitch was it. My boy Chris here started my first company. You'll appreciate that. So you want to hear my elevator pitch when I was back at Thrive Networks, my first startup? Yeah. I mean, I used to make $400 a week. $400 a week for five years, all right? And I'll prove it to you. This is a voicemail that I left 399 times a week for five years. It went something like this. No, 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 the small things on a proactive basis. When the engineers come on site, they can take care of the higher level, more strategic initiatives to 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. This is John Barrows with Thrive Networks, 617-529-7271. Oh, damn. And I was so damn proud of that. I would leave that voicemail. I'd be like, mm, what's up? Nailed it again. Pitch, tone, everything was perfect on that one, right? And I was looking at my number. I wouldn't get a damn callback. I would get more callbacks when I would screw up a voicemail than I would nail the perfect one.

So I did this one by mistake one time. I was like, hi, this is John Barrows with Thrive Networks. We do outsourced IT support for small, oh shit. Look, look, I'm sorry. I was trying a new pitch there. That was a disaster. Look, we fix computers. You got problems with your computers. Call me back at 617-529-7271. I got more callbacks with that approach, hands down. So I started doing it on purpose, right? So to me, like, that's what we need in sales. If we are going to survive in sales and not get over automated here, I got to figure out what to say. How am I going to be relevant here without just, you know, I don't want to read a script. I don't want to read a pitch or anything like that. I do need something to say, though.

And so this is the one thing that you guys can come up with coming out of this. I call them attention grabbers. Forget about elevator pitches, all right? Attention grabbers. What do 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, you know, the characteristics here. The first one is short, right? Periods and commas of the enemies. You tell me you do this and this and this and this, I self-select and I'm all set, right? So like one of mine, like I go to, you know, I went to Dreamforce, like Salesforce was my biggest client, right? I go to Dreamforce every year. I went to Dreamforce like six years ago. Never been there before.

And I get on the, and I get on the, I'm just there to meet my executives and all this other stuff. I had, and I was like tech conference, whatever. And, but then all of a sudden I get on a conference on the expo floor and I'm looking around at like name tags. And I'm like, oh, look at that. That's a VP of sales. Ooh, that's a VP of sales. That's a, oh, oh, oh, still. This is all VPs of sales. I'm like, this is like a lead orgy for me right now. I'm like, I'm going to get more prospecting done face to face in front of my exact target audience in 30 minutes here than I could do in 30 days for crying out all that on the phone. So I had to switch my mindset into what am I going to say? Like, I wouldn't, someone said, what do you do, right?

I went to John Barrow sales training, consulting, fortune 500 companies, guarantees the results you're looking forward to. Nobody wants that. So it was like when I was there to a VP of sales in the SaaS industry at Dreamforce, when somebody says, John, you know, what do you do? I train Salesforce how to sell. What response do you think I get 100% of the time when I tell a VP of sales in the SaaS industry at Dreamforce, I train Salesforce how to sell? How do you do that? Well, you know, I do, you know, train about 5,000 of their sales professionals on prospecting techniques, driving media business in the pipeline. You know, all about doing a little bit of research on somebody, customizing, you know, firing up to an executive, getting referral down, you know, about a 15, 20% response rate on that one, having someone doing it.

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 schedule some time, talk about your situation, see if it makes sense for us to take the next step. You know, we're a mess right here at Dreamforce. A lot of people going on here. So you probably don't even remember this. Why don't we schedule some time next week? You got your iPhone on you? I know you do. Why don't you take it out? I see it there. I see it in your pocket. Oh, I make it awkward for people. I'm like, come on, you said you were interested. If you were lying, then that's your fault. All right? Make it awkward. All right? I mean, don't get me wrong.

Go around with a bad scanner, right? Get all the bad scans so everybody can send those great meetings at Dreamforce, whatever. But I walk around with my iPhone and my calendar is littered with 15-minute call calls after an event like this. Crazy, right? Because you can play around with it and that's why you can have some fun, but it's got to be short. Specific targeted. The more targeted you are with your message, the better off it's going to be. And now, the ideal state is you do research on somebody and you know that, but we don't have that kind of time all the time. Like it's not, like I said, it's not worth doing a half hour worth of research on every single account you're going after. It's just not.

Because it's not about that one email. It's about the contact strategy. So you can get targeted, right? There's three types of kind of cadences, if you will. One's the fully tailored, right? Fully tailored. I'm on your website. I did a whole bunch of research. Then it's the targeted. A targeted approach where it's based on a persona, right? And then there's the template crap. If you want to see a fantastic example of a targeted email that you can plug into any one of these, the sales loft specifically, where with the cadence, if you don't want to do research on every single one, go take a look at the blog that I wrote you last week. This guy reached out to me with a targeted approach. It was the first time that I've actually appreciated a non-customized approach, but it was targeted to me because he knew I was in training and he came up with like six different emails that dripped out to me.

And every single one of them was short, but every single one of them pointed to a different challenge that I had, right? One of them was about engagement during training. Another one was about profitability. Another one was about, and he just kept dripping. And after that fourth or fifth one, I was like, okay. I'm like, I know you haven't done homework on me, but I'm impressed. So I gave the dude a meeting. Now I didn't sign up for his stuff, but I gave him a meeting and that's half the battle, right? So go look at that if you want to see that targeted. And that targeted, you can do. But that's where it comes in. You've heard a lot about yesterday about like the persona-based stuff, right? And so, by the way, here's a, if you guys, I got a little giveaway for everybody here if you want it.

But all you got to do is hashtag this one and throw this one out there on my, on Twitter or whatever. It's at John M Barrows. M is Michael, all one word. Anybody ever use Hourly Nerd by any chance? If you haven't used Hourly Nerd, go check it out. Hourly Nerd is it's crowdsourced MBA kids. So it's all these kids who are getting their MBA and you know, they're like Harvard, MIT, Stanford. So they're way smarter than I'll ever be. And they intern at places like Bain McKenzie and all those places. So they got access to information I'll never have access to. And what you can do is you can put a project on Hourly Nerds. You want to see a market analysis of this type of market for this type of product or whatever it is.

You post it up there and you'll say, I'll pay up to $1,000 for this. And then you get all these nerds, self-proclaimed nerds bidding on it. And they'll be like, I'll do it for $900. I'll do it for $800. So you get real high quality work at a fraction of the cost that you would pay a consulting firm for. So what I did is I went on there and I say, I want to see the top priorities of the top executives and top industries in 2017. And ooh, what they came back to me with nice. See that little spreadsheet on the back right there? I have broken down now every top 10 industries, CEO priority 1, 2, 3, CFO priority 1, 2, 3, CIO priority 1, 2, 3 today. And it's a link to the article of where they found that from.

So if you want that, take that picture, say John Barrow's the greatest on Twitter and I'll send it over to you, right? Original tweets though, no retweet crap, right? And so, and because the concept here is CIOs in the healthcare industry have different priorities than CIOs in the manufacturing industry. If I understand what those are, I can start to target my message. I can come up with better questions, right? I can show that I know what I'm talking about. I don't want to sit there and pretend like I know what your world is all about, but I want to know enough about your world to ask relevant questions. You know, like I've always been a priority-based seller, right? But I'm embarrassed to say that up until I was about 35 years old, that, you know, the way I got to the priority stuff was, I'd be like, tell me about your priorities.

That was my question. Tell me about your priorities. And looking back on that question, I used to get some really vague ass answers like revenue. It's like, oh, let me show you how I could impact your revenue. Okay, get it, get it, right? And so now I go in and say, hey, you know what? We're typically working with other CMOs in the healthcare industry, and they're telling us the top priorities are X, Y, and Z. Are those the priorities you're faced with right now? Even if they're not, the fact that you show that you know their world a little bit tends to open up that conversation a little bit more, right? And again, I'm not going to pretend like I know your world. Like, this is all this thought leader crap everybody talks about.

Like, please, you need to break me a thought leader. Like, I mean, you got to earn that thought leader stuff, right? Or challenger sale. Like, you better earn your challenger sale, please. I think it's real dangerous to try to teach a 22-year-old kid how to be a challenger. Real dangerous. Or thought leader, please. It's like Gary Vee. Gary Vee talks about you can't be a 22-year-old life coach, right? Like, maybe to a 10-year-old kid, all right? It's the same thing with thought leader. Like, if you're brand new in an industry, if you're brand new in a, you know, in your company or whatever it is, you're not a thought leader. So don't try, but you can move in that direction. You can educate yourself.

You can ask better questions, more insightful questions, and that's what that stuff does for me, all right? And then inspires curiosity. When you say, when you say whatever you say, you're looking for a what? Or tell me more. Or how do you do that? And that, like, this is a perfect event to try this stuff out at, by the way. Like, because you know how, you know how people communicate? This is the way that people communicate as human beings. 8, 35, 57. 8% of the way that we communicate as human beings is with the words that we use. That's email. 35% is the tonality in how we use those words, the inflection that we put in them. And the other 57% is body language. That's why face-to-face selling is so much easier than phone sales.

Anybody ever tell you face-to-face selling is harder than phone sales? Tell them to shut up. Because I can sit in front of you for an hour, and I can say something stupid and watch your face go like this and be like, totally kidding. I just want to see how you're going to react to that, right? And I can adjust. Whereas over the phone, I got no idea whether you put me on hold or on mute and just let me blab away. You ever known you've been on hold or on mute, or specifically on mute? I figured out when I'm on mute and when people aren't paying attention, it's when the yeps and the uh-huhs come at all the wrong times. You know what I mean? You get the yep, uh-huh, sure, yep. And you're like, I didn't even make a point right there.

But that's why phone is so much better than email. We're a rather sarcastic group in Boston. Anybody ever try to put sarcasm into an email? How's that work out for you, right? Put all caps because you're super excited, and they think you're yelling at them a little bit. I sent an email to a dude a while back, and he hits me back first email, a little winky emoticon. I'm like, a little too soon in the relationship for a winky here, pal. Like, not quite sure what to... Right? And you know, and who hasn't lit off on somebody when reading tone into a text? Right? I mean, who hasn't done that? And so that's why, you know, that's why phone is better, but we use email to get there, right? But we do have to get them, we got to get them to say what or tell me more.

Results-driven, here it comes, right? The number one thing, because what others say about you is so much better than what you say about you. The number one thing I'm going to ask anybody here who has anything to do with marketing or if you want to go back and talk to your marketing, the number one asset I think any marketer should pay attention to and develop is case studies, case studies, case studies, case studies. That's the only marketing material that I think matters, period. And not just case studies about, oh, they significantly increase, no, quantifiable metrics around the results that you drive. That is what is the, that's the easiest way to come up with messaging. Because what you say about you, okay, fine, whatever, leading provider wrote, good for you.

What Gartner says about us being in the fourth quadrant, fantastic, you know, third-party validation. But what our clients say about us is hands down the best material that we got, all right? So go out there and get those case studies. And it's got to be, in that case study, that's a story, so it's conversational, right? And also, you got to have some, it's got to be positive here. You got to have some, some energy around this, right? Because if you don't care about what you do, why in the world would I, right? I don't think we all need to be Tony Robbins here, but you do have to have some sort of enthusiasm for what you do. All right, somebody told me this one once, I thought this was great, that they said that sales is a transfer of enthusiasm.

I like that. You know, because I believe that strongly in what I do, that if you fit that profile, my job is to travel a little bit of my enthusiasm over to you, right? I mean, if you could just get this fired up, man, right? Sales is an emotional thing, and you got to have some emotion around it. This is also why I think sprinkling phone calls throughout the day is a waste of time, by the way. I think it's a waste of time. Because it's real hard to get hyped up to make calls throughout the day. It's not that hard to get hyped up to make calls for an hour. Call them power hours, where for an hour, I'm just going to hammer the phones, and I'm going to call into one persona, and this is, I'm going to show you how this ties into marketing.

What's in it for me? You got to answer that question. Like, what's the most valuable asset any of us have? Time. It's the one thing I can't get back. So if you're going to leave a voicemail to me, you're going to send an email to me, it better be pretty damn clear that I'm going to get something value out of this, all right? And then the last unique competitive advantage. I'm going to tell you right now, the number one unique factor all of you have, right? On the prospecting side of that, once you get into the middle of the sales process, it's actually easier to understand what the unique factors are of each one of us, because then you can uncover the questions and go from there. But the number one unique thing that you all have at the beginning, all of our competitors can pretty much lie about what they do, or at least misrepresent it and make it sound like we do, right?

One thing they have a hard time lying about, and it's the results that you drive for your customers. That is each one of your number one competitive differentiators. That's it, all right? I'm going to throw up an example here of how you can come up with an attention grabber, and I'm bringing this one up because this one's directly related to Sales Loft here. So Sales Loft and I worked on a client who worked together with this Affinio, and look at this. This is Lisa. She put this one together. Sales Loft platform combined with the techniques of Team Learn John's training gave us a 100% month-over-month increase in activity, 35% increase in book calls, and a 59% increase in qualified leads pushing into the pipeline.

That's what I do. That's what Sales Loft does. They're not the leading provider of sales training and consulting, blah, blah, blah. Nah. And now, that's my attention grabber, by the way. Hey, the reason for my call today is one of my clients, actually the SDR leader at one of my clients, Affinio, said that after combining my training with Sales Loft, they were able to increase month-over-month activity by 100%, increased 35% in book calls, and a 59% increase in qualified leads pushing into the pipeline. I'd love to talk to you about it. Give me a call back, 617-529-7271. That is my attention grabber. That is my elevator pitch. That's what you can do coming out of here today, is to go look at your case studies and reverse engineer them, and come up with this messaging that you can give to your sales reps to make phone calls with.

And then you can create what I call messaging matrices, right? So right now, I look for a quality matrix and a quantity matrix. A quality matrix is based on triggers. So we all hear about trigger-based selling. You open up a new office. You launch a new product, a merger and acquisition. I really recommend each one of you go home and think through what are the four or five triggers that happen in the companies that you go after that you can kind of standardize on? Because the beauty is you can actually, and I'm going to talk about templates here, not to be templates to be blasted out to a million people, but templates to be used from an efficiency standpoint. Because everybody, every time somebody goes through a merger and acquisition, you can kind of say the same thing, right?

You can kind of repurpose that messaging until you figure out whether it works or not. So you can actually create a merger and acquisition template. And again, not to be blasted out. And you start with a customized part. So it's like, hey, I was doing some research and I noticed customized, customized, customized has to be about them. That's the only thing people care about. The reason that prompted me to reach out to you is many of our clients who go through mergers and acquisitions leverage our solutions in this way. Repurpose that. Put it into sales loft. Track it, right? Figure out whether that works or not. Have your whole team using the merger and acquisition template. And then the quantity is more based on priorities and the personas that you're going after.

So again, CIOs in the healthcare industry, what are their top three priorities? Come up with that messaging. Now you have quality and quantity matrices here. And I know those probably aren't all the titles that you all go after. But if you think about this, right? There's three, three, eight, you know, what's that? Six, that's 18, you know, 36. That's 36 different things that you can use to plug into a cadence so you never have to touch base or check in ever again. Ever again, by the way. If there's nothing you come out of this presentation with is never can say touching base and checking in ever again in your lives. The most meaningless phrases in sales. And here's the one to replace it with, by the way.

Go home and I say this one all the time is start every single conversation off with this phrase, the reason for my call is. You can't finish that sentence, you shouldn't be making the phone call. All right? So to finish up, and this is that cadence where you mix it up. You have to mix it up, right? Because different people communicate in different ways, right? If you send all emails, you're missing out, right? So you have to mix this up. And the phone, though, and this is I'm going to hand this over to my friend Steve Richard here after this, and it's hopefully going to be a good layup for him here. Because the phone is still a piece of this puzzle. I get why it's not used anymore, right? I mean, I'm a Gen Xer, right?

I'm 41 years old. I grew up with the phone. If I was on it, if I was on email, making cold calls, those 400 dials, I was getting hit, right? But millennials now, especially the younger, they didn't grow up with a phone. They just didn't, right? And you add that to the open office. You guys all got the open office environment, right? Like, I love the open office environment for collaboration and stuff. I hate it for phone. It kills phone. Because say you even feel like making phone calls, right? So you're like, all right, you know what? I'm going to get on the phones. But you're the only one in your area, in the open office environment, making phone calls. Does it feel like every single person in the office is listening to every damn words coming out your mouth?

Right? And I'm a pretty confident cat. So I'll be up there. I'll be like, all right. But as soon as I catch that, like I say something a little off and I catch that person that kind of looks at me like, what did you just say? Like, I'll fall apart. I'll be like, oh, shit, right? So that's why I even, I, back when I was making hardcore cold calls, I would have to find that conference room, lock myself in that conference room, put the headset on and go to work, right? And that's where I could do it. So the way that I think we can actually address that is with those attention grabbers is by coming up with those. And here's another piece, marketing. This is how marketing and sales alliance is my dream come true scenario.

Another piece that I firmly believe is missing in sales education these days is business acumen. It's teaching kids how to actually know what business, we teach them structure, we teach them techniques, we teach them process, we don't teach them business acumen, right? And I think marketing can play a role in this. So here's what you do. Once a week, or going home this afternoon, sit down, marketing does a lunch and learn, okay? Pick a persona. What is this person all about? Who, what is this person? And again, like Doug was saying yesterday, not just the, oh yeah, CIOs, I know what CIO, no, CIOs in this industry and what are their challenges? And now what, like, and usually you can reverse engineer a case study.

So you get a case study based on that persona. The bottom of that case study says the result. Take that result, turn that into your attention grabber, okay? We show CIOs in the healthcare industry how to do this, okay? Then because it fits that persona, you can come up with two or three questions that are relevant to that persona, that make it sound like you know what you're talking about, right? And then you have a story to tell. So that marketing comes in, does that little lunch and learn, and then everybody gets on the phones from one o'clock to two o'clock and says the same thing. We show CIOs in the healthcare industry how to rinse, repeat, rinse, repeat, rinse, repeat, rinse, repeat. And you take a little back and napkin math.

I don't, you know, I just go old school with tracking when it comes to phone. I just go one, two, three, four, five, one, two, three, four, five, one, two, three, four, five. And marketing, by the way, is sitting in there listening, listening to how that messaging rolls out, right? So they can hear what's going on. And now, and by the way, everybody, since everybody's doing it in an hour, everybody's kind of walking around, there's some energy around it, right? People are learning from each other, those type of things. And then everybody keeps track of it. And then everybody puts the numbers together. If you get 10, 20 reps, you say you got 10 reps making 20 dials in an hour, give or take, and this is not, you're not doing research.

You got to have all your stuff prepared and all that other stuff. You got 200 data points there that you can look at and say that approach worked or that didn't, all right? It's a nice way to just get everybody on the same page. You don't need technology to do this. You don't need another process to do this. This is a way where you can align sales and marketing. Marketing can learn about what's working and what's not by being in the trenches. Marketing can educate sales that we desperately need. And we can come up with messaging that we can test and split test and split test and split test to figure out what works. And there's alignment there, all right? So that's pretty much it. I'll end with this.

And yes, I am a Patriots fan. You'd better believe it, right? Exactly. Go ahead, bring it. Bring it. Oh, you'll boo even more. Hold still. I got more for you to boo about. But this quote, like, that's my boy, Bill Belichick, right there. And I don't know if you've ever seen him smile, so I put it up on there. But there's a whole saying about the strength of the Wolfpack, and I think it's a lot of truth to that. On a football team, it's not the strength of the individual player, but it's the strength of the unit and how they all function together. You've got to get sales and marketing working together. Don't look for a technology. Yeah, fine, try to find a technology to do it, but there's other ways you can do it to make a difference, all right?

Thank you.