KEYNOTE | John Barrows - Age of the Agile Org

Somebody asked me, John, if you could go back and tell your 22-year-old self something, what would it be? My number one answer to that was A-B split test everything you do. Hey, everyone. Welcome back to Make It Happen Mondays, where we talk about sales, business, entrepreneurship, personal growth, mental health, and everything in between with guests who I truly respect and I think make a positive impact on the world around us. Now, we're going to take a little bit of a different approach with this podcast this week. This one is to share with you a keynote that I did recently. It's called Age of the Agile Sales Org. And the whole concept is we've gotten ourselves into this pretty big mess here with this predictable revenue model and grow at all costs.

And it's just not customer-centric in any way, shape, or form. And I've been talking about it breaking for a bunch of years at this point and how we had to do something about it. But then when ChatGPT hit and AI hit, it's no longer an option. And so I walked through a structure that we can use to help get our way out of this. And I wanted to get it to you all so that you can kind of get a perspective on where I see things going. So I hope you enjoy it and let's make it happen. How are you all doing today? You guys ready to get after it? All right. It's good to see you all again. It's good to be back. Actually, I remember there's been a couple of times. I was over at, I think it was a sales kickoff in New York when you were way smaller.

And then I was out in Chennai. So where's all my Chennai team here? Where are you? There we go. Say hi to the group for me back home, right? But yeah, I'm excited to be here because a lot's changed since we last talked. And we're going to get into all of that. But for those of you who don't know me, so just a little bit of background here. So John Barrow's grew up in Boston, Massachusetts. Still live there. Went down to Maryland. University of Maryland, drank my way through four years of college. I got my degree in marketing because I didn't know what I wanted to be when I grew up. And just out of curiosity, anybody here got their degree in sales? Anybody? Here in the States, there's still, there's maybe about 200 colleges that you can get your degree in sales, but it still drives me nuts that this is the number one profession on the planet.

And yet none of us are actually formally taught how to do it, right? We all go to school for whatever we think we want to be when we grow up at 18, which I think is hysterical to ask a kid. And then we get our degree and we get out into the real world and we realize either, ooh, I don't want to do this or B, I can't make enough money doing this. So hey, I'm pretty good with people. I heard you can make some money in sales. Let me try that out. And I don't know about y'all, but my entree into sales was, all right, John, welcome aboard. Here's your territory. Here's your quota. Good luck. Excuse me. Any guidance on what to do here? Yeah, there's a phone. Start making some phone calls. Oh, okay.

Right? And my training was either, hey, go follow that guy. He's pretty good. Or here's a script. Anybody ever had to read a script in their careers? Yeah, that feels good, right? And by the way, I don't care how cool you think you are reading a script. You ain't cool reading a script, right? But the good news is, is we succeed despite that lack of education. The bad news is we develop a lot of bad habits along the way. And that's what happened to me. I got into sales. I fell into sales just like everybody else. My first good job was DeWalt Power Tools. So y'all seen those Dodge Ram pickup trucks driving around giving away free tools. It's pretty much the coolest thing I could have done in college.

I did that for about a year and a half. And I sold Xerox. Anybody here sell copiers? All right, who are my copier reps in the room? Anybody else? All right, who'd you sell for? Cannon, how long do you last? 10 years. 10 years? Ooh, you broke the mold, my friend. There's a two-year threshold on copier sales reps. You're either in and out in less than two years. You're in it for the rest of your life. So congrats for getting out. But did it at least tell you how to sell? Teach you how to sell? I mean, talk about selling a commodity, right? It's like 45 pages a minute over 42 pages a minute. Ooh, but it scans the email, right? I mean, come on. So I mean, and I sold to the government too. So I couldn't even negotiate on contract.

So I did that. That's where I learned how to sell. And then I started a company. And this is where it's relevant to y'all. I started a company doing outsourced IT services. So Thrive Networks, which is actually now the largest MSP in the country. We started that and we were bootstrapped. And I had no idea what I was doing. We did outsourced IT services to the SMB market. So companies under 200 employees, we managed all their infrastructure, servers, workstations, backup security, antivirus, all of it. And I was 23 years old, so I had no idea what I was doing. So I took every training I could. I took Sandler, Miller, Hyman, Taz, Spin, you name it, I was taking it. And I came across this one group called Basho.

And Basho was the first training that I took that I loved. Because it wasn't this big process I had to follow. It wasn't this big theory about selling. It was, here's how to send an email. Send an email. Here's how to make a phone call. Make a phone call. And I'm a keep it simple, stupid guy. Like, don't ask me to go through all this long stuff. If you give me something I can do, I'll do it. And so I used Basho to help growth thrive up. We ended up being the fastest growing company in Massachusetts for a few years in a row. Got us to about 85 employees, about 12 million in revenue. And then we sold off to Staples. So Staples came and bought us. And I spent about a year going through that integration.

And come to find out, apparently, I'm not a corporate guy. I don't have much of a filter. And I really don't like playing politics. You're all going to find that out pretty quick here. And so after a little while, Staples offered me another position. And they fired me. And I was looking for a job. And they said, you know, and Basho came knocking and said, John, you want to be a trainer? I was like, no. And they're like, why not? I'm like, I don't like trainers. I'm like, why not? I'm like, because up until that point in my career, now I've met plenty since. But up until that point in my career, the only type of sales trainers I'd ever come across were either failed sales professionals or professional presenters.

Y'all ever been through a training where you could tell the trainer's never actually done what they're telling you what to do? Or if they did, it was like 20, 30 years ago back in my day. And they're wearing a suit that's three sizes too big. And they're doing a role play that would never actually happen in real world. Right? Exactly. I didn't want to be that guy. And so they said, John, don't worry. You have to use these techniques to sell so you can train so you can get paid. And I was like, I don't like the whole practice what you preach thing, right? So I joined Basho, took on some bigger accounts, brought on some bigger ones. And to make a very long story short, they screwed it up and I took it over.

So about 15 years ago, I went back on my own with JB Sales. And I've been working with some pretty cool companies, including you, over the years. But man, have things changed. Specifically last year. I mean, I got caught up with it like the rest of us. I mean, last year, I had this business up to about 25 employees and about 5.5 million in revenues. And Q1 hit. Oops. All my clients were SaaS. 95% of my clients were SaaS. And they went away. They all had money with SVB. That was fun. So I was trying to figure out how to save myself and the business. And I will tell you right now what we're going to be talking about today, prospecting. I don't care what other skill you want to work on as far as negotiations, objection handling, all that stuff.

If you can learn prospecting and learn how to do it well, you'll never go hungry. And the rest of that sales cycle won't be as hard. I always say, you know what solves all problems? Negotiation, discounting, all that stuff. Big, fat pipeline. You got a big, fat pipeline. You don't have to try too hard. You put yourself in a position where you want the business. You don't need it. And when I want the business, I sell the right way. When I need the business, I do some shady shit. So that's why we're going to put ourselves in a position to be able to do it consistently. And this is for existing accounts. This is for new accounts. This is for anybody. I don't care what it is because the game's changed, which is why we've got to be agile.

I love that in the speeches this morning. The agility right now because what worked six months ago is just not working anymore right now. So if you are not trying and testing new things, you're getting left behind because we all got a little lazy over the past few years. And by the way, including myself, I'm positioning 2010 to 2022 as the golden age of sales. And I'm sorry, if you got into sales after 2010, look, sales is not easy by any stretch. But shit, it was a lot easier when money was free, grow at all costs, ROI didn't matter, go, go, go. That was fun. We all got a few inflated egos about ourselves, about how good we were, didn't we? Yep, I did. Right? And then, ooh. And look, we over-engineered the sales process.

We really did. I mean, this is what sales is. This is what we turn sales into, which is painful. We've got SDRs and BDRs acting like robots. And it's not their fault because we've stuffed technology down their throat and we've given them cadences to just press play on. And these SDRs are sitting there and just, hey, first email, well, the leading provider of, did you get my first email? Bubbling this one up to the top. Hey, why aren't you responding? Starting to get angry. And then my lovely breakup email, one, two, three, stuck under a rock. Like, could you just respond? Please don't ever send that email out again, by the way. If you do right now, just stop that one. That one's ridiculous. Right?

And so, say SDR trips over an opportunity where somebody's like, yeah, this is actually kind of interesting. Well, the handoff to the AE is never really all that good. And the AE almost always has to re-qualify the opportunity and ask the same questions, which pisses off the client. And then they ask their BANT questions and they drone through their demos. Good Lord. Demos. Oh, I mean, look, demos are important. Don't get me wrong. But, man, the way that most reps do demos, it's my least favorite part of the sales process. You know why? Because every demo is exactly the same. They all go something like this. And, by the way, I go through probably three or four demos on a regular basis, and they all go through like this.

Hey, John, is this still a good time? I got some pet peeves. If I pick up the phone for a scheduled call, please do not ask me, is this still a good time? Why would you give me that out? Actually, no, I got to go to the bathroom right now. Why don't we push this till three? Now, what you should say is, do we still have 30 minutes? Do you have a hard stop at 2 o'clock? That's what I want to hear, right? Because if you do have a hard stop at 2 o'clock, that means your brain is going to start moving in a different direction, around 150, 155. So I do want to know that. Well, this is still a good time. Okay. We'll get about a 30-minute demo here that I'd like to go through there. And if you have any questions as we go through it, just let me know.

Okay. Right? And then they press play, and they go through every fucking slide like they were badged for in boot camp. And they pause intermittently going, does that make sense? Does that make sense? Does that make sense? Anybody ever said no to that question, by the way? Anybody ever been like, wow, what you just said there blew my mind, right? And even if they say yes, does that tell you whether or not it made sense? No, but it makes us feel good, right? And then we get to that end of that nice little canned piece of graph demo, and we always get that lovely little parting gift from the client. And by the way, if you ever hear this word at the end of one of your demos, you know you've done a miserable job.

And it's the word digest. You know what, John? I need a little time to digest what you just told me right there. Why don't we circle back in a couple weeks? We'll take it from there. Does that sound fair? If you hear that, stop and apologize to the person. You just wasted their time. It is our job to help them digest the information. If they walk out of the conversation more confused than they were walking in, we've done a terrible job. But man, we feel good about it, right? So say we go through that and just happen to hit somebody who actually needs what we have, then we usually offer them a massive discount just to get the deal done. And then, ah, CSMs and A, who are my account managers in the room?

Where are you at? I love you all, and I am sorry. From a sales professional standpoint, I am sorry for handing you over, usually a total bag of shit. Client doesn't even know what they bought, why they bought it. The champions never involved in that transition, and you guys are playing catch-up for minute one. That's fun, right? And then got, you know, QBRs, whoo, those are a joy. And then we go through those, and then we get our 90, hey, your renewal's coming up in 90 days, your renewal's coming up in 60 days. Hey, renewal's coming up in 30 days. Please renew. Here's a massive discount, right? And so then they get on, and then we got marketing. God bless marketing. My background's marketing, but wow, the marketing sales divide has been here since the beginning, and it's still here to this day.

And then we get the customer down here doing whatever they want to do, coming in and out of the sales process, whatever they want. They don't go through a linear sale. I love everybody who has this linear sales process. It's like, it's not a linear buying process. I love how discovery is a stage. Oh, yeah, you stop asking questions? Good. Good job. See how that works out for you. So they come in and out, and we got to meet them wherever they are. And then we throw social on top of this, and then, ooh, ChatGPT shows up. AI. You want to see something crazy right now? Believe we're living in the Matrix? There's a book called The Third Eye where it talks about how the Terminator and the Matrix are actually the same movie.

Terminator is the prequel to the Matrix. My thing is Skynet's ChatGPT. We woke this sucker up. So we've got to figure out how to play with this, or we're going to be in trouble. And there's a few people, like, so I'm working with Chris here. We're going to show you a few things on an AI standpoint. Bless you. I'm not worried about getting replaced by AI. Chris and I have the same philosophy on this. I'm worried about getting replaced by the rep who figures out how to use AI. That's who I'm worried about. So for the rest of us, we've got to figure this out. And so, all that mess is why, and this just came out recently. Gartner talked about how they averaged out millennials, Gen Xers, and boomers.

And they found that over, on average, 43% of B2B buyers want a rep-free experience. They do not want us involved. And that's just going to get worse with Gen Z coming up. Now, that's the bad news. Good news is, of those 43% that wanted a rep-free experience, they had a 23% higher regret rate. They regretted the decision more when we weren't involved, which tells me there is a lot of value for us to add to this equation. It's just different than it has been, which is why we've got to level up and ask ourselves this question. What can you do that a computer can't? And that question is getting real hard to answer these days. You want to freak yourself out? Open up ChatGPT and act as a customer.

Act as a prospect for Freshworks and ask it, hey, I'm a SMB, I'm an enterprise, whatever it is. I'm looking for solutions in these areas. I'm thinking about using Freshworks, dub, dub, dub. Tell me about Freshworks. What does it do? How do I learn about it? How does it compare to all their top competitors? What are their strengths? What are their weaknesses? How does it fit with my business plan for the next 12 to 24 months? In 10 minutes, you will realize how much value is engaged in that conversation and then try to compare that to the 90% of the sales calls that are happening right now, where a rep just asks their bant questions and then flips their demo right over to them and starts pitching to them.

So this isn't an option anymore. We have to evolve or else. I think the tolerance for the zero value interaction from a sales rep goes away this year. The tolerance for that lack of value is just going to be done. So we've got to figure it out. And there's a couple of ways we can do this. Now, I'm going to kind of layer on a couple of things that I want you to think about throughout today because we're going to get super tactical right after this part. But throughout today, I want you to think of things and moving forward. And this is how I think that we can evolve here. One of them is context. So I stole this one from Gary Vaynerchuk. So you all know Gary V? He's a little crazy, but he's cool.

Man, does he hate Patriots fans. But anyways, he said one time that everybody talks about content is king. Content is king. He said, fine, if content is king, then context is God. And that got me thinking about marketing and sales. Marketing is content. Sales is context. If we as sales professionals cannot put any context around our content, we are no different than marketing, and I have no idea why we're getting paid to do what we do. Blasting out template emails, that's content. I do not need a sales rep to do that. Making generic cold calls with a generic voicemail. I don't need sales reps to do that either. Anybody seen air.ai? Put it on your, write it, don't look at it now. But put AIR.ai, go to their homepage, and listen to the cold call that this AI bot did to upsell somebody on $3,000 glasses who already said no to the product.

And the guy had no idea it wasn't a human being. You think phone's the last frontier? Wrong. Video? Oh yeah, video's cool, right? I've seen video that I still cannot tell if it's an actual human being or not. Now context, right? Blasting out template emails, that's content. Generic demos. Context is taking that marketing material, and before it hits my inbox, telling me why it's relevant to me. Webinars. You've got to do a bunch of webinars, right? Here's a tip for you. Take your top 10 accounts that you want to get, you want to stay top of mind with, right? Take the executives in those accounts. And when marketing puts out their email that says, hey, we got a webinar coming up, take that email, forward it to those 10 individuals individually, and say, hey, I'm not sure if you saw this webinar that we have coming up, but the reason I think you should go to it is because, X, Y, Z, whatever.

And then if they don't go, say they don't go, right? So they won't go to it, right? And then the email goes out, hey, sorry, you missed the webinar. Here's the link to it. And it goes in my things to read folder, and I never look at it. Take that, forward it back to the client. Say, hey, it doesn't look like you were able to attend the webinar. Some of the key takeaways were X, Y, Z. And by the way, if you start listening to this webinar around a minute 15, 22, and go from that to minute 22, 37, there's some really tactical things in there I think you might get some value out of. Content context. Think about it. If I send you a webinar, you're going to watch it? Even if you do, everybody knows the first five, 10 minutes of a webinar are a joke, right?

Like, oh, how's the weather? How you been? I used to do the game last night. That's great, right? Like five minutes into a webinar, I'm falling asleep. I'm out of here. But if I tell you, hey, go check and look at minute 15, 22 on that webinar, aren't you at least a little curious? What's a minute 15, 22? I know I am. Context, context. Presentations, demos. If you have 30 slides, I promise you, they only care about five or six of them. I promise you, do not go through the whole thing. They don't care. They care about the part that's most relevant to them, right? Context. So we're going to figure out how to put some content together and put some context around this. And then the other one is science and art.

Obviously, sales is a science and an art. There's no question about that. But my belief is that sales should be more of a science than an art. And the reason is the science lays the foundation for the art form to be that much more effective. The structure, the process we put in place allows the art form to thrive. And that's why I can get away with training across the world, right? Everybody, I go to all different regions and different cultures and everything like that. And one of the things that kills me is American-based companies that take American-based training and bring it overseas and train it the exact same way in every region. And look, I'm not going to pretend like I'm not Captain America over here.

I'm Boston, Massachusetts. I'm about as direct and in your face as it gets when it comes to selling. But the way I can translate this training to everybody, and I'm working on my fourth passport and two million miles in less than 10 years, thank you, COVID, for helping me, is because I focus on the science, the structure, the process, and split testing. And that's when we go to agility. One of the things I'm going to tell you, there's no wrong answers anymore unless it's not tested. Somebody asked me, John, if you could go back and tell your 22-year-old self something, what would it be? My number one answer to that was A, B, split test everything you do. Everything you do. By the way, I don't care what it is.

So say you're making cold calls to CIOs and SMB manufacturing, right? Come up with two different messages, CIOs and manufacturing and SMB. Make 30 phone calls with this approach, make 30 phone calls with that approach. See which one yields a higher response rate. Say you got one email that can go to a group of people because they all fit a similar profile. Cool. Send it. Like, say it's 50. Send it to all 50, but break it up 25-25. Tweak the subject line. See which one gets you a higher open rate. Objection handling. Ain't no rocket science to objection handling. This is just science. Write down an objection that you're all getting smoked on right now. Go into chat GPT and say, what's the best way of handling this objection?

Give me five techniques to handle this objection and how you would do it. Then go pick the ones that you like. The next 10 times that objection comes up, deal with it this way. The next 10 times, deal with it that way. You'll figure it out. And if you do this, you're not only going to figure out what works a lot faster, you're going to stay more motivated too. Because I don't know about y'all. You can see a sale is a brutal profession. You know what used to make it somewhat tolerable? Is that we're all in the bullpen together, sitting together in the office, getting our asses handed to us together. Right? So if you had a bad day or a bad call, you could literally turn to your friend and be like, yo, did you get that?

By the way, I just called somebody who's died. Anybody have called somebody who's died before? Yeah, that's fun. Right? And by the way, if you haven't, you haven't made enough cold calls. I've called like 10 people in my entire career that are straight up dead. And like, what do you do with that? Right? It's like, oh, so you don't need that license? No, don't say that. Terrible. But like when that happens and you're in the bullpen with a bunch of other sales reps going through the same thing, you can kind of be like, whoa, brutal day. You want to grab a drink? Now that we're sitting in our house by ourselves, a lot of us, you have a bad day or a bad call, who are you going to talk to? A cat?

Be a scientist. Because say I tell you to make 50 dials in a day. And you get no meetings. That's a terrible day, right? Yup. It is. Demoralizing, too. But say I tell you to make 50 dials. And instead of making 50 dials, I tell you to pick one persona, come up with two different messages, and make $25 with this approach and $25 with that approach. And you still get no meetings. To me, that's not a bad day. You just figured out two approaches that don't work. Tomorrow, you come in and try a couple new ones. And if you could say you learn something every day, you'll get through this. And you'll get through it better than most. So, with those, if we put a little context over our content, and we have a little bit of science, we can actually create a sales org that is more like a sales lab.

And this is what I'm recommending to all the clients that I work with. It's kind of like, you know how engineers have hackathons, right? Where they pick something, they kind of nerd out for a little while, and they figure it out. Like, it's the same thing. I think we should do the same thing in sales. We should control this, and we should work together to do this. I mean, the reinvent, right? Perfect example. Like, we need to reinvent ourselves constantly, because what worked six months ago is not working right now. And we can't do this individually. You hear me talk a lot about split testing and all this other stuff. Like, as an individual, it's hard to get to those numbers. But as a group, oh, man, we could get there pretty quick.

Right? So, pick something, anything. I don't care what it is. I mean, this report just came out about how only 28% of a sales rep's time is spent actually selling. Only 28%. The other 72% is some type of admin thing. I guarantee you, AI can take care of the majority of that and give us the time we need to go back and do what we do best, which is engage with the client. Another one that I stole from Gary Vee, like, back in 2017, is when I went to his office, and I had just seen this AI email that was written better than I was. And for those of you who are familiar, I used to train Salesforce for a long time, and a couple of their reps came out, and they created this artificial intelligence bot that created super hyper-personalized emails based off of my email.

And they were like, John, we want to show it to you. And I was like, yeah, sure, fine, whatever. Right? And they sent it to me, and I almost had a heart attack. This thing was better than I would have ever written. It wrote it in 60 seconds. And I went to Gary, and this was when I saw him. He had this 4D session, and he said, I said, Gary, you could do Q&A with him at his office. And it came to it, and I said, Gary, I just saw an email written better than I could have ever written by a robot. Where does that leave us? And he goes, don't worry about the tech. You're not going to beat it. But be the last mile. And that's what stuck with me. Be the last mile. Let the tech do all the heavy lifting.

Let it do the research. Let it even write the email. Let it even write the proposal, whatever you want. But right before you hit send, make sure you humanize it. Please just make sure you humanize it. AI is about augmentation, not automation. I agree that most everything these days has to move towards quality, because quantity is being taken over by the AI stuff. So that's where we have to come in and actually go double down on quality. But somebody asked me this, and remember this one. Well, let's talk about prospecting for a second. The holy grail of prospecting is personalization and relevance. If you can be personalized and relevant in your messaging, you tend to win the day. But if you force me to choose between personalization or relevance, I'm going relevance all day long.

Just because you all know I went to the University of Maryland does not buy you any points these days. But yet I still get reps sending me emails saying, hey, John, I see you went to you, Maryland. Go Terps. And then it hard cuts to some value proposition I'd have no interest in. I'd much rather have you say, hey, John, as a CEO of a sales training organization, have you made the switch from on-site to remote delivery and retained your revenue streams? Hmm. That's a very relevant question you can ask somebody like me. And guess what? You can send that out to 50 other CEOs of sales training organizations. So we're going to get that into figuring out how to craft that messaging because that's the linchpin here.

The biggest challenge I see most companies have is how to create sales-ready messaging. And that is not the elevator pitch. That is not the email with 15 bullet points in it. All right? So with that, I'm going to walk you through a step-by-step process. And by the way, if you want to follow along, like I said, if you've got your laptops, you can. If you want, you just take some notes. But you will have this entire presentation in your inbox. So you can take a look there, and you're going to have a spreadsheet that I'm going to show you that you can use to do some of this stuff. And specifically on the exercise, we're going to be lighting it up. All right? So first things first, we've got to figure out how we're going to get to 100 billion.

All right? Anybody know their numbers? Anybody know, like, how many? Like, so y'all got your quotas, right? So what's, anybody know how many meetings that they need on a monthly basis to be able to hit their quota right now? There you go. I like it. How'd you figure that out? So how'd you figure that out for you? Just. All right. Well, I'm going to unveil that secret, because you've got to back into these numbers, right? Quotas don't ever go down. They always go up. And so when you don't have a plan for your year, what, are you going to just work harder? Like, that's what killed me. When I was at Thrive Networks, we would go 50%. Year over year, my CFO would keep coming to me every year and say, all right, John, we've got to go 50% year over year again this year.

I'd be like, but we did that last year and you have no compounding interest here, right? Like, it's really hard to do 50% on top of that and I'm only one person. And because my CFO was so black and white, like, literally, like, there was no emotion in him at all. Like, he did not care about how I felt about the quota. Because I was like, Calvin, stop it. You're working me too hard. He didn't give a shit. He was like, work harder then. If you can't do it, I'll find somebody who can. Again, it wasn't until I learned how to speak Excel that I was able to actually have a conversation with my CFO that wasn't based on emotion. And so I had to learn my equation. And this was mine. So Thrive Networks, outsourced IT services, our average deal size was $3,500 a month.

That's how much you had to spend with us for us to manage your network. And I had a 50% close ratio back then. Ooh, was that nice. Every time I put together a proposal for you, 50% of the time it closed. And every time I met with you, if it was a qualified meeting, 50% of the time it would actually turn into a proposal, which was fantastic. My problem? Prospecting. I had a 0.5% conversion ratio. That is not a 5% conversion ratio, ladies and gentlemen. That is a 0.5%. I had to make 1,600 dials a month or 400 dials a week to get eight meetings a month. And I did that for five years. Five painful-ass years. And by the way, bless you, I will prove that to you. Let's go back here. This was 20 years ago.

This is my elevator pitch. Anybody got an elevator pitch that they want to stand up and proudly profess to the team right here, right? Because it's so awesome and they're loving it. Nobody ever does. You know why? Because elevator pitches are usually super boring. They're all about us. They're super cheesy and they're way too long. But, man, I used to think the elevator pitch was it. I used to think you just come up with a kick-ass elevator pitch, right? Say it to a bunch of people. Make it rain. So this is mine. And I'm going to take my glasses off. I cannot promise you this is not right there, okay? This is the voicemail that I left 399 times a week for five years. It went something like this.

I'm sorry. It went exactly like this. Hi, this is John Barrows with Thrive Networks. We do outsourced IT support for small to mid-sized companies in the Boston area. And we take a really unique approach to manage your IT infrastructure by combining the best of what technology and people have to offer. We tie our network operations center and our managed services to your environment so we can take care of all the small things on a proactive basis so when the engineers come on site, they can take care of the higher level, more strategic initiatives to help drive your business forward. I'd love to talk to you about your IT support needs. If you could call me back at 617-529-7271. This is John Barrows with Thrive Networks.

617-529-7271. And oh, was I proud of that. I would be like, mmm, what's up? Nailed it again. Pitch, tone, everything was perfect on that one. Right? And then all of a sudden I started to look at my numbers. I wasn't getting a damn callback. I would get more callbacks when I would screw up a voicemail than I would nail the perfect one every time. I did this one by mistake once. I was like, hi, this is John Barrows with Thrive Networks. We do outsourced IT support for some... Oh, shit. I'm sorry. I was trying a new pitch there. That was a disaster. Look, we fix computers. You got problems with your computers calling me back. I got more callbacks with that approach. So I started doing it on purpose, right?

So now looking back on it, I'd still make 400 dials. I would, right? Because you got to get the volume up there just to see what's going on. But instead of making 400 generic cold calls with a generic elevator pitch, I come up with four different approaches. And I do 100, 100, 100, 100. And I would see which one yielded a higher response rate. My ACV is $25,000. If I send out 100 emails, I get about a 7% response rate. If I do 100 cold calls, I get about a 3%. And these are people saying, sure, let's have a conversation. And if I do 100 in-mails, I'm around a 10%, right? And that means I do about 60% email, 10% phone, 30% in-mails. Then once somebody says, sure, John, let's have a conversation, about 63% of those turn into deeper dive discovery calls.

And from those, 49% turn into proposals. And from those, I have a 32% close ratio, which means I have to generate 13 meetings a month, 35, whatever your secret is, 13 meetings a month to be able to hit my number. Now, I'm more like a senior AE, so I get leads given to me through inbound and marketing and referrals and stuff. So I still need to generate seven meetings a month. And if you look on the right-hand side, that means I have to do about six or seven activities every single day. And to prove to you I'm not just up here telling you this because it sounds good, if you want to look at my calendar, where is it? There it is. I'm going to talk to you a lot about a routine and creating a routine for yourself around prospecting.

Right? And this is the quality approach. And I think everybody, I don't care what your role is, I don't care who you sell to, SMB, we should all have a routine to focus on the quality side of prospecting. So if you notice, it's kind of like working out. If you treat prospecting as an event, it never happens. It's kind of like, it's like, how many of us have done this, right? Where it's like, you know what? Thursday afternoon, that's when I'm, from two to four o'clock on Thursday afternoon, that's when I'm going to do my prospecting. Right? And so you go through the whole week and then what happens on Thursday at around two o'clock? What are you looking at? Yeah, you're looking at a nice blank hour, two hour spot with no internal meetings, no bullshit that you have to deal with.

And so you either don't do prospecting because nobody likes doing it, or you go down a rabbit hole of research and an hour and a half later, you still haven't sent an email out, right? It's the same thing. It's like working out, right? It's why I suck at working out and I'm trying to do better is I'm an event driven worker outer. You know what? Like say I'm going on vacation, right? What am I doing two months before vacation? I'm at the gym. I'm eating good. I'm making sure. All right, good. Here we go. And then I come back from vacation. What is all pizza beer? Thank God. Here we go. Summer's coming. Don't want to look like a whale on the beach. Here we go. All right. Oh, Oktoberfest, thank God.

I know that if I just woke up every day and did a few pushups, few sit-ups, hit the peloton for like 15 minutes, I'd maintain. But I'm a train wreck because that's how I tend to, right? That's why you see that's my New Year's resolution that isn't going so well as far as working out every morning. It's on the calendar though, so it makes me feel better about it. Anyways, but I usually get up every morning at five o'clock and then I'll go try to work out a little bit, right? And then I go grab my Dunk's coffee and I come back to the office and see that one right there that's a tier one prospecting, I pick one account and that's what we're going to do after lunch, by the way, I'm going to have you all pick one account and we're going to come up with a tailored contact strategy to that one account.

I do 10 minutes of research and I try to find as many triggers as I can, right? Reasons to reach out to people. And then I map out a seven to 10 touch sequence and I send my first email and I schedule the rest and that's it. 30 minutes once a day. And then to that next 30 minutes, I'll show you what I do. That's personal brand building and social selling. And I'll show you how I build that into my routine. So in one hour a day, I prospect into my tier one accounts, I keep myself updated on all the trends that are in the marketplace right now, I do social selling, I build my brand in one hour a day and I'm going to really encourage you to figure out a way to build this into your process. Taking whatever I put out there for y'all as a way to think about how do you create your routine and it doesn't have to be the morning, it could be lunch, it could be after, it doesn't matter, just have one so you're doing it consistently.

Because if you have to prospect when you're hungry, anybody ever gone to the grocery store when you're hungry? Yeah. Good idea. You come home with like five times more groceries than if you were when you went when you're just not hungry at all. It's the same thing with prospecting. If you prospect when you are at your pipelines empty, you're going to panic and you're going to send out hundreds of emails to every like, so you can just get something and you are murdering your addressable market when you do that. So we got to be more strategic and you got to be consistent with it. All right. So step one is understanding your equation. Step two is knowing the details of your ideal customer profile.

And I mean the details and I don't think enough people look at this. Most of us just get our territories based on very basic demographic information. Right. It's industry size, number of locations, and we just take it from there. But let me ask you, are all prospects in your territory created equal? Are they? Do they all deserve the same amount of our time? No. There's equality. There's equity and equality. They are not all equal. I tear out my accounts and these are existing accounts and net new, by the way. I highly encourage you AMs to do the same thing. They are good, average, and crap. So what we want to do is we want to tear out our accounts. What are those characteristics? Because this is time management right here.

I recommend everybody have a list of top 10, top 25 accounts. These are the ones you really want to get into. These are the ones that we're going to follow on social listening tools. We're going to engage with them with highly personalized stuff. Right. And then, and be very thoughtful with our approach to them. Tier twos, we can do volume, but again, personalization and relevance, relevance. Tier twos, I can send out 20 or 30 emails if I understand the segmentation of that group. Right. And then the tier threes, I used to throw my tier threes away. I'd be like, ah, you're bad customers anyways. I don't want you. Now I love my tier threes for one reason and one reason only. Practice. And anytime I'm trying something new, I rip a list of my tier threes and throw up all over myself.

Who cares? I mean, as long as I'm not saying anything offensive, I can kind of do whatever I want to do to them. Right. So it's like, if you're, if you're, if you're trying to have a hard time, like delivering price, for instance, get some tier threes in your territory and be very direct with price and don't budge. Tell them what the price is and then shut up. See what happens. Right. If you're dealing with an objection and you want to be a little bit more forceful with how you handle objections, get a list of tier threes and practice so you can move upstream with that. All right. And here's mine again, that spreadsheet, by the way, the spreadsheet that I'm going to shoot, that's in your inbox, it's tabbed out.

And so you have one tab for the ICP, you have one tab for each one of these. So see if this will go. There we go. So that's where your basic demographic information is, right? For me, it's Boston, New York, computer networks, you know, and I don't really, by the way, I don't care how much revenue you have. I don't even care how many employees you have. You know what I care about? How many sales reps you have. I honestly don't care what your revenue is. Guess what? So Apple sounds like an awesome tier one account for anybody, right? Apple, who wouldn't want to have Apple? Me. You know why? Apple's got a ton of sales reps. You know what 80% of their sales reps are? Store B2C employees. I don't train B2C.

So as incredible as Apple looks from an outsider's perspective, it's not worth my time, right? So that's why we've got to dig a little bit. Now, you have some of this stuff. So again, I'm going to layer in a lot of the materials that you have here, but I want to take a little bit deeper approach to this because I think it's that important. Because again, you know, when everything fell apart in Q1 for me, I was still in SaaS and people were telling me, John, get out of SaaS. It's, you know, it's too volatile. You got to get out of it. And I was like, well, like, I don't want to. First of all, most other industries are super boring. And second of all, like, I just, I don't have a foothold in those.

I don't have any relationships in those. And it's a learning curve for me. So how do I stay in SaaS without getting slaughtered by what was happening in SaaS? And so what I looked at is looked at my ICP and all this stuff. And I said, all right, well, let me ask, maybe I should look at their ICP. Like, who do my clients sell to? And I found out that if you were, like, if I went on your website and most of your customers were SaaS customers, it was not worth me talking to you because you were getting destroyed just like everybody else. But if you were SaaS selling outside of SaaS to retail, finance, manufacturing, whatever, you were doing pretty well. So guess what? I shifted my ICP to focus on those and started to see some traction.

So we got to get detailed. And a great way to do this, and let's, let's, a lot of stuff I'm going to talk about is how to align sales, marketing, and customer success here. What I highly recommend you all do is go back to your regions, go back to your teams, grab the top 10 customers in your vertical, in your territory who are doing really well right now with whatever, like, as a business, they're thriving, but they're also thriving with your solution. Grab those top 10 and dissect the hell out of them. Rip them apart. What are all the nuanced details here? Because the more detail you can get, there's two things that you're going to get out of this. One is, you're going to be able to figure out, first of all, never waste a cold call.

Right? So say you're making calls, right? The main goal of a cold call is to get a meeting, right? Well, the secondary goal should be to gather that one extra nugget of information that we can use to help better profile them. So, for instance, if you're using, like, Sales Loft or Outreach or any one of those type of tools, those sales engagement tools, that's great news for me, right? Sales Loft, Outreach, Gong, Vidyard, like, all those tools I work with really, really well. And I complement really, really well. So say I call into a VP of sales and the gatekeeper picks up. And I'm like, hey, is that, you know, and the gatekeeper's like, no, she's in a meeting. Can I push you through her voicemail?

Well, yeah, sure, no problem. Hey, real quick, do you guys use Sales Loft or Outreach or anything like that? Yeah, why do we ask? I was just curious. Thanks. Click. Now I go into, you know, database. Check out the box that says that's, and then eventually I can run a report that says I want to see every VP of sales in the SaaS industry that uses Sales Loft under 50 million. And that might only be a list of 30 or 40 people in my territory. But I can come up with messaging that is relevant to that group. Because my messaging to a VP of sales in the SaaS industry under 50 million that's using a tool like Sales Loft or Outreach is different than it is to a VP of sales in the manufacturing industry that's using, I don't know, Microsoft Dynamics or something like that or whatever it is, over 100 million, nuanced enough that you got to be relevant.

And so we dig that little deeper, right? So this is what you want to go down. And for me, again, department headcount, growth, technologies, competition. There are certain competitors that if you are, that you know you have a great story to tell against in a certain situation. There's other ones that you're like, damn it. Like Sandler, perfect example there. Sandler. People are like, oh, I'm a Sandler shot. I'm a Sandler shot. Good for you. I love Sandler. You know why? Not because I'm better than Sandler. I mean, we can argue that if you want to, but that's not the point. You know the only two outside vendors at Salesforce for 10 years? Me and Sandler. That's it. I showed the reps how to get the meetings.

Sandler took it from there. So I compliment Sandler really, really well. So when I come across somebody who's like, oh, we're a Sandler shop. I'm like, oh, fantastic. Hey, upfront contract. If this conversation goes well, will you feel comfortable taking the next steps with us? Pain funnel. What level are we at right now? We at the second, third? I don't know yet. Question. Ask me a question. I just want to reverse it on you just because I can't. So just out of curiosity, how does Sandler help you get those meetings? They're prospecting stuff. Dog shit. They're prospecting stuff is this is how to make a cold call. That's literally what they teach people how to do. So not that I'm better, but we all have our specialties.

So I compliment them really, really well. So if I can find that out, it's a goldmine for me. Right? I mean, service now, all the different competitors that you have. There are great stories to tell against. So gather as much of that information and then go find the nuance. Again, you have, you know, niche solutions, competitors, right? Zendesk, Salesforce, Oracle. And then you got the next level here of the stuff that's really nuanced about you. Like for me, I care about your average contract value. Because if your average contract value is like 50 bucks, it's going to be hard to justify this training. If your average contract value is 10 grand, 15 grand, 30 grand, okay. I can justify this a lot easier, right?

And predictable revenue model, where you have the segmentation of roles. That's music to my ears. That's the world I grew up in, right? So all these little nuances help me figure out exactly who my real ideal customer profile is. And there's a stat that I just saw recently. You know that only about three to 5% of any one of our addressable market is actually in market for what we have to offer? Three to 5% are like, I need this. The other 97-ish percent are at some stage of zero interest, never will, to, yeah, no interest because we got something in place, to somewhat interest, to kind of having a pain, to then moving upstream. So that's why I believe as sales professionals, we need to be mini marketers.

Everything about what we do has to be an impression point. That's why we have to work together here. It's not just sales and marketing. I mean, when you were talking about that, you know, marketing and that sales being like, ah, marketing stuff sucks, so we're going to do it ourselves. Like, that is the worst case scenario, but it happens all the time. And we got to figure out how to make that impression. That's why a lot of people say, John, cold calling, why should I make cold calls anymore? Nobody picks up the phone. Anybody gotten a callback recently, by the way? If you had, tell me what you said, right? And by the way, I don't even want callbacks these days. You know, you ever gotten a callback and you had no idea who the person was?

Did the one that, hey, John, it's Bill. And you're like, fuck, what's up, Bill? And you're like, firing away, like, who the fuck is Bill? Like, shit, right? It's like, I actually don't want that. But the point isn't to get a callback. The point isn't even to have them pick up the phone. The point is to leave an impression, a positive one. Because it's all about that positive impression. So that when we get them to think, they listen to that voicemail, that then make them go look at that email, that then looks at our website, that then comes as an inbound lead. Like, that's a success in my book, right? Now, it's tough to, attribution, where'd that come from? But if we're going to really work together on this and figure this out, we've got to figure that out.

And so that's why everything we do, that's why your brand matters. That's why what you do on social matters, how you share. That means that voicemail, that means that mass blast email that you send, that matters. Because that is a negative impression, right? And that impression matters. And so we're going to try to figure out how to be as intentional as possible with this stuff. So now, step one, know your equation. Step two, figure out what your ICP is. Now step, oh, and by the way, set up some systems. Sorry, I don't have the dual screen. I keep forgetting. But, so here's an example. You want to talk about taking candy from a baby here. So this is Sales Navigator. So I take everything that is on this list, everything that's on that list.

And I go into Sales Nav, and I know some of us have us and some of us don't. There's plenty of other tools out there that we can use to segment our database, but this is one I use. And I got one list, and it's legit like taking candy from a baby. I go on there, I put all my demographics, right? So size, industry, and then look at the bottom left right there. See, that says companies, past companies. If you used to work at Salesforce, and just to let you all know, I haven't trained Salesforce for them about five or six years, so I'm actually very happy to be working with y'all, because they went with Korn Ferry, and I'd rather work with y'all to leapfrog them at this point. But I made a lot of money off of Salesforce over the years, and I trained every rep.

The reason I'm here is because of Salesforce, right, Will? Part of it. Part of it. So when somebody, if you worked at Salesforce from 2010 to 2018, you went through my training, and you liked it. I know you did. All right? And so now, if you are a VP of sales at another company that fits my profile, like I said, it's taking candy from a baby. I don't even have to try. But guess what? Those VPs aren't usually, Will did, thank God, but those VPs aren't usually, I'm not top of mind unless I stay on top of them, right? So I have to be alerted when these things happen. I have to be like, hey, congrats on the new role. See, hey, now it's just settled. You want, because guess what? Everybody thinks when somebody starts a new business, that's a great time to reach out to somebody.

Whenever somebody's like an executive or somebody starts at a new company, that's a great time to reach out to them, right? Wrong. Wrong. Unless they're familiar with you. Unless we've worked together before. What executive in their right mind is going to come in and one of their first decisions is going to be to implement a technology or some solution that they've never had any experience with? They're not going to do that. They're going to bring in some people they know. They're going to bring in the tech that they know, the relationships that they know. And so it's a fool's errand to say, hey, congratulations on your new role. I'd love to talk to you about all the wonderful things we can do as you drink from the fire hose for the next six months.

Can I add some complexity to your onboarding, please? Shit. But check this out. I take this list. I get alerted. Two or three people show up on this list every single week. And then I export that list. And I have one email that gets me a 32, literally a 32% response rate on one email. Not a cadence, not a contact strategy. I don't, I even call myself out that it's not relevant, that it's not personalized. Hey, Luke, this isn't personalized, but I promise it's relevant, especially since you used to work at Salesforce. And now the VP of sales over at Twilio personally trained a whole team at the Basho coming out with a new offering. We've got this cool thing to be open to a call. Hey, John, good to hear from you.

32% conversion ratio. And I don't have to put in much work at all, but I have to stay on top of them. I have to be paying attention to them because they are not reaching out to me. But for the most part, you have to stay top of mind. By the way, there's a little nugget for you. I'm going to throw tips and nuggets out throughout the entire day. One of my favorites is, and customer success, you can do this, account managers and sales reps. You ever get that, hey, call me back in six months, call me back in three months, right? Ask them this question verbatim. Hey, how do I stay top of mind between now and then without being annoying? Dead serious. And then you give them a reason why you're asking.

So we talk about, there's some psychology around giving somebody, like, people reasons. And so, like, the reason for recall, like, by the way, there's one thing, if there's nothing you do different coming out of this session today, it's I want you to take these two phrases out of your vocabulary, and it's touching base and checking in. Two most meaningless phrases in sales. It means there's no reason for your call, so therefore, there is absolutely no reason for me to talk to you. But, man, I used to think that was it. I used to think that was my job for 10 straight years. Touching base, checking in, touching base, checking in. I felt stupid saying it. I just didn't have a replacement for it.

Then I took this training, and they gave me one. It was, hey, the reason for my call today is, because if you cannot finish that sentence, you should not be making the phone call, right? And so, it better be something better than I want to sell you something. So you do that with questions, too. You want the easiest way to know that you have a good question? Assume they're going to push back on you and say, why do you need to know that? And so you have a reason. And if that reason is self-centered, then it's probably more of a qualification question. If the reason is about them, then it's more discovery. And those two are different, right? So when somebody says, hey, John, call me back in six months, I'll say, yeah, no problem.

I'm happy to call you back in six months. I think I'll try to deal with the objection. What's going to change in six months? Whatever. But then I'll say, hey, so how do I stay top of mind between now and then without being annoying? And look, the reason I ask is because I tend to follow a lot of the trends that are out there in the marketplace, like what's happening with AI, some of the new tools that are there. So is there anything that if I come across that you'd get some value out of? And by the way, that does not have to be JBSales specific. And they'll tell you, yeah, you know what, John? If you come across any tools I should be paying attention to or any new techniques or anything like that, feel free to send them my way.

So that's what I track that you told me you were interested in. And then I'll show you some stuff later on this afternoon of how I track that. And then I put you on tools where I can get alerted when certain things happen so I can stay top of mind and always have a reason. And I tell you right now, with existing accounts, it's even more important. So with that, let's see, coming up on lunch. Yep, so step three, we've got to find those reasons. And we've heard about this was triggers, right? Like you know what a trigger is, right? It's just a reason to reach out to them, basically. And triggers can be about the business or the individual. Now the business, those are like mergers and acquisitions, opening up new office, launching new products, all that stuff.

The individual, that's more like, you know, quotes or blog posts or something, you know, podcasts or anything like that. And then there's timely ones, things that just happened, like you just went through a merger and acquisition, you just launched that new product, whatever it is. And I try to stay three months-ish, if you will, on that stuff, like anything over three months, maybe six, stretch it a little bit. And then there's static ones, where if that thing's on their website, like a mission statement, vision statement, something like that, then it's always there. So I want to look for all this stuff. And this afternoon, we're going to break up in a group, so we're going to pick one account that you all want to get into.

And I'll just give you a quick example of how I look, you know those 30 minutes? In your email, there's a link, it's called How I Prospect into My Tier 1 Accounts, that'll show you a video of exactly what I do in that 30 minutes. And what I have is, I have the company's website open, and I have the contact of the, I have the LinkedIn profile of the contact I want to go after. I'm integrating a lot of AI into this prospecting stuff, so right out of the gate, I have something to make a connection to here. You know, whether it's good or not, I'll figure that out later, because one of the things is, I want you to time, if you're going to do research, I want you to time yourself, right? Because you go down that rabbit hole way too easy, so I got a little thing on my calendar, like a 10-minute timer here, right?

So, and I try to find as many different things as I can possibly find that I can make a connection to. And so I go, all right, so you did new generative AI enhancements, so you got a new product launch, you got quarterly results, I can rip through that. Then I got, you got some new hires here, I think, right, just a few. Mika, I think she just left. So, Mika, I'm going to stalk you for a little bit here. So, I'm going to put it, you know, she's got her LinkedIn profile up, and when I look at her, she's got a job experience here, SAP, Amazon, Adobe, those are all clients that I've worked with. So, those are all avenues that I could use to potentially find a connection with her. Oh, there she's, sorry.

You left at the perfect time, as a matter of fact. I was like, ah, she's leaving. You're on the backstage, I was like. Yeah. So, sorry, I hope you don't mind, I used you as the example here. But, you know, and then she's got a whole, and then she's done a bunch of posts on social, right, about how you're hiring, and we're looking for exceptional, like, so I help people hire, and then this one, I love this, right, for us with culture. I'm huge into culture and values and all that other stuff, so these are all reasons that I can use to make a connection if I wanted to reach out to her. Now, I've got to figure out how to tell this story. I've got to figure out what value it is, because I don't want to just make random connections here.

Hey, you went to UMaryland, go Terps. Like, you don't want that. But in five minutes, I found five or six things that I could use to reach out to you to try to make a tell story around, right? And so this is what, this is a little bit of the exercise we're going to do this afternoon after we create this messaging. But we can also use tools to help automate this stuff, so it actually, we get the information. Oh, actually, this one's Chris. This one's actually killer, too. Chris, have you all played around with Chris's 10K analyzer yet? Shit, that's just bananas, isn't it? Like, if you're going after a publicly traded company, it gives you more reasons to reach out. Like, I used to, ah, 10Ks. God, what a snooze fest.

Like, literally, I would never look at 10Ks. You know, I would read the first paragraph from the CEO, and that's about it. And the rest of it, like, boring, right? So I would never use 10Ks to actually figure anything out. Now, I take that 10K, I stick it in the 10K analyzer, and it tells me exactly, summarizes it, tells me the pain points, what to sell them based on my product suite, and then it even gives me messaging to use, to align. Like, that would have taken me three hours before AI, and now it takes me five minutes. Thank you, Chris. Yep. Then we got tools like Owler, and by the way, this one's free. All the tools that I share with you, there's a free version of these and a paid version of these.

I love this tool. It's Owler. It's basically a Google Alerts on steroids. The free version, you get five accounts that you can track, and you can track them on very specific triggers. So if you look at the top of my screen right there, and again, this is existing accounts and net new. If you look at the top left, clients under a year, clients over a year, prospects, my top 50, and then some other ones, right? And then you can follow on very specific triggers. For me, it's acquisitions, funding, hiring, new offices, product launch, right? And so now, I set this up, and there's a dashboard that I look at every morning that sees what's happening. But I also get an email in my inbox every single day about what's happening with these accounts.

And these are all reasons for me to reach out to you. Like back in the day with Salesforce, they used to acquire a new company every single week. And if I was a major account exec, and that was my only account, if Salesforce was my only customer, I might be able to stay up to date with them. Maybe. If they were my only account. But I'm running around like a chicken with my head cut off, trying to run my own business here. Salesforce was a big customer, but not one that I spend every day looking at. And so every time they acquired a business, it was like $30,000 to $40,000 in my pocket. Like, easy. But they weren't calling me saying, hey, John, we just acquired this company. Could you go train them?

I had to stay on top of who they acquired. And then I would reach out to my contacts there and say, hey, I just saw you acquire. Could you make the introduction to the head of sales over there so I can make sure that they give the same training as you guys so when you integrate this, it'll actually work? And it worked, but they weren't calling me and saying that because they got a million other things going on. So I had to be alerted. So these are the type of tools that create this Iron Man, Iron Woman of sales that allows me to do way more than the average rep can because I'm leveraging some of this tech. And then there's, yeah, oh, and you also get an email. Like I said, you get an email once a day that actually says, hey, this company just did that.

And a lot of times I'll just forward this over. Like I track on funding and awards, not because I think funding and awards are good things to reach out, by the way. I mean, God help that person that wants, you know, say a company gets funding. God help that person that's on Crunchbase once that hits. They must get eight million emails from sales reps. Be like, hey, so I got a bunch of money. Let me show you how to spend it. Right? So instead of that, instead of that, you know what I do with funding? I track my existing accounts and my new ones as well. And when I see funding, I send them one email and it says, hey, congrats on the funding. Hopefully that means something good for you personally and professionally.

And that's it. Not, I want to sell you something. Not let me, yep, whatever. And it's almost like this weird reverse psychology. People are like, wait, you don't want to talk to us? No, no, I'd love to talk to you. I just don't need to. I just thought it was cool. Good for you. Hey, you got an award? Congratulations. Look at you guys are killing it over there. Keep up the great work. Don't you think that's a little better than touching base and checking in? Hmm. Right? And I mean, truth be told, Juniper. The old customer of mine. I didn't even have them on my list. Thankfully, I had them on a strategic one because I follow all my investors, like all the, you know, VCs and stuff like that. But they got 133, so I said, hmm, okay.

And all I do is I take this and I forward it to the client, and you'll see here. Hey, Brandon. How you been? It's been a while. Still cute talking to Juniper. Saw this came across. There it is. I hope you mean something good for you personally and professionally. You're on my list to reach out. This time, I actually did want to engage. We're coming out with a new approach. P.S. I still rock the Patagonia you guys gave me all those years back. That's my ugly mug, right? And he gets, hey, John, love the jacket. It's so good to hear from you. I'd be happy to catch up. Full disclosure, I've been shifting my role. Let me know we can do both, blah, blah, blah, right? So that was cool. But then he sent me this afterwards.

Ah, by the way, you're the only sales coach that we know that reached out. Good to see you. Still practice. Won't you preach? It's not that hard. It's not that hard. I'm not that bright. You know how, like, I loved, everybody thought I was a genius. I have a terrible memory. Everybody thought I was awesome because I would always remember people's birthdays. But do you know how I remember somebody's birthday? Literally, as soon as I meet you and I find out your birthday, I go onto my calendar and I set a recurring meeting on my calendar once a year. And it shows up every year and I send you a nice little text message every year. Hey, Bert, happy birthday. Oh, my God, you're so thoughtful. And I'm not like the Facebook birthday person.

Screw you if you are, by the way. I got 700 friends apparently on Facebook who all think I'm so awesome that they reach out once. Or LinkedIn. I had to shut off that one. Good Lord. Apparently, once, have you ever gotten into your LinkedIn profile and you see seven years in a row, one, the same exact, happy birthday, John, happy birthday, John, happy birthday, John. It's like, stop it. All right? So, but this is the type of stuff that shows that you actually give a shit. And you don't have to try too hard. And then you can do other stuff like this. Where's another one here? Yeah, oh, okay. So then step four. So now, we get tight on our numbers, right? So we know exactly how many we get. We get then tight on our ideal customer profile to figure out exactly who we're going after.

Then, we got to figure out what triggers we can look for so we can be efficient and track things. And we're going to come up with messaging that we can repurpose for those triggers too, by the way. Because look, every time somebody goes through a merger and acquisition, you all can kind of say the same thing, right? Your value proposition can be similar. Every time somebody launches a new product, you can kind of say the same thing. So we're going to craft messaging right after lunch where we can use and repurpose. So you're going to be able to create a message that's 75% big, that reads, hi, Sarah, I saw you recently merged with. And that's the part you're going to have to customize. The reason that prompt me to reach out to you is because value statement.

And that doesn't have to change until we figure out whether it works or not. And if everybody in this room is tracking their top five accounts using Owler free on mergers and acquisitions, and you all use the merger and acquisition template, when that pops up, you're going to be able to figure out whether it works pretty damn quick. And if it does, cool, leave it in. If it doesn't, dump it, try something else. But then we've got to figure out who we're going after. So now we've got those triggers. Now we've got to figure out how to speak the language of the people that we want to talk to. And I don't mean French, French, and English, and English here. It's above the power line and below the power line.

People above the power line make decisions. People below the power line don't. They speak a different language. People above the power line typically speak, I say, Excel. Everybody else speaks Word. Learn how to speak Excel. Remember me and Calvin? Calvin, 50%. Once I got my spreadsheet down in the next year when he said 50%, I was like, all right, Calvin, no problem. I just put it in a little calculator. I was like, cool, that means we need two new hires. We need another two grand a month on marketing. And he'd be like, dude, we can't afford to do that. I'd be like, well, I can't afford to hit your numbers, Calvin. Because it was all data-driven, he actually agreed with me. So with this, I got to speak Excel.

But look, executives don't talk about feature function with executives. They don't want to hear that shit. They're talking about the future, the strategy, 100 billion. That's what we're trying to figure out from an executive standpoint. Below the power line is feature function, speed feed type of stuff. Below the power line is usually pain because it's about today or yesterday. Whereas above the power line is about tomorrow. And so we got to learn how to speak that language. Opportunities versus challenges, right? So we got to figure that out. And look, people talk all the time about like driving urgency, right? Look, or creating urgency. I'm going to tell you right now, we as sales professionals cannot create urgency.

We can't create it. We can uncover it and we can drive it though. And the way that we do that is by aligning with the priorities. Because when your CEO stands up and tells you, like, these are the things that we got to do this year to be successful. If I cannot tie my solution to one or two of those, good luck selling anything of significance. But unfortunately, the way I used to get there was by saying dumb stuff like, tell me about your priorities. What keeps you up at night? God, I love that question these days. I'm like my daughter, next question. All right. So, so I got to learn how to speak this language, but I'm not a CIO. So how do I figure that out? Well, you got some good resources internally.

You got some good slide decks here of different personas, right? That type of thing. I'm also going to share with you a report that we do every single year. And this one just landed literally two weeks, two weeks ago. I put this out there. It's in your inbox. We do a report on the top priorities of the top executives in the top industries every single year. And if you notice at the bottom, right, tech, SaaS, retail, manufacturing, oil, and gas, CEO priority one, two, three, CFO priority one, two, three. And the concept here is CIOs in the healthcare industry have different priorities than CIOs in the manufacturing industry. CIOs in the manufacturing industry have different priorities this year than they did last year.

I'll tell you that. And if we are not staying up to date on that, then you're missing out. You're not as relevant. But if we do know this stuff, we can be relevant. And then you can even use tools. Chris, you got another one, right? The persona builder. Yeah. Oh, actually, I use Perplexity. Another one I use is Perplexity. This one's cheap and this one's free and awesome. So what are the top priorities and challenges of VPs of sales in the SaaS industry moving into 2024? And then it breaks this all down for me. Challenges, priorities, even gives me additional questions I should be asking to augment my education. I've found that AI has put my business acumen on steroids. And I'll tell you right now, out of all the techniques that we're going to talk about today, if there's one thing that you won't do to improve your results and your rate, is improve your business acumen.

Period. Learn how to speak big business. Stop pitching. Executives don't want to be pitched. They want to have a conversation about what's going on in the marketplace. Learn it. You know, and then here's another one, the buyer persona one that Chris put together. This one, actually, you can get buyer persona information where you can go in and learn about what these people care about. So when you talk to them, instead of saying, tell me about your priorities, you say, hey, you know what? We're dealing with CIOs in the tech, you know, in the manufacturing industry. And they're telling us, as I'm walking into 2024, the top priorities are X, Y, and Z. Are those yours? Even if they're not, the fact that you show you know their world a little bit tends to open up the conversation a little bit more.

So it's not about knowing the answer. It's about knowing enough to be curious so you can ask better questions. You can come up with better messaging. This message is what we're going to work on right when you get back. We're going to create sales-ready messaging. And it's going to be based on triggers and personas. So this is the equation. This is the one I found that all companies have the hardest time doing because, again, my background is marketing. But the marketing messaging, right, of an email that is 15 bullet points and uses words like transparency and synergy and those type of things, that's great. But that's what marketing should do. That should not be what we send out there. Or, you know, all, like, hey, look at all the stuff that we do.

We need to throw darts as sales reps. And it has to be something I could put on one scroll on an iPhone or on 10 seconds when somebody says, go, what do you say? And that is not the elevator pitch. And so I've been working on this for the past five years, and this will get us pretty damn close. So it starts with a persona. So ideas, CIOs, and healthcare, okay? Now, then pick a trigger, priority, or challenge. Not all three, just one. Then, what component of your solution aligns with that? As an example, I do sales training at the highest level, right? But I got two programs. I got filling the funnel and driving a close. But even within those, I got filling the funnel. I got email, phone, social selling, contact strategy, messaging.

And driving a close, I got negotiations, objection handling, closing, meeting execution, and questioning skills. I do live sessions like this, and I have a whole on-demand catalog and a membership that I got, right? So I got all these little pieces of what I do. So what component of my solution aligns with that priority or challenge? And you got a lot of components of your solution, depending on what you're selling. You got a lot of different things that you can talk about. So the whole thing, again, when we're talking about prospecting, I'm not talking about once I'm meeting with you and having this conversation. I'm talking about prospecting. Because say you put everything you do into one email, and we can maybe, you know, I do prospecting, meeting, execution, negotiation, objection, and closing, right?

I could probably put a nice, tight little message around that. But say I send you that email or leave you that voicemail, and you don't respond. What's my next email? What's my next voicemail? Hey, it's me again. Not sure if you got my first email. Just bubbling this one up to the top. Thoughts? Now, instead, my first email, if you're a VP of sales, my first email is going to be about prospecting. You don't like that one? I don't care. My next phone call to you is going to be about negotiations. You don't like that one? I don't give a shit. Here comes meeting execution, and I'm just going to keep poking at you. And if every one of those messages is at least relevant, I might miss and miss and miss and miss and miss, then I might strike that nerve.

And because those are all relevant and value-oriented, you might give me a chance. And that's what we're going to finish up here. Once you identify your component of your solution, now, if they apply that component to the priority or challenge or trigger, what would the result be? What would the benefit be? And there's your message. And so we can create sales-ready messaging for both triggers and priorities. These are mine. VPs of sales, ideally in the SaaS industry, who are going through a merger and acquisition, leverage our negotiation scorecard to align new business units with a common language so they can quickly start selling new services. That can now become my merger and acquisition template.

So now I track all my companies on mergers and acquisitions. I get alerted on a merger and acquisition. I open up that template, put a little flavor on top, hit send, and I'm doing some pretty high-quality prospect in a very efficient way. Or I want to do a little bit more volume. VPs of sales, whose main priority is keeping the reps motivated and engaged now that everybody's working from home. Leverage our live remote training to infuse some energy in the teams and give them techniques. Now I can call every VB of sales in my book and say the same damn thing. Hey, thanks for taking my call. Can I get 30 seconds to tell you why I'm calling before you hang up on me? Who is this? What do you want?

Hello, this is John with JV Sales. And real quick, the reason for my call today is I'm working with a lot of other VPs of sales right now that are just freaking out because their reps are just not motivated because they're working from home. And they're leveraging our training to do it because we've come with some energy and give them some techniques to drive our results. Love to have a conversation with you about that. What's the best way to get some time on your calendar? Rinse, repeat, rinse, repeat, rinse, repeat. Test it against another one. Rinse, repeat, rinse, repeat, rinse, repeat. If it works, cool. If it doesn't, whatever. Learn, iterate, agile. I do want to add a question here. So, questioning skills, that obvious discovery here, open-ended, closed-ended, layering questions, right?

But I want to talk about interest questions for two seconds. And this is going to set the stage for the emails this afternoon. This is Glengarry Glen Ross. By the way, if you haven't seen Glengarry Glen Ross, don't watch the movie. It's a depressing-ass movie. But go on YouTube and watch the best eight minutes of Alec Baldwin's entire career. Because in there he talks about, right, ABC always be closing. Now, by the way, sidebar, homework assignment for you. People say, what's your favorite sales movie? Glengarry Glen Ross, Wolf of Wall Street, Boiler Room? Nope, nope, nope, nope. Nope, those are the worst sales movies I've ever watched in my entire life. Great movies. Great movies. Apparently, I've got to find some lewds, because those things look fun.

I'm just joking. But it's everything that's wrong about selling. It's everything that's wrong about selling. They're trying to screw people out of money. You know what I mean? So you've got to go watch my two favorite sales movies of all time. You've got to watch my second one first, and then my first one. So my second favorite sales movie is Pursuit of Happiness. Right? I mean, talk about hard work. I thought I worked hard. I don't hold a candle to that guy. That guy was holding, you know, seven seconds so he could get the shelter by four o'clock, so he could have a place for his kid to sleep. So the problem with Pursuit of Happiness is like 95% depressing. It's like the last five minutes, you're like, oh, finally, he actually got a break.

So that's why you have to watch my favorite sales movie of all time. Anybody know what my favorite sales movie is of all time? Tommy Boy. Helen, you look like a Helen. Let me tell you why I suck as a salesman. Say I'll go to some guy's office. Say he's remotely interested in buying something from me. Well, I get excited. I'm like JoJo, the circus boy with a pretty new pet. Right? Anyways, that movie is so pure as far as sales is concerned. So you have to watch that and then go pollute your ears with this crap. But eight minutes, best eight minutes of Alec Baldwin's entire career. In there, he talks about ABC always be closing, but he also talks about Ada. I thought he made that up. He didn't.

That is a history lesson here. 1898, a guy by the name of St. Elmo Lewis came up with this. 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. Then we have to have a desire. Then we have to move to act. So, let's look at an email. Subject line gets my attention. Those first ten words right there on that email because I can read it on that screen. That's got to get me interested. And what am I interested in? There's a universal truth in sales and human behavior here. My friends, what is the one thing on the planet that everybody loves talking about? Thank you. I don't care what region you're from.

I don't care what, where you are. Everybody loves talking. So, how do you start it? That's why you don't start your emails off. I'd like to introduce myself. Shut up. I don't care who you are. One of a recent surveys say, shut up. We're the leading provider of. No, you're not. None of that is interesting to me. What's interesting to me is me. So, how do you make it about me? You personalize it. Hey, John. I was on your website. I read your blog. Whatever. That's cool. But that takes some time. Or you can ask a question. Hey, John. How are you keeping your reps motivated and engaged now that everybody's working from home? And by the way, I'm asking this question not because I'm expecting an answer from you.

I'm asking you this question so you can open up the email and I'm going to answer it for you. Well, the reason I ask is because. And so, if we have these questions and these messages based on triggers and personas, we can start to tell a story that put us in the best position possible to get somebody to at least respond to us. So, I hope you enjoyed that keynote and it got you to think specifically around how we have to level up right now. Again, it's no longer an option to be average. AI is coming for all of us. And like I said in the keynote, we're not going to get replaced by AI. We're going to get replaced by sales reps who learn how to use AI. So, if you're looking to level up your sales game, you've got to join my membership.

If you join my membership, I will literally give you everything I got. It's the same training, filling the funnel and driving a close that I give to some of the fastest grown companies in the world to help them excel. Workshops every single month on very specific topics like AI and how to leverage it. AMAs plus my whole on-demand catalog. You get all this for 419 bucks. So, if you're looking to level up your game, join today. Now, if you don't want to spend the money, totally get it. I still try to give away as much free content as I can. Join my newsletter. It's jbarrows.com slash newsletter. And I send you a weekly newsletter on Saturdays that are sales from the streets, tips, and technologies that I'm coming across to, again, help us all level up.

So, let's do this together and let's make it happen. Let's do this together and let's make it happen.