Tony Dicks: How Outsourcing and AI are Redefining the Sales Landscape

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Now, today's conversation is with Tony Dix, the CRO of CloudTask, the world's number one marketplace to buy and sell B2B sales services. Now, CloudTask used to be an outsourced SDR organization and has elevated to creating a marketplace where companies can find outsourced agencies or individuals to help them drive their business into the funnel. Now, look, my opinion about using an outsourced prospecting company to book meetings has definitely changed over the years, especially now with AI. I personally tried them in the past and absolutely hated them for all the reasons that Tony and I get into. However, now with the SDR function struggling for many organizations, the need to be way more agile, and the abilities of AI, outsourcing is a legitimate option that I think a lot of organizations should look into, especially because there's a lot of extra benefits in outsourcing that most companies overlook.

So if you're a sales leader trying to figure out how to solve the problem of top of funnel issues, or you're a sales rep who wants to see what the options are out there, you're going to want to listen to this one. Let's make it happen. Tony, what's going on, brother? Welcome to Make It Happen Monday. How you doing, man? Hey, JV. Thanks for having me, man. I'm good. I'm good. It's another day down here in Medellin. Spring all year. Can't hate that. Nah, man. I'm jealous. We're in Boston. You're in Boston? Yeah, I'm in Boston. Cold as shit. Dreary and rainy. So, yeah, don't rub it in. How long ago, man? How long ago was that conference? It feels like forever ago, but I only think it was like three, four months ago, right?

Sales Agency Growth Conference. Time flies, but that was May. It was a little over six months, so it was a while, man. Yeah, and that was my first time in Columbia, too. So, I loved it down there. So, cool, man. Well, look, we're going to get into, I think, a topic that I'm getting asked a lot right now, which is, you know, should I outsource my SDR function, period? Because the SDR is obviously with AI and everything else happening right now. That position in sales is, I think, the biggest influx right now because nobody knows what to do about it. And with your background, it's going to be a cool conversation around that. But before we do that, do me a favor. Let's back up and give your origin story, man.

Like, talk to us about where you come from, like where you grew up, like family, like parents, like all that shit. Because I always love to hear that journey about how people became who they are, not just the work side of them. So, give me a little background on that and then we'll dive into it. Yeah, 100%. I definitely want to see the replay on this because I'm always, when you start writing your origin story, it's much more difficult. So, man, me, I like to say I'm kind of a world citizen. I mean, home for me is Washington, D.C. But my parents are, my dad was in the military. So, I've lived, if I count the years that I was moving around with them, like we move every two, three years as a family.

And we always kind of move back to Washington, D.C. So, that's where most of my years, formative years were spent. So, that's why I call that home. I did not plan to join the military, but I started working with multinational companies when I graduated from undergrad. So, I was still moving at an average of every two-year clip. So, to date, I've got about 26 cities under my belt, different cities for a year or more. I don't count the city. I've stayed in for less time. And so, I like to think one of my superpowers is perspective. I've experienced a lot of different things. And so, I try to pull those from those different buckets of experience over life. And apply to the things. So, that's a little bit about that.

26 places that you've stayed for over a year. Like, I've been to 26 countries and stuff. I haven't stayed in some place there a year, 26. That's crazy. Yeah, man. Yeah, man. So, I had the pleasure of going to North Carolina A&T for undergrad school down in Greensboro, North Carolina. Went to Kellogg for my grad degree. Spent most of my years. I mean, I've sold commission only. Gone broke. Talk about that one day. Yeah, yeah. That teaches you a lot about sales. Yeah. Especially spending time with the wrong prospects. I spent a lot of years. I mean, I worked at Enterprise Rent-A-Car. And I spent a lot of years in pharmaceutical sales, which is a different beast. It's, you know, field-based selling.

Selling on a system. Having systematized messages. Secret to that sale, too, is when you figure out you're a walking commercial, then you can get really good at it. And the other part that sometimes I see people not do these days is living to sell another day, right? This idea of actually keeping a relationship alive over time and not always having to try to find the next lead that you're going to burn. It's something you learn out of that group. I ran sales teams. I ran brand teams, global teams, domestic teams on the marketing, on the brand management side. And I'm a Black Belt Six Sigma. That brings it all together. So, I love making money, like growing companies in a process-oriented way so we can make those sales predictable and profitable.

That's really what I'm all about. Love it, man. That's insane. And then put a cherry on top of CloudTask. What are you doing right now with CloudTask? CloudTask. I'm the CRO, COO over here. In a nutshell, we are trying to transform the sales outsourcing game or not transform it. Let's just say we're evolving with the times, bringing the B2C experience to B2B sales outsourcing. And right now, man, it's a journey because there's a lot in sales. You know, think about it. Ask 100 people what's a lead. You might get 100 different definitions. So, when you're trying to go from a service-based model, body to body, to an online model where you don't have the flexibility of just explaining things around, you know, explaining around things, but you really need to try to find continuity and have a common language and, you know, have things be consistent.

It's not only a feat by itself, but it's definitely a feat when you're trying to impact the sales community and a bunch of sales personalities, right? Because marketing, with digital marketing, has gotten there a little bit. They got there a little bit earlier. And now, as we go into sales, salespeople have marketing tools now. But just because we have marketing tools doesn't mean we learned marketing skills. So, there's some things going on there, but it's guaranteed to be, it's been a wild ride and it's going to be worth it because, you know, without sales, you have no business and we have to constantly be getting better at it. And, you know, there's no experts. You're an expert today. You could not be an expert tomorrow.

Things change all the time. So, I'm a lifelong learner. I enjoy that kind of thing. So, it's stressful, but I'm into it. Well, that's, you know what, man? That's the thing. It's like my wife and I were talking last night. Like, she's going crazy right now because she's, you know, busy as shit and like doing stuff and doing both of us up until two o'clock in the morning, like just admin shit because we're both solopreneurs for the most part. You know, I'm back to being just me and Megan and he's, and she's, she's got her own small squad, but she's, you know, CEO, CFO, everything. And, you know, every once in a while it gets a little like, what the fuck, man? Like, I don't know if I can keep doing this.

But then every time I take a break, it's kind of like this sick, twisted thing. I mean, it's like, ah, I'm bored. Like, now I don't know. So, it's like this weird balance of like, I don't want to be bananas busy, but when I ain't busy, I'm bored as hell and I get in too much trouble. So, that's, it's almost like this. I have to, right? 100%. And I, speaking of that, I mean, I'm, I've had to start meditation. I was like, you know, and, and normally I don't really have, a lot of times I'm feeling like I got, I got to do something. So, I don't have the patience, but now when you're juggling all those things at the same time, it's like more important than ever. The sleep gets affected. I don't know if, actually, John, I don't know if Amir told you about the whoop.

He probably did because he don't tell, oh, okay. This thing has been telling me everything to the extent that, you know, sometimes you don't make a change until it gets uncomfortable enough that you just don't keep it the same. So, those signals, man, I can see my heart rate such that if I meditate, then it tells me where the ranges are. So, I now kind of, before it was like, meditate because it's good and you feel better. Now, I could actually see the metrics, right? All right. What's that called? What's the thing called? It's called the whoop. Hey, don't get it until I send you my affiliate code. All right. Yeah, send it to me, man. Is it W-H-O-O-P? Yes, sir. All right, cool. Yeah, send me that affiliate code.

I'll take a look at it. You got to be still at all times. Always, man. You guys, you all know how to make money way better than I do. I do things the hard way and fucking don't get paid for shit. But look, let's dive into it because I think that's a good transition just with, you know, chaos, whatever. But what you're doing with CloudTask and trying to change the game a little bit when it comes to outsourcing. You know, I used to outsource IT services back, you know, in the early 2000s. And the word outsource was like a blessing and a curse, right? Some people thought of it as, okay, cool. I can actually offload some stuff I don't want to do. A lot of people thought shipping jobs to India or whatever it might be.

And it was a bad word, right? And when I was younger in sales, you know, as a VP, I engaged with some outsourced, you know, cold callers and outsourced prospecting groups. And they were fucking disastrous because they were, like, legit, like, script oriented, right? And we had to map out the whole script with the tree. If they say A, then say B. If they say C, then say D. And I put some effort into this shit. And then I would listen to some of their calls. I was horrified, like horrified, right? And I was like, this is doing more harm than good. This is bringing no value to my life. And admittedly, I probably didn't give them as much of a chance. You know what I mean? Like, after, like, three months, I'm like, piss off.

And we all know it takes a lot of momentum to get after, you know, a pipeline. It takes a lot longer than three months just to build it. But now, so I was anti-outsourcing 100%. You hit me up five years ago, and this wouldn't even be a conversation. I'd be like, Tony, fuck what you're doing. I don't like it at all. But now, with the SDR model specifically, and it being under fire with AI and how we've over-automated the process in a lot of ways and turned these reps into robots, the predictable revenue model that historically grew the SaaS industry of segmentation of roles was great when money was free and was great when it was a grow at all cost for us as businesses because we could scale, right?

But it's never been a customer-centric approach because nobody likes to be handed off five times. And the model's broken hard now because those SDRs don't even stay in the company for more than four. I think it's like the average is 14 months now. So it's like, it makes sense when you build that SDR and they become your AE and they stay with you for five, six, seven years, right? Then you get your ROI. But if you look at the SDR model as itself, as its own little entity, it is an insanely unprofitable model. So I'm now, and obviously because of our partnership and everything, wide open to the idea, and I'm also recommending outsourced from that standpoint. So walk me through the evolution that you've seen, and then let's talk about why you should or shouldn't outsource or insource that function in your organization right now.

So how have you seen things evolve? Yeah, let's talk through it. And, you know, by way of entry, let me be clear. I was new to the SDR role when I got with CloudTask and started working on in this direction of the sales outsourcing. So because most of my career, when I was doing sales, I was the full scope salesperson. Sure, I'd been in hunting models, farming models, but either way, you know, the buck stopped with me. So I actually had to study up on it. I didn't come through guessing and just, you know, was an SDR role and soon everybody knew what it was. So one actually good book for those that might, you know, just be trying to get their head around the role in the first place, by the way, is Sales Development.

And I got to say, I can't remember, shoot, I'm forgetting the author's name. I want to give the shout out, but I can't. Trish, is it the Sales Development Playbook? Not the same thing. That one, Trish Bertuzzi? But it is by the same, what's the author's name? Trish Bertuzzi? No, that's a different one. This one is by, I'll get back to it. This one is called, oh, Sales Development, Cracking the Code. If you put that one in, it'll come up. But that's one to reference. So what I learned from that and then also what I've seen. So I'm going to combine the two of, you know, some study knowledge as well as some practical knowledge. A few things. Somebody's going to run the SDR model. There, you definitely have to pay attention to your ACV.

And the deal is sometimes I see companies that come through looking for SDRs and they don't decide on an ACV. They're like, oh, well, we sell products and we've got these different pricing ranges and all this good stuff. But this is when you have to apply marketing style approaches like marketing campaigns to sales. They're sales campaigns. So you decide what products you're going to sell. If you try to apply SDR model broadly to everything, you're going to fail. If you go ahead and make sure that, you know, whatever product you're selling, the average contract value is going to be $5,000 or above, then you're kind of in the window. Now, that information also is from Winning by Design. You've got their book, the SaaS sales method, right?

They start actually putting some numbers to these things so you can go about it in a very strategic way. And with that, let me just state one of my purposes, John, you know, through the marketplace, people get to hire agencies. And one of the things that we're doing is that it's important. It's basically like same side selling. We have to work on both sides to help the sellers sell better in a way that is more transparent and more customer centric, ideally. So they went on our platform and vice versa. Equip the buyers with the information. They need to be good buyers because a lot of times people show up and they're like, yo, well, what can you do for me? How many meetings can you get me? And that's part of the reason why they're having a bad experience with outsourcing an SDR, much less kind of running an SDR shop because the same thing you do with your sales team.

In fact, know your numbers. I believe, John, you have that, right, where people could go in there, set your metrics. You're supposed to have quotas and goals for your people, whether they're an AE or an SDR. Those should already align to your financial goals and targets. So you wouldn't be in the red or be, you know, shooting in the dark if you did that beforehand. But when you decide to call up like it's Burger King, have it your way, tell me how many meetings you can get me. And then, OK, great, I'm going to pay for you to do it and then hope for the best. Well, I got a little saying. If you don't know how to inspect what you expect, everything is going to be suspect. So your failure is due to neglect of your responsibility to cycle.

How has it evolved? SDRs are the most requested role. They're the ones that get outsourced the most frequently. If you already have inbound results and know who your target market is and you just want to have some folks, take that for you so you could have maybe an internal team focus on something else or you're going from the stage of you're a founder that's doing a lot of sales with your internal team and now you're building a sales team and you want that management oversight, it can work for you. But what you need to know is what you're really buying. You're not buying meetings. You're not buying the outputs. You're buying the management and oversight, all the recruitment, the training and the management of that team.

So you and your team can focus on other things. This is especially good for that tech founder that doesn't have a ton of experience running the sales team, wants to get that thing up quickly. It's also good if you are, let's say you're in the U.S. market and now you want to break into another market, but you're not sure that you want to take on some of the cost and expense that goes behind hiring a full-time team where they're like a W-2 employee, depending on whatever country that is. But we know kind of what that entails. Well, boom, you get to get that out there and experiment with it. One of the things you mentioned, John, and I'll pause so that we can have a break in there and I'll go on a long rant.

But one of the things you mentioned also that could be addressed here is if you want and say, hey, you know what? For me, what would be valuable in an SDR model is if I get that team up and if everything works out, I get to acquire that SDR and continue growing them and developing them. Guess what? There are shops that can do that. You just have to create your requirements. It's important for you to decide what your requirements are first, your business requirements, financial goals, and what you want to see and what you're getting. And go shop for what you want instead of taking a bunch of meetings with people and letting them tell you what they'll do. Right. Hey, I want to take a quick minute to share with you what I'm working on these days with my new JV Sales Membership.

It includes live monthly training delivered by me on my two signature courses, Filling the Funnel and Driving to Close. It also includes monthly workshops that I'll be running on specific skills and different tech like ChatGPT and how to leverage it in the sales process. And it gives you access to my entire online catalog with every course and every tip I've ever done. You get all of this for $420 a year as an individual or $5,000 for teams. And as an exclusive offer to my podcast listeners, if you go to www.jbarrows.com and click on the individual or team membership and use code podcast, you'll get 20% off. Let's make this happen together. No, I love that because, you know, that's like for me where what I've been telling people is when they look for an outsourced model, one of the most important things you can look for is their ability to almost put you in a position where you eventually don't need them.

Because of the data and the insights that they're gathering for your market, it's the same thing that I do from a training standpoint. My goal is that you don't need me after my training. My goal is I'm going to give you the structure, the process, everything you need. Now, if you want to engage with me after that, by all means, right, I'm happy to. But really, ideally, you should have somebody internally that can take this and run with it. And so, from an outsourced model, one of the things that I think is a massive benefit that people overlook is, to your point, like I actually think meetings is the tertiary benefit of this model. The primary is, to me, is insights into what's happening, like what messaging is working in the marketplace, what are people responding to, you know, what are the objections that we usually get.

Because all that intel, with all the volume that these outsourced models can do, that intel is going to help dictate and make adjustments to your marketing, to your content, to your pitch, to all that stuff. So, it's not just a sales function. It's a market intelligence function in a lot of ways. And that's how, if I could go with a group for three months, if they didn't give me a single fucking meeting, I'd be fine as long as they came back to me with data saying, John, man, you got three personas here, CROs, VPs of Sales, and VPs of Enablement. I'm going to tell you straight up, CROs don't give a shit about what you do, because not a single one of, we tried emails, we tried calls, we tried videos, we tried all this stuff.

CROs do not, or you have to significantly change your messaging if you want to attract CROs, right? Whereas VPs of Enablement, man, we struck gold over here with this type of message. So, out of all the different types of messages you play around with, this is the one that actually hit. So, now, great, thank you, now I adjust internally, and whether I bring that internally and do it myself or continue to outsource, but that piece, the market intel piece, to me is a way overlooked piece of this equation that most people don't really consider, because they look at getting meetings, right? 100%. I can tell you, you are 100% right about that. I mean, I would say, I'm going to break it down to 10.

And out of every 10 buyers that became clients for agencies that I've seen, and even in CloudTask old model, directly providing these services, out of every 10, what probably actually was really focused and say, hey, I want to make sure I'm getting the insights. They just overlook it. They think it's all about the meeting. And that may be, I'm just throwing out, this may be a controversial topic, but I'm going to just throw it out there. You know, I'm looking, the way I'm seeing it is, what makes the most sense to me is that if you're going to have folks do a cold call and cold email, those types of things, I would want to align those SDRs that are doing outbound work. I would want to align them with the marketing team.

Why? Because the marketing team is more likely to test some messaging and sales, the sales team doesn't test messaging as much. They don't think about that metric as much. So, this is a way just to, you know, avoid hurting yourself or kind of like putting yourself in the best position for success would be, I'd put my cold SDRs with my marketing team, test messaging, like you said, and get some results and try to get, I try to, I actually have them trying to convert MQLs, like go give her, sell more, or yeah, go give her, sell more, like go give some stuff away. Ideally, our lead magnets and things like that and engaging people around that with a cold email so that they're getting something so that we can take advantage of reciprocity, right?

And go from there and the inbound SDRs, put them on the sales team because those are the ones that might follow up with the people that downloaded that piece and then try to get them converted into an SQL, take a meeting with the sales team. Now, all of a sudden, you know, a lot of times the way we set up our scorecard, not even a lot of times, all the time. The way we set up our scorecard is like the majority of what we actually get. It determines the results we get because people go where they're incentivized. There's either positive consequence or negative consequence. It starts with your scorecard. And that's why it's so important to go ahead and get your business results that you need. Oh, we need to generate a million in sales.

Okay. Well, what segment of customers at what contract level are we going to focus on to try to get that? Where are we going to place that bet? Boom. Okay, now let's build all of our incentives around there. How many sales do we need? How many people do we, how many calls, emails do we need to send? How many people do we need to make those calls, send those emails? And of course, that triggers now into AI, wherein now you still might, you're still going to need a body. The deal is though, if you can do more with fewer bodies, now you're talking about greater profitability. And that's why I think the outsource model makes so much more sense these days because of the AI tools, because of the ability to gather insights and be very, adaptive and agile with messaging and testing and all that stuff.

I mean, look, does it matter that I get a call from the rep or the outsourced rep if they both come with a good message and, you know, and take it to a certain level? You know, I don't think so. And so I think it's, and I don't even know if it's controversial at this point, man, when you said that the SDR is going to marketing because I'm watching, it's happening. Like I've talked to well over a hundred CROs this year and the majority of them, if they haven't already restructured or gotten rid of, quite frankly, their SDR org, they're seriously thinking about it. And so, you know, I believe that we're headed back to full cycle sales with SDRs rolling up into marketing and operations and doing true ABM stuff that then feeds back leads to full cycle sales reps that take them from there.

And we're all going to be sitting in front of a dashboard where instead of it saying, hey, you know, sitting in the office and be like, hmm, who should I call today? It'd be like, no, no, no, John, you need to call Tony because Tony just did these things. His company just did this. This was what happens. Oh, and by the way, call him because he likes phone over email because here's his personality profile on Crystal Nose or whatever the hell that, you know, you want to do there. And here's three snippets of talking points that you can say when you give a phone call to him. And then we're going to have this call. It's going to record the whole thing through AI. It's going to port it right into our CRM and it's going to do the follow up for us.

So it's really going to be that Ironman, you know, the thing. And that's where I think that outsourcing plugs into that Ironman, right? It is, that's a piece of this puzzle. But because the, I would still say no if the SDRs became AEs, right? And stayed in the company. I would still say no because I even rise bad as the results that SDRs are getting these days, if we can teach them how to be good AEs through that process, then we win. But that is, that ship has sailed. And so now I think your point, we flip it over where we hire an outsource model. And then if we like the kid that is our sales rep, then there's a transition process where that's now we hire him full time. And then we take on that risk as opposed to taking on the healthcare and benefits right out of the gate for a kid who's probably going to run away from the profession in six months.

Because let's face it, SDRs, half, more than half of them, like this is the job they got because they don't like their stupid, you know, whatever degree they had. And, and they get into it and they think, oh, let me try out sales. I'm pretty good with people. And then they just kick, kick right in the fucking teeth. And within three months, they're like, nope, I don't want to do this. And so you've just invested all this time, energy into a kid who maybe, maybe doesn't want to be in sales. And now you're, you know, again, CASA, CAC is brutal on that, right? 100%. And I'll add to that, you know, one thing that's unique about our platform is that you also have, you can deal with agencies that give you the oversight, or you could also outsource that SDR, we'll call it offshoring for terms of, for purposes of separating a little bit, but hire them as an independent contractor all in the same place.

And when you're hiring offshore, you have an opportunity to reduce that risk as well, right? Because now you could hire some talent that there's a lot of folks in Latin America that have worked at call centers or done things like that. And the biggest thing though, is, is that what you would pay for that same talent in your backyard in the States is significantly less when they're living in another country. So now you've further reduced that risk, not only by the regular churn rate of an SDR, but also on the amount that that SDR needs to receive from US pay in order for them to live a decent life in their country versus the amount it would cost you to spend that same money in your country. I'm going to throw out one more benefit when you think about the outsourcing piece.

So we got the part about insights. We got also the part about oversight management. So being able to focus on what you're good at and kind of balance things out that way. The other benefit would be, especially for the founding, the founders, the folks that are founding and just getting started growing a SaaS company is your books. It's just a straight accounting benefit of having something that's not considered a GS&A cost on your books, right? Because this ends up being this variable cost. You could cut it when you need to. You're not married to it. You, of course, don't have benefits and health and all this great stuff. But additionally, it's that thing where, you know what? If that doesn't work or if the market slows down and you've got the flexibility to adjust up and down, which gives you flexibility with your investors or which other other stakeholders you need to talk to.

Because at the end of the day, right, building this business is about building your valuation. And so outsourcing helps with the valuation game. Yeah, it does. How long does it take? What's your experience on Ramp for an outsourced model versus a sales rep, right? Because I'm trying to get to like, if I'm a founder, if I'm a VP of sales right now and I'm in this mess and I'm looking at this overbloated SDR team that I grew because, you know, we could, you know, like last year we just hired. The money was there. Let's go. And I'm sitting there thinking to myself, like, this isn't working, right? So like, I'm looking for some comparison points here to look at to say, all right, if I hired a sales rep, say it's not right out of school.

Say it's, you know, a kid with a couple of years experience. So I got to bring them through product reviews. I got to bring them through this. I got to, so, you know, probably everybody says three month ramp to get productive. That's bullshit in general. It's usually probably six months at least. You know, it's a really ramp, right? The right way. So how, what do you see compared to how fast outsourcing can ramp? And the reason I ask one more piece is, you know, I think, again, it goes back to expectation setting. A lot of people think, turn the sucker on, meetings are going to fly, right? But just like a sales rep and getting them on board, you have to get the company on board. You got to get a momentum.

You got to tweak the messaging and you're probably not actually executing. And my guess is that a lot of, because I've talked to a lot of these outsourced, so it's not even really a guess. But after about three months, if those results aren't there, the client cancels and it's like, ah, like you were just getting started. So what should the expectation be and how does it differ compared to the full time? Yeah, I would say if you use an agency, average ramp time is four months and I'm going to add the why so that we could peel it back, right? You hear different things, but on average it's four months because normally a client that's outsourcing, the average outsource, the average buyer, they don't know who their ICP is for their outbound.

They haven't defined it, right? The second one, they don't have their messaging tight. They normally are like, hey, can you figure out my messaging for me? So my scripts, email scripts, LinkedIn scripts, whatever, they don't have a list already designed. So they, so besides the definition of the ICP, they don't always have the contact records there. They're like, oh, could you provide contact records? Okay. And then the last part is marketing materials that can be used maybe for generating, like let's call them lead packets. I don't want to call, because I hate when people talk to me about sales slicks. I mean, I don't know. This is, it's like, oh, right, well, hand me the, hand me the yellow pages and I'll start making calls for you.

But, um, you know, but I'm talking about literally, you know, educational, informational pieces, maybe that could play at the different levels of the buyer chart. They don't have them and they don't have a sales plate. That means the agency has to create all of that from scratch. They're not in your business. So just like you said, John, I, you have to onboard that agency just like they're an employee. You should be hiring agencies just like their employees in your mind. That's how you should think. And then the deal is, if you need them to create these things on your behalf, then they have to test them because it's not a quick process to come up with a plan. Otherwise, marketers wouldn't have jobs.

Salespeople would have jobs on a regular basis. You wouldn't do annual planning. So the deal is, is that normally, and I would even say four months, but I feel like four months is aggressive if you think about what's really going into that. So four months is normally that baseline. If they, if you have any of those things, then maybe the time to ramp goes down because the upside is, is that these agencies are normally having to create these things all the time. Probably, or ideally, you should check and make sure they have a methodology that they're using to do this approach. And if you like the method that they're using, you're buying that as well. Right. And that could give them a headstart versus trying to do this in-house.

Quick break here to highlight another one of the podcasts on the HubSpot Podcast Network, the audio destination for business professionals. Now this one is Success Story hosted by Scott Clary. Success Story features Q&A sessions with successful business leaders, keynote presentations, and conversations on sales, marketing, business, startups, and entrepreneurship. And I just got introduced to this podcast recently. And one of the ones that really caught my attention was the one with Ryan Blair. Ryan's the founder of Aftercall, a platform that offers science-based healing modalities such as meditation and breath work to awaken humanity to the next level of consciousness. He also created the Blair Foundation, a nonprofit that supports entrepreneurship education for single mothers and at-risk youth.

Now you all know I've been on this journey to learn a lot more about myself and spirituality and all the different things that are more important than the day-to-day lives. And this is really getting into it. And you also know that I'm a huge proponent of helping at-risk youth and single mothers and women in sales and everything else. So this really struck home. So listen to Success Story wherever you get your podcasts and let's make it happen. Yeah, and I think that's, I mean, it's, patience these days is not something that people are up for, at least in my experience. And so, Brad, like, you always, I think since the beginning of time, you say sales is a numbers game. So it's obvious. I don't even, I just, I don't know.

Give me five meetings a month. Like, wait a second. I never heard of that. Your quota is five meetings a month. I need you to get 10. Not when you told me you'll get five and I didn't get five. What kind of meetings do you want? You want qualified meetings that'll actually close or you just want to meet with anyone? Because that's the other thing that people complain about. And it's a valid complaint. Sure. Like, did you ask for that? Right. What did you do to make it? Did you give that guidance? With yours, I mean, you brought up some stuff that, you know, I know and you know, but it still blows my mind. When you say that you get involved with these companies, I understand a startup might not have the nuances of their ICP, the nuances of their messaging and shit like that.

But the fact that we have companies that are five, 10 years in business and don't have a crystal clear picture of what their ICP is and who they sell to most. Like, do you, like, when you did cloud tasking, like, you actually did the outsourcing part of it, did you, like, what, what percentage of clients, curious from you, what percentage of clients that you got involved with had a tight grip on their ICP? I'm going to go with 10%. Shut the fuck up. I'll call it 12 just to give it something like, you know, because I did, you know, 10, 12% of people that have a clear idea. I mean, outside of, yeah, we sell to this industry or mid-market or enterprise, right? Like, outside of that, most people just, just go.

Just seems like they're going. And it may have to do with the fact that most of the time the conversations with, uh, with someone from a company that is looking to do sales outsourcing is someone on the sales team. Yeah. Not the marketing team. So, you know, in pharma running a brand, our primary channel was the sales rep. So I dealt a lot with literally just, would you run the play? Would you stick to the message? Would you use the tools? So it could be one of those things where, because the salesperson is coming over and not really paying attention to the marketing, or maybe even not agree, doesn't agree with marketing, they don't bring it to the table. So it could be that the company has it and it's just not being communicated in the sales outsourcing conversation.

But yeah, it's extremely low. It's been extremely low. Yeah. And that's, it's, it's sad because I, because I do that in my training. It's funny. I was doing a, you know, fill the funnel session today before our conversation. And there was like 26 people on the call. Right. So it's usually just a straight up training. And, um, and, uh, and when I started talking ICPs, you know, I started kind of giving the framework of ideal customer profile and like four people dropped. And I'm like, I almost guarantee that y'all thought this was rudimentary. This was basic. And, and, and they didn't wait for me to get into the nuances of why. Right. Cause I was like, all right, we got to tear out our accounts, tier one, tier two, tier three.

Right. And we look for these types of things. And as I was going through that, I could, I could almost see the quote unquote senior sales reps sitting and watching this and being like, dude, I know what my ICP is. Like this is fucking garbage or whatever. Right. And I, and I actually think the ICP is something that almost, and you're proving it to me here that most people skip over. And if they don't skip over it, they don't go deep enough in it. They just get the very basic criteria, like industry size, number of locations type of stuff. And, and then they just start hammering away. And it, and I think there was something, I read this report recently that only like three to 5% of your addressable market is actually ever in market for what you need.

Right. So if you get as huge ICP with this broad ass stuff, you almost have to do mass blast stuff just to see if you can, you know, trip over something, but the tighter you get, the tighter you get on the clients that you read the most value to, and then the more value you can add to them, then you start, yeah, you got to nurture and there's patience to it, but those are the ones that are going to make your number way more than the volume is. A hundred percent. I mean, and I, and that, that's that three to 5% I got that, that maybe I wouldn't, I wouldn't doubt that that's the new number. I remember the last thing I was looking at, I refer to a, what was outbound sales, no fluff. I remember they were talking about 8%, right?

But to your point, the deal ends up being what, if you are, if you, if you, if you just like, give me a list, make some calls, this much converted, now I need to find another market, which I find happening a lot in the outbound space. That's probably also why, right? You just ignore an ICP thing because you're like, just give me some more leads. Right. But the fact that you're always looking for more leads, you don't actually, if you're not focused on the insights, like what you brought up earlier, John, you don't know if some of these leads are actually good leads, they'll be good in 12 months, 18 months. Yep. You don't know the impact of that on your numbers. That information though, improves your forecasting and it's a much healthier conversation with investors, tell you that much.

One more thing I want to hit on on that one, John, is that I noticed there seems to be confusion for me personally, people use TAM for anything. And now ICP, I don't even sometimes know if they understand the difference. So I had to create a difference for myself. Hey, look, talking about the TAM, let's talk about the people you can serve, which pretty much means you should have a list, right? Because you could use any of these tools today, pull it just one time and say, hey, I'm going after this market, that market, that market. You got a bunch of companies. That's your company list. After that, then you'll have a prospect list, which should be a segment of your TAM. It should include some ICPs that are probably in that next level of segmentation.

Once you decide who your prospect list is, you could go different ways depending on how sophisticated you get, but let's just keep it really simple. I got a TAM, I segment my TAM, three to four segments minimum. And then I decide who I'm going to target for a specific campaign. And I know that there are probably some different roles or something in there, or maybe there's going to be some different regional differences, whichever metric you want to define some ICP profiles. So it's like, this is who we're talking to. Back in the pharma space, we used to do it all the time. And the good thing is when you're that farming model, all of the people that have offices, that's the TAM. Then I would go ahead and decide what doctors I was actually going to put into my prospect list for my territory, because some of them didn't like me, they wouldn't let me in.

Some of them had traction. Some of them just had bad insurance plans, whatever that might not be convenient, put them in there. And then from there, guess what? I still had a breakdown of a tier one, tier two, tier three, or four priority. And the last thing is the ICP part. We used to do our ICP, like the one, the last, the one I liked the best that I was a part of building had to do with their attitudes and beliefs and their kind of treatment style, right? So their buyer style. So we had one person who's like the, tell me, two of those segments were the tell me segments. And one who was kind of like more about efficiency and the other one was more about that care, that interpersonal relationship.

And so they cared about different things. Like when we do the personality profiles and you have like, oh, this isn't expressive. So you want to talk to them this way, connect with them this way and share these type resources, not because it's the, it's exact, but it's a starting point. So then you can kind of start personalizing as you get to know them. And then the other side was the ask me side and these, and there were two profiles where I'm the expert thought leader and then I'm the mad scientist kind of, I like to put solutions together myself, but these just gave you directions. So you could create a more personalized experience from the start, have a starting point, create more personalized experience and do that.

So I think there's a lot of confusion between this stuff about a total addressable market, ICPs and how to really use them in a good way. And this RevOps thing, I hope will address it. Your training definitely does. I actually love it. I'm about to, I'm about to be using the priority, the executive priority matrix here. Cause I just want to like put it to work and I, and I see it as useful, but I see it as useful also, not just for sales, but also for marketing, which means they could be working together. Right. If you're doing a one to many messaging to my group, you're giving me air coverage. So when I walk in with my one-on-one messaging, they ideally know my company, know what I sell. Now all they need to know is know me.

Well, that from Jed Blunt. I'm going to have a prospecting. So I love it. Yeah. Just, I love that. That's the, that's the prospecting book, right? An article prospecting, but you're right. I mean, it's funny you bring up TAM and for those listening who don't know what TAM is, it's total addressable market versus ICP, which is ideal customer profile. But if you watch Shark Tank, like the U S version of Shark Tank, right? Religiously used to watch that thing. Yeah. I love that shit. Right. And look, the fastest way to get an eye roll at Shark Tank is talking about your TAM. Well, you know, it's a $3 billion market. And if we just got a fraction of the percent of that market, we're going to literally every time that comment comes up, the sharks just like, like, shut up, literally go away.

Like everybody tells us that, right? I'm out. Yeah, exactly. All of them. It's quick too. Like, cause, cause that's the wrong mentality. It's like, it's like, no. Yeah. I mean, I guess theoretically, if you got 0.01% of that, you know, sure. But who do you really sell to? And this is why I think it's important for everybody to go back into their ICP right now, just themselves, regardless of insourcing or outsourcing, because shit's changed drastically. I mean, I use this example all the time. Like tech industry fell apart in Q1, right? Obviously. And SaaS is my, that's my industry. 95% of my clients are SaaS. And so disappeared, right? And I got all sorts of people coming back to me and be like, dude, you got to get out of SaaS.

You got to diversify and all these other markets. And I'm like, eh, I'm like, well, first of all, I don't want to, because most of the other markets are boring as shit and I don't like them. And second of all, I don't have any brand or credibility in those markets. So I got to, I got to learn those markets and everything else. And so I was like, how do I stay in SaaS and tech, but stay alive in Q1 and Q4, Q2, because of what was happening. Right. And what I did was I started analyzing my ICPs, ICP. So my client's ICP, because if you, and I found out, and it was pretty obvious if you just look back on it, but if you were SaaS selling to SaaS, so if the majority of your customers were SaaS, it was a fool's errand trying to get money out of you.

It was a fool's errand trying to prospect into you and nothing. But if you were SaaS, a SaaS product, and you sold outside of SaaS, so, you know, retail, finance, like all the other industries that were doing fine, right? If you were doing okay, like you were doing all right. So I shifted slightly my ICP to stay with SaaS, but to look at their ICP and it made all the difference in the world. Conversations were easier. People were picking up the phones. Whereas if you call somebody selling SaaS to SaaS and basically the first half of this year, you got told to fuck off, like nobody wanted to talk to you. Yeah. And that makes a lot of sense too, especially like, I love what you did there with the checking the ICP of your ICP, because especially since you're selling sales training as an example, right, everything is supposed to line up to how can you help us sell better?

So you're understanding who they're selling to and being able to contextualize it that way makes everything so much easier. By the way, it's funny. I remember coming back from a conference one year and this was a marketing conference. I want to say it was inbound for HubSpot. And I was just, you know, I got trained on this kind of like be a marketer and salesperson at all times, right? So I'll be watching commercials. We're at a restaurant at an airport in Boston and watching commercials. And I see these, this commercial of like one of the dating sites for over 50, right? And I remember that a lot of these dating sites, they're all owned by Match.com. And it's Match.com and then they've got these offshoots, right?

And I was like, man, you know what? They create a more kind of segmented or like specialized site on the same thing. They just change it, make it specific about something. And they run commercials, which means they must be making enough money to run a commercial. And so it does well, right? I'm like, this is interesting. You know what? I noticed something. The pitch is always, or when I'm watching this, it's always, we know you better than they do, which is what, if you know your customer better than anyone else, then you get the connect with them more easily. Sales conversations become easier. Sales cycles become shorter. You're not going to get everybody because like you just said earlier, right?

A percentage of your market is available or in the buying window at a given time. But the deal is, is that customer insights is still the most important part of your whole sales game. The whole sales cycle, marketing sales. If you don't know, then that's it, right? So what kind of value do you create and what is holding your prospects back from achieving that value without you? And there you go. Well, and that's, that's kind of like the idea of, you know, design thinking and sales, right? I mean, I know you're Six Sigma, right? But on the product side, a lot of design thinking where you actually sit in and you become a, you become a customer basically. Like, so if you want to sell into some of these enterprise, whatever you, you become a customer and, and say you want to sell to Walmart, right?

You go walk the floors of Walmart, you check out, you, you know, you, you, you do the self checkout, you return something, you sign up for their newsletter. Like you, you figure out what it's like to be a customer. And then you bring that insight into the conversation with the executive. And so, you know, that, you know, as it leads to like, that's, I think the, why this shift in outsourcing makes sense now more than ever because of the access to information, right? Somebody can get up to speed. Like you can go into ChatGPT, Bing or whatever it is. And I can be like, you know what, say if I was outsourcing, you know, for said company, I don't even need the company to teach me on their product.

I can go to ChatGPT and be like, yo, what's this do? How's this different than everybody else? What do their customers care about? Those types of things that I could be up to speed pretty damn fast. Whereas before I'd have to sit with the client, I have to understand their value propositions. I'd have to understand all that stuff. Now I can just ask these AI tools to educate me and therefore I'm up to speed and you don't have to go through a six month onboarding process with me because I can figure this out pretty quick. And that's why I think the shift to me has been of why I think outsourcing now to me is, is, is, is a better option in a lot of ways than it is to insource because of the, the tools because of the resources and because of the ability to gain deep insights very, very quickly and have that relevant messaging going forward.

And you know what? That's a great point. I just want to put one cherry on top of that. One thing, if, uh, if anyone out there thinks about outsourcing to build all what John's talking about right now, consider that you don't actually always need that outsource partner to use your email address. They don't need to be associated with your company for the workout, especially if you decide that part of that's going to be some experimentation. You don't want to hurt the brand during that experimentation. Right now I get folks, I feel like, I don't know, John, I don't know if you've seen this, but I feel like the art of the pre, uh, pre-call planning is dead. Now with some of this AI stuff, like all I get is like automated things and people are pulling all the way down to pulling a list off of these, uh, sales intelligence tools.

But I, I mean, I've, I've had somebody send me something and said, yeah, man, I know you, I know you are into, uh, it was like laundromats or something like that. It was like, I'm not even close to that. It was on, and it was on LinkedIn, but the deal is, is like one, yeah, you don't need them to use that when you're doing some experimentation. You could always get to that point later. The second part is, is that when they're doing some of this outreach yet, like John said, you could experiment with things to learn things. You could have them send out surveys to get that information and, um, to tighten things up, you know, you could have them test out messaging. You could do all types of things there with minimal risk for your day-to-day brand and reduce costs on the cost of kind of doing that with an in-house team.

So, you know, the major thing would be, you know, don't think about it as a one trick pony. Think about what you need and then go ask for it instead of just asking people what they do. Cause ultimately most of these agencies, they'll do what you want them to do if you come and ask them. So you have a lot of control over how this thing plays out. That's, that's the key. I think that's where a good agency and a bad agency, a good sales rep and a bad sales rep are understand it. Cause you're going to ask that question of, look, we can go through the song and dance and you can hire us to get meetings. I'm going to tell you right now, probably three to four months, you're going to look at the results and say, this ain't working.

Cause you're not putting any effort into this and you're looking to just push an easy button here. That's not the way this works. The right way to do this is this. And if you're not willing to do that with me, then go find somebody else to do it. And I, you know, and I think that's the challenge that a lot of sales reps have is walking away from a deal that isn't the right fit. And I don't think we have, quite frankly, and that's why I'm really happy that things have kind of fallen down back to earth now, because, you know, as far as like grow at all costs and all that bullshit, cause it's forcing a quality approach. Like, I don't know if you saw, you probably saw outreach put it out that, that I think in, in 2024 that Gmail and all those are going to ratchet back like 5,000 emails per domain, dude, 5,000 emails per domain.

So that means like salesforce.com with well over 5,000 people in their organization is, is, can only send out 5,000 and we'll get hit if their bounce or, or, or, you know, complaint rate is like what two per something insanely low. So I, as much as like, I think marketers are probably fucking having a heart attack about that. I couldn't be happier because I think it is forcing the, the quality approach. Now, the danger is that everything's turns to social now and you know, you wait to see what happens on LinkedIn right now. I'm seeing the AI bots come on LinkedIn. And by the way, anybody listening to this, I'm sorry on a soapbox right now. Um, anybody listening to this, if you are using AI tools to auto comment, on people's posts on LinkedIn, fuck you.

Like cut it out. You are ruining the platform. AI should be used for augmentation, not automation and cut the shit. And I got no problem in mails, whatever. In mails have been garbage for a long time, but comments on LinkedIn, man, come on. So yeah. Yeah. Anyways, man, you got to control AI. AI has to be controlled. Yep. You're part of, you could be part of your team, but you can't just let it run crazy and just assume you got to check your AI, make sure it's not making you look crazy with what it's saying. Please check your AI. Yeah. And I don't, look, I don't need any, anything else like helping me look like I'm insane because I do a fine job of that myself. So, all right, sorry, let's wrap this thing up, man.

Where, where can, uh, last thoughts and where can anybody find out more information about what you guys are doing? Cause I really do love the shift that you've made and, and the difference you're trying to make in this, in, in this space right now to do this thing. Right. So tell people where they can find us a little bit more info. Absolutely. Cloudtask.com. You'll be at the part of the Cloudtask marketplace. And there you'll be able to, uh, quickly download a list of sales agencies with vital information that you probably have to have one-on-one conversations to get. Uh, so you'll be able to do that. We'll see things by different services that they offer rep, just like you're shopping on Amazon on this particular list on the database.

As right now, we're still kind of in our manual format as we get our online self-serve experience launched. Um, so that's the starting point there. If you're looking for offshore reps, uh, from other countries where you could staff up your team, get some SDRs or other roles, um, at a, at an, at a third, third country, third country, third world country rate. At a, at a lower rate, third world countries, then, uh, you could download the list there as well and, and get in the game. We're also creating content to try to give guidance around and, and tools of things that you could do. So you could find some of those on my profile on, uh, LinkedIn is Mr. RevOps is the handle LinkedIn slash N slash M R RevOps.

Um, so we'll be, we're definitely going to turn up the notch just like you, John, we'll be turned up the notch coming in 2024, uh, with valuable, actionable content. Ideally, uh, that's what we're, that's what we're going for. And we're looking to make these relationships for people that companies that want to outsource and the, and the service providers that serve them to have better, more harmonious and fruitful relationships that they go forward. It's not always about getting to the end goal. It's like what you said, it's about having alignment of expectations so that you get what you're paying for and you guys aren't using the same words, but speaking a different language. And that caused confusion that was a relationship.

Awesome, man. Well, look, I encourage everybody to check it out, whether it's through a team, whether it's getting somebody individual, this is a model with, if you are questioning right now, the value of your SDR org, or even to build one, uh, check out this as an option. I would never say this five years ago that this was an option. I would never recommend this, but because of how fast things are evolving right now, I think this is a, an extremely viable option here. So thanks for coming on, Tony. I appreciate it, man. As always for having me, JV. All right, everybody looking. Thank you all very much for listening as always. And hopefully you enjoyed the conversation as much as I did. Like I always say at the end of all these podcasts, go out there and make somebody smile today.

Cause no matter how bad your day went or how bad you think it's going, you make somebody smile and you know, you had a good day. World needs a lot more of that right now. So thank you all very much. And I will see you on the other side. I hope you enjoyed that conversation as much as I did with your support and our incredible guests. We're one of the top sales podcasts out there right now. And I can't thank you enough now to keep the momentum going. It would mean the world to me. If you could go and leave a five-star review on your favorite podcast platform and share some of your favorite episodes with your network. Also check out my new website, jaybarrows.com. Well, you'll find even more ways to engage.

There's a ton of free content and you can also get trained from me directly as an individual or for your team. Look, I'm out there selling every day, just like you are, and I'm doing my best to stay on top of all the latest trends in sales and technology. So if you're looking to level up and you give a shit about this profession of sales, let's connect and make it happen together. you