Subscribe
Share
Share
Embed
If you think outbound is dead, you’re either lying or you’re bad at it.
Quotas keep rising, your people are grinding, and the pipeline isn’t growing. It’s an equation that drives you mad. While everyone wants more opportunities, only a few know how to build an outbound culture that delivers.
I’m Todd Busler, former VP of Sales, now co-founder of Champify, and I’ve spent my career sharpening how to build a company pipeline that’s self-sufficient.
On this show, I’m talking to sales leaders who have cracked the outbound code. They’ve built an outbound culture beyond their SDRs and scaled repeatable systems that drive real pipeline without relying on hacks.
We’ll break down the winning plays, processes, and frameworks behind growing that outbound muscle to help you get results faster.
No fluff. No hacks. Real strategies from real people who have done it so you can stop guessing and start opening.
Toby Carrington (00:00):
What we've got to the point now, Todd, is where AI sprawl is like SaaS sprawl a couple of years ago. We're already churning certain sort of AI point solutions, I'll say, because they've remained just that. It doesn't matter how sort of powerful the technology is, if you end up with 27 different agents that aren't coordinated, that aren't working together, then it becomes very, very confusing for people.
Todd Busler (00:31):
Everyone wants to build stronger pipeline, but only a few know how to make it happen. If you're listening to this show, you know outbound is not dead. You just need a little help building a system that actually works. Well, you're in the right place. I'm Todd Busler and on this show we're breaking down the plays, processes and frameworks behind repeatable pipeline growth straight from the people who've built it. Let's get into it. Toby, how's it going? How are you?
Todd Busler (00:58):
Hey everyone. I'm pumped for the episode today. I have a long time friend, Toby Carrington, joining the show. He's currently the Chief Business Officer at Seismic, a leading enablement platform. He's seen their journey over five years, right from big private equity investments to working closely with new CRO with tons of experience from Microsoft.
I think this episode's really interesting for two reasons. A, he's really close to the go-to-market function, obviously at seismic. And he explains the learnings, mishaps, and things he wish he did differently, or in different order. And then secondly, for any company that's maturing, this is a great, informative podcast.
He talks about things he wish he did earlier in their journey, things he wish they never did, and also has a unique view into the landscape from working with tons of go-to market organizations as customers. I hope you enjoy this one. I know I did.
Toby, how's it going? How are you?
Toby Carrington (01:55):
Great Todd. Good to see you, man.
Todd Busler (02:08):
Good to see you as well. I appreciate you taking some time. I think you have a really interesting vantage point for what's happening on the market because you've been at Seismic, it's coming up on six years, right?
Toby Carrington (02:19):
Yeah, that's right. Yeah, been a good ride.
Todd Busler (02:22):
Yeah, great run. Ton of different growth, ton of different leadership. You've stepped into very senior roles and then I also know you spend a good amount of time in the early stage startup community, whether that's advising some early stage companies or just always having your finger on the pulse of what's happening. So I'm excited to see your opinion on what's happening in the market.
Toby Carrington (02:43):
Happy to chat about it.
Todd Busler (02:44):
So six years started really running rev ops to being now chief business officer. How has your role evolved?
Toby Carrington (02:51):
I joined running classical revenue operations, which at the time was a fairly new concept. The combination of marketing, sales, customer success, professional services ops, but we've evolved that over time to where I run all operations for the company and as part of my role as chief business officer, I also run now marketing, I run our SDR team and so I run growth. It's sort of an interesting thing. I've seen a few people with the same job title or maybe others called things like Chief Growth Officer or so forth, but we've put all of our growth engine and growth generation like top of funnel under one roof.
Todd Busler (03:31):
Yeah, that title isn't super common. Has it grown in scope from when you first got that title and kind of mandated, has it grown with more things coming under you? Do you think this is a title that we'll see more frequently?
Toby Carrington (03:44):
Possibly. I mean it's an interesting thing, like the title. I was reading an article the other day about how the title of Chief Marketing Officer is actually going away in the top Fortune 500 customers. I don't want CMOs out there to panic or what have you, but there's often different titles like Chief Growth Officer, Chief Business Officer, things like that, that are rolling up different functions where you have all pieces of the pipeline growth, that sort of both top of funnel and working on the engine, working on the system that makes all of those things flow better through the funnel. That's at least what we've done and amongst larger B2B similar size companies to ourselves like upper and mid-market, lower end enterprise customers, I'm seeing more and more people either add that to the scope of a COO or something similar.
Todd Busler (04:34):
That makes sense. Seismic's super interesting to me because you're selling a product, thinking about enablement and everything that goes into it. It's not just a function within the business. So how does that shape how you think about selling just because of the product and the market that you're selling in?
Toby Carrington (04:51):
It's an interesting one. Running enablement for the world's biggest enablement company, it's always a lot of pressure. I mean, I have a great enablement team, so I think that's the first thing, but we have to be our own best customer and in fact we call ourselves customer zero, Todd, and I think that should be the case for anyone who's selling their own product, whether it's a platform or some sort of point solution or whatever. I think you should be your own best customer. And so we make sure when we roll anything out that's going to go to our customers. In fact, we deploy it in our own environment first as it comes to any sort of integrations or anything like that. And we also make sure in terms of voice of customer, that we're our most vocal customer. So we obviously integrate and know a lot of people in the enablement community very well, and so we try and reflect what we think will be their feedback back to our own product team as well. So our enablement team spends a lot of time with our product team on shaping the future direction of the product and so forth. So it's a very interesting position to be in, that's for sure.
Todd Busler (05:55):
Think about it the same way, I like that we don't call it customer zero, but I like that our reps should be breaking our product, right, pushing it to the limits, sharing how we're using the product. And it's a a lot of benefits for that.
Toby Carrington (06:06):
Todd, people complain in the field about certain tools and people complain about Champify, about Seismic, about whatever, but there's a difference between complaining and then really owning that feedback loop, like being that voice of customer. And of course you've got a seat at the table when you work your company or my company or a company that sells the users and own software. Important to realize that.
Todd Busler (06:25):
Yeah. How do you get the team to take almost that ownership mindset? Because we have that here too, where I have reps using Champify and they're like, oh, this thing isn't quite right. And I'm like, okay, well the answer isn't to complain about. The answer is to say what should this do and share that feedback. How do you do that at such a different scale or such a bigger scale?
Toby Carrington (06:42):
Best practice that we follow, we've created what we call councils, enablement councils with the go-to-market team, with the product team, with the marketing team, with the different core functions within the business and how they utilize the platform. The way the marketing team utilizes Seismic is different to the way the professional services team utilizes Seismic. So we make sure we have a regular cadence of review of feedback or follow up like you would follow with a very robust voice of customer process. But we do it very specifically, not just gathering everyone together and listening to all the opinions. We do it very specifically in a cadence of specific councils with different internal groups.
Todd Busler (07:23):
That makes sense. Toby, before we dive into some of the details here, one zoomed out question a bit. I'd imagine you had an opinion on what is a good enablement, how do you do enablement at scale? Where does tech fall into that? But how has your opinion shifted or morphed or matured as now you spent six years having hundreds, probably thousands of conversations with different companies on this topic?
Toby Carrington (07:49):
I think when you view how organizations view enablement, there's a big maturity curve. There are people that are just looking to solve, they're hiring quickly, they have basic onboarding challenges. They have problems with content that people can't find what they need and things like that. And then you have the other end of the scale and that's becoming more and more prevalent, especially in our larger customers who are really trying to evolve their go to market to be faster, to move up market, to have bigger deals, win more and so forth. And I think in the current pace that things are going, people are realizing they need to, whatever industry they're in, they need to keep up with the times. They need to release products faster, they need to do all of those things faster. And so enablement as a strategic lever is something that I've seen evolve even during my time at Seismic from typically we would talk to people, VPs of enablement, heads of enablement, heads of product marketing and things like that.
(08:50):
And that's evolved very much to a C-suite topic now as well, cos, COOs, CMOs, even CEOs at many companies, the number of times people talk about enablement of their field and they don't mean training and readiness, they mean truly transformed ability to deliver differentiated buying experiences in whatever they're doing and making sure that they're at whatever scale that they're at, they're delivering the most effective service for their customers. We are seeing that more and more in earnings releases and things like that as well, Todd. So I think the move from tactical to strategic has been very interesting to observe and obviously we're hopefully a part of driving that as well.
Todd Busler (09:34):
I couldn't agree more. I feel like when I was getting started in tech sales was kind of like cool enablements function. It might be off to the side, they might not have all the respect and now it's like every category feels more competitive and harder to differentiate. The tech is moving so much faster that this function has to be critical. And when I talk to companies, the ones that take enablement extremely serious, they're the ones that are growing really quickly. The way you sell matters so much more. So that I'm not surprised to hear that this conversation is getting elevated in the C-suite. I see it every single day.
Toby Carrington (10:09):
Totally.
Todd Busler (10:10):
I caught Hayden's podcast with Kyle Norton, I found myself jotting down notes the whole time. Obviously Seismic's at a much different scale. But one thing I love about doing this podcast is I'm learning a ton. I think I have a pretty good idea of what I'm doing, but I find myself just constantly learning what have been the top two or three things he's brought to the business that have either moved a needle or that you've been really impressed by.
Toby Carrington (10:33):
So when Hayden joined us as CRO, he unified straight away all of our customer facing functions. And so I think as we talk about a differentiated customer experience and let's say us being able to demonstrate through an amazing personalized buying experience or customer support experience or whatever it is that unification alignment across different teams. And so I think there's a lot of orgs out there where there's still a huge amount of tension between sales, customer success, professional services and things like that. And that alignment that he's bought has been great and I think many organizations underestimate the power that you can get from a true alignment and I mean down to a very detailed level, aligning quotas, aligning lists, aligning customers that are taken care of and so forth. I think the other thing is Hayden has this concept which I really like of working in the business or on the business some people might say in the system or on the system.
(11:32):
And that's making sure that all of the leaders spend enough time not just chasing deal after deal using a sales example, but that they're also doing the right things. They're doing their training, they're making time for coaching, they're thinking about how productivity can be improved with AI or whatever else. Spending time for people to elevate from the day to day. And I think that's been a really important topic. One of the other things that I love obviously given my role is that Hayden has got a saying about pipeline is personal too, and I think that's also really good. I've seen a lot of organizations and where reps, salespeople believe the pipeline should be delivered to them to come as out of the sky inbound or from a BDR team or what have you that I've seen it work very effectively here and at other places where there's really, really strong alignment where there's specific emphasis on sellers, on customer success managers and so forth. Not only doing their job of booking deals and retention and so forth, but also really actively working on driving their own personal pipeline. Those are a few of the things that he does, but I think the collaboration alignment and really understanding that the way for us to scale is going to be not just doing things the same way, not just hard work, not just crazy amount of effort, not just all of those things that are still important, but it's also really thinking about the ways that you scale.
Todd Busler (13:00):
It's really interesting you say that we have a customer high flying public company and throughout the deal cycle they kept saying, we talk about PG all the time pipe gen, right? And they kept saying PPG, and I was like, what are they talking about? And it's personal pipeline. And the same idea. They were very focused on saying, Hey, you're owning this. It's not just pipe generation. You're getting this from your SDRs, you're getting this from your partners, whatever. You own this. And I think that subtle shift is very important and it's kind of validated here.
Toby Carrington (13:31):
We have leaderboards, I mean we have leaderboards for reps generating their own pipeline. Now of course we still are looking at overall pipeline and it's all one team. That's part of the reason why we've put a lot of that under my purview. But you still need to look at the sources of pipeline. But what we've actually found, Todd is very clearly pipeline, which is generated by sales reps, closes faster, has higher win rates and has higher deal values. There's a very clear in our data. And so when we have our sales reps focusing on creating their own pipelines as well, that turns into deals for them down the track.
Todd Busler (14:07):
I couldn't agree more and everything in my experiences led to the kind of same realization. I think I was talking to head of enablement, Doug May at harness, he used to run it at a Datadog, I don't know if you know him, and he said the other kind of subtle benefit of when AEs are owning more of their pipeline and you are kind of inspecting, Hey, what are you doing as an individual is you also see conversion rate of other sources go up because you know how hard it is to get in a deal, right? So you treat this with a different level of intensity or rigor. One thing you said, Toby, around the alignment part, I want you to dig into that a little bit because a lot of organizations, whether it's the sales and marketing function, SDR and the AE function, the enablement, where that fits, what does good alignment look like? How have you and Hayden partnered on that to make it happen? Because everyone says, yeah, I want better alignment, but it's hard in practice.
Toby Carrington (15:01):
Call me old school Todd, but I still believe very much in rigorous cadences from every organization. I think probably that's listening has a forecast call where they discuss new deals and they look at pipeline and I bet they all do it at 10:00 AM on a Friday or 4:00 PM on a Monday, whatever time. But they do it at the same time every week in the same order, in the same format. Or if you don't, maybe you should do that because that's the best way to be efficient and get into that practice. But I would assume that a very high proportion of people are doing that. We view and I view and Hayden views that doing the same thing for pipeline generation, doing the same thing for at risk accounts that need a teamed approach to save is the same thing. And so we've also created regular cadences, same time of the week, same water, same process, same format for how we discuss and prepare for those type of things.
(15:53):
So the pipeline is no longer reps or sales leaders complaining about why they don't have enough pipeline. It's a collaborative meeting with marketing with the BDR teams, with the account teams both pre and post sales when it relates to existing customers talking about pipe generation, what worked, what didn't work and so forth. And the other thing is making sure that people are accountable. I mean if we have a call about an at-risk customer and we have the whole team on, we have a series of actions, we follow them up and let's again pretty hold school. But it works because if you just do an ad hoc, if you just use emotion rather than data or facts or action items, you end up with a different result. So we've seen very clear results of doing that both in terms of business results, but very much in terms of fostering the spirit of one team.
Todd Busler (16:43):
It's interesting in this AI world we're living in now and vibe coding and you don't need structured meetings and it's like, I don't know the best sales orgs I talk to every day. They have rigorous cadences, they're inspecting, they have high accountability, they've scheduled operating cadences. I don't think the vibe coding world and the vibe marketing world transfers the way a great sales org needs to be run.
Toby Carrington (17:09):
You need to use AI in everything that you're doing and helping to prepare for those cadences, helping to do those things. But until we get to the day where humans are not buying, then humans are not selling. There's going to be personal expectations of how you show up, how you prepare what you do. I was actually listening to something yesterday, one of the CROs that I admire a lot, my friend James Roth over at ZoomInfo, he also said something yesterday about Consider me old school, but if you turn up on time, if you follow up, if you present yourself well and so forth, you will perform better. And I still think all of those things are very true as it relates to preparation and accountability and personal accountability and working together.
Todd Busler (17:52):
I think they're more true now. I couldn't agree more. I caught his podcast recently too and I was like found myself jotting down all of these notes. I'm like, I think the way you sell matters more right? Today I think it's just like there's a certain group of people in sales that are like, that's the product or we don't have the positioning. It's like I think the sales rep can control a lot more than people give credit to, which means all of the stuff that James mentioned matters a ton, right? It matters a ton.
Toby Carrington (18:18):
The buying experience and the trust that is built in that cycle. Look, it doesn't matter how far down the funnel that somebody is and when they start to have that human interaction, it needs to be absolutely first class and that's where we're still big believers in the way that you prepare, making sure that people are ready for those moments, that batter are even more critical now because there's potentially less of them given how much research and whatever is being done with AI. So a hundred percent agree with you, but a lot of that is discipline, it's personal discipline, it's personal accountability.
Todd Busler (18:52):
So I'm hearing a lot about how Hayden brought some even more rigor around alignment, more of a focus on the PPG, right? The personal pipeline generation, the ownership of that. How has that focus and rigor on personal pipeline changed either the types of reps you recruit or the people you're promoting? How has that kind of flowed through the organization?
Toby Carrington (19:16):
I think there's a couple of business results maybe that are worth talking about too, top of that, and that's on the back end. When you take a short-term view, just win any customer, whatever it is, pipeline came in from a particular non ICP customer, but a rep was like, okay, I'll work on this. Maybe you close it at a lower rate or so forth. But the flow on effect is that those non ICP customers churn, they're not successful. We spend a disproportionate amount of time taken care of them. So in things like us as a marketing and operations team, refining our ICP where we're going to go after and target that also requires a very personal buy-in from the sales reps to ensure that they're focusing on the right sort of pipeline ignoring the rest of the pipeline. As you go from an earlier stage company to a later stage company, you can't just take any deal.
(20:09):
Not all a RR is created equal. And so we've seen that start to flow through because people see the results. They realize that when we're dealing with customers that have a real need for our platform, that the deals are bigger, that the customers stay, that they as a cohort over time they buy more. And that was an interesting shift for us to move from do any deal so that we can grow to doing the right deals. That's meant of course, that we've had to hire reps that think maybe a little bit more long-term continued to lower the span of control of our reps. I mean as Seismic has always sold into larger companies more traditionally, we have products that go the full span of different types of customers, but just the way we evolve, we were solving problems that also big companies had and went in there.
(21:02):
So we sort of had a muscle of selling to the enterprise. What we've done though is made sure that we're not just winning the logos, that we're also really having a very, very clear expansion plan over time with those accounts. And in some of our larger global segments, people are not even on an annual commission plan. It's extended beyond to even a two year type of plan to encourage a bit of longer term thinking with those bigger customers. So there's things like that that has meant that we've had to change and hire general managers in some cases of their business. We've hired senior leaders and we trust senior leaders to run their businesses, whether it be in financial services or in our tech vertical or whatever it is, but we've had to move away from just shooting down whatever deal was in front of us to really thinking strategically about for the ideals.
Todd Busler (21:55):
Where do you think people go wrong in that Toby, right? I talk to a lot of organizations, Hey, I want to be more strategic. I want to make sure we're not just getting the logo. We're thinking about what is the total potential spend we can capture at this account or what is every line of business that we can go get in practice? How do you go and make that happen or where do you think people go wrong?
Toby Carrington (22:15):
I've seen people go wrong in the way that people sort of transition accounts. If you have this very traditional model of you win a logo, you win a customer and then you hand it off to someone like some sort of hunter and farmer or maybe AE and CS where the incentives are misaligned for the rep to stay involved in that account, I think that's one thing because the person who's created that initial plan, that initial trust and so forth, then if they completely move away and don't have incentives to stay involved, yeah, I think you minimize the chance there. I also think if you're too optimized for quarterly achievements, short-term targets and things like that, that's another thing. And I also think I've seen organizations that change territories really, really often. I mean there's some large organizations like Salesforce that are pretty well known for changing territories all of the time.
(23:14):
I know that I said years ago, don't do that to me because I don't want that and I'll grow a much higher rate if you don't do that. And so I've had the same rep for years, but I think there's something in that too where people, some organizations philosophically chop and change reps or whatnot, and I don't think that that is the right way of doing things. You and I have known each other for years now, and so there's not buying and selling per se, but there's an inherent trust built up with people over time and I still believe that that's really important as well.
Todd Busler (23:46):
Makes a ton of sense. Talk to me about one thing that I'm very fascinated as organizations go from more single product to kind of platform plays, and I think Seismic, at least from the outside has done this very well, how do the leading indicators or how you size up your bets change throughout that expansion motion, right? I'd imagine when you started it's like, hey, we have our target accounts, we have a singular product, we know what the number of meetings we need to get. We understand conversion, and when you're going into new markets with new skews, how do you approach that?
Toby Carrington (24:19):
With clear measurement I think is the first thing. We are measuring, for example, very clearly not just all opportunities, not just all meetings, but we're measuring opportunities that are platform opportunities defined, however you want to define it. For us, that's three or more of our skews as part of a platform. So we're specifically measuring that. We also know, as I said before, about given the levels of seniority that are involved in our deals, our bigger deals, our platform deals are where the ones that start with meetings and opportunities with the right type of titles as well. So one something Hayden Espouses, which I love is called Selling to All Rooms of the House. And so an opportunity is not created equal. If there's an opportunity which has a head director of enablement as the main contact person, or if there's an opportunity that has a director of enablement and the VP and the Rev ops VP and the CMO and senior sales leaders involved, that's also what we're looking at. So those are the types of leading indicators. We're looking at meetings with the right people, meetings about where people have understood the full vision of the platform, and of course we are looking at taking a couple of steps back. We're looking at making sure that our SDR team, our AEs teams when they're having these calls and meetings, that they are in fact pitching and talking about the entire platform rather than going back down to what we used to sell 10 years ago and just talking about that.
Todd Busler (25:49):
So you're doing this at a much bigger scale, but it's something I'm thinking a lot about. We started as this relationship tracking, we've added a lot more, but people know us as the relationship. I'm sure you deal with some of that and you have people that have been successful have hit their number or exceeded their number consistently and it's like, look, I have my way of doing this. Obviously you take enablement very seriously. You mentioned this concept of a council, but how do you get some of those people that have been successful in kind of the old guard of a company and say, Hey, look, this is how we're doing it now and here's what I need you to do. How do you get the right buy-in to go get them doing that?
Toby Carrington (26:24):
Change management is still one of those amazing things. I mean, we're doing all the classical things, but we've had some great examples of where our deals are 3, 4, 5 times what they would've been in terms of size by selling the platform, and of course we're sharing all of those stories, whether it be at kickoffs or our monthly meetings or these type of things where we're widely sharing. We're also, we talked about cadences and things like that. We're also making sure that we institute not just deal related inspection like between frontline sales leaders and sellers, but also pipeline calls, coaching calls and things like that, and skills development too. So our frontline leaders are also expected to be working with the reps on some of these things, thinking bigger, thinking more broadly, engaging other people in so forth. And of course when people are winning and when they see the results, that's the other thing.
(27:19):
So we're making sure that we have the right sort of data that's going back to support the fact that, look, when we do this, revenue per seat is higher, win rates are higher and things like that. I'm a big believer in being very transparent with what works, letting people know. Then the other thing is incorporating all of those best practices. I mean there are certain things that top salespeople do and they do them at a different frequency. They might do more of something, they might do less of something, but they also do things to a certain degree of quality. And so wherever we can systematize that or incorporate it into our playbooks and so forth, we're doing that as well. So that just relies, you need to do a lot of collection of data of what works, what the ideal playbooks are, what the ideal profile or set of behaviors that people do, and then make those the standards, and that's sort of what we're doing to continually trying to evolve.
Todd Busler (28:16):
Is there some examples of those sets of behaviors that the reps are doing maybe now way more frequently than a couple of years ago that are starting to work that you're trying to get the whole organization to start doing? Any examples there that jump out?
Toby Carrington (28:29):
Yeah, I mean I want to use it again, this is going to make me sound really old school, but the number of meetings with the right people, we have clearly shown that as a result on both pipeline deal advancement, deal closing and so forth. And so we are inspecting, are they having meetings with the right people and when they're having those meetings, are they saying the right things? We also have things like a facilitator through our own product, which are around buying experiences that they're creating and how frequently and how well they do those. For example, creating digital sales rooms, using our own products to create a more personalized experience. The higher frequency and the higher quality of the usage of things like that is very clearly associated with more successful deal cycles. So it's a lot about the activity management, doing the right things and then doing those things. And that for me has been really, really critical.
Todd Busler (29:28):
It's easy to overcomplicate a lot of this. If you're meeting with the right people frequently, good things are going to happen and now everyone's using call recording. You're evaluating different meetings, you'll increase the quality of those meetings over time. Just make sure you're having enough meetings with the right people.
Toby Carrington (29:45):
That's right. You can have the greatest meetings, but the concept of being single-threaded or multi-threaded against, it's a concept as old as time.
Todd Busler (29:53):
And not going anywhere.
Toby Carrington (29:55):
That's right. Not going anywhere, but you can record all the calls and look at all the signals and whatever, and if you and I talk 20 times, we might have great calls, we might cover it, but if you're not the right person that I should be speaking to or I should be speaking to other people or I don't understand that those are things that still require inspection. They require frontline leadership, they require coaching, they require all of those things and then taking that programmatically and bringing it back into here is what we do when we are going to launch a new product, here is what we do when we are going to launch a specific take out campaign for a specific competitor or whatever, what that play looks like. It revolves a lot around what does everybody do and to the quality, the level of quality that they do it.
Todd Busler (30:40):
Toby, I think there's a lot of learnings. I'm obsessed with revenue and how people go to market and the variety of different ways to approach things. I think there's a lot of learnings in mistakes or missteps or things that you should have done earlier. What would you say over the last couple years of your journey are things that you're like, wow, okay, we tried X and it didn't really work to the level that we thought or we tried Y and I wish we did it two years earlier. Anything jump out?
Toby Carrington (31:08):
I mean more the latter. Something that I wish we had done earlier, and again, it's about a coordinated effort for pipeline generation. So we do something we call PG Tuesdays Pipe Gen Tuesdays, and it's basically we pick a segment of our team once a month on a Tuesday, any given Tuesday, let's say we do it for our core enterprise segment or what we do here is for that day, it's only about pipeline generation and everyone that's involved, whether it's ops enablement, preparing lists of people to go and target marketing with specific messaging campaigns leading up to that particular day, content website activate, whatever it is, all different, all the different functions. The sales team, the BDR team, people get in a room usually in person with some other folks joining and that's all they do, and we generate 4, 5, 6 times sometimes the amount of pipeline that we would normally generate in any given day with just that focus.
(32:14):
Now, you can't overdo it because you need to prepare for these things, but I sort of took it for granted that of course people are working together to generate pipeline of course, but again, it's a little bit about creating those rituals, those routines, those cadences to make it happen. So that's something which I wish we did earlier because it also had some really interesting side benefits. As I said, people are together, they're jamming together, they hear each other, they all sit together in a room. Sure, you can virtually listen to other people's calls and so forth, but there's nothing like everyone sitting in a call, in a room in a big boardroom, being able to hear each other, jamming together, celebrating wins, ringing the bell like we used in the olden days, let's say. Creating a bit of that and then everyone going to lunch, having dinner, happy hour afterwards together, that sort of thing. It's been really good.
Todd Busler (33:00):
What makes that day go really well? There's a lot of prep that goes into that. I always think about the best run PG days. PG Tuesdays is like, how do you do the right preparation for that day so you're executing as much as possible and how are you enabling them with all of the right ammo that a rep can take? So what goes into that? What teams are involved? What does great look like when executing that day?
Toby Carrington (33:25):
We usually run very, very specific plays, for example, customers that have previously bought Seismic but have moved somewhere, which I'm sure will appeal to you, or things like customers that own a certain part of our platform but not another part. And we run a very specific cross-sell campaign or customers where we know they use a competitive solution for part of the platform, very specific things at the level at which it's a manageable, a manageable list, the right titles, the right context. So that of course involves having the right data. So the systems team spends a lot of time making sure that the data is clean, the phone numbers, the emails, whatever that are given to the folks are correct, but we don't do it just broadly, call whoever you want. We run very, very, very specific, plays this product to this segment of market, this type of person, this type of buyer persona.
Todd Busler (34:25):
First off, I love that Toby, because when you go in and you're like, alright, everyone's focused on this rip out campaign, everyone's focused on expanding this use case, right? It's very easy to measure. Everyone has a clear goal. You can see how it's going. You can learn from the talk track who's responsible for, I'm sure there's no shortage of ideas and everyone has no, we should be doing this, we should be doing that. Who owns that and what have you seen? I'm sure, but who's responsible for coming up with the ideas and here's how we're going to go execute it.
Toby Carrington (34:52):
It's our field marketing team together with our sales leaders and like I said, we have very regular cadences of what are we going to do around pipeline generation. So sort of picking the topic, picking what the thing is that we're going to do next is usually a input into that and then it's called coordinated by our field marketing teams.
Todd Busler (35:12):
Toby, it wouldn't be a podcast in 2025 without talking about AI, and I know you have a lot of different components of it in your product, and I was reading some of the positioning before we talked, but I've seen some organizations say, Hey, there's a lot of really interesting AI that is super helpful. When you talk to Kyle Norton, you're like, okay, here's someone running a super s and b motion. There's some really forward looking things. I think on the enterprise and strategic side, it's delivered less. It hasn't had the same level of impact. That's my opinion. I'm curious what you're seeing implementing that's really having a major impact on productivity or influencing specific metric. What's moving the needle? What's your approach and how are you thinking about it?
Toby Carrington (35:54):
What we've got to the point now, Todd, is where AI sprawl is like SaaS sprawl. A couple of years ago we're already churning certain sort AI point solutions I'll say, because they've remained just that it doesn't matter how powerful the technology is, if you end up with 27 different agents that aren't coordinated that are working together, then it becomes very, very confusing for people. So one thing I will say, and we're seeing that very, very strongly in our customer base is that platforms are still winning and platforms that have the context and the data to be able to inform the AI and to really be integrated in the workflow. So you still need to be looking at platforms and solutions that have the right context, that have the right context around the workflow that they're talking about. Let's use simple, simple example like Microsoft. The domain of email for example is where they're strong.
(36:58):
So anything that's involving email and things like that, Microsoft Copilot is really, really strong. Whereas where you look at things like sales and sales flow, that's where Agentforce and our product, for example, Seismic Aura like Agentforce and Aura is really the next generation of an integration that was more traditional AI historically CRM integration, things like that. But those things are still important. It's important that within the ecosystem people are working with platforms that integrate with each other and that where people don't have to leave the flow of work of what they're doing. I'm seeing a lot of people creating a bot for this, an agent for that, they're coaching this and whatever, but people have to go everywhere to do it. It's not in context. It's not a logical flow for the way people work. And so I think that's really important. The other thing is that overlap becomes even clearer, more unclear for a buyer of technology, and I work with a lot of early stage companies and I see a lot of these team, it's becoming more and more complicated because everybody could do this and there's overlap and so forth.
(38:02):
You still have to partner with people that have the domain expertise, that know that workflow. We're seeing that, as I said, we're already churning a couple of platform because the application of the AI was the wrong thing to do. So people need to be very careful of the shiny object syndrome of you could do this with this particular thing, or is it really better to have a platform that does many things and most things well enough that has AI in context? Right? So I mean maybe a shameless plug for a couple of companies that either we use or that I'm involved with. I'm sure you've probably seen Momentum.io pretty heavily used, and again, why I like them is they're fixing a data problem. So before generative AI, you ask any rev ops person what they have to do first and they will say, I have to fix my process and then I can apply technology.
(38:57):
That's bullshit. Now, that's not true. You don't have to fix your process. AI can fix your process if it has the right data and you tell it what you want to do, you have to describe the end state and then fix your data. And Momentum is doing an amazing job at I guess enterprise listening, collecting the data and then pushing it back out into the specific things that basically enable processes to happen. But the way you do it is you describe what it is you want to do. I want to reduce churn by doing X, I want to, whatever the case may be, and putting all of the data in. We don't have a problem of not having enough data. People have a problem of having too much data and not knowing what to point at what data to do for what purpose. Another one that we are using, we just relaunched our website and we have on there virtual inbound SDR from a company called 1Mind. I'm sure you've also...
Todd Busler (39:52):
Played with it before this call. I played with it a little bit before this call. Yeah.
Toby Carrington (39:56):
That's an amazing technology. Now, I do not share the hypothesis that Amanda, the CEO has about humans being replaced by AI, but I see that we can have really, really engaged conversations with our prospects and customers on our website. The conversion is significantly higher than other traditional means of filling in a form or different types of non-AI chat. And then that gets handed off with a lot more context, a lot more data, very, very clear next steps for our BDR or sales teams. So of course these AI super humans can do a lot of different things, but that's the application that we're using it for. Yeah, there's a lot of other interesting things. I just think that people need to focus on very, very specific workflows, use cases and focus on fixing the data that will enable that. One of the things that I'm most excited about is with our own product is the integration with things like Copilot with Agentforce and things like that.
(41:01):
Because what you can do as a seller now with the combination of agents working together with the right context, the right content in the flow of work is really amazing. So I would just say as people are reviewing their go-to-market AI strategy, that the principles of not having sprawl, making sure you have a clear strategy, but then fixing your data, experimenting a little bit, but really not losing sight of the fact that you still need to be in the flow of work. You still need to basically make the people's day in the life, whether they're an SDR, whether they're a marketer, whether they're a seller, whatever was CSM, whatever it is, what you are trying to do is make the day in the life of that person significantly more effective, significantly more efficient.
Todd Busler (41:52):
You answered my question before I even got there. I was going to say, what advice do you have for, because I'm putting myself in the shoes. I feel this as a CEO of a company, but if I'm a new CRO, new VP of sales, you're getting pitched by a thousand different AI work streams and vendors, and I agree with you already seeing this kind of AI sprawl and it's easy to get caught up on, wow, look at this sexy thing. But it's like, look, if it's not solving a real problem, if it's not in workflows that people are going to adopt, if it doesn't play nicely with other things that you're doing, it doesn't matter.
Toby Carrington (42:24):
That's right. And you need the context and you've also, you've really got to dig into what problem is it solving or how will it change the day in the life of the particular internal constituent that we're talking about, or how will it improve the customer experience? Just because you can do something with AI doesn't mean that you should if it's not the right thing, and I think people have to be careful. It's very easy to spin up a company now GU on some other model with a very specific niche use case, and you've got to make sure you zoom out a little. I mean, one sort of piece of advice and something that we've changed even internally where 1400 people or so is when we are doing our planning, like our workforce planning, our talent planning and so forth, we've now really incorporated into our process asking the question of do we need to add a human to do this?
(43:17):
Or is there an AI agent that can built within some of our existing platforms that can do this? Or is it some sort of assistive AI combined with a person that can scale? We've seen, for example, in the last 18 months or so, the productivity of our BDR team is almost double per head now. We still have plenty of BDRs. We're just not hiring at the same rate that we were because of the productivity that we're able to get with generative AI. And so instead of just applying your old capacity models like you might have two years ago to determine how many new salespeople do I need, how many customer success people do I need? I mean, I think people should first of all think how can I solve that specific problem with a person and AI?
Todd Busler (44:01):
Toby, this is awesome. Where can people find you if they have questions? LinkedIn best?
Toby Carrington (44:06):
LinkedIn's best, although I'm not loving the new algorithm where say if I post something, you find out about it three weeks later, but LinkedIn for sure.
Todd Busler (44:14):
Toby, I just first off, I want to say big thanks for taking some time. I know you're really busy running in a very big sizable business and I always learn things when I talk value. I appreciate your generosity. I'm rooting for you guys and it seems like you guys are on a great path. So big. Thank you.
Toby Carrington (44:29):
Thanks, Todd. Appreciate you. Always happy to chat.
Todd Busler (44:31):
Alright, take care, Toby. Thanks for listening to Cracking Outbound. If this was helpful, let us know by messaging me, Todd Busler, on LinkedIn and share this episode with a friend that you think will be interested. If you want more resources about building and scaling all things outbound, you can sign up for our newsletter at champify.io/blog.