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Welcome to the Revenue Rebels podcast, hosted by Alan Zhao, Co-Founder of Warmly.ai.
We feature B2B SaaS revenue leaders who have challenged traditional methods to achieve remarkable results.
In each episode we cut through the fluff and dive deep into modern tactics used to achieve success: intent-based outreach, social selling, B2B Netflix, video marketing, warm calling, customer led sales, influencer marketing and more.
On the show you can expect episodes with those who create demand - marketing experts, partnerships gurus and social media superstars and those who capture demand - outbound and inbound sales experts, leaders, and practitioners.
Our goal is to shine a light on modern, effective and unique revenue generating methods and equip you with the insights you need to unlock your next strategic advantage.
We're huge proponents of signal-based selling and signal-based, data-driven B2B go-to-market as a whole. Ask us what "Autonomous Revenue Orchestration" means and we'll be more than happy to shine a light on our vision of what the field of B2B revenue will become.
For more content, check out our YouTube page and LinkedIn newsletter!
Alan Zhao: [00:00:00] He was the founder and CEO of refine labs, a B2B demand gen agency that he started in 2019 from his living room with one 100 an hour client contract. And then in less than three years, he grew it to an eight figure revenue business with over 200 B2B companies that he's consulted for. He then started the revenue vitals podcast, which is one of the premier podcasts for revenue leaders out there.
Alan Zhao: Oftentimes challenging the status quo of B2B go to market strategies. And what is he working on right now? He's the CEO of Paceto, which is a tech enabled go to market strategy consultancy. Where they use proprietary data models to help B2B executives identify and execute against their highest priority growth levers.
Alan Zhao: Today we're going to be talking about signal based sales. What is it, why we do it, and how to set it up. Chris, pleasure to have you on again today.
Chris Walker: Let's do it, Alan. Happy to be back. What's up, everyone? I can't see people in the crowd, but great to be here. Looking forward to diving in and hope it's super valuable for everyone.
Alan Zhao: Amazing. And folks, please do, uh, leave questions. Uh, we'll be going over that after each we split up into four segments and in each segment, it's gonna be 10 minutes and then five minutes [00:01:00] Q and a. So please drop your questions. Uh, in the chat. So let's start off. What is signal based sales and why should we care about this topic?
Chris Walker: So, uh, signal based selling or signal based go to market is effectively an evolution of how go to market teams are actually like sales development. Sales teams will follow up and have reasons to reach out for people. So historically, it was all based on either MQLs, first party signals and or, uh, Just random cold list.
Chris Walker: Let's find this account and call someone now with the introduction of all this new data, like website deanonymization. So you can understand the accounts or even the people inside of the accounts. There are signals around job changes, so that there's a new CMO, which might be a good signal for you to reach out and activate sales.
Chris Walker: People have been on some third party website reading about your category of product. There are a lot now of second and third party signals and the evolution of first party signals where Sales development. Sales teams now [00:02:00] have a ton of different reasons of how to reach out. All this data can be super powerful and super useful.
Chris Walker: But when we have all these signals, we also need a method to understand what are the signals that actually matter. How do we separate the signal from the noise? Because still today, Um, a sales development rep or a sales rep, or we will reach out to a prospect and more than 99 times out of a hundred, they're going to lose that opportunity or not even get an opportunity.
Chris Walker: Um, and so we need to be able to use data to be able to figure out what are the signals that actually matter. And then how does this create an advantage inside of our go to market so that we're able to reach out to the right accounts at the right time.
Alan Zhao: Uh, and why is signal based selling, why is it coming to the forefront recently?
Alan Zhao: I think, you know, with terms of throwing around a lot in the past, maybe with account based marketing or. High intent leads and, but, but, but today it's, it's getting a little bit hotter. So what's the
Chris Walker: reason behind that? Because, um, I think historically, if you think about, and I don't really look at it this way, but a lot of people do.
Chris Walker: So let's just use it for the sake of conversation. You kind of had like [00:03:00] this inbound, Motion where marketing is providing MQLs and you have this outbound motion where sales is basically doing their own independent prospecting Um and specifically on the outbound side Sales has been using signals for a while, but generally it's like get this person from zoom info Let's look at our cold or our clothes lost lists or things like that And what this what signal based selling does is it gives an avenue to optimize your outbound motion?
Chris Walker: Uh, at a much higher level to reach out to the right accounts at the right time. Um, and then furthermore, I don't look at these as distinct, like inbound and outbound. I think looking at it in first party and third party is a much better way to look at it. And then inside of the go to market, when you look at it that way, you look at it holistically, not marketing versus sales, but all these signals together.
Chris Walker: Um, we need a way to be able to combine and look at all first, second, and third party signals together to understand what are the things that actually matter to our go to market.
Alan Zhao: One of the things I've noticed is that, and I haven't been in sales for very long, but, um, in the past, maybe there was just a [00:04:00] couple of automated sequences that came out at me.
Alan Zhao: And then these days, I'm basically inundated in a carpet bomb. My inbox is filled to the brim with people trying to sell me stuff. And most of which is 80%, 90 percent is probably automated. And so when you have that much automation going through, um, I, I almost never respond to any of the ones that I see that sequences.
Alan Zhao: I always respond to the ones I feel like are personalized. So I feel like signals. Tell you which ones to prioritize, which one to focus on, and then you have a higher chance of converting that prospect, especially if they're a best fit one. But I'm curious to hear your thoughts there.
Chris Walker: Yeah, I mean, I like to make the, to separate these two ideas between reaching out to the right, right person or the right account, the right fit, and then reaching out at the right time, and then delivering the right message through the right medium.
Chris Walker: I think these are Three different independent things. A lot of companies have figured out who the right fits are. There's enough firmographic data around companies and companies think about with account based strategies around their ICP and they know what types of people they want to reach out. So a lot of companies have figured out what are [00:05:00] the right fit.
Chris Walker: Um, I think the next evolution is really around what is the right time to reach out, which I think signals provides a, a, the fastest avenue today to be able to do that. And then following on to that, we're going to have right message, right medium, where some of that might be automated through AI, and other ones are going to be human personalized outreach.
Chris Walker: Um, and all three of those require their own sort of optimization steps.
Alan Zhao: I totally agree about the right timing. Someone once told me this, which is like, yeah, who do you, classic go to market problem is, who do you target, what do you say, and when do you say it? And the when being the most important, but the unsolved one.
Alan Zhao: But if you have the when and the who, then the what you say matters a little bit less, kind of like what you're saying. And just curious, just curious from your point of view, what's the state that we're in today? I think maybe we have the who, like you said, we can filter down, we can target the right ICP.
Alan Zhao: The what, still working on that with the SDR team. And then the when, so where are we in the state of the when? How are people figuring out this when question?
Chris Walker: Uh, I would say that we're in a state of chaos. [00:06:00] I would say that there are tons of tools popping up that sell some level of data that that is a signal that sales could use.
Chris Walker: Um, there is not a lot of measurement or especially at scale consistent measurement around the effectiveness of these signals. So we have tons of different people across our go to market. Operating on different signals with no real tracking around it, so all we have is the anecdotes of what people say.
Chris Walker: Yeah, I reached out during this time, and I like, because it was a job change, the job change signal is working for me. But we can't go back as a go to market strategy leader or a revops person or a chief revenue officer and look at the data and say, At scale, this is working. Um, and so I think that we're still in a little bit of state of it's exciting.
Chris Walker: There's a lot of progress being made. There's a lot of opportunity happening. Um, but I think that it's going to take a lot of time to create the, the infrastructure and the data around how we continuously use this. So yes, companies are [00:07:00] using it, but then over time, if you just look at this and you don't have it, then all of a sudden companies are going to have.
Chris Walker: 10, 15, 20 different tools that are providing different data sources and not be really clear on which ones are working. And we're going to get back to the same problem we had with MQLs, which is that 99. 9 percent of MQLs don't become a customer. Um, and so the same exact thing, phenomena, will happen in signals without a data layer to understand which ones work and which ones don't.
Alan Zhao: Love it. So, let's go back to the, um, the pieces of the signal based platform. The analytics piece is something, you just mentioned this now, You, you also mentioned there's signal orchestrators, providers, um, aggregators. Can we talk a little bit about that and then we can dive into which types of tools that roll up in each?
Chris Walker: Yeah, signal providers have been around for a while. Think Bambora, TrustRadius, G2. It's a third party platform, typically. Um, that is able to de anonymize at the account or person level and then provide you with that [00:08:00] signal from their third party property into your data layer. Um, so those have been around for a while.
Chris Walker: Um, then you look at the next level up, which would be a signal aggregator, which is taking a variety of different signals, bringing them together and then giving you a pool of signals. So six cents is an example. Many people know they ingest Bambora, they ingest G2, they have their own first party account level website, de anonymization, and they feed you all of these signals, whether it's in a black box or discrete signals.
Chris Walker: Six cents specifically is a black box still today, to my knowledge. Um, and then there are upstarts popping up that have, Generated a lot more transparency around the signals in the data, so they'll aggregate the signals, but then give you exact exact signals to work off of. Um, and then there's been an interesting, whether it's a blend or two separate platforms of Um, the orchestrators that then take action against the signals.
Chris Walker: So in the historical thing, that was like a sales loft or an outreach. You push the signal into that, and then you have a sequence. But now these platforms are starting to come together, [00:09:00] uh, where the signal aggregators will also have some AI or outreach or sales engagement layer where sales will take action within the same platform of the signals.
Chris Walker: And then for lastly, downstream, uh, from my perspective, inside of the CRM, you will have the measurement. Of the effectiveness of the signals inside of the CRM that's taking the signals, comparing it to opportunity data and things like that, and giving you the analytics around how to continuously optimize
Alan Zhao: and for two of these stages, can you implement these stages at any size of company or do you need to be a certain size?
Alan Zhao: Because what I've always seen is for larger enterprises, they'll adopt the six cents, which is like the full package and 10 sales, automation, sales, orchestration, marketing, automation, market orchestration. But the price tag is pretty, it's pretty large and so curious from, you know, talking to 200 B2B companies, if you've seen only one stage exist at certain sizes, two stages, three stages and how they set that up.
Chris Walker: I mean, first off, when you're at a large enterprise or a mid market company, the cost of the software [00:10:00] is marginal compared to the cost of change and the cost of actually transforming the organization inside of the company. So. Um, like sure, you might pay 200, 000 for that technology, but then you're gonna spend millions of dollars trying to get everyone to actually like use and change around the technology.
Chris Walker: So I just wanted to call that out there. I think the likelihood of success in large orgs and what I've seen so far and implementing things like that is very low. Um, you actually don't get widespread adoption on these tools very often, and the cost of change becomes very high. Um, and so I think that that creates an advantage for earlier stage companies or nimble growth stage companies that are able to make adjust like major adjustments inside of how they run their go to market that are able to manage the people changes in the processes and the data, I think, gives us an advantage when we compete against maybe a big, large competitor that runs the category.
Chris Walker: So Um, I, I see widespread adoption of these things much more quickly in early stage companies. Um, [00:11:00] I think just given that the, the organize, the barrier of, of organizational change is much lower.
Alan Zhao: Yep. One of the issues with smaller companies that I've seen is that they don't have the manpower and the resources similar to how larger companies have all these people that they can orchestrate.
Alan Zhao: Smaller companies don't have the person to man the chatbot or man like if there's a signal that that hits to automatically to leverage that signal and reach out. They don't have the time because they're taking calls and they're feeding off inbound or they're doing their own prospecting. There's not as much processes.
Alan Zhao: Um, so it's, it's definitely a double edged sword and at least for Warmly, we're trying to figure this out as well because larger companies, they have the budget, they have the people, and then they have all this orchestration they need to put in place. Smaller companies, they don't have the people, they're willing to try for automation, but you still need,
Chris Walker: it's hard to connect the two.
Chris Walker: There's a big misunderstanding that more money makes you go faster and more people make you go faster. It's oftentimes the reverse, that you move faster with less people and more nimble [00:12:00] teams and, and, and you, you make more of the right decisions when you have less money. Um, and so that's just something I like to put out there because a lot of people think in order to grow faster or be more, we need to spend more.
Chris Walker: And in my experience, especially with larger companies, it's actually the reverse, um, that more money and more people create more processes. It creates more bloat, it creates more reporting layers, it creates more politics, it creates more meetings, it creates less scrutiny around. Do we actually need to spend this 300, 000 here if and when you have a 20 million budget?
Chris Walker: 300, 000 is 15 or 1. 5%. It just is. It becomes a, you don't scrutinize the investments in the same way when you have less money and less people. So I like to change that paradigm because I think that it's empowering for earlier stage or smaller orgs that are competing against big companies to think that way.
Alan Zhao: That's really, yeah, it's very powerful. It reminds me of this book that I think a lot of people are adopting now, which is 10x is easier than 2x. And this [00:13:00] idea that if you just go 2x, you just work twice as hard, you'll get 2x results. But if you're trying to achieve the 10x outcome, then you have to fundamentally shift the way you think about things.
Alan Zhao: And so to your point in the past that you've talked about this is like, we might be spending, The 10 X budget on the thing that only gives us the two X result. And we're not even looking at the two X thing that we're spending two X on that it's supposed to, that supposedly giving us the 10 X result that we could doubling down on.
Alan Zhao: So it's a great segue into, uh, let's talk more about signal based analytics if you don't mind. Um, and, uh, what that's all about.
Chris Walker: Yeah, signal based analytics is the process of isolating the signal that triggered sales to reach out. And when you do that in a large mature go to market, you're going to collect millions of data points.
Chris Walker: And those millions of data points provide very clear trends on what are the signals that drive high sales productivity and high sales velocity. Um, and a lot of people will say, Oh, well, Chris, it actually what matters is the 19 other signals that happened before that. Um, and in our experience, maybe those things do matter, but the, the primary signal that happens that trigger [00:14:00] sales to reach out has a massive determinant and create very easy, clear ways to optimize your go to market, your sales development resources, your marketing investments and your sales resources just against that one data point.
Chris Walker: And so. Um, I think there's further exploration and further work to do, but as a step one, I think just tracking the signals and using that data to then optimize how you spend marketing dollars when sales development reaches out how many sales development resources you actually need all the way downstream, I think provides a great data layer to optimize to go to market around efficiency and return on investment, which is something that hasn't been part of the conversation and B to B tech.
Chris Walker: Uh, historically and now it is.
Alan Zhao: Is there like a scrappy way for companies to get started on doing this? Do you track it all in the CRM? Do you make fields for this? Do you have like, self attribution on the forms when they fill out their inbound lead form? What are some of like the lower hanging fruits that people can do?
Chris Walker: Uh, the, the scrappiest way to do this would be to use, uh, a [00:15:00] camp, like a responded campaign member against all signals and then track those outcomes. Um, so a lot of marketing teams will use campaigns. But then when you think about why sales is reaching out with their own independent prospecting, it's largely untracked, what I'll call a black hole.
Chris Walker: Um, and so being able to integrate both of those things together, the campaign object is not ideal for this, but it is a scrappy way to be able to get a lot of it done and get those insights. You could also think about, like, in this way, just having one primary thing where, uh, All of sales activity is generated and triggered through the can't, can't respond to campaign member object.
Alan Zhao: Got it. And, um, how about for larger companies? Have you seen it implemented at the larger scale? What's the thing that they're able to accomplish that smaller companies can't as far as analytics goes?
Chris Walker: Is it because they look good? It's actually a lot easier to implement at a smaller company because you have way less tech debt, way less processes, way less politics, and other things like that.
Chris Walker: And so I don't think this is a [00:16:00] big versus large conversation and because big companies have more resources they're able to do this more effectively. I actually see it as the reverse. And so, the ideal way to do it is to use a custom object that I Unifies all the different objects inside of the CRM for data analytics and reporting.
Chris Walker: Um, and so that object would now be a standard signal object that then takes data off of the contact, off of the lead, off of the opportunities, off of the campaign members, stamps its own data. And then is able to track this full view between the actual signal that happens all the way to close one revenue.
Chris Walker: Um, in a very comprehensive and complete way. And so I believe that unified pipeline architecture. I'm very surprised. Salesforce has not made anything like this standard already because it's a huge problem in companies. Um, people have built managed packages and Salesforce apps and custom builds in order to get there.
Chris Walker: But there's no, uh, there's no real support from Salesforce, um, to do that. And then inside of HubSpot, HubSpot has [00:17:00] created a lead object that's, that operates very differently than how. The Salesforce lead object works. Um, and I think that that HubSpot object with some customization could be able to, to do unify all the data and collect that properly as well.
Alan Zhao: What is the thing that you're collecting specifically for the custom object? Is it the, uh, How this person got in the first touch, you know, first touch lead source. What's the thing that is, he's being tracked all the way through that you're mentioning.
Chris Walker: It collects everything it collects and calculates everything related to that signal all the way through the opportunities.
Chris Walker: So you're at the highest level, you have ARR, you might have account segment, you have an account tier, you have the rep that's working at, you had the SDR that's working it. You have, when you booked a meeting, whether the meeting was held, how many days between a meeting to the meeting held, Did it become qualified pipeline?
Chris Walker: What stage is it in? What was the time between stages? Um, what was the primary signal of why sales reached out if there that was a signal if it was related to marketing? What are the utms related to that? I just rattled off some [00:18:00] of the things, but the purpose is to right now, in a B2B company, all that data is spread out between six different objects inside of the CRM and then some other random shit in different tools like marketing attribution and marketing mix modeling and things like that.
Chris Walker: And you can't package it all together to be able to analyze it and make decisions. And so the object basically unifies the go to market together instead of using these discrete objects that track part of the process.
Alan Zhao: I love it. Okay. And so a workflow might be, there was someone who visited the site or there's a third party intent signal.
Alan Zhao: And then your SDR goes and reaches out. They become an opportunity. All this stuff is being tracked. How do, why did we, why do we decide to reach out? Well, this, this SDR reached out because they saw this signal and that's a line item. That's like a custom object field. So Sally reached out, this was a signal she reached out on.
Alan Zhao: This is the AR size of the deal. And this is associated with every single record, lead record, account record, opportunity record, HubSpot is different company
Chris Walker: deal. Yeah, there's, there's effectively two, two different ways that you could do it. Most companies will do it this way first and I'll just cover the other one.
Chris Walker: [00:19:00] So most companies will do it this way where a sales rep will reach out and Okay, so you have a sales rep that reached out and then in your data, you're going to look back and see what happened with that. Contact your account within a look back window. You're to identify what was the primary signal and then through that you're going to create the record and you're gonna be able to track that record all the way through.
Chris Walker: If that person is recycled, disqualified, closed loss, that record gets closed. If that thing happens again, then a new record would be created. And so that's using Sales reaches out, let's look back and see what happened. Um, alternatively, you could say this thing happened, now sales go reach out. Um, and so you can change it from a looking back, like a reactive sales reached out, let's go look, to this happened, sales go do something.
Chris Walker: Um, and so those are the two different ways that you can do it. And either way, the record will be created in the same way. It's just whether or not you're looking back or using the data to drive the action.
Alan Zhao: Yeah, maybe I'm not understanding this part, but when there's a signal and the salesperson reaches out, does that create a record in the CRM?
Alan Zhao: The [00:20:00] fact that there was a signal or, or is this a separate system that does this? Because we're trying to track, I think, um, uh, the times that you reach out and the signals you reach out for, and then the records that created the CRM, like these might be two different things, but curious to hear your thoughts.
Chris Walker: Yeah, so most companies will operate this way, like I mentioned, so sales is going to reach out with a sales engagement platform or hopefully their activities and outreach are being tracked. So that happens, we know who it's to and what account it's to. And then we're going to look back in the data that we have of that person and try and identify what the signal was.
Chris Walker: So and then based when the salesperson reaches out, the record gets created. Oftentimes a record will be created and it will say no, there will be no signal because the companies don't track it or there was no available data. Okay. Um, in the future, when we think about how a I could automate a lot of outbound and how we're gonna be able to use data to continuously optimize that I believe in the future.
Chris Walker: Basically, almost all, if not all of sales outreach and sales development outreach should be happened based on data. And so instead of the sales rep just doing random [00:21:00] stuff and then us looking for the data to connect it together, It's here's the data sales go do stuff now. Um, and so I think the, the long term view will be okay, we have this signal based on the historical data.
Chris Walker: We know this signal is high quality and we know this, this account or person is the right fit. Sales go do something with it. And all that happens in architected automatically through revenue operations.
Alan Zhao: Got it. Yeah, that is very interesting. Thinking about it this way, which is when there's a signal, um, sales does an action or any sales marketing, whoever that they do an action and that action is associated with the signal.
Alan Zhao: Yeah. Like we're not really set up that way. Marketing will put out campaigns. It'll have campaign ID sales will reach out because they, you know, through intuition or through their timing or for whatever reason, but we never in the CRM track that information. So how do we track that? Like when an SDR goes and reaches out to someone on LinkedIn, do they don't necessarily input here's the reason I did that.
Alan Zhao: So how do we start to track this?
Chris Walker: Uh, you, I would never [00:22:00] recommend relying on having a sales rep or a human resource put in manual data around why they reached out. So that's something that people think would be a hack, like, Oh, let's just have our SDR put in every time they reach out why they did something.
Chris Walker: But it's going to lead to low quality data, inconsistencies in the data, and most people aren't going to do it. And then we're wasting five minutes. Per reach out per time to have the SDR think about and enter data, which is a total waste of time So I wouldn't definitely wouldn't recommend that but given all the tracking and data we have around our target accounts and all of our Customers and how most of that is logged inside of a crm or ancillary tool That when our sales rep reaches out, we know who that we know that they reached out and we know who they reached out to.
Chris Walker: And therefore we have that contact record. We can go back and look at what happened with that contact record and try and make at least an estimate or educated guess around the signal. Is it perfect? No, but it does provide the quickest way to get there for companies today. Um, we use that in a lot of our historical analysis that process more or less.
Chris Walker: Okay. [00:23:00] Um, most companies have somewhere between 25 and 40 percent signal coverage against revenue, and most of those things are first party marketing signals. And the third party data that sales is using for independent prospecting is not tracked at all. So, while people are pumped to have Sixth Sense, and Common Room, and Warmly, and Reggie AI, and all these other tools that are, and user gems, and all these things going wild, That they don't have any idea whether the things are working or not outside of the anecdotal opinion of the people that use them.
Chris Walker: Um, and so I think that will create issues downstream, um, that haven't been realized yet. It'll take some time for that stuff to weed out. I mean, I think a lot of us believe that a lot of the signals that come from a lot of the platforms are total garbage. I think a lot of people think that. Um, and so, if we think that, having, tracking the data to confirm, validate, or refute that, those assumptions I think would be the next, next best move.
Alan Zhao: I love it. I think you're absolutely right. When I talk to a lot of the people who are maybe using the incumbent software, one of the biggest gripes was, I'm not sure if [00:24:00] this works. It sounds like it should work. I should be reaching out because it's high intent prospects that are doing X, Y, Z things, but I'm not sure if it actually works and they have to look at the overall pipeline increase or decrease and oftentimes it's kind of the same or it's the, uh, the CMO who set it up or decided to buy this, this piece of software, uh, is no longer there because of the short tenures of C, CMOs and then the people that are operating it have left STRs gone and the orchestration just falls apart.
Alan Zhao: Um, coming back to this other point though, you said that, um, you find the lead. Yeah. The lead and you have to give us information who reached out. How do you back into what signal it came from? Is there like a common flow that you found like a common flow of lead gets created and then be back into the signal because it was likely this reason?
Chris Walker: Uh, yeah, I mean, we built custom software to be able to sift through specifically visible full circle campaign members, whatever the standard way that companies will track that inside of their CRM. So. Um, I mean, you could have your RevOps team try to write really complicated SQL queries and things like that, but I think that software will [00:25:00] ultimately be the solution here.
Chris Walker: Um, and then, there's just comprehensive logic around what object are we looking for, what are we looking for, within what time period. Um, and so that's generally, like, in terms of looking back historical, that's the only way to get it done, because you can't go back and fill in data that you didn't collect in the first place.
Chris Walker: So, looking back for whatever you have is the only way to get it done initially. And I think moving forward, companies should be looking at it more as a proactive. This happened, sales do something. Rather than sales did something, let's look back and see what happened.
Alan Zhao: Got it. Is there one example of a looking backwards?
Alan Zhao: Like, what's, what's the SQL query in theory that you would run, uh, for a lead that came into the system and then you back into the signal that brought them there?
Chris Walker: Sales reached out, we go back and look at the data. They're, they use visible. So we have all these different touch points of what things happened within a certain time period.
Chris Walker: We see that three days ago they attended our webinar. That was the most recent thing we say. Okay, this is attached. Even though we didn't MQL, this webinar attendee [00:26:00] were able to go back and say there are this webinar three days ago and then make an assumption about that was the reason why sales reached out.
Chris Walker: Um, and so without without doing the processing and looking back, you would not attribute that to a webinar. Um, and it's this is just to be clear. This is I used the wrong word there. I don't view this as an attribution solution at all. Um, it's really about trying to collect the data and think about your go to market as a specifically strictly.
Chris Walker: The one sale starts to take action all the way to close one. It's just a big machine, especially when you operate at scale. You have hundreds of people operating in a machine you ideally want to have consistent processes, consistent demos, consistent talk tracks, consistent proposals, consistent S. L. A. S.
Chris Walker: Follow up times you want to have as much consistency in your manufacturing facility as you can. Um, and so it's just thinking about it in that way. Um, and then looking at data to find ways to optimize. Got it. So it seems like step
Alan Zhao: one, you need to track everything. You got to track when these people come [00:27:00] in, where they came in from the webinars, all these touch points that happened, they need, they need to be tracked because if you don't track it, then there's no way to even back into the data.
Alan Zhao: I was curious if there was like other things. So you're basically aggregating as much information as possible, whether it's first party, whether it's the ones that you track yourself or it's even third party signals. And then you say like, for instance, maybe six cents had a big signal that said this, this company is in market.
Alan Zhao: Uh, the SDR reached out for that reason. And then therefore you guys have a book meeting
Chris Walker: or an
Alan Zhao: opportunity.
Chris Walker: Um, yeah, but with six cents, all you'd be able to say is six, six cents. MQA it, you wouldn't be able to say why they MQA it, which is one of the, what I consider a real flaw in their product right now.
Chris Walker: Is there a way to get the, why they MQA it?
Alan Zhao: This is basically what you were saying. Use
Chris Walker: a different vendor.
Alan Zhao: Okay. Are there any other vendors? And this could be, could be your, your, your tool. Um, that people are using to get that information about why these, some of these black box companies. You know, you just get more granularity into this.[00:28:00]
Alan Zhao: I mean, to my knowledge, Sixth
Chris Walker: Sense is the only one that does this. So you could have demand based common room, Warmly, Reggie, ZoomInfo, like, I think pretty much every other tool on the market does not, does not hide the reason why. Um, I'm not 100 percent educated on this, but that's my understanding right now.
Alan Zhao: Got it. And this role of, if the company were to do this, they would need to implement it with a person and it has, it has to be a role. So whose job is it to do this?
Chris Walker: Um, for back and yeah, uh, for, I don't know, since 2020, 2021. Um, I have been communicating my perspective that I think that rev ops should be the driver of outbound.
Chris Walker: That we should every single outbound action should be based on data. It should be tracked. Rev Ops should be doing this. What are they doing? Instead, they're too busy building ad hoc reports, building compensation plans and random shit like that. Um, I think it's a huge [00:29:00] opportunity for, for Rev Ops to programmatically design our outbound machine, our, our sales development prospecting machine.
Chris Walker: Um, and so I think that's when it comes down to it, I think that's who should be doing it. Um, at least building the nuts and bolts. Maybe you have a different architect that's actually designing the, you know, what medium we're reaching out to. What are we saying that is, you know, a little bit more focused on customers and spent more time with customers than a RevOps team or person would.
Chris Walker: Um, but I think when it comes to the plumbing, like operations is going to build the plumbing. And the question is, who's architecting the building? Um, and I don't have a clear. I think there's a lot of people with a lot of skills that could be able to do that. But I think you have to be very data driven.
Chris Walker: I think you have to understand customers. Well, I think that you ideally have done sales, sales, prospecting, marketing, many of those things before. Um, I don't, uh, yeah, those are some of the things, but I think this role is very, not very well [00:30:00] defined.
Alan Zhao: If, if RevOps were to implement something pretty easily, what would be like maybe some low hanging fruits that they could just start out with?
Alan Zhao: Because as I understand it, and you already alluded to, RevOps may not necessarily today be the most strategic function. They don't necessarily talk to customers on a daily basis. They don't sell on a daily basis. They don't market on a daily basis. So. They're not really fully plugged in, but if there was like, you know, you guys should probably do this.
Alan Zhao: What would it be? Would it be to bring in a tool that tracks analytics software or to make certain custom fields, make sure everything flows smoothly, like AR is attached to the contact, attached to the leads, attached to the account. Are there any low hanging fruits that they can implement? To,
Chris Walker: uh, get rid of the MQL.
Alan Zhao: Yeah, to set up the system we're talking about right now, this signal based analytic system.
Chris Walker: That's what I'm saying. The number one thing they could do is get rid of the MQL, replace and replace it with something that's aligned against the whole revenue organization. That's not a marketing qualified lead.
Chris Walker: Maybe it's just a qualified lead. And then you have [00:31:00] first party qualified leads. You have second and third party qualified leads. And everything is moving through one process instead of this disparate here, all the MQLs. And then here's this third party outbound prospecting that we're not tracking. And just bringing it all together, um, in a, that would be the hacky way in a similar fashion to how the companies would track an MQL, but tracking all of it together.
Alan Zhao: Would you say this is, let's get rid of the MQL, let's just call it the SQL, and then everything falls under the same categorization to fit this, uh, I would just get rid of the
Chris Walker: M. Oh,
Alan Zhao: so
Chris Walker: qualifiedly,
Alan Zhao: just unify
Chris Walker: everything. Yeah, or you could call, you could call it, you could have some other people have scoring around the fit, um, and the signal, you could call it a qualified signal.
Chris Walker: I'm not, I don't, I haven't really thought about the terminology and frankly, I don't really care that much. But, um, yeah, like the, the, the key point is getting rid of the M that it's not a marketing qualified leading needs to be a qualified prospect or a qualified leader, a qualified signal, whatever [00:32:00] you want to call it for our go to market team.
Chris Walker: Um, and I think this like MQL really creates the separation between marketing and the rest of the go to the market team, go to market team. And I don't think that it's productive.
Alan Zhao: So I like how you called it. Qualified lead or signal like signal and qualified leader are almost synonymous. So if you fulfill, are you basically saying that if, if it feels like the signal score, then it's a qualified lead.
Alan Zhao: However, it does that maybe it's some sort of heuristic. Well, we'll have to come up with that. Then it becomes qualified lead.
Chris Walker: I mean, I think the difference here is that a lead is a person and a signal is something that a person did. Um, and so it adds like a lead is typically just based on the fit of the lead.
Chris Walker: I think the signal is really about the fit of the lead combined with something that they did that indicate that they have a high level of interest and it's the right time to reach out. Um, and so that would be the distinguishing there. But whether you call it a signal or a lead, I think being able to compress that and look at it across every, every single reason that your sales team reaches [00:33:00] out and tracking that in one comprehensive way, no matter how you do it, campaign member, object, custom object, some other custom, like homegrown solution.
Chris Walker: I think that's really the first step that rev ops could take.
Alan Zhao: So it sounds like lead scoring, which would combine aspects of both fit and intent these two together. So just the fact that you have any amount of lead scoring for lead, and then unifying that. That's, that's the low hanging fruit.
Chris Walker: Uh, lead scoring or a lead scoring model would be a signal.
Chris Walker: So you have lead scoring model A, that would be a, that would be a signal. So I wouldn't consider signals a lead scoring mechanism. I would consider lead scoring one discrete signal. If that makes sense. Is there such a thing as like a unified score for a
Alan Zhao: lead though?
Chris Walker: I'm not sure what you mean.
Alan Zhao: Yeah. Like lead scoring is, is one of the signals, but is there, if we just look at, [00:34:00] I guess a lot, a lot of the customers, maybe they just want one score.
Alan Zhao: Like who should we go after this? The score of this is 99. So let's just go after that. And then you, you unpack it with the analytics software that you've built out, which is, you know, here are all the, all the, uh, the piece or here, all the signals that went into this score. And you can decide for yourself if you want to reach out, but holistically, like for a RevOps person, it's just one unified score.
Alan Zhao: I'm just thinking, wondering if that's what you've seen.
Chris Walker: Uh, I haven't thought about this too much, but from like off the cuff, I think this should be a, it should be binary. We're going to reach out or we're not. Not the score is 80, you decide if you want to reach out or not. I think it should be reach out or not.
Chris Walker: I think, I think that there's a requisite enough data to be able to get there right now.
Alan Zhao: Got it. Okay, so this, you have to hit a threshold. That makes sense. Um, we have one question that came in and it's how do you tell, even from your own experience, like how do you tell if a website [00:35:00] visit is stronger than a lead form or, um, like basically, yeah, is a website visit stronger than a lead form?
Alan Zhao: What are some of the signals that you've seen be the most powerful in terms of indicating high intent?
Chris Walker: The conversion from signal to closed one is the number one way to figure that out and Um, you could also like apply common sense where someone that fills out your form and says, I want to talk to your sales team is going to be more like a, uh, more ready to buy than someone that just came to your website and didn't take that action.
Chris Walker: Um, but looking at the, the combination of just, Have like the signal. This person submitted a demo request. We had 100 people submit a demo request. How many of those people became a close one customer? Maybe that's three. So 100 demo requests, three close one customers. And then you take 100 website visits and you look at if we reached out from sales on those 100 website visits to accounts or people, how many people became closed one, likely one or zero.
Chris Walker: Um, and then that would be able to determine which [00:36:00] are better signals overall. And I use small numbers there. But companies that are at scale will have it. thousands, tens of thousands, up to millions of data points that they can have, where the trends become very, very clear.
Alan Zhao: It makes sense. Yes. And this is how you would tear signals between tier one, tier two, tier three.
Alan Zhao: Um, yes.
Chris Walker: Yeah, I haven't really thought about tearing signals, but that could be an interesting thing toe to consider.
Alan Zhao: Next question is given all these advancements and single base go to market. How should small teams rethink the way they traditionally build their sales teams when transferring out of founder lit sales?
Chris Walker: Um, I don't think this has that much to do with signals, to be honest, but it's just a, this is more of a financial planning and business strategy exercise where back in the day companies would decide how many sales reps that they need based on what they're Average quota attainment is every single individual rep will close a million dollars in business.
Chris Walker: And therefore, if we want to get 10 million in new business this [00:37:00] year, we're going to need 10 reps. And it was just a reverse sales headcount model of how much revenue do we need? How much is each salesperson going to close? Okay. This is how many salespeople we need. Um, and that model just doesn't work anymore based on the way that B to B buyers buy and evolve, which is very different than when those models were built in the two thousands or the nineteen nineties.
Chris Walker: Um, and so now the way to decide how many salespeople that your business should have is based on how much pipeline you can create consistently. Um, a combination between the investments that you have in marketing and founder founder brand, if that's available to you and in sales development, this is how much qualified pipeline we create consistently.
Chris Walker: This is the win rate against that. Okay, this is how many reps that we need to be able to to take care of and close that level of qualified pipeline, which would have if companies built the model that way, they would have somewhere between two and three times less sales reps than they do today. which is just the reverse of 35 to 45 percent sales quota attainment right now.
Chris Walker: [00:38:00] Um, when you have 30 or 40 percent of your sales reps hitting quota, one, it's a planning issue. And two, you don't have enough pipeline for all the sales reps to be successful. Um, and three, it's not a sales, uh, it's not a sales capability problem at that point. It's a pipeline problem. Um, and so I think just the way that companies plan sales headcount needs to be fundamentally rethought.
Chris Walker: All right. based on the way that buyers buy today, which is far more independent buying and far less control of that sales has in the process.
Alan Zhao: Is there this issue of when you're a founder coming into sales, you want to bring on another person to help drive more pipeline. So it's also a question of, do you hire the salesperson first as a founder?
Alan Zhao: Do you hire the marketing demand gen category creator? Like how do you think about that? Especially in this day
Chris Walker: and age, you figure out how to do marketing yourself as the founder.
Alan Zhao: And what will be some of the things that, yes, door number three. And what will be some of the things that, um, work today?
Alan Zhao: Because [00:39:00] we know that, you know, most sales and marketing strategies don't necessarily have the infinite shelf life. So today, what's been effective for founders?
Chris Walker: Host a weekly live event and crush organic LinkedIn content.
Alan Zhao: That, that has definitely worked for many companies that I know of. Um, and how about if their audience isn't on LinkedIn? And then I guess you have to find the right channel that they're. They're, uh, they're in.
Chris Walker: Maybe you're selling to construction workers that use Facebook more. Maybe you're selling, I don't know, like I don't know very many B2B companies that sell to people that are less than 25.
Chris Walker: But if you did, then You know, maybe tick tock is the place. Um, but generally B2b companies that sell to an executive level buyer that makes buying decisions. Your audience will use linkedin Um, and you can run a very simple test for like five hundred dollars You can target the people that you want at the accounts that you want using ads You can run those [00:40:00] ads for two days You can see how much reach and how many impressions happen on those ads And then you can know for sure whether or not the people that matter to you or use the platform or not
Alan Zhao: Got it.
Alan Zhao: That's really good And so Once you've figured out the founder, uh, founder marketing, what does that take you to? Does it take you to a hundred K and ARR typically, or does it take you to a million? And then that's when you have to think about how to scale this.
Chris Walker: Um, I mean, most companies that get that raise money and get to a million A.
Chris Walker: R. R. Get to a million through investor introductions and founder sales and things like that. So this is not a this is not a path that most companies take just to be clear. Um, but the benefit of the founder brand strategy is that you do the same amount of work and you get exponential or incremental more results over time.
Chris Walker: Where I continue to have to do three podcasts every single week. I post three podcasts I post on LinkedIn the same amount of time that I did since 2019 [00:41:00] But my reach is significantly higher at the pipeline that I created significantly higher amount of people talking about me inviting me to speak on events.
Chris Walker: All those things continue to increase. Um, and so the it's kind of like how people thought about SEO in 2000 and seven, right? Like the results that you got on SEO in the first year were good. But then in year two, they got better. In year three, they got better. In year four, they continued to get better. Um, and so you have to think about this as a compounding strategy that goes with you, not let's figure out how to do founder marketing to a million ARR and then stop doing that and do something else.
Chris Walker: You have to think about it as a long term business growth strategy. With the recognition that the number one way to grow your business today is to be the best in your competitive set at organic social media content. Thank you very much. That's it. And why is that? Because that's the number one way that people can consume and become aware of net new information and then take that information and share it with the other stakeholders in their [00:42:00] business and use content as the way to educate the rest of the buying group around why they should make a decision or do something differently in their business.
Chris Walker: That starts with someone being aware of it in social media platforms that have reach and that reach then moves into. Dark social type of sharing inside of slack channels or direct messages or text messages or things like that. And that content finds its way to all the people in your target customer that need to see it and allow your customer to independently educate themselves and buy a solution rather than having to go and ask your sales rep 20 questions in a meeting.
Alan Zhao: Okay, so this is an education game. How would you go about doing this? It can be pretty generalized. Like, do you create content? Um, do you create, this is how you do the thing that you're trying to do that our tool is supposed to just do for you. But if you were to hack it on your own, this is how you do it.
Alan Zhao: Like, what's the methodology to reach this audience and make sure that they talk about you? Once we're getting social platforms.
Chris Walker: Um, host a weekly, host a weekly live event that you do where you provide free consulting to your target customer. Invite your [00:43:00] customers, invite your prospective customers, invite your prospective customers.
Chris Walker: Have someone that's hosting the event that is credible that those people can learn from and then record that content and then use that content in your social media, organic posts and then the organic posts that do well, take that and then boost it using thought leadership ads to your target set of accounts.
Alan Zhao: Love that our next question. It kind of switches us back to the single based analytics process. But so everything is starting from sales outreach. How do we get the sales team record the data in? We all know sales teams never add all the touch points. This is an issue that we've come across a lot.
Chris Walker: Uh, You have two options, build the automation to look back in the data and never require sales reps to do manual work, which I would never, I would never ask our sales representatives to put in a bunch of manual effort.
Chris Walker: So this is a rev ops project to collect the data and then create the automation to look back or change the paradigm completely, where when sales does prospecting, it is triggered by a signal rather than the other [00:44:00] way around. Those are the two, those are the two options that you have.
Alan Zhao: How should a sales rep think about spending their days?
Alan Zhao: Should they be. Actively looking for the signals that have been working, like maybe all the data is in the CRM, but I feel like the question that has been largely left unanswered is what do I do right now at this moment? Because the world is so dynamic, it's changing so quickly, like the right signal, it's, it changes by the second.
Alan Zhao: Like, um, in a moment's notice, someone could be on the website and then you could be talking to them and they're a high intent prospect, but the next second they're gone and the signal changes. So how do you think a sales rep should be spending their time?
Chris Walker: I mean, like, okay, I'll, I'll come at this at a couple of different angles, but I think it's first, it's really important to note that your control as an individual sales rep around your own success and the success of the company is just way 10 years ago. Um, In the fact that the way that pipeline is created is very [00:45:00] different than it was 10 years ago when it comes to a sales reps, sales reps, self generating pipeline and how much was going to come from quote unquote marketing or first party assets and other places like that and the way that customers buy.
Chris Walker: The process that they use in the amount of research they do before they want to engage with a sales rep is entirely different, where a buyer is going to complete 80 to 90 percent of their buying process before they even try to engage with a seller. Um, and so I think that's a recognition that we need to have as a seller when we think about what company do we want to sell for, what brand and what product do we want to sell for?
Chris Walker: And choosing that right is probably the number one, the number one decision we need to make as a sales rep today. Um, now when we get into the, the, the micro. almost none of your individual companies are going to be tracking all of these signals and feeding them to you. So it's going to be your responsibility to go out and figure out how to, how to do that.
Chris Walker: Um, I would be looking for specific, maybe they give you sales navigator, maybe they give you user gems, maybe you have zoom info, whatever tool you have available. And [00:46:00] if you, if they're not going to track the data for you, then you could take the concept and idea of, I'm going to track the data myself. I'm going to do my own experiments around this, where I get, uh, I'm going to do 200 reach outs a day based on 200 of these signals.
Chris Walker: I'm going to track each of those different things. I'm going to see which ones I'm getting responses for, which ones the meetings are being held, how those meetings are going. And then I'm going to be able to isolate and understand these are the signals that actually matter. Um, and so I think, think, Thinking about it as like your own type of experiment which a lot of people might do anecdotally might not collect the data But I think that is potentially your best bet today.
Chris Walker: Is it perfect? No, but given the constraints in the way that you are you have to operate today. That would be my my primary recommendation
Alan Zhao: If you were a sales rep, I know, you know, you're doing many other things, but what tools would you advocate for? You mentioned a couple of like user gems, LinkedIn sales navigator.
Alan Zhao: Are there ones that are like, we need
Chris Walker: this tool. I need this to succeed. I mean, here, the, the key insight as a seller to know [00:47:00] is that the number one thing that impacts the success of your outbound prospecting is your name. When I send an email and they see an email from Chris Walker, it doesn't matter what the subject line is.
Chris Walker: It doesn't matter what's in the email. It doesn't matter what time I sent it. It doesn't matter why I sent it. The likelihood of someone opening that email and consuming it is very different than blah, blah, blah, sales rep that you've never heard of. Um, and so that's an insight that I think everybody needs to know.
Chris Walker: Cause I think people really undervalue that part of it, that the sender is the number one most important thing because Like, even if I just reach out cold to people and I send those emails, I'll get nine out of 10 meetings. Most people will get zero out of 10. They might not even get opens from that. Um, and so thinking about how you can be more known inside of your target customer set through engaging in their content, maybe producing content, maybe going to events, maybe producing in the community.
Chris Walker: Only if you plan on being in that industry for a long time. If you're a sales rep that's going to jump from one company and then 18 months later go to [00:48:00] another company and then 18 months later go to another company and play the jump around game. It makes no sense to invest your time to do those because you're gonna be starting from scratch every 18 months.
Chris Walker: So, but if you are committed to a space or an industry that building the credibility and the awareness around your name will have long standing impacts in your career long term. Um, and uh, and then when it comes to the actual like signals what I use today are who are the people and accounts that visited my website that didn't fill out a form.
Chris Walker: Who are the, who are the people that have a new Chief Revenue Officer? What, what companies within this set of demographics and size have a new Chief Revenue Officer? Is a great reason for, for me to reach out. Um, and then we get enough pipeline through, through our website and inbound DMs because of my content.
Chris Walker: So those are the, the available things that we use which we feel are the. for me doing founder led sales. I'm not going to do things that fail 99 times out of 100. It's a waste of my time. And so [00:49:00] what we try to isolate are the things where we have a really high probability to get a meeting. And then even after that meeting, have a high probability to close.
Alan Zhao: Amazing. I think the, um, there are many important key insights there. One of them is you should be building your brand as an individual SDR. You can be posting on LinkedIn, posting video content, and we've seen it for ourselves too, that the more well aware people know who you are, uh, the more likely they are to open your emails and maybe take a meeting with you.
Alan Zhao: Uh, Chris, I know you got to leave in just about five minutes, so I want to have the audience, any last questions that people want to ask, please post them into the chats so we can ask them. Um, I'll start with my last question and then if there are any more that we can, we can feed them through. But just curious, LinkedIn has been a big channel for a lot of folks in the go to market space.
Alan Zhao: Are there other channels that we should be considering? Because once you've accepted, you can tap out of linkedin. What do you do next?
Chris Walker: Um outside of linkedin, I think the the following tier down and no level of prioritization would be podcast Following that would be a weekly live event That [00:50:00] you do through zoom or something like that and following that would be a strategy around youtube shorts Um in the and I guess I would you could put email in there somewhere as well I think email could be a good medium, but you don't get the you don't get the reach like you do in social networks um So I think those are the next available places that you would go from there
Alan Zhao: And, uh, for the social platform, it's pretty difficult to go viral, especially if your audience is fairly niche.
Alan Zhao: Like for instance, go to market's a big world out there, but even then you wouldn't expect a short to go viral. If it's talking about really like things that we're talking about right now, typically it's maybe a small subset of people. So how do you think about that?
Chris Walker: Um, that. The volume of engagement is typically like inversely correlated with the results of the business results that happen in a B to B company that, uh, let me say that a different way that typically my worst performing posts from an engagement standpoint are the ones that drive the most inbound DMS and pipeline [00:51:00] from them.
Chris Walker: They're more specific, they're more targeted, they matter more, they're less applicable to people, they're probably things that people aren't talking about as much. And so, in this game where people are chasing likes and engagement with the idea of going viral, I've gone viral. I've had TikTok posts go for 500, 000 views.
Chris Walker: I've had LinkedIn posts go for 3 million views. You get no pipeline from them. Um, because you're not talking about things that actually matter to your target audience, you're not talking about things that challenge the way people think you're, and so there's a big difference between pandering to the algorithm for likes and engagement versus creating a message that really resonates with your audience and motivates them to try to make a change or be interested to reach out to you.
Chris Walker: Um, and I think we need to be able to balance that, especially in B to B, where we sell to a defined set of accounts and people inside of those accounts. It's different. And this is why I think that people do not take enough. A lot of B to B marketers take so much context and advice that comes from B to C or from people that sell newsletter subscriptions or some other type of [00:52:00] media company.
Chris Walker: And then they try to bring that into a B to B company. And a lot of the advice that comes from those types of businesses are not applicable to B to B companies. Sure, if you sell gym shorts to men. Of all ages, it would make sense that you want to get 10 million views on your video. If we sell to CIOs at companies that are between 200 and 1, 000 employees, there's only 1, 000 people that matter in the whole world for us.
Chris Walker: Um, and so who cares whether we get 10 million views on a video? There's only 1, 000 people that matter to us, so it's There's a, there's a very big difference, especially in B to B in terms of reach and engagement and how that matters to business results.
Alan Zhao: I love it. Focus on the quality of content. Don't worry about the vanity metrics.
Alan Zhao: Just make sure you're reaching your target audience with the message you want. Chris, it was wonderful to have you on today. I learned a lot. I hope the audience learned a lot. And if there's any remaining questions we can follow up later. But thank you so much again for your time.
Chris Walker: Appreciate you all having me here.
Chris Walker: Hope it was valuable. Thanks, everyone.