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.
The thing is how do you stand out? In a sea of white dots, how are you a red x? And to me it is putting that upfront work even though it is risky and it doesn't scale right now, but we're so early we can do it and we can actually put a motion behind it.
Todd Busler (00:14):
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.
(00:42):
Excited to introduce our guest today, Brian Hamor. After a professional basketball career in Europe and starting and exiting a company in the recreational sports department, he got into tech sales. He joined a Series A company and was there from about zero to $5 million in ARR. First is the early rep, and then as the first head of sales. A problem he kept seeing was that people do a really bad job engaging, closed-lost opportunities. And after seeing how invasive this problem was, he started a company to go solve it. The company's called BuyerExperience and the reason why I wanted him on our show is he talks through tons of B2B SaaS companies about why they're losing deals and what they can do about it. Tune in at the 19 minute mark. I think he gives some of the best tactical advice I've heard in a long time. Enjoy.
(01:30):
Brian. What's up man? How you doing?
Brian Hamor (01:32):
Good. How you doing?
Todd Busler (01:33):
Doing great. Pumped to chat with you. I know we had to move this around a little bit. Appreciate you making some time.
Brian Hamor (01:38):
Yeah, likewise.
Todd Busler (01:40):
So give the audience a background. What was your experience leading up to BuyerExperience?
Brian Hamor (01:44):
Yeah, very non-linear. First 26 years of my life played basketball, so I played in college, played overseas for a few years, so entered the business world at 26 and I went into medical sales for a short stint. Then I went to and co-founded a company called Playeasy. So Playeasy is a marketplace that connected people that hosted big sporting events to help them find facilities, rinks, baseball fields. So we automated that whole process, helped bootstrap to over seven figures and they're still alive today doing over seven figures in bootstrap revenue. Left there, ended up leading sales at a Series A startup. Helped them go from zero to 5 million. And then that's where I kind of rented the problem where I'm solving out BuyerExperience. I was in a VC board meeting and they were like, well, why are you guys losing deals? And I had the bar chart, it was budget, timing competitor, and they're like, yeah, why? It was crazy. I couldn't answer that question. And then I went to talk to other sales leaders and they couldn't answer it either. And then I kind of saw the win-loss market itself and it was like this is a massive problem and I just had a different spin on the market and how people were solving it, and that's kind of what led me to start BuyerExperience now.
Todd Busler (02:57):
What was just a quick overview on that zero to 5 million run. What company was that? What space was it in? Who were you selling to?
Brian Hamor (03:04):
Yeah, it was Marpipe. So it was an ad tech space. So basically companies know what ads went on Facebook, but they don't know why. Was it the model and the picture? Was it the green color, the blue color, the copy. So we were able to automate multivariate testing. It's called to isolate. It was this copy that one for this audience, a blue background is better than a green background.
Todd Busler (03:25):
Makes sense. So you mentioned what kind of sparked the idea for BuyerExperience. Was there a moment where you realized, hold on, why aren't more people taking this seriously? Or why isn't this a bigger market or why isn't someone been dominating this?
Brian Hamor (03:39):
I think that was the weird part about it, right, is once I started talking to people, it was just kind of standard that no one really looked at it. It was like, wait, so 80% of pipeline goes to closed-lost. People go and pick through all these deals. There's really no system behind it. Then sales leaders get into a VC meeting, they get these questions, they can't answer these questions about where 80% of the pipeline. When you think about all the resources that go into top of funnel when it comes to SCR, salaries, organic, content, SEO, all that stuff and the millions spend that it is kind of hit me like this is kind of crazy how no one spends any money or optimize an actual system behind winning back loss deals.
Todd Busler (04:16):
Why do you think that is?
Brian Hamor (04:18):
I think no one owns it. I think it is not something that's talked about in meetings either internally or even with VCs and board meetings. Everyone's always talking about outbound and it's kind of optimized and outreach and the SalesLoft did that. It's like, all right, you have your list, then you have open rates, you have clicks, then clicks to replies and replies to meetings, and you have all of these conversion rates. But in terms of lost deals, no one's actually treated it like a funnel. It's not really discussed. It's more looked as a bonus. So I think a lot of companies just don't know how to build the funnel, and that's kind of what we're trying to help educate is here's the funnel that we're going to help you build and here's how it should be tracked.
Todd Busler (04:56):
What's the status quo? When you get into most of these conversations, I'd imagine they have some type of marketing drip or periodically someone who knows Salesforce decently. That was my experience. There's some marketing drip that doesn't do anything. And then there's some nerdy sales leader that once they're in the seventh week of the quarter goes, oh shit, we have a pipeline gap. Let me go run a closed-lost campaign. What's the status quo?
Brian Hamor (05:21):
Yeah, I mean you nailed the status quo. And I think the thing from a buyer perspective, right before you just nailed that, a buyer goes and evaluates five different softwares, they go with five different sales reps and most people choose nothing. So now you have a buyer who just went through five sales processes, all get marked to close, lost all go into nurture sequences, all are generic messaging, all are just checking in, all are now added to a marketing drift that they're going to hit with new features that they don't even know they care about. So the whole thing is just chaotic and it's turning into the spam of what outbound has kind of turned into now too. Interesting.
Todd Busler (05:57):
Yeah. So you mentioned that ownership problem, I agree with you, right? It's kind of sales ops, you see some product marketing people you see once in a while, a big enough team, there's a competitive person. What are you seeing most commonly? And then secondly, what do you think is ideal? Who should be the owner?
Brian Hamor (06:13):
Yeah, I'm seeing a mix of like, oh yeah, so we have, marketing has their own nurture sequence and then sales has their own list that they can go through, but there's no rhyme or reason. Sales can just, if they have time available in the day, they can just go through the pick list and dial who they think is the best people to reach out to. And then what I think should happen is today it should be in the win-loss category. So today product marketers a lot of times own win-loss. So it should be product marketing and sales owning that funnel, product marketing, own the insights sales own the actual revenue tied to it, like the actual win rates to it. So product marketing should be saying, okay, so how's the sales experience? What could we improve? What competitors do we go up against? What did they choose? Why they choose it? And then if we improve in these areas, can we win these deals back? And then that funnel should be pushed right back to sales to get back in the pipeline, but those two should be measuring that together.
Todd Busler (07:10):
That makes sense. You've talked about something online called the rebound funnel. What is it and why should sales and marketing leaders track it or think about it?
Brian Hamor (07:19):
Yeah, that could be my basketball background, but if you look at it, you got inbound and outbound for the top of funnel, but then rebound, same thing as basketball ball doesn't go in the hoop and then you got to sell, rebound in it. Same thing with sales. This buyer goes to the funnel, gets mark closed-lost, and then it's like, okay, now you need to build out that rebound funnel. So how many total lost deals do we have? How many actually left feedback for us out of that feedback? How many voluntarily opted into yes, reengage if you improve in those areas because a lot of times it's like a poor sales experience or they onboarded the competitor they're not happy with. So that's a key point is like that's a rebound deal. Someone that opted in and said, yes, I'm open to reengage. And then lastly, are they back in the pipeline and what does that win rate?
Todd Busler (08:02):
When I get into why some of these win back strategies fail, but you said something really interesting. So you said in that canonical example, someone looks at five different vendors, they do five different sales cycles, they buy nothing. How much do you think about category maturity for the impact you can have? And what I mean is if you think an up and coming category where most of the companies are losing to do nothing, stay with status quo versus a mature category where you have to have something, how do you approach that? Do you even think about that distinction?
Brian Hamor (08:33):
Yeah, 100%. So that was actually top of mind for us the last few weeks is win-loss was just recognized as a category by Gartner, I think when the last year or two. So for us it's that we want be in an existing category. Now teams are starting to actually create budget for it, but within that category we need differentiation. So our philosophy is like companies and win-loss today are all insights focused, which is great, but with AI, insights is kind of table stakes. We want to be revenue focused first. Win-loss we believe should generate revenue and those insights should be table stakes and now pushed into all your other tools, whether it's like Tableau, Salesforce, whenever they're using. And then obviously with MCPs nowadays it should be super easy to access that data and no one should be locking into your platform.
Todd Busler (09:15):
So your dream state here is they're not logging in, they're getting this fed to them in existing systems, it's kind of always running in the background, feeding them kind of rebound or re-engagement opportunities.
Brian Hamor (09:27):
Exactly. So you have the two layers or insights and then the rebound ops. So when you look at insights, AI obviously layers over data. So the better the data, the better your AI will perform. So we're giving a layer of get all this direct feedback from buyers, the closed-lost buyers, the hardest feedback to get because they said no to you, and then how do you layer AI over that is kind of how we're helping companies implement it.
Todd Busler (09:49):
Yeah, that makes sense. I think more and more solutions are taking that approach. I think that's what CROs want. They don't want someone logging into another product. So you mentioned most companies are stuck at level one or level two. I'm sure you talked to some organizations, maybe a much smaller percentage that are actually doing this pretty well. What are some examples of what great looks like and someone that doesn't need to or doesn't feel the urge to engage with someone like BuyerExperience?
Brian Hamor (10:15):
The best companies have a system when it gets marked to closed-lost. So a system in terms of okay, when that gets marked closed-lost, maybe you wait a week, two weeks, but then they do something, they either reach out to them for an interview to get unbiased feedback internally or they push to a third party like us to reach out and get unbiased feedback, whether it's an interview, a survey, which we do AI surveys on those. But that's like step one is like are you getting feedback? Once you get that first party feedback, then it kind of cascades the okay, now we know exactly who we're up against. We know their exact use case in their words, and now we can kind of make that context plan to reach back out and reengage 'em and get them back in the pipe.
Todd Busler (10:56):
That makes sense. I would imagine a big part of this, Brian, is relying on rep feedback, assumptions, honesty and CRM notes. That's got to be a problem you face. How do you think about it?
Brian Hamor (11:08):
Yeah, I think the first thing you always say is you've never seen a sales rep write the close off reasons that I ran a terrible demo. The incentives are completely misaligned. Why would anyone ever write that? A lot of times they don't even know. They don't know what good or great demos are, especially in a scaling org or the BC backed org, you're hiring multiple reps a month. So ramp times are tough. Training's tough, so they're going to go and they're going to swing and miss. I mean everyone has off days. So I think with us it's like that truth is going to actually get you the context to win those deals back. So in terms of CRM stuff, you can't really even trust it. They're just pick and drop downs at that point.
Todd Busler (11:46):
What's been some of the most surprising feedback, Brian? Because I think what's really interesting is you see a lot of different companies and in each company you see a lot of closed-lost deals. I'm sure you're starting to see some themes across all of this data. What's been the most surprising or the most consistent pieces of feedback from these closed-lost interviews, surveys, et cetera?
Brian Hamor (12:06):
So the number one theme for areas for a sales to improve from buyers like eight months ago was sales process pretty bland. It was like, oh, the company's process or the sales rep didn't follow up, stuff like that. And now we're seeing product knowledge and expertise as number one, which is showing us these sales reps have to be a little bit more solutions engineers because all of this, there's so much tech, now the BD entry is lower, so you're competing against all of these different incumbents and now these sales reps need to be product experts at this point. They got to be able to not only do disco but now dig in with these sales leaders, marketing leaders, product leaders, be able to talk their language. So that's been an interesting thing we've seen in the last few months with the data.
Todd Busler (12:50):
That's an interesting topic. I actually have a post going out on this today. I think on one component of what you just said, I think there's going to be less sales reps in the future that are higher paid and way more knowledgeable, not just on the tech component, but think about just on the competitive landscape. Every single company, and I have a lot of conversations, it feels more competitive than it has at any point. And the minute you think you have your competitive talk track down, two new players are flanking you from the bottom and some bigger players starting to step on your toes from the top. What do you think that means for the seller? You got into SaaS sales, 26, 27 years old, you figured this stuff out. Do you think that's going to be possible moving forward? What do you think is going to happen?
Brian Hamor (13:36):
I completely agree with you. I think it's going to be less sellers and they're going to have to be experts, and I think the reps that stay at a company for a long period of time going to have a massive advantage because they're going to know all the use cases in and out. They're going to know the demos in and out. They're going to know competitive landscape in and out. It would lasted five years with the Zer era. People were going in and out one year, eight months, one and a half years ref weren't. They're long enough to actually become experts on the product and the use cases. So to your point, I think that the future's going to have smaller amount of smaller sales teams experts, and they're going to be there a long time. To your point, why would you leave? You're getting paid that much money. I think that is going to be the future.
Todd Busler (14:15):
Yeah, it's going to be interesting to see how it shakes out, but I think the world of just like I played football, you played basketball, take the 23-year-old hunger kid, drop 'em in there. I think that's going to keep getting harder and harder. So yeah, I'm eager to see how that shakes out. Talk to me, Brian, about what you're seeing from a potential revenue standpoint in terms of what are companies leaving on the table from not having this process dialed? And I think the question behind my question is, I'd imagine much like our conversations at Champify, you're talking to a VP of marketing or a CRO or VP of sales and they go, look, Brian, I get you can move the needle here, but I got five other things I'm comparing you against. How do you talk to them about Hey, here's the economic impact of working with us, and what kind of data are you seeing there? Themes?
Brian Hamor (14:58):
Yeah, so we can kind reverse engineer it from their ACV and total loss deals a quarter. And how we kind of do it is like let's do a hypothetical of let's say of 500 lost contacts a quarter, and let's say your ACV is 20 K, so if we can get even a 10% response rate for insights, so let's say out of 10%, 50 respond to that, and then out of 50 we see about 55% of those opt in to say yes, reach back out because they had a poor sales experience, not happy with the competitor. So that means about 26 to 28 are now saying yes, reach back out. So if you can even have a win rate of 25. 50% of those that literally raised in their hands, now you're talking 20 K ACV multiplied by 10 deals per quarter. Now multiply that by four quarters, you can extra 40 deals a year and that's just one company running the entire program, a whole team of SDRs and a whole team of top of funnel, and then you can just have one program in the backend that's kind of automating this whole process. And not only that, but also going to need those competitive insights to help boost whatever AI you're implementing.
Todd Busler (16:03):
Yeah, it's nice, super clear tie to revenue and I'd imagine some of the challenge though is like, okay, this bet with BuyerExperience maybe is clear path, but how does that compare to the potential impact of something new? And it seems there's this constant obsession with new accounts breaking into new. How do you have that conversation or how do you make that argument? Is it pure revenue focus?
Brian Hamor (16:25):
Yeah, it's a good question. I think the main thing there when people start evaluating is how much time is this going to take me to implement too? If you're going to make a bet on a couple of different softwares, how much time is this going to take me to get adoption? So for us, we're full service. So we get started in a day companies, we have a portal, they export a CSV and we say, Hey, give us your last nine months worth of lost deals. Sometimes it's 500, sometimes it gets up to a thousand. Over the next three months, we're going to go get a ton of feedback for you and we guarantee over the next three months we find 15 deals you can win back. That's kind of our prove it pilot because now we're tied to outcomes and we say, Hey, we'll do it for free if we don't get you 15 deals. And then from there, it's all service. So they don't have to integrate anything, they don't have to do an API, they just hand us a CSV. So for us it's the time to value. That kind of helps that because if they're evaluating five things and one of 'em is like, yeah, I could get started in a day and I'm guaranteed they get 15 deals to win back, it's immediate pipeline and it takes none of my time. That's what we're trying to remove risk from all of these deals.
Todd Busler (17:25):
Love that. I think the offer that you mentioned is getting more popular where people want to be a do more. For me, Jason Lemkin talks about this nonstop and I agree, and b, de-risk this for me because there's so many options I have. And if you're so confident, then put your money where your mouth is. We do the same thing and I think that's going to become more and more common. Before I dig into some of the stuff you are doing to build your company, I want to dig into two areas. The first part is, okay, you're giving this company amazing insights and I'm a customer, it's great. I just get these things fed to us. Many are tell this person to reengage. Great, I don't know if we would've done that. It's amazing, but the execution matters. What are the best companies doing on how they're going back? How are they handling that? Who's the owner? What are the calls to action? Because that matters a lot for you to make sure you can tie to that revenue.
Brian Hamor (18:21):
In terms of owners, it's sales and rev ops. So we have sales leaders that like, Hey, these are the highest priority deals. So if you have a thousand lost deals, it's tough to keep track of a thousand, but if we're handing you a short list of 30 that said reach back out, sales leaders want that. They're like, oh, this is low hanging fruit. So rev ops will operationalize it in terms of like, okay, are these account owners still here, a sales rep, they leave the company and then the sales leader will stay on top of those deals. These are the highest priority deals in our funnel, so let me give these to the best reps, give these the right context and make sure the reps are following up. So it really takes that ownership on the rev ops and sales side stance.
Todd Busler (18:59):
And then what's the messaging look like? The sellers going after that is just like, here's changed in the product or is it tying to what they said in that survey or feedback? What's the best practice?
Brian Hamor (19:09):
That's the best part, right, is because that email is all based on the feedback we got from the buyer. So since we know their use case, since we know the competitors that they evaluated, since we know their exact reason why they didn't move forward in their words, now we can tie that to an email to say, Hey Todd, I know you're going to move forward because we didn't have X, Y, Z integration. We just released this. You have 15 minutes to check it out. And our AI also rank these. If someone says, no, we didn't choose a competitor, and yes, reach back out and you can read all their sentiment, that's immediately a high priority lead because they didn't choose anything and they want to reengage. And then we have someone who might've chosen a competitor and says, yes, reach back out. That might be a medium priority. Then there's nurture, which is like, Hey, reach back out in two years. They just signed a multi-year contract, but I was interested in this and this is what we'd be looking for. So really is about AI prioritizing those deals and they give you the context to reach back out.
Todd Busler (20:00):
And then in theory now it's like, okay, I have X number of deals over Y next few quarters exactly to go back after. And this is the steady stream of ideally high quality pipeline that's set up for you. What are you seeing in terms of as we released insider AI for Champify, I'm very much in agreement that people really under invest in everything, closed-lost. What data are you seeing in terms of win rate for second at bats or velocity? Because a big part of this is they know the problem, right? They're interested in the problem, you don't need to convince them of the problem. It's more show them why we're the right partner. Any interesting data on win rates that you've seen or velocity?
Brian Hamor (20:41):
Yeah, so we're still early. You get exact win rates, but I can tell you every client that we've had in the first four months has won a deal back. One of our clients won back a 50 k deal in the first four months. The first client ever had won back a 20 k deal in the first four months. That was kind of the signal that made me go all in on the rebound funnel. But in terms of actual win rates, we're probably still already at the exact amount, but so far we've seen about 25 to 35%. Still very early though.
Todd Busler (21:05):
Makes sense. Brian, what advice do you have for people listening that are saying, okay Brian, I'm convinced that we should handle this process, this part of our business better. We can't spend any money on this right now. What advice do you have for the person that's like, alright, let me set up the best process I can without working with someone that external?
Brian Hamor (21:23):
If they have a big large sales team, that's tough to operationalize because it gets same thing as a CRM and you have a large sales team. CRM gets harder to manage. There's all these different processes. So large sales team, that's tough to do. Smaller sales teams, everyone should be doing two things. As you running closed-lost surveys and post-purchase surveys, now you have two channels. Even if you're getting 5%, 3% response rates after a year, that adds up and it can impact product roadmap. You can also see, hey, what competitors are we beating in the buyer'ss words? Well, who are we losing to in the buyer'ss words? So even if you're getting a low response rate, it is coming from your company. It's worth running both of those surveys and setting up automations off there.
Todd Busler (22:04):
Love it. Yeah, I think people tend to do it on a loss and there's almost equal value in the win, right? Why did you select us? And there's so much things you can learn. I think the data you're seeing is also really interesting. You mentioned the trend of, it started from a sales process execution standpoint. Now it's almost becoming product competitive knowledge. I find this trend all the time is the sales process can control way more than people think, right? It's easy for a sales rep to be like, oh no, it's this one feature, it's the price or whatever it is, and it's like the sales rep actually is a huge impact. What have you seen on that front or any things that you find yourself having to convince people of like, Hey, this matters.
Brian Hamor (22:44):
Yeah, I'll give you an example. So last year, one of the first clients I ever had when we first started with them, they had some of the worst feedback we've seen.
Todd Busler (22:52):
What does that mean?
Brian Hamor (22:52):
So we asked the question like, Hey, how did the expectations of sales rep that didn't meet your expectations? It's like exceeded met below or significantly below, almost 50% were selecting below or significantly below. Over those six months, that company had to strip a lot of those sales reps. They got much leaner, similar to what we were talking about with the trend. They had only have a few sales reps now. So we just ran a campaign for them the last three months. They only had four come in that were below expectations or significantly below, which also gave a massive increase to rebound deals because these people, it just wasn't bad timing. They didn't choose a competitor or they need a certain case study or it's very simple things to solve. So now because they have less sales reps, but better sales reps, they're going to have a better experience plus more of these deals are open to reengage because no buyer wants to reengage with a sales rep they had a terrible experience with. So net everything's better, burn rate's lower, experience is better.
Todd Busler (23:47):
Cost acquisition cost is way better.
Brian Hamor (23:49):
Everything, everything. So that's kind of the best outcome I've seen.
Todd Busler (23:54):
This topic's super interesting to me because I just think as AI makes it easier and easier to copy features, get to feature parity quicker, the sales process is what matters. The way you price, the way you have an offer, the way you are intelligent and getting a prospect to think differently, the way you service all of this becomes more and more important. I just had Ryan Heinig on who's a CRO at this company called 2X dot marketing. He was the previous VP of Sales at ThoughtSpot from like eight to 125, and that was in the BI category. I was like, how did you differentiate? He's like, sales process. He's like, you have to outsell. When you talk about those below expectations or significantly below expectations, why is that? Do they suck at discovery? Do they not know how to put together a business case? Is it they don't know how to talk about the competition? Any themes there that you're seeing? Because I would imagine the VP of Sales, CRO goes, oh shit, thanks Brian for bringing this to my attention. I need to go fix this. Here's the 1, 2, 3 things I need to fix.
Brian Hamor (24:56):
Very controllable things, which is always the most surprising thing, especially coming from former athletes. It's like, just do what you say, follow up. If you say you're going to follow up tomorrow, follow up tomorrow. Somebody's like, Hey, we were in a crunch for time and the sales rep took a week to follow up stuff you read that you just can't even believe you're reading, which also gives you faith like, okay, I could probably take this guy's job because if you're not following up for a week, that's pretty scary. And discovery for sure, because especially nowadays, when you have those transcripts, discovery is everything. The better questions you ask, the better answers they have, the better transcripts you have, which now better transcripts, the better you can have, the better visuals you can create off of the better workflow, a whole better process.
Todd Busler (25:35):
Better competitive positioning, better ROI decks exactly.
Brian Hamor (25:38):
Everything. So everything kind of falls up that discovery.
Todd Busler (25:41):
Alright. Let's dig into your business a little bit. Brian, I know your background. You mentioned zero to five. I know that was a pretty heavy outbound motion. It's different today, right? The motion for getting into pipeline with the theme of this podcast, which is cracking outbound. I think what you're doing is a huge part of outbound and should be, whether it's called rebound or outbound, it should be a part of pipe gen, right? How are you approaching pipe gen for your company, right? You're still a pre-seed seed company really getting going. I think you have something very compelling. How are you getting into deals and what's working for you?
Brian Hamor (26:14):
Yeah, so we don't really use too much of automation. So actually I have one of my friends who's like this 25-year-old kid who actually is obsessed with AI, who scraped these AI tools together, who does custom research for us, and every week we wake up to a set of accounts based on people that miss revenue targets specific podcast episodes where these people were talking about the closed-lost funnel or revenue growth stalled, these very custom companies based on data he found for us. And we use that to go tailor our messaging to them. And a lot of times what we'll do is we'll also go below the line, talk to AEs, understand the closed-lost process, get a good feel for that, and build that business case before discovery. So now we're going to executives saying, Hey, we've talked to four AEs. Here's what you guys are doing.
(27:01):
Here's the process, here's what it's impacting, here's how we fix it. Worst case, I can show you how we're doing it for other companies. And that's typically, it's a lot of upfront investment, but to me the whole automation is getting out of control. So I think the thing is how do you stand out? In a sea of white dots, how are you a red X? And to me it is putting that upfront work, even though it is risky and it doesn't scale right now, but we're so early we can do it and we can actually put a motion behind it.
Todd Busler (27:28):
I'm already hearing the pushback of some gray-haired VP of Sales CRO says, how are we going to have conversations with four people below the line just to get to a well-researched value hypothesis or point of view? What's your response to that?
Brian Hamor (27:41):
Are you an SMB? What's your ACVs? Because if you're a 5K transactional deal, then no chance you should be going below the line. That should be more automated. But if you're a strategic sale mid-market 50 K plus, then that investment's going to be worth it, especially because the more upfront work you do, people don't realize those discovery calls are better, the sales process is better. They trust you more. If you're just...
Todd Busler (28:05):
Targeting is better, right?
Brian Hamor (28:06):
Targeting is better. Everything just is better and it's only better for you as a company, but it's better for the buyer too. So I think overall it helps the CAC, it just depends on that, your actual motion to your point SMB, it wouldn't work for, it's not worth talking to AEs for that.
Todd Busler (28:20):
Yeah, I mean we do a lot of the same stuff we call canvassing, which is like, yeah, go figure out what's happening. Go figure out what the VP of Sales CRO is talking about in the all sales or all hands beating and people would say, that's really expensive. That's really hard. That's a lot of work. My answer is, what's the alternative? What are the other things you're going to do? You go and blast some automated email. Good luck again, if you're in an SMB massive TAM, more commoditized, more mature product, but a lot of us aren't selling that.
Brian Hamor (28:50):
And it burns your tam. So everyone always talks about, oh, if I send a hundred thousand e emails, I can get this small conversion rate, but it's still 50 meetings. It's like, how long can you really do that? What kind of product are you selling? If you're doing a $10 a month subscription or something, yeah, sure, go for it. But if you're selling like SaaS, it's strategic. Yes, it's tough to do.
Todd Busler (29:09):
What other parts when it comes to AI, are you excited to improve your top of funnel motion? We have a very similar process, Brian. We have someone that owns the account research basically saying, Hey, here's the accounts we should be focused on. Here's our best crack at how we can help them in a super relevant way. Anything else that you're doing or seeing or thinking about that you think can move the needle for you?
Brian Hamor (29:30):
I've been looking every week besides the actual research part, and I actually went to a panel a couple of weeks ago asking the same question to leaders that were working at big companies. I haven't really heard of any great B2B use cases besides people using Claude, Perplexity, ChatGPT. The one I heard was Gong for forecasting. But in terms of how we've implemented AI, I think people are still figuring out B2B. I think no one wants to say it, but a lot of these things you see on LinkedIn that are showing a hundred step automations, you can only do that for so long and if you are a growing 50 person team, that stuff is just hard to scale and it is hard to do.
Todd Busler (30:07):
I feel the same way. I feel like for S and b, massive tam, if you're selling rippling or ramp, yeah, it's a different story. And I think there's some amazing applications of AI when it comes to pipe gen. But if you're selling even something 30, 40, 50 k and you have a smaller tam, you can get help on what account should I focus or how do we get to a hypothesis quicker? But there's not that much that's dramatically moving the needle there.
Brian Hamor (30:36):
I think that's what everyone is still experimenting and looking. That's why everyone's kind of taking these top of funnel meetings. But in terms of actual adoption, I haven't heard much from a lot of sales leaders yet.
Todd Busler (30:45):
Last question for you, Brian. Where do you see the evolution of your product going? It feels like to me you're like myopically focused on, hey, this is a real problem, people need to do something to fix it. You're a compelling solution for that, but where does this evolve? Where do you see the company going? What's kind of next? I know you have to earn the right to get there, but how are you thinking about it?
Brian Hamor (31:03):
Yeah, so I think today is I see a problem in the win-loss category that it's insights first and we want to get the revenue generating program. And I think right today we're very reactive, right? Someone is closed-lost, it comes to us, we get feedback, we try to get them back in the funnel, but now how do we take that and put it to being proactive? So now a rep runs a bad discovery call, not just AI analyzing the call, but how do we get feedback from the buyer and a discovery call saying, Hey, this didn't meet our expectations, and how do we route that to a sales leader and how do we capture that feedback? So now we're turning from a very reactive platform to a proactive platform. And whether it's an AI running that call or a human, you always need feedback to improve that process. So I think the next step for us is mastering that revenue, generating win loss. How do we turn that into a program, but then it's getting proactive and how do we prevent revenue being lost?
Todd Busler (31:57):
Got it. So basically just go and have that impact earlier.
Brian Hamor (32:00):
Earlier. Yeah.
Todd Busler (32:01):
Literally makes a ton of sense. Brian, where can people find you if they want to get in touch or have questions? LinkedIn's best?
Brian Hamor (32:09):
Yeah. I'm on LinkedIn, DM me. Brian Hamor, H-A-M-O-R on LinkedIn and email's brian@buyerexperience.io.
Todd Busler (32:15):
Love it. Brian, I appreciate you taking some time. I really respect how you've gone about this. I feel the same way that this part of selling and go-to market doesn't get enough attention and we have this obsession with a hundred step automation to break into a new account and it's like, look, if you've been around for a handful of years, you've talked to a lot of the good companies and there's a lot of gold and you can use certain products to reengage them. You can use your product in surveys or even outside of your product altogether, but people should be taking this more seriously, especially as the efficiency of all of the other prospecting activities you can do keeps getting harder. So I love the way you think, I'm rooting for you and I appreciate you taking time and sharing about your journey.
Brian Hamor (32:56):
Yeah, appreciate it, Todd.
Todd Busler (32:57):
Alright, take care Brian. 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.