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Welcome to the Sales Transformation Podcast, the definitive stop for leaders driving change in the sales world. Hosted by Collin Mitchell, we dive deep into the minds of Founders, CEOs, VPs of Sales, and Sales Development Leaders from trailblazing startups to industry-leading public companies.
Our mission is simple: to illuminate the path to extraordinary sales leadership. We explore a broad spectrum of sales territories, from the intricacies of Founder Led Sales and Outbound Sales to the transformative potential of Technology in Sales and Social Selling. Whether it's mastering your CRM, optimizing conversions, scaling sales teams, or engineering a complete Sales Transformation, our conversations are set to challenge the status quo and redefine sales success.
With a new content every day of the week, we bring you unfiltered interviews with the luminaries of sales, people who have not just succeeded but transformed the way we think about sales. Collin Mitchell also shares sharp, tactical sales tips every week, packing decades of sales wisdom into bite-sized insights.
So, if you're ready to rewrite the sales rulebook and learn from the best in the business, the Sales Transformation Podcast is your ticket. Write us a review, share the show, and join us on this journey of sales evolution. Let's transform the way we sell, together!
Get ready for an episode on calling culture and the future of cold calling. Kevin Hopp joins us again to dive deeper into outbound sales and the importance of building a strong calling culture. So grab a cup of coffee, sit back, and prepare to gain valuable insights on the power of effective cold calling. Let's jump right in. Colin, over to you.
Collin Mitchell:Welcome to sales transformation. We've got Kevin Hopp back on the show again. If you missed the first recent episode with Kevin, we talked a little bit about his experience. We talked a little bit about his experience as a seller and as an entrepreneur and, of course, we talked about outbound and cold calling and stuff. But, today, we're gonna talk a little bit more about what Kevin is really hyper focused on right now, which is helping outbound teams with calling culture.
Collin Mitchell:What does that mean, Kevin? Break it down. Let's get into it.
Kevin Hopp:Well, thanks for having me on the show, Colin. I really do appreciate it. It you know, it's funny. You and I talk on the phone once a week anyways. So now now everybody gets to kinda hear what we talk about.
Kevin Hopp:But, calling culture is what I am really kind of focused and obsessed with at the moment. This isn't a product offering, a a service offering the Hop Consulting Group is doing. Now calling culture is what I see the anti cold calling is dead movement. Right? The rise of the silent sales floor is coming to an end.
Kevin Hopp:This idea that AI is gonna take over and you don't need SDRs, you simply just need to have AI bots that send thousands of LinkedIn DMs and emails every day. I think that that all is going to lead to sellers that don't know how to talk the talk, that don't know how to have business conversations, and I'm passionate about bringing calling culture to organizations that are in that season. Right? So if you think about it, like, who would who would work with me on calling culture? These are these are teams that are seeing email response rates that are really low.
Kevin Hopp:These are teams that know that phone is the way, but their connect rates or their their their conversation rates are low or they're, you know, they're not converting on the phone. I'm partnering heavily with a number of dialing technology companies because it turns out the people that invest in dialing technology are actively looking for this sort of stuff. But I I just believe that cold calling is not dead, and I provide companies a structured methodology to go outbound and have real live conversations.
Collin Mitchell:Yeah. I mean, I think that I think it's almost, I I mean, I hate to even say this, but I feel like cold calling is, like, kind of coming back in style. Right? Not that it never went out of style, like, I'm not saying cold calling was dead and, like, totally out of style, but for the folks that have just been, you know, email trigger happy, and just, you know, trying to blow it out of the water with sequence sequences and trying to avoid picking up the phone at all cost. A lot of those folks are now coming back trying to figure out how do we have an effective calling culture, how do we have how do we be effective on the phone because email is still effective, but it's increasingly getting more difficult.
Collin Mitchell:There's a lot more competition and noise out there. It's even a challenge just to not get in the spam folder. You name it. There's so many challenges of running a good solid outbound via email that people are scrambling and trying to figure out why haven't we been using the phone and where do we get started.
Kevin Hopp:And when they start to use the phone, they actually find a lot of those same challenges from email. Right? Like dialed to connect ratios aren't what they used to be. You know, the FCC is now the FTC or whatever is, you know, telling us on our phones, spam likely, telemarketer, unknown number, etcetera, etcetera, etcetera. Right?
Kevin Hopp:So it's harder than ever to do phone. So what I'm proposing is phone is doable. You need a process. You need a structure, and your team needs to be trained on how to have that conversation. It's one thing to invest in technology and throw technology at the problem.
Kevin Hopp:It's another thing to just have this rah rah culture mentality of pick up the phone. Let's go. But then they're they, you know, if you're dialing by hand, they can only have so many conversations in a day. So the calling culture program blends all 3 of these peep all all three of these things. Right?
Kevin Hopp:People training, process training, and technology training.
Collin Mitchell:Yeah. And what do you what are your thoughts around I mean, I know there's still a lot of people that are trying to figure out with sort of whether they're all remote, you know, maybe some in office or hybrid, but let's just say, you know, most people these days have sort of remote, which, you know, has its own challenges around building culture in general. How do you build a strong call culture with a remote team or hybrid team?
Kevin Hopp:It's a great question. So I I think, technology is a really key piece of the puzzle here. It it really is. Without technology, you're not gonna be able to build a strong calling culture in a remote environment. Let's put it that way.
Kevin Hopp:You can definitely do it in person, but, the the dialing platforms are realizing that you can build in collaboration tools into this concept of, you know, auto dialing. So a lot of these tools are not just a dialing platform. They're actually a team coaching collaboration platform that also has a dialer. This is game changing stuff. This is this is, like, kind of that all in one, offering that allows you to develop a strong calling culture and a coaching culture as well.
Kevin Hopp:Like, we could talk about that. Like, the fact that a lot of teams should be coaching and looking at cold calls, reviewing cold calls, you know, making sure that their process and their scripting is really tight. That's a huge part of this as well.
Collin Mitchell:Yeah. And you mentioned coaching. So I wanna dig into the coaching component a little bit because I think with remote teams, coaching is something, you know, that tends to not be as easily done or high of a priority when, you know, it maybe is a little bit off easier to do in office. What are you seeing? You know, how does a team build good coaching programs around calling and helping focus, you know, individuals, on where they may need most help?
Kevin Hopp:Yeah. I mean, I think there's, you know, one thing that every STR manager can do out there, if you're not doing any live call coaching, you're not doing any call review, I think the easiest thing to do is to institute a once a week call review. And that's where you ask your SDRs. You say, hey. You guys should be making cold calls, and if they if you don't have a strong calling culture, they may or may not be doing it, but then you make a new requirement.
Kevin Hopp:New requirement is everybody has to show up with 1, 2, or 3 cold call recordings to this call review on a Friday, and we're gonna review them. We're gonna look at the game tape. Right? If you think about it, it's it's a very similar thing to a to a football team. You always watch game tape to see where you can get better, to see what you did in the past and where you need to improve.
Kevin Hopp:That's just a small step, a procedural thing that even without, you know, a world class coach teaching you how to do cold calls, you're gonna get better if you force your SDRs to listen to themselves and you actually do the review. And there's a lot of this, like, awkward, like, oh, I don't wanna hear myself talk. I don't like it. Like, it you you gotta leave that stuff by the wayside and really look at the game tape to figure out where you need to improve the post.
Collin Mitchell:Yeah. And are you suggesting that this is done as a team together?
Kevin Hopp:Absolutely. Yeah. That's another piece of this that's like, SDRs can get really soft because, like, oh, I don't want Steve to hear my cold calls. What if I say something silly and Steve laughs? Gotta go to this collaborative culture where everyone's learning from each other because you're all trying to talk that talk about the same thing where you should be.
Kevin Hopp:Right? Working for the same company, you're all trying to set meetings, hopefully, in different territories. You're gonna step on each other's toes. But, I I remember, like, you know, when I was in SDR, we had an office environment that had, like, silencers. Right?
Kevin Hopp:So that there were, like, these things that are on office towers that are playing white noise. They play white noise, like, at all times to make it so that if I was on the phone, you couldn't hear it as well as, you know, the guy over in the cube for me. And, we actually had a calling consultant, like, a outbound consultant guy come in, and the first thing he did was he got rid of all those. Like, hey. You guys need to listen to each other.
Kevin Hopp:You need to learn from each other. Like, we need to we're we're gonna win as a team here. And I got kind of obsessed with that idea, and I I watched it work. It worked really well. And now I've brought that same sort of vibe and energy to many different organizations where everyone's on Zoom at one time, and we're listening to Bobby's call altogether, but the manager gives the feedback.
Kevin Hopp:The the coach gives the feedback.
Collin Mitchell:Yeah. I love that. I think that's hilarious. I was thinking, why would you wanna why would you wanna not hear each other on the sales floor? That's the most valuable piece of being on the sales floor.
Kevin Hopp:I know. I know. So that was, you know, that was that was a mistake. That's what that was.
Collin Mitchell:So let
Kevin Hopp:silencers out there.
Collin Mitchell:Let let's talk a little bit about technology because I think this is one that trips people up quite a bit. You know, there's more and more options out there today. How does an organization what are some things that, you know, sales leaders, organizations need to be thinking about when deciding what is the right dialing technology because there's a lot of options. I know you work with several of them. You know, they have certain strengths and stuff like that.
Collin Mitchell:But as the, you know, potential buyer of a new dialing technology, what are some things that I need to be thinking about to right size me in what the correct solution is for the technology?
Kevin Hopp:Well, you're asking the right guy. I'm a, referral partner and trainer with about a dozen different, dialing technology companies, and they're not all the same. Right? One of the things that I think people, you know, people that don't make cold calls think that a dialer is a dialer. I'm here to tell you that there are, like, really 3 distinct types of dialers.
Kevin Hopp:Right? The top, the upper echelon of the market, the most expensive dialers are gonna be human assisted dialing tools. This is where you're paying a call center agent to make calls, and then they are live transferring it to you. So anytime there's a human involved, it's gonna be expensive. That's the top tier of the market.
Kevin Hopp:There's a bunch of vendors there. The middle tier of the market is getting really, really popular right now, and that's AI parallel dialers. Calling multiple people at once because we all know that most phone calls don't get answered. Right? So you're saving all that time and efficiency, and they connect you using AI to the first person that actually picks up, like an actual voice.
Kevin Hopp:And then that's a middle tier price. And the bottom tier of the market is called the power dialing market. This is, like, you know, 90% of the sales tools out there have a power dialer connected to them. And it's just the idea that if you make one phone call, ring, ring, ring, ring, ring, ring. You hit the voice mail, you hit next call.
Kevin Hopp:Ring, ring, ring. So it goes 1 by 1. It's the slowest and guess what? The cheapest. So if I was a sales leader and I'm listening to this, I'm thinking, okay, Kevin.
Kevin Hopp:Like, what's right for me? There's a few different ways to look at it. Right? And, like most things in sales, it's not. There's an economic component to this.
Kevin Hopp:Right? Are you selling something that's really expensive? If so, we can build a business case for why you should invest in some decent data and probably get a a middle tier or a top tier dialing solution. Are you selling something that's really low cost and you have good inbound, you know, in high intent leads or a lot of MQLs, I'd go with the power dialer. Right?
Kevin Hopp:Because these are people that you're not gonna need to call as much probably because they show some sort of intent. And the economics won't work out if you look at, okay, I'm paying 100 of dollars a month for the dialing solution alone, plus the cost of labor, plus plus plus. Right? So it's it's a bit of math. And then the other piece of this is every dialer is only as good as what you put into the dialer.
Kevin Hopp:And it's a piece of the pie that, like, most sales leaders just simply overlook because they think that because they have a database, so we got, you know, Dun and Bradstreet, ZoomInfo, Apollo, whatever. You get a database. Now I don't I don't that's it. That those are my leads. And then when you start dialing these leads, you're basically just using the dialer to sort through all the crap because phone numbers are highly inaccurate.
Kevin Hopp:So investing in better leads or in lead verification would also allow you to go a little bit cheaper on the dialer because you don't need to sort through the crap as fast. Does that make sense?
Collin Mitchell:Yeah. Definitely. But I think something that, you know, as you were talking there, something that got me thinking about was, I think, as important as the technology is and making sure that you're choosing the right technology, I think it's important that people understand the technology isn't gonna fix your problems. Right? So if you don't have good data, the the technology is not gonna fix that.
Collin Mitchell:If you don't have good strategy, the dialer's not gonna fix that. And if you're not investing in coaching for your people, then all they're doing is calling a lot of people and hitting activity quota, but not booking any, you know, really qualified meetings that are turning into opportunities and hopefully close one revenue.
Kevin Hopp:Yeah. Yeah. And this is that's the calling culture program. You just told the story for me. Right?
Kevin Hopp:It's not just one piece of the pie. I don't just come in and help people choose a dialer or optimize the dialer they have. I might introduce new ways that they could be using it in tandem with their sales acceleration tool or their CRM. But most importantly, I'm giving reps an actual framework. I have a cool calling course.
Kevin Hopp:It's very well documented. It's a whole methodology. And it's a focus on the conversation itself. Right? So if you focus on that piece of it, you're gonna make the most of all the other investments that you've already made.
Kevin Hopp:And to your point, a lot of a lot of leaders think that buying the tech solves their pipeline problem, and they're just getting their reps into conversations that they don't know how to win faster. Yeah. Right?
Collin Mitchell:And and and the thing is is when you have the dialing technology and you're making that many calls, like, you will get some dumb luck here and there just by sure playing the numbers, but that is not a good effective sustainable strategy.
Kevin Hopp:That's what we're here to preach, man. That's what we're here to preach. And many, many, many organizations out there right now are using that strategy, And the dialer will get you more in less time, but you can get multitudes more if you take a step back and really look at your people process and technology from a, calling culture standpoint.
Collin Mitchell:Yeah. Well, awesome. Kevin, been awesome having you on again. As we wrap up, where's the best place to for people to follow, connect, learn more about all the things you got going on?
Kevin Hopp:LinkedIn is absolutely the number one way to find me. I also have a personal website, solo.t0/hop, hopconsultinggroup.com. Many different ways to interact with me, but most importantly, check out my podcast, hop on calls. It's a, live cold calling show. So I'm not a guru that preaches from the high pulpit who doesn't make cold calls.
Kevin Hopp:I cold call. Right? So I I I practice what I preach. I do it live. So come check it out, see if I'm full of baloney or if I'm really legit.
Kevin Hopp:Awesome. For having me, Colin.
Collin Mitchell:Thanks for tuning in to today's episode. We hope you enjoyed it and that you didn't forget to subscribe and share so that we can help more people transform the way they sell.