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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.
Zack Sikora [00:00:00]:
It's not only about quantity when you look at leading indicators, it's about the quality as well. You know, I always say if there's a goal of 10 and someone does 6 or 7, but they're all with a CxO, EB type of meeting, I'm going to be giving that person high fives and then we'll talk about how we can get a couple more the following quarter compared to someone who does 12 or 13 on a goal of 10 and they're meeting with the janitor that will take a free lunch every other Tuesday. That's not being really thoughtful and strategic about your business.
Todd Busler [00:00:32]:
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 built it. Let's get into it. Hey, everyone. Today I'm excited to be talking with Zack Sikora, the GVP of Sales at Benchling, one of the hottest vertical SaaS companies in all software. He's learned from some of the best CROs and some of the highest performing sales organizations in the history of B2B SaaS. He's also done multiple stints as a VP of Sales and CRO across industries and brings deep enterprise background. Today, he'll share his very thoughtful process on all things that go into building a highly productive outbound enterprise sales motion. And he's not afraid to share a few hot takes and strong opinions. Enjoy. Zack, I'm pumped to have you. I appreciate you joining. How you doing?
Zack Sikora [00:01:39]:
I'm doing good. Thanks for having me.
Todd Busler [00:01:42]:
Yeah, I'm excited to chat with you, mainly because we never worked together. But, you know, you came to where I worked before and I heard so many good things about a lot of the team that I helped assemble that had so many good things to say about you and now kind of working a little bit together in customer capacity. But you've seen a bunch of different really good companies across different spaces and stages and I think that your experience is super unique. So, you know, you've been at AppD, people, AI Heap, Benchling, what's been the common thread on how you approach sales across all of them?
Zack Sikora [00:02:14]:
So I'll take you a step even further back. My first two jobs were at Cisco Systems and then emc Big infrastructure companies, by the time I joined, they had been in business for multiple decades. They were billions in revenue. And in a way, they were consumable. You know, you're trying to pull up an application, you run out of ports, you got to buy another router, you got to buy another switch emc. If you run out of data storage, you don't have enough gigs, your application crashes. So we didn't have to think about people, PG, they were consumables. We didn't have to think about being as strategic.
Zack Sikora [00:02:50]:
I, I don't want to dismiss, like, you didn't have to be strategic, but, like, there was a pull from the customer of, like, we have to have more of this because we're running out of something. Transitioning into software. Software is a little bit more out there. You have to sell more on value. You can't touch it, feel it necessary. So when I got to AppD, it was one of the greatest experiences and blessings in my life because, like, they were so focus on how do we talk about value. We have this great technology, but not only how do we share that vision of the how the technology will make the practitioners work better, but better yet, how does that actually drive a business outcome? How does that solve a problem that a board member cares about or our potential shareholders will care about? And so that playbook, I really dove in.
Zack Sikora [00:03:35]:
I was one of the people that hadn't come from some of the previous companies where a lot of my peers were from. They were from Blade Logic, they were from bmc, maybe even back to PTC. But I looked at it as like, something's working here because people had splintered off and gone to companies like Okta and Medallia, now AppD. So there was this legacy of people that were just doing really well and creating great companies. Like, I got to go dive in headfirst. So when you talk about not only what I saw at AppD, but where I tried to follow to every company afterwards, they all had some lineage, they had some tie to one of those companies. And so it was things like they had a common playbook. Every one of those companies or the CEO on the board had a desire to go build that.
Zack Sikora [00:04:20]:
They had a sales process. They wanted to create a common vocabulary. And I think the reason is, is because when times are really good, you can run around and you can hustle deals and things look great. But we all know at some point times get tough. And if you don't have common fundamentals to fall back to in tough times, it gets even more hard. And in Good times when you're scaling left and right, you got to be able to think about what's the common thing that will be our North Star.
Todd Busler [00:04:49]:
Funny story, Zack. I don't know how we got this meeting, but when he was like sub 50 people, it was me and one of the original founders and we're like, we have to figure out this outbound thing. Like we got to a couple million on the inbound. Swipe your credit card like, all right, we have to figure this out somehow. Ravi was the co founder and go to market. Got a meeting with Joe Sex and he came and like spent an hour with us. And we left that meeting like, holy shit. Like we thought we had an understanding of what we were supposed to do.
Todd Busler [00:05:19]:
And we just realized in that meeting we knew like 1% of what like great looks like. It must have been amazing kind of seeing that and the growth. What did you pick up there like that has carried with you throughout your career? Like, you mentioned the shared vocabulary. You mentioned a lot of the playbook. What couple things really stuck with you.
Zack Sikora [00:05:37]:
The first thing is how you diagnose your pipeline and the activities. Maybe the better way to put it is they took something down to the simplest degree. And the simplest degree. What I mean by that is activity is your indicator for everything of how you execute across pipelines. So if I over try to simplify it and think of things in threes, I think an AE's job every single day is to wake up and think about pipeline generation. Pg. How do I get indoors, if you will? The second thing is how do I qualify now that I'm in to make sure this is worth my time. And I think that's actually the most important thing that AppD taught a lot about is how do we really qualify this to make sure this is worth our time.
Zack Sikora [00:06:16]:
And then once you actually are in the door, how do I close it as quickly as possible? And so you can look at activity across all three of those buckets. So let's take the first one outbound and discovery. If you are not doing well with activity there, like if you think of a leading indicator, that leading indicator low, There's a whole bunch of ways to think about that. Is my messaging not strong? Am I reaching out to the wrong people? Am I being too tactical versus strategic? Have I done enough research to actually land something knowing that they're be competitive? You can start making guesses or hypotheses about why that is low and then you can go coach to that and try to help fix that. When you then Think about that second bucket of qualification of like, okay, you're doing a lot of discovery and you're getting to like that go no go meeting of like we're going to put this in qualified pipeline right now and that's not converting the right way. Do you have the wrong people in the room? Did you size it wrong? Was your call it new business meeting deck? Was that not well thought out and did not make a mark? Were you too tactical? Just talking about feature and functionality to someone too high? You're able to look at that activity right there, who you're meeting with, how often, how many people are in the room and you're able to see is that a gap? And then when you get into the third bucket because you've done the first two really well, but your deal is moving really slowly, is that not working because you're single threaded and that person that you thought was a champ was actually really a coach. Did you not do a world class POV to actually show the technology and how it solves the technical and the business problem? Did you not add a business value assessment or some sort of ROI that that gives them something to go justify why to prioritize this investment versus the other. So that was the thing that I think AppD taught me the most is to be able to take what we do in sales.
Zack Sikora [00:08:02]:
And a lot of us think we're artists, right? That we just have these relationships and that we can just go figure it out based off gut feel and experience. And by the way, that's great. Like I want all my leaders to have OR and all my reps to have high eq but they put a science aspect to it where you could balance the two to be able to course correct quickly or, or on the other end of that, if something was working really well, you could then go show the others why this person or this individual was having more success at a faster time.
Todd Busler [00:08:30]:
So much to unpack there. I was actually just listening to a podcast with Carlos de la Torre, the Harness CRO, right. And he was talking about how he got someone in the early days to come from EMC and like how different it is of doing that type of sale, which is very relationship oriented kind of versus the way you're describing this is just like how do you turn this complex go to market function into repeatable steps and a series of things to get better at. I want to dig into one part of this I learned under Scott Davis. Like I saw a lot of this playbook. I think people that haven't been exposed to this. And sometimes when I talk about it, the one challenge I see, sometimes I'm curious how you think about it is how do you do the balance between, hey, PG activity, getting new business meetings, obviously critically important, but then at the same time having the discipline on qualification to say, okay, are we really going to work this and that balance you mentioned, the go no go, I think, is a part of that. Can you explain what that means and kind of how you think about it?
Zack Sikora [00:09:29]:
Sure. There's a couple no gos, right? So it's not only about quantity when you look at leading indicators, it's about the quality as well. Because sometimes if you do this the wrong way, people just want to throw numbers up on the scoreboard. But it's about the quality. You know, I always say if there's a goal of 10 and someone does 6 or 7, but they're all with a CxO, EB type of meeting, I'm going to be giving that person high fives and then we'll talk about how we can get a couple more the following quarter compared to someone who does 12 or 13 on a goal of 10 and they're meeting with the janitor that will take a free lunch every other Tuesday, just, you know, not looking. So that's not being really thoughtful and strategic about your business. So a go no go in my mind is whether it's an NBM of like, you're going in there, a new business meeting, you're saying, hey, we're going to go and do something like a pilot right now and we're going to use your resources and my resources. Is this something you're willing to do and that go no goes, typically with the eb, you want someone there that's going to say, yes, I'm going to allocate my team's time and at the end of this, should you meet what I need to have completed or the value is realized, we are going to spend money on that.
Zack Sikora [00:10:43]:
You can't always do that with the practitioner because they don't have access to budget, especially as you think about larger enterprise deals. Back to what I think he asked me is how do you balance the PG versus the qualification and running the deals? That's the hard thing. And I'll talk about it in a couple ways because everyone wants to close deals. No one wants to PG. Speaking to Carlos, I heard him once say, what's more fun than PG? And the answer is everything. Making quotes is more fun, right? Closing deals is more fun. Taking a customer out to cocktails or an event is more fun. Pretty much everything's more fun than pipeline generation, but you got to do pipeline generation.
Zack Sikora [00:11:18]:
So that's one of the reasons why I think leading indicators are great across the three dimensions. Because when you see someone who's just in that third bucket, they're spending all their time there, you're like, hey, brother, at some point you're going to close all those deals and then you're going to have nothing in the pipeline. But back to how do I try to motivate? And really, it's the inspiration. Because PG so hard, everything works and nothing works. Meaning I can reach out to you with a really prescriptive message and you can be like, I'm going to respond because the timing's right. You hit a note, I can send that same message to someone else. And they don't. So you got to try a lot of different things.
Zack Sikora [00:11:51]:
And so one of the things that I've learned along the way and I've taken is you got to celebrate the small wins. You gotta put that in a platform that you show peers and all the crazy ideas and all the great ideas that they're doing. And you got to broadcast that to the rest of the team for a couple of reasons. One, you got to celebrate the small wins because if you wait till the big win, you're going to be waiting a long time, especially if you're in an enterprise sale where your sales cycle is going to be quarters, Gosh, sometimes even years. So what are the little things that they did? What was the creative messaging? How did they do their research? How did they do follow up that walk that fine line of staying present but not being a pain. And he broadcast that to everybody because you, you want that rep to have that, like, sugar high right there. Like, I did something and I'm getting recognized. But you also want to do that.
Zack Sikora [00:12:40]:
So all the peers will be like, I haven't thought about that. I hadn't tried it. And all of a sudden they start collaborating with each other. You got to create that community of, hey, we all agree this is really tough. And we're in this together. We're going to share ideas. And so one of the things we do, a PG Monday call and every company that I've been at to talk about numbers and goals, but more important, to share these small wins. And I try to talk, and I have my leaders talk as little as possible.
Zack Sikora [00:13:08]:
I want the platform and the spotlight to be on that individual AE who actually did it. So I try to create inertia and tailwind that way and try to teach enablement and creativity that way so that by the time you get to the deal we're going to throw every resource at it. But if you're not doing that first piece of it because it's the least fun thing to do, you're going to fall down.
Todd Busler [00:13:30]:
It's awesome how you think about it and describe and I think the other thing is like subtly you're showing as well how important leadership is a looking at and rewarding those top of funnel behaviors and then kind of getting out of the way and say learn from each other, right? So it's not only just the enablement part but it's showing how much you value that. Which I think a lot of people get wrong. I think a lot of people, you know, celebrate that win which yeah, that matters. But like a lot of the problems tend to be more pipeline problems. I see and I see the best leaders constantly focusing on that. So it's awesome to hear you see the detail.
Zack Sikora [00:14:03]:
You know I have two kids and I tell them eat their vegetables or do this or do that. My brother in law will come in and he'll say the exact same thing and they'll be uncle. That was the most amazing thing ever. And I'm like dude, I literally just told you that two days ago. But they had to hear from someone else. They had someone that's more of a peer, someone they feel that is more doing their their day to day. And if that's what works, that's what we should celebrate.
Todd Busler [00:14:27]:
I want to dive into some more of the kind of PG top of funnel. How you go about that before we do. I think another thing that's really interesting about your background is you've sold to a wide range of Personas, right? Like it CIOs, CTOs sales product now kind of R and D leaders in a more vertical SaaS phase. What did you have to learn the hard way there? And I think spec when it means to like I can just tell in talking to you for 10 minutes like really important about the quality of meetings, how senior in an organization. So maybe if you can answer that in the context of like getting to power, getting to the eb, what did you have to learn the hard way there?
Zack Sikora [00:15:03]:
The common thing across every industry is you have to be curious and it has to come to a business outcome. Look, every company I've worked for has great technology and that great technology when you're talking feature functionality, especially earlier on in the maturity of a company you might be able to hustle deals, hustle deals with just the technology itself because there'll be just some buzz around it. But as you grow and as you become more strategic and you want to go from maybe doing a 25k deal to 100k deal to doing 7 digit deals, it has to be business outcomes. I'll tell you a story at People.ai. We were trying to sell to a really hot company at that time and we kept talking to them about pipeline, for example, and they would lap us out of the room because that company at that time was about to go public. But we don't have a pipeline problem. We hadn't done our research, we hadn't thought about the business outcome that wasn't a pain for them for that time in that company there wasn't a pipeline problem.
Todd Busler [00:15:57]:
Doesn't sound too familiar now.
Zack Sikora [00:16:00]:
Yeah, but their problem at the time, after we got kicked out of the room three times or locked out of the room three times over a year and a half was like, we have to think differently. We what is this company trying to do? And so what we understood was is they were switching to a consumption based model of how they sold. And so selling the deal was cool, but getting the customer to adopt was how the street was going to look at them and base their valuation and their stock price off of like how do you retain these customers and sell them more? And so we pivoted our technology and our outreach and our conversation about how we could help that aspect of it. And so whether you're selling application performance monitoring, whether you're selling go to market software, whether you're selling product analytics or now selling to research and development, if you're not thinking about how a company is trying to drive a business outcome and you know, the easy way that everybody talks about is make money, save money or reduce risk, if you're not aligning your technology to that, you're going to struggle. And so whenever I join a new company in a new industry, I really try to figure out like how does the company we sell to do one of those three things and how can we tell a story? Because if you can do that, just back to the example I gave. The amount of conversations that opened up and the level of seniority we got to once we changed our tone about what we were going to be able to help them solve for. It changed the dynamic, it changed them wanting to spend more time with us, it changed the access to other people that were MBO to it. And I see that across every one of our technologies or sorry, one of the companies I've sold for is.
Zack Sikora [00:17:34]:
It's the same thing. People are running a business and yes, your features are cool, but folks, as you go higher up, they want the feature, but they want to know how that feature is going to help that drive some sort of timeline or outcome. And if you're not talking about that, you're going to be relegated to lower practitioners that won't be able to think about things in a strategic way.
Todd Busler [00:17:56]:
Awesome story, and Zack, tactically, like, you're in that organization, the People.ai example, you're talking about a problem. Sure, but frankly, they don't care about that problem. How do you go from like, okay, still this account is someone we want to work with. They're on your target account list. How do you then go, okay, walk out of the room, tail between your legs. How do you re approach that? With a different value prop. Like, is it different people in the organization? Does some time need to pass? How do you earn the right to like, even approach them with a different potential pain hypothesis?
Zack Sikora [00:18:25]:
It's typically in that example. And I think a lot of them is we were talking to the wrong people about the wrong problem. And so once we figured out what that company's executives were talking about on analyst meetings and doing our research and our prep, our PG changed. We realized we needed to go to a new group. We went back to the people we had chatted with, but they were now coaches. We were able to go back to them and say, hey, we have a new hypothesis. What do you think about that? And they're like, well, yeah, that's the public information. You've done your homework now.
Zack Sikora [00:18:57]:
Right? And so when we changed that, then we started figuring out who to go to. And so it's not like we ever alienated the people. And we weren't so bad when we missed the first time that we were able to check back with them. But it was a new group, it was a new message. And it started from cold PG of like, we had to go with value based outreach. About. Here's our hypothesis of what we think your CEO and your CFO are talking about. We now know your company is switching from a more traditional sales model to a consumption based model.
Zack Sikora [00:19:24]:
We got that validated and we got that credibility. And all of a sudden people were willing to take a conversation with us saying that is a priority. We do actually want to have you back. We do want to now speak with you about how you potentially could help us address that.
Todd Busler [00:19:37]:
I love that story because I see a common theme with people either earlier in their career that don't come from the big PG backgrounds. It's like, oh no, this account, I need more accounts. It's like, no, no, no, hold on. There's a potential pain hypothesis. Are we even talking about the right problem? There's the people, right? And then when there's timing on that, there's things that are constantly changing. So I think that story is awesome and a great anecdote for people listening. Where have you seen outbound go wrong? Because I'm sure you know, you joined some of the companies we're talking about here, they weren't as mature as when you left them, right?
Todd Busler [00:20:08]:
And I'm sure maybe the outbound process, it wasn't so built out or wasn't humming yet. What's usually broken are the common trends you've seen across these, these organizations you've been a part of in lead.
Zack Sikora [00:20:19]:
I think when the AE doesn't own the outbound, that is the biggest problem when it's relegated to another function. Now it also depends on the business. Four or five companies I've chatted about and that we've talked about where I've worked, they've been enterprise, strategic, multi Persona, multiple product companies. There are other companies that are more velocity, volume, maybe you speak to one person. Your sales cycle is very short and potentially your ASP is, is smaller as well. So first of all you got to take the look at what type of business you're running, what your go to market motion is and what your product market fit is. But let's talk about more on the enterprise and selling higher up when other folks think it's going to be inbound, when it's going to be all SDR driven and folks are going to just get layups left and right and all they have to do is close the deal. I find that's where pipeline and outbound is typically broken.
Zack Sikora [00:21:11]:
Now I tell everybody when I interview them for a company that I'm working at like look, we have to build the scaffolding and the go to market engine around you. I'm not saying we don't have a strong SDR program. I'm not saying that you can't build a strong marketing program that's going to help you drive leads. But the Amy has to wake up every single day because realistically, especially as you go higher up in segmentation is going to have less and less accounts. They have to know that account like they work there. In an SDR, if you have a 3 to 1 ratio or 2 to 1 ratio, 4 to 1, whatever it may be, they're not going to be able to do that much research. They're going to be spray and pray. They're going to be more of a rightful blast and a he has to be the one that understands the business problem like we talked about and start thinking about the messaging for that.
Zack Sikora [00:21:57]:
And so I think that's the biggest thing is like the AE has to own that every single day. I know people will get real, real passionate about this, but I'm never a believer. You should have a, a hunting team and an account management team. That's just my own philosophy. I think you need to have every AE have a, a mix of both because one, you want them to PG, but you also want them to have an install base to go grow from. And then I think you need to think about how do you PG across, whether it's pure Greenfield and how you get in there or how do you PG into different groups if you have a large enterprise and you've only sold to one of them. But I think it all starts with the AE.
Todd Busler [00:22:35]:
How do you go and get the A's to make that transition, right? I'm sure you've walked into some organizations that were more marketing, SDR led and you're trying to change some of that culture. Is that possible? Will most reps get on that wagon and change the behavior? Do you slowly have to bring in your own talent? I know people think differently about this. I'm curious what you think.
Zack Sikora [00:22:53]:
I heard something. Whenever you bring in change, regardless of whatever it is and you're a new leader, 20% of the people will believe, just blindsided, jump in the deep end of the pool. There's a 60% like, yeah, that seems to make sense, but I don't know. And then there's a 20% that are going to just cross their arms and say, no effing way. That's not how I've done it. That's not what I'm going to do. The challenge for a new leader is that middle 60 and that bottom 20 sound exactly the same. Very few people in that bottom 20 will be as outright and just say there's no effing way I'm going to do it.
Zack Sikora [00:23:28]:
And so what you have to figure out is how do you move that, that middle up as quickly as possible and show them value of why them doing it will lead to bigger asp, more strategic conversations. And that goes back to celebrating the small wins. So you got to find in that top tier of 20%, you got to find the people that just jump in the deep end, start doing it, have success, celebrate them and then their peers, I call it the water cooler talk. They'll be like, oh, oh man. Todd just got into account. He had never thought of. He did that on his own outbound. He did that creative idea that we showed on PG Monday.
Zack Sikora [00:24:01]:
I'm going to go pull him aside and buy him a cup of coffee and be like, brother, how'd you do that? So you need to move that thing up that, that middle group up the fast as possible. The folks that don't want to like, you got to go have some adult conversations with them about this is the way the business is changing. We want you on board, but if this isn't the right place. But my goal is always to try to get the team that's assembled because they have so much historical knowledge, they know the accounts. And then also bringing in new people is also never a bad thing as well. Like bringing in fresh ideas to also learn from all the greatness that has already been there. It's always great. That's how companies grow.
Zack Sikora [00:24:36]:
That's the definition of growth mindset. Like how can we learn from each other?
Todd Busler [00:24:40]:
Yeah, I think the hard part is figuring out like who in that 60% and how do you find that as quickly as possible. And you can kind of get some false starts of like, yeah, I am bought in, but then three weeks later the behavior isn't changing, right? It's challenging. And why the best get paid the big bucks, right? You've seen a variety of different scale as well. Getting maybe like a click down more tactically.
Todd Busler [00:25:02]:
How does the outbound motion change if at all, right? Like is the way you approach it very differently or the tactics that you're using to break in accounts. How do you think about that as businesses are scaling?
Zack Sikora [00:25:15]:
I think about it like the core fundamentals you have to have outbound from your a. It doesn't matter whether you're a two person company or you have 200 people in your organization. I think of it as, when you're a small startup, your leads are going to come from probably your own personal network, your VCs network, things like that. That's where you're going to get inbound from. And as you grow in scale, there'll be some sort of growth in leads that will come in inbound. But at some point they kind of plateau. And so if you don't have that outbound muscle with your own salesforce, you're going to struggle. But then as time comes, this is What I was talking about, you got to build the scaffolding around it so your SDR program, your channel program, your marketing budget hopefully gets bigger and you start being more sophisticated of things like maybe ABM if you're going after the top 25 accounts or the top 100 accounts, so the maturity changes.
Zack Sikora [00:26:12]:
But the core fundamental, in my humble opinion, is the AE still has to own that every single week. Because if you don't do that, regardless of whether times get great and you just keep growing or whether you get more headwinds, if the AE is not owning it, you're going to struggle.
Todd Busler [00:26:29]:
Makes a ton of sense. And I think some people fail to realize that or like, you know, don't want to accept that. Hey, that's the reality. And I have to get these bought in. And you deal with problems with that. There's a lot of talk on, you know, hey, it's getting much harder to break into accounts. Email response rates down, a lot of hangover, in my opinion of the ZIRP area has some of these categories extremely crowded. Does it feel much harder for you today than it did, you know, if you go back previous cycles? Or do you think it's like, hey, the tactics have changed.
Todd Busler [00:26:59]:
The job has always been hard. What do you think?
Zack Sikora [00:27:02]:
The job has always been hard. First of all, right, we've chosen a profession where you get told no a lot more than you get told yes. But I also agree it's gotten harder. I blame it on COVID. Let's blame, you know, everything on COVID. But I tell my team our customers and prospects have gotten very comfortable with bunny slippers, right? You know, I don't want to meet with you. Let's do a zoom call or send me an email.
Zack Sikora [00:27:29]:
Like, we had to figure out a way how to build champions outbound close deals in a remote setting. And so there was this like one dimension wall compared to actually being there on site. That said, like, I think the way that you break it down is if you can show value, customers are actually willing to meet live. But it's not going to be quantity, it's going to be quality. So you have to have some sort of deposit that will make them get out of their bunny slippers and meet you in the office as we all come back or meet you in a Starbucks. And so, you know, one of the things I really try to talk about is how do you make these deposits? Really smart people, especially executives, they don't need more money. They don't need to go to a Giants game. You know, they can go buy their own ticket, but if you can give them something like they learn about and like a dinner with a keynote speaker, maybe not about your company, but about industry outlook and trends and things like that, people will typically go to those.
Zack Sikora [00:28:28]:
Because, you know, if you've ever heard like, Bill Gates reads five to ten books a week because he wants to learn something. And I think as you try to call higher up to executives, if you can give them something that's considered a deposit, that will help them learn something about an industry trend or a peer introduction or whatever it may be where you're not asking for anything yet. I think people really are willing to take a phone call or meet you somewhere because those opportunities become less and less. But it's got to be something valuable to them, not just to you as the seller.
Todd Busler [00:29:01]:
I love that. And I couldn't agree more. I was saying like a, on the deposits front, but also like the bar has gone a lot higher on how much that person has to learn or what type of value are they going to get from this? Because they're just getting inundated. You know, you have new A's that you've hired from out of industry. I think benchling is a great example. Like, you've gotten people that, they know the playbook, they know PG, but they've never sold to this Persona, they never sold to these types of accounts. How do you actually enable them to figure out what are those right deposits, what are those right offers, what are those right learning opportunities and who's responsible for that? How do you go about it?
Zack Sikora [00:29:37]:
Yeah, so one of the things we're really fortunate at benchling is we have a really strong enablement program. And you know, when I was at People.ai, it was great. For four years, I got to talk to sales leaders every single day. And one of the common themes.
Todd Busler [00:29:52]:
And steal the best things they're doing.
Zack Sikora [00:29:53]:
Yeah, I got to see all the struggles that they were doing. I got to see what was working well. I got to see what everybody talked about in public, but what was really going on behind the scenes. And I think one of the things in SaaS that I've seen shift and let's call it the last decade is the greatest companies have really strong enablement, folks. And I think enablement has taken this shift in the last, let's call it the last decade or so from the back of the house to, hey, Bobby's not really good at selling, but he's a nice guy and brings in brownies every week. So let's Throw him in to enable it to where it is today. Someone who's sitting at the right hand of the CRO saying we need to reduce ramp if we're hiring people and we need to increase productivity of the reps because we're not able to hire at all costs. So how do we get them more dangerous on our product, the industry and things like that.
Zack Sikora [00:30:45]:
And so that was one of the biggest things when I came to Benchling was what is the commitment, what is the investment from the CEO, the board and our CFO to really not just talk about it, but to really do it. And I feel very fortunate that that Benchling and our executive team has made that type of investment. So to answer your question, you know, we look at it as we can hire someone with domain experience and then we have to teach them the playbook or we can hire someone with playbook and then we have to teach them the science. And so we do everything from multiple boot camps. You know, I have come from a place where you've done one boot camp, but sometimes like boot camp, one just needs to be about product and how you go pipeline generate. Talking about closing deals is too new. And so we add the science or we add the playbook into that component. We then send them back to the field for a quarter or two.
Zack Sikora [00:31:34]:
We then take them back out of the field and we understand where they are based off of different things we're seeing. And then we customize boot camp two more to whatever track they may need. Our company has got what we call bench experience. They're actual scientists, they have PhDs and things like that. So the good thing for a guy like me who doesn't have domain experience is I have so many resources. So what we're finding is this nice blend of people who have thought about how do I value based sell, how do I understand the business that some of our largest companies that make therapeutics, what are they trying to achieve from a time to market or a cost savings? And then how do we take the great experience of everybody that works at Benchington that has that practical, you know, day to day, hands on type of experience? And how do we come together to think about an account plan or an outreach program or whatever it may be to go tackle those issues so no one's left behind? But it all starts with enablement.
Todd Busler [00:32:31]:
Yeah, I think there's a lot of hype slash buzz in the market on the importance of RevOps and I think that's very true. But I think enablement doesn't get enough praise and I think that's a role where you're going to see the best people making tons of money and being in high demand because it's just getting more and more important. I agree this has always been hard and I haven't been doing this as long as you have, but it is harder. Which means the people that can enable teams at scale, the people that can like put together those big boot camps, give the creative offers, get someone from out of industry to learn quickly, are becoming in high demand. I think that's going to continue to happen.
Zack Sikora [00:33:06]:
I think RevOps is just as critical and I think you've probably seen it just like I have in my career. When you're a frontline leader, you Think about your 5, 6, 7, 8 years and your little world. But as you scale, you have to have a strong RevOps program as a leader to be able to understand the data and have that partner there, that same like, I'm seeing gaps at a data level now. Let's go add context on and go get curious about why this is a problem or why this is really working well. And then you put more tailwind behind it and then enablement is there to help you fill those gaps as well. So, you know, I just noticed in my own career the importance of having such a strong partner in both of those functions to be able to drive a business.
Todd Busler [00:33:47]:
Yeah, I made every mistake under the sun at my experience at Heap, but I think the two that I always come back to is just the power of really good RevOps, the power of someone great in enablement and like how much of a step function that could have. And I don't, I just didn't appreciate that. And then you see what great looks like and you're like, oh, wow. And I think you're right. A partner to the CRO, it's the partner to the VP of sales, someone that's thinking as strategically seeing around corners. And it's a force multiplier that I wish I learned earlier in my career. Last question I have for you, Zack. What do you think Outbound looks like in five years? I think a lot of the things will be similar, but with the emergence of AI and people trying to, you know, a lot of just different technological changes.
Todd Busler [00:34:30]:
What do you think this looks like over the next five, eight, ten years?
Zack Sikora [00:34:33]:
I wish I knew because you and I, if we knew that we could go start a side company and consult on that, right. AI is going to be a big component of it. I think the challenge we'll always have with AI is that fine line of cutting corners with it versus taking the first 80% of it and doing that last mile of the personalization and the customization of it, which is going to be what sticks out. I think what we talked about earlier is going to become more and more important of how do you figure out where to go meet the customer in a live setting, whether that's a conference, whether that's a dinner, whether that's whatever it may be. Because people will get more and more busy and try to figure out how to keep an arm's distance because they're going to use AI to figure out what they need. I think it's going to always come down to I don't see a world and maybe I'm just a dinosaur, where the AE doesn't have to own it and have to realize the trends that are going on. Because we talked about how it used to be hard, but it feels harder now, it's probably only going to keep going in that progression and things are going to change. So I keep going back to that one constant will always be there.
Zack Sikora [00:35:42]:
The got to figure it out and then just look for trends and signals to figure out how they could be the the first mover to figure out how to get to where the customer is.
Todd Busler [00:35:52]:
Zack, this was awesome. I appreciate you sharing your knowledge. You can see that you've earned the right to speak so intelligently about this and I'm sure you feel like I do where you made a lot of the mistakes to get to where you are and figure out like, okay, how do I avoid these in the future? Hopefully people listen to this can kind of accelerate some of their careers from the learnings you're sharing. So big. Thank you. I appreciate it. For anyone listening, Zack's doing a lot of hirings at Benchling. Really good team that you put together.
Todd Busler [00:36:17]:
I would go have a look and Zack, big thanks.
Zack Sikora [00:36:20]:
Thank you. Enjoy the time.
Todd Busler [00:36:23]:
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.