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.
David Boyle (00:00):
What sellers need is the message they're going to use in their sales call. Tell me what to say to this role. Tell me what five questions to ask for this role. It should be concise, it should be right on point.
Todd Busler (00:18):
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. Hey everyone. Todd Busler here. I'm really excited for my guest today, David Boyle. He's currently a founding partner at RevCentric Partners, a sales enablement and revenue consulting shop. But the reason why he's interesting is he's learned from the leaders that have created the playbook. So a lot of the companies that run the modern-day MEDDIC and MEDDPICC playbook, he was there in the early days. He's been at great companies like Zscaler, Sumo Logic, LaunchDarkly and more, and he's going to share three reasons on why DPs and CROs draw a goal to drive pipeline productivity and what he's seeing across multiple of his consulting engagements. He's a breadth of knowledge. He's no bullshit and you're going to leave with some actionable tips. Enjoy. Mr. Boyle. What's happening?
David Boyle (01:31):
Hey bud. So good to be here.
Todd Busler (01:33):
Excited to chat with you. You got a lot of learnings that I think are hard earned and valuable for the audience. I'm excited to get into it with you. How's your summer going? All good?
David Boyle (01:43):
So good. We cherish the summer months in New England. Every day is Christmas Day right now. It's just so great being on the coast of Massachusetts during the summer.
Todd Busler (01:54):
Love it, love it. Alright, I'm going to hop right into it. Dave, you've held nearly every sales leadership position. What pulled you back into the trenches to start RevCentric?
David Boyle (02:04):
Thank you. A good question. I don't think I ever left the trenches. So one thing I learned early and you had a guest on, a friend of mine, Ryan Heinig, who's really talented. He was on recently about getting in the boat, getting in the boats, like getting in the trenches. I don't think I ever got out of the trenches or the boat because I was taught early on by folks like Carlos Delatorre and Dan Viajero McMahon, the legendary John McMahon, that you have to be in the trenches no matter what your level is. But I do get your question. The question is why RevCentric? And I've always had a penchant for process and enablement. I've always liked it. I was part of the original enablement team at PTC when we rolled out MEDDIC, and I've seen firsthand how effective enablement helped my teams be successful or any other team like I just mentioned, Ryan, sure grab any great leader.
(03:00):
It's enablement and I just thought it was a great opportunity to pass forward and teach others what the legends taught me. My big breakthrough or insight came when I was reading leading Sales Productivity at LaunchDarkly for a few months, which is a similar role my good friend Doug May has over at Harness or my good friend and former boss, JP Bolen, has at Rubrik. And I was doing all this cool stuff and I said, man, I really like this. I want to do this all the time. But to more clients, I kind of maybe gave me a little confidence to do it all the time, so I'm no longer selling, no longer doing what I used to do. Now it's just enable them.
Todd Busler (03:41):
What does the typical engagement look like? Who are you working with?
David Boyle (03:43):
Sure, so I have three other partners, Peter Tyrrell, Greg Dennison, and my co-founder and co-managing director Dan Privett and at RevCentric we focus either on helping leaders, we have a whole portfolio of leadership offerings and then IC offerings. And our typical client typically is a relatively new leader, maybe the last six months who's trying to make a change, trying to improve things, trying to see a bump in performance, an improvement in pipeline maybe, and the company is 5 million to a hundred million. They're in growth mode and they really need to get significant revenue growth.
Todd Busler (04:30):
Dave, I know we're going to get into a lot of different parts of the playbook and everything you learned, but you've spent some time at some awesome companies, right? BMC, PTC, you mentioned LaunchDarkly, a good run at Sumo, Zscaler, right? These are some of the best names out there. Where do you feel like you've learned the most in your career? Was it like getting exposed to this the first time, or you feel like maybe on your third or fourth run you've really started to master it?
David Boyle (04:53):
Two different companies, same people.
Todd Busler (04:55):
Say more.
David Boyle (04:56):
The first was PTC. I was at PTC for 29 quarters and some people joke that I learned how to duck, but PTC was an incredible experience where I worked in the Bay Area in Scandinavia, Boston where I had various roles from VAR manager to seller to sales trainer to leader, and that was very foundational. That's where MEDDIC comes from. The foundational components of solid selling and PTC ingrained in me the idea of accountability, extreme radical accountability, that was PTC. It was hardcore. All my partners are PTC guys. We don't let anyone in who's not a partner. It's a secret. The clubhouse in the treehouse, the second time where I learned the most was at BMC software in the incredibly talent rich New York office after BladeLogic was acquired from 2007 to 2012, and in that office had some legendary people and we refined MEDDIC and we used other techniques like go/no-go meetings and the Three Why's and all that stuff. And we had some incredible leaders there that are now at various companies doing incredible things, both different companies, but there were actually a lot of the same faces.
Todd Busler (06:26):
What's your take on why so many CROs struggle to get this motion going? And what I mean by motion is you guys run a tight PG playbook, you're very strict on the qualification, right? And there's a ton of process and structure that goes into that. I'd imagine now you're talking to a lot of CROs across five to a hundred million in ARR. Where do you see these CROs struggling?
David Boyle (06:49):
In the creation of qualified opportunities, which is not just prospecting, it's what you do on the first discovery call, it's the one two punch, which leads to how many opportunities do you have in stage two? That's a critical metric. How many opportunities in stage two better be at least five to one because only 20% of those are going to close. But in addition to the creation of quality sales opportunities to work on, they really struggle with forecast accuracy. I see it as a common struggle. Now the causes for those are varied, but those are two of the common things that we see. The third and final most common problem assures death and taxes. The third one would be hiring a talent, the ability to hire a talent time and time again in addition to pipeline generation and forecast accuracy. That's a huge pain point.
Todd Busler (07:42):
You talked about helping a client three X their new meetings in six weeks without doing any hiring. What made this possible? How much is on, hey, just quality and activity and consistency of prospecting versus executing on how they run that first meeting. How did you do that? That's an insane stat.
David Boyle (08:01):
Yeah, but it's common. Our typical customer sees a 40 percent increase in qualified sales opportunities to work on per seller within six weeks. And it's not by hiring more sellers because we're talking about opportunities per seller and it's not about, yeah, so it's primarily about getting folks on message. What is the value message hypothesis that you have? And once you're on message, and that could be how you leave a 22nd voicemail or what are you saying on LinkedIn or what's your email or what's your call script as your prospecting, but it could also include what's your discovery questions, what's your value hypothesis? How are you going to run that first call? All of those things fall under the tent being on message, and if you can get folks on message, then they have a chance. Very rarely are organizations on message, and this is why they can't create qualified opportunities.
Todd Busler (09:08):
So I'd imagine a lot of these organizations you walk into, they've done some messaging work. Is the problem that as the team scales, they're just going rogue and doing what they think works? Or is that it hasn't been updated frequently enough? There's not an owner. What do you see?
David Boyle (09:22):
Actually, I see a lot of times they haven't done messaging work. They receive a message and they're told that this is the message, but it's not necessarily good messaging. No, the best messaging work necessary messaging work needs to be a collaborative effort where consensus is achieved through a series of workshops where you get different department heads, different ics together to hash it out, and there's some significant arguing that goes on, but eventually you land on what the message should be and that message is concise and it's effective, right? It's not not obtuse. So it takes time to craft that. We call that our design work, and once it's designed and you get consensus, then you can go and roll it out. But no, I would say most haven't done it.
Todd Busler (10:09):
I know that contentious work, I've been in the two-day full-on cross-functional command of the message debate conversation, so I know the work that goes into that. Do you think this is changing or getting harder? As we're all aware, AI is making software easy to build, there's more competitors. Do you think that's getting harder to do this and I mean do this as stand out and also do this as competitive landscapes, at least feel like they're changing a lot faster?
David Boyle (10:37):
I think AI is great. It's made our job easier. We use AI all the time and it certainly helps us in the crafting of the message, but the magic comes in the arguing, the magic comes in the consensus building. That's where the magic happens. So we get started with AI, but we have to get everyone in the room together to hash it out, to shave it down. Less is more, less is more. You have to get concise, right? A seller can't remember nine bullet points, long-winded emails. They have to be three or four bullet points, short, concise, effective messages. And so I actually have not seen it change fundamentally too much though AI does help get the ball rolling, but the work still needs to be done. The consensus still needs to be achieved.
Todd Busler (11:33):
What are the common mistakes you see in some of the messaging? Is it just like, Hey, this isn't value-based, is very future-oriented, or what do you see?
David Boyle (11:42):
The most common mistake I see either by updating existing messaging or perhaps being in competitive situations and coming across alternatives is that the messaging that's created is not persona based. What sellers need is the message they're going to use in their sales call. Tell me what to say to this role. Tell me what five questions to ask for this role. It should be concise, it should be right on point. It shouldn't be some long-winded tooth complex framework or construction that sits on your desk as some reference guy. It should not only be to the point and persona based, but it should be actionable. So what is my email? What is my elevator pitch? What is my sales deck? The assets themselves need to be created, give the IC, we call it like the weapons to go to battle, the very end product weapon, the sword, the shield, the helmet. We're the armorer, we craft it, but we don't get on a whiteboard and draw up a picture of two people, sword fighting. You got to give them the actual weapon and then teach 'em how to use it.
Todd Busler (13:02):
In my previous question, you said, Hey, okay, there's these three kind of common mistake areas that CROs are falling into, the lack of forecast accuracy, the hiring talent, and then the lack of focus on getting real stage two pipelines. So you go in there, you help these people with their messaging. It sounds like a lot of the benefit is in the debate and coming up with the message, very persona oriented. Okay, great. We're all on brand. We have a great message. Now how do you go and help CROs fix that second point on like, all right, now let's go create a lot of pipeline from this. What are the steps?
David Boyle (13:35):
And again, everything I'm relaying to you, I've learned from others, and it's almost like common sense. It's from our own experience, our own observations. When our partnership was created, we just leveraged our own observations and what we observed was that there's almost zero adoption following sales trade that the actual single day event or two day event has very low impact. What really has an impact is the consistent application of the lessons learned in the trenches. I learned by going on sales calls with guys like Carlos Delatorre, I learned going on sales calls with guys like Brian Halligan, he founded HubSpot. It's going on the sales call with your leader to apply the playbook where the final adoption actually ever happens. It's not in the training class. So we've made a point here as part of our deployment model to actually be pretty light on the enablement classroom training though it's important and we're very strong and provide continuous training anywhere from four to eight hours a week up to three months where we stay and actually go on live sales calls.
(14:53):
We will literally go on a live sales call with an IC in that company to help them to make sure they're using whatever we taught to them, or we'll do live prospecting sessions and actually prospect for them, which is great because they think the old guys, we can't do it, and we like to show 'em who's boss, so we'll actually prospect with them or we'll do forecast reviews with them and actually be in the trenches. We find that if you're there over time and apply it consistently, adoption does happen and that's a key focus for us is live. What my partner Dan calls and I agree, live coaching, it's live.
Todd Busler (15:32):
What I'm hearing is it's not just, Hey, get up, do this two day training because no one remembers it, no one follows it. It's after we're doing some form of training. It's consistently doing this across the team in live sessions, watching people actually do the job, real feedback consistently over time
David Boyle (15:49):
Based on their own personal experience. Isn't that what you found works that this is the only way?
Todd Busler (15:53):
Yeah, for sure. The big trainings never work. That's a hundred percent true. I mean, look, the common theme I see across, and we have about a hundred customers now, some of the names of guys you mentioned, right? They got the best PG cycle. They take enablement extremely serious, right? There's a reason why this has become so standard on some of the best companies.
David Boyle (16:13):
That's right. Our observation tells us that adoption is slowly earned through consistent application and we're committed to that. We are committed to live coaching because we know it's the only way it can work. We like doing it because it does provide us a feedback loop as well. We don't want to be in this ivory tower and think we have a good prospecting message. We've got to try it ourselves. So it allows us to optimize our initial offering back to the client, but fundamentally we do it because we can do it because we're salespeople. There's a lot of consultants out there that wouldn't touch a live sales call with a 10-foot pole. We actually, I jones for meetings. I want to go on more sales calls, so we actually really enjoy it. What I was prospecting this morning with one of our clients for an hour with a group of 11 or 12 BDRs, let's go. So it keeps us sharp and we really enjoy it.
Todd Busler (17:12):
I've heard you say sellers want to be enabled by other sellers. When you're walking into some of these organizations, they have some form of enablement and then where do you see, hey, the experience that you and some of your partners have is able to drive different behaviors, adoption, consistency, et cetera?
David Boyle (17:29):
I think if you ask any seller given a choice, they want to be trained by another seller, but we work very closely with enablement teams. They serve a very important job. A lot of these enablement folks are really good programmatically very good with running the programs, the administration side of it, and so we partner with the program management side of the house, the enablement team to deliver effective enablement offerings. Some of our clients are so small they don't have an enablement team, but most of them do and we supplement them and complement them. There are two different types of personas and we work well with them.
Todd Busler (18:07):
Dave, I want to ask you two spicier questions. One is some of the best CROs in tech right now, VP of Sales up-and-comers, have been trained through the same playbook style. What separates the great leaders that are trying to execute this playbook from the mediocre ones? Because not everyone nails it with this and sure there's earlier stage product-market fit issues, but what separates the greats here?
David Boyle (18:34):
So if all things are equal and you have the same playbook, it's pretty clear to me it's like two chefs with the same recipe. The better chef's going to have a taste your meal.
Todd Busler (18:44):
And what does better chef mean here? What are the qualities?
David Boyle (18:47):
So for me, it's talent. Fundamentally it's talent, right?
Todd Busler (18:49):
Recruiting.
David Boyle (18:50):
So you have a playbook, but some people are just more talented at executing it, right? So the analogy I use is, yeah, you might be in the football game and you draw up the plays a back shoulder pass to your tight end. Okay, well you better make that darn throw, right? Tom Brady, I'm from Boston. The ability to execute the playbook is as important as the design of the playbook itself. So talent really matters, and this goes back to my original point where we typically see three main areas of problems and it's the hiring of talent. You got to be able to hire great talent. They'll take that playbook like some artist can take a guitar and just make it sing. You're just better at playing the courts.
Todd Busler (19:38):
Talk to me a little bit about that talent part. I meet a lot of founders. Sometimes they ask me for advice. Hey, we're hiring our first head of sales. I need someone that's going to be able to recruit well. What do you see those best recruiters, the best VP of Sales that can get holy shit type of talent to come with them? What do they do? What enables them to do that? Is it charisma? Is it that they have a hit list, that they're always keeping warm, like a good recruiter? How do they do it?
David Boyle (20:03):
They do it because of they've proven in the past that they can deliver and help people and they've helped people's careers, they've taught them the playbook, they've taught them the skills. So these people have been able to be more successful because of them, and that earns loyalty. It's all based on what you've done in the past. That's how you bring people along. Yes, you're charismatic for sure, and yes, you have empathy for sure. It's really about the teaching. It's not tacos Tuesdays, it's not foosball tables, right? It's not going out to beer is a Thursday night with the team though. That's all important. It's the teaching of the craft. If you're able to teach the craft, people will love you. And so a lot of these great leaders have been able to teach the craft and they've earned that loyalty so they're able to bring a certain number of people with them. But in many times, as we know, sometimes people just aren't available. They got a good gig going. You can't just summon the Bat-Signal and everyone comes running. So you do have to recruit net new people, and I do believe a strong component for net new is a yearning, a desire for the rigor, for the playbook. You can find people that want that and they'll come to you because they know their skill sets will be improved.
Todd Busler (21:30):
The interesting point, I think there's people that we talked about, Ryan Heinig, he has people he is like, I've delivered. They want to come work for him. Again, you can recruit top talent for the rest of his life as long as he is doing this. The first timers, first leadership gigs. I agree. It's also about the teaching, the empathy. Are they getting in the boat with you? Do you think the way a great leader assesses talent for people that don't maybe have the big network yet, how they assess talent has changed? Has the qualities of a good seller changed with advancements in ai and does it change or is it the same as when you were getting done?
David Boyle (22:07):
It's the same.
Todd Busler (22:08):
Which is what? What are the three most important things you think?
David Boyle (22:11):
So there's DNA and then there's skills and the DNA components are stuff that a candidate's had since they've been in high school thanks to their mom and their dad and their peers and all that. And I have children, they're wildly different, so we all come out a little different. One is unusual level of curiosity or intelligence. That's right in the DNA. The second component is there is a motor or grit that's done some deep-seated pathological drive. There's a pathology there. And then the third component is they're coachable or adaptable. McMann was talking about the other day, adaptability. I keep it simple, coachability, they can be coached up. They're quick learners, they want to learn. It's an emotional disposition and that's not easy. If you think of those three different components, to get them all together is very hard, very hard. But that's just DNA, right? That's the athlete. All of our clients want more than just athletes. They want skill. So they're looking at whether or not they have prospecting prowess and they're looking at whether or not they can multi-thread a sales cycle and talk to different buyer personas that care about wildly different things. Even though it's the same solution, they care that this person can sell value, clear demonstrable evidence that they've sold value in the past.
Todd Busler (23:41):
You're given a bunch of awesome traits and characteristics. What of these that you're mentioning do you think are the must-haves, right? When you're looking at someone's like, I've talked to some sales leaders, it's like, look, they had to have done deals somewhat in the same motion kind of range. I don't care about the product, I don't care about industry. Or others are like, look, if they can prospect consistently, that's the thing that mattered. What do you think are the non-negotiables that you're guiding your clients on from a hiring standpoint?
David Boyle (24:09):
These are all great questions. So the non-negotiables are the DNA. We rank 'em 1, 2, 3. 3, the highest. You must score a three in all three of them. We look at it and I say we, my partners and I, based on our past experience including PTC, we think a B actually has the same qualities of DNA as an A. The A just has more skill, but what's fundamental, what's minimal, what's non-negotiable which is the difference between a C, is they are unusual levels of curiosity, unbelievably coachable and they're pathologically driven and you cannot negotiate on any of those. Now, the skills, that's a different matter. I would have to say prospecting prowess is non-negotiable.
Todd Busler (24:51):
The coachability part I care so much about, and I actually learned this from a technical CEO founder that had no sales background and I interviewed for a job with him and he makes me do a mock demo pitch and I do it. And he said, what'd you do? Well, what'd you do poorly? I gave my feedback, honest assessment and he goes, cool, do it again, right in the moment. And I was like, wow, okay. And I remember I was like 24 years old and I did it. And I think that was a big reason why I get hired and now that's one of my best things. I think the coachability part, you can test pretty easily. How do you help the earlier, maybe first time sales leader or CRO needs help on the hiring front test for curiosity because sure, everyone says curiosity is great, but how do you find that out?
David Boyle (25:37):
Oh, by the questions they ask, by the preparation for the meeting and their desire to control or at least understand the process. You'll find that people will interview the same way they sell and we coach our candidates and as former leaders when we would interview candidates, and certainly when we teach our hiring class to leaders, see how they demonstrate themselves, their abilities when they're interviewing. Does it reflect selling? Are they prepared? Are they coming with a deck? Do they have an hypothesis on the requirements? Are they differentiating? Are they qualifying digging in? Are they capturing the notes in the interview on an email following through on next steps? This should be just automatic for them. We think that someone's curiosity can be represented in some of those actions. It should be really digging in. It should be really curious and passionate and interested about what's going on. They shouldn't be passive observers in life. They should be attacking it.
Todd Busler (26:41):
Yeah. I always had this when I was at one point in my previous company, we were hiring a lot of reps and I always found there was kind of two traits that tended to be a more early in your career sales role. So there was less pure experience to go off of and history of W twos and quota attainment. And in the preparation you would find someone to either really be nerding out competitively about the space, why you're winning, and really trying to carve out like, okay, how am I going to impact these required capabilities? Or they were really nerding out on the business, tell me about your NRR. Why do people churn? How are you break in the segment? And honestly, if they ask questions like that, I was like, alright, nothing else in this interview matters. If you're thinking like that, you're going to be doing the same thing for your customer.
David Boyle (27:24):
Yeah, why not? You're watching them sell right there.
Todd Busler (27:26):
A hundred percent.
David Boyle (27:27):
Let 'em go.
Todd Busler (27:28):
A hundred percent.
David Boyle (27:28):
Yeah.
Todd Busler (27:28):
Hundred percent.
David Boyle (27:29):
Watch them operate in their natural environment. Yeah, that's right.
Todd Busler (27:32):
Dave, this is awesome. I love the way you think in terms of the interpretation and the execution around the playbook. Like look, anyone can go listen to John McMahon podcast and anyone can Google what MEDDPICC is, but the reality is how do you go execute this in practice? And I think there were some awesome tips today around adoption, the three failure points. The last question I have for you is for some of the naysayers listening to this podcast right now that say, Hey Dave, this is awesome. This playbook was invented two decades ago. Selling has changed a ton. Stuff's happening over text message and Slack and buyers are way more educated and there's more free trials. What's your response to that?
David Boyle (28:11):
I say the data doesn't show that. The data shows that the vast majority of sellers are in that plan. They struggle. The data shows that pipeline is far too weak. It's half of what it should be time and time again. I would disagree with that entirely, that I think there's such fundamental truth to selling. They never really change. You need to have a curiosity. You need to be driven. You need to want to, if I may, control the sales cycle. Certain people are able to do that with grace and with agility and great effectiveness and nothing's changed.
Todd Busler (28:51):
Love it, Dave. You're the man. Where can people find you?
David Boyle (28:53):
They can find me helping others at revcentricpartners.com. We're doing great things and I guess if people are interested in driving performance, in particular revenue growth, we'd love to talk to 'em like three other partners love what we do. It's an opportunity for us to teach others what the legends taught us.
Todd Busler (29:11):
Love it. Dave, I appreciate you taking some time. I encourage people that are trying to think through adoption, PG, driving the right behaviors, all the stuff Dave talked about. I mean, I think what's really interesting about your background is you've seen it at multiple different stages of companies and now you're seeing it across a variety of different companies and there's so much value in that breadth. So I appreciate the time, Dave.
David Boyle (29:32):
Appreciate you. Thank you.
Todd Busler (29:34):
Alright, take care.
David Boyle (29:34):
Take care.
Todd Busler (29:38):
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.