[00:00:00] Welcome back to another episode, sales transformation. it's great to, I mean, I think we've been in this business for what? Seven, eight years now. Never actually been on an official podcast, paths officially crossed for some reason, I don't know why, I know we were a slight kind of quote unquote competitors probably with Darwinian Ventures and Ledium for some time, obviously you've moved on to Nooks now, but it's finally good that now that you're at Nooks we can get on a call like this or a podcast and finally shoot the breeze about the industry, before we get started, maybe give us a little bit of background about, Darwinian Ventures, your experience in sales and sales development.
[00:00:41] I think it's so unique when you come from an agency background in outbound sales. There's only probably a few of us who carry a torch that work with so many different companies over such a long period of time. maybe give us a little bit of color about that background. Yeah, for sure. [00:01:00] Definitely seen you in like WhatsApp groups all over LinkedIn.
[00:01:04] yeah, so I got into the agency world after like my, I guess I was at two, two tech companies. I started as an SDR, then moved up to an AE, then bounced into cybersecurity. was an enterprise AE.
[00:01:20] And, I found that with early stage companies, I felt like I wasn't learning and I felt like there were better ways to go about going to market, especially when you don't have a brand and a reputation, which is what the majority of startups don't have rather.
[00:01:34] I, got connected with Andrew, who was my co founder at Darwinian. And, for about six years, we built up Darwinian Ventures as a boutique, outbound sales agency. So it was like, I call it full stack sales. It wasn't just lead generation. We did deal closing, we did sales ops, we did tooling overhauls.
[00:01:55] But, really the sweet spot was early stage B2B tech [00:02:00] companies that were just exiting seed, you know, coming out of stealth and ready to go out and get their first few like commercial wins and kind of blitz to a million in ARR. it was an awesome ride. I ended up, well, now I'm over at Nooks. They were one of my clients.
[00:02:15] I actually was like looking at a zoom call. I was doing a war room with all my reps. We had like 20 reps after I went in. And I was like, man, it'd be really cool to be able to like listen to everybody's calls at the same time.
[00:02:27] Like no one likes hitting mute and unmute. It's Really frustrating. And then I mocked it up on a Google slide. And then one of my reps actually set a meeting with Nick Hill. So it was like manifestation. but yeah, I mean, through Darwinian, it was a really good opportunity to learn kind of horizontally, like we sold products cybersecurity, education, HR tech, legal tech, sales tech.
[00:02:52] so I think, gives you some really sharp knives, like go out and kind of understand how to take things to market and all the [00:03:00] different strategies that you would need to put in place. I always think that Being in the agency space for so long, one of my pet peeves is the oversimplification, especially on LinkedIn, especially in these silos, we hear the oversimplification of outbound and, you know, just send emails and, you know, it's that easy to get appointments and just create more domains, just send more emails and poof, you have appointments and suddenly you have sales and you know, you've been, you were in the agency space for six years.
[00:03:33] I've been in it for 10 years. It's crazy to think of how many businesses when you work with hundreds of companies, how amateur a lot of companies are when they think about a sales process or an outbound process, how little they know about what a good strategy is, let alone what sales tools they should use, let alone what an email infrastructure is, let alone what a good cold [00:04:00] call sounds like or looks like.
[00:04:02] Of course, they want the outcome. it varies from one organization to the next, and it's a unique experience that you have and that I have, how do you start advising one company what tool to have or what strategy to use or what sales technology to maybe implement?
[00:04:22] do you now run against that at Nooks, even as you're kind of advising new clients or? prospects coming into your pipeline of, what the best tech stack or a sales stack is that they should be implementing at the right time. Are you still finding that a lot of companies are in their infancy and understanding even the value of a Nooks?
[00:04:45] Yeah. I mean, so I'm actually more on like post first initial customer acquisition. So most of the conversations I'm having are with existing customers. So I think everybody. Understand the value of a dialer. but [00:05:00] I think there's some fundamental truths and they're definitely across the board.
[00:05:04] When you look at phone, email, LinkedIn, there's some universal standards, right? Like got to have an opener don't feature sell value. do your research ahead of time with emails. You got to keep them short, got to warm up the domains. I think the piece where people get misinformed is that they see this script, this email script.
[00:05:23] You know, someone will post it on LinkedIn or something like that. But the reality is like who you're selling to matters, whether or not your brand is known the level of the person you're selling, the value that you can create, like there's so many variables that it's like, you have to take everything with a grain of salt.
[00:05:40] I think where I did see like a lot of early stage companies making mistakes is just like on the fundamental pieces, right? I think you do have to do some email warming, I think you do need to rotate your domains or like send from secondary domains, If you have a sales team and they're booking meetings via the phone, it is a [00:06:00] massive restriction to not get them a dialer.
[00:06:02] Like if you want to go and double the number of meetings, you can try calling at a different time of day. Good luck. You can bounce around different data providers. Good luck. You can double your team size. It's a lot of money or you can get a dialer, and then for LinkedIn, honestly, I just don't know what's working on LinkedIn these days.
[00:06:19] Like the amount of these LinkedIn AI tools that are out there. It's just like, I don't know what to trust. I probably haven't responded to a cold LinkedIn message in a long time. Like a prospecting message. Right. If I get a LinkedIn DM after I got a cold call or an email or something, I might respond, but I don't know.
[00:06:38] It's like, I feel like GPT is like taking over my LinkedIn feed right now. Well, let me ask you this. I think it was outreach, obviously back 10 years ago when we were pretty close with outreach at Ledium. I think it was outreach, but I think they were saying that, hey, we built an amazing sales platform, obviously, and what outreach did and what sales loft did and then what [00:07:00] Apollo was able to come in and do.
[00:07:02] but just giving a company or giving an SDR team or giving a sales team the platform doesn't necessarily mean they will then get the results that they want, right? So you can sell them the tool And obviously you're selling them the tool with the idea. Of these results, and they often buy them with the idea that, oh, if we just implement it, boom, we will have X results.
[00:07:29] So I think in the early days, it started to become great. How do we get success teams in place? How do we start implementation teams? Even we were a part of an implementation team for some of these platforms How do we get them better implemented? How do we get them, using better sequences or better structures?
[00:07:46] How are you guys handling that at Nooks? Just because you buy the dialer, just because you're starting to dial, doesn't necessarily mean appointments are coming, which is what I assume some companies still [00:08:00] today might expect. I know when they come to us and probably with Darwinian, just because we come to Darwinian or Ledium, Where are our appointments?
[00:08:07] You guys are the experts. Where are our appointments? Yeah, I mean, a hundred percent, right? You sell something, you put your nice slide deck together where somebody had some like massive outcome and they like buy it because they think they're going to have that massive outcome too. But the reality obviously is that, you know, there's end users behind the product or the service.
[00:08:30] at Darwinian, the reality is most startups are going to fail. founders like to talk about themselves or their product and they spend years pitching their product and getting investor money a lot of them think that their products are going to change the world, but the reality is that most of them won't make it.
[00:08:46] so, there's always an element of due diligence. what we started doing at Darwinian was sales audits before we signed on customers our price point was also really high. I'd say we were on the higher end of retainer based service.
[00:08:59] [00:09:00] providers for outsource sales, because we did like full cycle. So it was like a staff in one dedicated person. We did all the sales ops. so we, you know, over time we tried to be mindful of like the types of customers we were, or clients we were getting. Like, is there actually something substantial here?
[00:09:14] Like, can I actually close a deal? Do I think I can close a deal? otherwise we're just going to be wasting their money and our time. Going from, you know, like think about just how a team builds a calling program, right? It's like somebody comes in and says, Hey, we need to add calls to the mix.
[00:09:32] Okay, what does that actually mean? Like, you got to write a script. You got to get the data. Somebody who's young, recently out of college, or maybe didn't go to college or stepping into, this is their first sales job. They never picked up the phone. it's an immense learning curve, it's a big mindset shift, that like, you're just gonna get smacked up, and you have to be okay with that, and a lot of teams just aren't ready for that, they don't understand that you're gonna lose a whole lot more than you win.[00:10:00]
[00:10:00] And once you've got that mentality, then you start getting into like, okay, like let's write our scripts. We can use data to draw conclusions and make changes. Like my team is comfortable making 20, 30 dials. Now all of a sudden we can make 200 or 300 dials and everything's gonna be moving on their screen.
[00:10:16] They're going to be connected into all these different conversations. So there's a learning curve. I think we do a good job here at Nuxt where we have all of the AEs actually run trials with the team. they obviously have been in that role before, so they understand how to help teams progress their skillset, how to dive into different connect rates, how to help with scripts, how to set up different lists and campaigns, but there's always an element of onboarding and training and coaching when folks are buying Nuxt, and some teams just aren't ready for it.
[00:10:45] They just. You know, they're not committed to calling, like you have to be committed to this as a channel. And you have to commit to it for like, a long time. It's not going to happen over a week that you're going to see all the results. do you see that as maybe, as one of your [00:11:00] biggest obstacles is, I mean, obviously we know because we've been in this space for so long that one of the biggest obstacles to phone is almost that, like, That phone hesitation, like just picking up the phone, it's so much easier to set up a sequence, to send an email, to send a LinkedIn message, to send a Sendoso gift, because man, that hesitancy to pick up a phone and actually communicate with somebody, if I can do every other task in my day as an SDR or an account rep before I pick up the phone, and your platform can, solely based on them picking up the phone.
[00:11:35] The teams that are kind of implementing Nooks are so integrated with the phone and understanding that it's one of the backbones of their channels that they have to execute on that you don't see really that hesitancy that might be in some younger sales development teams.
[00:11:53] Yeah, I mean, we definitely do see some Hesitancy, like when we run these pilots, even for some of our [00:12:00] existing customers. I mean, there's reps that have like the phone reluctance fees. I actually think there's like a few, if you were to break this down, there's like a few things you have to get over, right?
[00:12:10] I think the manager's role is really important. I think managers need to put their foot down and be really clear about expectations. I think they need to build a team that you don't have too many, significant differences in, like, your sales folks, you know, like, they're all somewhat okay with making calls versus someone that will not make calls and another person will make a hundred call.
[00:12:37] Like, you can't have that. Because that's not really repeatable. you can't build motions around specific reps. You have to figure out what works and how do you clone that thing, whether it's LinkedIn or calls. So that's one element of it. I think a lot of this has to do with the reps themselves.
[00:12:53] Like if you're getting into sales, you're going to be in a career. where you are in front of [00:13:00] people all the time, right? I'm on a podcast. After this, I have a big demo call with a bunch of people, right? You're going to conferences, sitting at a booth, shaking hands, right? You're going to get the negative reactions all the time.
[00:13:15] So I think you have to have a certain personality where you're comfortable being rejected or being on camera or talking. And then I think the last piece is, you know, one of Nook's big differentiators is Our war room, right? Like the sales floor where we try to gamify this, right?
[00:13:32] Like when I started in sales, open concept floor plans were new and we had a bullpen and we had a gong and my CRO was loud and he came and dapped you up when you booked a meeting and then COVID hit and all of a sudden you got a bunch of people sitting in their bedroom.
[00:13:46] With their blanket on, making cold calls, that doesn't bring out the energy and the excitement. So that's a big value prop for us. And we do see teams that get over that reluctance because they're like, Oh, it's actually kind of funny when [00:14:00] Kevin just screwed up a call really bad. I can learn something from this, you know?
[00:14:05] Now, that's one of the things that drew us to Nooks, of course, you have competitors in the space, which is a great topic into itself and probably its own standalone podcast. I always equate a lot to outreach sales loft. It's one of those outreach sales loft, arms races just in a different space.
[00:14:22] it's probably good that you have a competitor in space because it pushes you guys for development. It's good for everybody. that war room for teams that are as much as we want to say, Hey, more and more companies are pushing into an office. Obviously, Ledium, we see a lot of value for SDR teams.
[00:14:37] I'm a big believer that SDR teams should be in office. There is a value to a new rep being in office. if you can't do that, I think the next best step has to be a tool like Nooks, where, hey, when you are dialing, when you need that instant feedback, when you can walk over to somebody's desk and give that immediate feedback.
[00:14:58] Hey, this is what you could have [00:15:00] done differently. Here's that feedback here. Even when your peers can listen to you, Oh, you should have done this or, Oh, and let me apply that. You have to have that. That's what's missing in that kind of office environment. And if we can't build it, then you kind of have to replicate it somehow.
[00:15:15] And obviously, I think that's what Nook's tapped into, really, coming out of that COVID era. And I don't think we're going fully back to it. Yeah, I'm definitely not going back to the office. I love working from home. I mean, I, I almost go as far as like, if you don't have nooks or you're not in office, I don't think your SDRs are going to progress at the speed that they need to.
[00:15:38] I mean, I think the status quo for managers is like, I mean, when I had my team at Darwinian, I would have loved to like spend four or five hours listening to calls, doing call coaching, you know, I don't have that time. Most managers I talked to are like. I got 10 reps I'm managing. I'm like, well, okay, like you don't have time to coach.[00:16:00]
[00:16:00] Yeah, it's tough without a system like Nooks and, and you had Darwinian, I have Ledium and we've had a lot of SDRs and I've had, I've tried remote, we've tried in office, I've tried, you know, in a different country, multiple countries, I recognize, and it's hard to think that not all employees are equal, which is a hard thing to get across.
[00:16:18] So not all SDRs are the same mindset. So you do need an environment where they can kind of self motivate each other working, you know, that's that whole gong concept to hear it to try to, get that next appointment, to battle each other when we didn't have that environment, it actually the work wasn't being done.
[00:16:40] It wasn't even not progressing, it was work just not being done, and then you as an organization are then putting in processes, not to help coach, not to help get better, but actually help police, and so now you're actually, not focusing on your pipeline and focusing on messaging and [00:17:00] objections and battle cards, but it's actually screen monitors and, a whole different system, which is unfortunate.
[00:17:08] And I think that's one of the things that Nuke was able to come in and keep a lot of teams honest. At least that's what we found pretty much immediately upon implementation. For sure. And, you know, I think you can set up your team. So like, you know, your dialing gets done every day together, you know, maybe the reps have like one independent call block, but like, they don't need to spend eight hours a day on the phone.
[00:17:34] They have to spend eight hours a day when you're click calling, because it takes a long time to get those calls done. But, I totally agree. I mean, every company has a different amount of calling that they need to do or not do or how slow it should do. I call it the money ball effect of outbound is really when you understand outbound as an acquisition channel and the metrics behind it and the activity behind it, you can start [00:18:00] to get very smart with activity.
[00:18:02] If you understand, you know, an average connect rate might be 10%. Then, okay, then I can actually get very dialed in with how many reps are needed, what activities they can be applied to. I think that's where agencies, kind of have mastered that program, the great ones on why can one SDR be assigned to three or four different clients if they're calling.
[00:18:24] Well, it's because they're not calling all day, because if you have a system like Nook's, I'm not calling 500 contacts for one company all day. and if you have a team of different people, and so that's where technology is starting to come in and see this as a true acquisition channel, much like digital is kind of how we see it.
[00:18:43] Since you've been in, I mean, you've been in a side where you, you did email, phone and LinkedIn, you've helped kind of startups scale. Yeah. Now you're on the phone side. One of my pet peeves, especially in the LinkedIn and these silos we live in, [00:19:00] is the noise of just email. Email's the only channel you need.
[00:19:04] Just set up 50 domains. Don't worry about calling. Don't worry about LinkedIn. Just send more email. how much does this aggravate you to see these new agency owners or these new thought leaders or this noise on LinkedIn really advising businesses and business owners and startups, just say, Hey, forget an entire channel like calling.
[00:19:28] It doesn't work anyway. So don't even, don't even worry about it. Just send more emails, knowing what we know from the last 10 years of experience. Yeah, it definitely aggravates me. I think, you know, company to company, you're going to have your recipe for outbound. Like I've had some clients where LinkedIn was successful.
[00:19:50] I've had some where email was and some where phone is, but tools are like a pendulum, right? everything swings one way and then it swings back another way. Some new tool columns just swings that way. [00:20:00] I think right now we are probably at the point where we're coming back from the email provisioning, like send 10, 000 emails a day, use GPT to write all of that because.
[00:20:14] At this point, so many people are doing it. People's emails are flooded. Like I get, I don't even know how many emails every single day. I don't respond to one of them, to be honest with you. If I get a cold call, I might, if I get a LinkedIn message on top of that, I might.
[00:20:30] Like, like Apple's cracking down, Google's cracking down. I think what's, what is kind of nifty is like the, art. like the private server tools now, where they're like actually building their own email like that. That's cool. But I think we're going to come away from that. I think we have started to already.
[00:20:49] And look, let's be real. most of our customers that are in the, eight, nine figure revenue ranges, their teams are dialing. it's really interesting because, I say [00:21:00] everything's in cycles, and it's amazing how much this, this more successful accounts or the more clients we're getting as well are hearkening back to strategies of 2017, which is email, phone, LinkedIn, video again is what we're trying to push, with SendSpark video in 2017 and 18 was just on the rise with, the technology that was coming out in that space.
[00:21:25] Sendoso and how can we implement that, right? You kind of lost track of Sendoso outside of enterprise from like 2021 to 2024. But now we're trying to implement it back and say, Hey, this is a full. like multi channel, phone, email, LinkedIn, video, offline, digital, everything. And if you can do that, in addition to, by the way, conferences you're going to, webinars you're hosting, podcasts and events, it's not just a send an email or this team versus that team.
[00:21:59] You [00:22:00] need marketing, remember, and I know you're You've been in a long enough back in 17 and 18, it always was, was outbound in a marketing function or a sales function. And that was the biggest debate. And I think we're coming back to that debate of, Hey, it should sit in the middle of marketing and sales because that's when it operated at its best point, I think.
[00:22:24] let me ask you this kind of, as you guys are looking at. the next 12 months or the next 24 months, where is this tech going? Like, what's next even with AI? Like, how are you guys even envisioning it? Nook's mission is to make reps like 100 times more productive, right? We've put in some AI in the dialer, With like, voicemail detection, transcription, like doing summaries of calls and all that sort of stuff. I think that the next place that we're going to is like the stuff surrounding dialers and building your lists and like getting [00:23:00] organized.
[00:23:00] You don't have to like import export, like resurfacing conversations, things like that. I think, the actual execution of the work will still be like, The go button that the SDR has to hit it. And they're actually the ones like doing the talking. but there's all these different facets of like building a GTM motion or like an outbound motion that I think are still ready to be automated.
[00:23:24] Right. And like, that's sort of our plan. if I were to do outbound from scratch at a whole new company who had no brand awareness, I would use AI to help me build my lists, like find lookalike companies, I would use an AI dialer to help me get more volume.
[00:23:41] I would not use AI to write my emails and hit send. if you're a team that's sending out 10, 000 emails a day, 20, 000 emails a day, like you're probably not segmenting enough of your customer base. Like you're probably just going like blanket, spray, and pray. And [00:24:00] there's a lot more that can be mined from a company and a profile that I think that a rep can spend time researching.
[00:24:06] If you have a dialer, you can just do your dials in two, three hours, and then that gives four or five hours in the day for really well put together, LinkedIn and email campaigns, like be the one that stands out. With a recorded video or something like that, or find something interesting about them.
[00:24:21] Well, yeah, I mean, and that's not even to say if you're sending 10, 000 or 20, 000 emails a day. I've been in this business a long time. Maybe 95 percent of my clients don't even have a market that size. So that can support an outbound capacity of that amount. So, I don't even know what B2B industry that would, that would consist of.
[00:24:44] No, this is a great conversation. Look, we got to have more of this. I think, as we dig into, outbound in general, but and anything kind of you guys are doing, obviously, depending on when somebody is listening to this and that's, you know, in the last two months raised a ginormous amount of [00:25:00] money to help lead that next level of growth.
[00:25:02] Something that you obviously have a lot of experience. helping companies do or startups do, that next level of growth, anything coming up, anything, you want to kind of promote or let anybody know? Yeah. Nook's just released data enrichment. It's early. We're still working through it, but I think it's going to be a game changer.
[00:25:22] Nook's Numbers is great. Well, obviously we've already tested it around a little bit. it'll be a game changer on the workflows, as it kind of gets released to more and more users, and has more and more data providers, over time, so that'll be even better. thanks for joining.