Hi, friends, welcome to the Winrate Podcast. I'm your host, Andy Paul. Now that was David Weiss. And David is one of my guests on this episode of the Winrate Podcast. David Weiss is Chief Revenue Officer at the Sales Collective. My other guests joining us today for the discussion about sales effectiveness, the buyer experience, and improving win rates are Mark Petruzzi.
Mark is the co founder and managing partner at Accelerant Growth Solutions. He's also the author of Selling the Cloud, a playbook for success in cloud software and enterprise sales. Also joining us, Kyle Williams. Kyle's a frequent contributor to the WinRate podcast. He is the founder and CEO of Brickstack.
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Okay friends, that's it for this episode of the Winrate Podcast. First of all, I want to thank my guests, Mark Petruzzi, David Weiss, and Kyle Williams for sharing their insights with us today. If you enjoyed this episode, please take a second and subscribe to this podcast, the Winrate Podcast with Andy Paul, on iTunes, Spotify, or wherever you listen to podcasts.
Again, thank you so much for investing your time with me today. Until next time, I'm your host, Andy Paul. Good selling, everyone.
Hello everyone. Welcome again to another episode of the win rate podcast. I'm your host, Andy Paul and joined by another stellar group of panelists. Yeah, it seemed to outdo each ourselves week after week. Can't get everybody just a little bit of time to introduce themselves. We're gonna start with you, David.
Tell us a little bit about yourself.
Awesome. Well, thanks for having me, Andy and Kyle. Appreciate you both and Mark. Excited to jam out with you. , so my name is David Weiss. I am the chief revenue officer of a company called The Sales Collective. We are a sales transformation firm. We help organizations build process, hire people, train their folks coach and develop them, and then essentially set them up for scale.
On the side, I also run a company called DealDoc, which is all about helping organizations identify Gaps in their deals and how to then close those deals through or close those gaps through a variety of plays I essentially wake up every single day and need a team to help sell salespeople and organizations sell better So yeah, that's me.
I'm based in Houston, Texas, by the way Boston, New York. I hate the cold.
Kyle.
Thanks for having me again, Andy. Good to be on. My name is Kyle Williams and building a company called Teller with someone you know well Andy.
Oh, well, I know. Well, yes, not the audience knows well, but yes,
and go ahead.
unless he's the only listener in which case everybody knows him well, but yes. Yes. My son, you're building a company with my son.
Yep. And what we do is we help executives build on a methodology we call executive go to market, which is this unique opportunity in the market where platforms like LinkedIn are rewarding insights from true experts, which tends to be executives and founders. And so we help them get those insights out of their head. out onto a platform like LinkedIn, build a universe of their audience, and then proactively communicate with the right, right folks to get them into pipeline, generate new opportunities, M& A, that kind of thing. And so building a platform for that.
Yeah. Yeah. But that's, yeah. And not to mention that you're, I think now you're certainly number one in terms of number of appearances on this podcast. Whenever there's an opening, I call Kyle. But yeah, always appreciate having you on the show. Yeah. And Mark.
Awesome. Mark Petruzzi. I live in Charlotte, North Carolina. I'm very happy to be here with this incredible group of panelists as well. My background is a little different from the standpoint of I started my career after business school as a strategy consultant for a firm called the Mac Group, which is a boutique Harvard based firm that has done some really incredible things over the years. Got myself right out of strategy consultant into operation roles, moved right into a founder role a couple of times you know, CRO CEO roles as well. And then got talked into writing a book. Did that first one about four years ago now called selling the cloud actually 10 times bigger than we ever thought it would be.
And it actually, What it did for me is it turned me back into someone that the strategy firms the MBBs, McKinsey, Baines, and BCGs started chasing after very aggressive again. So they forgot about me for about 15 years in between. Book came out and suddenly they felt like I was an expert and wanted to bring me in as an expert partner. Wasn't able to do that, but was able to join BCG as an advisor. Been working with them for about four years now as well. So now I do a lot of work with BCG still, some of the biggest SAS companies on the planet, part of some of their work, and then I get to work with some of the smallest SAS companies on the planet and really bring those expertise back and forth, which is a lot of fun.
Just released the second book, this one much more focused on data science. and AI for selling organizations and have launched another company that is now focused on really just general sales transformation and effectiveness. So, you know, very happy to be here and I can't wait to see where we go with this discussion.
All right. Well, thank you everyone. Yeah. So, , let's talk about your book a little bit. Titled data and diagnosis driven selling, leveraging insights, intelligence, and the power of AI to deliver efficient, durable revenue growth. Which is not too different than the mission you talk about, David with sales collective use data and science to maximize revenue.
So, okay. Let's also talk about data science. yeah, I mean, markets aren't new. So what elements of data and science are you focusing on to help drive revenue?
Sure. Well, I'll start with, I guess the reason why we wrote this second book and the point of view. What we wanted to do is kind of bring. Some knowledge and some background to our CEO, CROs rather, clientele that are out there in the areas that they feel least qualified in. And really tied down to us, our research showed us there were three.
They know about data science, they know about analytics. But they've really struggled to figure out how to leverage that. And far too many times, the CEOs and the boards are going to the CROs and kind of saying, what do you need and what can we do for year round data science? And that's not an area that they typically feel real comfortable about.
So we wanted to help that build up that muscle for them. AI's everywhere. You can't get away from it now. But it ties very closely with data science and you know, we wanted to make sure that the expertise we've learned Now I've been working with AI for six years now. Now, you know, Gen AI is only a year old Six the six years have been around predictive AI and if it seems like everybody's forgetting all about the capabilities and the power predictive AI I've certainly jumped in with both feet on the Gen AI side as well So those two areas could correlate.
And then the third area being in SAS predominantly my entire career, I really wanted to make sure that CROs and other sales leaders. Really understand the, you know, particularly if they're in SAS, the language of metrics and how important that is. Because again, same story, they have their board coming to them, they have their CEO coming to them, and talking in these terms of metrics, and you know, just really not having the, many of them not really being comfortable with what they're describing, even though they're measuring some of these things every single day.
So those three areas are what we came down to with this book and like I said the feedback has been incredible And what I love about it is it's a lot of this once they've read the book the feedback I got feedback I get is you know, this is great. I can get this skill set You know I brought in to this book a close friend of mine Ray Reich who has what I think is the most powerful Oh database on SAS metrics on the planet.
In a company he started called Benchmarkit. He's involved in this, and it teaches these sales leaders that, you know, you need to know some of this, but you don't need to know all of this. And I'll throw out one last point, because I'd love to have all of your perspectives on this as well. I've actually heard just over the last 30 days or so, that two different recruiters telling a CRO that they need to go take data science courses.
They need to go, you know, these are the courses to take, go learn it. And again, I think that's an overkill much as I think the things we bring in the book are valuable. I don't think you need to turn CROs into data scientists either. So those are the three areas of the book. Yeah.
I mean, this idea is, it seems like increasingly in the SAS world and then jump in is that, you know, the metrics that people really focus on are more, I'll say on the recurring revenue side and less so on. new customer acquisition front. I mean, is that seem to be the case?
Cause what, you know, if you spend any time on LinkedIn and you listen, look at what people are writing, especially, you know, some of the revenue leaders from SAS companies, I don't be too focused on SAS, but yeah, let's go over there for now, it's like, in fact, there's somebody that wrote one is like. Sales is going to kill your SAS company, meaning the sales department.
Is that, oh gosh, it's like, well, sure. I get where you're concerned, but it's like, there's always this exclusive focus on how do we renew and upsell? As opposed to how do we continue to bring new opportunities into the pool, because, you know, absent that. Yeah, at some point you're not going to be able to renew anything.
Right. So it seems like SAS metrics to the point you're making with, and I know Ray and Ray's, you know, very smart guys is focused purely, you know, more as I'm recurring as opposed to really anything that's really helping move the needle on new customer acquisitions. David, what's your thoughts?
I actually think it's the exact opposite
Okay.
So what I've seen mostly coming out of LinkedIn, and I think it's a way over abundance of it is, you know, top of funnel, you know, metrics. It's all the, you know, put this number.
Let me interject cause yeah, I agree with you on that. See, I don't consider type of funnel selling FYI. So anyway, go ahead.
When I say top of funnel, prospecting based metrics.
Yeah. Yeah. Like that's marketing. But anyway, go ahead.
No, not marketing.
No sellers. Sellers may do it, but it's fundamentally marketing just FYI. Oh
not part of marketing is in my, from my perspective Falls in the category of demand generation and falls in the category of awareness and falls in the category of brand. What an SDR does in my mind is not marketing and it's not a marketing function. It is a sales function. It is someone one to one reaching out to start a business to business conversation.
That's not marketing, that's sales.
Yeah. Okay. We'll disagree. I mean, lead generation is fundamentally a marketing, but anyway, go ahead.
Lead generation is,
Well, that's what STRs do. Right.
no, SDRs go and have one to one conversations to book meetings. They're not, it's not to, it's not lead generation.
So it's even before lead generation then.
No, it would fall into the category of after lead generation. So you have two sides of the house. You have the work marketing's doing, you have the work sales is doing.
The work marketing is doing is lead generation, the work sales is doing is, you know, one to one versus one to many, where I'm trying to start a direct conversation with you. And SDR, XDR, BDR is trying to do that. And there's, you know, an extreme amount of that out there where it's, I'm going to build my target list, then I'm going to put those people into specific sequences using a different Data and hyper personalization and personalization at scale.
It doesn't really exist. It started to become that way based on, you know, Mark's work with AI. Then it's, you know, I'm getting in them into the funnel and then measuring, you know, the metrics between it. I think there's way too much talk there and not enough talk on, you know, first meeting to second meeting conversion rates and how to drive those up and then how to have more successful demos that then, you know, lead to a deeper exploration with more people and how to drive that up and how to identify gaps specifically in those areas.
And then, you know, those two. You know, proposals to close. And then, you know, we're getting more and more like over the last, I'd call it six months to a year because new business has dried up because of the economy. And because of the oversaturation of focus on top of funnel now we're seeing, you know, a pivot to, Oh yeah we need to keep our customers because this is not, so yeah, there's more of that now, but that has not been the focus over the last, you know, shoot five plus years on, on LinkedIn.
Yeah. I mean, I don't know that I see that a decrease in emphasis on this top of funnel stuff, which I agree with you is just for me is sort of a little disheartening is, yeah, I guess maybe the word is that it's like people just want, you know, so much of that content is just, you know, give me the recipe.
Right. Is certainly a complete lack of willingness to think for themselves, to figure this out. And I don't know, Kyle, what do you think? That's that concerns me.
Yeah, I guess I'll wade into the what is sales development fight a little bit here. Well, what I would say is my perspective is, I think there's like, what do, what was the intention of that role? And then what does it become? And then where do we really see this going over time is like, you know, I'm not thought about this framing before, but I kind of like the way you frame it. You know, David of like, you know, are we thinking one to many or one to one? And I would say that's a good starting point to say, you know, for sales, if we're thinking about rows of data, you should be focused on one row at a time. Marketing generally is thinking about hundreds of thousands of rows at a time.
And I think the initial premise of the SDR role was you're thinking in fives and tens of rows at a time. But over time, the majority of The sales development role has become thinking in terms of thousands of rows at a time. And so, you know, if I think of like three, four years ago, I was like you look at the things that sales development is having to do, and it's like, well, gosh, they're like many marketers, right?
They have to think of a build a list, segmented, all the things you listed, David is like, those are things that really fundamentally are disconnected from the majority of steps you're going to, you know, the perfect SDR three years ago, it's not necessarily teed up to be a great SDR. A. E. Other than they're exposed to the product and some of the initial objections. And so I see a world where we can move sales development more towards that role where they're spending more time in sales. I think, you know, if I think about, I guess there's maybe two topics and then like data as part of the sales. conversation. I think it's great to see this rise and especially, you know, like, you mentioned Mark, like we don't necessarily need CROs to become data scientists. And I would agree with that certainly. And I would agree also that a layer of data literacy is certainly important because we're moving to a world where you've got things like you know, taking natural language and turning, turning that into a SQL query. So I can just describe what I want And then now that call to the database, which normally would be something where the CRO would ask their analysts or rev ops to do can now just happen. And so, you know, if there's not that underlying data literacy to understand, you know, where that query maybe isn't as dialed in as what an analyst would do You know, we need that understanding to be able to interpret it because the rapid the ability. I think it's a net positive to be able to ask those questions and have them translated more quickly and get the data more quickly. But that underlying understanding is going to be more and more important over time. So you don't. You will get a clear, but potentially wrong answer. And I think anybody who's used chat, GBT is familiar with hallucination at this point. Now apply that to a database query and now you've got a new problem.
Well, so yeah. So stepping aside from the SDR issues is lot of the emphasis appears to be as we look at, you know, AI and quote unquote data or science is. Geez. How do we substitute, how do we use systems? How do we use machines to substitute for the judgment of the salesperson in the moment?
You know, and I think Mark, I think you refer to it, at least some of the marketing for your book is, you know, you no longer have to rely on the instinct, intuition, and tribal knowledge of sellers, a, is that desirable? B, is it, yeah, it's not really desirable. And then we'll follow up.
And that's a great place to start because At the end of the day and Andy, you and I have had these discussions before. Is it desirable? It probably in, in some ways isn't desirable, but it is definitely needed today. And here's my point of view on this. We have gone through, especially over the last few years of the pandemic we have grown through a period.
In total, about 10 years where anyone in, you know, I mean, across the economy, forget about it just being sass. I mean, a lot of B to B sellers were really, you know, enjoying their job and enjoying what they needed to do to make money each quarter and each year. But they
saying because the economy was so robust or,
And the core point is they needed to do less, year after year, not more, and not get better in many cases. So I think there has been some atrophy that has kicked in, that as we mentioned earlier in the podcast, is starting to disappear. You know, a little slower economy, some of the challenges, particularly in the tech world.
So I think in some ways, For most sales organizations that I work with, the, this kind of technology that can help. Help of a typical sales rep get better and improve is necessary. You know, if you had really perfectly run sales organizations and you have the best of the brightest in place, then, you know, sometimes their ability and their instincts can take it to a whole nother level of performance.
But I think it's a, it is a bit of a put and take where you need to have some of these tools in place, not. Every single one that's been ever been created and not, you know, over burdening your sales team. Matter of fact, a lot of the tools that I'm working with now are really focused on just adding productivity and not doing the things that the CRM has done to our sales team for many years.
And that is putting a big burden on them without a, without any real response on them. Productivity said to the sales rep. So simple version of my answer is, I think some of this is necessary nowadays, but it's really important for sales leaders to not to not just put systems and technologies just for systems and technologies.
Yeah. But to get into why I started driving at is because you're not the only one that's mentioned this. I mean, there's you know, gone to websites of, you know, companies in the RevTech space, the very explicit saying, look, you know, the purpose of this technology is to Sutton, and this is a quote to substitute for the judgment of the salesperson, meaning we don't trust the seller.
To do the right things in the moment, or even to know what the right things are to do in the moment with the buyer. And you're certainly seeing more of this type of Emphasis, or if you will, as we see, you know, newer generations of AI sales assistants and so on coming onto the market. And I, that was where I was getting to, is it really desirable?
Because, you know, certainly it's been the dream. I know of many corporate leaders to get rid of sellers to a larger grill to reduce the reliance. I mean, is that really what we're trying to do? Are we trying to really use these tools to help the sellers? Not substitute for the judgment, but to help them make better judgments.
I have a couple of thoughts on that, but I'd love to hear Kyle or David's view on that, that first where are you guys sitting on it?
Yeah. So I think there's a couple of things to unpack here. So one, you know, sales has gotten harder, but it's gotten harder because reps don't understand how to deal with a non budgeted environment versus a budgeted environment. That's why sales has gotten hard is because in the last handful of years, organizations have been fleshed with cash.
So they've been able to buy lots of toys and try and use those toys to improve the business in lots of different ways. That's, you know, in an environment where lots and lots of things are getting budgeted. And it's actually an incredibly easy environment to sell into because all you need to do is essentially capture money that exists.
What changed is that went away. And now sellers need to sell in a non budgeted environment. A non budget environment takes building business cases and getting economic buyers and executives involved. That is a way different skill set and that's why people are struggling. I do not think it's a, Pipeline.
I do not think it's a I don't think it's a lot of the problems people think it is what I honestly believe it is that sellers, great sellers already knew how to do this. And most of the sellers didn't. So that's, I mean, let me just put a little thing there that,
No it's a fantastic point. And we'll come back to it. Cause that's, that is.
And then, you know, the other thread that was pulled a second ago was like, Hey the desirability of this. Most AI and I advise for. You know, AI companies that are doing this is most AI is being aligned to the concept of autonomous agents and autonomous agents are. Let's look at different pieces of the sales funnel.
Let's plug in AI is like a copilot with the seller. And let's then enable them at different points to research better or to, you know, be served a piece of data in the moment from a coaching and and knowledge based perspective. And I'm a huge fan of autonomous agents. I think there's great productivity boosts that are going to come from that.
And I don't believe AI Should replace sellers. And I don't think it's going to replace sellers, but I think AI that I think sellers that use AI will replace sellers that don't, and I firmly believe that. And then the other side around, like, do we want to take judgment away? It, to me there, it's not a it's a yes and a no.
Do we want to take judgment away? And could we even take judgment away from more seasoned sellers? No, hell no. We want to enable the crap out of them. And that's the concept of agents. Do we maybe want to take. A degree of judgment from a green seller that's, you know, been in sales and hasn't had the experience or hasn't run into the situation or hasn't mastered the situation yet.
I don't say, I don't want to say you take judgment away, but you want us, you want to be way more indexed on serving and telling. Versus coaching and enabling and that just depends on the, like, if you think of a the Ken Blanchard model of situational leadership. I think that, I think there's a direct application of situational AI, where based on where someone is on their development spectrum, you are doing more telling, versus more guiding, versus you are leaving the F alone.
And that really depends on where someone is on that spectrum.
Okay. Like that, Kyle.
Yeah. I think there's a lot of strong, I strongly agree with a lot of those points and I think some of them, you'd even look a little bit further back, you know, looping back to the sales development role itself, right. It's like when that was founded ultimately one of the, one of the conditions that was different. 23 years ago ish when that SDR team was first formed at salesforce in 2001 was a source of new information for a buyer was. The AE demo, you know, you would find out about new things by, Hey, we have this new demo. Do you want to see it?
And so ultimately if you could tap the right people on the shoulder and put them in front of the demo, there's interest in that.
And I think the interest in a demo is at least an order of magnitude lower than it was 23 years ago, just because of the alternatives. And I think another part of that system was We're going to drum up all these people who are interested in the demo, but then we got to make sure we're not wasting the AE's time.
So let's make sure we properly qualify them before they get access to the AE, and we'll keep that experience. And ultimately you play that forward over two decades, and a large amount of our, you know, Sales process, especially from an inbound perspective is designed to filter out bad buyers, and I think it is over tuned for, you know, if we're talking about data science, like precision versus recall it's very precision focus.
How do we make sure only the best ones get in? But we're reducing the recall, reducing it's a bad experience for a greater buyer when they're, when they have to run that gauntlet. So I think that's one thing that I think, as part of this like systemic like anemic sales reps issue is like, we've designed this process.
It says, well, we're going to beat everybody up until they get to you. And so then they should only be good. And then you can sniff your nose at them and say, well, you know, maybe they're not good enough for us to talk to is the
inherent premise. I know that no one's saying that externally. And I think about when I was at Google in 2009, and our team was split in two and he had one director who ran one team. One half of the team, one ran the other. And the thesis of one of those directors was I want to set up a system where sales reps are like hamsters on conveyor belts, receiving pellets, right? They don't have to think they just, the pellet shows up, eat the pellet, wait for the next
one. I think it's another unwritten thing that's built into a lot of these systems that say, like, we're going to replace reps, we're going to replace.
I think from a starting point. Those mindsets combined results in this atrophy of sales. Then you compound it with now people are flush with cash. And so then do you think this is cool or novel is a sufficient bar for companies to buy from you? Just means we don't have to develop the skills and the system is designed that we don't want to overly invest in people because we want to make them those hamsters on the conveyor belt, I think in this new environment There's generally a trend towards being more lean. I'm encouraged by the opportunities that we're going to develop sellers. And we're going to have actual expertise because in my experience, that's what buyers are actually starving for is context and expertise. Not to be shoved through some process designed to pop out all the bad ones.
Yeah, I agree. I mean, I think that I like to say is, especially in this really noisy environment is that if you're a seller and you're actually talking to a buyer and you have a conversation with the buyer. It's because it's not because they want to talk to you. It's because they need to talk to you, right?
There's something that they need to be able to some sort of help, right? Cause they're in this process. They're having to make this decision and if they could do it on their own, the data shows they would. But the fact that talking to a salesperson means that they need help in some dimension and the sellers need to be equipped to be able to find out and understand what that help is. And to the point David was making before is say an easy money times bar was pretty low but now we actually have to go through this process and we're finding that is problematic for a lot of sellers.
Yeah it's problematic for a lot of sellers. It's problematic for a lot of buyers. I'll give you guys an example. I'm evaluating an LMS right now. The LMS landscape is one of the most crowded of any products. I currently have 17 in evaluation right now. I've had all sorts of different experiences.
The problem is like, and we talk about buyer journey and like what a lot of people, there's a myth that was debunked that 67 percent of the buyer journey is complete by the time a buyer reaches out.
Oh, it's 80 percent is what people are saying. I, first of all, I agree with you. It's, it should be debunked, but the last one I heard was 80 percent and don't even bother trying to influence the buyer because they don't have time for it. Yeah, go ahead.
and so Gartner said 67, 80. I honestly I think it, I think there's something, you know, again, like a spectrum on this based on the complexity of the product. But I think, you know, some of the issues, like, the speed of tech development has been so fast that there, there is no longer immediate contrast between tech solutions.
They pretty much can all do it. And that is a huge problem for one, the buyer, because if you all look and sound and do it, you know what my decision criteria is? That's a huge problem for the buyer, that's a great problem for the buyer, that's a huge problem for the seller. Here's the difference, here's the problem though.
There is nuance. What sellers aren't as good at, and Kyle I really liked what you said a second ago the job of a seller should be creating contrast. The job of the seller should be removing the decision fatigue from the buyer, understanding where they are on their journey. And we talk about buyer journey and it's really hokey and I don't want to go too much on like the concept of buyer journey, but.
Where someone is in the in their buying process how deep of an evaluation they've gone We need to understand that and we need to align to it and the problem with so much of the current sales Environment sales process is like I submitted 17 requests to vendors I gave them my decision criteria up front deep detail vision criteria up front All of them wanted to do a discovery session with me.
I'm like to do what well We want to understand your needs I've given it to you already. Then it's like, okay, just show me a demo. Well, we don't even know what to demo to, so we need to meet with you before. Demo to the freaking criteria I gave you. And then it's like when I start meeting with these vendors they know their products so well, but they can't help me understand the other side.
They can't understand why I should pick them for someone else and create that contrast for me. So now they all look alike. So I really love the idea. The job of the modern seller in my mind, create contrast, have deep insight and expertise, know your, know the competition as well as you know yourselves and be able to help the buyer understand that.
And then, you know, meet them wherever the hell they are because all different buyers are on all different journeys. And if you don't freaking understand where that person is, like how can you properly show up and deliver the experience they're looking for? Yeah.
Yeah. And so there's absolutely, and I think there's been this, as I said, this, the more recent, just in the last six months of this wave of, you know, that's 80 percent and don't even as a seller, don't even buyers don't want to talk to you, don't even try to influence them as if everything's just going to turn out to be price and yeah, I think Gartner's research a few years ago on their buyer enablement, which was really perceptive, which was into a point you made Dave about insight is that. They found is that the buyers are always open to new insights, no matter where they are in their process. And if you can provide that insight, then it doesn't matter. Whatever this mythical number is of how far they are, they're going to do a little bit of reset to recalibrate and reconsider and incorporate those insights into what they're trying to accomplish.
I have a question for you, David. You reached out to 17 vendors for LMSs. So, I just saw a stat the other day from Pape Leha from Winter, the market research company, said, you know, the average buyer is talking to three vendors.
Yeah.
That's my experience as well. Right? Like I talked to executives C level.
It's like, they're not going to talk to more than three at best. It will be, I'll send my team to go talk to the 17, narrow the list. And I'll talk to them. Why'd you reach out to 17?
I a couple of reasons. The LMS space is the most crowded I've ever seen. So, when I started doing my initial research, I couldn't see contrast between all the vendors. So, that's why I built my criteria and sent it to them. I said, take yourself out of the mix if you can't do this. And guess what all 17 said?
We can do it all. Shit. So now it's like, now I need to go and do my investigation on it. I'm narrowing it up to three and I'm gonna do a really deep dive with three. I have been able to knock a few out along the way. But that, it's just, that space is so crowded, and I'm one of those people, like, I may you guys talked about the CRO should get you know, study
data scientist.
Yeah I am very, I'm a data driven human. I should have been a CFO, but I enjoy interfacing with humans more than I do numbers. So like I like data and I'm a seeker of truth and truth is in nuance and truth is in depth and in order to get to the right level of depth, sometimes you need to, you know, Go through a 17 person LMS evaluation to
Now, did anyone, this is the other question I have because you did 17. So you usually don't get a sample size like this. Did anyone velvet rope you and say, Oh, this is a CRO at sales collective. We're going to be able to like, you know, you have influence in this space with a lot of our customers, like. Let's jump you directly to a founder or an expert, or what was that experience?
None. And in fact, the biggest players in the space were the most difficult to deal with. Which I could kind of understand because of who they are in the cloud and the perception that they have. But the two biggest players in the space that I'm not going to evaluate because of how difficult they are to do business with literally made me fill out, I submitted my decision criteria.
They made me then fill out a questionnaire that was essentially banned. They then had an SDR call me in Verify Bant. They then refused to set up a meeting with me to show me a demo because they wanted to have a discovery meeting with me to tell me about how great they were and all the rewards they won.
Which is essentially, I want to show you a PowerPoint deck of my website re qualify all the things I already showed them, and then we'll do a demo. And I was like, no!
No. Yeah.
No way! So, yeah.
anyone see how we just did an incredible proof point for why guided selling is needed? And here's what I mean. Again, not to control everything, but to do one of the things that I think is the biggest benefit of guided selling and this technology nowadays. And that is that most sales leaders, most managers.
Do almost no coaching any longer. So there's no coaching because we all know there's four. Sellers here that have been very successful in their careers on this podcast and none of us Would have made the mistakes that those 17 sales reps did that you're interacting with and in most the cases We would have velvet roped you right into the CEO and made you feel really special right from the beginning Not what they ended up doing and no none of those individuals have even a sales manager you That is seeing this and said, Whoa, hold on for a second here.
These are some things we need to be thinking about as we interact with David. That's why that's the core reason why I like guided selling and the technology that is out there. Not to take every decision away from the sales rep.
But, to but but let me raise a question on that though, Marcus, and to a point David was making about this is sure. I understand guided selling the value of guided selling, yeah, you're creating your own instance of this, right. Based on your experiences. And so we look at SAS in general and. Hey, let's admit it. Selling is kind of shitty, right? Win rates are low with the experiences of buyers are bad. I mean, what are we going to teach these systems to enable the sellers to actually be more effective? Because there isn't the institutional knowledge in most of these cases to be able to do that.
And let's see it. We've gotten higher David at every instance and bring that institutional knowledge, you know, in.
It comes together on how you leverage that institutional knowledge and for the same reason why we typically always see 20 percent of the sales team selling 80 percent of the revenue in any given year. Well, same thing. It's that 20 percent of the sales team that you want driving this institutional knowledge. Or the guided selling process.
Yeah, and I, and if calibrated right, I really love the concept of guided selling because it's like, hey rep, next best action here. You know, potentially could be this. Have you thought about or Hey, you know, the, what I, and I can't do this yet, but, and for some reason humans should be able to, but they can't is be able to do sentiment analysis on what people are saying and being like, Hey I don't know if you've noticed a change in tone in this buyer, but they're starting to get kind of pissed off.
You may want to change your approach. Like. That would like things like that, which I know are coming, but I do really like guided selling for that reason around like next best action. Cause there are some folks that, you know, could really probably benefit.
Given that we're talking about driven is like, if you drew a bell curve of the distribution, I think like the challenge I have with some of this tooling is it seems designed to take people from the low end of the curve to the middle of the curve versus the North star being, how do we push people all the way to the right? But I think it's a very different mindset and it feels like the last 10 years of sales tech has been that like, let's do what the lowest level rep can do, load up a list and blast it out. And like,
I forget what the, it's either a philosopher or somebody was like, you need to build everything for the lowest common denominator. And I forget who said that. But yeah that's a lot of what's happening, which
But according to my Facebook wall, I need to shoot for the stars. Cause at least land on the moon, right? Like
I think the, I don't know, in my mind, one of the most relevant quotes I love is from, you know, Edward Deming, which was, you know, every system is perfectly designed to get the results it gets.
And, you know, this has been the problem, at least, you know, again, we're, again, we're not trying to focus exclusively on SaaS, in general is, hey. It was designed to get exactly these results during the go times as David talked about, you know, where everything was, you know, unbudgeted or, you know, discretionary, let's say and yeah, as long as we focus on top of funnel, we can be hugely ineffective on the bottom.
We didn't really know, have to know how to sell
Yeah. That was one of my predictions for 2024 with my friends or at Flo. We were having some conversations around like, what do I think the future of of sales is? And I said I believe this year is the year we finally get serious about managing deals and stop focusing so much on top of funnel, but for this exact reason.
Like, we need to learn again.
big, heavy side on my part. So question around that though.
Yeah.
Is not digressing too much, but yeah, one of the lessons that I think we was not, has not been learned over the last 20 years in tech in general is the lesson is just because you can do something doesn't mean you should, right? So just because we can send out a billion emails doesn't mean we should, just because we can spam people.
Cool. And do we have any reason to believe it's going to be, these are the same people that made the decision to deploy sales technology that way. Is there any hope at all? They're going to make better decisions about how to employ AI technology and sales.
No
I mean, Mark was shaking his head. David said, no, Kyle hasn't had an emotion yet,
processing. Yeah.
yeah. Processing. Okay.
what I don't want to monopolize conversation. Mark, I know this isn't an area of expertise. I'm happy to, do you want to go take that one first? I'm not, I can make a comment.
Sorry Mark,
go ahead. Go ahead, David. Good.
So, one I was actually at outreach in some of the early days and and I sold some of this tech. So, I, I get this the. The, there, there is a the tech that has existed has caused so much of this problem. What I will say is I am seeing around the corner of the future of tech.
It's one of the things I really geek out on is
Startups that are just getting funding that are kind of building the next wave. And what I really do. Like, is what I'm seeing related to intent and intent, and not the old world of intent that works some fraction of the time but like the new world of intent where I'm going to scrape the intent.
Entire world of people, of firmographic and technical individuals and news and any competitors and market trends and all of this available, all of the data, and then be able to come up with hypotheses on, on, based on your ICP, the accounts that you should focus on and when and how. And I'm really liking that because that executed properly actually reduces noise.
And it reduces noise dramatically. And it reduces noise dramatically because the old world of doing it was only 3 percent of buyers are ever in a buying cycle at any given time. So I need to cover white space. So I need to essentially hit all buyers, at all the time, to try and find the 3 percent that I could potentially sell to.
That's a problem. Now if I can just say, oh cool, These are the 3 percent and reduce all that noise over there. That done right has the potential just based on math to reduce 90 plus percent of noise and 90 plus percent of BS and have sellers just focus on the accounts that are in cycle at the right time.
That could be really exciting. So I believe in that. I trust in that. I think there's value in that. If it works, but we'll see.
So David, this is probably maybe an opportunity for another podcast. The I 100 percent agree with you with that. The problem is most companies, unfortunately, are screwing that opportunity up as well. And a lot of it is built around the general ICP. That now everybody has an ICP.
Or at least they think they do.
But you know what? In my opinion, What I see 90 percent of the time is not an ICP. It is a purely demographic kind of perspective. It's, you know, this size company, this industry, this geography. That is 3 5 percent of what an ICP should be. And I work with a company called Rev that That takes it to the, you know, a bit to the next level and really brings in exographics and how a company executes and how that fits back to, to, you know, they're buying style with your selling style and all these great things.
So I think perfect idea. And we're getting there, we're getting closer, but unfortunately, like, you know, this is what happens. I see everybody wants to go build ICPs. They do it. They get it done. They get it done once and then they just keep it there, which is a whole other issue. You know, ICP, your ICP as a company is evolving and changing every day, every minute, not to once every year and a half or three years.
So there's all those dynamics that come into play as well.
Yeah. I really love your point there around the constant iteration of the ICP and getting beyond the standard, you know, industry size, region revenue, you know, things like that and to stuff that's, that is harder to understand and harder to get data on and harder to see and harder to build trends on, but value of AI is like, if it can do some of that work for you and then every new customer you sign up, And as you sign up more and more, ICP needs to adjust, but now you've got different stories and different use cases and different successes and you're seeing success and failure.
So, yeah, I love that. Feed, take that concept and feed it into the other concept I was mentioning and you've something very, yeah, good point.
think the big risk I see, as long as we, as long as the friction or cost goes up when it doesn't work. And that's some of the gap I see is like the top invention, everyone's talking about for the last year in sales is AI, but the second biggest invention from a top funnel perspective, everyone's talking about is a domain is 12.
And so I can buy a hundred of them. And so, you know, from that, we've created the, if you combine those two, then you get the worst of all worlds. You're, we're going to create an accelerated version of the peak and fall of the SDR role. If we're not careful, because you That's reducing the friction.
And I've seen that for the last decade, anytime there's an option to say tensions up and I've got this button where I can just push it and 10, 000 things can happen, or we can slow down and think about this, or we can go really specific and everyone pushes the 10, 000 button and there's a new version of that now that, you know, I just saw something from Alina, the co CEO at Chili Piper, where she was getting an She got an email that says like you should buy a product and there's probably some AI stuff in there.
But in the PS it references one of their customers, which is Chili Piper, her own company for the product being sold. And so, you know, we have to have those checks and balances that say, you know, does this make any sense? Are we really trying to focus on that? I think the difference, the mindset of what you talked about, David, of like, I'm trying to generate a one to one conversation is not, I don't think implicitly or explicitly the mindset of most teams.
It's really more of. How do I drop dynamite in the lake to see what fish pop up? And so those mindsets are going to be the difference between I think how some of this tech gets deployed over time. I
Well, and the scary thing is, you know, Google almost ended cold email last year. And they were, they retracted that and made it a lot more reasonable and focused on B2C versus B2B. But they tipped their hand. That wasn't by mistake. They have intention. They just realized, Oh, maybe it's a little too fast too soon.
It doesn't mean that doesn't come next year. So I mean, I was posting a lot about it when it happened. I was like, if this isn't part of your strategy, it needs to be. And if it's not part of your strategy now because somehow you just took a deep breath and like, you know, it's not going to happen. It's going to happen.
It's just a matter of when. They've already tipped their hand.
And so what's the strategy that you need to have?
It is what it is. It goes back to kind of, instead of the, we're going to blow up the lake. I like that. You know, we're actually going to, you know, fish one to one like we were supposed to. High intent. High, good high intent. Right now there's not good high intent. There's not. There's intent. It's, I don't, it's very dark funnel and a lot of hit and misses.
But I think again, future When we get that, we can cut out 90 percent of the noise and focus on the buyers that are really in buying cycles. And when we figure that out now all the Google spam blockers and all of that stuff, it doesn't, like, you'll be good because response rates will be higher and the people you're reaching out to, and there's volume will be less.
It will be much more, you know, prescriptive. And then that solves a lot of that problem. Oh, by the way, there's this old thing called the phone. How about you pick that up, but you know, that too. So
Well, I was going to ask that because isn't part of the answer, but I mean, Kyle's or address this is, yeah. If we look at this purely from the perspective of. What SAS has mostly been, which is tech selling to tech, basically like companies still selling to like companies which, you know, turned out to be serve a little bit of a problem when market went to hell.
But if it is that tech selling to tech, then you still have this volume compulsion. I call it the, you know, tile hit the 10, 000 button, right. As opposed to, as David said, pick up the phone. Hey let's do serve what. Used to work was let's build some relationships, you know, one on one let's, it may take a little more time, but it's going to bear more fruit at the end of the day than what we're doing now.
Yeah.
yeah, every company seems like they're trying to design like their Walmart, right? We got 10, 000 people coming through the store every single day. So we need to like hyper optimize like on the margins and where does the self checkout button go? And we're going to have this gate that you have to walk through on the way in. And the future of sales maybe looks more like. a Gucci store where you walk in and they go, here's, you know, here's your diet Snapple that they don't even make anymore, but we kept a batch for when you come back. And like, how do we create that experience versus feeling like I'm getting shoved, shoveled through Walmart.
Very cool. All right. Well, gentlemen, we've run out of time, but a fascinating conversation. Thank you. I presume everybody's on LinkedIn. People can find you on LinkedIn. Okay.
absolutely.
Cool. All right. Well, Hey, thank you all. And I look forward to having you back on.