Subscribe
Share
Share
Embed
Welcome to the Revenue Rebels podcast, hosted by Alan Zhao, Co-Founder of Warmly.ai.
We feature B2B SaaS revenue leaders who have challenged traditional methods to achieve remarkable results.
In each episode we cut through the fluff and dive deep into modern tactics used to achieve success: intent-based outreach, social selling, B2B Netflix, video marketing, warm calling, customer led sales, influencer marketing and more.
On the show you can expect episodes with those who create demand - marketing experts, partnerships gurus and social media superstars and those who capture demand - outbound and inbound sales experts, leaders, and practitioners.
Our goal is to shine a light on modern, effective and unique revenue generating methods and equip you with the insights you need to unlock your next strategic advantage.
We're huge proponents of signal-based selling and signal-based, data-driven B2B go-to-market as a whole. Ask us what "Autonomous Revenue Orchestration" means and we'll be more than happy to shine a light on our vision of what the field of B2B revenue will become.
For more content, check out our YouTube page and LinkedIn newsletter!
Austin Jouett: [00:00:00] A lot of the time SDRs are very afraid to just speak directly in a professional way. But that is something that I would find whatever it would happen to me. If we got ghosted, I would immediately start following up within different business units at that account, because at that account level, there's obviously there's some sort of interest.
Austin Jouett: Like you shouldn't just drop it. If one person's like ghost you and doesn't respond, especially if it's a large enterprise account. But what I would always go after in terms of triggers that demand base was if they're researching something that ties directly back to our USP. Directly, not high level. And if they're researching any of our competitors, because what that tells me is an SDR or a seller or anyone using the platform that's pulling that intent tells me that they know something about what it is that we do.
Austin Jouett: So there are already higher level intelligent than they would be if they're just doing broad research on ABM.
Alan Zhao: Welcome to the Revenue Rebels podcast brought to you by Warmly. On this show, we cut straight through the fluff and dive deep into the specific tactics that [00:01:00] B2B revenue leaders across sales and marketing are using to find success in today's environment.
Alan Zhao: I'm your host, Alan Zhao. All right. Super excited to have on Austin Jue, who is a full cycle account executive at Intentified Demand, a lead generation agency that uses AI and intent to get you qualified pipeline that's actually ready to buy. Right now, prior to Tentify, Austin was a senior enterprise SDR at Demandbase.
Alan Zhao: For those of you who don't know, Demandbase is one of the biggest players in account based marketing and signal based selling. There, he was awarded the Top 30 Under 30 Global SDR by Outplay Award. He generated 1. for the year that he was there, and he achieved 105 percent quote attainment. So today we're going to talk about the strategies that he used at Demandbase and how they were able to build an intent based go to market engine.
Alan Zhao: Awesome. Welcome.
Austin Jouett: Thank you, sir. I appreciate it. Let's get this thing rocking.
Alan Zhao: Let's go. So let's dive into a quick background about yourself and then we'll go into the main topics.
Austin Jouett: Yeah, 100%. [00:02:00] So I like to start my story like this. It's relevant. Bear with me. So yeah, you and I, you already know this, but. I have been in the sales industry since I was 11.
Austin Jouett: So I know it's a little weird, 11 year old sales guy, bullshit. It's not, and I'll tell you why. So I grew up with a family that was pretty well off for themselves. I, the typical American dream is I really want to provide for my family. I want to retire my mom, retire my dad, buy them a house, buy them a boat, stuff like that, I think most of us would agree.
Austin Jouett: That is the atypical or not atypical, the typical American dream. I have the atypical to that. So. I, they're already successful. They don't need me. I'm over here. I have to figure out what I need to do for myself. At 11, my parents started their tycoon stuff and their business entities out in Oklahoma. They started doing specifically what it was that we started doing was Orion's cleaning supplies.
Austin Jouett: It was a cleaning company. We'd go around, we'd clean buildings, office buildings. I remember this in like fifth grade. I was like, I was doing it until nine o'clock at [00:03:00] night. I was doing cleaning buildings like that were 20 foot story. 20 story buildings, stuff like that. That's where I came from the 11 year old in me.
Austin Jouett: Whenever we were starting up that cleaning business, my dad actually gave me a product to sell. He literally would drop me off in really sketchy neighborhoods, got to say out in Oklahoma, Tulsa. And he would drop me off with a box. Box of odor assassin is what it was called. It was a can. It was an air freshener spray, like Febreze or stuff like that.
Austin Jouett: I, hell, I could probably pitch you to this day what it was, but essentially he would drop me off in neighborhoods and said, Hey, here's a box. Sell these in two hours and I'll be back. That is literally like the upbringing that I had. So fast forward a little bit into more of a professional career.
Austin Jouett: Obviously sales just always been my jive, didn't really want to go to school or anything like that. So I took a backseat on school, started focusing on sales and building up my acumen in the business world. I did door to door as many of door to door is a shit show of a job for the first little bit, [00:04:00] um, for the majority of people, but.
Austin Jouett: I will say I did that for about a year and a half. I led about a team of, I think around 25, 26 people. We were number one in the entire nation for a couple of months out of the year. I can't remember what year it was now. Hell, I'm getting old, but yeah, no, that's where I got my start. I was going to open an office in Seattle.
Austin Jouett: I found out that the door to door world was not for me and that it was a little bit more of a cult than I had wanted to accept. I did a transition. I did technical recruiting for a little bit and then I just hated it. It was in St. Louis. It was that it was in a really shitty office environment with frat boys, frat girls, and just wasn't my style.
Austin Jouett: And I made another change, landed in software as a service, tech sales, demand based as Alan mentioned at the beginning, I was there for about a year and a half. Generated sourced over 2. 8 million, had 1. 6 close roughly. I think if I, those numbers should be correct and yeah, no. And since then I've moved on to intensify demand, as he mentioned, [00:05:00] and where I'm a full cycle account executive.
Austin Jouett: That is the video. It's very high level my background right now, but yeah,
Alan Zhao: it's an illustrious career in sales. And for most people who graduate in college, they would think that it wasn't very long, but you've been doing it since you were 11. So you've been doing it for over a decade now.
Austin Jouett: Yup. I've been doing it for a while.
Alan Zhao: So what do you think transferred over from door to door sales over into software sales?
Austin Jouett: Active listening. And so there was something in, there was something in door to door sales that I don't know what the term would be. If you correlated it to B2B tech sales, but it was something called concrete feet.
Austin Jouett: We would literally, it's just how we were trained. So you can call me a bad sales guy or whatever you want, but how we were trained is we were literally told to sit there until they slam the door in our face, not this three objection, four objection, five objection, bullshit. It was literally, you're staying there at that door until they slam it in your face.
Austin Jouett: The amount of times I've had a gun shoved in my face and door to door is more than I can [00:06:00] count on one hand. Let's put it like that. So I think that honestly has correlated extremely well over into this industry. Just coming from what I come from. Listen, here's the thing. You're telling me that I can go to B2B tech sales, do some cold calling, cold emailing, and the person on the other end is just going to do this.
Austin Jouett: If they don't want to talk to me as opposed to slamming a door in my face, it just made the transition a lot easier. And it made me realize we don't have it that bad. Like it's not, it's really not that as intense as a lot of people will talk about on LinkedIn. Like SDR is super hard. I get it, but it is not as hard as coming from something as door to door.
Austin Jouett: And I think that honestly has set me up for the success that I've had. Because of concrete feet and just really understanding when to give up, when to push. That's really what I gathered from door to door. I'd say
Alan Zhao: it's crazy for everyone's plight as someone who always has it worse. And people say they're going through STR and B2B sales.[00:07:00]
Alan Zhao: Is, is like you're proving grounds. It's when it's a period of your life when you have to scrap your period was even before that, be able to experience gratitude for B2B SaaS sales is incredible.
Austin Jouett: Yeah. And, and me and my, me and my buddy had a conversation about this the other day, cause he came from door to door, same company that I did.
Austin Jouett: And he's an account executive at a, at a different company. We were talking and we were just chumming it up a little bit. We were like, dude, what were we doing back then? And I will say, listen, it's, It is truly a skill set that has made the B2B world a lot easier for people like us that have just gone through stuff like that.
Austin Jouett: So I would say to anyone out there that's never done the door to door or anything like that, the B2B cold calling stuff like that. Just take a step back. Listen, just the way that I always go about it is it's human level prospecting. I talk about it all the time on LinkedIn. These people are humans, man.
Austin Jouett: If it's a CEO, C suite, director plus whoever, treat them like a human. These people don't want to be treated like they're gods. Like they're going to see the death that is desperation. Just [00:08:00] have a conversation. If they're mean to you, make a joke about it. Like it does not have to be that serious, but I just wanted to get that out of it.
Austin Jouett: Cause I, that's something that a lot of junior SDRs are really. Their mindset is the direct opposite of that. And so they just need to focus in a little bit more on, on what truly actually matters, but carry on. Yeah.
Alan Zhao: Like your best friend, but we'd love to get into what is it was like for you to be an SDR demand based.
Alan Zhao: How did you guys approach lead generation? What was the setup? What was the tooling you guys used? Yeah, let's start there.
Austin Jouett: Yeah, 100%. So the setup that we had, so I'll start, I'll give you like my timeline. So when I first started at demand base, I was using, I was more on the inbound team for a little bit while they were coming up with different segments, stuff like that.
Austin Jouett: So what I did, I worked with A tool called qualified. And then I use the ABM or account based marketing platform that demand based owned and operated. So what we would do in terms of the inbound kind of generation side of the house is qualified would kind of kick off leads to us, In terms of if [00:09:00] the account was already in Salesforce, or if it was not in Salesforce and you had a good conversation with them, let's assume that the account was already in Salesforce.
Austin Jouett: It was already being worked by your fellow peers in a fellow SDR. You'd qualify them on qualified on their little website. Basically it's a chat bot that would come in and it's just all your website visitors that are de anonymized. So what we do is we correlate everything. We find out if they're already being worked as they are.
Austin Jouett: We pass them along to that person. We ping them on Slack. We'd say, Hey. We have this person on the line right now. They're asking this question, XYZ. This is your account. This is your person go after them. That's how we do it. We pass it along. If it was on the opposite side of that, where it was an account or prospect that was not already being worked actively, we, what we would do is the process.
Austin Jouett: There is we'd. Get them in, we'd answer the questions over the chat bot, and then if they got interested, we'd book them for a qualification call or call call is what we call them as an SDR. So we were not passing those leads on to a ease or anyone above yet, because they just weren't to that [00:10:00] stage. And we don't want to waste our valuable time and closing.
Austin Jouett: So what we do is we'd set up just a 15 minute call. It might be annoying for the prospect, but it is truly. The benefit for the prospect, because what if it's not a good fit? They waste 30 minutes. They find it. And what the hell? So what we do is we'd ask just basic qualification questions. Then once we've got those, we pass them along.
Austin Jouett: We'd set up a 15 minute call. Then once we're done with the 15 minute call, if it makes sense on both ends, we pass them along to an AE, then they'd run a discovery call. Then if it made sense for a further one, they'd run an hour long demo call. That's the typical process and that regard. So I'll stop there.
Austin Jouett: If you have any questions, cause I know I started up the first part.
Alan Zhao: No, it's a crazy process. Probably not the most ideal buyer experience. We passed along three times before you actually get to see the demo. No, it's
Austin Jouett: literally not. It is very annoying for prospects. And I think a lot of the times. Where they would ghost was at that point after the qualification call that the SDR would run is because listen, man, whenever you get a junior SDR in that doing that, [00:11:00] and the buyer already knows pretty much, let's say, even 50 percent of what you do or the area that you do, and you're just trying to get basic information when these people have clearly shown interest.
Austin Jouett: And are already on your site wanting to take a demo. I just, that whole process to me just never made sense. Truthfully, I hated it. I just genuinely just disliked it, but yeah, crazy process. It's not a good time on the buyer's side either. And honestly, I think it just makes the buyer cycle just elongated.
Austin Jouett: In my eyes,
Alan Zhao: and potentially lose deals, they were qualified in market to buy all of a sudden they got turned away because the SDR who was servicing you didn't really know the answers to the questions and you had to wait two weeks to speak to an AD.
Austin Jouett: Exactly. And is that on the SDR? No. Is it on the leadership?
Austin Jouett: Is it on the way that they're doing go to market or? Did it go to market in the past? Keep in mind, all this is past stuff. I do not work in man based anymore. They could have updated all this, but yeah, man, I mean, that just whole, that whole buyer disconnect, it starts there and that's where you don't want it to start.[00:12:00]
Austin Jouett: You want the buyer disconnect to happen whenever they think that it's not a product for them. I know that sounds really weird, but that is, that's what I think in my eyes. But yeah.
Alan Zhao: So let's talk about some of the things that did work. You mentioned before that there was a process where you pulled acceleration pipeline reports and let's talk about that.
Austin Jouett: Yeah, so whenever I got moved into our start of the growth segment, so one thing that we do really well with cross cell upsells. So we say, let's say we had the account based marketing. They were focused on marketing personas. Okay. They already owned us. Let's say I have a book of, I had back in the day, I had four or five eight years that I was working with on the growth side.
Austin Jouett: They each had a book of business of about like 35 to 50 accounts. They were all active. They're all demand based customers. The majority of them, I'd say a good 90 percent of them own the account based marketing platform or the advertising platform, which is the marketing personas. So what I did, this is what I found great success.
Austin Jouett: And in terms of upsells [00:13:00] and signal based selling is we drink from our own champagne. A lot of you guys might not notice band based basically they de anonymize website traffic, basically making it easier for you to go to market. What we would do in the growth side is I would take the target account lists of all the accounts that I was allowed to work because there was very, very.
Austin Jouett: What's the word? It's very niche in terms of who you could target within current customer bases. So I take, let's say, 50 accounts that owned the ABM ads platform. Marketing persona is done. What I do is I take those 50, add them into a spreadsheet. I then go prospect 5, 10, 10, People at those accounts within the sales function to upsell them on a sales intelligence cloud solution, which is basically just data competitor to zoom info, stuff like that.
Austin Jouett: What I do then is based on the signals in inside of domain base, I would go into the account, let's say X, Y, Z account. I'd go into that account. They own ABM ads, whatever they don't have SIC or data. So I immediately go in there, pull an intent report showing [00:14:00] for sales, intelligence, cloud, or related solutions or keywords that are related to me.
Austin Jouett: We had keyword sets that we would do. So you just click a little button and you'd say sales, intelligence, cloud, keyword set at this account level. Then what we would do is we would see, okay, perfect. This, hopefully they would have a training intent or some kind of intent, right? Let's assume for the ease of this they have some active intent around sales intelligence tools with clean data.
Austin Jouett: What we'd do is we'd screenshot that graph. And screenshot where the spike is. And then we would write an email to the sales leaders that would be interested in the sales intelligence platform. We'd write that, what we'd call those a pipeline acceleration reports. And then we'd send that out to them and say, Hey, listen, I see that this is.
Austin Jouett: Obviously some area of interest right now for your guy's company. I'm already X, Y, I'm already working with XYZ on your marketing team. Figured this would be a relevant time to connect further on sales, intelligence, data, blah, blah, value prop, CTA, send it over. That is something that for cross selling and upselling and intent based [00:15:00] like signal based selling is as a game changer.
Austin Jouett: That is something that truly did work. I think I was booking upwards of 14 meetings. I think that was the most I booked in a month. The quota there was around like four or six, and then they changed it up to 12 after we started smashing it with that kind of take, if you will, that's another way. So there's a third way.
Austin Jouett: I know we've talked about two ways so far. There's a third way that I did and the net new enterprise side. So if we want to talk about that, we could go down that route too. All right, man. All right, cool. So basically what it was in the net new size. So net new, obviously a different beast, very cold outbound, even with signal based signals or selling anything like that, making it a little bit warmer.
Austin Jouett: We all know in the back of our heads, it's still cold outreach. That's just how I've always viewed it. Could be wrong. That's just how I view it personally. So what we do there is I would have a list of my AE specifically in the growths I had to. Uh, break it down with one. So let's say I had one AE in that new enterprise.
Austin Jouett: He [00:16:00] has, let's say 5, 000 accounts overall for the entire year. They do account planning the year before. He has 5, 000 accounts. He then goes fine, goes and finds 50 accounts that are his top 50 AE accounts. He throws those aside. I do not work those at all, unless he wants me to help tag team, whatever. Then the rest of that account list, I have green filled on.
Austin Jouett: So what I do and how I prioritize all my outreach, whenever I got a new patch or started in that role is I would start building these pipeline acceleration reports at the net new level. So what I mean by that is let's say I found, I go in there. I, into the domain based platform, drinking there and champagne.
Austin Jouett: Again, I'd go in there. Load up Nicholas's accounts. My account executives counts is full 5, 000 lists, excluding the 80 top 50. Then they're already tiered out through tiers. I think it was one through four. I think it was what the tiers were there. Tier two, tier one is the top 50 tier two is top on a hundred tier.
Austin Jouett: Three was top two 50, I believe, and then so on. So what I do [00:17:00] is I'd go into more of the top of funnel leads first. I'd find, I know that's a backwards strategy, but bear with me. What I do is I'd go in there, find the top level funnel accounts that were showing interest in account based marketing. That was the first product that I would go after.
Austin Jouett: Then I would work it through the funnel. I'd score them my own and a spreadsheet. Then what I would do is I would go and make the actual reports. So before I would do outreach to any of these accounts, I would do, I think it was like every Monday I would run like 10 pipeline acceleration reports.
Austin Jouett: Essentially. Took a little bit of time to do for them. That's why I could only do 10 a week, but essentially what I would do is I'd go into the account, I'd find out based on their website, based on LinkedIn, based on everything that I can do research wise that we all have access to, I'd find five to 10, or I'm sorry, it was 15 to 20 keywords that related to their products and services and even their competitors.
Austin Jouett: So if it was Salesforce, I'd put HubSpot, CRM, customer relationship management. I'd just put Blast all those out. I'd build that report. It takes about a day to populate for each one. Build that report out for tracking purposes. I would [00:18:00] leave it on a spreadsheet. And then whenever I'm doing cold calling, I'll just do a live, a little cold call real quick.
Austin Jouett: Hey, Alan, this is Austin over here at Demandbase. I actually had a pretty good reason to give you a quick call. You got a second boom. You got a second. We talk. Yeah. So basically demand based, we de anonymize website traffic. I'm just genuinely curious. Is that something on the roadmap for you or something that you're trying to look at, blah, blah, blah, value prop, go into it, have a pitch, the CTA on a cold call or even emails, this is how I booked a lot of revenue in terms of net new, is Perfect.
Austin Jouett: Since you obviously already see value in all of this, Alan, how about I do this? I'd like to just, we drink from our own champagne, truly. So what I'd like to do is I'd like to number one, set you up on a call with my director. Account executive director call. And then number two is ahead of that call. I'd like to take just like 15 keywords, 20 keywords from you right now, run a pipeline acceleration report to show you the top 25 accounts that are actually already doing research that you're not even aware of on and off your site, [00:19:00] based on your solutions and keywords that you gave me, as well as a sneak peek at the contacts being de anonymized at that level as well.
Austin Jouett: Do you think that would be worth something to discuss further on a call? Boom. They are immediately going to say yes, because the amount of value that they're getting there is you're not asking just for their time for free. You're giving them something that's tangible. They can take those 25 accounts, bring them back to their sales team and be like, Hey guys, we should be hitting these.
Austin Jouett: Why are we not? The amount of times that I booked someone off that on a cold call, I'd send them over the list after. The fact, and then we'd go over it on a call with my director and then to be like, Oh man, I was a great call out. I didn't even know that they were looking us up and that's actually a really good account for us.
Austin Jouett: We had our sales team reach out to them last week. We started getting some traction like stuff like that Is what makes signal based selling work, especially from a net new perspective that is Roundabout way On the three kind of pieces that I use for success at demand based specifically
Alan Zhao: If you're a fan of the revenue rebels podcast, you know [00:20:00] Please leave us a review on Spotify and Apple podcast.
Alan Zhao: Your support goes a long way to helping us bring on more amazing guests. Thank you. That's powerful. And you also mentioned one more aspect of it, which is multi threading. So you're trying to penetrate larger enterprise accounts. So tell me a little bit more about how you do that.
Austin Jouett: Yeah, so multi threading in the net new enterprise space.
Austin Jouett: So if I booked a call, let's try and give you an example. Obviously, this is like months back I did all this. I'll try and give you an example. Let's say I booked a meeting with XYZ company. Great call, got the marketing team involved, account based marketing, advertising. They're super involved with it, built them out a pipeline acceleration report.
Austin Jouett: We got them on a discovery with my AE, moved the demo stage. They wanted to procure the product. We're doing a proof of concept, whatever. What I do then is once we're at a proof of concept stage, the best part to do as an SDR, at least from the SDR perspective, is go ahead and build out another pipeline.
Austin Jouett: Pipeline acceleration report. Just like I was doing with the cross off cells, build out another one, relate it back to their products and [00:21:00] everything like that, but then relate it back to sales, intelligence, cloud, stuff like that. Then go do that same outreach to their marketing counterparts or not marketing counterparts, their sales counterparts mentioned their names, name, drop them, send a screenshot of the previous pipeline acceleration report.
Austin Jouett: Send a screenshot of what exactly they said that they found useful of it. Send a screenshot and just articulate why it is you're reaching out. Almost, I almost always treated the multi threading portion. Once it got to that stage, I almost treated it as, they're already a client. I'm just doing a cross sell upsell just like I was doing in the growth.
Austin Jouett: That's the mindset that I would have whenever I would do the outreach back to them using the parse. Then you feel like a friend. It's not, it doesn't feel cold at all. Yeah, exactly. At that point, it's definitely just more warm. It's more inviting. It's. Listen, if you have at any point and, and, and to tell them not lying, don't lie to your prospects.
Austin Jouett: Do you have a genuine end and you can tell your prospects like, Hey, I'm already working [00:22:00] with X, Y, Z, and your marketing team. They're very interested. We're about to get, you guys are about to procure a product anyways. I just wanted to see if you were interested in this because I'm already seeing a lot of interest based on the pipeline acceleration report.
Austin Jouett: I'm already seeing screenshot interest coming from you guys onto our sales intelligence cloud as well. Just wanted to throw that out there. Do you think it'd be relevant timing for us to hop on a call with my director? Boom. And then you start multi threading everyone in. Then once it gets all wrapped up, I think we did this with, I'll say it, Broadcom.
Austin Jouett: I think we brought it in Broadcom at 300 plus, 500, 000, two years ago at Forrester, I think is whenever I sourced that. And that was a similar situation. We did a lot of multi threading within their different business units, and it really made it coer, like coercive or cohesive is the word I'm looking for.
Alan Zhao: And then what happens next? So as an SDR, you're helping multi thread the ease, trying to manage all the relationships. What else?
Austin Jouett: That's a tough question. You're probably not like my answer as the SDR and [00:23:00] our job functions. Once you get to that point, you pass it along, man. Once you've gotten, once you've gotten the meeting set, you've done the follow up. That's one thing that you need to do, assuming that you're doing all the follow up and you're following the entire deal cycle, which I think that every SDR should be doing.
Austin Jouett: Let's say that there's a lag or a time where they go, someone like we've all experienced, that's when I would go rerun another pipeline acceleration report, re show my value, but show it for a different, show it for a different business unit at that company, especially at the enterprise level. A lot of those companies have different business units.
Austin Jouett: If, if one business unit is slowly crumbling. Go find another business unit at the multi billion dollar, 10, 000 plus employee company, screenshot the intent report again, use the same messaging, say, Hey, I already talked with XYZ and your different business unit. He was very interested, call it out. I think a lot of the time SDRs are very afraid to just speak directly in a professional way, but that is something that I would find whenever it would [00:24:00] happen to me.
Austin Jouett: If we got ghosted. I would immediately start following up within different business units at that account, because at that account level, there's obviously there's some sort of interest. Like you shouldn't just drop it. If one person's like goes to you and doesn't respond, especially if it's a large enterprise account, but genuinely, if everything is going well, no one's ghosted you or anything like that.
Austin Jouett: After you've done everything that you can in terms of the pipeline sellers reports, you've made it all tracked. Like you have it all logged in your serum. The SDR shouldn't be doing anything else. It should all be the AE. The SDR's got other things to do. We have other people to go book. We have other pipeline installation reports to book, or to make, and everything like that.
Austin Jouett: We don't have the time to make sure that we're on top of it. It's the AE. That's the responsibility of the AE at that point, in my opinion. Got it.
Alan Zhao: Coming back into the signals, what signals have you seen be successful during outreach?
Austin Jouett: Yeah. So one of the main signals that I would find specifically was competitors. So [00:25:00] whenever you're doing, I know we talked about this previously, but whenever you're doing an intent research report, like I, like we've been talking about previously, if they're just showing intent for, let's say demand data, we'll just use in demand based as an example here, if they're just showing interest in an account based marketing platform in general, or just account based marketing or go to market, you know, Platforms or go to market strategies.
Austin Jouett: That is such a broad, in my, in my opinion, that's just such a broad topic. Nowadays, obviously this was like eight months ago. It could be different, whatever right now, that is just a very broad topic in my opinion. So that's not going to be a relevant trigger for me. I'm not going to go right. A whole report and say, Hey, I saw you doing research on just account based marketing.
Austin Jouett: I would hope that they're doing research, or if I'm reaching out to someone that's showing intent, I would hope they're doing research as in, Hey, they're researching six cents or they're researching role works or they're researching like X, Y, Z, or they're researching de anonymizing web traffic, specifically stuff like that.
Austin Jouett: That is anything that [00:26:00] you can tie back directly to a USP or unique selling proposition. That is what an intent is. That is what a signal is. Anything that you cannot tie back to that, it's not a fucking signal. Excuse my language, I cuss like a sailor sometimes, sorry. It's not a signal in my opinion. It just genuinely is not.
Austin Jouett: In my opinion, it's not. That is what I would say is the relevant triggers. Relating back to demand based, obviously each one relevant, it's hyper relevant to your specific product, your solution, who you sell into stuff like that. So this is just an example, but what I would always go after in terms of triggers that demand based was if they're researching something that ties directly back to our USP.
Austin Jouett: Directly, not high level. And if they're researching any of our competitors, because what that tells me is an SDR or seller or anyone using the platform that's pulling that intent tells me that they know something about what it is that we do. So they're already higher level intelligent than they would be if they're just doing broad research on [00:27:00] ABM.
Austin Jouett: That's what I would consider not necessarily golden triggers, but your silver triggers, if you will. If all in the gold, silver bullet,
Alan Zhao: gold triggers existed. Yeah,
Austin Jouett: exactly. I don't think there truly is a, unless a demo request is a gold trigger. It
Alan Zhao: might not be from a qualified
Austin Jouett: lead. Exactly. Exactly. So that's the real question is how do we get to finding all the qualified opportunities without doing everything that we've talked about at scale?
Austin Jouett: But
Alan Zhao: yeah, intent plus qualification. These two intent fit qualification, what can be improved upon signal based selling. That you can do today that you couldn't do when you were at Demandbase.
Austin Jouett: What could be improved right now? So I think that one of the biggest disconnects is obviously these people know that you're going to reach out to them.
Austin Jouett: I think that this signal based selling in general is becoming, I don't want to use the word saturated because that's wrong. That's not the right word for it, but it is almost becoming like a saturated [00:28:00] state because here's the thing. If you're a buyer in today's state and a B2B technology company, or you're looking for B2B tech that you typically do know if you've been in the space, that they have all the relevant tools.
Austin Jouett: They see that you're doing this research. They see that you're doing some top level research. So they know in the back of their head, most likely they're going to get reached out to. Okay. So the question is, how do we reach out to them and make it less friction or make it less, make it more friction or make it less friction in terms of the outreach to them, whenever you're doing it and you're saying it and making it less creepy.
Austin Jouett: So I think one thing that's improved now is a lot of the time, whenever we would do the outreach at first, because whenever we were coming up with this strategy, demand based, it was almost like creepy. Oh, Hey, I see you're on my website. Here's a screenshot of exactly what you're doing. It's almost creepy, but the finesse to it is where it comes in.
Austin Jouett: And that's, what's been evolving in my opinion, to answer your question is just learning how to finesse the intent to make it to where the prospect doesn't [00:29:00] find you creepy, because here's the thing you walk up to a girl in the bar and you're like, Hey, I saw you were researching 25 year old tech gurus on Instagram last week.
Austin Jouett: You want to go on a date? What do you think that woman's going to do? She's going to look at you and slap you. So it's the same thing with the prospects. I think that's what's evolving right now is we're, we, as the sellers are realizing it's creepy, creepy, but there's a way to do it correctly. And the way to do it correctly is to meet them where they're at.
Austin Jouett: How do we do that? Intense signals. How do we do that? And how do we gauge what intense signal is relevant to be reaching out to you at the right time? that comes with a lot of time, error processes and trial, in my opinion, which I think is what the stage is where the B2B tech world is in terms of signal based selling.
Austin Jouett: That's where we're at right now. We're in a stage where we're trying to figure out. What is creepy? What is not creepy? What's relevant? What isn't relevant in terms of doing the outreach to these people? So I think it's a great question. I don't even have a full blown answer to you because I think it's always evolving right now.
Austin Jouett: I think the purpose of right now, single one based [00:30:00] selling is just trying to stay away from being creepy. And how do we do that? That's a great question. I don't have the answer to that. Do you?
Alan Zhao: Oh, it's tough. Each industry is different. If they're security or financials, especially security related, then They don't really want to be reaching out because that's a violation of security.
Alan Zhao: And then you don't want to be the type of person that has all the PII information and then emails them and wait. Yeah. So it all depends.
Austin Jouett: Yeah. So that's, I know that's not the answer you're really looking for, but that's what I would say right now. We're just in a space where we're trying to figure that out.
Austin Jouett: I think that's, that's exactly where we're at. And I think if you were to ask me that question and. Shit six months, I'd be able to give you a really solid answer on that because I think that tools like warmly are coming up with different ways to do exactly that, making it less creepy, making it more humanistic because that's something that I think that's actually a better answer for you.
Austin Jouett: Is I think that signal based selling is going to be moving towards more of a human humanistic level of selling as opposed [00:31:00] to, hey, I saw you were on X Y Z. Please take meeting with me now. Now we're going to find ways to make it super, super relevant based on the triggers that we're getting. Part that I just really don't know is how deep are we going to be able to get in terms of signals?
Austin Jouett: Like how deep are we really going to be able to get? And at what point is it going to get to the point where it's like, all right, like what is the buyer need to research now? I don't know. It's all very weird. So it's all very fast changing is what I would say.
Alan Zhao: The market's fast changing these days. So anyone's guess what's going to happen in two years from now, Boston.
Alan Zhao: It's fantastic having you on this pod today. Really appreciate your time. How can people find out more about you?
Austin Jouett: Well, you can go on my LinkedIn, LinkedIn, and then, uh, have a newsletter, DNA newsletter, DNA prospecting, but yeah, LinkedIn is the best way to connect with me, Austin Jewett, just as you guys see it on the screen, but yeah, that is pretty much the best way to reach me.[00:32:00]
Alan Zhao: Fantastic. Thank you so much, Austin.
Austin Jouett: Yeah, absolutely. I appreciate you for having me on and, uh, looking forward to another episode.
Alan Zhao: A hundred percent. Let's do it.