Empower your business with product qualified leads for Supervision

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[Music] it's time to accelerate hey friends this is Amy welcome to episode 507 of accelerate sales podcast a record where I hold in-depth conversations with today's leading experts in sales marketing and leadership six days a week join me on accelerate today is Mitch Miranda he's the founder and CEO of whaler that spelled WH al our know either whaler specializes in helping sales teams identify what it calls product qualified leads so P Q ELLs are a different take on new business development with Enterprise buyers so I'm anxious to learn what it's all about so let's jump into it Mitch Miranda welcome to accelerate thanks andy they Shammi have to start off with a quick story oh by all means start with a story is this literally habit of yesterday's at stop line and i love when this when these things sort of happen but i was the challenger sale was used on me by a taxi driver yesterday which was incredible now what was the taxi driver selling yes so i you know i'm on my way home we have this rule in the family i've got to be home by seven o'clock right or am i sleep on the couch because it's dinner time kim canvass dinner okay exit um you know a cab just happen to be in front of me so instead of grabbing an uber lift i you know i kinda happens off this cabin I'm like hey you know I'm going up to this part sound died you know hundreds of times I say just take Pine Street go straight on up and he goes no that's not the right way to go right now it goes this time of day you're gonna get the Powell Street cable car it's gonna back everything it was like that's not the best way we got to go over here go down chinatown go broadway tell me is like much faster they go no I've been doing this for 15 years I'm like this skull of Pine Street like save me that save me they are your eyes like no I'm not gonna go that way the cable cars gonna screw up everything and I go will you just please go up Pine Street he goes no I'm not gonna go that way you need to get out of my cab I go really you feel that strongly about it and he's like yes I go okay well how about this I I know it typically takes me about you know 13 14 minute stay at home so let's time it and we're gonna take your way and so he goes sure enough he's like he takes his away it goes down Broadway tunnel I found a new way through the city which which was interesting and and lo and behold we got there at about the same time 14 but there was much less traffic right at that particular time and I was so ecstatic right like that um he'd use a challenge or say on me the guy had been driving to Kansas City for a lot of years and you know the cab fare was whatever ten twelve bucks and I just gave him a fifty I was like that was so awesome because a you taught me something and be you you stuck to your guns and you know you you are a taxi driver that knows the city very well so I think thank you for teaching me something new and and keep the change so that was my Challenger sail from a taxi driver it was incredible man absolutely well I mean he knew the city he knew the subject matter and actually knew you as a customer more than you thought he did mmm very interesting very transy said as a bonus you learned a new way through the city I though I would surprise you didn't know about the broadway tunnel well no at that point in time right like I do and yeah I do get stuck on Pine Street from the cable car because anybody's like this particular point time nope the way which is interesting and compare that to the typical uber lyft experience which is yeah it's just in the in their app and they was following the GPS no reason almost right yeah it's not exercising any sort of initiative whatsoever so yeah the dot stops there so I've just stopped on the dot like no you need to pull over cuz you're blocking traffic and I always call them and say I'm gonna walk up you know a block and I'll meet you at that corner because there's less traffic or whatever and I'm surprised the the companies don't actually teach the passengers a little bit more about walking you know half a block locks you save you probably echo a lot of time then trying to stay on the dot but yeah yeah for another time another time all right so opening question for you is it's sir Stan a question ask a lot of my guest is so in your mind today what's the single biggest challenge facing sales reps single biggest challenge always I'd say is training I I think by far the more the reps that I come in to into contact with they just haven't been taught properly like the fundamentals first and foremost and certainly today you know I I'm in the technology sales enablement business and still I think no amount of technology is ever going to replace like the fundamentals of just being trained you know in in good sales technique and the professionalism of sales I think there's there's well a lot of alarming trends that are making that are really making the sales profession I think exceptionally diluted right now so so what are these alarming trends I'd say one in particular that that really alarms me is the emphasis around this SDR function right the sales development rep business development rep whatever you call it mm-hmm and really the trend that this is in essence a career right and really in term I might view the world there's two things in a business you build stuff so software so you ship code and then the other side of the fence you ship revenue right so you really should your the whole company is aligned with one of those two key functions right right in the sales profession of shipping code or shipping revenue is you know selling its closing right it's been able to learn at it do all those things that the you know you and I have learned over the years and I think the PDR as a profession is that you're basically learning the first part of your sales career yeah he's got to learn how to prospect and start conversations and do all those good things but you never learn the part to actually close right and I've had this conversation probably four or five times over the last month or so and I really feel bad for these these young salespeople because you know they're one-to-one year into there's SDR training and then their boss or manager says hey you've got two options you can either go a into the closing role who kind of scary you have to have a commission no never done that before or B you can become a PDR manager and of course you know you're taking advantage of a young professional where they can go back to their friends and their families hey I'm a manager now right like how it's really tempting to not be really accept that kind of direction right and you're a step further from the ultimate goal which is closing to really understand whether you want to be a sales profession so you know the conversation I've added there two three four years into the SDR manager never closed before and now they say I really want to get into sales now Mitch I tell your you are unfortunately a real disservice has been done to you and in order to get into sales you're gonna have to go back to ground zero and you're gonna and I would recommend you just get into any role that you can where you are selling anything I don't care if it's book spots tour guide what I saw well anything just get into the function of actually closing small little deals doesn't matter whatever it is because until you actually start closing you are not actually doing the sales you're not doing the sales role so STR to me is STR as a career I guess is is the thing that's most alarming to me but um well I mean I want to explore that a little bit because yes I think part of the service we do to its is and serve following what you're talking about is we define these things so poorly right so you talk about the closure role going to me I hate that that description because first of all you know how often have you been in the room the customer makes the decision right so this idea when you say a closer what people automatically think is we're getting some of this and go in and they're closing the deal right and the stereotypical sense which you know isn't that what happens really what that role is that's a discovery role that's a it's a understand the customer role it's putting together the right solution a role and if you do that appropriately the customers gonna buy from you and closing has nothing to do with it exactly and so it seems like we have to serve you had a very clear distinction right we do two things on a company we develop code we ship code you know it's software you can say in sales you only have two things really that a company does it acquires customers and retains them is how do we fit those roles into that that those functions right and I agree with you I'm I think we're doing a huge disservice to a broad swath of people they're new to the sales profession because just four things you talked about is we say either yeah we're gonna make you a manager or the third option is you know if you're lucky you might become on a quote-unquote Account Manager and risk assess which is still considered a lower former life and in some of the sales organizations compared to the account execs or closers which is also nuts because they're the ones generating majority of the revenue right right exactly it is you know and I think again it's down to the sales leaders also that are that are promoting this we're really now what I've seen be very effective because you also have this this snowball effect where you have people have never closed before coaching young new talent in the sales profession but they don't actually know what it is to do sales right right but they have the data yeah right so you know again you're now you're perpetuating the problem but where I have seen it be very effective is if you get into that STR role right you really shouldn't be in that role for six months maybe a year maybe at that if you're not and we could talk about some ways that you can you can get out of that role but um you know if you go into sales and then yeah you're gonna you try closing you figure out whether you really like it whether you excel at it you go do that for a year and then you come back in and you coach STRs that's okay because again I've seen that be very effective because you're you're coaching you you're also trying to identify early talent to accelerate people into into the a role or coach them in the right way that they can learn you know that the skill set and where they need to excel to ultimately get into the into the a role so you know I but the the idea of STR as a as a career path is to me just absurd and and it's down to the sales leaders you get folks need to really understand that it's a progression and to ultimately the the role of being a Sales Professional yeah yeah I mean I think that that in some ways it mirrors a little bit what happened back in the let's say the 80s when the IBM and Xerox now they're the big companies were every year were gone higher thousands of fresh college grads put them into these quote-unquote you know marketing management or sales management training programs with the idea that they were gonna wash out right most of them over the course of the next two years and what we left is the people that they want to keep and it seems like this is just a new version of that right right or the the people that nest didn't necessarily fit their model what they think a salesperson should be right yeah and I think that's the other big big disservice is around there are lots of different styles of being a very good Sales Professional right I have my own biases I have a technical background I tend to to hire and like people who have mathy more technical backgrounds because I think in technology they tend to be more curious and they tend to just want to know why things happen like a customer just bought from me why I got a go ask them I don't know I'm just gonna go ask so I have my own biases but there are I've seen I have hired and worked with Lots fuel that have non-technical backgrounds I think mmm they're there there are so many different ways to be successful in sales there is no just right way to do it and I think that's also part of you know you have a court obviously some core fundamental traits but I love getting people that other teams do not like I end to like those folks friends at our building particular type of sales teams and if I come across when I'm like oh you need to go talk to Jim or Jane right like you'll fit in right there and I go Jim or Jane anyone that doesn't really fit your stereotypical so I'm like Sinha my way I'm like I tend to find those misfits or those people that just don't don't do the typical sales approach and my view are can be exceptional Kimmy Kimmy really um it can be really good but you can do it right but I think one of the reasons that's the case and this is this is becoming a more of a theme on this this particular show is being accelerate is that yeah we so we have these very tightly defined roles increasingly in sales and certainly you know in the tech context sales world and you know par the reason then we sit there and wonder why some people don't perform well given so how narrowly circumscribed their their responsibilities and what they're supposed to be doing and how they're supposed to be doing it that yeah the the power of the individual gets lost right the power of the individual to sort do things their way because it's like always like well it's gotta be this and cycle hmm okay that's that way you've got one sample set and believe me you may be growing quickly but you know the bulk of your sales people are still it's still not cutting it why is that the right way why not why not give people some more latitude so they can develop their individual strengths and so you have this opportunity you said the people you consider us are the misfits I'm with you I always want the higher the misfits because you bring me somebody with a stereotypical sales background and and there's never did it for me and I think you yeah I mean you always in your entire sales career the best people I always seem they're always coachable kind of at any stage I love learning from somebody else who's very good at sales and learning new ways or new techniques or new ways that you might be able to approach a particular sales opportunity so I think those so it's not whether to me that's one of the real risks I see in a lot of the sales models that I people are employing these days is that it's like just too rigid right now there's no freedom for the individual to really serve be themselves yes yes absolutely because you still have to be you know right you know the top you still it's a sales pressure very regimented it's very process driven you still have to like you know it's grinded down you still have to do all these things but you're right there should be a lot of latitude and sort of how you get there and an openness to experiment because everyone will have a style that they develop ultimately on on their own that they find work works very well for them yeah I mean like when I was new in sales I certainly did not fit the mold at all in fact my first boss that hired me was extremely clear about the fact that that it never hired anybody like me before wasn't really sure that he should have hired me but you know I had a an interesting interview experience so okay great but yeah it turned out well right cuz he took a risk oh yeah right and I think that's that is the also separates great managers and great heads of sales that can identify talent right it's the same on the engineering side of the fence there are you can of course there are some particular traits you look for but there are being able to identify that talent and then coach the talent right and I know I have you know the a players are always gonna be the a players and they'll kind of do their thing but can you as a Sales Leader can you really can you get the most out of your can you get your C players up to be B players right that's where you can make the biggest impact and a lot of that is in just coaching and coaching to the style right you can't coach everybody the same way you got a coach to the style and for the strengths of that particular person so I think just that comes down to good sales leadership and good sales management where you run into those types of people and they they can they are the real difference makers and how effective a sales team can be well I think that you identified sort of a missing piece because you know creasing they were seeing apps and technologies come up love the AI driven things saying okay what were able to help you do is is really understand precisely what your a players are doing right because we can record the calls and parson and you know apply our algorithms to them and and so the B players can listen to it don't know exactly what they players are doing so they can be just like the a players great but that doesn't work right a players I mean great you can listen to what they're doing with their calls and you might pick up some some interesting tips but the fact is impart threes in the eight players is because they're not playing by the rules that's the thing that I find so the conundrum that's so interesting in so many sales organizations is that yeah the the rule disciplines are applied not this one's the sort of the rigid formulas are applied to the B and C players and they're NBA's in the age of the ones that have earned the right to to be a little more flexible and more free but then they serve suppress that in the B's and C's which is really as you said it that's we're not sort of the next generation of strength that's coming from and you wanna be able to develop your bench if you think that because you know sales people turnover really quickly if you think that you're always going to replace your to a player's by going outside hmm yeah that's a horrible strategy right you need to develop that's not sustainable you need to be able to develop your B's and C's to be they take the place of the a is when they go right right and of course you're only getting a very small snippet of the time slice right of a particular a player right you're not seeing and everything that they're doing you know throughout the entire sales cycle which is the majority of the work right examine so I do I totally agree with you've got a to be a good manager you've got it you get it really got to be in the trenches and you've got a coach and you've got to give people the options to try things and see you know well here's here are what people are doing here are some things to try let's go see if it works and let's go see if we can improve this particular part of you know of your sales experience that maybe needs a little bit of work yeah all right was talking about about your company whaler so what was the impetus to start whaler so whaler funny enough you know again engineering background so when I got into sales after banging out code for a while I don't I take a very different approach to I wasn't classically sales trained so I took a very different approach to how I was gonna do sales myself and then start to build sales teams and a lot of I don't know if I think probably was you know in the early days I also worked we sold enterprise software into game developers so I just got exposed to a lot of I'd like to video games they still like video games and into how games were developed and game development is just fascinating I've never seen a more extreme industry where you have the extreme of the creative people like the people that are way out there right and then on the flip side of the fence you have the hardest core of hardcore engineers because they're building you know every four years on proprietary software they're building on the hardware right on the metal so talk about assembly program was like really really hard core engineers so you these two totally extremes and they come together and they and they build this completely complex 3d real-time thing right that is and it's fun to play it's like it's amazing that these games even can come to there's a reason so many of them because they are so incredibly complicated but anyway I got exposed into how they would use develop player telemetry systems and how they would use a lot of the cable we see players going here here okay let's put in this particular you know drop point or this particular the game player let's tweak this and I thought well man why can't I do that in sales I'd love to if I could see what users and what prospects were doing inside my product like to me that would give me all the context into why and how I needed to reach out to them because I could say well yeah you're I see you've used this particular part of the product but I kind of can I think I know your use case given that I know you and your company and what you're trying to do so mmm that gives me a reason to reach out to you and teach you something about maybe the best way to use my particular product so usage behavior for me what that prospect was doing inside your product was really the most important data point that I found that for me as a salesperson was the most effective right in me and helping me kind of teach so that concept we really I started to just build that into my sales teams and monitoring a lot of in product usage and ultimately no I implemented that at a few sales teams and then quite a few other teams that I work with and we took that concept in and pulled it into a platform called whaler about just over a year ago that we officially launched it and that's our that's our focus a customer called us Moneyball for sales so I kind of like that really our customers today primarily are open source or the biggest pain point today is open source freemium premium so in remise enterprise SAS products where they usually have the in product usage readily available and we monitor all that and push that out to pick the particular sales rep say hey this is this is interesting behavior about either this user or more interestingly in groups or sorry in enterprises groups and what the group behavior is because you may you know if you have three or five or seven users that all of a sudden become very active within a product over a specific period of time let's say a seven day earth or a 14-day period that's interesting and that's really when me as a salesperson I want to I want to now engage and go teach them something because the timings right so okay so you were with it a certain oiler right so your product then works with companies that use your product are our companies that SAS companies have these set a free trial or freemium model of some sort so let's let me know you talked about generating leads hoping land leads and so on as and used for phrase convert data to do intent identity intelligence so so that what's what's that mean in the case of somebody that hasn't even got that point of signing up for the the free the free trial so do you do anything before that or it all starts at that point know it all starts once the user has signed up either in signing of the product so for us that's a that's a key starting point and even in my you know in my own sales sales career using data pre sign-in right like downloading white papers attending webinars not typically a very strong signal for me personally as a sales person mm-hm I wanted to know okay once they got in the product okay that's that's still starting to get interesting but I want to see what what they do right because a lot of times especially in these freemium or open-source models you want you may want customers to just sit there for a while they're not ready yet you know though the biggest challenge in sales is just getting the timing right right understanding when they're they're actually at a point where they're open to having the conversation and being taught sometimes you just can't you just can't chase the person who just signs up and it starting a user product just because they may fit some perma graphic data there may be may be a reason to just wait and wait until three months later when all the sudden user two three four five comes in over a short period of time maybe that's the right time to to reach out so those are some of the things all the things that we monitor and try and service to the sales rep to to help them I like that and so what what does the rep receive back from from whaler so I did I you know integrates with Salesforce obviously so mmm they get that information automatically updating to their their contact record or something we do yeah we we call it Intel right so we basically monitor all this and then we see something interesting we push that piece of Intel into Salesforce and usually its we can't do it over email or an API through our API but the goal is to get it in front of the rep in whatever workflow that they're already you know is already pre-existing and tell them okay this interesting thing is happening now here's why context is really important right I'm not I've never been a big believer of black boxes and just kind of you know the magical machine learning that that to me is doesn't really exist mmm it has to be this fit it has to be a we spend a lot of time working directly with the sales reps to understand ok what are things that they think are interesting and then we'll use that human interaction along with you can scale it a little bit faster and experiment more by using machine learning but certainly there has to be a lot of human intuition and hands-on understanding that that needs to go into into this and providing that context of the sales rep then then gives them all the information information they need and sort of how they need to reach out how they need to reach out in need direct with that particular prospect well let's talk about the context so hmm what is the context or setting for them so you know somebody's using it but but is it based on you know the history of what past similar people have done and so engineers are aggregating a history or where has the context established yeah so a good example we have these different Intel types I'd mentioned so for instance one one we call the Trojan horse right so the Trojan horse Intel basically will we have some out-of-the-box settings but we kind of configure for the team but for argument's sake we'd say ok whenever we see at least four users from a particular company they might sign up and use their business domain they might send up and use a gmail doesn't matter we'll be able to identify them and pull them all together but let's say we see four users that have finally signed up and started using the product within a seven day period so short period of time high activity within a short period of time and it meets all the firma graphic criteria so typically that means you know it's a North American company employee size greater than 50 employees and that then we would package up and say alright we basically have a Trojan horse hiding you know a group of high qualified users that now sales are up will you either if we have a decision maker that's identified in there we'll highlight that and say we should probably call this VP because they just started use the product you know two days ago so in your war with just an email address you you're doing some sort of data enrichment so you're being able to pull out titles and you know as you said they were using a personal email versus business and you can correlate that back to the business mm-hmm exactly there's a there's a lot between email but most importantly we kind of flip it we don't look at the if the person first we monitor for the user behavior first because again if somebody signs up and let's say it's you know Mitchell a lurex sign up and okay I'm at whaler and you know or or ten employees and X you know X firma graphic data not necessarily rationale to just go out and reach out to me right mmm-hmm now so what we'll do first is we look for the usage pattern of the behavior first so then highlight okay is this an interesting person that's doing something interesting or just a group that's doing something interesting and if it is then we'll go out and say alright does this then fit our demographic and firma graphic filters so it's kind of flipped looking for the behavior first and then we go out and say okay is this say some students in Indonesia or is this actually you know a good b2b prospect that we might have in North America so it's a little bit it's a little bit different in that method but the the key is usage pattern first and then as you mentioned being able to go out in and pull together all the firma graphic demographic information so are you seeing on your customers that because increasing I see is that that were used to being easy to sign up for a free trial increasingly companies are you talk to somebody in sales before you sign up for a free trial I mean you see that as a trend and is that based on you know data that they're experiencing through their own experience that that you know how are close rates if they have to go through a sales first step because in some cases quite frankly I find it really off-putting and I won't do I won't do the free trial if after lunch I'm in sales as opposed just signing up for it is it's um I find it's mostly a function of the sales leader that comes in I'm usually these models start off as these freemium self-service II models and at some point they might get to 10 or 20 million revenue and they say okay now we need to go higher sales team right in order to get to the next next tier and usually the sales leader comes in and they go well I can't see I can't see anything that's going on in this this freemium even premium let's call it credit-card side of the business I'm blind so I'm competing against myself shut it off I put up the hard stop top at least at least talk to sales right so it's usually that the sales leader just hasn't worked in one in a open source or freemium to Canadian credit card than to enterprise model like there really have been very few successful companies that have done that and as a Sales Leader it's usually just the first reaction so that to me is in a lot of what we have to do is just is this educate because if we can go into sales here and say hey we can give you visibility or you know the revenue leader in the sales marketing side of the fence and say hey we can like really the freemium and credit cards head of the business that is all legion if you if you can mind that in and let it grow and and leverage it then it becomes a huge advantage to than the enterprise side as long as you're surfacing up only you know the small percentage it actually is now Enterprise ready but once you start to tell that story and explain how how we can do that then the sales leader typically understands oh great okay this is actually a this is an amplifier I mean because you're always gonna have to do inbound and outbound right very few instances where you get the luxury of one it's always this you're gonna have to have this balance of doing both but some the education piece is probably the first one because it's conceptually using the product usage in that way is not typically very intuitive to people that we come across so education is a big piece of what we do what we have to do so who's your ideal client profiles in today it's it's very specific its Bay Area I don't want to die don't travel well no it's more than take advantage of the seventh-largest economy and you know in in the world right right so of course we there are always exceptions but of course that's really California that's the seventh yes yes right it's it's 50 Northern pretty evenly but them I preach this a lot like you got on your own backyard even if you're you're startups in Boise Idaho or whatever like focus in Boise I had a focus in your backyard because you got to be able to get customer FaceTime um right in their learning to I mean you need to go in like I said we work a lot with the reps we need to we need to learn a lot as were continuing to build this platform so ideally its its Bay Area and developer focused so if they're Deb first open source models are pretty good freemium models DevOps any sort of engineering development platforms that's where the pains the biggest as you really have you know you want to encourage the proliferation of the of the freemium piece because you want to get in their toolkit right because there is nothing more phenomenal than you gets in somebody's toolkit I'm sure they might be this student in the Philippines today but as soon as they go start that job right as the engineer at company X boom that's you're now in the toolkit and as long as you can see that and you can see that Oh they've not logged into the product or seinem but it's the same person previously use their gmail address now they're using their at Dropbox email okay great they heard thick this isn't a fresh new lead this is a lead with context right and so that's another the resurfacing lead is another one piece of Intel that we service where we say hey this user isn't new we've seen this user before and sure they were at a different company or they were in a different context and they were you know in the freemium tier but now they're you know they're here and it's a different context and maybe this is the right time now for for the sales person to reach out based on that so that's why I love these freemium models it's your in the tool kit huge advantage if if you know how to leverage it excellent okay well Mitch thanks for joining me we have to wrap up here so tell folks how you can contact you and find out more about whaler which is whal our no that's right a boston whaler the boat right which we try to get that one but yeah you just hit the website or just send me an email Whaler calm and more than happy to to help you really the the methodology of another customer references says the product qualified lead right we're really it's the pql and i'm a just a huge proponent of whatever you do regardless of whether you use little Whaler you need to start leveraging that in product usage behavior because it makes the buying experience much more valuable if you're a buyer and the person reaching out to use actually has some context and exactly and how they can help you right so you absolutely need to be leveraging the pql model and figure out a way if you're a sales person or a sales leader even if you're an individual rep figure out a way you might have to go take the product manager out for coffee or you might gonna need to you know go Chum up one of the engineers but figure out a way that you can get product usage because pretty much every team nowadays through you know different functions have the product usage usually its product managers but figure out a way that you can get some of the product uses because if you can get that for even the leads that you're working or your opportunities you are going to be have a huge advantage in again the value that you can bring to helping that customer along so um pql methodologies by far the thing that i hope people will will really start to embrace because it's it's quite powerful okay excellent alright good mitch will have will have you back on again and friends thank you for spending this time with me today please come back join me again tomorrow I've got new episodes every day of the week you sure you find something you enjoy until then if you have a moment please go to iTunes or ever you listen to this podcast and subscribe to the show leave a review your feedbacks really important to me so again thanks for joining me till neck time this is Andy Paul good selling everyone [Music] [Applause] [Music]