Revitalize Your Sales Strategy with Expert Sales Development Outsourcing

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[Music] hello hello hello everybody Welcome to another version of our CEOs in sales Tech series that we're running right now I'm joined today by Derek Ray founder and CEO of Demand Inc and soon to be releasing uh lasso doai Derek how you doing today I'm fantastic thank you sir how are you I'm doing great I'm doing great like I said uh I ran through demand in with um David a while ago and uh it's really really cool you know product and solution that that you've been working on with sales teams and um and now you've got lasso coming out Derek how did you get involved in this what was the initial problem that you were solving with Demand Inc and then developing lasso yeah so demand is a best-in-class sales development as a service that I launched um almost seven years ago um since then we've we've driven we just we just crossed the 7even billion in pipeline book for our clients Mark which I'm very proud of but the the vision was really to create a um a solution where any client can hire us that want that needs help with B2B top of funnel acceleration if they have a internal Str Str bdr team or not we can plug in and accelerate top of funnel and the the three kind of core areas of sales development which is research copyrighting outbound experimentation to book meetings so um that's how it started uh seven years ago but prior of that I led go to market efforts for a ciner back security company that later exited and and uh became a unicorn um at exit so I've taken a unicorn you know SAS company to Market and prior of that I was in the media space um started a couple companies I've sold a few so I come from a a transactional top of funnel full funnel sales background and the the really the nature in terms of how you book meetings get in font of Brands and sponsors and opportunities and media um the amount of meetings you take you know Road shows conference Outreach um just continually feeling top of funnel um that I would say that ethos applied to uh SAS is why I had success in in a Silicon Valley context and so building demand you kind of have this best-in-class breed of you know top of funnel philosophy plus technology which is what lasso is that we built for you know utilizing open Ai and AWS and clearbit and a lot of machines to find opportunities that you're missing that's ultimately the the value prop for lasso which we'll get into but um you know at the end of the day I'm a sales developer I book meetings I wake up I write copy I research um I experiment and so um you know fast forward you know seven billion in pipeline over 100 team people on our team um 60 professional sports teams a lot of startups some of the most recognizable Brands uh Tech brands that are clients um nothing's changed you know you know the the work we're doing in terms of um you know peing interest in in Booking meetings or getting people to reply it's probably become more challenging uh for most but for us I think we certainly have a technology advantage and a and certainly a framework Advantage it's interesting because um in if you talk to sales Tech Founders there's sales Tech Founders that were in sales or in demand and or in you know sales development and they had this issue that they needed to work out so they developed a product or service and then on the flip side there's technologists who are just like wow you know sales technology is a huge you know Market I I should develop something and it's it's interesting because they they both have strengths and weaknesses right um like the sales sales guys like just get it but sometimes the the technology under the hood is like wait a minute this is like yeah Wizard of Oz yeah th% the um and for us you know we represent so many teams and so many verticals or so many clients I should say um that you know we built out a necessity right and you know investing seven figures in data having 30 people on a human research team to do Mechanical Turk uh programmatic capabilities for crawling parsing like best-in-class sales development um I'd say skill set technology ET tooling um wasn't enough like we still needed to build AI to solve gaps and anyone that's in sales anyone that's in sales development anyone that reaches out to accounts and contacts in a B2B way they know the difficult challenge of finding net new right and when you have these you know these you have these large data sets that you've invested in um and you've been engaging for a while eventually you start to lose sight of the forest amongst the trees right because the human cognitive ability to maintain relationships the dumbar theory I think it's like 120 relationships we can maintain in all of our lives our brains just weren't were never uh you know it was never meant for us to have a a total addressable Market in the thousands right and some of our clients will be 10,000 potential buyers 100,000 potential buyers and so that closing the cognitive gap of you know having a piece of AI to say like here's the contacts you're missing that match IP who you haven't contacted and here's what you're here's what you should say to them um you know we're we're building out an necessity out of what we like what is our ideal want need in technology and we went out and built it and that's what lasso AI is that we've just launched um the the and the best analogy to compare lasso it's like a phone book right and and I actually have cold called in phone books before I'm at that age where when my career started I literally had a phone book and and when you you know you know back then your thumb got dirty or whatever finger you used to track of your place in terms of where you were in the phone book and and the same issue then is present now in terms of the the phone book just went digital and it's hard to know did I reach out to this person and when was the last time or I have to go into CRM I have to you know hunt these things down and so you know building AI to say okay phone book's no longer going to open I it's just going to tell you here's who you're contacting here's who here's who you're not currently talking to so exclude open opportunities existing customers uh folks you want to avoid focus on net new like that programmatic ability for any salesperson to receive here's your like you know the Glen glary uh Glen Gary Glen Ross leads like that's what lasso is it's literally like these these These are the best leads and and not only that we didn't stop there we also built in open AI as chat GDP so and trained it with a ton of uh language training in terms of writing concise emails whyi now uh that's what we built in lasso so it's kind of like a salesperson's dream and it's because it's built out in necessity it's built for us and so we're excited to bring it to Market that's amazing and I think a lot of the people on the call are going to be Googling like phone book Glen Gary like I mean we we get that right because um we're probably in the same generation but yeah if you guys need to like Google that stuff U we'll put it in the show notes but um you you said something interesting in that there you broke it down with Demand Inc into like there were three big buckets it was like researching you know uh finding people and then writing you know something interesting so that they're they they'll talk to you what were those three buckets and then how did it kind of come together into what you're developing at last yeah so um research copyright Ting out about an experimentation and if you don't mind I'll share screen um so you can see uh our framework um can you see my screen yeah yeah and for people listening to this on audio um Derek's showing their framework at Demand Inc and maybe you can kind of like talk through what's on the slide in case um somebody doesn't have screen access yeah so left to right uh framework the right is you know objective and key result completed which is meeting booked a research copyrighting outbound experimentation those are the three buckets um meeting booking is is part of what we do as well but that's that's really um an afterthought to the core framework in terms of you know making sure you're researching the right contacts you're putting out the best message possible that's personalized every single message we we we send is personalized to the actual Prospect at the company which is a very important distinction um and then from an Outreach perspective best-in class um you know scientific experimentation on um on what's resonating um across it could be different icps Industries um uh seniorities job titles Etc and because because we can break all that down and we built uh on top of AWS and built a lot of machine learning so uh what's interesting is when you're using Ai and you're actually generating individual messages um sequences and cadences they might be thematic but the actual the being able to um have visibility down to the variant and the variation that you're using is incredibly important so say if you have a Cadence and you're targeting CMOS in the Fortune 500 and in within the fortune 00 there's different Industries and you notice that one value prop is resonating in one industry uh that's over indexing in engagement you know to do more of that and then you need to also it allows you to assess why the message might not be resonating in another industry right because the the goal of what we do in terms of top of funnel acceleration it's really about the experimentation yes we want to drive meetings yes we want to you know um help our companies you know hit their Milestones raise Capital exit whatever it might be we just had client that was bought by Apple um in the last uh in the last quarter which is exciting we've had a lot of clients make exits we've had over 30 you know significant funding events for you know some of the top um from you know top you know VC funds Kleiner uh Sequoia Nea Etc and so this framework in terms of exting top of funnel the most important part is experimentation in terms of if it works is it good is it bad you can use the the uh Chinese farmer example of you know horse runs away you know is this good is it bad we don't know let's keep going horse comes back next day with two more horses you know the um the the importance of of testing iterating um and and once you establish Champion variants you see things that are working you can do more of that like that type of visibility and we have a business intelligence tool is built for analyzing um cold email um when you see those those little wins those open rates reply rates meeting to opportunity conversion the up tick and you start putting more volume at those variants you see them start producing I mean it can be gamechanging for our clients and so the the the space and channel of email has become way more crowded way more noisy you know a lot of the spray and prey you know template based you know um you know send the same email to every single you know title person industry um and see if anything comes back I feel like those days are are really gone and the the announcements that Google and and Yahoo have made in terms of how we need to improve in the in in 2024 and meet the new requirements to send cold email um I think it's it's great for the industry um and going back to you know generational differences you we have an entire Generation Now of sales development folks that probably never wrote oneoff cold emails right and when you think about early sales development using email and the in the late 90s early 2000s we didn't have these tools where you could mail merge CSV you know blast out to 10,000 people um it was you know where we started in terms of looking at a person on LinkedIn writing a cold email guessing their email getting high bounces all of those things it's amazing where we are now in terms of being able to programmatically have better list programmatically you know find um you know contacts opportunities but the the ability to tell a story Peak someone's interest in email using plain text is is a skill set that it seems like it's been completely missed you know over the last two decades where because we went to these you know these volumetric plays and that skill set is more important now which is amazing to say in 2024 than it ever has been you know in terms of being able to Peak Interest and we really like to think of it as as like almost songwriting you know and in Nashville which I was explaining to you prior you know the show my wife and I were just we just moving out from San Francisco to Nashville and um you know in Nashville you know songwriting storytelling is is really the the industry there and it's fascinating because when you look at good songwriting and Nashville they'll say it's four chords in the truth right um uh cold email is very similar it's about getting to the truth it's about um personalization at scale um not being sounding salesy not creating sales resistance with a message even though we're salese like how can you be human at scale and have a reason of why you why now um so it's exciting times for sales development it's exciting times to bring technology to the table uh that helps you know salese find find Opportunities they're missing both at the account and contact level deliver personalized messaging um and also to you know have built it from necessity because we know you know every sales team we work with uh you know when we show them what we've built and then we put it in play you know they fall out of their chairs with excitement it's definitely a I think you know for the fear that AI is created for a lot of folks I I do believe that we salese are going to gener uh or benefit the greatest from a lot of the technology that we have now that we didn't have you know six months ago yeah I mean maybe these things are actually beneficial right because you you think about how much time do you spend as an SDR or a sales rep digging through files and files on LinkedIn and you know whatever data provider you're using and you're you're just trying to find the right person at the account to reach out to just right there I mean that's those are that's like hours a day for for a lot of these people and then once you find the right person and you get you have some confidence in their contact information now you've got to write an email that that you know entices them to respond and and that's really hard now they're even making it harder because you can't get your email to the inbox if you get you know marked as spam with all these things so it's like you're you're talking hours a day of the the mundane repetitious activity that nobody wants to do and and even at the end of it you might get to the end of like eight hours a day of doing this and have no results whatsoever so why not get an AI to do all that absolutely or a 20% bounce rate right yeah so you're um you know you're uh you're spot on and uh you said it better than I could but let me so this is this is lasso AI so this is our internal tool that we've we've been using for the last two years um and and I'll just I want to show you know any salesperson that sees this uh will immediately see the value but what I've done is I've uploaded a list an ABM list so account based marketing list so this is the Fortune 500 let's say I let's say I I sell the Fortune 500 companies and what I'm going to do is I'm going to tell lasso I want to find CMOS at at Fortune 500 companies um and I just want their email address I won't use a phone number because I want to avoid any type of uh data um concerns but what I'm going to do is I'm going to go after Cosmos that are actually within the marketing department um you might see assistant to the CMO or something that could appear because we are using a keyword um but what I can do with lasto is I can use exclusion in terms of and this could be open opportunities existing customers you know folks already talking to so now when you think about okay I'm just I have an account based list I'm telling lasso to go find this exact contact at this company and in in a matter of milliseconds we're going to parse 20 million pages and then validate every single email programmatically um in and and you saw it I mean that was maybe two seconds and this is still working through the entire Fortune 500 but what lasso is doing is it goes out finds person's name that matches the title and you can see the list is getting larger um and these are all CMOS at Fortune 500 companies and it's programmatically validating their email address it guesses first and goes through validation second and then I can add more data to this their LinkedIn direct phone number you know any firmographic data uh to the the contact information but what I just did was I just ran a 100% additive Gap analysis of buyers that match my ICP that I I currently don't have or I'm not talking to and I just did that in second so when you talked about you someone that's spending 30 40% of their time prospecting you can now do what would take months or even years you can literally do in seconds and that's that's and this is what we've had this is this is literally the internal tool that I'm showing you uh the public tool l. is much prettier but we've been sitting on this for about 24 months and this has been gamechanging for our clients so this this allows us to you know obviously the the cognitive load that sales development folks have in terms of trying to find that new that solves that problem so you can really focus on the more impactful aspect of your day and that's hopefully closing deals uh but the the other thing you mentioned in terms of um you know creating personalized emails or or contacting them we've also built GPT into this so there's but wait there's more right so we built GPT into this so yeah right I mean I mean you set it up so good you set it up better than I could I mean the the problem statement so if I were to sell so say I'm selling Demand Inc my parent company uh to um you know to um of course uh last pass last pass last pass is no offense to anybody from last passive but it's just the biggest piece of junk okay um demand demand okay so you're typing in what's the name of the company Demand Inc which is D so demanding is my parent company AI enabled sales development okay yeah exactly AI enabled sales development this is the White Glove you know top of funnel we plug in you know we become part of your team we push all activity you know full transparency it's like having a best-in class you know sales development team uh that's external right but we're part of we're part of your team so um and I'll finish doing the live prompt here uh AI enabled sales development uh for we'll say top of funnel acceleration and this is um I'm prompting AI so the AI will do the heavy lifting here um 100,000 meetings for our clients 7 billion uh in pipeline uh generated and we have clients uh like sorry Uber Salesforce Live Nation and 100 plus startups I'll exclude the professional sports teams we work with because it's not relevant for these Fortune 500 companies um and then we'll put a basic CTA we haven't uh spoken to your team yet hoping to schedule a demo so pretty pretty common you know you somewhat this is pretty concise I could could throw a lot more at it uh and let the AI go to work in terms of from a messaging perspective so it takes 12 seconds for the first message to return um and there they are see them coming in in Black here so we'll open this one so now you you know the the human time it took to um to prospect the entire Fortune 500 final what I'm missing now if you look at the bottom body and this is written for the CMO of AMD hi John I understand you over see marketting AMD are you interested in learning more about RI powered sales acceleration I'm reaching out as RI enabled sales development has enabled 100,000 meetings and generated 7 billion pipeline for clients like uber Salesforce Live Nation 100 plus startups can we schedule a demo to discuss our service right um from it starting keep keep in mind there's things that I could have done to prompt better to give it more information um there's things we can do like we can we can do what we call like post jacking or newsjacking so we can look for news about AMD or we can look about something John posted on LinkedIn because we have access to his LinkedIn so there's ways for us to enrich but from a core message perspective short to the point scannable you know less than 90 words ideally close to 50 like when you think about the data that we're sitting on in terms of what's working now we built AI to produce that messaging and and I did single prompt too so anyone that's listening it's using GPT to prompt and they're like uh regenerate regenerate more concise you know add this add this um we could prompt the entire Fortune 500 on a single umbrella prompt and write copy for every single CMO that's going to be personalized to that individual in a matter of you know human seconds right we're talking less than a minute Max so going back to what you said earlier in terms about being more efficient saving time we're going to save sales teams thousands and thousands and thousands of hours a year with this technology that's insane and so um you know for for people that use like Outreach and sales Loft and those type of things after those emails go out and you start to get some activity what's the next step for the SDR like then they come in the next day is there is there a notification or something when when somebody responds or how do they how do they know what to do next yeah so we built so we we built lasso to work with those things to play nicely so anyone that's using uh sales loft or or or Outreach um that's our that's our ICP for this right so anyone that's doing sales development sales enablement um this allows them to find prospects faster and then personalize email at scale so they could upload all of this um in a CSV into those platforms we also broke down the components of the message the opener the the first sentence the second sentence the CTA so maybe they just want to use lasso to do the personalization piece and they use that as a mail merge but it's broken down in a CSV format so any seller could say okay do I want to use the full message that lasso created or do I just want to use the elements of that message and then I want like a static second message that I've already written that stays the same but I'm going to use lasso for the subject line I'm going to use lasso for that you know first uh you know the first sentence hook which in those first seven to 10 words that's the most important place to have personalization because it's scannable pre-open so when you look at the subject line in the first sentence we actually see them in parody in terms of when you're optimizing for better open rates or better response rates those first seven to 10 personalized words in the the first sentence is really key so sales teams can can utilize like anyone using sales lofter Outreach can use um uh can use lasso to increase engagement uh but to answer your question ideally you know from a you know the the process that you're using now is simply just going to become more efficient right because you can you can increase your throughput in volume increase your throughput in terms of personalization so in theory that should increase engagement so ideally that salesperson comes in the next day has more opportunities to respond to to book a meeting and keep in mind this is all top of funnel so this is this is helping sellers um you know get on first BAS or achieve what I believe is the hardest part in sales is getting the meeting so hopefully this leads to more responses uh more meeting opportunities to to go close got it and and so they might come in and just have a couple of uh meetings already set on their calendar from from the the work that they did the night before absolutely that that's the dream right is the dream it's running while I'm sleeping that that is a dream it's a it's a calendar that you know an empty calendar that just you see it you know fill up with meetings right but oh my gosh yeah wow okay let me ask you this so so just a real world example so we just on 10 bound we launched a uh directory of sales tech companies and so there's two sides of the marketplace there's the sales tech companies that need to advertise on 10 pound and so I need to talk to their digital marketers and then we also need sales people to go on and review the sales technologies that they've been using so we can build up the traffic on both sides so you could take one of the other what do I do how do I use lasso to help with e either one or both of those yeah beautiful two- side Marketplace like all marketplaces right um so on on the on the tech side you know you just want to Define ICP in terms of um you know who do are they selling a product is you know is a SAS product and then you know Are there specific you know categories or you know you just want to look through in terms of you know what are the characteristics of those accounts and and essentially go through a list creation process in terms of here are the accounts right and if you have those already um then uh you'd run those through lass to go find the exact contact and and one caveat is our account list builder for lasso is something that we're developing for Q2 right now lasso is really for ABM teams that have already done that list identification or account identification to go find those contact we're missing we built the hardest part first which is the contact finding function um the second part is the accounts which is you know a lot of us have pretty much any sales team should have the ability to they already have their accounts especially you know if they're um you know if they're running an ABM model they already know who they sell to so if it's you know startups that sell SAS that have SAS product with x amount of funding you'd have a list like that you'd run it through lasso we can also help you create the list if you want us to but in Q2 we'll have our account list Builder so you could theoretically just build it in lasso and then say lass find me contacts that are match this criteria and So based on those two different efforts one you're going to be targeting an ICP or a a t a title of a salesperson right and so that message that prompt to that person is going to be slightly different because the CTA that call to action you're going to say you're going to explain you know um that you're looking for you know a different type of action or behavior and maybe there's a different value proposition for them participating versus the other one where you're essentially selling 10 bound and why you know this is different or why this is additive or you know maybe you have something different from like G2 or or you know whatever is out there in terms of that you want to Benchmark or or Baseline in terms of why they should you know fill out a profile and you know put their technology into your platform um so both of those functions though in terms of finding those contacts creating messaging that's you know specific to them that's personalized as well hey seeing that you lead this seeing that you lead sales for said company I'm reaching out to you specifically for this reason like that type of umbrella prompt with lasso exactly what we built it for that's perfect and so I still need to have some creativity and market knowledge in order to make the prompts right so when is the AI gonna come and be able to make the prompts for me no I mean it's coming I mean there's I mean now and anyone that's using GPT like the the the creativity you can like and I'll you know if you ever gotten writer block right um and you like yeah always so GPT it's like and sometimes you already have you have the right maybe it's the rewarding but you just want to test it and I just the other day I was I was trying to you know find a um a way to imply a sense of urgency into a message without sounding salesy and I'm like and I'm prompting GPT for that and and so prompt engineering that is definitely something in in terms of we as humans are very new to from an AI perspective and this is really a moment in time and there's probably years from now we'll you know look back at this and laugh about what we're talking about um but it is a thing and um and we're training we're training Lassa with over four million emails so we have um we have a a tremendous advantage in terms of the volumetric machine learning that's happening now to to train in terms of what's working even when you think about probability going after like SE Suite or high high seniority the type of messaging you're going to use there we see the machine learning telling us okay with these types of messaging you know you're going to approach a SE Suite different than a VP different than a director and it's most likely to be more referral based connecting us folks in your team knowing that you're going through almost like a scheduling process that's probably going to involve a executive assistant and when you can do that programmatically or the AI smart enough to know to switch the the type of message from direct to referral based on seniority or even ideally down the road you know maybe we have you know machine learning down to that individual contact like what type of messages do they actually respond to if we reach that type of you know scale potentially like that's crazy yeah wouldn't be wouldn't it be cool it's like this person only responds to you know uh you know emails that are 15 words or less and so you're write like so you know to write a sentence it'd be pretty cool but and from a recipient perspective you know we're not encouraging you know more you know spray and prey mass s you know um you know you know messaging we're really encouraging you know personalize why you why now why I wrote this specifically for you um to the point of uh the test that you're passing is this is this written for me right and and really focused on the prospect so I think that the the the medium and the channel of of sending an email is about to go through um a new era it's already happening we're seeing it um and I and I and I think that as as recipients of cold email that we all see and the amount of spam we get um I'm optimistic that that's going to change I'm optimistic that um the you know Google you know monitoring span complaints you know requiring AB unsubscribe um full authentication all of the things that Google and Yahoo are rolling out in in in in February 2024 um those are good right and and some people might be sitting there thinking this is the end of fun like I've been you know sending templated emails for a very long time how am I going to do this and they've probably seen a diminishing return in the last 12 months because we see it you know we see that from an email Channel perspective if you're sending templated based emails right we know that and we hear it from the teams we work with that there's been 20 to 30% decline in the same you know types of activities they were doing a year ago they're just producing less now is is there you know does a recession factor into that is it economic you know um there's a lot of variables that can affect that is it even deliverability is it because your messag is ending up in spam um we do see this email as more problematic than it's ever been but as The Optimist and also the problem solver and someone that uh is effectively paid for booking meetings right we see it as an opportunity and we happen to have built a technology that's timed perfectly coincidentally for this new change in terms of policing from you know Google and Yahoo and really this I think a more a cultural change that we needed to make as salespeople to be more you know to be more personalized and effective at communication so um it's definitely a glasses half full opportunity uh Challenge and we see that things can break but our response organizationally is good you know because if it's broken for us it's broken for everybody how can we how can we improve how can we how can we be better at at sales and sales development so it's an exciting time yeah it's interesting because out you know Outsourcing your sales development makes a lot of sense in that you know you you you don't necessarily want to put the car together and put you know become a licensed mechanic you just want to get in the car and drive you know so it's just like basically you're uber for sales development you just call up the agency and you're you're on your way you don't have to learn all the mechanical stuff but it but a lot of companies want to do it in house because they feel like over it and and they're they're um they're going to they're going to develop their sales team you know as as the bench strength to bring it up but but um you know I mean there's there's so many uh great opportunities for a company like yours because you're an expert in the process of sales development and all those aspects and you know a a like a cyber security company for example they're an expert in cyber security they don't need to also be an expert in sales development they could just get an agency and done then they don't even have to hire sdrs you know and buy all this equipment for them they could just pay a invoice right yeah absolutely and you know creating bench dep for sales teams is super important what's fascinating is when you think of about the top of the funnel it's it's top of the it's top of the funnel bottom of the food chain in terms of bottom of the org chart typically like a lot of people have seen this as an entry level position but it's the top of your how you start your entire Revenue process right and and how we ended up there in terms of top of the funnels bottom of the food chain in terms of from a priority perspective we're going to hire people out of college to dial and smile and dial and and you know let the cream float to the top that mindset um I mean that is a an absolute Miss in terms of what the discipline is of sales development and I I do believe when you look at like you can go and get a marketing degree you can go and get these you know certain types of you know uh if it's you know content and copyrighting and design where's sales development because sales development requires the skill set of recurrently without having the AI that we're showing you and programmatic kind of efficiency that we're developing like you need to be able to like you're going to be buried in sheets every day as in sales development and you're going to be doing things that are never meant for a human to do like list cleaning right so what is that so whenever you parse a list of accounts and it like say it's Pepsi right you want to reach out to Pepsi and say hey so you do this for you know for Pepsi but normally you get like the legal name it's like Pepsi incorporated or something and so you have to spend your day thousands of rows uh thousands of cells and you're looking for you know to list clean company names and you're spending hours doing that to make sure that when you merge that into an email it's not going to a hat tip that you're clearly using automation I've done that yeah right subject lines I mean even even finding like the Casual in like the inner tone like you do social media at said company at Disney will say like you're not going to reach out to someone and say hey seeing that you're you know vice president of social media Disney you're gonna say hey see I see you lead social for Disney we should chat right what is the human like inner inner tone sound like and in order to do that you're going to be burning a lot of hours doing manual rep uh repetitious boring stuff um and then and then you have to put on your copyrighting hat and be David Ogie right and write and write these amazing messages or just spray and pray and hope that you know it is a numbers game and and as long as you annoy enough people with cadences that have 26 steps in them something along those lines they're going to eventually like give in and respond and so the the discipline though the craft of sales development peaking interest personal ation at scale understanding how to manage data um I mean it is such a complex you know type of role and skill set to have and then and guess what in six months you need to become an AE at least that's the you know you know it's a it's a stepping stone to something else and people don't stay a career in sales development tickling unless they're maybe uh you know leading the department Etc but I think culturally we have some changes we need to make as as businesses as B2B business in terms of sales development is here to stay right the the skill set of developing the ability to do B2B Outreach at scale is is here to stay um the tooling is coming in to help us and so I do think that we'll see you know industry changes where you have folks that are you know you know Chief you know in sales development or or not just Revenue like cro but in terms of getting you know the conversation started um it's kind of like the the lead off hitter for a baseball team I get on first base so um you know the the the the lineup or the power hitters can potentially score a run and that's you know nearly identical to what we're seeing happening in business that's so true it's it's interesting because usually the CMO or the head of marketing is on the hook for developing pipeline but they've never been an SDR before or they've never been in sales they came up through like you know brand or demand gen or something like that and so it's just it's almost like the person in charge of what you're talking about has no idea what the inner workings of the sausage making are are at all they're just like I'm going to go to a Gartner you know magic quadrant meeting and and go to speak at this conference and stuff like that so it's just this weird you know disjointed thing the the other thing is you said something interesting there's there's some colleges out there who have sort of a there's a marketing you know bachelor's degree with a sales certificate that you can get it's sort of this starting ugly stepchild over in the corner nobody wants to say oh I majored in sales you know then again most of the people being pumped out of these bachelor degree programs go into sales or they become SDR so there's no training or anything they just are all of the sudden yeah you know now they work at home and they've got 10 different tools and stuff it's it's a very weird situation but well the I think the it's funny you say that because the whenever we present copy to a client so here's what we recommend right if if if our client is a marketer the reaction I mean they'll practically fall out of their chair because we couldn't be more opposite than a way a marketer approaches store storytelling right Mark marketers are a myopic they think about the product the product name uh even the way they've been educated to communicate with like a introductory statement the supportive evidence and the conclusion like in terms of how we all taught to communicate and then you look at our how we text message right you look at how we how humans actually communicate to each other and and when we produce messaging it's Prospect first it's human first we're saying like you know Pro names are you know important to you not a prospect that's never heard from you right so we're going to exclude all these things your normal way of communication and we're going to be um explicitly human to the pro to the person and so for example if it's conference Outreach and we're headed to Vegas subject line might be connect in Vegas question mark right like you're headed to Vegas I'm headed yeah you're headed to Vegas I'm headed to Vegas and and then you know your opener is going to be hey senior attending you know RSA in Vegas uh and you do this for say company we should find time to connect here's a couple you know things about what we're doing I think you'll find it interesting let's uh uh there's a starbacks to the bottom of of the escalator maybe we can find a time to meet there right like that human message and when people receive that they'll never guess or at least now they will because AI is here but in years past the amount of success we've had Being Human it's interesting that we need machines to be human and then the actual the humans the actual human generated messaging is this you know uh verbose you know blah blah blah of what we built named blah blah blah built by people that are backed by blah blah blah from you know blah blah blah backgrounds like the the the types of you know my tech crunch article exactly my tech crunch article oh exact oh yeah yeah Tech crunch but yeah yeah here's myword email that has a link at the bottom of it you should go read and learn about our case study it's like come on you kidding we have time no one has time people Scan they don't read anymore it's a it's a scanning game on emails and so uh the more it's it's shorthand it's it's tweet length it's it's you know brevity it's and it's cutting through the while not sounding like you're a salesperson right because sales resistance like that's the that's the problem with engagement and emails that are going to spam it's because you're writing spam you know it's it's this super salesy email it's about you it's not about them and um and it's and fascinating that you know it takes a machine to help us um be more human uh but um it's also I think a a time for change and and you know with change comes opportunity so it's exciting times it is and and I mean you're you're living it every day so okay so Demand Inc and then lasso um how do people I I think you're going to get a lot of interest in this so how do people get in touch with you if they can they do uh a a trial or something something like that how how would it work yeah so go to lasso doai okay um you can sign up for account uh for no cost we have a pay you go program we have a bunch of uh we have a bunch of launch benefits and perks to Discount to get people using we want as many as many folks on the platform as possible we want their feedback um we want to hear what we should build next too we got a bunch of cool stuff that are in the works but um we have a very much a for us by us mindset in terms of what we're building in lasso so lasso .i um you will get connected with the human if you're hearing this the beginning of 2024 uh because we are embracing you know the community we want your feedback we want to show you it how to use it um give you bonus credits to to get as much value out of it as you possibly can um if you want top of funnel or full funnel or top of funnel white offering through Demand Inc in terms of you want to sales development team uh to plug in um that's Best in Class go to demand inc.co so demand and in.co um you can find us there and uh there's a contacts uh for um on the page but you know from a lasso perspective to and think of lasso as it's a research you know tool in your copywriter and then demands kind of like the full manage service um we can show you both and anyone that's interested we're happy to chat with you um through either Channel and you can book a demo on lasso as well so um whatever way you come through um just let the folks know on our in that you want to at both and we'll and you we'll run you through a demo to see you know if one of them speaks to you that's perfect and and I know that um lasso and Demand Inc are on the 10 bound directory lasso has a few preliminary reviews already and and then I'm working with Dan to get a couple of reviews on Demand Inc as well so you guys can also connect and go through there and um I'll get you in front of Derek so you can check this out Derek thank you so much for coming on the show good luck with everything thank you sir thanks for having me and hopefully I'll see you in the Bay Area sometime yeah I'll see you after Nashville right all right take [Music] care