Revolutionize Your Sales Process with the Ultimate SDR Funnel Solution

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hello everybody and welcome to today's version of hq digitized linkedin live today we're doing um a discussion about how to be a champion sdr in with today's digital virus um and we have a special guest with us today uh and we'll uh i'll let danny introduce himself here in a bit uh danny goff um who i who i wanted to bring on with respect to this topic and we'll talk more about this obviously uh because he is in fact um a manager and trainer and recruiter all the above as well as an sdr and for other str's so he's he's going to be able to bring us some perspective on the world as it really is as opposed to the world that we all think we know uh when when we talk about us i think we're really gonna we're all really gonna enjoy that and i'm looking forward to it but i just wanted to talk a little bit as well real quick about digitize hq so this is a place to go where we can all talk about everything digital enablement for for the swiss c suite on down to the front lines right so this is where we talk about all things digital as it affects uh b2b and even retail when when that makes sense so um we have the founder of um funnel amplified and a number of other businesses mr brandon lee would you like to introduce yourself oh sure everybody uh as thomas said i am the founder of funnel amplified and uh my passion is around using social media to create first conversations with customers so that's uh that's why i'm involved with digitized hq nice nice and i am just so just in case you didn't know i am the cro chief revenue officer for funnel amplified and danny you're up give us all right thank you fellas good morning i appreciate you guys having up having me on here i appreciate the introduction a little bit background on me have been with driver reach now for four years uh prior to that i ran my own art manufacturing business so print fulfillment for artists all over the country all over the world ran that into the ground and wanted to get into technology uh believe it or not so had some friends that had done very well had kind of followed that s sdr to account executive model one of my good buddies does very well enterprise sales i saw his lifestyle he was doing uh remote sales working about three days a week and uh making a lot of money and playing golf the other day so i said there might be something to this and so had an opportunity got connected i'm in indianapolis indiana uh very involved with the startup community here got connected with driver reach started out as their first sdr sales development rep some people call them business development reps did that for a couple years and then about 25 000 phone calls and 40 000 emails later and i don't even know how many linkedin messages so maybe that's where uh funnel amplified comes in i think but uh here i am senior account executive so i just to be clear i'm not a currently an sdr leader but i am an advocate um i love and i respect the sdr position i think it is so valuable a lot of times underpaid and misaligned with incentives but they're a lot of times on that front line just working the phones working email working digital i will say every industry is a little bit different so you may not like some of my answers today to some of these questions with my outbound techniques but i'm also in an industry that is very slow to adapt to technology i know there are a lot of those out there but they are required in transportation by the federal government to keep an up-to-date phone number and email address that's in a database so the people that i'm selling to are on the phones so my recommendation would be whoever you're selling to meet them where they are and then we can use digital strategy social strategy to help engage yeah i know not in your head thomas you know you're starting with the clothes i don't even know what's wrong with you danny why don't you tell them how we met yeah so i was a i wouldn't say young i was about 31 years old took my first position in tech as the first sdr for driver reach and the big buzzword of shoot would have been 2018 was this social selling so i started to do some research just like uh every prospective buyer does today online and through social and then got connected with thomas did a a good training really valuable training at the time i was primarily focusing on linkedin social strategy had approximately two connections on linkedin i hadn't really utilized it um did about six months of training and uh here i am today with over 14 000 connections uh that really helped amplify my messaging my brand and it's been quite the ride so very appreciative of of everything that you taught me thomas and looks like we've got a tool that i've seen a big gap in the market where we don't have to track all that in spreadsheets anymore so let's talk a little bit about sdrs because that's really what this is all about today and what we really want to do is to help two sides of the equation if i can put that language around it so the first side is obviously the sdr themselves those that are currently doing it those who want to do it may be transitioning into that kind of role and secondly is is those that employ recruit hire and train fcr so we want to speak to both groups with with some perspective here and that's why your your viewpoint is so critical danny as as well as as brannon so i'm going to put this this question out and my question is and you can maybe kick it off danny because you're what is the main what is an sdr number one um and not just by by reading it up but by definition what they do and what are generally their main objectives yeah sdr sales development rep again typically on the front lines typically doing outbound work there are different um you know inbound versus outbound and different companies have different positions uh and roles for them but they are the ones that are typically qualifying and scheduling meetings in the software world the model is svr sets the meeting they're pounding the phones email using digital strategies different cadences and they are supposed to be teeing up the account executive who then comes in at some point does a thorough discovery does a demo to the the pain points that they've identified during that discovery and then closing that opportunity so front lines booking opportunities working to tee up that accounting executive depending upon how the process works within each organization right right brandon would you say that that's more or less what you've seen by way of the customers and clients that you support and work with now brandon your mic might be off i i did that so i wouldn't interrupt earlier and there you go i think you don't have to put like a dollar in the in the mute jar or something like that because of it um yeah um yeah i do i mean i think that uh you know and you know i'm opinionated on this um but but yeah i mean that's that's the role i won't disagree with that now whether i like it or not is another story but but yeah that's definitely the role their job is to go out meet people develop conversations and set up demos would you say that the the way that they do that job um has or is changing over the last number of years brandon what's your perspective on that well i think it's i think it's going to change a lot from from you know call it march of 2020 with the pandemic definitely put a change in it but i think it was changing before that because the data has been changing i think a lot of either sdr leaders or sales leaders overall have ignored a lot of the data i think i see what a lot of these very well capitalized companies have done their growth model has been just put more butts in seats and make more phone calls and send more emails not because it's the most efficient or the best sales process but it was really the only process a lot of them had and when you can throw money at it you put butts and seeds the challenges i see with the sdr model is high turnover lack of success burnout and so from a cost perspective for companies um i don't think it's a great model but i don't think they've a lot of companies got we have seen the alternatives yeah yeah i love that danny what do you think yeah i would agree i think everything starts with a solid foundation you and i were talking about this the other day thomas a lot like my example uh with my career day one spent half a day with a uh an sdr trainer very skilled at what she did knew nothing about our industry was given a script and then the second half of the day was hitting the phones um and it was like here you go figure it out sink or swim booked uh my first meeting that day went on a run of about a year and a half straight of booking at least one new opportunity per day so a lot of that though was i was in a position in my life where i had to figure this out i had a newborn on the way i was about to be a father and uh i my my goal at that time i wanted to get to that account executive position uh because that's where a lot of a lot of times uh that's where the money's made there are companies that do incentivize their sdrs and pay their sdrs well uh but that's the everyone's still using um i don't know if it was 2009 2010 that that hubspot playbook so they've got that that marketing funnel driving demand through ebooks through content then becomes a marketing qualified lead then at that point that's typically kind of mid funnel the sdr will begin their outreach sometimes depending on product market fit and where you're at and the stage of your business that sdr is actually creating the demand as well or at least the awareness maybe not demand so they're somewhat of a marketer on the front lines too but it is changing you have to get creative and i'll say this again you have to find ways to meet your prospective clients where they are well you're looking at email with an open rate of maybe 20 percent well and those you know i mean this is the thing that i've been saying and i'd love for so many from mailchimp or constant contact or somebody to come tell me i'm wrong is open rates there's a lot of technology on the back end that calls an email open even though human eyeballs may not have actually looked at it or they've opened it long enough to delete it and it still gets categorized the num and and i think a lot of marketers like to focus on open rates because it's a better number but the best the best number is click rates and conversation rates that have come from those emails and and we just don't talk about those enough and it's it's because they're they're not great numbers to be sharing 100 yeah what what's what good's an open if it doesn't create a conversation right yeah brandon with that in mind what can companies do now to improve what you just described in terms of how the sdrs can get better impact well and i think i mean danny's saying all the right stuff in my opinion you've got to go where your buyer is you've got to go meet them where they are and whatever if you're using that hubspot model and it's inbound top of the funnel they they read a few pages they download a pdf whatever it gets handed off to an sdr whatever that front process is to me doesn't matter as much danny is spot on we've got to start looking at how do we meet them where they are and that's where i think the biggest change is taking place that is the most ignored right now right buyers are not and there are some successes there are some successes with pounding the emails and pounding the phones but is it the most efficient use of a person's time if you're going to put another button a seat and pay a salary and train them to do something just because we've done that for the past 10 12 years 15 years 50 years doesn't mean right now it's the best use of time and i think we're in a very pivotal stage where over the last 10 years buyers have changed a lot and buyers have changed a lot because they do not need sales people for information now i got the grade my beard danny doesn't so obviously i'm a little bit older a little bit yeah i got a little bit more but uh you know when i started in sales in the 90s the the cold door knock and the cold call yeah the advantage that we had back then was they didn't have google they didn't have linkedin they didn't have you know the internet they didn't have landing pages they needed us for information and we were the fastest source of information they could wait for the journals to come out or they could wait for the industry newsletter things and all that but overall they needed us for information and so they were willing to let us have a seat at their table take them to lunch do whatever because they used salespeople for information rightfully so and we thought oh man we're killing it but that's why back then the emphasis was on could you close a deal not on could you generate a conversation and as buyers have changed in my opinion and technologies have changed buyers have just as much technology as we do they can unsubscribe they can block us they can be connected to us on social media but ignore us they can do everything they can to keep people out of their circle we have to earn the right to be invited into their circle well yeah that's why i think again it comes down to a foundation foundation with your training foundation with your tech stack data integrity data governance data enrichment if you don't have that then you're going to struggle so building the right foundation from the very beginning ideally you know all your systems talk to each other you have the right information in those systems uh but there is no perfect system all right like specifically your crm [Music] okay we saw a question here uh your crm is just really important like the the advantage of a crm is to get time back in your day and to work more efficiently but if you have a poor foundation and your workflows aren't set up properly and you're not aligned with marketing and you're not serving up those leads to your team then you need to reevaluate kind of that data governance or that the that foundation yeah so dan asked this question and um danny you might be the best qualified person ask it so is a phone more effective than email and getting a qualified lead interested or a meeting booked and i know thomas you have a very strong opinion on that as well well you know you got to break that out first right because you know one of the things that that we get um pushed back on is that people suggest we're saying phones are on an unnecessary tool and you'll never you never need a phone again well that's that's silly right i mean these things still do dial even though many people don't know that but they actually do dial um and in fact they do work so there is value but the value isn't where it used to be so with with respect to that question is a phone more effective than an email that in qualifying somebody whenever you actually talk to somebody it's a better way to qualify and to develop that opportunity vis-a-vis getting an appointment or or whatever step in the sales process you might be that said to get that phone call took probably another activity before you got there because if you dialed a hundred times to get that person who isn't answering an unknown number i'm i'm impressed but not so much because you probably wasted two weeks and doing it right when what you could have done is begun that process with a sales cadence that includes digital activity and allows you to create that opportunity so you can get them on the phone because now they know you're calling or now they know you're in a zoom caller or whatever whatever the scenario is that you've created by way of creating the conversation through engagement and thereby the relationship going from there so the answer needs to be set up in a way that makes sense from the perspective of is it cold calling or is it calling somebody form who already knows you because if it's cold calling the answer is no if it's warm calling the answer is yes right i want to circle back to something earlier because brandon says something kind of interesting about when um when he started real real quick i'm going to let dan know first i'm curious for dan to comment in on what your response was to that as well but go ahead thomas yeah please do dan i'd appreciate that keep going on what you may not like my my response here um with my 2000 plus meetings that i've had um in the last four years 99 have been booked over the phone um but every industry is a little bit different the the qualifying piece i i wanna you wanna be able to trust depending where you're at in your business you should be able to trust your data that you have in your crm assuming that marketing is aligned to help warm that conversation up um so if we if we've had a conversation pre like you're spot on thomas cold calling is dying but how can we warm it up how can we have conversations in other platforms to be able to create engagement and then reference that engagement on that phone call and you know i think that's interesting danny i i totally agree with what you just said i may disagree with how to do it i don't know you said if if you're coordinated with marketing that's warming up that lead for you my question is could the individual do that warm-up process better than expecting buyers to go to your corporate domain because we know buyers are hesitant to go to corporate websites it's just not part of their daily until they absolutely want to they're not doing it but becoming the term that i like to use is how do we make ourselves in a familiar entity as an individual can we become familiar to our prospects yeah as a way to speed up the opportunity that they are willing and excited to get onto a call with us and i know that we can and that's why i've gotten into more of the social activity because social activity is the opportunity that we can get in front of them we can engage where they are we can pop up in their notifications and they see our name and they see our face we come part of their social community and we become a familiar entity so that when you do either make that call or send the email you're no longer cold you're warm to maybe even hot because they like what you've said inside a social what do you think about that yeah that's that's the approach that when i first started working with thomas my strategy was more of a a content marketing strategy so i was new to the industry i thought about well it was actually uh david delaney i don't know if you know that name runs 10 bound um big sdr trainer advocate and i had been listening to a webinar of him i won a free training for a month where we had a phone call once a week and he recommended that i put myself in my prospect's shoes so i started calling up prospects asking them questions better understanding their business better understanding what they go through on a daily basis and then from that point i think for almost a year straight uh weekdays i i made at least one post on linkedin and it wasn't about me that see that's where i think a lot of companies miss out or misunderstand how to market at times from a personal brand standpoint at least putting out content that would be helpful to your industry well an interesting thing i remember some of your content back then like showing that that trucker i remember this who had passed away and they put his hearse on a flatbed and drove that puppy across the country and he had a convoy of followers from one end of the country to the other and you rolled with that and not only did that support the people that you work with it supported the industry as well and your your uptake and your build from that was absolutely outrageous and that's what that's what it's about but i want to come back to something you said um and and because it combines in with what brandon just said as well and you said that you have to go where your customer is right um now when you say that right the first thing that pops to my mind and this is of course me and not everybody has this problem but the first thing that pops to my mind is that you need to know your customers profile who is your customer where are they how do you reach them right from that you can say okay so they're they're generally here this is where i'm going to reach them wherever that might be now in your case with driver reach and you set it right off the top today right government regulates and mandates that those phone numbers and emails are published furthermore that those people representing those phone mails and emails are paying attention on the basis of the information coming to them one way or the other so right away your specific customer profile gave you an enormous leg up by way of reaching out to those folks and i don't mean to in any way negate the the the work you did in the and the results you got not at all but i'm saying that's a better position than somebody who's cold calling right or calling out without the ability to be recognized by that individual right and or have their email address and it truly is simply cold outreach in that way so that's not a versus b that's a golf ball versus a watermelon right so we we want to clarify that and that's why it's really important that we know where and i love what you said where are my customers right and once we determine that you know because it's not always going to be on linkedin is it yeah 100 and um to take it a step further my strategy and thought process okay so we typically sell to recruiting managers so who do recruiting managers look for in the transportation industry who are they trying to connect with drivers so i put out a lot of my content to be geared towards those drivers so get the likes get the engagement get the connections with these drivers and then naturally you know those drivers are commenting well okay the recruiting managers are looking for those drivers and then they happen to stumble upon my post see what i do so the the work that we did setting up the linkedin profile being clear on your mission then i might get a couple messages a day from recruiting managers after they do a little research on our business on me um so it can work in certain uh industries certain businesses doing marketing for your customers customers um could be a strategy and it worked very well for me building my network on social right right then you've got that engagement you look up what company they're with you have the federal database of these phone numbers and it's just that much easier um hey i really appreciate your your comment on my post it looks like y'all are hiring some drivers let's schedule a few minutes to chat i think we might be able to help or whatever your pitch is or your uh some people have scripts but we'll get it get into that that that's that leads very nicely into another another question another area here and that is to what extent um did you have a cadence and and a process that you followed and then repeat repeat repeat as an sdr then now and and what do you think about the future in that respect that's a great question um try to quite a few cadences over the years primarily phone and email social needs to be in there as well i think the issue is not not se ag again coming back to the the crm foundation and not setting up the the reporting the dashboards to be able to measure and manage what's working so it's kind of like flavor of the week we'll try this one week we might have gotten some results but we're not really a b testing like we should be but there absolutely should be a cadence primarily mine has been phone and email and then i involve social after that initial depending where the lead came from or lead was sourced all i'll involve social after that initial connection so after my initial discovery or demo call i will then connect with them on linkedin right well let me let me ask you this of all the people that you know to be both sdrs that you worked with right and str's in general how many of them do you think do work with the cadence a and how many do you think have an effective cadence b i i'd say maybe 50 percent okay with the cadence maybe right um effective probably under 20 just because it's not being managed appropriately they're not they're not doing an analysis frequently on what's working what's not it's ever changing and then the content is a big issue too with these sequences those that aren't familiar with sequences specifically with email pre-scheduled drip campaigns that go out okay is this content marketing content are we adding value is it personalized is it relevant i think that's a big issue just there's um a lot of times management can be so caught up with certain metrics how many emails did you send how many phone calls did you make that the quality gets lost and it's more about quantity but i do i do believe that you should have those those metrics those standards expectations set up front and that does need to be held accountable so whether that's 20 or 10 emails a day 20 calls a day 15 linkedin outreaches a day like there needs to be some sort of standard operating protocol when it comes to those it comes to that outreach see it's such a it's such a hard i'm sorry thomas did i interrupt you go ahead that wasn't an opening for brandon lee i don't know what it is you know well it's it's the hard part is this is that it's um you've got to put some protocols in place you've got to get some numbers some metrics of things that are expectations in place why do we do that because some people take advantage of it get that the challenge is it it then handcuffs other people to a process or a process for thomas here it handcuffs them to a process that may not be the most efficient here's what i mean by that i remember this was from the uh the podcast the brutal truth about sales and this was probably i don't know two years ago maybe even more but i love the story he had a guest on there and she was a younger woman who actually was raised with his daughter i believe and she had graduated from college she was in her first company as an sdr and she got called into her boss's office and she's telling the story on the show and she said she walked in and her boss said you know i want to show you this this is the list this is the amount of emails that so-and-so sent out and he sends out the most emails on a regular basis and she was like oh crap you know what do i do and she said and here's your list this to this and she's like nervous and she goes oh well uh let me explain she goes no hold on her boss says hold on here's your numbers your close numbers your sales numbers and here's his numbers what are you doing differently and her basic response was she was taking much more of a human approach she wasn't putting people through a machine to hit her numbers she was reaching that she had quality outreach versus quantity outreach and it was paying dividends because she was leading the business uh in the closes and i think that's the challenge that leaders have is they want to put metrics in place to you know kind of the whip um behind people to make sure that they're doing the work but what it forces what it causes is people to do the you know inefficient work mm-hmm again quantity over quality yep and it's i mean my opinion and obviously i have a bet but it's a training issue there's a better way to do it it takes a little bit more time on the front end you can't bring sdrs through like an assembly line and just go sink or swim you know that's still when you look at the numbers if 50 60 percent of your sdrs fail maybe more than that right the waste of money and time and effort but these companies like i said in the beginning they're putting butts in seats bunsen seats bunsen seats and figure the incentive as you've said is if you if you crush it as an sdr you can become an ae and that's where you start making money and so they treat sdrs like an assembly line when i think it's it's a little bit of a go slow to move fast approach and i think that's been lost like you're going to invest six to eight months in an sdr knowing that 50 60 of them fail right what if you hired few of them invested in them in that first four five six months so that they become successful and they don't leave or get fired at at the eight month mark because they're just not making the money that you said they could make yeah and that that stroll can look different for every company a lot of times they're the ones that are filling out your crm doing the research so then you've you've got all that work combined with the outreach combined with the expectations of the meetings book booked and the show rates it's just a lot so if i were to do it um you know if i had a startup in order to hire sdrs i'd maybe hire two and then either hire internally a researcher um or outsource that work so that all the fields all the data all the personas the contact info everything's accurate in your system so then when you are doing that outreach it can be more effective so you're not wasting their time doing crm work interesting thomas what do you think about that well i i think that's that's that's a that's a really good idea anything you can do to to speed up the process so more can be done where it's impactful is is is going to be important um but i but i think that um at the end of the day this is just my experience everybody's got different experiences and i've worked with uh some some rather large groups as well and i don't see a consistent sales cadence right uh whether it's at the str level or whether it's at the account executive level um i don't i don't see that i see in in most cases that there generally is some kind of defined sales process and cadence that they want those teams following but i don't see that as as you pointed out to earlier uh danny that it's that it's accountable that there are kpis and goals against it and that people are watching and following and you know accountability is important i mean nobody's going to deny that but when you have a 50 fall off right you want to be careful with accountability i guess but um i what what's really important is the dials right and this and this is something that people miss uh and what i mean by that is that in in traditional phoning and emailing outside of you know the tag line on your email maybe or or what your what that first line was that somebody might read there's not a whole lot of dialing up or dialing down of what you're you're either sending an email or you're phoning or you're not right it's it's pretty black and white with social and digital activities whether they be on linkedin or facebook or whether you're putting them in other digital media profiles that can be effective as a company or individual you can test you can do what you said danny you can do a versus b and you can do all these different dial ups and dial downs on different profiles on different digital and social media channels and not only that but i don't have to wait two weeks to see what my results were i can see my results in real time right now when i take that and i build it against the cadences that we've developed for my team of two or 10 or 500 because it doesn't really matter now i've got data and this is less for me about accountability and more for me about help making these people productive so now i'm dialing and i'm setting up the system in order for them to get the best impact they can be getting and now i can align those cadences and the steps we want them to take is it reaching out on linkedin is it reaching out on facebook messenger is it sending them to our group page is it sending them to some of the ctas on our website what are the different things that we can be doing in that cadence sequence that are going to make the whole thing run right and it's like indianapolis 500 man i mean the guy who fixes that engine they all have the same darn engines for the most part but it's the ones who can tune those engines the best and get that tenth of a second faster than win the race well this is very similar you've got to tune the engine you don't just throw it out there and hope there's enough gas because as the 50 attrition rate shows you there probably isn't so that's my take yeah i love the indy 500 i think we're i think we're only 93 days away but who's counting is that what it is it's a big deal here i was like spoken from a true indianapolis boy right there yeah you know i think it's for me a lot of this conversation it starts at leadership level because um for whatever reason over the last 10 years as um you know i take that 30 or 40 000 foot view as venture capital got more companies were taking in venture capital there was high pressure to grow fast and they didn't know what else to do and so and they had the money so they put a bunch of butts in seats and said hit the phones and then technology came out of that because they were hitting the phone so how do we make more phone calls how do we make sure that people are being efficient with their time okay let's send out the email cadences too so we can alternate phone calls and emails but they were all geared around being efficient for the company to grow but the biggest variable that they forgot about in my opinion is that the buyer's a real freaking human being and we haven't been treating buyers like a human being business has always been around that networking side and and i know there's a lot of people that say oh relationship doesn't matter anymore because the purchase is very personal to the buyer they still have to know like and trust to whatever extent that is the person that they're working with and you can lose that a lot faster when you're drilling for a demo which is what you're really empowering sdrs to do you got to get that demo every day at least one demo at least one demo at least one demo i have experience it really really turned me off and and i think it was like 2012 2013 i was getting messages from marketing from from infusionsoft screw it for forget protecting the guilty it was from infusionsoft i'd use infusionsoft before i quit and i was getting these messages paid in an email cadence about coming back and they had this special offer and there was going to be some special training that you could go into and all that and after i'm like you know i'm kind of curious um i hadn't quite bought into hubspot and so i said you know curious filled out the form and then i get a phone call from somebody and they had absolutely no idea what i responded to they went into sales mode and i'm like okay well hold on what about this they're like oh we don't do that like well yeah you better get your facts straight because that's what i responded to so again marketing put a campaign in place the sdr had absolutely no idea what it was and they just came at me from their script yeah right or training yeah poor data visibility probably had no idea where the lead came from [Music] there there was a lot of flaws in that but but the biggest flaw in my opinion as the buyer was the sdr had no idea and had no real concern about who i was what i needed what i wanted anything that they just push push push to get me to agree to a demo so they could throw me up to an ae and check the box that they secured a demo for the day or whatever you know maybe it was two per day at the time i don't know but their focus was just to get me to agree to a demo and they didn't care about anything else what it told me is they were trained equipped and motivated just to get me to agree to a demo to a point that they didn't give a crap about anything else about me yeah and and that's one of the biggest challenges i see with sdrs and i know you know leaders will go oh well we don't do that well you may think you don't but by the time the processes get in place what's heard by the sdrs is this is what i need to do or maybe i'm wrong what do you think dan no i think you're you're spot on um poor alignment from the very beginning the incentive is the meeting uh for that sdr role uh i i like to simplify things uh how many quality conversations can we have a day right how can we track and ideally we can track that somehow and have a dashboard um it could be through email could be through the phone through social but have i had five to ten quality conversations today and then sbr's also i think you you gotta think long term um so not just about that meeting right now today gotta get that on the calendar provide some value every single time you you reach out every touch point whatever channel that's on and be helpful and if you don't get it today as long as you're adding value then that might become an opportunity down the road can i see a question on that i'm sorry danny go ahead and finish i was just saying don't be too short-sighted yeah so i have a question on that and this really isn't as skeptical as it may sound but maybe it is i don't know um i hear that conversation a lot add value just keep adding value keep adding value you know give give give you know vaynerchuk's whole thing jab jab jab jab right hook it's you know is in um dave lorc one of our customers that says deposit deposit depends before you take a debit love the theory i see that very weakly supported inside companies they talk about it they give it lip service but at the end of the day when they're asking about activity they're like how many demos did you book and what they forget and this i go back to i always remember this story i learned so much in this short period of time back when i owned um by design publishing we had a call center this is back in like 2003 when i think call centers were actually effective we had a call center in the in the business for sales then we had the call center for customer success and my vp of operations came to me one day and she said hey i've got a problem with your behavior it's like okay what did i do and you know she was totally empowered to be my i told her she was my tell me about my blind spots and she said brandon you tell the customer success team that their job is more important than sales because retaining and and renewals were important to our success he said but your behavior every day you go out of your office and you walk to the sales room five or six times a day and check the sales numbers you walk to the customer success department maybe once or twice a week she said what do you think your physical behavior tells them versus what you say to them and it was this big aha moment for me is that no matter how much i told customer success how important their job was and everything my physical behavior of walking to the sales room five six times a day and looking at the board and seeing where our revenues were spoke a totally different story to them i had to change my physical behavior in order to change the whole culture in my company and i think that's where we get in these mistakes is that this 30-day pressure the quarterly pressure sales leader go back to how many meetings did you book and all of a sudden that whole give them value because they may not close today but maybe they'll close next week gets thrown out the door because now it's like shhh i gotta get that one today i gotta get it in today i gotta get it in today and we stop treating buyers like they're human beings and on their own journey and we try to force them to fit into our personal sales timelines what do you guys think about that danny i i think that's the way most organizations run today and those are the metrics that they seek is that number of meetings and some of those other items when you are adding value get lost and that data is not visible i don't know what the answer is necessarily but i would i would agree that that is a big issue the answer is that change has to come at the top and it's really really hard to come at the top and i think it's partly because a lot of sales leaders have spent their last 25 or 30 years doing the same process and what's happening is that they're living right in the middle of a big era of change and they're not seeing the change that's right in front of them i i think a lot of these sales leaders are like uh you know frogs and a boy in a pot that's that's on heat they don't realize they're boiling uh but they're gonna look up one day and they're going to be boiled i think those are all really good points and that's really valuable information especially given the changes that are happening and what people have to do but we have a question here and it's it's an interesting one so i want to i want to address it and then you guys can jump in and tell me what you think um my my answer to this is going to be different than yours i'm guessing danny um but maybe we can we can even duke it out a little bit on this one so my answer to this would be that your first step should not be to try and connect with somebody personally on a cold call your first step should be to find them research them do a little bit of digging on them and connect with them on social media thereby starting an engagement process where you can build a relationship that should be your first steps now once you've done that and you've learned a little bit about mary or john or paul or steve now you you've earned the right to engage share their content have them in your content now you can reach out and say hey john it's been great going back and forward i'd really love to talk to you first and have a virtual copy do you have time tomorrow and john says yeah that would be great now you can get that warm call have a great call learn about them maybe even get into what their pain points might be based upon what you do and what you've been reading in your content and vice versa but also you've gotten to know him or her and so you can bring more and have a real human conversation rather than a cold call where you've got to quickly find something that's important yeah hopefully you can guess that the right thing assuming you got them on the phone in the first place so that that would be my answer but but i leave it to you too now to yeah i'm with you 100 on finding ways to warm it up uh our methods are a little different and again by depends on industry business model all that but anything that i can possibly do to warm up that conversation so i would recommend if you're an sdr stop or start from the top down go for that ceo go for that vp or that head of the department and then work your way down and then you can reference that conversation because i don't know about you well i guess you don't have bosses but uh if my boss told me to do something i'm most likely going to do that so if so and so recommended that i connect with you know someone else then i'm going to reference that on that call or if that's where the this uh data integrity um having this accessible in your crm so you can see that you can see and tie in relevancy from past meetings from past opportunities um from past conversations so something could make that conversation more warm than just a pure cold outreach so hey we'd met with you in in 2019 i know the timing wasn't right wanted to see if you'd be open to scheduling a few minutes to chat and a lot of times that same person that was there in 2019 is not going to be there a couple years later especially in transportation um so little things like that doing a little bit of research in advance before your outreach so my mine's a little bit different it depends where that leads coming from i think we would all like to have a 100 inbound you know then look today this question could become an entire um one-hour conversation you see there's so many things that that frustrate me about this not from michael's perspective at all but this is why i say generating a conversation has become the new closing right this skill with sales people is needed in the beginning now as i said earlier today you know cold knocking cold calling 15 20 years ago was easy a lot of people wanted to talk to you because you were a source of information and now that they don't need you as a source of information getting that conversation is so much harder and as michael says here is trying to personally connect with them but i i believe if you ask a buyer right now things like we did years ago so what keeps you up at night look if you don't know my problems why am i talking to you right if i've got to explain to you what my problems are you haven't done your research if i have to explain those things to you then why are we doing it yet because i don't need you unless you're helping me i don't need you to take my time for me to tell you what's going on with me and i think that's the way buyers think they're too busy to do that and and danny i agree with you if we can reference something you said you said like looking in the data to a post a previous conversation but and as you said hey in 2019 we have this conversation but that's probably not the same person i think all that is spot on what we need to do is create those conversations ahead of time for ourselves and that's where social comes in sales has got to be much more especially in this digital world especially with buyers so busy and buyers have the ability to protect their own time and keep you out of what i call their circle of trust we've got to create the opportunity to get welcomed into their circle of trust and that's where social plays in we can go engage with them we can become that known entity as i like to say by commenting on their post or commenting and engaging on posts that they comment and engage with get into their digital community before we ask for that conversation treat your prospecting as a networking event not a sales event they just visually if you think of your you're in the networking room with the cocktail in your hand they have a cocktail in their hand what is that conversation like versus a conversation you have when you're sitting across the the table in their boardroom from them because generating the conversation is more like a networking event danny and i are at a networking event you have a cocktail in your hand and i walk up to you and i hand you my brochure and i tell you how awesome we are and ask if you got 30 minutes for a demo you're gonna call security or punch me in the nose because it's completely inappropriate behavior but yet that's what we end up training and requiring sdrs to do eight hours a day and then ask them at the end of the day how many meetings did you book yeah yeah and that's where you know michael's question i you know don't know anything about his organization or his training but he might be tasked with pretty much hitting the phones all day so if that's what management's telling him to do find any way that you can possibly provide relevance and warm up that call so it is not purely cold outreach be respectful were interrupting their day i think it was a study by gong a couple years back i don't really pitch at all on the phone i i don't pitch until i might give them a little teaser of what we do but i don't pitch until we've done a thorough discovery then i'm solutioning to their problems so for michael it start top down uh warm it up somehow through mutual connections through relevancy that you've done the research through social um and then i i go straight for the kill i show that i'm interrupting their day i am respectful and then i don't know if you'd be open to i'd like a few minutes to chat show you what we do that might be able to help you grow your company or whatever that pitch might be from there no i agree with you but and i i agree with you with one caveat danny i think we have to create that relevancy we have to create that um the desire in them to want to speak to us and that's where social comes in and we can't do that with a cold call and it's harder to do it with a cold email with the amount of emails coming in but we can do that in social and that's where our data shows is the big difference of where social comes in and that's why i like to talk more about social prospecting versus social selling absolutely that's that's a really good point well you know it what an incredible conversation and what i love is being able to get that feedback directly from you danny i see we've got another question here taking the top down approach i don't know if you want to put that up real quick brandon yeah absolutely that conversation would be different for a c-level executive hey can you help me out um just curious who handles uh marketing it depends on your persona that you're looking to speak to but absolutely you're not trying to pitch them you're simply getting permission to speak to someone else in their organization and then on that next outreach you reference that conversation that you had with that sea level exec yeah and with that sea level exec the the fact that you've done some research uh and that you know a little bit about them and the company and all the rest of it that isn't a nice thing to do that's the only way you're going to have impact right you've got to show that you know who you're talking to what you're talking about and where they're coming from or where they might be coming from in lieu of what it is you're going to ask because if you haven't done that they're not listening by the way that series of points is just as relevant if you're lucky to get them on the phone as it is when you're talking to them on social or any other conversation you're having so the world isn't about should we be cold calling or should we be doing this the world is about what's effective what's the best and most productive way for you to spend your time and social and digital prospecting takes the place of that in many cases today but you still end up building the relationship here or on a zoom caller or or eventually in person those things don't go away it's how we engage and start as as brandon always says the conversations because that's what it's about yeah that's good that's good do we run out of time gentlemen i think we we may have here that's good though so dan and uh michael and ben thank you for the comments at least the ones that we can see i know we don't with stream yard that we use we don't get all the ones from uh some of the platforms uh out there but i thought today was good what'd you guys think oh i thought it was fabulous and danny i so much appreciate your taking the time because getting your perspective really made it valuable appreciate the opportunity i love what you guys are building too excited to see uh that grow well everybody thanks so much for joining us at uh digitize hq if you uh if you want to join anytime and be part of the conversation please do uh if you want to invite other people to be part of the community and we have the linkedin group we have the facebook group thomas i don't know about you but i've seen the facebook group is so much more active than the linkedin group it's really kind of interesting yeah and i find it even people that i know on linkedin i end up engaging with them more inside of facebook it's pretty funny yeah digitize hq but yeah so all right everybody well have a great friday and we'll see you next week have a great weekend okay bye bye everybody thank you