Many entrepreneurs are skilled sales people, but many are not. What do you do when you need to hand the sales leadership to someone else?
In this episode, Mike and Mark talk about all the challenges that an entrepreneur faces when they are considering for the first time to bring in a full-time head of sales, a full-time sales person, or hiring a firm. It's not an easy transition and often times the real issue is that it's really not time yet. The challenges are complex, and a lot of it has to do with confusion between the roles of sales and marketing and the difference between the two. Mike and I dig into many of the situations that make for success and for failure during the transition. This discussion is particularly relevant for commodity or services businesses.
GET IN TOUCH:
MARK LEARY:
www.linkedin.com/in/markhleary
www.leary.cc
MIKE FAHERTY:
https://www.facebook.com/ProSalesConnection
https://www.prosalesconnection.com/
Production credit:
Engineering / Post-Production: Leo Medley
Art / Design: Immanuel Ahiable
January 23, 2020, Wednesday
SUMMARY KEYWORDS
sales, prospecting, marketing, people, business, ceo, selling, deals, conversation, salesperson, person, question, generate, customer, building, company, meeting, hire, client, leads
SPEAKERS
Mark
Mark 00:00
So we're rolling. Cool. We are live. This is you're doing it wrong with Mark Henderson Leary and my name is Mark and I have a passion that you should feel in control of your life. And so I want to help entrepreneurial leaders feel more in control of their business. So today, we've got my good friend, Mike ferry, the CEO of pro sales connection, and a graduate of the Goldman Sachs 10,000 small businesses program and just a successful entrepreneur all around who's really obsessed with what it is to, to grow revenue for small business, particularly technical technology companies and tech services companies. Is that is that fair?
00:36
Yeah, absolutely. We We specialize in b2b and everything about growing. Excuse me, can you hear me okay? Could be okay. They have a little bit of a allergies today. It's kind of nasty.
Mark 00:48
Oh, don't forget, I've got this. This is the sanitizer. If you spray this on the microphone, if you're afraid of the germs, that's, you know, if you're germaphobic, don't let go. I'm not
00:55
afraid of germs. But you know, you may want to spray when I'm done. Now I Well, I Well, that's part of that's part of the process,
01:00
no, but everything that we do is b2b focused. And we work with all different sized businesses. But really, this the sweet spot for us is emerging enterprise companies, companies that are over a million dollars, they've already learned how to sell their thing. And now they just need to start doing it at scale. And, and that's really where we can come in and really optimize processes for them, their small businesses that want to be big businesses versus small businesses that want to be a little bit better. Sure,
Mark 01:28
yeah. I think every business I've ever talked to worked with struggling with growing to be something a little bit better, more. And, you know, one of the things that I wrote down a couple questions, and we'll go over what we need to go, that's interesting, but I mean, revenue and sales and marketing is everybody wants to know something about that. And a couple questions are kind of my record, when people show up. And they want to grow. What Don't they know that they think they know? Well, okay, what do they know? What do they not? And that's the question. What do they not know that? I think, no, you need them to get in position, they're ready to go in there, you're in you have to ask them questions that they don't think they have to answer.
02:09
Well, I think I'm surprised at how, how much people don't know that I think they should know. It. So that's always a little bit funny. I'm usually tickled after a discovery meeting with a with a business, I think, I can't believe they haven't thought about that yet. So that happens a lot, to be honest. But they're, you know, entrepreneurs, people starting businesses running businesses, their heads down. A lot of times they come from the technical side, right? So they, they, they built something, they built a product before they thought about really building a business. And so they're great at building products. And they're learning the part about building a business. And so that dynamic goes on all the time. And so when a lot of times whenever I first engage with someone, what I think they should know that they don't yet is some of the fundamentals, what is your message? What is the thing? How do you talk about the thing that you've just built in a way that causes people to want to know more about it? or want to experience it or want to consider using it or buying it? That's that's a big one. The other one is, you know, how confident are you that you understand who the people are that are going to actually pay for this? And what problem you're solving for them? Well, so
Mark 03:23
that's an interesting question. Because the way you ask that, how confident are you? It seems to me that people I've worked with never even asked the question like they like, you know, how confident that you know, who is your target market? And the worst answer is the reflexive Will anybody or something kind of in that category? And so how do you how do you interact with that first person, that person in that first conversation is ready to monetize? And I want to talk about fast path of revenue in a minute, but like, they're ready to monetize you like, Hey, who you're selling to? And I'm like, everybody, like now that's not well,
03:55
well, that. So I asked the question that way, because I'm polite. And so it's just us here, you don't need to be polite. Well, that's the way excuse me, that's the way I would ask the question, because in often I may answer is I'm not very confident at all. And so then I say, well, what's what's what's your best guess? Where are you at in understanding that, and then they'll talk for a little bit about what they think it might be. But that's, that's precisely why when we engage customers, we have the biggest impact whenever they're sort of just past that first million dollars. And, and that's a, you know, you can get there sooner, sometimes it takes longer for people. But one of the thoughts, you know, one thing that sort of developed over the last, I don't know, maybe six months to a year is this notion that they're the first the the beginning phase of building a business is hand to hand combat, okay, it is, you're having to grind out every single deal. And until you've done that enough, you haven't validated all these assumptions and all these These assumptions that you've made about who your customer is, and why they want this, or why they should pay for it, how much you should sell it for and what process you'll use for selling it, how you should deliver it? Should it be a subscription? Should it be a purchase? Should it be installed? Should it be in the cloud, you know, you have a lot of assumptions about what you think that the customer is going to need or want. And until you've sold it about a million dollars worth, you're, you're still understanding, you're still learning and you're still developing that what it is that you're going to do
Mark 05:33
a million dollars worth. Okay, so I counter that a lot, which is somehow the person in front of me, or I'm talking to is trying to sell in a, we'll call it programmatic way they want it, they want to create the sales engine. And the person I'm talking to has not on their own hands, repeatedly sold the product, right? And I've learned like, Well, that doesn't work. So how do you get somebody from? Because there's different scenario, there's like somebody has been promoted to the position, there's somebody who isn't, there's an entrepreneur who managed to get a couple of big deals. And so there's selling skills, selling reps was like two or three major deals and the rest of the time, they're, they're trying to passively get business some other way, somehow the person in charge of growing the business just doesn't have the experience in the sales process. What do you do there?
06:25
What we help them understand what the deficiency is? So just by asking, you know, thoughtful and powerful questions, right, so you get you get someone to talk. And once you ask enough questions, and an intellectually honest person will say, you know, you're asking me good questions. These are reasonable questions, and I should probably know they answer them, but I don't. Yeah. So where do we start? And how do we get to the point where we understand this? And so sometimes for us, depending on how, what stage they're in, if they're really startup stage, minimal viable product, you know, proof of concept stage, then, you know, the answers might I just might give them some advice, and then tell them to go get some reps, get some reps, you know, let's, let's get some deals done. Let's get some stuff on the board. And then let's ask better questions about Okay, well, what happened? What worked? What didn't work? What assumptions? Did you have going into that conversation that that were disproven throughout the course of the process? Do you think you're ready to scale this? And oftentimes, what they've got the reps, they go, No, I'm not just yet I still have a little bit more work to do. So there's this, we use it a lot. I don't know if you're familiar with the idea of the entrepreneurs journey. It's, it's this, I don't know where it came from, I should be able to reference the source of it. But I've seen a bunch of different versions of it. But really, if you picture a line graph, Okay, so the first, the first phase of this process is sort of this slow incline. And, and along the, I guess, the y axis, the up and down axis is there is confidence. It's not money, just entrepreneurs. commotion, yeah, okay, emotion, right. And so as they're starting the business, they're kind of on this slow incline, they're feeling better every day, proof of concept is going well, they're ready for minimal viable product, and they start getting excited. They start, you know, testing in a beta testing, some people are starting to show interest in the solution. There may be the entrepreneur, the business owner, the CEO, closes a dealer to he gets a couple things going get some revenue coming in, he starts to get excited. He's like, okay, you know, this is getting to be a real thing. Like, this is going to be a real thing. And I need to start building out infrastructure to grow a business. And they do as much as they can for as long as they can. And then they their confidence level really takes off. They go, Okay, we've got it. in there. They that's whenever they usually go out and hire that first sales guy. Okay. Yeah, right. So they go get that guy. Usually it's a, it's a real seasoned vet, right? Someone from inside the industry. So when they used to work with the other place that they were at before, he was the best guy over there, or the best guy they could afford from over there. And they bring in this this, this person who has all these great skills and experience skills that are completely different than the CEOs because he was he or she was often the technical founder, right? So their skill set is building the thing, not necessarily selling the thing. So at times, they differ probably too much to this person, because this guy comes in with all the bravado of a seasoned sales guy and says, Look, I got this thing. I got it, don't worry about it. We're going to grow this thing we're going to we're going to do really well. competence levels soaring for the CEO. He's like, Okay, we've got it. He starts calling out to his Rolodex, his or her you know, relationships and network and starts bringing in pipeline and bringing in deals, confidence levels now soaring that that line is steep, steep, steep, climbing, my confidence as high as it's ever been. Okay? pipeline is filling up deals are Getting closed revenue is being generated. Everyone's excited. And then there's this Oh, shit moment. Okay? Absolutely, we're good, we're good. Okay, there's this Oh, no moment that happens. And they they start having conversations with the with the sales guy, they're like, Okay, this is really great, but I noticed that there's fewer and fewer opportunities in the pipeline. what's what's going on white wire? revenue is good, that's going well, but I'm noticing that we're the controllers are even paying attention. Or noticing that fewer fewer opportunities really getting put in the pipeline, things are starting to slow down. So they have a sit down with a sales guy like what's the what's the deal? What are you prospecting? Like? What are you doing to generate new leads? And he's he says, I don't prospect, that's not what I do. Right?
Mark 10:50
Okay, that's a huge deal, right? So that's the nerve that I hit. A lot of times it's marketing and selling are different. And if you don't have marketing as a thing, where are you prospecting? And there is that role of? How does the prospecting fit into the sales? Guys,
11:06
you get into a really uncomfortable conversation with that guy, right? He says, No, that's not what I this is what you brought me in to do. That's not my skill said I did that 25 years ago, I don't do that now. So you need to invest in some marketing, you need to get some lead generation going. Because, you know, you know, I can close deals, but I'm not gonna go out and find deals. I've already done. I've already worked my network. Right. And that's what we've been living on. When are you going to start investing in generating demand?
Mark 11:32
So that's, I mean, I don't want to stop you there. Yeah. But But like, there's a huge question there for every business, which is to understand where the leads come from, and how that turns into structure. Like, how is your business structured? Where can you programmatically create leads with Purdue Amir up to see Do you have 1000s or 10s, of 1000s? of prospects? And you need to generate lots of leads low cost through website and digital? Or are you a very high dollar premium service that requires? High biz dev? Hi, prospecting from the from the sales rep, or is the is the marketing component really on the person who's picking up the phone and dialing and getting that going? Because it's not apples to apples, most of the sales positions, I would say all the sales positions I've ever worked with, have a prospecting component. The question is, how much is it? Is it like 80% of your job prospecting? Or is 5%, your job prospects? But you got to figure it out? Yeah.
12:38
I mean, look, a good salesperson is not going to wait, right? What I see often is not going to be efficient, for the business to give them leads, they're going to go find it, they're going to find the business. And that doesn't necessarily mean that they're good at it. Right? That doesn't mean that they necessarily have that skill. Sure. There there. There are hunters and there are farmers, those that's a real thing. There are people that are good at cultivating relationships for the long term, and there are people who are good at
Mark 13:09
that's a very fair point. So when I was thinking about that, I was thinking about the hunter, the product, the the farmer account management side is a completely different conversation. Yeah,
13:17
yeah. So what we also see is, which is an interesting point is, you know, I talked about, I talked about this, this ascension of the entrepreneur spirit as things are going up and everything's going well, and he's starting to realize how he may he or she may have a problem that there is, it's sometimes when you confront that salesperson with the issue and you say, Okay, look, man, I need you to start prospecting, I need you to start building a pipeline for deals like, you know, can you make cold calls, right? Sometimes the answer is, I don't do that, which is the honest response. But unfortunately, and this is the really unfortunate situation is whenever the entrepreneur is told, Yeah, no problem. I got that. That's exactly what I'm gonna do. I'll start, I'll start prospecting, we'll start building a pipeline. Great idea. That's what that's what I'll focus on. In, especially in enterprise sales, long sales cycle, high dollar value. I've seen sales guys in that situation, I call it hiding in the sales cycle, they will, they will hide and they can hide for 612 18 months before they really really gets discovered that they're actually not going to be able to generate any more pipeline they've sold to everyone that they know. And there's they're not, they don't have it in them or they're not motivated to go after really drive new engagements with new customers and entrepreneurs left. You know, thinking that it's happening it but being increasingly concerned that they don't see the uptake and they don't see the pipeline building. If they're even aware of have to be measuring that and tracking and looking at it. A lot of times it's just a trust? Well, I don't know, I don't understand that. That's Steve's job over there. And he's working on that. And he assures me every week, every month, or when we see each other, that that he's working on it. Well, there's Hi there,
Mark 15:16
well, yeah, they're hiding is absolutely there. And they may not even know that they're hiding, they might feel like they're doing the right stuff. But what I see that the way you described it, I kind of heard it as if they bring in their Rolodex. But that's not the only way that problem happens is anytime you bring somebody into a spot where there's an opportunity to farm, and, and people do this all the time I did this, I want somebody to hunt, because I wanted them to grow. And while they're hunting, I also need them to farm. And what that does is it creates the illusion of value. I mean, it's not true, because sometimes there is value in retention and customer relationship. But I found that they that took all of their bandwidth away to hunt. And now I put somebody who might be actually be a hunter and a farmer or a farmer in a hunting position. And now I've taken away all their ability to hunt and all the activity and calls and prospecting they're doing is doing nothing to expand the opportunity. And I completely put them in a well that they can't get out of and they can't grow the business and it was my fault.
16:16
It is leaders of sales organization CEOs, entrepreneurs make that mistake all the time. And it's, it's, it's unfortunate. The these what will happen is that they will, you'll start to have conversations like I can't prospect because I've got I've got these three or four accounts that are taking up all my time, and it's really just a Do you want me to stop paying attention to our biggest customer? Is that? Is that what you're asking me to do? Right? So they put the entrepreneur, the business leader, the sales leader, in some organizations in this really tough spot where they're, they don't really know I need you to do both things as well. Okay, I'm gonna keep trying to do both, I'll do better. And then he goes, Yeah, takes care of because every every sales Look, I've done this, you were honest, I I'll be honest with you, I've done it. I've it is, if given two options. 95% of the people out there who call themselves professional salespeople will do the thing that is not uncomfortable for them first. So they will make sure that their expense reports are done, they will make sure that their CRM is up to date, they'll make sure that their follow up calls with relationships, that their that their biggest accounts, they take them to lunch, they're going to do all those things. And if there's any time left over, they'll make cold calls in the prospect. Yeah, I wish there never is in there never is. And so that brings us back to that entrepreneurs journey. Once that revelation happens for the entrepreneur, and you realize, Oh, no, this is actually I know what I see it now I can see the problem. Their spirit starts to plummet. We call it the pit of despair. Yeah, so this line just drops straight down. And that's usually the moment where they get on their, their Google box, right? And they say, okay, they figure out what do I need, and they start typing things. And one of the things they say they they, they're confident that well, if I just had meetings, if I just had a meeting with someone who has interest at bats, and he that Bachelet right, I'm great if I just had a meeting.
Mark 18:23
Yeah, I grew this business with like a 90%. Close rate. Yeah, everybody has that star, every entrepreneur, I grew the business with a 90% or 100%, close rate, just give me more opportunities, and I will close the mall.
18:33
Yeah, you put me in front of a customer, and I'll take care of it. But I don't know how to get in front of the customers. So they they start typing in, you know, sales meetings, scheduled sales meetings, and they start looking for someone to give them a meeting. And you know, that's part of what our company provides. So a lot of times I get found in that moment. And that's, you know, we'll have that. Yeah. So that's a lot of times,
Mark 18:56
and I've been there, I did the same thing. You know, I'll pay a lot of money for a meeting if it's a qualified meeting. And people can Yeah, it's high demand. It's a high pain point. Like, that's exactly how I felt about it.
19:05
Right. Like when they get into that moment, that's whatever, they they start looking for an answer. And we have the most success when the entrepreneur was at that moment. Where are the business owner sales leaders at that moment when they've already gone through this Hi, and now they're in the pit of despair, and they're a little more humbled to, okay, I know it's gonna take more than just a really slick sales guy to get this thing to grow. And for it to be repeatable. I've paid my dues. I've learned my lesson. I've got to try to do something different. And this is whenever they start looking for other input and other ideas. And they'll go through and they'll try things. They'll start advertising, they'll, they'll hire an agency, they'll they'll set up a relationship with a business development or sales development team like weed or they'll try to build their own sales development team, someone to do prospecting for that guy.
Mark 19:57
Well, so that you're just kind of out on the But what I think is this giant iceberg of we talk business owners and the people I know in the world I've been in with hundreds of businesses that I've networked with, coached or been coached by or whatever, over the last 20 years. This, you know, it's revenue is the problem. Sales is the term we tend to use to describe it as a business owner who's trying to grow. But we're really talking about several different disciplines. And I think it's really tricky to not have a command of those disciplines, which is like, account management, farming side of things, retention, it's a whole discipline, net new growth, you got to have a concept of what that sales term like a sale sell the sales of net new selling outside sales, something along those lines, and then the marketing nightmare, like what discipline of marketing Are you talking about so many business owners, myself, I've been there and the people I work with, I worked with, I did a short time with a technology startup and they wanted to launch their, their new brand. And they spent all their money with a PR company. And there was no sales process, there was no demand generation, that was the everything was around awareness, they burned like three or four, maybe $600,000 in like a six month period. And for me, the boils down to an ignorance of like, PR is marketing, right. And so if I'm talking to the PR company, they're a marketing company, and therefore they're going to help me understand how to spend my marketing money. This PR company knew nothing other than softening and awareness, didn't know anything about you know, advertising and conversions and turning this into monetizing that no concept of any of this stuff. And they were it was the fastest way that this company, and the company did go out of business very, very quickly after that they burned all their money. So when you when you somebody, what's your take? What's your perspective on how to make sense of the marketing ecosystem and the in the in the sales disciplines, for for a company who's never realized that it wasn't just one word selling? It was like six for four to six disciplines?
22:09
That's right. The easiest way that that I found in our team is is found to educate the business leader in that moment is to take a step back, and it's you know, it's the funnel, right? So a lot of a lot of, you know, the funnel is used over and over again, everyone everyone has, at this point, people have all kinds of different perceptions of what this is everyone's got their take on on a on a sales and marketing funnel. But if you'll just, you know, just pardon the the metaphor here and let me just kind of walk through what what you're talking about is there really are maybe four, you know, around four or five layers to this thing, if we take it from the bottom up. So if you understand the sales and marketing funnel is just this idea you put, you put prospects in the top and out the bottom comes deals right or revenue, right. So that's generally the concept that we're working with right here. So at the very bottom of that funnel is sales. It's the deal is the opportunity management. Right above that is sales enablement. So this is the things the resources and the processes that the salesperson uses to help them successfully move deals out of the bottom of the funnel. Just above that is what we call sales development. So this is
23:33
this is not that. sales enablement. This is assets, tools, brochures, language, it's my process language,
23:41
sales tools, AIDS templates, it's the things that may friction removers Yeah, it's the thing that makes it productivity enhancers, it's the things in consistency, it's about what can I set the sales guys up with a with a set of tools and process and structure and management structure so that they all act similarly? Right?
Mark 24:07
They they consistency, so critical?
24:10
Yeah. So they're all doing similar things. And they're doing it at at consistently above average levels, because we've taken the time to make sure that the emails look like the email should look and that we communicate our value proposition consistently in a way that makes sense. And everyone agrees that that's what it is that we're we've got discipline around the tools that we use the CRM or or, you know, Sales Automation platforms that we're using, right? So that's what I would call like sales enablement. It's the things that go into making the salespeople productive, right, ultimately, a deal gets done between two people, and that's what I'll call the opportunity, you know, management of the deal management. But there's this thing that's kind of sits above it. I'll just call sales enablement, right. It's just all that stuff. Above that we call sales development. So, back in the old days, we call it a telemarketing then we call it lead generation. And then this sort of over the last few years, it started to be called sales development. But it's really just this idea that there's a person with the specific responsibility of outreach. Their job is they're, they're hired, trained, compensated motivated. For outreach, their job is to reach out to the marketplace, make calls, engage customers in great conversations, that that reflect their brand that support the brand. And all they're trying to do is generate enough curiosity and interest in that prospects mind that causes them to agree to spend a little bit more time learning about the the solution the business.
Mark 25:45
So is this synonymous with demand generation? Or is this really a side of this of the funnel? That's really different? Is it? Can
25:51
you call it sales and not development? And it's, it's no, I would say, it's, I think the things that people call lead generation, demand generation, even broadly, marketing, even inbound marketing, all those things are sort of the level above what I'm calling sales development. So that's those are things that are
Mark 26:11
there in a sphere of influence. That's how I'm kind of hearing like, it's a set. It's the it's almost like the nurture side, to some extent, they're in the community somehow. It's not just cold outreach, right? It's really
26:20
can be cold outreach, but it should also have an element of nurture follow up, because that's what sales guys are not good at. Right? They have a great conversation, hey, this guy's really into what I'm talking about. And then the guy says, we have a couple of meetings, we have a good discussion, and then you tell me, no, not right now.
Mark 26:38
So why is that? Not? Why do you consider it not marketing?
26:42
Because I think the sales development is really the moment where there's a handoff between marketing and sales, it sits as a thin, a Thin Red Line, right between those two functions. So the marketing going above the sales development team, that marketing and advertising would sit above that these are marketing, or we'll call marketing inbound, it's I'm creating content, I'm, I've got a website, I'm doing all these things to try to attract people. And then from a advertising we'll look at is just paid paid impressions to try to, to it's an outbound in nature, I'm going out to people to try to put my message in front of them. So there's this inbound element of attracting and advertising is this outbound element, right. And both of those things are happening. And the ultimate result or goal of that is obviously increased awareness, and then consideration. And we want those people when we're doing that, and we're doing it well, we want those people to take some action and make themselves known to us, when they make themselves known to us, it goes into the sales development team, the sales development team then starts the engagement with that person, regardless of what level of qualification they are, they begin to engage, that could be volume, right? So that in that takes tons of tons of effort. When we generate leads, quote, unquote, leads, we get a customer to fill out a form, in the very simplest sense, get a customer to fill out a form for one of our clients on their website. And that lead comes to us as qualified. In some cases, we even have one client where we put a checkbox in the bottom of the form says, I would like to set a meeting check. Yeah, yeah, they have to check. It's not default check. They have to check it. Yeah. It takes us on average, six phone calls to get there. Even when they check it, even when they given us the form and check the box, we got to reach out to him six times before they will.
Mark 28:38
Okay, so I'm hearing something pretty powerful here. Because I was really you know, my definition of marketing is very clear. It is awareness up into kind of the way you described it, sort of your marketing is education, awareness creation from I never heard of you all the way up to the point where the the customer prospect client says something like, you know, we might have something to talk about here. And as soon as they say that, that starts the sales process in my mind, but and so I was I was really trying to get my mind around like, why is this sales which call it sales, sell, develop sales development is not part of marketing. And what I heard is that for especially for the businesses you work with, once they self identify once they've ostensibly become marketing qualified leads, the deals not done, like you know, these are still a lot of work, you still got to pull them in and you got to pull them in with lots of different technique efforts, patience, and so I I know that applies differently to different businesses, a lot of the b2c thing bases companies I work with and even lower costs relative to the p&l like so if it's $1,000 purchase is a different size purchase depending on size of company. So like so those lower costs relative to the size of the company purchases don't don't require so much effort like some Hey, I look at your stuff sounds good. Let's have a conversation and bam we go, that requires much effort. So it sounds like when you're working with companies, you're working with companies where there's a proactivity. For the for the marketing, qualified lead, it's not urgent enough, it doesn't just flow over. And you really want to put some pressure on that qualification and the nurture and the relationship building before they, in earnest, work their way into a really qualified deal.
30:28
Yeah, there's tons of work that we're doing with prospects, up until the point where they've agreed to have a scheduled meeting with a subject matter expert, or a sales executive or whatever CEO, whatever that next person is that needs to meet with them. We are a conduit we we were our responsibility is to sort through the volume of noise, have great conversations with people identify the ones that are qualified, based on our client's criteria, and then the one and then and then present the value proposition to them in a way that causes them to want to invest more time to learn more about it. Yeah, we want to get them to ask the question. That's interesting. How do you do that? I want to know more. Right. And so if we can get them to that point, that we scheduled a meeting with the salesperson, and we we've handed off now, it's in the bottom half of that funnel, and it is entirely a sales process until such time as that prospect says, this is interesting, but not now. Yeah, so it should fall into a nurturing category. And it should be where it goes back to the marketing team to continue to nurture it,
Mark 31:30
right. So it sounds to me like this is particularly valuable for and probably this content is valuable across, but I want to get real specific, somebody listens to this podcast, I want them to be able to understand specific tangibility. But this is resonating with me with highly timing, timing sensitive, like, meaning like when I was in the IT services business, you make the change to a new outsource it provider as rarely as possible. Yeah. And so then the buyer is, in my world with non technical CFO, the most senior business leader in charge of technology is usually non technical. And so that meant that 90% of their life, they didn't want to anything about me. And then for 10% of their life, they urgently needed to know about me and me, I needed to know when that was and there was no way that over the course of a five year period, they might have two months of over five years, two months is when they're actually ripe, to have a conversation. So I've got to have a conversation with somebody who doesn't want to talk to me for the most of the five year period, and be there in the moment when they say you know what, my tea guy is quitting, or I'm firing him or the IT company we work with finally, finally deleted our data too many times, which is how it is like, the fifth time deleting the CEOs mailbox was the final straw, and they're gone. And now I want to have a conversation. So that sounds like that is the kind of thing you want to overcome with that layer.
33:00
Yeah. Well, you you can I think, I think what what we, okay, let me think about how I want to respond to that. Because that, first of all, that scenario is so real. And it's so especially in that space, managed services, IT services, solutions integrators, those guys. And we have a number of them as clients, and we've been working with them for last 11 years. And you talk about a tough space that that use. It's just, it's really because of exactly how what you articulate. I was talking to a guy yesterday, someone we both know. And you know, and we went over that exact scenario, he and he said to me, Look, I don't even know that they had the meeting three weeks ago, to say that we need to cut that line item. And I just got fired. Yeah, I mean, I didn't even know that that meeting happened. I've been trying for two years to try to build a relationship with this guy to talk to me, because he doesn't want to know anything about what I do. Until such time as they go, we need to cut something. And there's a big line item on the on the p&l that says, Well, we spend this much on this service. Well, let's cut that let's let's even get a better deal on that price. He's like, I've been trying, they wouldn't do that if they understood the value I was bringing to the organization, but they won't give me the time of day to to build a relationship and share it
Mark 34:12
well, so that specifically that it's both sides of the equation, right? So in the prospecting side, if I'm trying to win over a new client, they don't edit. The last thing they want to talk to me is about replacing their existing provider. They don't even want to talk to they like well enough to have hired. And so that's, that's, that's the hardest part. And then there is the account management side is making sure you're in the game, especially with disengaged buyers.
34:36
Yeah. And so I would think of that activity is two things. When we talk about how do I engage the existing customer. I think that's an account management Yeah, element. That is, but that requires thought and a structure and a process and KPIs in order to do that and do that. Well. We don't do that for our clients. Our clients are responsible for managing their own relationships to their own customers where we're purely on building that sales funnel?
Mark 35:01
Well, I think that's good because that clarifies the roles like you were talking about. If you try to put one person in the account management and growth, it won't work and the years that you're making them say, like, you got to figure out retention and customer management, that I'm going to bring you new people. And that's where the line that's I think that's very clear and healthy.
35:16
Yeah, that. So just an interesting thought on that just kind of we can go anywhere, right? So one of the things that we've one a question I get a lot, right, whenever I so I've talked about this buyers journey, and just just to finish that diagram, and go Google entrepreneurs journey, if anyone's listening and are waiting to all the people who are listening, I'm sorry, this sounded terrible. To all of you don't all go look at one time because we don't want to break the internet. But you can see the diagram that I'm describing. But after you get through that pit of despair, then there's this period of optimization where you're trying things and you're some things work, some things don't something's work, something's down, and you're kind of up and down, up and down, up and down. And then you build that you finally settle on a few things that work and they work consistently. That's where you start, you go find money to invest in that thing. And then you get a smooth line that goes up into the right at a consistent rate. And now you're now you're a mature business. Now you're scaling. So we want to help our clients kind of sort out the things that are going to work and not work sometimes that's the channel in which they're they're doing their outreach. Sometimes it's the message that they're using. Sometimes it's the audience or the segment of the marketplace that they're approaching. Sometimes it's the persona of the person within the companies that they're targeted. And we'd be talking, targeting the guy next door to that office, not that guy, but the guy that sits next to him. Yeah. And he's put all your time and energy into that guy, and you realize it's a dead end. Right? So we're testing all those different elements of, of the marketing disciplines in the marketing process to figure out what are the things that are working, what are the things that are not working, and then we settle on them and fine tune. And once we do that, it's like, go get cash, because we're about to scale. That's, that's the exciting point for our clients. But where they make a mistake is on that gentle slope in the very beginning, when they're just past minimal, viable product, they've got their first few customers, they think they're already over there. They think they've already figured it out, and it's time to go scale it. They think, right, as they're about to go up this this client where they their spirits are high, then they're going to go into the pit of despair, they're never gonna have to do real work to figure it out. Yeah, they think they're gonna skip all of that, and everything's just gonna take
Mark 37:24
off. But you're right, it's not just isn't gonna skip all that. They think they already did it. They think they've already got the stuff figured out, I got a 90% close rate. Clearly, there's no problem here. And they don't realize that all the leads they close were given to them on a silver platter through relationships, that they're not going to reproduce. And once you start generating new demand with people you don't know, the burden of proof of why you should talk to them. And when they need you, goes astronomically through the roof. And that's when you pressure test things. I think salts are falling apart.
37:54
So we tell that guy at that point at that moment. Well, first of all, we educated them that this is likely what's about to happen for you there. They haven't they haven't hired their first sales guy at a time. Sometimes they come to us they say, Okay, I think it's time to hire a sales guy. But I'm trying to figure out do I hire a sales guy? Or do I hire you?
Mark 38:13
Right? Okay. Yeah,
38:15
that's a that's a fair point. I'm a CEO, I'm at this moment where I realized that I'm, I'm out, I'm out of place in this role of being the sales guy for this company. That's not my highest and best use, and the only one who's capable of doing it, or the only one has the passion for doing it right now. And so I'll fill that role for the moment, but I need to get I need to start building something that's sustainable. And they they come to us and they say, Well, okay, what's the case for working with a company like yours, versus working with working, you know, hiring a salesperson to go in that direction or building this thing internally? And, you know, usually my answer is it? Well, first of all, if they've sold enough to really understand who their market is, and who their customer is, and what they should price their thing at. And if they've done that first million dollars of hand to hand combat, if they're past that point, and now they're now they're at this mode, where they're going to try and start trying to scale Salesforce. If I'm working with them, after the absolute best thing for you to do is to hire us. And that sounds self serving, but it's the truth. Let's, let's put together a program where we do outreach on on your behalf, we fill up your schedule, we bury you, we bury you. First of all, we you get confident that there you found a partner who can put you in front of people who would do business with you, consistently, you understand what the costs associated with doing that. So you start to get some, some numbers in your head that what the cost would be to get a secured qualified meeting with someone you want to do business with. And then we get as much of that as we possibly can until the point where you're overwhelmed. That's the moment where you go hire the salesperson. So what they will do The mistake I see made most often is they go hire that salesperson, they don't do what they don't work with someone like us, they go hire a salesperson and they expect them to build the pipeline, the good ones will, will get get give you a lift, but the majority of them are not going to be able to do this. I mean, this is the case with the main services guys getting back to these, this particular market, right? How many of these managed services companies do you know, that have hired a sales guy, and he was there for six months, and they lost their shirt, and he never brought in a deal. And they were just, it was just devastating to them?
Mark 40:34
Oh, it's terrible, you know. So there's a rationale, particularly in technology businesses, or anybody who the founder is likely to be more technical than selling oriented. It is. And the the rationale is this, the symptoms are all over the place. And I'll talk about both. But the rationale is, I'm bad at this, I was never good at it, I hate it. And if I've got $1 to spend, or $1,000, or whatever the budget is, and I have to choose between somebody who's doing the work that I hate, or somebody who's going to make a lot more work for me to do, which is the new it's like, if I'm only going to spend the $1, I want somebody else to do it. And hopefully, they'll be able to do some of the prospecting work. And so it's the pain point. And what you're telling them is that for you to get what you need, and to get rid of the pain you've got, you're gonna have to experience 10x the pain in the short term. And they don't want to make that decision. A lot of times,
41:30
it's a tough sell. It's not a panacea, it's not as simple as silver bullet, right? My, my belief is that you're going to dramatically increase, improve the likelihood of being successful in the long term. If you build out a process for generating consistent meetings in demand for your business, before you hire the salesperson to work the demand, create the demand, and then get the salesperson to work the demand, don't create a sales, hire a salesperson getting back to your very first point, confused sales and marketing and hire a salesperson to generate demand. That's the mistake there salesperson to generate scalable demand. And it won't work. It just a I'm sure it's worked before, consistently at scale, it doesn't,
Mark 42:18
I don't see it working at all. And so what so the simple summary on what I see with that as people try to get their selling responsibilities off their plate too early. Yeah. And for any number of reasons, they're too busy, they like the technical work more, they don't think they're good at it. They don't understand it, it's uncomfortable. They said been told no too many times, whatever it is, you're trying to get off their plate. And more often than not, I'm sending CEOs have also have many size companies, not just knowing 2 million $5 million companies, I mean, 10 $15 million companies, sometimes I'm saying, hey, you have no consistent sales process, you don't know you don't have a clear sense of the voice, your organization has transformed over the last $5 million, to a point where you don't know how your customer even buys anymore, you selling stuff today, you didn't sell last year, and there's and you're gonna hire somebody to kind of figure it out. That's not impossible at a certain scale. But it the likelihood when it's totally blank slate, there's no process like you can't even describe it. You only the principal can do that only the founder, in most cases has to go back, get hands dirty, get their arms around, what are people buying? Why are they buying it. And once you can sort of dissect that, then you can do something with it. And so the kind of the early in the conversation, what I heard, especially this idea of the you're doing it wrong concept of in this case, I'll say one dude, you're doing it wrong concept is I've hired outsource marketers before, and it didn't work. But why one of the why's is that, if you if if Mike is engaged with you, Mike can bring out these elements. If they're there, if you haven't done the reps, you can't get them out of them. So it's like you have to throw them back in the pot. You're like, Look, you know, I know, it's like the difference between a capable CEO wanting to grow and an incapable CEO looks exactly the same. Like Like, who's your target market? I don't know. Both of them say that. But one of them actually does. If you ask the right questions, the other one, no amount of questions gets the answer. Go back, sell some more, try some reps, get some data and we'll help you figure out what's behind that. But you will not get there if you don't have the reps with your hands dirty up close in person.
44:30
And that's what the that's that concept that we call hand to hand combat. It's like that's what it's going to take. You can't, you can't scale it. It's going to take conversations with people who are considering buying your thing over and over again, in some going the way that you want it to go and others you learning from before you're really ready to do that next step and start scaling something so you're just you're just not there yet. And people don't want to hear that. Like you just need to go sell more, just like you said. You're on the right track. Congratulations, everything's going really well. Let me give you some clues the things to watch out for because here's, here's something you might it's might be swirling around in your head right now that you're thinking you might want to try as an answer, let me tell you, it's not, it's not the wrong answer, but just here are the things to be aware of whenever you go, when you consider that. And so giving them a little bit of advice, and, you know, making myself available as a resource to them when they get stuck. And then hopefully, they figure out how to get those get a handful more of those transactions under their belt, and feel just that much more comfort and confidence spending money to get in front of more of the people that they want to do business with, because it's expensive. So it's it's Yeah, especially in the enterprise solution, you're selling a, you know, a five to six figure dollar, you know, solution, it's expensive to get a meeting with the person who's gonna make the decision to do that. And so if, if you spend that money in your meeting with the wrong people, or people who are or your when you get the opportunity you with, because you don't really understand the problem that that person is dealing with, or that your solution is not necessarily the ideal solution to solve that problem. Because you haven't had enough of the conversations. It's, you know, it's painful, and it can jeopardize emerging businesses, for sure.
Mark 46:24
So let's talk about this concept of fastest path to revenue. Because I think that that's a compelling inspiration. It's an expectation. What is that? To me? It just sounds like it's one of those things where, what's the fastest path or path to revenue? And how disappointed Am I going to be to hear the answer?
46:48
So it's really, it's really simple. What we, you know, this is a great conversation, this type of conversations that I have with customers every day. So hopefully, people are enjoying kind of listening in on it. So the fastest path to revenue, it gets back to that funnel, if we can just imagine that funnel in our head. Again, the bottom of that funnel is the sales activity. The top of the funnel is the marketing activity. In the middle of the funnel is the sales development activity, that that sort of handoff between the marketing team and the sales process. So most organizations have a sales, something whether whether they feel like it's really awesome, or they've got the best people doing it, or it's well documented and supported, they at least they've got a few customers, or they've got a lot of customers, right? They know how to take someone from I'd like to buy this to getting an order, they know how to do that. So that part is already fairly operational. Where I see where we talked about fastest path to revenue is saying, Okay, now it's time to spend some money and trying to grow the business. One thought is like, the startup you're with is okay, let's go spend all of our budget on awareness. Right, let's go hire a PR agency. And they're going to do press releases, and they're going to help us with our brand and make sure our website looks pretty and all these things, right. So they their their t shirts, we need t shirts, lots of T shirts,
Mark 48:17
I got a trade show, we're gonna give out the best goodies are gonna be a liner on the blog for all this toy tchotchkes for all the kids,
48:24
right? So you and I both know that, that that activity doesn't generate revenue, it's, it's nothing, there's anything wrong with doing those things. But they have to be done in the right order and in the right context. So if you're going to go to a trade show, or get t shirts thinking it's going to create opportunities. It's not you're building awareness, which is useful. But you can make tons of mistakes, building awareness, if you if you haven't quite figured out yet, in a very consistent way, who you need to talk to what you need to say to them that will cause them to stop and say, okay, that's interesting, I want to know more about it. And we believe that the best way to do that is over the phone with one to one conversations with decision makers in your target market, validating a message, getting real live feedback on that message iterating that message in real time. And then, and then proving it out by putting meetings on the calendar, the person who's responsible for selling it and watching deals start to close, that that will be incredibly validating. So we can we can get our clients in front of the people that they want to do business with, or they think they want to do business with. And we can do it consistently. And by doing that we we clarify with the messages, we refine the message, we validate their, their target market or the segment of the marketplace, what the audience is for their thing. we validate who they thought the person was that was going to buy this thing. That persona we call it a marketing speak, we validate that persona All those things have to be right in order for the sales development process to work. Once you know what that is, and we consistently can generate meetings with people who could actually do business with you think of how much more confident you're going to be to go out and start doing demand generation. Now I'm really clear, I need to be at these places, I need to be talking to these people I need to go to in front of in front of these segments of the market. And I have a very clear message that's been proven, in real conversations with real prospects that resonates with them, we're going to have a real, we can have hundreds of conversations over a period of a few months with the people that you want to do business with, that you and your sales team are not going to be able to have. And we can do in a structured and consistent way, almost as a test to validate that this is what's important to the customer. And when we hear things that we're not sure of or that we think is interesting, or a competitor or competitive solution pops onto the radar that you didn't you weren't even aware of because it will we don't need this because we do it this way. That's intelligence, that sure magically for the business, and we get that in real time through the sales development process. So we start there.
Mark 51:09
Well, one of the one of the sticking points, I'm curious, I won't spend too much time on it. But when you start with this persona, we're getting laser focused, I see a lot of companies get stuck, when you say like, who is our best buyer, and they go, Well, you know, this person, and it's this other person, and this other person too, and this other person and totally of an industry and sometimes is senior and some of this Junior, and you know what I'm trying to get a company focused, I'm saying, well, who's your best? And they're like, well, it's kind of this other person. But if I say something about this, this kind of technical leader, that I don't want to alienate this other group. And in my experience, that's not a real concern. But you're not a real interpreter. It's a real fear. It's the fear is real, the impact is non existent. But what do you do when you're working with somebody to say like, Hey, here's where we're placing our bets. Initially, you're testing a hypothesis, and somebody doesn't want to let go of this idea that there are many things to many people?
52:00
Well, first of all, we ask them really great questions to understand what they believe it is. And then we always ask them to talk to a few of their best customers. And we validate what they believe it is. And
Mark 52:14
do they ever show up with like, well, I've got the head of it here. I've got the, the frontline, they've got the person Tony purchasing, and I've got the CEO over here, and there's like three or four Tony's in persona. And you're trying to figure out like, well, we got to pick one.
52:28
Yeah, sometimes I don't think you necessarily have to pick one. It's just how much budget do you have? And how much?
52:35
Well, that's like, that's that's not a small question. How much budget do you have? I know how much budget but they didn't have any coming into this conversation in most cases. So
52:43
yeah, I mean, that that certainly happened. So I think the key for us is you ask the question, like, what do we do? Well, what I'm gonna do is I'm asking what their best guesses. And I'm asking a lot of challenging questions to validate that and to make them support or defend that concept. And then I'm going to go talk to the people that I've actually done business with them before, and ask them, how did how did it? How did you come to, to do business with this company? Why did you choose them? You know, what about their solution? What about the their approach? You gave them? The advantage? Were you considering other people? Were you considering other businesses? Who else within the organization? Who else within the organization was involved in making the decision? What was your actual role in the decision making process? You know, what would have happened if we approached one person versus the other? You know, with this solution, okay, I'm just we just get the real intelligence a week.
Mark 53:39
Because there's, there is a an important dimension, which I believe is most, when I'm working with a client, I'm drawing them to their target customer, their target cart client, or whoever that that persona is. And I just clarify, I define that person as the person whose decision gets you paid, and that there's lots of reasons why I use that formula, but then it sorts it, especially when you've got lots of people in play. And that's important for the purposes of getting your messaging, right, understanding the value proposition getting laser focused, but that does not eliminate the possibility. Not all businesses have this, but there's oftentimes a committee in the buying process. And so you have to understand that dimension is how many other people are going to be in this process, which is a different thing than your target. Target. Customer client.
54:28
Yeah. Understanding, knowing that in this segment or for this particular solution, that that's how decisions can be made or Yeah, is somehow our decisions made, how was the decision made? is really important. There's really this is a this is a cool conversation that we get into sometimes because people have been, I think, wrongly, focused too focused on the decision maker, right? They think if I'm not If I'm not marketing to if I'm not selling to the decision maker from the very beginning, then I'm not going to, you know that I'm wasting my time. And I, to your point about committees and in matrix decision making in large organizations or complicated organizations, there's a lot of people that you can start your sales process with, you know, you can start with the end user, start with the person who's going to be most impacted by the thing that you've got, who has the most to gain or maybe the most to lose by a decision to use your solution. There's nothing wrong with starting a conversation there. Sometimes it's the easiest point of entry, if the decision is ultimately going to be made by the CEO, you know, if I have two or three or four conversations with people who are users, or, you know, influencers, in that decision, I'm capturing intelligence, as I move through the organization, I'm much more compelling whenever I finally have an opportunity to meet with the CEO, and sometimes the CEOs are going to meet with with you, as a, you know, from a, from some level of outreach that, you know, you orchestrate on their behalf, right? They're going to, sometimes you have to be champion within an organization from somewhere below, in order to ever get access to that person. So if you think if I talk to the CEO or move on, you're, you're I think you're missing opportunities all over the place. So
Mark 56:32
that's that there's a subtlety in that. So if the CEO is on the committee, that doesn't mean they're your target persona. Sometimes it is a smurf, I can speak specifically see if the CFO is a target persona, the CFO is going to hire IT services, they're going to do it because they're going to hire somebody who's going to make them look good, because they want their users happy. They want the CEOs support taken care of, you're gonna meet the CEO, but the persona you're satisfying is not the CEO, the CEO, the persona, you're satisfying as a CFO. So I think that's a critical question. I understand you don't build your marketing language to the CEO, you build the marketing language, in that case, the CFO and understand that your sales process is going to have to answer questions that because the CFO his needs are in many ways aligned with the CEO, but they're through the language of the CFO.
57:25
Yeah, well, in that case, you know, to use, you know, the way that we approach it, the CFO would be the decision maker, and he would ultimately be he or she would ultimately be the person that we'd want to, we'd want to work with, but there's real value in, in getting meetings with or approaching people that surround that decision maker. Entering into into the organization lower on to someone on that person, staff, and being championed up to your decision maker, the CFO in this case, can be really smart way to do it. Also, one of the underutilized strategies is being referred down. So calling into the CEOs office and just being clear like, here's, here's who we are, here's what we do, it's likely that you're not you know, that this isn't something that's decisions made on your team or, or by us specifically, you probably have someone in your organization that you that you have given this responsibility to. Who would that person be, you know, who in your staff should I actually be talking to? People are really happy to refer down into the organization. I've that that conversation works particularly well, when you're talking to an executive administrator, or, you know, chief of staff or administrative assistant for a CEO. Because their job is to protect their CEOs time. And they're not as interested in protecting his staffs time. So it's really easy for them to say, No, you're right. CEO wouldn't be the person to handle that. But you need to call Steve. Oh, can I tell Steve that you said that? That he's the person we need to meet with? Yeah, of course. Right. Can you transfer me what Steve's title you know, then we're gonna have some more questions. Get some more Intel. So when I call Steve and say look at talk to the CEOs assistant, and they said that we need to meet with you. The conversation goes a lot better. Totally different. Yeah.
Mark 59:26
Yeah. Well, so I realized this conversation kind of started migrate, or I felt like a migraine, maybe you don't agree, but started talking about? Well, as I see this, it I want to talk about what I want to talk about regardless, selling see exactly what you want to talk selling, selling versus marketing. So there's a story I wrote back in the IT services days, where I hired a company who professed expertise in generating demand appointments and paid them what I thought was a lot of large amount of money every month for a contract of six or seven. And the agreed amount was something like, I will call it five to seven qualified opportunities per month for that period, at the end of the period, they had produced virtually nothing, and started to point back to us in an inability to sell. Right, which was interesting, because that's the reason I tell that story is just cautionary I, here's a little tip, you know, put put questionable marketing services on your credit card, and you as a marketing company should not accept credit cards. But but but but put putting it on a credit card. And if it doesn't work, you can call the credit card company and say didn't work. I want my money back, which is exactly what I did. So I got all i got like $20,000 back. And and the end of that story, though, it was they were a terrible company. And they were using a very important question to smokescreen them. So
1:00:50
I don't want to confuse the two because they were terrible. They needed to be fired. And they were but the business too. I think I know who it is. So so you're not going to come across some folks if you're listening.
Mark 1:00:59
So So the question becomes, if you want return on investment in the path, the path of revenue, we just we started the conference started this question of fastest path to revenue, that includes the ability to close the deal. So if you get the opportunities, the number one point of frustration for outsourced marketing is we get unqualified opportunities. They're getting us appointments, but they're junk. And the flip side of that is, these are what you get, and you guys don't know how to close or don't have to have conversations. And both of those are valid. So we'll just kind of jump into that.
1:01:33
Yeah, well, that that's, that's a that's a big one, right. And so it's actually really interesting, because you said, you, you frame that around outsource marketing companies. And the reality is whether there's an outsource marketing agency involved or not, anywhere you have a sales team, in a marketing team, you have the exact same conversation. So whether that marketing team is an outsourced provider, or it's an internal resource, that conversation happens every single day, in CEO staff meetings, leadership staff meetings, every single day sales guy says, Our leads the leads that we're getting for the marketing team are crap. Marketing team says, How would you know they're crap we sent you 100 last week, and you didn't call any of them? Well, we don't call them because they're crap, we called a few. And we realized that they were crap. And I'm not going to waste my sales guys time. Like, well, if you don't call them and give me real feedback, then I can't improve the process and make the leads better. So I need you to work them, and then tell me what's wrong with them. And then I can do a better job generating better leads. And so this conversation is happening all the time, every day, whether we are any other marketing agency is involved. It's a really, it's, uh, if I'm a CEO, I'm frustrated as hell listening to this conversation, right? So I'm like, well, which of you guys needs to get your act together? And that's probably what I'd say, Go sit down and figure this out. But, or everyone's right, because if you can't figure out what the problem is, then I'll just assume it's both of you. We'll just figure something else out. We'll start over. Yeah. But that that particular problem is, is is everywhere. sales teams are notorious for that. And so for giving that feedback in the marketing teams bellyache, you know, and I love marketers, I am one, but I'm also sales guy, but they bellyache about well, you know, I'm just gonna keep doing what I'm doing, because they're not giving me any feedback. So I don't know if it's working or not working. And, you know, and they're jeopardizing my budget, which is making me very dissatisfied in my work. So the answer is Mark, insert an organization like ours that sits right between those two marketing team generate all the leads you want to generate, put them into the sales, the sales development process for a company like ours, we make sure that every single lead is called it's called thoroughly seven 810 times whatever is appropriate. We capture feedback, we disposition, every single phone call, we capture notes, we generate qualified sales meetings that the sales guys want to have, as a result of the leads that as we kind of qualify them and, you know, in cleaned them up as they move through the process, the sales team only gets good, solid, qualified meetings, the marketing team gets consistent feedback on every single lead that's generated, and everyone wins.
Mark 1:04:15
Okay, so you do that you sit in between the marketing and sales, and what are the various configurations, you got to outsource marketing, and you're sitting between that or you've got inside marketing and inside sales, and you're sitting between the two, it's usually
1:04:26
one or two things to see there. There's a marketing team, and we sit between the marketing and sales that we provide that sales development process. In that funnel. We're in the middle of that funnel, they're doing all the demand generation things, and they're generating leads those leads flow to us. We do our work and we do the outreach and engage the prospects and have the conversations qualify the meetings. We're trying to do three things set a meeting, disqualify the prospect so you don't spend any more time on that person or anyone who looks just like that person. or nurture. Okay, great. They're good fit. There's interest, not the right time. Okay? Give this back to the marketing team, you guys need to have a consistent process for nurturing and staying Top of Mind with those leads. So now they have feedback on 100% of leads that flow through the process, sales team gets what they want, everyone wins. So that's one scenario. The second scenario is, there's no sales and marketing function, or I shouldn't say that there's no marketing function within the organization, all their sales were much, much more common, right. So we would do both of those things. So we would generate leads, and do the sales development piece for the client. And still, the sales team has the same deliverable, they still get the sales meetings, they go do their, you know, run their meetings, run their process, and try to close as much of their businesses they can, whenever they close more business, then it costs for them to generate the leads, then everyone's happy, and we work with them forever.
Mark 1:05:47
Okay, that makes sense.
1:05:49
When they don't, then sometimes we have to, you know, try to coach them, you know, try to figure out ways to improve the process, try to figure out ways to get better leads for them that are easier to close. But sometimes we have to be really honest with the CEO or the business leader, whomever, that you might have a sales process, right. So sometimes that's, that's real, that there is a sales process. But it's now becomes a very transparent process, it becomes, we've shine light on the problem we've shown later with the right tenses there. But we've, we've put light on to this problem, because we've put enough volume into the process to pressure tested, distress tested. So when the guy goes on one meeting every two or three weeks, it's tough to get a feel for whether or not it's a problem with the leads, or it's a problem with the sales performance, because you get one every now and then there's not a lot of stuff going on, all of a sudden, he gets to three, four meetings in a week. And over a consistent period of time, over a short period of time you start to see, hey, none of this stuff is turning into pipeline, none of this stuff is turning into revenue. And it starts to become obvious where there may be problems.
Mark 1:07:02
So I'm curious. Well, I think everybody and I, I'm no different. I like to think that I can take on the best clients. And, and I try to really filter to people who are the right fit for me, and I'm the right fit for them. But people sneak past. And for a lot of reasons. I'm assuming you're no different that you get people that you're working with. And over the last 1520 years, you've had people who looked like it was gonna be good, or even it didn't look, I was gonna, but in retrospect, what are the reasons that this just doesn't work? Like, like, you can't like, what are the fail spots? Because I get that a lot like, why, when they're working with me, where does it fail? who fails? And why? So what are the what are the contrary indications like Don't, don't do this, if you're
1:07:51
yet you know, not to keep coming back to the same, you know, analogy, but it really is this, these people that are early, they're early, they're too early, they haven't done the hand combat. So I'll now take so there was a time where I was confusing. Myself, I was confusing. That early stage climb with the I've already sold a bunch of it, and then figured out that I don't really know how to sell it. And I'm now in the pit of despair. And I'm trying to work my way out of it. And then I'm sort of in that phase of the climb, I've I've fallen into that trap myself of engaging with people who are not quite ready. They were confident he had figured it all out. And so all we had to do was just understand who their market was understand their personas and go talk to them. And then we would go do that and find out that the market doesn't care about what they're talking about their personas that they want to sell to are not interested or they have another way to solve the problem that's much more elegant or efficient, or whatever it might be than their answer. And so we have to come back and tell them that their baby's ugly, which is, you know, which makes us look like we've failed and we have from a sense of that we didn't qualify it well enough. Sure. But we've done this this outreach, they spent money real dollars with us that we're in that stage usually limited funds that we there. Yeah, they're precious dollars.
Mark 1:09:22
Last couple of bullets in the gun made right and and so
1:09:27
you know, so I think we do a better job now of saying you're not quite ready for what it is that we do. You still need to go fight some more and win some more deals on your own. And just be real when you spend money here. I want to make sure that you're super confident that you know who buys, why they buy and what problem what pain Are you actually solving in the marketplace and how you What is your competitive advantage over the other alternative solutions in you really need to make sure that you're ready you understand that Before we start going and talking to people at scale about that, because that's it's there better ways to figure that out than spending a bunch of money on marketing program just to come back and say, no one cares about this right now. And so that's the biggest, that's the biggest mistake that that we make. And so now, I will take someone at that stage, but I will do it, it will be eyes wide open, we will set the expectation that you should expect to know return on investment from this for the next 90 days. Yeah, that you should look at this as a research project, where we're going to do outreach and communicate to the marketplace. What what we what do you think we're going to validate whether or not that's something that people care about, and will likely find some opportunities for you. But this should be looked at as a proving ground for the hypothesis. And then once we've proven the hypothesis that we can start doing more marketing, or we might say, let's stop, you have some work to do. Okay, now, we've we've validated, or we've proven wrong, your hypothesis, and you need to go back to the drawing board, figure some things out, and we can try it again. Or go try it on your own, until you feel confident when you're ready, then we can do this. Because we're not a branding agency, we're not about building awareness, it's, if what you're trying to do is make your company look pretty, it doesn't really matter if it solves a problem in the marketplace. If you're just trying to create a perception, tried to do PR, you're trying to you know, do quote unquote, branding, which is not what we do I have a ton of respect for the people in the rain. It's really important thing. Right, right. In the order of things. It's, it's not first, it's something that it's something you can grow yourself into once you understand who you are.
Mark 1:11:51
Makes sense. Well, Mike, this has been fantastic. Is there anything else you want to share with the listeners?
1:11:59
No. Well, of course, like I would be foolish not to. So yeah, so pro sales connection is a sales marketing agency focused on b2b companies. And we focus on helping the cash register ring, right, we don't do the pretty stuff. We're about creating messages and outreach programs that generate real pipeline. And you can learn more about how we do that. We have
Mark 1:12:25
How do people get ahold of you? They want more information, get some contact information, we'll put that in the show notes. We'll make sure their website and your email address cool.
1:12:31
So we have a we have a little video series that I created three short videos actually talks about some of the things that I talked about today. It's just pro sales connection, comm slash grow.
Mark 1:12:43
Is that like include the Santa Claus video. It does not include this. Oh, no, that's can find that on my LinkedIn, you got to check out the Santa Claus video. It's totally awesome.
1:12:51
Yeah, you can find that so you can reach in connect with me just Mike fer de f as in Frank h er t y.
Mark 1:13:00
Awesome. Appreciate it. This is really good stuff and I hope people reach out if you have questions. I think we tackled a lot of things in the selling and marketing world and some some nuances there. This is you're doing it wrong with Mark Henderson Leary and we'll see you next time.