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Tried, True and Tested Approach to B2B Sales: Steve Schmidt
108 Plays2 years ago
Sales is a combination of art and science.
The best salespeople combine personality, insight, research and time to engage people and convince them to make purchases.
In this episode of Marketing Spark, SellX's Steve Schmidt talks about:
- How salespeople should operate given the economic landscape
- What makes for a great sales person beyond sales
- How sales and marketing can work together effectively
- The biggest mistakes made by salespeople on LinkedIn
- Why Steve has enthusiastically embraced TikTok
- The link between sales and demand generation.
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Transcript
Introduction to Steve Schmidt and Sales Leadership
00:00:10
Speaker
As a B2B SaaS marketer, I recognize the importance of creating partnerships with sales to drive growth. I know that marketing and sales are a powerful one-two punch, but to be honest, I've been remiss in not having enough sales leaders on this podcast. So today, I'm going to address this situation by talking with Steve Schmidt, Chief Revenue Officer with CellX, which helps companies expand their sales teams without making up higher. Welcome to Marketing Spark, Steve.
00:00:39
Speaker
Hey, thanks for having me, man. It's a, it's a good time to be alive. It's a good time to collaborate with marketers and you know, whether that's people like yourself and messaging and focusing on that. I just got done clipping up content from Beck Holland this morning. We were really diving deep into her, you know, flip the script personalization and relevance and just.
00:00:57
Speaker
I said, you know, Beck, I'm hearing this so much right now. And so this is why I was excited to chat with you because I get to talk to you too. Like we get to dive deep and say, Hey, right now this landscape is kind of freaking out. And so today I can't wait to talk to you about like the importance of really what people are seeing is how do we, how do we focus on personalizing? How do we focus on quality over cranking the volume up? Man, this is, this is a fun time to be alive. That's what I say.
00:01:24
Speaker
There's a lot of things to talk about from the sales and marketing perspective, given the economic landscape has shifted so dramatically and so quickly.
Journey from Tidal to CellX Merger
00:01:33
Speaker
But before we get into that, I did want to talk to you about your entrepreneurial journey for SelleX. You were the founder and CEO of Tidal, which focused on sales for early to mid stage companies. Can you talk about
00:01:48
Speaker
the journey from title to Cell X. What was happening at title and how did the merger with Cell X happen? So this is, I'll give you the play by play. So 2020 for me was kind of this year of an evolution. We all go through these things in life where we kind of feel a significant shift. And for me, the way that COVID affected me was not in a bad way, but it was just, you know, that story of here I am working out of my
00:02:14
Speaker
son's bedroom, everybody had an overwhelming sense of uncertainty, which has sustained itself. I think for the better part of two and a half years now, um, we can unpack that later. But what I did was I kind of sat there and I looked at my wife and I said, you know what? I'm, I'm finding myself here back again as an account executive after leading sales for a long time. And I said, I just, I feel I'm at a point right now where nobody wants to hire me because I'm from South Dakota. I don't have a bunch of software on my resume and
00:02:43
Speaker
And that's where I was trying to break into again. But I was really successful with being able to break into new businesses. And so I did that at T-Mobile. I did that at AT&T. Verizon Wireless over the 15-year span. Before, in 2017, I went to outreach. And so the only reason I didn't have a job in SAS and was sitting there wondering about it with my wife was because I had moved from Minneapolis to South Dakota. And what that was a pretty significant part of my life. I had gone through a divorce, relocated, and here I am.
00:03:13
Speaker
happily remarried, happily sitting there going, wow, I have a choice now. I have a spouse who's very supportive. And she looked at me and she said, why don't you go out and do your own thing? And so consulting, as you know, is a vast sea of a lot of things. And so I said, I want to be on the execution side versus the strategy side. So I called a couple people. Jake Dunlap was one of them. I said, Hey, Jake, do you know anybody who would need really good top of the funnel services? And he had a couple companies in mind. And so we got to work. And before you knew it, six months later,
00:03:42
Speaker
We had 42 clients and 30 employees. And then another year later that, that grew to 52 employees and over 118 clients, seven and a half million in revenue. So that bedroom turned into an office. The office turned into a company of 52 people. And that company, uh, was sought out by cell X and cell X had seen some posts on LinkedIn, right? Mark, you that's how you and I met. And, uh, there are venture capital precinct company, uh, 4.5 million in 2020 had seen a post and they said, Hey,
00:04:12
Speaker
I think you guys might want to consider contacting this company. They look like they really have it together. At least it appears that way. And you guys might want to consider merger and acquisition versus organic growth as you kind of flex forward into your A round and kind of unroll and unpack this and release it to the public. So they contacted us, came in on a blind demo.
00:04:29
Speaker
didn't really tell us what they did. They were in stealth mode. And so we didn't know that we were being, I didn't know I was being interviewed essentially to say, Hey, we want to hire you. And Dean Glass, who's now my boss, um, turned 30 the other day, very young guy, sold his first company to TikTok founded SelleX. And two years later, he's sitting there going, Steve, I need you to come over here and leave this thing for me on the revenue side. You know how to do this. You know how to, you know, as a practitioner, you're passionate about it. And I said, not without the rest of my company.
00:04:55
Speaker
And he said, well, that's not really what we were thinking. And so about six months after that, what had happened was, you know, 38 employees from title came over to Sellex. And then we opened our operation together on June 16. And that day forward, Sellex now went from a company of seven to a company of 40. And we brought in RevOps client success, data quality, call quality agents.
00:05:20
Speaker
And so we had all the infrastructure that they didn't have, and we perfected that in a services world in a relatively short amount of time. I think perfected is a strong word, but I'd say we did pretty good at it. And so now Celix today is a software SaaS offering and we have that services backbone. But I will end with this is right now, like the most
00:05:37
Speaker
The funnest part and the most challenging part is like transitioning the mindset to still have services and being of service at the top of mind, but to fold that into a SaaS offering where it's meant to scale with philosophy. So here we are today, the company's thriving, but also challenged with the same economic conditions as everybody. So here we are and growth is on the mind and that's where we're headed up into the right hand.
00:06:01
Speaker
As a seasoned sales leader, I have to ask you what it's like to have a 30 year old boss, obviously very smart. He's got a track record for success. What's the dynamic like when, when you've got all this experience and you've got this entrepreneurial track record and you're dealing with somebody who's relatively young and, and for that matter, relatively inexperienced. Yeah. Good, good thought. That was the first thought that I came to my head was this guy's young.
00:06:26
Speaker
And it turns out he had a 10-year entrepreneurial track record back to college. And so myself, relatively a young spring chicken two and a half years into this, I thought, this guy knows things I don't about venture capital, about the things that, quite frankly, I didn't want to learn about because I knew it was available. But running a services company,
00:06:46
Speaker
Venture capital isn't really an option because the margins aren't there. The growth scale isn't there. So I never paid attention to what that can do or, you know, I certainly knew the bad components of venture capital and sort of the idea of what it can do to ruin a company or sort of force growth. Right. But the part that I really liked about Dean and it rains true today. This has not changed as he grows slow. Although it appears fast on the outside, he doesn't like to make quick decisions operationally. Um,
00:07:13
Speaker
And he's constantly asking us, what do you think about this? What do you think about that? His feedback loops are extremely tight. And so what I've learned to grow is I'm sure there's a challenge in the gap of maybe call it experience in terms of a year's owner. But he knows so much about the part of business that quite frankly, I don't want to have to learn. And I know things about revenue and top of pipe that he doesn't want to have to get to know. He appreciates the hell out of it. He founded a company around it.
00:07:38
Speaker
But that is not where his expertise is going to lie. His is going to be steering the company, leading the company and pushing us forward.
Navigating Economic Volatility in B2B SaaS Sales
00:07:46
Speaker
Before we hit the record button, you and I were talking about the economic landscape and how a lot of B2B and a lot of B2B SaaS companies are, and I'm not using this word too dramatically, are desperate for leads. There's a lot of anxiety right now because the economic landscape has shifted so abruptly. 2020, 2021 were awesome years. The rising tide lifted all ships.
00:08:13
Speaker
And that's changed with rising interest rates and economic volatility. I'd be really interested to get your perspective on how the sales landscape has changed and how salespeople and sales organizations need to operate differently. Collaborating across other departments has never been more important. So I think those companies who have demand gen
00:08:39
Speaker
marketing arms and all that messaging tied quickly into sales. And a lot of that's done through automation this year. Um, a lot of people have, pardon me, abandoned the ability to sit and have a conversation without taking it personal. So for example, um, revenue right now and client success like that, that intra battle of handing things off once you have a customer, right? Always kind of this toxic relationship. And we're looking at it right now going like a lot of companies, how do we expand the revenue we have?
00:09:07
Speaker
as well as think about top of pipe. And so when I talk to other CEOs, um, they are panicking right now and they also don't necessarily have the economic favorability to just make a bunch of mistakes. And so we have this really important time where you can see in their eye, the hesitation, they're asking for guarantees and guarantees have never been a thing from companies in a time where we all feel this slight grasp of desperation. Right. And so I also think the more we talk about it,
00:09:35
Speaker
the more it proliferates the future of that. And so I think that what will happen here, which is very common in human nature as we'll talk about it, it will get solved at a macro level that we couldn't quite understand. And before the, just like when VCs and tech felt it three to six months before everybody else felt it, we will feel the emergence of capital injections again, before the public markets and consumer markets realize it. So I predict that,
00:10:03
Speaker
By the end of Q4, early Q1, we will be coming out of this, mostly because there will be desperation from people that we need to start getting this thing moving again. So six months is about as much as our country tolerates these days for any sort of change that it can affect. So I think right now, you have two choices, and this is what I'm hearing. Number one, take action and take a hold on the market while everybody sits on their heels. Or number two, sit on your heels, protect capital, and de-risk everything, which is boring, but also very effective.
00:10:32
Speaker
Yeah, it will be interesting to see which option companies select. Early 2020, a lot of companies sat back on their heels, tried to ride it out. Other companies pressed forward really aggressively with sales and marketing. And when things picked up again, they were well positioned.
00:10:48
Speaker
The one observation I will make about the sales and marketing landscape is that a lot of entrepreneurs are leaning heavily into tactical execution. The need for leads is being fueled by the fact that if we do more tactics, if we do more stuff, if we have our fingers in more pies to drive brand awareness and consideration, that'll fix the problem. That'll help us address this pipeline issue that they're suffering from.
00:11:14
Speaker
And I almost feel like they're putting the cart before the horse. They're not planning the work and then working the plan. Is that what you're seeing out there? Well, yes. I also think that we've seen that enough where people are now saying, well, what are you doing? And so we talk about dark social and the conversations that happen behind the curtains.
00:11:39
Speaker
And in the peer groups that I'm in with other CROs, so not at a macro level, like a community, like Pavilion, but call it a group of five to six people. And Sixth Sense puts on a really good CRO monthly coffee session where we sat there. And so I just listened. I wasn't there to pitch our services. I just said, hey, me too, right? And the talk was really around what are you doing so then I can de-risk it by saying, okay, if you're going to do that, and I kind of know that you're reputable, then I'm going to do that too, because that feels like the safe move. So I also think right now,
00:12:08
Speaker
that dark social will continue to emerge as sort of this, hey, these people are coming out of nowhere where in fact they're forming little pods of trust saying, hey, if you're going to do this, then I'm willing to do that too. Versus, you know, hey, we're just going to forge ahead and do this because we feel it's best. I think that's what people do is they typically don't want to lose a loan in a time where risks can be, um, can lead to failure, you know, in a big way.
00:12:33
Speaker
A loaded question for you and your answer may have changed given where we're at right now. What makes for a great salesperson and as important are there ways to assess a salesperson success other than sales? So the second question I'll answer first is I feel like a true
00:12:56
Speaker
Quality salesperson does bring their whole self to work. And I'm not saying that to ruffle the feathers of those people who want, you know, work-life separation. It's just, it is so hard to succeed in a job like that and win, unless you're always on right now. And I know that just kind of right, everybody goes, wait, what? I'm supposed to turn myself, I get that. Be present with your family, do that. But I will say those people who tend to check in often and frequently and have a sense of urgency,
00:13:25
Speaker
I would say are the people who are first and foremost going to succeed in sales. Now I've seen a lot of introverts lately, especially who have the ability to pause and look at data.
00:13:35
Speaker
Pause and actually do research. So I think the seller today that I would say what makes a good salesperson today is More than ever it's self-awareness Who are you going to forge trust with that? You don't know today versus who are you going to hustle your way into? So I feel like whether that's caught at a macro level influencers
00:13:56
Speaker
I don't want to go down that path necessarily in a packet or practitioners and then consultants, right? You start to look to those people to go, well, those people can be an extension of that. And I need salespeople who can come into my company and build these personal brands enough where they still have a sales backbone to say, I'm bringing a little bit of hustle. I'm bringing a sense of urgency, but I'm also willing to go out there and take the time on the background to over time build.
00:14:25
Speaker
trust in a marketplace where I can offer value without talking about my company. And that's where we seek content and backing up to 2020. So when the recession started last night, pardon me, when COVID hit and the last time people were hanging onto money, we came out of the gates with title and we weren't anything before that. And so we came in with a storm when everybody else was sitting back on their heels. And I was the first salesperson because it was just me.
00:14:49
Speaker
And we were hungry and we were going after it. We were coming in with energy in a time where things were flat and people were scared. And I think what that did was it was like a bomb where people went, whoa, who the hell is title? Who's Steve Schmidt? Who's this guy? And I'm just sitting there going, hey, we're here. And this is what we're doing in LinkedIn. And just that platform itself allowed us to thrive and grow. And, you know, 90% of that revenue mark came from
00:15:12
Speaker
you know, over six and a half million from LinkedIn posts. Now, I wish I could tell you that every one of those people we had a very successful experience with, but what we learned, and I'll say this, is through that selling experiences is trust, right? So trust, trust, trust.
00:15:27
Speaker
That's how people are going to do it, and they're going to go to Dark Social in their communities and go, hey, have you heard of this? Have you worked with these guys? Are they legit? And so right now, those salespeople who are willing to establish trust and be patient are going to win in those channels. And so immediately, I don't think it's going to be the person who busts out the gates and crushes top or funnel. I think it's going to be someone who, over time, can do a little bit of that up front and, over time, can do a lot of it by evangelizing without the title in the space versus the company that they work for.
00:15:55
Speaker
And so I think the modern seller should be half evangelist, half content. Well, a third evangelist, a third content specialist, and a third very traditional salesperson who knows process, who knows fundamentals, and can see things through from front to finish.
00:16:10
Speaker
I was reading a post this morning about the new SDR and how they need to operate. And one of the things that the author emphasized was that they need to be smarter and more strategic is that they have to be armed with deep intelligence into a prospect.
00:16:26
Speaker
and really understand the prospect inside out before they even reach out. So it's the idea that if you're not prepared, then you're probably going to fail because your sales pitch won't resonate. How do you get sales reps to think that way and what do they need to do to actually arm themselves with the information they need to be successful? I would say that we might want to rethink that entire idea and think that the traditional mindset of selling
00:16:56
Speaker
might not be where we need to be thinking today. And that's why we're starting to emphasize more discussions with that SDR organization reporting to the marketing, because if it is indeed a direct extension and within that ethos of how you're creating demand and how you're circling, whether that's an ABM, ABS correlated campaign, or whether that's as simple as here's our marketing event and how are we going to approach this with sales together?
00:17:20
Speaker
and focus on outcomes versus MQL. So another hot topic, right? Is how do we start to marry that up? So I think the modern SDR to have them lead with content, to have them lead with community is not your traditional seller.
00:17:34
Speaker
And that's why a lot of those sellers are struggling right now because the seller of the future cannot simply transition and take a course on social selling and perfected tomorrow because that's not why they got into the job more than likely. They got in because they were told, hey, if you hustle, if you do this, make some cold calls, like it's going to work out. And that worked and it still works to a degree. But if your entire organization is depending on only outbound with no coordination,
00:17:57
Speaker
on collaborating with messaging and an overall impact to the market, then you're simply throwing darts at a big board that everybody else is throwing darts at. I would rather distinguish myself as a seller and establish a team of sellers, which is what I'm doing right now. I'm hiring four more account executives right now. And not one of them is coming from a traditional background of, I've sold, I've developed funnel and done this. They've certainly done that, but now they've gone on to do other things with a content within
00:18:25
Speaker
of advertising within media where we can now start to become a media company who has one hell of an offering behind it because I believe that that's the company of the future. You mentioned EQ or emotional quotient as a key ingredient for
Essential Qualities for Modern Salespeople
00:18:42
Speaker
sales. Can you talk about the importance of leveraging and controlling emotions by salespeople and how they can build that into their sales processes and workflows? Yeah, I laughed a little bit because I was just thinking
00:18:55
Speaker
I was reading or watching a TikTok by Leslie Vanessa, just kind of like talking about the emotional fragility of salespeople and how we, by nature, at least the salesperson of today and what we've known is tends to go from high to low and tends to really celebrate wins and really get down on themselves. Then we go, well, good, because that's going to motivate them because they don't want to do that again.
00:19:19
Speaker
And I don't know if we're living in a generation where fear is the primary motivator or pain or risk aversion. I think people are looking for what causes me pleasure more than pain. And so e-key allows you to be self-aware and aware of what others are going through and empathy versus sympathy by definition is saying, not only do I feel sorry for you, but I'm able to sit in your shoes and truly understand and listen to you talk about it and truly understand that. And so by doing that, naturally we're extending out to the market saying, hey,
00:19:48
Speaker
If it isn't about us, then what am I saying about you that makes you get value? That's why I deliver content that people can take away and apply every day if they want to for free. We all know that strategy is what is hired.
00:20:01
Speaker
And people will pay for it, but very few people are willing to execute on it. So that's why the free methodology of giving your stuff away works so well is because they're going to go, Hey, I like this, but I'm not equipped to do it. Or I don't have time to do it, but it resonates with what you're talking about, resonates with my business. And so that kind of selling takes time and people want immediate wins took four months for me to get one lead off it. Now we're getting four to five a day.
00:20:25
Speaker
And so that is what you can do over time. So I think that you need to be willing as a company to have longer, call it, ramp periods where you're augmenting funnel, whether it's internally or externally on the front end. But that person is building themselves as a trusted advisor, whether they're hired from the space or whatnot to go in and evangelize for the customer versus for the company.
00:20:47
Speaker
You've talked about trust and empathy and the need for salespeople to do their research. And this is an interesting question given the fact that Silex is both a services and a SaaS company. Curious about the fact that a lot of marketing and sales are automated by software. And curious about how do you feel about the mix between technology and people where
00:21:15
Speaker
One plus one could equal three. You get the scale through technology and automation. You get the personalization through relationship building and establishing trust. What's that balancing at look like to you? I think it's a really good question. I'll give you a very tactical example of what it might look like at the rep level.
00:21:41
Speaker
I think a rep could use software to help simply automate connections only, but no messaging, no cadence, no DM, no pitch slapping, because that will help populate your audience within your ICP, right? There's a lot of tools out there that do that today. People abuse them and use them, then they get banned. And so it's this kind of taboo thing. But let's say you automate that so you don't manually do it and then it claws back.
00:22:06
Speaker
you know, the invites that don't go out, okay, that's about as much software as I'd want to use in that effort. Now, on the other end, what I'd still do is, who cares about the DM? Because if you're creating content, you are now getting that first page of their newspaper developed. So as you expand your audience, and this is the secondary tool, and I've given this idea to a few people, I said, so do that. Now, like this situation, have once, twice, five times a week,
00:22:32
Speaker
your ICP on and do a micro 20 minute podcast and just talk about them and talk about the problem that
00:22:37
Speaker
They're facing and just let it be all about them. And then what you do is you post the content, tag them, give them the assets and they go, Oh wow, cool. I'm going to take myself, show my friends and family because I like me and I'm a human. So when I get this stuff, it makes me feel good. And I also want to advocate for myself. And so now that travels onward and you're also still connecting with your audience. And so while that's building over time and you're developing trust, credibility and relationships, you are also working traditional funnel through outbound, inbound, whatever. And before you know, you have so much funnel and credibility.
00:23:08
Speaker
that you don't know what to do with it and then suddenly you have to build a company around it like I did just to support your efforts. So if that can happen out of one person with 58 people in a company doing $7.5 million, what could you do if you had the infrastructure of a company to help support that initiative and drive that out? Now the problem is, a lot of these companies don't encourage creativity. So they're going to go, yeah, I'd love to do that, but I'm afraid to go out on my own and post anything to LinkedIn because HR will come down and say, what the hell are you doing?
00:23:33
Speaker
Or my boss will say, well, geez, it'd be better if you're on the phone making cold calls and making videos at the break room. And so I get that. And if I were you and you really didn't like that and you wanted to get out of there, get the hell out of there. Because that environment is for different people than you. That environment can have a very traditional seller who wants to sit in a great cube, thrive. But if that isn't you.
00:23:52
Speaker
Then that kind of sales role, I think, is the biggest need for SaaS companies right now, especially those who are willing to invest in taking a little bit of a quote unquote risk by allowing people to flex a little bit and enabling them with called the mechanisms of video editing, you know, a content team to support their initiatives, go do it, fail a little bit, win a little bit, and then
00:24:12
Speaker
Have them build that too, because whatever it does for them, that's good. Don't worry. You're getting the benefit in the meantime. When they move on, which they will anyways, they'll move on and you'll still receive the impact of their brand. And by the way, if they suck and they're toxic and they're bad, you'll also receive the negative benefit of that. So be careful on who you hire and who you allow to do that and make sure that they're very authentic and they're more interested in you than they are themselves. That's the secret ingredient.
Storytelling and Communication in Sales
00:24:40
Speaker
The other angle to sales that I'd like to explore is messaging. That's something that you wrote about recently and how it allows salespeople to connect with prospects. As someone like me who focuses a lot on positioning and messaging and the ability to be clear, coherent, and consistent in how you go out to market, what's the role of messaging and storytelling within sales?
00:25:08
Speaker
It's everything. We use a proof point as the second P, problem, proof, persuasion. And that proof is an emphasis on telling a story. And telling a story in words that people understand. Salespeople tend to be very verbose, me too, right? We all want to talk. But when we stop and think and remember that the words that they hear and the story that they hear very simply, even if it's the same story over and over again,
00:25:35
Speaker
needs to be clear, concise, where you say, this is who it was. This is how it was before. This is what they did to solve it. And this is their life now that they solved it. And that's how we appreciate stories in human life. Hey, Mark, I went out, um, was outside this concert, ran into your buddy, Tom. Tom's awesome. And he was like, Hey, how's Mark doing? And I was like, Oh my God, Mark's awesome. He's so busy now, you know, da, da, da raising kids.
00:25:59
Speaker
And he was like, you know what, we all got to get together. And you know what I said, I was like, you're damn right. And so what I did is I set up a time and I want you to go da da da. And then you're going to go, okay, cool. Well, a little bit of me in there, you know, um, that's good. And it makes me feel good. And you told me a story that wishes I was there, man, I miss that. So how do I get a part of that next time? I sure as hell I'm going to let's get that on the calendar right now. That sounds fun because it made me feel good because someone missed me, not because I missed the event.
00:26:28
Speaker
And I think that that ability to personalize that and make it about other people versus more about you is what's probably the biggest challenge for a lot of people. One of the topics that I have to ask you about, and this is, I guess, controversial,
The Role of Cold Outreach Today
00:26:42
Speaker
And people aren't very polarized in terms of how they view it as cold. Cold outreach, cold calling. You have one camp that says it's alive and well, and it's what you need to do to reach prospects, particularly when they're busy these days. And then the other camp says, listen.
00:27:00
Speaker
in a world full of relationships and authenticity and trust, it's just not gonna work anymore. And to me, this is a really fascinating topic because there's no right answer, but it would be interesting to get your view on cold and how cold fits into your sales methodology and your sales workflows. The worse the targeting, the worse the messaging, the colder it will feel. So I think if you got deep and wide with the fishnet,
00:27:29
Speaker
Um, you're gonna get a few in there and you don't need super great messaging. You just kind of need to get lucky. And that's why some companies have survived, right? It's called the old spray and pray. But right now I think, I think cold will always have a place, right? It's kind of like, you know, I met my wife kind of coming in cold. You know, when I approached her, she was not looking, you know, and I wouldn't have gotten and call it what I want. If I would have sat on my heels and waited for it. And so I think that those people who are bold enough to come in cold and have a very good idea of who they're
00:27:59
Speaker
ideal customer is and the messaging that that customer wants, they can still survive with cold and they will survive and they'll still have the benefits of an outbound message. But what we're seeing is traditional cold bound email is more than dead. Email is deader than a doornail. We did it to ourselves. DMs are deader than a doornail. We did it to ourselves and cold calls are deader than a doornail because we did it to ourselves. We kept calling people over and over again with no relevance and they already feel like you're barging into their life.
00:28:29
Speaker
Now, I'll end with this is I think a warmer cold call is one that you can start to, and Chris Walker will roll over if he hears this, but yeah, let them raise their hand a little bit and cold call them. Now it's time to go out and get them and lead the horse to water because they might have a problem and it might not be the first one, it might be the third one, but now might be the time to capture their awareness. Because if you do not demand capture on that,
00:28:55
Speaker
and go out and grab the lead and generate it in your funnel, which is now lead gen, because your awareness created that, but you're going to grab it and point them through. Now you are forcing things to happen. And if we look at the amount of things in life that have happened due to force, whether it's how North America and America came to be, or the history of man, many things that happened in a big way were not due to people sitting back on their heels and waiting for the perfect situation. They were happened because of bold initiatives, and they were certainly pattern interrupts at the least.
00:29:26
Speaker
I have a client that has desperately tried for the last six months to leverage cold email. They've done it through ABM, they've done it through extracting information from Apollo, they've tried different creative approaches and time after time the response has been almost zero.
00:29:47
Speaker
Very few opens, no engagement, no conversations. Why has cold email died so quickly? It used to be the fact that you could get some engagement, you could get some conversations going, but it seems to have crumbled. And if it doesn't work anymore, is it dead? And if it doesn't work anymore, then what do companies do from a cold perspective?
00:30:11
Speaker
I think cold creative companies are going to alternative channels to come in cold. So think about the really non-traditional ones like Quora, think about Reddit, think about WhatsApp, like different mechanisms to come in on and stay away from SMS cold, just stay away from it. Trust me, because it's illegal number one and all these other things. And I think that the idea is that
00:30:33
Speaker
cold is going to feel cold. So why do we not start looking at the other channels and exploring that? Although I might not know it, there are certainly millions and millions and millions of people who do. And for example, Quora very much unfamiliar to me until I started diving in. And then now you have to be engaging with people. And now there's these little sub communities that happen out there where although you're now still cold to them, they don't know you, you can find the time and the topic to insert yourself.
00:31:02
Speaker
And that's where I think the younger generation, for the most part, because they grew up in that ecosystem, is going to look at, like, by the way, I could go to Facebook and have a successful B2B prospecting campaign by messaging every one of my prospects and adding them as a friend. You have a much better chance than doing that through DMs on LinkedIn. By the way, I mean, I tested it. That works at scale.
00:31:20
Speaker
There are a lot of different things you can do that feel cold by simply selecting a channel that's not being tapped into. And so I think it's less the art that's fatigued and the channels that are fatigued. There are cybersecurity solutions that will keep you out of inboxes. Enterprises pay people millions of dollars to make sure your email never gets delivered there. Companies like Gated are now keeping you out of the inbox, right? And so when you look at your chances, you've got an offensive line of steel curtains from
00:31:47
Speaker
from sideline to sideline. So why are you focusing on pouring more money into a channel that no matter what, A, doesn't strike up a conversation that you can actually get benefit from. B, although it's your lowest cost channel, could also just harm your domain and all sorts of terrible things that you can do by trying to depend on that.
00:32:06
Speaker
I would wait for the invention of seeing what Web3 does to allow you to diversify your email delivery. Elon Musk has delivered an email technology that supposedly is going to be able to allow you to get through those barriers. And so I think with any sort of obstacle becomes innovation to get around it. So that'll be the interesting part to me is seeing who is from a technology standpoint going to crack the code on email because nobody's done it yet and people have spent billions of dollars trying.
Enhancing Sales and Marketing Collaboration
00:32:32
Speaker
We're bouncing around a lot, but I did want to ask you about how sales and marketing should work together. Off the top, I talked about the fact that it's a one plus one equals three proposition, that if sales and marketing can create a very cohesive collaborative partnership, then it becomes a virtual circle. Sales is feeding marketing the intel they need. Marketing is providing sales with
00:32:55
Speaker
the assets and the narratives and the messaging that they need. And then they can move forward in lockstep that the fact that they can be very aligned in terms of how they're going to identify prospects, engage prospects and attract them.
00:33:14
Speaker
How do you make that happen with an organization? Because sales marketing tends to operate in silos and the head of sales and the head of marketing have their own fiefdoms that they protect. That world doesn't seem to strike me as feasible anymore. So how do you make these organizations blend together and work together? You force it to happen. I think that's the only way. And I know that that sounds forceful, but here's a really good example of something I implemented.
00:33:40
Speaker
is what I would do is take sales and marketing and every Friday say we are going to do a 10 minute micro podcast where you two are going to get on and do one together and you're going to deliver that news to the company and what you're trying what's working and how you're succeeding.
00:33:54
Speaker
And you're forcing that to happen, which will force collaboration across the rest of the week. Now it might start off bumpy depending on your relationship. But now not only are you getting those two departments to work together, but you're reporting back to the rest of the company, which is now opening up your communication channels, which is every company's biggest problem, right? You might be in sales and all of a sudden a campaign rolls out. You go, whoa, what happened there? You know what? I didn't see that one coming or we're certainly not in lockstep. So I think something as simple and tactical as that.
00:34:22
Speaker
really works well versus hoping and praying or hiring a trainer or sub-moderator to come in and intervene between those two people. So that's just really tactical and it's free. It's really free and the outcomes will be significant.
00:34:37
Speaker
I wouldn't be a good interviewer if I didn't ask you about your approach to LinkedIn and have you establish yourself as a leading and authoritative voice. But before we get into that, I wanted to get your take on the biggest mistakes that salespeople make on LinkedIn because a lot of people are obviously jumping on the LinkedIn bandwagon. It's a great place to connect and have conversations, but all of us are feeling the pain of salespeople who are DMing us.
00:35:04
Speaker
Cole DMing us, commenting on posts that have no relevance or posting stuff that is clearly sales oriented. Can you sort of look at some of the mistakes that they're making and how would you as a sales leader, advise people on how to take a better approach to LinkedIn? Well, I think right now we're seeing what happens in social media, which is two years ago, we were saying, Hey, everybody like LinkedIn works. Where is everybody? And now we're seeing everybody going, okay.
00:35:33
Speaker
I'll try it so we see, you know, call it. The number one thing is there's a lot of SDRs on LinkedIn. We all know that, right? You know, they sell, they hit quota for one month and two months later they're starting seven side hustles and selling eBooks. And so if I'm a buyer or a prospect or someone looking at you, I'm going hell to the no. Do I want to work with this person? So I think the number one thing we do is we don't represent what we do and the company we work for as well as we should. And we've taken the idea of personal branding and just crushed it and said, oh, cool, man, I can get a side hustle. Well, guess what?
00:36:03
Speaker
You know what a really good side hustle is, is something where it's infrequent and that pays you a lot of money. And so master what you do today so well where someone's willing to pay you less for time and more for value. And the best value is coming from successful outcomes from existing customers who refer you to other people over a period of time. And so rather than forcing this to happen at breakneck speed, realize that LinkedIn is still a really good platform if you go for trust before, you know, call it a restaprocity.
00:36:32
Speaker
If you go for getting before you go for receiving and so comments to me, like when I see people commenting just for the sake of the algorithm, it really turns me off from them. It makes me also want to not like them because I'm going, I see what you're doing now. I also respect it because I know you're playing that game.
00:36:48
Speaker
But you probably got a team of five people behind you helping you do that. Now, I've got a ghostwriter. She does not write my posts. She takes what I talk about one hour a week and breaks it down and rewrites it, right? So I do take advantage of a team. I have a video editor, real simple, but those are the people that I use on LinkedIn and it's always me. When people DM me, it's me. And so I think that now when I look at how to do it right is over time I build value. Over time, we've somehow got a catalog of 500 videos and posts that people have
00:37:18
Speaker
You know, I get messages from people who are like, man, I implemented this and I went from the worst SDR to the top 80 in a year. I'm like, man, that makes me want to cry. Like that makes me happy because I now started storing those in case I ever need those for a rainy day, but just to know the impact you had without asking people for it. I've never asked anybody for shit on LinkedIn. Pardon my French. Never.
00:37:39
Speaker
I've only given now I have people who probably can't know, I know I have people who can't stand me who would think that I'm not their kind of person and that's okay. I used to get concerned about it. Now I don't even blink. I don't read the comments that are negative. And I, if I, if they're toxic, I delete them and block them just because you know what, it's my LinkedIn. And so if I'm going to put the time and energy into putting what I believe is quality out there, I'm not going to let a troll come in and crash it. I'll let someone with a strong opinion any day.
00:38:04
Speaker
If they want to disagree with respect, let's have a conversation in public. I'm all for that. But when you get disrespectful and you're one of the millions of trolls out there, then, you know, move on. And that's where I think LinkedIn is, yes, you want to have an open and candid conversation, but we did not show up to watch two people argue about petty things. Take that offline and let's get back to call it business, which is how do we make each other better? How do we make each other profitable? At the end of the day, we're all in business to make money. Let's be honest.
00:38:31
Speaker
How do we help each other do that more without just trying to get money? And that is built by value. And you know this, Mark, because this is your space is when you do it for people and you do it well, they're going to start to refer you, which is how you grow your business. Peel back the ending a little bit on your tactical approach to LinkedIn. Do you post every day? Do you look to post different types of content? I know, for example, that you leverage video in a big way, but also text posts. Walk us through how
00:38:59
Speaker
your day-to-day approach to LinkedIn and how much you plan in advance versus what you do spur of the moment. My morning posts are always written in real time. So that's me sitting down over a cup of coffee. The evening posts are always Mackenzie and me. We sit down and peel it apart. So that's typically when the video will happen. And now we're getting into pillars. So our approach is centered around what are we really talking about this week?
00:39:22
Speaker
How do we get themes in place so people don't feel like it's all over the place, right? And when we look at the analytics on the post, which is where I look at the success of it, it's always founders and CEOs, one and two, who are getting the impressions. What that means to me is those are the people who it's resonating. Whoever your target audience, and this is the tactical exercise I would tell everybody, go to LinkedIn, go to your latest post and look at the audience impact. And is the one, two, or three within your targeted persona,
00:39:48
Speaker
If not, what are you going to do today to change that? Stop writing posts that other SDRs would like. Who cares? Yes, it's great to have a community, but that's not what this is for. It is for you to establish yourself in a space where people who could potentially buy from you are engaging with your posts, not a community of other people struggling like you. That's great, but you know what? I call it, that's a community.
00:40:12
Speaker
You can find that in RevGenius or whatever positive influence that's an awesome community. Go in there and they will love you and treat you and take care of you. That's, they do it awesome. LinkedIn though, if you're an SDR and you're selling to manufacturing, man, I would be researching manufacturing. I would be listening to every manufacturing podcast. I would be following every manufacturer thought leader.
00:40:30
Speaker
And I would become an expert man. I would wear a fricking hard hat and you know, I would just be the thing because to me, that's the only reason you should be doing that job is because you love the space. And if they know you love the space and you care for the space and you want the space to thrive, now they're going to let you in.
00:40:46
Speaker
to the circle. That's great insight because my experience from LinkedIn is that a lot of my comments are driven by marketers and a lot of the content that I'm commenting on is written by marketers. So it's this sort of community of like-minded people who are focused on the same thing. Yeah, and that's good, too. Yeah. And when I look into my analytics,
00:41:10
Speaker
My top three audiences consistently are CEOs, founders, and the head of marketing. And that's all I care about. To me, that is success. And if that keeps happening, then you know you're on the right track. 100%. One final question.
SellEx's Unique Services and SaaS Offerings
00:41:27
Speaker
And this is the question that I should have asked you right off the top, is to talk about SellEx. What does SellEx do? You mentioned it's a services company and SaaS. Who does it serve? And why would someone want to hire SellEx versus do sales in-house?
00:41:43
Speaker
Yeah. Celix is a company that we are a platform. So we currently have the offering of call it what is traditionally known as outsourced SDRs. We have 300 plus XDRs. We love the X anything, right? So we're trying to over time when we talked about this modern seller, how do we do that for people in more of a modern way?
00:42:02
Speaker
And modern doesn't mean email and digital. It just means thinking about it differently. And so when people want to use our platform and how does do that, that's what we do today. We do that soup to nuts. We write the content. We develop the ICP. You probably know your ICP, so we're going to pull data, clean data. Now, what we found over time is we are not the best fit for companies who don't know, especially if they don't have a product market fit. They don't have a TAM identified. They have never flexed on outbound at all. If they don't have risk tolerance, that's going to be us really going out and tip of the spear.
00:42:32
Speaker
Okay, like this is gonna, where are we marrying up with marketing? Where are you marrying up with messaging? And a lot of companies go, what do you mean?
00:42:39
Speaker
Like we're just supposed to do this thing called predictable revenue, right? We got an SDR and you guys just make it happen and we get rich. And I'm like, well, no, I mean that was Salesforce. They had a secret thing called like the world's best CRM that they built over time. And that's how they built their business. Our targeted customer tends to be because of that environment SAS is really that call it three to 100 million is the sweet spot. Typical people. We talked to our CEO CROs.
00:43:04
Speaker
But that platform that we're now calling a revenue enablement platform is as we walk into Q4 and get bigger, right? And now that we're going to be able to beef up engineering and come in with some really exciting news pretty soon is we're going to be delivering a SaaS product that we will compete directly without reaching sales loss.
00:43:22
Speaker
And we will be, instead of a revenue engagement tool, we will be an enablement tool. So we can not only be a tool that you can use for your teams, but not just your sales teams, your demand gen teams, your marketing teams to get insights and run campaigns.
00:43:37
Speaker
And that is the central nervous system that Selix wants to become. And we have partnered with Salesforce, HubSpot, Calumly, Chili Piper. We're about to partner with companies like Clearbit. And so when you come to Selix, you can start to plug in those things you need natively within us. If you think Salesforce and their app marketplaces, we're building that same sort of marketplace that people are one item you can get in the marketplace. If you need a CRM,
00:44:00
Speaker
that which would be i guess weird but if you needed to buy sales force you never bought it you could also. Buy sales force and now we think you know i don't live up on sales force that be a good thing to have you can also say you know what i don't have a tool like clear but i guess i've never been tracking my okay let's talk about that because we actually went and took your website visitors that you're not doing anything with the day and then repurpose that outbound. We have such a stronger ability to capture things and so we're trying to not just be.
00:44:27
Speaker
the lead general trying to say how do we think about your entire revenue motion and how do we deliver software and people if that's what you need that can allow you to push that forward so that'll be the transformation you see and will always keep that that people part as a emphasis point but when i think of center right now with that think of having that be more left to right.
00:44:48
Speaker
And that will be something you can do on the platform that no other company as a softwares company can offer. And so that'll be a very unique. Distinguisher where companies can throttle us up and down with people as they need us versus going to find the next lead gen firm on pavilion, because you need to put a bandaid on a little bit of a wound. Final question. If people want to learn more about Salix and you, and I know the obvious answer, if they want to learn about you, where do they go?
B2B Engagement via TikTok
00:45:14
Speaker
TikTok actually is where I'm having the most fun lately. Steve sells stuff is my TikTok name. LinkedIn is still somewhere where I hang out quite a bit, but TikTok's been super fun. And man, I'm telling you right now, the first deal came out of TikTok last week. Like we've got our first real deal that went to contract and deal velocity was five days from first conversation to contract. A lot of a B2B marketers, a lot of B2B salespeople are still on the fence when it comes to TikTok. What sort of put you over the top?
00:45:41
Speaker
I needed a place to be entertained as much as I needed a place to learn. And honestly, like I don't go there and I don't want my kids on TikTok because man, there's some serious weird stuff to it now, especially with their now feature they just released, which is super creepy. But I do know that people are going there and I'm a little sick and twisted to say no matter what, I was not first to LinkedIn, but I will be first to TikTok. And so when there's market capture happening there,
00:46:04
Speaker
I'm going to, like Chris Walker, good luck catching up to him right now if that's your goal, doesn't need to be. That's kind of what I want to get that far ahead. So by the time you have a million, I have a million followers, the next person goes, man, I have 20,000. This is really tough. Not because I want to compete and beat everybody, but I want to be someone who is called the voice of reason, looking sales on the voice of TikTok in a generation that's all about bits and bytes and sound bytes.
00:46:27
Speaker
Well, it sounds very inspiring. I think for people like me who are just starting to get into TikTok, it's good to know that people like you are already there and already starting to build an audience. It's fun, right? It's a fun, creative process. It's a break from the call it like, oh my God, I got to get CEOs and founders. It's like, I don't know who's going to watch this. And by the way, I'll end with this. As I turned a TikTok post just out of curiosity, marketers will love this into a paid ad just to see what an organic TikTok would do on TikTok as a paid ad and put 20 bucks into it.
00:46:57
Speaker
Uh, and it had, I don't remember 140,000 views, 2000 likes, no business, right? But the traction you can get on there. I think it's a lot like Facebook where I'm like, I don't know where this is going, but people are looking at it. So nothing came out of it. So I'd say, until you have a clear message on TikTok or put ad money, just have fun with organic. Cause that's where you're going to get the biggest reach. Hold on to your ad money on TikTok till you can figure out.
00:47:22
Speaker
what you want to be the outcome of that versus saying, oh my God, TikTok, we got to go there. Like redirect all our spending, just do little tests.
00:47:29
Speaker
Do a little test. Well, this has been a great conversation. We covered a lot of ground. We bounced around a lot and hopefully we've explored some of the inner workings of sales that people need to know about. So I want to thank you for your time and I want to thank people for listening to another episode of Marketing Spark. If you enjoyed the conversation, leave a review, subscribe via Apple podcasts or your favorite podcast app and share via social media. And to learn more about how I work with P2B SaaS companies as a fractional CMO, strategic advisor,
00:47:58
Speaker
and on positioning and messaging development, email marc at marcepin.ca or connect with me on LinkedIn. I'll talk to you soon.