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S4 Ep02: Revolutionizing Sales with AI Tools and Techniques: Insights with Mario Martinez
18 Plays5 hours ago
In this episode of Dial It In, Trygve introduces Mario Martinez, founder and CEO of Ingreso, who specializes in digital sales training and AI-powered tools. The discussion revolves around the increasing difficulty of selling in a noisy, remote-first world and the challenges of prospecting in such an environment. Mario explains how AI can be leveraged to improve sales processes, citing examples from Fly MSG, a productivity tool aimed at enhancing sales engagement. He highlights the use of AI in automating and optimizing sales tasks such as commenting on LinkedIn posts and cold calling, as well as detecting grammatical errors and rewriting sentences. The conversation also touches on the importance of trust and personalization in sales, and how AI can help in targeting and engaging potential customers more effectively.
Connect with Guest:
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Website
…
Dial It In Podcast is where we gather our favorite people together to share their advice on how to drive revenue, through storytelling and without the boring sales jargon. Our primary focus is marketing and sales for manufacturing and B2B service businesses, but we’ll cover topics across the entire spectrum of business. This isn’t a deep, naval-gazing show… we like to have lively chats that are fun, and full of useful insights. Brought to you by BizzyWeb.
Links:
Website: dialitinpodcast.com
BizzyWeb site: bizzyweb.com
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Transcript
Introduction to 'Dial It In'
00:00:08
Speaker
Welcome to Dial It In, a podcast where we talk to fascinating people about marketing, sales, process improvements, and tricks that they use to grow their businesses. Join me, Dave Meyer, and Trigby Olson of BusyWeb as we bring you interviews on how the best in their fields dialing it in for their organizations.
00:00:26
Speaker
Let's ring up another episode.
Host Trigby Flies Solo
00:00:30
Speaker
Welcome back everybody. it is season four, episode two, Dave's on a plane. We finished the first episode and then he immediately left town. So I'm by my lonesome today, but I'm pretty excited because I have an amazing guest who I've known for quite a long time and have all the respect in the world for.
00:00:47
Speaker
So as somebody whose job it is to sell and as it is, as such it, as my job is to teach people how to use AI and to work on growth in their own companies, I've just been tortured by this idea lately of how do you get better at selling when the volume is so loud universally everywhere?
Guest Mario Martinez Introduction
00:01:08
Speaker
And so that's why I'm happy as I'll get out to bring on our guest, my friend Mario Martinez. Mario is the founder and CEO of Vingresso, a globally recognized leader in digital sales training and AI powered tools, including the flymsg.io productivity suite.
00:01:26
Speaker
With an extraordinary 105 consecutive quarters in B2B sales and leadership, Mario has helped generate hundreds of millions of dollars for clients worldwide.
00:01:38
Speaker
He is recognized among the top 10 most influential business leaders by Beyond Magazine. He's been featured in Forbes Inc, Entrepreneur, and Huffington Post, and appeared in Salesforce's award-winning documentary, The Story of Sales.
00:01:52
Speaker
He also hosts the Modern Selling Podcast, which he has never invited me on, but he and shares insights with top sales and marketing leaders around the country. Has the coolest chair in the world and is one of the best seventh grade basketball coaches you ever meet. And he has the unfortunate distinction of being my friend. Welcome, Mario.
00:02:11
Speaker
Wow, that was a mouthful, Trigby. Awesome. Right. Thanks so much, buddy, for having me. And thank you very much for the introduction. You actually made me a little younger than I really am.
00:02:23
Speaker
It's not 105. It's 108
Community Engagement and Personal Life
00:02:25
Speaker
now. It's 108. Okay. Executive quarters in sales and marketing and leadership. Thank you so much for having me. And yes, basketball, that actually is now not just seventh grade, but we're doing 10 through age 10 through 19.
00:02:40
Speaker
So it is expanded and we create our own little private league and we've got every week that we, when we are doing it, which was February through May, we're actually gonna be doing it again here for the winter season coming up.
00:02:53
Speaker
We'll have anywhere between 40 to a hundred kids that show up for basketball. I actually talk about your son's basketball league all the time, especially when I'm talking to people who don't have a really large marketing budget. So what I tell them is you need to find a local kids basketball league and and you need to sponsor them and then you need to live and die by that.
00:03:14
Speaker
And you post massive game updates like it's game six in the NBA finals. And it's intriguing and it's interesting and it's engaging. And it's going to see your logo everywhere.
00:03:25
Speaker
You should follow my friend Mario because he does it with his son. And it's awesome. And I genuinely log on LinkedIn because I want to see if Mario's son's team won last night.
Humorous Anecdotes
00:03:35
Speaker
I love it.
00:03:35
Speaker
Funny as it may be, my best performing content is with my boys. i don't know what going to do when they get old, because at some point they just stopped being cute on the newsfeed and it's just another human. and
00:03:48
Speaker
My son used to have his own internet show too, when he was eight and nine, it was called spicy Luigi and he would eat spicy foods. And it was really literally, he just came up with the idea of hot ones, but for a kid. Wow.
00:04:03
Speaker
And he, he loved doing it, but we had to stop it because i own the domain spicy Luigi.com. And then when, There was the UnitedHealthcare murder about a year and a half ago where the guy the CEO of UnitedHealthcare got murdered.
00:04:18
Speaker
guy who murdered him, his name was Luigi. Apparently, he was really good looking too. And my views on Spicy Luigi for my nine-year-old eating Tabasco shot up like 4,000%. So just scuttled the whole thing. It was really depressing.
00:04:34
Speaker
Oh, mean, that was his YouTube money. That was his college fund right there. they Right? right Exactly. But it's it's amazing how these things get out because apparently our first episode was done for that was done. he ate Tabasco for the first time.
00:04:49
Speaker
And apparently that actually made it way made its way to the Tabasco company. And the CEO of Tabasco thought he was so cool that he sent us secure package and he has his own Tabasco uh sauce that with a handwritten label on it that says it says spicy luigi it's amazing how marketing with just being authentic and sharing information about your kids gets around and people think it's cool ah There you go. I like that story and how cool that the CEO of Tabasco, which is it Tabasco Inc. or are they owned by somebody else?
00:05:22
Speaker
It's the McElhaney company out of Louisiana. Yeah. i think that And they're proudly three ingredients. It's like vinegar, red pepper, and one other thing. And that's it. and It's still good. And they're not changing anything. And it's still awesome.
00:05:37
Speaker
Yeah. Yeah. Love that story. At least your son has figured out that he can monetize people watching him and staring at him doing interesting or silly things. So I'm going to make more money. I will. i will So I brought you on because I think you're an amazing guy and I think everybody needs to know more about Fly MSG, but I want to ask you just a simple, basic question to start with. Is it just me or is it harder to sell now than ever?
00:06:03
Speaker
Wow, such a great question, Trigby. The answer to that question is, it's harder than ever now to actually
Sales Process Challenges
00:06:08
Speaker
sell. And I like to think of the sales spectrum in two ways. First part is the pre-hello to the hello.
00:06:16
Speaker
And then the second part, the hello to the close. And I think the hardest part of selling right now is this pre-hello to the hello phase. That's what we call like the prospecting phase, the engagement phase, getting the attention of your buyer.
00:06:31
Speaker
So that's the pre-hello to hello. And when we go back to actually COVID, we actually did several research studies. If you look this up under the prospecting Vingresso, you'll see this study that we did. was done four times.
00:06:44
Speaker
And the last study we did had 1,295 respondents. And we gave them four options. What's the hardest part about selling? Is it getting the first appointment? Is it qualifying the opportunity?
00:06:56
Speaker
Was it getting to a proposal phase or closing the deal? And out of 1,295 respondents on the fourth research study with sales reps around the globe, 69% for the fourth time in a row, for the fourth time in a row of that study, 69% said the hardest part of the selling process was getting to the hello, the pre-hello to the hello phase. This, that right there.
00:07:19
Speaker
yeah And so arguably we spend probably, i would say 30 to 40% of our time getting to hello, but it's 70% of the effort. Yes. Right. So thinking about that, why has that become so much more difficult?
00:07:33
Speaker
It's become so much more difficult, one, because of laws that have been enacted and invoked that are ah some in global in nature and some in the domestic US, like for example, California decided to do their own thing related to privacy, which is similar to GDPR that doesn't follow federal suit.
00:07:49
Speaker
So with that in mind, you have all these different organizations, entities, government systems that are actually putting on different requirements of what you're allowed to get information on and what you're allowed to do with that information.
00:08:02
Speaker
So that's the first part.
Remote Work Selling
00:08:04
Speaker
I would argue, though, that probably is not the biggest thing that's holding us back. What I would argue actually is what has happened is because most of our buyers are still sitting in a remote first environment, meaning I work from home three days a week, I go in two days a week.
00:08:19
Speaker
Even if it's flip-flop, two days a week, I go in three days a week. Try calling them companies like LinkedIn, Clorox, any of the major Fortune 100s. Good luck in trying to talk to somebody that's actually a receptionist.
00:08:33
Speaker
It's just not going to happen. If you look at those dialers, even better luck trying to be able to get name recognition and get to an individual that you're that you care about. So that's become increasingly difficult. So we've got that gate.
00:08:45
Speaker
Then we've got additional gates. You work from home. I work from home. Okay, so I don't have a desk phone that I'm sitting in front of that I can see the blinking lights lighting up every time it actually rings.
00:08:56
Speaker
No, what I have is my mobile phone. But on my mobile phone, as an example, I've got this feature that is set up from Apple that unless the caller is in my caller ID, goes straight to voicemail.
00:09:10
Speaker
Okay. Okay. So you will never, ever get me on a cold call. Never. It just won't happen. ah And as a direct result, I only listen to my voicemails about once a week, about once a week.
00:09:23
Speaker
And for the most part, I start deleting those particular voicemails. So the data shows that pretty much out of every 100 calls that we make, we may speak to two to three people live. Okay. I would think for you, especially because your business is sales training and making better salespeople, aren't all those cold callers essentially doing the prospecting for you and giving you, hey, call let me call John back. Hey, let me tell you everything you did wrong. And here's how I can help you do it better.
00:09:51
Speaker
So for Vingresso, our roots grew up in only and exclusively on the pre-hello to the hello phase. So when we came to the market, you had Sandler, you had Miller Hyman, you had value selling associates, the rain group, all kinds of other players, medic, the Brooks group, you had all these different organizations that were already doing training, but majority of them focused on the hello to the close. So you got a deal. How do you close that deal? Now that's important. It's very important.
00:10:18
Speaker
But if 70% of that time is spent on the pre-hello to the hello phase, then we've got to think about how do we effectively utilize the channels? I was talking about cold calling and I was saying for every hundred calls, you may talk to two to three people.
Video's Role in Sales
00:10:31
Speaker
That doesn't mean you should stop doing a cold call. It just means that you need to recognize that you're going to do more to be able to get less. Right? So now we start looking at how do we use the alternate channels? Okay. This morning I already deleted 77 emails. Yep.
00:10:44
Speaker
ye 77 emails and I don't recognize the name. So I just immediately delete, delete, delete. delete And those that continue on emailing me after I've said, leave me alone or unsubscribed, I marked them as spam now.
00:10:58
Speaker
So now I have this extra filter that we have marked this for marking as spam. And now we go on to LinkedIn. We've got a lot of folks that are on LinkedIn. Now everybody's connecting with everyone and they're now sending randomized connection requests.
00:11:11
Speaker
And then they're doing emails and then they're pitching. So they've taken their pitch from email to LinkedIn. And then now we add on video as an example. And video actually is quite unique.
00:11:22
Speaker
And I think it's the it's the secret sauce right now. If you think about prospecting and we think about how to engage and what we teach people, one of the things that we see is that when you're cold calling, you're using one sense, the ears, auditory.
00:11:36
Speaker
When you're emailing, you're only using one sense, the eyes. When you're doing LinkedIn messaging or engagement, you're only using one sense, the eyes. But with video, you actually have the ability to be able to look. You have sight first, which is that cool looking Giphy.
00:11:52
Speaker
You have sight first. You have the coolness factor. And as soon as you click play, you've got three to seven seconds. And majority of people actually watch the data shows that majority people actually watch the first three to 15 seconds.
00:12:05
Speaker
So you've got three to 15 seconds. Some data shows three to seven seconds to capture that person's attention. So if your video actually starts out with, hey, Trigby, hope you're doing fantastic. You just wasted three and a half seconds for- Thanks, Fi. Yeah, exactly.
00:12:19
Speaker
So what you need to be thinking about is how to use video that actually as appeals to both auditory and visual senses right there. And how do you capture that person's attention, leveraging that video?
00:12:32
Speaker
And think about this, Trigby. Have you ever, you've got kids and yeah I've got kids. yeah Have you ever been walking down the street and you're holding your young kid's young child's hand, and you see something in the distance walking towards you, and you grab your son or daughter's hands a little bit tighter, or you move them to the other side.
00:12:53
Speaker
Without explanation, you just grab them and move them to the other side of your body, because you know that person's coming on, say, on your left-hand side. Has that ever happened to you? Many times. Okay. What was the reason why you made that decision to grab your son's or or daughter's hand a little tighter or to get a little closer to your wife who has the on the side of her purse or to move your child from one side to the other? What is it that you saw that made you think that?
00:13:20
Speaker
So my son four years ago got attacked and almost killed by a golden retriever. So he, any, if a dog is bigger than about 15 pounds, he's immediately afraid of it. So if we're walking,
00:13:34
Speaker
I'm going to always move him to the other side of him because it's, he's going to have a fear response and he needs to feel like I am and the dogs going to have to get through to get through me before it gets to him. And I'll tell you a funny story. And I've never shared this on the podcast and you have kids. So you'll appreciate this is a year to the day after his attack, we went to Disney world and i paid an ocean of money. We both had lightsabers made.
00:14:03
Speaker
and And then afterwards at Disney World, they do this thing where all the really amazing spots in Disney World, they have photographers that are just sitting there and they'll take professional photos of you and and then you can you get them for free. So we were in this kind of courtyard looking at the Millennium Falcon itself. The thing that I love more than anything else, the word Millennium Falcon. And i was my son is holding his lightsaber and there's a photographer taking picture there. And we were up about 15 feet.
00:14:32
Speaker
And the all these people from the courtyard below him started like coming to him. And I could see that they were all coming to him. And I had this what amazing moment as a father. that after him getting attacked, brutally attacked and almost killed, we'd lived through it.
00:14:48
Speaker
And all of this pain and all of this effort brought him where I brought him to the happiest place on earth in front of the fastest ship in the galaxy. And I had this moment of bliss and perfection.
00:15:00
Speaker
And I said that to the photographer and she goes, yeah, that's not what's what's happening at all. And I was like, what do you mean? And she yeah, go down and go over and look. So I go over and look. And of course, here's my seven-year-old who's afraid of everything.
00:15:12
Speaker
And i we both look over, both of us newly minted Jedi Knights. And we look over the and there's Kylo Ren and two stormtroopers staring at us. And Kylo Ren points at us. And so now I know he's going to melt down. So I do the only thing that I think i to do is I lip off to Kylo Ren.
00:15:30
Speaker
And I say, i shout in front of 200 people. I shout, I can't hear you with that thing on your face. Why don't you come up here and talk to me like a real man? And Kylo Ren goes from pointing me, it goes thumb up and starts walking up.
00:15:43
Speaker
So my son is now having the meltdown of all meltdowns. So I get down and I think of every Rocky speech in my entire life. And I park it in center field, Mario. It's the best inspirational speech I ever gave in my life where I say, not here, not in this place.
00:15:59
Speaker
Father and son, we are going to look evil in the eye and say, not today. And he looked at me and he goes, okay, dad. And so Kylo Ren and two stormtroopers walk up to us and I flip my lightsaber on because I'm about ready. I'm not moving.
00:16:12
Speaker
this is This is the line in the sand. Right then I feel this little forearm in my back and my son starts screaming, no, take my dad instead.
00:16:26
Speaker
first I'm sorry that experience happened to your son. and Secondly, that's a great experience. He knew exactly who to sacrifice. He said, or you saved himself. Take the big one.
00:16:37
Speaker
too precious. Love that story. So your point, back to your point, I'm avoiding danger. you look bit more But back you you made my point, which is you saw something up ahead and it was something that you didn't believe that was the right trust. You looked, you made observations.
00:16:54
Speaker
And that's the same thing that we do when we're prospecting and we see something. And how do we make that judgment on a human? What we're looking for on a human is we're looking for the trust building factor, which is what we see in the face.
Building Trust with Facial Expressions
00:17:09
Speaker
And instantly the brain forms an automatic opinion and thought of do I trust or do I not trust just by looking at someone's face? And what do we look at? The smile.
00:17:21
Speaker
will actually send the brain the message that you can trust this individual. The individual who doesn't have the smile is sends the brain the message, oh, be careful, oh, be careful.
00:17:34
Speaker
And so we think about this, And we look at how do we get somebody to click on our video? As an example, you better be showing those pearly white teeth that when you send over that particular message.
00:17:44
Speaker
So with that in mind, prospecting has become so much more difficult. There's so much more noise. Our buyers are sitting behind electronic mediums and they are protected and firewalled in many different ways, whether be the Apple send it straight to voicemail, the spam filter, the, and you fill in the blank, right?
00:18:03
Speaker
And so... That has become single-handedly the hardest thing. And this introduces concepts around how do you actually slice through the noise?
00:18:14
Speaker
How do you use AI to be able to create authentic engagement? How do you do this at scale and speed? And how do you do this in an omni-channel approach where Mario is not the voicemail guy?
00:18:28
Speaker
You'll never get me. Trust me, you will never get me unless you're in my address book. Okay. but I will actually engage through text messaging. I will actually engage through email.
00:18:41
Speaker
I will actually engage through LinkedIn, but you better warm me up. Don't just come at me and say you want to have a book and appointment. No, you need to actually have done some of your research. You need to actually have said something that actually says, okay.
00:18:56
Speaker
In fact, some sellers have actually started downloading Fly Message utilizing it and then sending me messages saying, hey, I'm a Fly Message customer. I was after using the product I thought about.
00:19:07
Speaker
And so what I do is I go to their email. I look inside of our CRM and I look to see if they actually use the product. If they didn't use the product, I write back to them, right bold and center.
00:19:18
Speaker
Thanks for downloading, but you actually didn't use it. So therefore you can't claim that you actually use the product and use that as an introduction method. and Not going to happen. Redo, go actually use the product and then come back and talk to me as if you're authentic and real.
00:19:34
Speaker
Those that actually do it, I say, thanks so much for being a customer. Love that. Hopefully you're using this feature, that feature, and this feature as a salesperson or BDR or fill in the blank.
00:19:45
Speaker
I'm interested, let's schedule a meeting. Or I'm not interested, but I'll tell you what, I'll give you 30 minutes of my time since you did a great job and I'll actually do some private onboarding and we've got 25,000 users to fly message. You called it FlyMSG.
00:20:00
Speaker
we um MSG stands short for message, so FlyMessage. I'll actually give you 30 minutes of my time to help you get the most of it, but I'm not your target prospect. Right? So whether they take the appointment or not is up to them, but at least identify them to be able to help them see that they did the right thing in how to engage.
00:20:18
Speaker
And so those are the things that we need to start thinking about. And those are the things that definitely AI brings to the table to be able to help make prospecting easier.
AI in Prospecting
00:20:26
Speaker
Now, once you get into the hello phase, Yeah, there's a lot of tools that are out there that can help increase your speed to delivery.
00:20:34
Speaker
What doesn't change is people to people engagement. What doesn't change is being real, human, authentic and building trust.
00:20:46
Speaker
What doesn't change is, did I solve a business problem? And can I give an outcome that the company is looking for? What doesn't change is, do they have budget?
00:20:58
Speaker
What doesn't change is, are they actually, is there actually a committee that is responsible for purchasing this particular product? And so those are all the things that still require human intervention that AI can't help you with, except with providing you leading questions or check boxes or things that you're supposed to uncover.
00:21:19
Speaker
And I think that's really the next wave on the hello to close face is it needs to become smarter. There's all these cool tools out there that record your calls and then actually provide you feedback on how you performed.
00:21:30
Speaker
yeah I'm not looking for that. What I'm looking for is I want to know Did I, as a sales rep, go through all of the questions that I should have asked and what is it that I don't know still at this point?
00:21:45
Speaker
And that gets served up as on the next call, it gets served up to me directly into Zoom, directly into Google Meet, directly into your video conferencing platform of choice or my printout when I go face to face to meet with that individual.
00:21:59
Speaker
What don't I know and what do I still need to know? For example, on a first call, you may not have discovered whether or not there's actually a budget line on it for this or the expected timeframe of when they're looking to solve this particular problem.
00:22:12
Speaker
And in those cases, you wanna walk in prepared for the next meeting. And quite frankly, I don't see the platforms like Otter and some Fathom and some of these other tools that have actually taken it to that level.
00:22:23
Speaker
That's what I need to know. All the basics. AI scopes it and combs through it, gets me the answers, serves it up at the top of my note taking inside my CRM, and then identifies the areas that I still need to identify, and then puts it all into my blue sheet, my yellow sheets, my white sheets, whatever methodology I might be using be able to fill in the blanks. You bring up a really interesting point because it is an inevitable part of the sales conversation, which is what is your expectations for how much is this gonna cost? And what is your expectation for when this is gonna get done?
00:22:57
Speaker
And almost universally that gets back to the original point of trust. And so when you ask that question, you can ask it any number of ways. There's dozens of ways to tiptoe around budget, but ah universally somebody is gonna lie to you and they're gonna say, cause they are gonna want to pay the least amount of money and have it done as fast as humanly possible because that's their sphere of understanding is they need the problem done and they don't want to spend a lot of money on it.
00:23:25
Speaker
So then you get into that that trust factor of saying, okay, if you ask them the question, they're going to lie to you. Just work past that and understand that it's going to be there. I'm not going to tell you the truth.
00:23:36
Speaker
Your job is to then set the expectation to say, when you circle back to money to say, okay, now that we understand how badly you need this and how screwed you are, if we don't do this and how we can get this done in two weeks, and then the price is almost becomes inevitable, but you got to take that trip with people.
00:23:55
Speaker
Yeah, absolutely. And so I think the key here is when we are thinking about how to engage with our buyer, when we're thinking about how to solicit a response and then how to drive a deal down the road, we need to be thinking about how am I building trust throughout this entire process from the very first hello all the way through, thank you for signing the contract. and this requires us to not be using tactics that are false and misleading.
00:24:24
Speaker
i get these all the time. Hey, Mario, I love what you did on the podcast with Jane Smith. Great show. And it has the topic, the title of the topic inserted inside there. Now, the reason why I'm reaching out is, now, AI is smart enough to be able to find some of that data and personalize it, but actually is it smart enough to listen to the show and actually take a snippet.
00:24:46
Speaker
You know what I love most, Mario, about this particular show is that 22 minutes and two seconds, you started talking about ah very much hit home because da-da-da-da-da.
00:24:57
Speaker
Now, that... It'd be, even if AI could do that, at least it'll get me to say, okay. You heard that. did They actually listen. Yeah. ah ah Now I'm interested and I'm engaged. That's just one example.
00:25:10
Speaker
What if you don't have anything to be able to engage with an individual? Maybe there's no points of presence at all that you can pull in that type of data. Now you're using industry data. Now you're actually gleaning content based upon the industry very specifically.
00:25:23
Speaker
And you're focused from an industry perspective on how to go about utilizing the industry trends and problems to that particular buyer persona that you're going after.
00:25:34
Speaker
That's one. The other thing too is one of the big problems that we discovered in our process of a seller engaging is the time it takes to write messaging the time it takes to do engagement.
00:25:49
Speaker
And most of our sellers were actually practicing cold calling with 100
AI Tools in Sales
00:25:56
Speaker
prospects. And if you listen to the first eight calls that they had that they actually spoke to someone live, every one of those calls were handled differently.
00:26:05
Speaker
yeah So they're practicing live on prospects. So one of the things that we saw in terms of I'm a big believer that a fool with a tool is still a fool. So in order for you to be able to excel in your skills at LinkedIn prospecting, at video prospecting, at email messaging or cold calling, right? In order for you to be able to excel there, you have to actually have training, training,
00:26:28
Speaker
And then once you take that training, now you have developed the skill and then you need the tool or technology to help you scale each of those individual activities. Bingo. That's exactly what we did with Fly Message. We took our training program, which was centered all around prospecting.
00:26:44
Speaker
And then we brought in Fly Message to be able to append those skills that we taught. For example, you'll love this, Trigby. In having trained well over 100,000 sellers, we ran a study about four years ago, three years ago, excuse me.
00:27:00
Speaker
And we discovered that 80% of our sellers were not posting on LinkedIn or commenting on LinkedIn. Yep.
00:27:11
Speaker
Hold on a second. We had a 97% NPS score, 97% NPS score, meaning out of thousands of students who went through our training program, they said it was a single-handedly the best thing that they've ever experienced.
00:27:26
Speaker
By the by, normally this is a time when i interrupt a guest and say, explain what NPS is, but this is season four and this is all about speed and selling. So if you don't know, you need to stop the recording, go look that up and then come back.
00:27:37
Speaker
ah Please continue, Mario. Net promoter score, basically it says, how good was the program, the product, the service, whatever might be. 97% is unheard of in the training industry, first off. And so i was confused and I thought, how could we have a 97% satisfaction rate, but only 20% of our sellers were actually doing what we told them to do.
00:28:00
Speaker
Okay, either they lied to us or we missed something. Good news is we went back and we started doing our research with our market and we discovered that they didn't lie to us at all.
00:28:14
Speaker
We actually did have a very high satisfaction rate of 97%. But what we missed was the following. Number one, if I taught somebody to write how to engage through commenting on LinkedIn,
00:28:26
Speaker
The problem that it took was it took too long and they didn't know what to write. Example, let's say I'm selling to you, Trigvy. I go to your LinkedIn profile. I then click on see all posts.
00:28:38
Speaker
I then look at all of your posts and or comments and I begin to look at how do I actually gain your attention? Subliminally in my mind, something says, you know what? I probably shouldn't just go like the last 20 things that he posted.
00:28:50
Speaker
I probably shouldn't go like the last 20 comments that he made. That's weird. And that actually doesn't get the attention that I want, the right attention that I want. So then I say, okay, I'm gonna pick a post.
00:29:01
Speaker
I pick a post, I click comment, and I stare at a white comment screen. Okay, now what do I say? So two problems that existed that we found. Number one, it took too long.
00:29:14
Speaker
On average, it took six to 12 minutes per comment to engage with process. Are you kidding, six to 12 minutes? Six to 12 minutes, because now I had open up your LinkedIn profile. Wait for that to load. Next, I had to go and click see all posts.
00:29:27
Speaker
Next, I had to read two, three, or four posts to be able to see which one am I gonna write a comment on. Then I click pick one, click comment, and then I start a white comment screen and I start typing.
00:29:38
Speaker
And I start typing something and then I edit it and then I re-edited and then I hit comment and go. And in most cases, I forgot to tag the individual. Six to 12 minutes.
00:29:48
Speaker
So the process was those that did it, 20%, it took six to 12 minutes. Those that weren't doing it is because of the ah what I just described. It took too long and they didn't know what to say. So I was like, oh my God, I could solve this problem with ai I could actually take our entire social selling training program, model it it and into our AI prompts, and I can pre-build the right things that I want people saying. A curious, which asks a question to solicit engagement, an optimistic post, or a thoughtful post or comment. So that's what we did. And we took a six to 12 minute process down to less than 45 seconds.
00:30:23
Speaker
Actually, it takes three seconds to write the comment. And then the other 30 to 40, 42 seconds is to sit there and at mention edit to my liking taste. And then we layered on top of that, Mario Martinez's persona.
00:30:37
Speaker
So now we have the ability on fly message to be able to write in Mario's friendly voice, Mario's assertive voice, Mario's transportation voice. Mario's FinTech voice, or you put in the whatever it is you want. So now we have that ability.
00:30:49
Speaker
So going from six to 12 minutes down to a matter of seconds, increase the productivity of our reps and started creating more engagement. So what would someone do when they saw a long comment and they asked a question? the Usually the author reply.
00:31:04
Speaker
Now that you had an actual conversation going, now it led to the opportunity to be able to go ahead and actually send a connection request. and get it accepted because there is a reason I reached out to you. Hey, John, it was so great to communicate on this particular post.
00:31:18
Speaker
Insert link. Now that we had a conversation, I'd love to be able to connect with you as well. Great. Usually there's some acceptable format that someone says, yes, I know this person at least somewhat. Or The individual author of that post went back and clicked on the person's profile. Who asked this insightful question?
00:31:36
Speaker
Ah, interesting. So that was the first problem that we discovered. The next problem that we discovered was reps were writing a bunch of this content, Trigby, and they would write whatever it is they would write, and they would send it, and roughly about four to 6% of all messages written had some sort of grammatical punctuation error.
00:31:55
Speaker
Bingo. And when you are, this is a huge deal because, and this is a good ah lesson for anybody because in the sales process, the way it was described to me, of which I fully believe is people are looking for every single reason under the sun to not buy from you.
00:32:12
Speaker
And your job as a salesperson is to exhaust every single one of those not buying reasons. Spelling and grammatical errors, details matter. Sorry, off my soapbox. Keep going. So you nailed it. And so if a seller is using AI correctly, AI will give you the baseline. Let's say it gets you 70% of the way there.
00:32:31
Speaker
The rest of it is you're customizing to the individual. Maybe it's 95% of the way there. And now you're actually customizing it to be able to match your like and tasting. Phenomenal. However, one of the things that we found was that there were so many mistakes. And so what a seller had to do was they had to go buy a different tool in order to be able to solve that problem.
00:32:50
Speaker
And so I was sitting there one day and I was like, gosh, I write so much ah content, not for just blogs, not for training content, but actually messaging.
Fly Message Features
00:33:02
Speaker
why do I have to have multiple tools? If Fly Message cares about the message to create engagement, then why not care about the message, including punctuation and grammar? And so we released the AI grammar checker within Fly Message to solve that particular problem, no matter where you go online, yeah?
00:33:18
Speaker
And so that's the ability to be able to engage. But then I said, there was one more problem that we had. No matter what I wrote, whether I had AI write it I personalized it or customized it I was always sitting there saying, God, is there a better way to say this? Is there a different way to say this?
00:33:37
Speaker
And so I had another tool that I utilized, and that was called a paragraph rewriter or sentence rewriter. And it was like I used it probably 200 times a day and it would automatically come alive. it would automatically look at my content. It would automatically see what it is that I have.
00:33:56
Speaker
And it would identify what I need to change and suggest it changes. And for the most part, nine out of maybe eight out of ten, eight out of ten suggestions, I would accept and say, yeah, that's a better way to say it. It's shorter, it's cleaner, it's crisper, what whatever the case might be.
00:34:11
Speaker
We noticed that this was a problem. And as a direct result, I said, look, if FlyMessage cares about from an AI perspective, could I build another assistant that actually works inside of the workflow? So whatever you change, we're going to check the grammar. That's the AI grammar assistant. Phenomenal.
00:34:28
Speaker
Now what I want to do is I want to be able to customize this and write it. And then I want to highlight it and say, hey, AI, is there a better way to say what I'm saying? No word whiskers, no extra commas, those types of things. And if my message cared about the message, about creating engagement, the perfect message for the perfect engagement.
00:34:45
Speaker
Then what it should be able to do is give me feedback and help me rewrite some of the sentences or paragraphs. And that's exactly what we just released this past week was what's called our paragraph rewriter.
00:34:57
Speaker
Highlight anything. You can improve the writing, humanize the writing, make it shorter, make it longer. You can translate it into 40 different languages. You can change the tone of a particular sentence where you want it to pop. Maybe you want it to be humorous and funny. Maybe you want it to be firm and assertive, whatever the case might be.
00:35:13
Speaker
And so now you started thinking about that. So that's all around the messaging that's around LinkedIn engagement. And then I said one more level. What I began to notice is that the voicemails that I heard from reps, as they called, from even within the same company sometimes, they were always different.
00:35:30
Speaker
There was never a consistency. And those voicemails that I did watch because we do coaching on cold calling, that I did see what I began to notice is that these sales reps, business owners would make a call and it would be different every single time.
00:35:43
Speaker
So there was no rhyme or reason based upon you being the pessimist, you being the friendly, you being the optimist on the other side. So i was like, man, if we teach everything on our training all about how to prospect, how to engage through email messaging, LinkedIn, and video, and I give you all these tools to be able to help you write this messaging, whether be on LinkedIn, a comment, a post, rewrite anything you're writing, do your grammar checking, even have text expansion, which quickly builds out content for you, predefined templates.
00:36:15
Speaker
I was like, I need something to scale cold calling. So we went out and acquired a company's technology and brought that into the fold. And by next week, we should be releasing what's called AI role play and sales role play and coaching, which is the ability for you to build out your own ICP on on your computer,
00:36:34
Speaker
And then we give you 15 different types of personalities based upon that ICP that you can go practice with. And then you can get AI to rank you to tell you how you performed.
00:36:45
Speaker
Did you meet the objective? It has a live conversation with you. You get the transcript back and you get all the analytics of how you perform, ultimately improving your cold calling skills.
00:36:56
Speaker
And that is a full technology solution combined with services. That's one package that we now deliver. And I talked all about that. i don't want to make this a commercial. I want to talk about the problems and the outcomes that people are seeing. I think that you're absolutely right. I think the problem with AI on the whole is that it's like a, I think of it like an episode of Yellowstone with all the horses in the paddock is everybody's coming out with this new AI and Hey, get this new AI, get this. good And Claude and Gemini and Rufus and all of these different, and they all have clever names, but yeah,
00:37:29
Speaker
So I have this little paddock of AI robots that really want to do stuff for me, but I don't understand what the outcome is. And I think the real game changer for Fly Message, and yes, I knew it was Fly Message, but I say Fly MSG because it's supposed to help me speed up, is that you're focused on the outcomes. If you use this tool, here's what gets better. You get better, you get faster, you get smarter with your cold calling.
00:37:51
Speaker
Absolutely, yeah. And essentially, if you think about our real focus for a seller is to really help them to write better, to pitch better, and to win more deals, right?
00:38:03
Speaker
That's really the focus of the outcome inside there. I think when we think about AI, and we think about how to utilize that, no, it's not replacing the seller, but yes, it should make you ah heck of a lot sharper and it should make you a heck of a lot better at your job.
00:38:19
Speaker
In addition, what you should be able to use AI for is to help you speed up the process by which you were using it. And that's where for FlyMessage, people ask me like, oh my God, Mario, it feels like it's a Swiss army knife. Yes, it is, but you don't have to think about when to use the Swiss Army knife because the Swiss Army knife is already embedded into all of your workflows.
00:38:41
Speaker
When you click comment, fly message. When you write, when you highlight something, fly message. When you write anything, we show up the grammar corrections. And when you get into a role play, we're gonna prompt you to be able to accelerate your skills. So with all these areas, you've gotta use AI, whether it's on the prospecting side or whether it's on the hello to close side, you've gotta use AI to level you up and to increase the speed by which you were doing something in an inefficient manner and to give you the knowledge that you need to be able to accelerate the deal.
00:39:17
Speaker
That's where I think AI can fall into play and its best format.
00:39:23
Speaker
So there is light at the end of the tunnel for sellers in 2025 and 2026. It's just a question of how quickly you can get better.
Modern Sales Strategies
00:39:31
Speaker
How quickly you can get better and how quickly you understand that the name of the game is really about hyper personalization, right?
00:39:37
Speaker
Hyper personalization is the name of the game right now and omni channel approach. There are still a lot of companies who are cold calling only. That's the focus.
00:39:48
Speaker
There are still a lot of companies who are doing only outbound email. It's not just that. And you also have to get a little smarter about certain things. For example,
00:40:00
Speaker
A lot of our enterprise customers have asked us, hey, is there a way that you can, with all of our organic traffic, help us see who these anonymous visitors r and then help us to be able to start messaging them?
00:40:15
Speaker
The answer is yes. And if your marketing team isn't doing that today, shame on them. There's plenty of tools that allow you to be able to identify who these anonymous visitors are in the US and in some parts of international And they begin to message them. You pull them in and then you enrich that data. And now you start messaging them, engaging with them and saying, hey, Trigby, I saw that you were on our sales prospecting article. Interestingly enough, it looks like you got about two thirds of the way down and you stopped that, right?
00:40:44
Speaker
Perhaps you didn't finish the article. I'm gonna give that article to you. Or perhaps it wasn't what you were looking for and you were looking for, how can I help my sellers too? Either way, I'd love to understand what were you looking for and how can I help?
00:40:58
Speaker
There's a fine line there because if you don't do that well and you don't have a certain confidence and understanding of who you are as a person, that comes off way creepy. Maybe not, but it's no less creepy than the fact that all of a sudden you're on TikTok or Instagram and you're being served up an ad for Colgate because you're just on Amazon prime looking at Colgate. So I think we're well past that. We all recognize that now when I go to my computer and I look at anything or I go to my phone and I look at anything somewhere, somehow TikTok, Instagram, Facebook, or Google is going to serve me up some ad for something that I just looked at and something I just watched.
00:41:36
Speaker
But if I can actually be relevant, meaning I'm not going to I need to know that you, Trigby, are actually ah a sales leader. If ah if you were not a sales leader and you came to us for some, I don't know, you landed on us. Oh, actually, I know I'll tell you it a real life example.
00:41:51
Speaker
Here we go. Somehow, some way, Google started passing over traffic for okay triple X videos. And we started seeing this in our Google traffic. And I was like, what are we being pulled in for triple X videos?
00:42:07
Speaker
Now, for those you listening in, maybe you're international triple X is pornography. And we were getting you actually reach the level where you are so good at your job that somebody did a porn spoof of you. So no, what happened was, is our article on video for sales was being served up by Google for triple X videos for sale.
00:42:28
Speaker
Triple X videos for sale. And so as men or women were looking for X-rated videos for sale, our video for sales content was being pulled up and I thought, oh,
00:42:40
Speaker
That's interesting. So I asked the team, how do you stop that? And we were out of ideas, but what we were doing is we were actually identifying visitors that were on our website.
00:42:51
Speaker
It was coming up and we started messaging those individuals. Now this one was a little interesting. Hey, Trigby, I saw that you were looking for videos, our videos selling on our article.
00:43:02
Speaker
When you know, darn good that you were looking for triple e's videos for sale. Oh, goodness. Talk about embarrassing, right? Not for us, but for the individual. just what That's an example of, is it the right buyer? Is it the right persona? Is it the right message? Is it the right content that they're seeking out?
00:43:20
Speaker
And you have to be on top of these things as a marketing team. or as a sales enablement or revenue enablement team, you have to be on top of these things. And I think that's where it gets fishy, but that's a really good example of, and by the way, that lasted for its solid six months. And then basically Google's like, oh, I don't think that triple X videos are forcing it.
00:43:38
Speaker
ah So all that traffic went away, which I'm glad I didn't want it there anyways. so That's not the purpose of our website at all. And, but it was a funny, actually the discussion. And actually this is the first time I told that story on any podcast, by the way. Amazing.
00:43:53
Speaker
and So anyways, for to your point, you need to know your audience. You need to know whether or not that particular buyer is a buyer that you want and, or would like to target. Yeah. So the ICP and is it the ICP that I want to target? So maybe a a large company, maybe your ICP, a CRO of a super fortune, big fortune 500, but maybe that's not your target company is the CRO of a fortune 500.
00:44:18
Speaker
So I think that's really important. And honestly, if people are creeped out by the fact someone knows where they're traversing, then they wouldn't have hit accept cookies when they landed on that website. I see. I think the answer is that both things can be true at the same time. Yes, it yes it is creepy, and but the technology is out there and your competitors are taking advantage of it. So do you want to be upset that it's creepy or do you want to get better?
00:44:43
Speaker
That and here's another one for you. This one actually, i think it's this is the first time I'm talking about it. I think this is well within our repository here of things that we're going to launch and will be the first to market on this one.
00:44:56
Speaker
But imagine this. Imagine if you can look at all of your competitors' social media handles, LinkedIn, TikTok, Instagram, whoever. And you could see who's liking, commenting, reposting any of those social media posts off of your company handle or off of any employee who shares that particular post.
00:45:22
Speaker
yeah Imagine if you could actually ah target those individual individuals. individuals and run them through a filter, which is your ICP filter. That's your first AI bot right there, your ICP filter.
00:45:37
Speaker
And then it spits out of a hundred people. Maybe it spits out 20 of them that are actually your ICP. Now you enrich them and you begin targeting them because you know that they're engaged with your competitors content.
00:45:51
Speaker
oh Now that is pretty sexy. And guess what? AI is there. You can now put on sniffers that are actually watching the public social media posts.
00:46:04
Speaker
This is all publicly available. And you can begin looking at stealing your competitors' ICPs and who's engaging with their content and begin messaging campaigns behind that. That's the power of AI. And that's the power of speed.
00:46:20
Speaker
Because before to do that, we would have to sit there for... hours to be able to analyze that data. Now I can analyze data and look at content and posts and interactions and at warp speed with AI because it can do it quicker, faster, better.
00:46:38
Speaker
We're going to have to save that for the next episode, but thank
Vingresso and Fly Message Relationship
00:46:42
Speaker
you. I always learn and I always feel better about myself anytime I get the opportunity to hang out with you. Mario, where can people find Fly Message Online?
00:46:49
Speaker
FlyMSG.io, flyMSG. You see it is MSG. Yeah, it is MSG. So the abbreviation, flymessage, actually flymessage.io will get you to the same spot as well.
00:47:00
Speaker
But flyMSG, I'm all about brevity. I'm all about shortening things. I'm all about speed and productivity. So I didn't wanna create a product that had the full word message. I wanted it to be short, brief, and increased productivity by typing MSG.
00:47:13
Speaker
So flymsg.io, it does lead you to Vingresso. Many people wonder, Who is Vingresso in relation to Fly Message? It's just like Meta and Facebook. That's all we are. We're just a holding company for several different lines of businesses. One of them is our technology. One of them is our training for salespeople.
00:47:29
Speaker
And then the newest endeavor will be centered around the AI agency, building out some really cool things like I just talked about a second ago. But flymsg.io. And then, of course, if you are going to connect with me,
00:47:42
Speaker
Do not send me ah LinkedIn connection request message without telling me that you heard me on the Dial It In podcast with Trigby Olson. You need to send it as a hyper-personalized. Otherwise, I will just simply ignore the connection And if my name is spelled incorrectly, you are not going to get a response from him.
00:48:02
Speaker
That one, it took me a little while to be able to spell your name correctly. So if you don't think that you get out of jail free card on that one, at least tell me that you heard me on the Dial It In podcast and tell me something that you- You and I have been friends for a long time, so you finally got it down. So Mario, I can't thank you enough for joining us and definitely check out Fly Message if you get the opportunity. So this has been season four, episode two of Dial It In, produced by Andy Witowski and Nicole Fairclough. Dave is not here today, but he'll be back next time.
00:48:29
Speaker
And with apologies to Tony Kornheiser, we will also try to do better the next time.