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15 Using technology to your advantage in the sales process
247 Plays2 years ago
The guys are joined by Josh Fedie of SalesReach as we discuss sales enablement, tips and tricks on how to use CRM for growth, and much more. Josh started in a marketing agency, transitioned to custom software development, and found success in selling creative services. If you love sales and timesavers and are looking for ways to improve your value as a resource to your prospects, this is a must-listen!
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Dial It In Podcast is where we gathered 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 Podcast
00:00:05
Speaker
Welcome to Dial It In, a podcast where we talk with interesting people about the process improvements and tricks they use to grow their businesses. I'm Dave Meyer, president of BusyWeb, and every week, Trigby Olsen and I are bringing you interviews on how the best in their fields are dialing it in for their organizations.
00:00:24
Speaker
Craig V of a special guest for us today, an old friend of ours and someone that's walked the entrepreneurial lifestyle. We talk about dialing it in all the time, but this guy really does it for a living and he's got the full SAS experience behind him. Is it Big Bird? It's not Big Bird. Why never book Big Bird as a guest?
00:00:48
Speaker
You know, the problem with Big Bird is he's notoriously hard to pin down and he's always got, it feels like he's got someone inside him that's just dying to get out. And so I don't think we should go there. I don't think dying to get out, but now I want to know who our special guest is and know who's dying to get out of him.
Josh Feedy's Journey and SaaS Experience
00:01:06
Speaker
Well, I'd like to introduce to you Josh Feedy of SalesReach. Josh, how are you? Hey, guys. How are you doing? How are you doing? Is the Big Bird reference kind of like the, sorry, I didn't have time for Matt Damon, this episode sort of spoof. I think it's got to be now. I'm up with a hook like that. Yeah.
00:01:26
Speaker
Yeah, you should start doing that. Thanks for having me on, guys. It's great. Yeah. That's amazing. Josh, we've been in the same orbit for quite a while because you deal a lot with sales enablement and just the things that go into making sales teams better. We've both played inside of the same spheres. You're very familiar with HubSpot and we do a ton with that. You're living the life of a SaaS
00:01:55
Speaker
entrepreneur and I'm super, I'm super interested to hear all that came to be, but just tell us a little bit about yourself and what makes you tick. Yeah. So live, live in the life of an entrepreneur. Uh, you know, some of my call it a dream. Some might call it a nightmare, right? Um, you know, and I guess it kind of depends on the day, but yeah, I mean, we, we actually came from very similar starting poisons. I actually, you're a competitor of ours for a long time, right?
00:02:21
Speaker
For a minute, right? Yeah, I started a marketing agency myself. And my entire background was in creative services. And I love creative services. I love marketing. I love selling creative things because I'm a creative person. So selling in a creative way was just kind of second nature. It felt right for me, right? There's certain things that I would probably be absolutely horrible at selling. But if I'm selling creative services, selling creatively, it always just worked well for me.
00:02:49
Speaker
After working at agencies, I ended up founding my own agency. And that was fun until it wasn't is what I like to say, right? And then I went back to working for other people. But that was the moment where I found my true passion. I kind of moved away from creative services and started really diving into custom software development.
00:03:08
Speaker
I was working at marketing agencies right at the time where agencies were really either going real heavy into the digital technology side of things or going real heavy into the marketing strategy side of things. And I started moving more towards the digital building and custom software side. Just loved it.
00:03:29
Speaker
And so, you know, I'm one of those guys that I just can't help but have ideas for things and think of things and dream about, hey, one day I'll do X, right? And the unfortunate thing is usually when I dream about the things, I actually do move on it, right?
00:03:44
Speaker
And so for my family, it's like, oh no, he's thinking about something again. What are we going to do next now? But that's where this one came from. I was really frustrated with my own personal sales process. I had built a rudimentary version of what I built now for myself. It worked really well, but I had no vision of how to productize it.
00:04:04
Speaker
I got into the HubSpot ecosystem and started exploring what HubSpot had built and just realized that the thing that I had built would really compliment the tools that they had built because the bulk of the tools that they had built, at least at that time,
00:04:19
Speaker
were very, very marketing heavy. There really wasn't a lot on the sales side of house in HubSpot at that time. They're building more now. They're focusing on the quotes and making the quotes portion of HubSpot a little bit more robust to give sales people something more. But I just felt like we needed a way to better guide our customers through their journey.
What is SalesReach?
00:04:43
Speaker
I felt like we needed a way to build a better experience
00:04:47
Speaker
of working with us i felt like the things that we were doing in a digital first way as sales professionals was really bad sending all the documents and attachments and links and i know now everyone's using video never sending videos on one off videos and how many emails are we expecting these prospects to juggle when we're talking with them and it was really truly frustrating me so i built a solution for it.
00:05:09
Speaker
And so it's really just in line with all the things that I did as a sales professional. It was basically, here's my process, turned into a product, hired a team, they built it. And we've been going ever since. It's been just over five years now since we kind of built this thing. So yeah. Well, I think what's really interesting about the product is the world was very, very different in 2017 and 2018. Yeah.
00:05:34
Speaker
when you develop this. I think we should probably start talking about the abstract. What is sales reach and how does it make my life better as a sales professional? First, I want to comment on what you just said. The first two years that we built this thing, the people that we were talking to,
00:05:55
Speaker
we're primarily marketing teams, okay? Because this is a digital product, so I'm gonna get to what it is, but it's a digital product. Essentially, it just looks like a webpage at the end of the day. So marketing teams and organizations were looking at this, and I would say, yeah, your salespeople are gonna build this, and they'd go, no, they're not. So yeah, they are. That's the whole point of this, is that your salespeople are having conversations with their customers and prospects, and they're the ones on the front line, they're the ones that know what they need from them,
00:06:22
Speaker
They're going to build a webpage and they're going to organize the assets and materials they need on that page and marketing seems to go no way. They're not smart enough. We don't trust them with brand specific things. They're going to screw this up. They're going to change our logo. They're going to change our colors. They're going to say stupid things on camera. I mean, I heard everything marketing teams, the way they felt about sales teams at that time.
00:06:42
Speaker
It hasn't changed that much. But the way they felt about sales teams at that time was really upsetting. I'm a sales professional. And to hear those candid remarks in the beginning was really, really hard. What was crazy, though, is that you're right. I mean, we built and launched this thing.
00:06:58
Speaker
pre-pandemic. So we built a tool for sales professionals to be more effective in a digital first space before anyone was screaming, we need to be effective in a digital first space. The pandemic hit and I'll never forget getting a phone call from one of my investors who was like, dude, this is going to be huge for you. And I was like, you know,
00:07:20
Speaker
I don't want to get excited about what's happening right now because that seems insensitive. But at the same time, this is the moment. This is a huge shift where nobody's going to be able to deny the shift that was already happening. Because that's the honest thing. When we started building this tool,
00:07:38
Speaker
It wasn't just a, hey, let's see if people wanna be better in a digital environment. No, it was because customers were demanding that salespeople become better without being face-to-face all the time. All the studies were already showing this. All the studies were already showing how buyers were changing, how the materials marketing teams are producing on websites and blogs and on YouTube and on social channels were changing the way buyers were educating themselves.
00:08:08
Speaker
Already buyers were wanting to speak to sales less and less and less and less and less before the pandemic even hit there were stats coming out saying that buyers do seventy percent of the journey without talking to sales. Those stats were coming out before the pandemic hit so the pandemic didn't cause people to not want to be in person the pandemic made it more acceptable socially.
00:08:29
Speaker
in a business space to no longer waste time driving across town and flying all day long to meet face to face for pointless meetings that could have been achieved over a Zoom call or could have been achieved with a better email that was more organized. So that's why we started building this platform. What it is to specifically answer your question, Trigby.
How Does SalesReach Enhance Sales Efficiency?
00:08:50
Speaker
Essentially, it's an asset management system. Recently, there was a poll that asked sales professionals if a customer asks you for some information.
00:08:59
Speaker
Do you know where to find it? 65% of them said no, which is ridiculous. Like what the hell are you doing? Trigby, if I asked you to send me a document about BusyWeb right now, do you know where to find that?
00:09:12
Speaker
Yes, please reach. Yeah. Yes, I do. Yeah. See, but that was the response that so many of the respondents gave on that. And I just thought, wait a minute now, that's the most basic part of your job. I've been in sales over 20 years. I have never once in my life had a meeting that didn't end with send me some information.
00:09:31
Speaker
Never once there is always something being sent after a conversation otherwise why the heck did you even have the conversation if you were tracking towards something that needed to have something delivered as an outcome from that conversation that was a pointless conversation and if you're out there having pointless conversations all day. Then you need to get into a different career choice right because pointless conversations and sales are not gonna pay your bills right they need to have an objective so at our core were an asset management system.
00:09:59
Speaker
so that your team no longer has to say, I don't know where to find things. Your marketing team can curate materials. They can be documents, web pages, web links, videos, whatever it is that any customer facing team, sales, customer success, onboarding and training, whatever customer facing team is using our platform might need to distribute to somebody.
00:10:19
Speaker
The big difference though is that we're a visual first asset distribution platform. So instead of me sending Trigvi an email after our conversation with as many attachments as I can fit before I run out of space, and then a second email that immediately follows it saying I couldn't get this to fit so here's the additional things I wanted to send to you. Instead of me doing that, I send you a custom web page. It's a link.
00:10:43
Speaker
In your email, you see a video GIF because I record a video on all my pages, but you don't have to, right? And when you get to that page, I record a video explaining to you what's on the page. I explain to you what the next steps are in our conversations. I give you access to my calendar. I give you access to my LinkedIn profile so we can connect. I give you access to all the materials you need literally loaded on a single webpage where this is super beneficial. And then I'll stop and let you guys talk.
00:11:08
Speaker
This is another interesting This is another interesting thing that happened during the pandemic
00:11:15
Speaker
Review teams, pre-pandemic, on average, nine people. So any time someone needed to make a big business decision to bring in a new product, vendor service into an organization, there were on average nine people that were going to review that in total at a company. And they were getting together in a literal room together looking at the vendors or products that they were putting up against each other. Pandemic hits. Guess what happened to that review team?
00:11:42
Speaker
It almost doubled. I'm bad at math. It didn't totally double, but it moved from nine to 14 individuals. So now you've got people working distributed all over the country, literally some all over the world because someone like, you know, you only live once I'm going to go work in France for the rest of this year. Right. You have people all over the world reviewing product services and it's gone from nine to 14 people that need to make sense of that deal. So you tell me.
00:12:12
Speaker
How are you going to do that? How are you going to somehow build consensus with 14 people that you're not literally going to be sitting in a room with? You're not even going to meet these people in some cases. So the number one job of a sales rep became finding ways to build internal advocates.
00:12:32
Speaker
Finding ways to make it simple for that internal advocate to understand the deal and the complexity of the deal so much that they could speak to it without you being in the room. We as sales professionals need to hone the ability to train those advocates to be us.
The Importance of Personalization in Sales
00:12:52
Speaker
when we're not in the room, right? We need to give them as much information as we have about things so that when people ask them questions, they don't say, I don't know. They say, here's the answer. And that's where SalesReach has proven to be insanely effective, because they don't necessarily have to know everything, but they do know where everything is. And all they're doing is sharing that web link with all those decision makers.
00:13:15
Speaker
And everybody's getting the experience that you as a sales professional put together. And you have the opportunity to personalize it with videos and to literally introduce yourself to them. It's as human of a sales process as you can possibly make without being in a room together. So that's what SalesReach is. All right. Well, thank you for that. So you've got a 20-year sales
00:13:37
Speaker
portfolio behind you leading you into developing this tool, which is a great tool. David and I both use it and think that it's great. So once the pandemic hit, what my experience was, and I'm curious to know what your thoughts were, is everybody panics and everybody started doing webinars and emails and all of it was bad. Yeah.
00:14:02
Speaker
And so all of a sudden, there was a flush to, hey, here's a patented three-step webinar. And then that was the first wave in the marketplace in selling was, hey, everybody goes to email. Then the second was MarTech Shiny Objects, which is sort of your space.
00:14:29
Speaker
Here's one thing that you can do to make your life better. Oh my God, you have to buy this right now. Look at this shiny thing. Look at this shiny thing. And I think what's really unique about your tool is the only way that it really works successfully is it's yes, it's a time saver. Yes, it's a different presentation of the theater of things, but it only really works if you do have a genuine relationship with somebody. Yes.
00:14:57
Speaker
Yes. And you're actually a good salesperson. Yes. It is not something that will secretly magically make make you a better closer, a better developer. It is something which is rare in the MarTech space, I think, because everybody is selling this Glenn Gary idea of I'll make you faster. I'll make you more money. Yep. You're not doing that. You're talking about how I can make you more you. OK, so.
00:15:23
Speaker
I'm going to get up on a soapbox for a second here, and I'm going to say some stupid things that are going to be held against me in five to 10 years in my life, okay? But I don't care. That's just how I am. You know that. So here's the deal. I am beyond fed up.
00:15:41
Speaker
with so many of the tools that i see in the martac in the sales tax landscape because what i see out of a significant amount of them is that they do a very small amount of stuff.
00:15:58
Speaker
in a way that is designed to just be so stupid simple that it fools the people using it into thinking they're actually being productive and helpful. That's what I see all over the place. Specifically, I will not throw any companies under the bus on this. I won't. I won't mention any companies. But one thing that we compete against a lot with our tool are other video companies. We compete against a lot of video companies, okay?
00:16:26
Speaker
And I see solutions all day long in the video space where they say you can send a thousand personalized videos every single day to somebody. And I'm sitting here going, wait a minute, I send personalized videos all day long. I'm not sending a thousand personalized videos a day. It's not effective, number one. But number two, I don't have time to do that. How are they doing that? Right?
00:16:53
Speaker
Well, it's personalized because it's going to programmatically put somebody's name on the screen and programmatically put their website behind their head. You're actually only recording one video. It's generic. You don't say anyone's name. You don't even mention the company. It is literally the same message to every person that gets it. But the background and the foreground gets changed out slightly at different points. Now, I'm sorry, but that is not personalization in my book.
00:17:21
Speaker
In my book, if you are going to truly personalize something, if you are going to truly humanize something, then the human element needs to exist within it. And smiling at a camera for one minute of your day and recording a generic video that you're going to send to a boatload of people, that's not it as far as I'm concerned.
00:17:40
Speaker
I get those emails with those videos all day long. I immediately block that sender. I immediately put those into trash. I'm not interested in that. Like you need to go a little bit further. I don't expect you to know my dog's name. I don't expect you to know my kid's birthday. I don't expect you to know the last funding round. I don't think any of that stuff matters.
00:17:59
Speaker
Okay, all that really matters is what you're bringing me something that is actually a challenge that I'm looking to overcome right now. And if it is, then I will be willing to have the conversation, but only if I feel some level of trust and reason to engage with you,
Prioritizing Buyer Enablement
00:18:17
Speaker
right?
00:18:17
Speaker
And if I'm getting those generic things, I just feel like a number. And if I feel like a number, I don't want to play this game. I just don't. I'm more important than that. Every one of us is more important than that. We're not just numbers. And so I fight every single day with our product. Every time I'm talking to my developers, we have customers that ask for new features all the time and we add them to the list. And if we hear certain things asked for in a higher frequency, it moves higher up the list. But every time we hear things, we say,
00:18:47
Speaker
Well, what are they really asking for here, right? Like let's really get to the bottom of the problem here that they're looking to solve for. We have to keep it simple, but we also have to stay true to our ethos, which is we're not just going to make this some AI generated BS fast that like makes everybody move faster because our end goal.
00:19:08
Speaker
We are not a sales enablement tool. We are a buyer enablement tool. We exist to make your buyer's lives better. That's what we always exist for. That is what we build for every single day. If I wanted to flip this and be a sales enablement tool and make the seller's lives easier and not consider the experience of their buyers at all, then I could easily join the ranks of the 99% of sales tech tools that I see in the marketplace and
00:19:35
Speaker
limit our features down to 2 instead of the 15 that we offer right now, and it'd be fine. That all being said, my next business, I can promise you right now, will be the world's simplest thing that does almost nothing. And I'll just let people sign up online all day long.
00:19:52
Speaker
That's where the money is. And that's why you see all that stuff, right? Like, I don't want to die on this cross, right? This is an incredible product and I love using it every single day. But one of the things I've learned is that those simple tools exist because those are the simple tools that sell. Because when you talk to a sales professional and you say, you know, hey, you can do this and look at these responses that your customers are going to give you, or you can just do this.
00:20:22
Speaker
And one out of every thousand emails you send will respond, but you don't actually have to do anything. Unfortunately, many sales professionals want to choose that other thing. But to Trigby's point, the customers at SalesReach, the sales professionals that we're working with are true sales professionals in the most genuine sense of the term.
00:20:42
Speaker
They are people that actually care about the job that they're doing. They are people that actually care about the objectives of their customer. They are people that actually care about building a meaningful relationship because they understand that building a meaningful relationship with one customer is going to turn into 10 customers, is going to turn into repeat business, is going to turn into that easier life that you think that those easier tools are promising.
00:21:05
Speaker
When in reality, if you just put in a little bit of extra inputs and a little bit of extra time on a per customer basis, that's where you actually find the gold at the end of the rainbow. Yeah, well, that's kind of the thing I was most excited to talk to you about, Josh, because as we look at the pivot or the difference between sales enablement and buyer enablement,
00:21:30
Speaker
There are some things that I know in our first conversations when we set up SalesReach, you completely changed my way of thinking in how we should be approaching this. And yeah, the shiny tool or the shiny object syndrome is very real. And I can't wait to see what product you come up with on that side. But the coaching and since you're talking to dozens, hundreds of people and turning them onto this idea of
00:21:57
Speaker
buyer enablement, what are some of the common themes that people are either doing wrong in their sales conversations or that they don't get initially to help approach it from your buyer's perspective instead of making it all about you?
00:22:14
Speaker
So okay, there's a couple of big ones that I see a lot. The first and easiest one is that I think that there's a big misunderstanding around what personalization actually is in a sales process. Absolutely. Huge misunderstanding about that.
00:22:29
Speaker
And I really, I really wish that there was an easy way to better communicate the differences. I mean, I've tried to, I've been singing it from the rooftops, but I think it goes back to what I was saying before. People always gravitate towards the easiest thing. It's just human nature, right? We all do it, right? Like I'm sitting here looking at a list of things I need to do today. And there's certain things on that list that I don't want to do. And I know I should eat the frog and put it on the top, but I'm not gonna.
00:22:57
Speaker
going to put it at the bottom. I just know it. We always go towards the easiest thing. And with personalization, there's this idea that if I, again, just put their logo on it, or their name is in it, or their company name is in it, or I mentioned a recent funding round, or I mentioned that I saw that they moved across the country, or I mentioned
00:23:17
Speaker
whatever it is. I mentioned their post on LinkedIn. They feel like, okay, this is personalized. And again, that's not it. That's not enough. We need to stop just gravitating towards the simple low-hanging fruit that we can grab and we really need to dive in a little bit more.
00:23:33
Speaker
right and we need to allow ourselves to spend a little bit more time and i think this is easier for me to understand than a lot of sales professionals that i've personally worked with because i was always the person on the sales floor that the manager was saying you need to make more dials today and i would always say the hell i do i'm on the top of the leaderboard i'm making five calls today.
00:23:52
Speaker
That's it. I'm making five meaningful calls today. I am researching them before I go after them. I am not wasting my time. I'm going to know exactly who I'm going to reach out to. I'm going to have meaningful interactions and conversations. That's what I'm going to do. I'm not going to smile and dial. It's a waste of my time. I'm going to feel defeated. I'm going to feel upset, right? So for me, it's always been a matter of just slowing down. Find actual human ways to connect with people and reasons to reach out to them. And it's not always.
00:24:21
Speaker
This is the other piece that I see people, personally, I feel like people are screwing up on all the time. And a lot of LinkedIn sales gurus are preaching the opposite of what I'm about to say right now. A lot of LinkedIn sales gurus are talking about doing all that research and finding all those things and calling out those things. And what I'm here to tell you is in my experience, over 20 years in sales right now, the reason 90% of people respond to you from a cold outreach is not because your cold outreach was so impressive that they couldn't say no.
00:24:50
Speaker
It was because they just had a conversation with someone at the water cooler or over the virtual water cooler about a challenge they need to solve for. And your timing of sending an email that specifically called out the challenges that you help organizations solve hit right at the right moment.
00:25:07
Speaker
Okay? I see people all the time sending emails that say, hey, what did you think about my email I sent yesterday? You know what would be more effective than you sending that? Literally sending me the exact same email every single day because it's not going to resonate until it resonates as far as I'm concerned. I'm not going to pay any attention to your email until I actually independently identify that I have a challenge that you solve for. So just send me the same damn email every single day. Make it Groundhog Day. Make it rain.
00:25:33
Speaker
send me the same message every single day and maybe in four months, I'll wake up and go, you know what my problem is, is bookkeeping. Oh, holy crap, here's a bookkeeper. I get 50 bookkeeper emails a day. I'm not interested in them right now. I've got a great bookkeeper, but who knows what'll happen down the road, right? So that's the other piece is so personalization,
00:25:56
Speaker
It's the last thing that I was going to get at though is I just feel like the word empathy gets thrown around a lot.
Empathy Over Aggression in Sales Tactics
00:26:07
Speaker
Nobody is so I can't say nobody. So few of the people that preach empathy and talk about empathy are actually empathetic individuals. If we're truly being empathetic, then we will be less concerned about our personal quota and more concerned about our customers' objectives, right? And if you truly look at the email messages that most sales professionals send to their customers, just checking in, hey, are we still going to move forward next month? Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Like it's very me, me, me, me, me, me focused.
00:26:37
Speaker
And that whole me me me focus is again part of why I wanted to build a product the way that I did because I didn't want me as the sales professional to be the focus. I wanted your needs to be the focus and one of your needs is a more simple way of navigating a complex situation and explaining that complex situation to your team, right? So I really think that there's a lack of empathy in sales.
00:27:02
Speaker
it's only been made worse because of the financial issues happening in the world right now sales managers are getting a little bit crazy demanding the same or better output than we had in previous years and they're not being empathetic to their team right when they're making those demands it's physically impossible right now to make more revenue today than you did yesterday i mean it's it's really insane what's happening right and i think just staying alive.
00:27:30
Speaker
is good enough as far as I'm concerned right now. Let's give people a little more grace. But also, if we truly understand what our customers are going through and what their objectives are, we shouldn't even be asking them, is this still a priority next month? We should know, you know what? That's going to get pushed back because we're having genuine conversations with them. And we understand where they're at and where things are tracking. And we're not going to force this in. We're not going to force in a deal before it's ready. Trigby, I saw your hand up. I'm going to bring you in here before I keep rambling, man.
00:28:00
Speaker
Okay, so question number three. Oh, boy. One of the things that I'm seeing, and I think I'm similarly plugged in to you as you are, Josh, to the sales community. Bump emails are getting aggressive. You talked about how, oh, hey, what'd you think of my email you sent yesterday? Your email was crap because I didn't look at it and F you for now making me think about what I didn't want to think about yesterday.
00:28:28
Speaker
So what I'm seeing is now I'm seeing people are more aggressive. I'm actually getting cold appointments being set for me. Oh man, I know. And then how come you didn't come to our meeting on Monday as subject lines?
00:28:47
Speaker
And then I open it and I'm like, ask you, man, I don't know who you are. I'm not going to take a meeting that I don't know. Here's a fun one. Here's a fun one that just happened the other day. So I'm getting these two, and I've actually put up rant posts about this on LinkedIn before, because I can't believe people are doing this. But people are literally just finding your book a demo button, or your schedule meeting button, and your email auto responds, you're out of office, but your calendar links on it, they just book a meeting with you. And when people started first doing this, I was oblivious to it.
00:29:17
Speaker
You'd get on the call and you'd think, oh, this is scheduled as a demo. And then, oh, they aren't interested in our product at all. They just want to talk about their product. What? They booked a meeting with me under the guise of book a demo, but this is a demo to experience there. How is this acceptable in any way, right?
00:29:36
Speaker
As soon as I started seeing that as a trend, I started responding to medians that were booked with me. I'd respond like, you just booked a meeting with me. What can I make sure that we're going to be discussing on that call? Especially if it was something where I was like, this doesn't seem like a fit. Where is this coming from? This isn't the type of decision maker I would even want to have a conversation with. I'm going to start calling this out a little bit.
00:29:57
Speaker
But here's a funny one for you. About two months ago, I had a meeting with a company and their VC joined the meeting. And the VC, at the end of the call, said, we think some of our other portfolio companies could use your product as well. And I said, well, this sounds great. I'd be happy to discuss a way to roll this out for more of your portfolio companies at the VC. We should have a conversation about that.
00:30:22
Speaker
And two months goes by. I have a lot of meetings in two months after that, right? And all of a sudden one day I get booked and I don't recognize the name of the company that booked at all. I don't recognize the name of the individual. This was not someone that was on the call. It was under a different name.
00:30:40
Speaker
And immediately after the booking comes through, I get another email that says in advance of the meeting, please review this document. And I'm like, what? And I open the document and it's basically what our expectations are. Okay. Like if you're going to be coming to the meeting, this is what we're expecting you to have prepared, blah, blah, blah.
00:31:00
Speaker
Yes, and it was, it was there. They had an automation glitch and it was the deck that they send to people that they're like vetting out to invest in, right? And I got mad immediately. And I sent this individual message and I said, I cannot believe
00:31:19
Speaker
in the role that you're in, in the position that you have, that you're going to resort to tactics like this, where you're going to take time away from a founder in their day, knowing full well how busy we are, under the guise of learning about my product, but then immediately
00:31:36
Speaker
pitching me your services. Like this is absolutely ridiculous. We'll be removing this meeting, have a nice day. And he responded, he's like, no, no, no, no, no, I'm really sorry. I don't know what you saw, but I was told I needed to have a meeting with you. I'm with this VC and we want to review this for our Portland. I was like, dude, I'm really sorry. But, and then I had to start my meeting with, let me explain to you what happened. Like, let me show you this deck that was programmatically sent to me. Once you accepted the meeting with me, you might want to make sure that that doesn't happen because that really started setting us off on the wrong foot.
00:32:05
Speaker
But to your point I'm getting hyper Hyper sensitive around that subject because I've had it happen more times than I can count at this point that somebody has filled tried to fill their quota of meetings booked in a day by just scheduling fraudulent meetings with me and No interest in reviewing my product just needs to put a meeting on the calendar and doing it But what I would say is
00:32:34
Speaker
is the flip side of this. One of my favorite things to do is when you get a email,
00:32:40
Speaker
And someone's trying to cold outreach to you and book a meeting with you in the proper way where they're letting you know why they want to talk to you and what the conversation is going to be about and asking you if there's some time available and doing it all the right way. Watch for those ones that are ideal fit customers for yourself. Because what I've been doing. I do that all the time. For years now is I respond and I say, you know what, Trigby, I'd be happy to meet with you, but here's the thing. I'll set aside one hour.
00:33:07
Speaker
The first 30 is yours. The second 30 is mine. I'm going to let you pitch me and then you're going to let me pitch you. And we're going to see where we can help each other here. That is a much better way to be clever about filling your day with more productive meetings than just throwing yourself on somebody's calendar. It's happening a lot right now. It really is. And it's bad. It's really bad.
00:33:32
Speaker
Well, the other thing that I do to weed folks out is if they send me an email saying, oh, an aggressive email, your SEO is really bad and you need to be doing all sorts of things differently.
00:33:47
Speaker
You know, we have somebody who works on our staff whose job it is to SEO the website. So I will always universally say, by all means, tell me what we're doing badly that you think you should do better. And let me know, I welcome the conversation. And 98 times out of 100, I never get a response back. So even if when I respond, yeah, happy to talk to you. What'll happen is
00:34:12
Speaker
The two people that do respond, they'll make up just complete reasons why you're not. Can I say that? It's my podcast. I'm going to say whatever you want on my own podcast. Yeah. Yeah. Like, like the famous example is, uh, he came back to me and he said, you know, we, you're completely, your, your ranking is completely horrible for private airports. Like we're a marketing company. Yeah.
00:34:42
Speaker
And so now the woman who does SEO for us, I've never let her hear the end of it, is every time we have a meeting, I ask her, how's the private airport project? Are you still screwing up on that one? And we have a good laugh about it. But see, Trigby, this is what we're talking about here with personalization and with slowing down to move faster, because what's happening there, the reason, when you call someone out, when you say,
00:35:07
Speaker
Wait a minute now, they're trying to sell me on services I actually provide. So let me just ask them, what should I be doing better, right? The reason they're not responding is because that response from you is the first time that they realized, oops, I sent a message to someone that would never in a million years need our services because literally we're doing the same thing, right? And they don't want to respond to you because now they feel stupid. Well, that's because
00:35:36
Speaker
You're on a list. You're on a list of a thousand people that are getting spammed every single day and you don't, you don't matter. You don't matter. Right. And you know, you don't matter and it doesn't make you feel any allegiance or loyalty or reason to respond to that. Right. That's why one of my favorite, honestly, one of my favorite things is, um, when we get people going on our platform,
00:36:01
Speaker
I swear to God, nine times out of 10 within the first week of someone actively sending out pages to their customers, they get the raving thank you email back from a prospect or a customer that they're working with that says like, this is awesome. Thank you for putting this together.
00:36:19
Speaker
and they share that with me. And that, for me, is the fuel that keeps me going because never in my life before I launched this company did I receive that email from a customer that was just like, this is so incredible. You spent so much time putting this together for me. The video was great. We understand everything. We are excited to move forward.
00:36:43
Speaker
That didn't happen that early in the sales process. It always happened later right before people were going to sign and everybody had the feel goods and, oh, we can't wait to work together. That's when that happens. This is, with this product, with so many of our customers, it happens almost immediately. And they always send me and go, it actually works. I'm like, of course it works. I mean, seriously, do you think I built something and I'm putting everything on the line for something that doesn't
00:37:08
Speaker
work the way I said it did. But that's the proof right there that the experience has been heightened for your customer. And if they're going to have to put you up against another vendor or product or solution that's essentially the same, which one are they going to move forward with? Well, you know what, even if you're twice as much money, it's
00:37:27
Speaker
probably going to be you because they feel more trust and more allegiance to you. And they feel more comfortable moving forward with you because they know that this is the level that you're going to be responding to them versus here's what everyone else does, right?
00:37:42
Speaker
I had a similar experience where I was doing a Zoom call with a client, sorry, with somebody internally. And what we had ended up with is she reported back to me and she did all this research that basically said, hey, we need to charge the client an additional couple thousand dollars a month. He said, okay. He said, so will you make that call? And I was like, yeah, let's just do it right now. So I called the client. I say, hey, it's tricky. Yeah, we're going to send you a bill for a couple thousand dollars a month.
00:38:09
Speaker
He's like, okay, thanks. Let me know. Click. The internal person was like, oh my God, the stones on you that you'd be able to pull it off. I was trying to explain to her, you don't understand. It has nothing to do with me. It has nothing to do with my stones. It has everything to do with the fact that he knew damn well that you did all the legwork to come to that conclusion. I was just the one who delivered the conclusion.
00:38:38
Speaker
It's only easy to deliver that if you've actually gained the trust and earned that copy. If you're backing up. Yep. You can, you can, at that point, you know, uh, hard conversations, they're not so hard. No, right. But I think we've got an interesting theme here. And the thing that I want to tune back to is how we're
00:39:01
Speaker
really answering the needs of our customers. And as we talked through this so far, yes, spam is bad. Spam is getting worse. We're getting more aggressive. Sales teams are given way too many tools that are helping them just piss off more people faster. How do we help change the culture of the sales team? And or maybe it's just a couple of questions for sales teams to keep in mind.
00:39:26
Speaker
in order to actually provide value instead of just trying to fake it until the numbers work out and they get a roll of the dice hit on a new deal.
00:39:41
Speaker
Yeah, it's a huge question. Just fix this. I know everybody in the world is talking about it. And I think you already kind of teased into it where you said you actually need to do the homework and you'd rather make five calls a day than 500 calls a day if those calls are actually going to connect. How do you make sure that your calls connect?
00:40:07
Speaker
Yeah. I mean, there's so much, there's so much that I'm tracking right now in the sales community because that's the way my mind works is I just, I like to watch how people are doing things to see if there's, if there's a product there somewhere, right? If there's something that people need, if they're, or are there things that I should be gleaming from this that I can apply to my own sales process, right? Um, I think that one of the things that we hear all the time
00:40:35
Speaker
is that the rise of the content creators, right? That the salesperson of tomorrow will be an incredible content creator. I'm going to call BS on that right now. I am. And again, this is going to go against the grain. This is going to be completely different than the things that if you're on LinkedIn, you're seeing.
00:40:52
Speaker
But there are a lot of very successful sales professionals in this world that do not create original videos and content on LinkedIn and never will, and they will continue to be successful. They will. However, there are people that, you know, that has become their lifeblood. That's where they're more proficient in their sales role is the difference.
00:41:11
Speaker
in their sales role, they are more proficient creating content that elicits a response than what other people that aren't creating content are doing that eliciting response and keeping them top of mind, right? There's other people that are really good networkers, really good at just keeping their name out there and really good at showing up at the right events at the right time, sponsoring the right things, doing the right things there.
00:41:34
Speaker
So I don't think everyone needs to become a content creator. However, I do think that every brand needs to consider themselves a media company. I agree with Gary V on that statement. And I do think that though not everyone that works for you needs to be part of the media team, the media organization within your company does need to be creating at a clip that is generating interest and generating buzz for your business because that's how people are finding things right now. The days of sending emails
00:42:02
Speaker
thousands of emails a day and getting responses. I'm here to tell you that's over. I talk to people all the time that are like, oh, how do we get through through email? And I'm like, you get through through other sources, not email. Listen, there's companies like Gated that honestly shouldn't even have to exist. I know the CEO, he's a great guy, right? And Gated is a really cool company. That should scare the crap out of every sales manager in the world. Because guess where your future budgets are gonna go?
00:42:30
Speaker
They're going to go towards donating to charities to get your crappy sales emails through to executives and organizations. Are you kidding me? Why don't you let everybody know what gate it is for those people that don't know what gate it is. If I had a gated account and you wanted to prospect me, you would send me an email and you'd automatically see, hey, if you want to get this email through to Josh, here's his favorite charity, donate $5 to it today and your email will go through.
00:42:56
Speaker
That's the future right now that we've created because of our crappy emails that we've been sending for years and years and years that had no relevance and no urgency and no reason to exist. Now you have to pay to play. This is a budget that nobody was planning for 12 months ago. Nobody was thinking we needed to do this. There's also been a rise of gifting, right? Companies like Sandoso where like
00:43:20
Speaker
You're going to send people all this swig in the hopes that like all this swig arriving in their office is going to elicit a response. You know, that's a thing that's been happening for years and years and years. That game has changed because they're utilizing more technology now to like make it more of a personalized and faster turnaround with the personalization through tools like Sendoso. That's been around forever.
00:43:41
Speaker
But I don't know, guys. I don't know when the... I get stuff all the time. I get people that send me stuff all the time. I don't respond to any of it. If you do want me to respond to you, literally the only thing I ever respond to is when people send me Johnny Walker green label. That's it, right? The people that actually know me, the people that actually know me and have listened and consumed my content know that the only way to get through to me is sending me a bottle of Johnny Walker green label. I received that. And I'm like, okay, you've done your research.
00:44:08
Speaker
right because you went into you know whoever whoever just discovered that nugget if they wanted to talk to me just had to listen to me rambling for like 45 minutes to get to that nugget right like if I receive a bottle of johnny green that says I listen to you I'm gonna be like I know you listen to me oh my god we actually should have a conversation right there's the nugget
00:44:28
Speaker
okay but there's all these things that you know like the world is changing in that way where like i don't know i don't know what the answer is but what i can tell you is that right now we're in a phase where.
00:44:44
Speaker
We need to be more cognizant of everybody's time. We need to be more respectful of everybody's time. All of these things that are getting in the way of us booking meetings, doing the easy things that we used to do are a direct result because of us not being respectful of other people's time and space and level in an organization.
00:45:08
Speaker
You do not spam the CEO of a business with multiple emails in one week, literally four emails I'll get from somebody sometimes, four emails in one week. And the first one is the only one that doesn't say, I wanted to see what you thought of my previous email. Every single other one says, I wanted to see what you thought of my previous email.
00:45:27
Speaker
So we need to be more respectful. Otherwise, all that's going to happen is there's going to be more and more technologies developed to keep you out of my inbox. And I do think, at least from my perspective, the only success that I have found in cold outreach, and I should be clear, SalesReach is not a cold outreach software. That's not what it is. I do use it in my cold outreach.
00:45:50
Speaker
but I use it in a cadence in my cold outreach. It takes nine touch points to get someone to respond. SalesReach is one of the nine touch points. It's actually two. One of them through email, one of them through what I'm going to discuss now, LinkedIn.
Effective Use of LinkedIn for Sales
00:46:03
Speaker
That's where I'm making all my money right now, is LinkedIn. Sometimes it is through creating content. I create a lot of content on there.
00:46:11
Speaker
I will tell you right now, without any shadow of a doubt, the best strategy on LinkedIn is not creating your own content necessarily. You need to create it so that you build your authority in a space. That's why you create content because everybody's verifying who you are all the time on LinkedIn. That's what the game is.
00:46:28
Speaker
But the best way to make money on linkedin is to find posts from other people ideal fit customers that you want to talk to talking about things that you are actually knowledge about that you can actually help them with and being the best response on their post. That's it that's your content that's your business development strategy right there and what i do.
00:46:51
Speaker
My unfair secret weapon is that when I am that comment on somebody's post, I'm putting a link to a page that I've made custom in response to their post. Okay. I just spoke with a woman yesterday who one of my customers, she had put up a poll. She said, is anyone using video in their outreach? One of my customers responded, take me in my business and said, I do use video specifically. I use sales reach.
00:47:16
Speaker
And I then chimed in and said, Dan, thanks so much for bringing us up. Mandy, if you're ever interested in understanding more about what sales reaches and how it works, I created a custom page just for you. Check it out here. Boom. Paste the link. Boom. The video gif of me holding her name on a sign, right? I always have a sign. Anytime I'm talking to someone, I write their name on a sign. This is second nature, right? Right. He's holding up a sign that says Trigvian Day for the... It's right there.
00:47:40
Speaker
It's right there. I always have that sign though. So she sees that her name's on a sign in her comments. It's like, who's this guy, right? I booked 10 meetings off of that page in a comment, okay? So ask some marketers out there, when was the last time your sales team was booked 10 meetings off of a single LinkedIn post you put out, right? Okay, well, I just booked 10 meetings off of a comment on someone else's post.
00:48:08
Speaker
Okay. So, and it, and it wasn't even that big of a post. It didn't even go that crazy. Right. So anyway, that's the strategy, as far as I'm concerned, is just engage with people, interact with people, stay in your lane. Right. Like if this is what you're an expert in, talk about how you're an expert in it, give some tips and tricks around, around that. So the people see you as a resource that they should listen to because I guarantee every person that booked a meeting with me off of that comment.
00:48:36
Speaker
first went to my LinkedIn page to see who is this guy? Should I talk to this guy? Is this someone I should trust in any capacity in relation to this weird buyer enablement term that he keeps throwing around, right? Hopefully when they went there, they saw the kind of content that they needed to see to reinforce that I know what I'm talking about. And that's what elicited a response from them, right?
00:49:01
Speaker
and meeting with me. That's how it works, right? That's the modern day referral as well, is waiting for your customers to sing your praises on a social channel. That's the modern day referral. Do not dismiss those and part of your strategy
00:49:16
Speaker
part of your strategy should be community building and advocacy right trying to get people to the point where they believe in what you're doing so much that they're willing to sing your praises when the timing is right it's not that big of an ask someone literally put up a post asking is anyone using video.
00:49:35
Speaker
And one of my customers that i love using video and i use sales reach it was that simple that took all the five seconds for that person to do that but it means everything to a company like mine but how do you get people to the point. Where they're willing to consider you and to make that extra effort to do that that's what you need to be focusing on.
00:49:51
Speaker
And again, this only comes after you build an actual relationship. You're not going to be doing that through spraying and praying. Actual relationships come from understanding. Actual relationships come from putting in the hard work. That's what it comes from. I think one of the great things about SalesReach on the Whole is that it's built on this idea, the real true idea in 2023, which is
00:50:15
Speaker
there's really no substitute for putting in the work anymore. And there's no tool that can make it better, make you quicker, make you somehow nicer or more friendly or more empathetic. The only thing that any tool like SalesReach can do is be a better megaphone
00:50:34
Speaker
to have you more clearly heard. That's a great tool. And I encourage anybody who's interested to take a look at it and see if it's a good fit for them. Josh, if somebody wants to find you, how do they find you? How do they find out more about sales reach? Yeah. So, I mean, if you want to find me, go to LinkedIn, right?
00:50:51
Speaker
I'm listed as Joshua Feedy because I started using LinkedIn when I was like 18 and I wanted to sound older than I was when I was 18. So I'm Joshua Feedy on there. So find me on there. Send me a message. Mention that you heard me on the podcast.
00:51:11
Speaker
proponent for putting in a personalized message and connection request. I like when people do that. I know that there's feelings on both sides of that fence. But I always think it's nice to have some sort of familiarity or like reason for connecting and I and I always dismiss like, Hey, love your stuff. And I think we can bring each other value. Nope. You can follow me then but I don't want to. I'm not ready. So LinkedIn,
00:51:34
Speaker
And when you get on linkedin you learn a lot about my business but also you can just go to sales reach dot i o we do have a free version of the platform for just single people to utilize you can't utilize that as a team and that's where the benefit of our product ultimately is when you have a team of people at a company using it together but if it is something that you've listened to this podcast and you're thinking you know maybe i'll just give it a shot.
00:51:56
Speaker
Go ahead, sign up for the free version, give it a shot, play around with it a little bit. And if you determine that it's going to be a good fit for your whole organization, then we can have a conversation about standing up in an appropriate account for everybody to share. So yeah, but this has been great, you guys. Thanks so much. There's a free version of, uh, of sales reach. There's a free version of it. Yeah. That's awesome. I know. You know what, you know what? Can I just throw this out? Cause this is one thing I'm really proud of actually with our platform. When the pandemic first hit,
00:52:27
Speaker
what, three years ago now in America? Everyone was scrambling, everyone was freaking out, everyone was laying off people. Nobody really knew what was gonna happen. We didn't know, is this gonna be one month or what, right? We saw a lot of people getting laid off. And the first thing we did three years ago was we rolled out what we call SalesReach Hired. It's free.
00:52:45
Speaker
And what it is, is it's a way for anyone looking for a job to create a page that they send to specific hiring managers at roles that they want to land. If you're looking for a job right now, and you are trying to figure out how to stand out, Newsflash, it's not going to indeed and filling out the resume builder on Indeed and just hitting send an admin to the job. You're going to be in a list of 1000s of people and you are not going to stand out. So this is what I've been trying to get people to do.
00:53:12
Speaker
is listen, you have to apply the right way, otherwise you're not in the applicant pool. But immediately after you apply the way that the company asks you to apply, record a custom video to the hiring manager, find them on LinkedIn.
00:53:24
Speaker
Build a page on SalesReach Hired, put your references, put any testimonials you can get from people you've worked with, put any accolades you've had on there. This is your modern day cover letter. That's what SalesReach Hired is. It's your modern day cover letter. Find the hiring manager on LinkedIn, send them a connection request with a link to that page. That will move you to the top of the list faster than anything. We have been offering that platform for free for the last three years now.
00:53:53
Speaker
And 100% of the people that have used our platform to get a job have landed a job. I don't make any money off of this. I'm sorry, did you just say 100%? 100% of the people that have used our platform to get a job have landed a job and many of them have landed jobs very quickly.
00:54:09
Speaker
Okay, so again, this is not something I make money off of, right? Obviously, the hope is that I will make money off of it. Because if you use this to land a job, the hiring manager will see you using this tool. Most of the people that would use this tool in hiring will probably be going into customer facing role. Hopefully you love the platform and you want to bring it into your company.
00:54:28
Speaker
So this isn't just like this, like, oh, I'm putting this good thing into the world. There's nothing in it for me. I'll be honest, there is something in it for me as long as you like the product. But it's free if you're looking for a job. So go ahead and use SalesReach Hired. And if you want to ask me about that, you can connect with me on LinkedIn, send me a message about it. But then we also do have a free version for people using it for business development. We just call that one SalesReach Free. So there it is. Amazing. Thanks, Josh.