Sales Transformation

[00:00:00] Welcome back to a another episode of the sales transformation podcast. I'm excited that one of my first guests since I've taken over from Colin is somebody, I think Evan we've, I think known each other since 2021. I think air Wallach's days, who I'm pretty sure our McLaren sponsors right now, so I won't give them too much of a shout out, but I think you were leading growth marketing before we might've even gone back to your convoy days when we really first met and obviously leadium and Sergei and I met convoy when we were really doing work with on fleet But yeah, I think that five, six years ago, when we first got to know each other and seeing you go from an interesting trajectory of global freight to global finance to the tech and data side of it now to an all bound sales technology, even moving [00:01:00] into third party data and a different type of data and a sales technology and platform and dialer and bringing everything full circle with service bell who Vegas company in some regard that I've known for a while too, but excited to have Evan done on this podcast with me today, Evan Excited, man, great to finally, I think it's been probably two or three years since we've actually had a chance to have a conversation.
[00:01:27] Yeah, it's been a while. Thanks for having me, Kevin. Yeah, it's funny changing industries a lot. People love to talk about how different industries are, and there are some differences. The main one is a competitive noise, but other than that, it's all the same, except that people think they're different. And in that thinking our industry is special.
[00:01:43] Is the friction, right? Is that, Oh, I want someone specializing in that kind of thing, but it's fun. You learn a ton going from industry to industry, and I've worked with tons of different industries when I was a consultant before all that too. So I can relate to your position where you're working with tons of different kind of companies and and trying to tell them, like a [00:02:00] lot of the stuff.
[00:02:01] It's copy paste. We just need to find what works for you. And they just don't want to hear that. They want to hear, I've done this exactly for your type of company, exactly the same size, exactly the same ICP. It's all this. One of the, one of the things I liked about the sales transformation and getting with Colin, five, six years ago when we first met and Colin starting this podcast three years ago, and obviously leading him taking over.
[00:02:25] Is it touches on so many different levels from, career growth, how do you handle, moving into starting your career, how do sales technology and its place and data and just, sales transformation means so much. You touched on kind of career growth and moving multiple different, industries and my myself.
[00:02:46] I started in political science when I graduated college, and then I got started my first tech company and customer success. So then I moved into product development, and then I moved into sales. And obviously, each one of those steps led into where [00:03:00] CEO and leading a company. But. Did you see yourself or see a plan where you would move into each one of those roles or did it each play into each other?
[00:03:10] But how did that lead its path for you? Yeah, I, yeah, very similarly oblique steps into this sass myopia that we all live in now. Started linguistics is what I studied and then started in social work and then needed to make more money. So I started freelancing blogs back when they were big, 2012, 13, 14.
[00:03:31] And then ended up VP of product for an AI startup way before it was cool. So that failed. And then yeah, convoy air wallets sinkery here, we're all shifts of necessity and, this country is getting very expensive which is also why nearshoring is so popular, that kind of stuff.
[00:03:49] Yeah, it's. You never see yourself making the moves you need to when it's out of need and, last couple of years I've started to be able to think more strategically about my career, but even that is a hard [00:04:00] muscle to, to exercise. When, particularly in Sass, the floor underneath, the ground underneath our feet is shifting so frequently thank you Silicon Valley Bank for not doing your due diligence and all that stuff so yeah you learn how to be adaptable and I think the people who are still in this game and here to play, like yourself are very much experimentation minded, willing to try things, willing to like, sift the chaff from the wheat in terms of what's new, what's meaningful.
[00:04:29] I know we're going to talk about AI today, clay like a lot of these really trendy things, like what's there and what's fluff. It's a hard question and you got to be constantly asking. Yeah, I think whether it's, my early career looking at people who move from one industry to the next or one role to the next, or even moving from marketing to sales or crossing over there, they're put at a disadvantage sometimes and saying as they jump or leap from one company to the next too often.
[00:04:59] But [00:05:00] I think that adaptability and sales and marketing is discredited. Too often, I think that's an advantage in that sales and marketing is moving and pushing the boundary so quickly that adaptability is almost a advantage that some people have that they can take that experience that they've learned.
[00:05:19] And take it and grow and take on the next challenge. Obviously if it's for the wrong reasons, then there's clearly a disadvantage there. But I see it as, if you can learn with it and move and push the boundaries to, then there's a definite advantage.
[00:05:35] Obviously, I'm fortunate and with Ledium that we get to work with dozens and dozens of companies a month. And work with dozens of challenges and sales struggles and product market fits said it's a unique lens that we see the world through. But yeah, I always love getting the perspective of those who jump from one industry to the next and the new challenges you're facing especially as you move to service [00:06:00] Bell, which is.
[00:06:01] Uniquely positioned. One thing I saw obviously because we've been connected and we're both on LinkedIn is And once you got to service Bell and maybe you can speak a little bit more at length to this But I've been in this space long enough that you often come across maybe five or six people that when They get connected with a company.
[00:06:21] They almost become synonymous enough with that company that they are viewed as a founder or people who are coming into the market or are coming into the industry, almost think they're the founder and the way that you've. Become positioned on LinkedIn and your thoughts and your views and obviously you're becoming a leader in this the space on the sales tech side and how you're positioning service bell, as an example, what comes to mind is like a Mark Cosglow with outreach, who you almost would position as a founder of outreach, but he's not that's what I'm positioning you in where you're coming in service bell.[00:07:00]
[00:07:01] It wasn't really until you got to ServiceVille that you had this renewed energy, and I don't know if it was because certain things clicked when you got there, it was just a product that you really understood and loved and got passionate about, maybe you can just touch on that a little bit.
[00:07:17] That's a very good question. Yeah, obviously I'm not the founder of ServiceVille, I work very closely with Daniel. And and we connect a lot, just we're in sync very much on the brand, the positioning. I think there's a few things that clicked really well that hadn't clicked in my past experiences, and this ties into what you were saying earlier about, often marketing and sales get knocked for jumping between roles.
[00:07:39] But often we're looking for very reasonable things like good compensation, product market fit. So you can actually sell and market successfully, right? 98 percent of startups fail, but 98 percent of founders think they're awesome. What is the disconnect, right? For most companies and go to market teams, sales and marketing know this better [00:08:00] than anyone.
[00:08:00] So when I got to ServiceBell, it was pretty quick to realize not only is the chat platform uniquely positioned to undercut big players, drift, which just got acquired by sales loft, right? Clearly validation obviously drift overextended itself as a brand and as a product and it's clear the sales life acquisition wasn't like a great exit for them, but qualified.
[00:08:22] com also an amazing product. You don't want our messages against them. Kevin is just same thing, but cheaper. It's yes, you should use this kind of product. It's great. It's a great tactic to detect companies on your website and chat with them while they're on your site. It works really well.
[00:08:37] Customers of ours who lean into it close six figure deals sometimes within a few weeks, right? It's a no brainer. And so messaging that was intuitive right away. And I'd been drooling over qualified. com for a long time as a B2B marketer, right? And account based marketer, and even that word drooling, I have heard that echoed from many other B2B marketers [00:09:00] and drooling because it's too expensive.
[00:09:02] So easy to come into the market with a lean team and say, yes, less money. Great story. And then Daniel says, Hey, Evan, we're building a dialer too. And it was like, at first I was like, why? But then we started talking about it and thinking about it and watching, similar competitors in this sort of automation of outbound based on signals.
[00:09:23] Sorry, really popular. That's a huge space now it's booming. It's taking over LinkedIn. There's a lot of fluff there and some really great stuff too. And I'd already been using some of the products in this space and and seeing how much it works to detect who's on the website and then send emails or now in our case detect who's on the website and then create call tasks, right?
[00:09:43] Automate the flow from clearly this company or this person is checking out your business and how do you move that into a rapid follow up. So if you don't catch them in chat, you can catch them on the phone. And it's also funny too, because. Kevin, I know you know a lot about [00:10:00] this space, but the dialer space is fascinating.
[00:10:02] It's very small, there's very few players in it, and it, there's a, like two minds on LinkedIn and in thought leadership. There's the emails are everything. Automation is everything. Cold calling is for dinosaurs. Literally. People say things like cold calling, isn't the only way to GTM.
[00:10:19] There's new ways to do it. And sure, automation is great, emails are great, but if you have a good cold call, and it's worth 20 email replies you're three stages down the pipeline, it's the first time you've ever spoken to him. That's one thing people don't understand. So I was excited about that, I've been a big fan of phone validation for a long time, so that kind of clicked.
[00:10:38] And then we put it together, and we're like, wait a second, inbound, and it's outbound. And then if we connect them with first party intent, with the website visitor identification, It's all bound. So that happened very naturally and smoothly. And then I dug around and looked at like ways people have talked about all bound strategy in the past.
[00:10:57] And, Sangram Bhatra of GTM partners, he [00:11:00] was one of the first to talk about it in 2017. And reach desk has been talking about it for a long time. Cognizant has an all bound selling article, but. But we just saw an opportunity to take a really simple phrase and just pop it in. And then the last thing I'll say on this subject of branding yourself synonymously with the brand.
[00:11:17] There's a few dynamics that we need to acknowledge as we're GTM folks. People don't buy from brands, right? In, in enterprise selling, when you're selling high ticket items, they buy from people, they buy from a rep, they buy from an experience, they buy from a founder, they buy from someone they believe in.
[00:11:31] So a marketer can do that by doing thought leadership posts, paid promotion behind those thought leadership posts with LinkedIn's new ad format. Your name on the newsletter as a marketer, right? All this stuff, become the person they can reply to because people want to ask a question. They want to get to know you.
[00:11:49] They, they want to engage and no one's going to do that to a brand. LinkedIn released the, for instance, case in point, LinkedIn released the messaging feature for pages, right? No one [00:12:00] is doing it, right? No one is writing into a LinkedIn page saying Can I get your pricing? No, you go to the website, you go, and then service bell picks you up and you get a cold call and all that good stuff.
[00:12:10] There's almost too much to break down there. One was all bound. So the fact that no, it's great. The fact that all bound predates you was baffling to me because the first time I heard that term was from you which just goes to show that the marketing of it hadn't even clicked in. When I think of it and I've obviously I'm not a dinosaur yet, even though to say that I've been in this space for 10 years doing sales development and leadiums now almost nine years old, and we've been doing it that long.
[00:12:38] It's crazy to think that I have kids now and I'm not doing all nighters anymore and web development and stay, it's crazy that we've been in this space so long. But it was just almost demand generation. And we have so many clients who think. Oh, you can just send an email and somebody wants it and they don't have [00:13:00] product market fit and they don't have, and it's just send an email.
[00:13:03] It's just that easy. And if you don't book an appointment, then we'll just cancel you. And I know agencies get a lot of hate and SDRs get a lot of hate. And it's because the expectations are wrong, and it is all down it's not that easy, it's not just one phone call, it's not just one email, and it's not just an email and a phone call, you have to have marketing together, you have to have Website tracking.
[00:13:28] You have to have chat on the website. You have to have the newsletter. And when you have all of those together, then when you send that email and the person's in the buying cycle and they actually have a need. And by the way, let's not forget the fact that you had to build a product that solves a problem because I hate to break it to you.
[00:13:45] Not everybody does. Then you can book the appointment. And when all of those things come together, then it works. And. That's where, that all bound term and it really built out that, Oh, that's demand generation and kind of sales enablement, [00:14:00] but a new kind of face to it, which was great.
[00:14:03] On that, Kevin one of the things we talked about often with all bound is your buyers are multi touch. What do you do when you get an email or a voicemail from a brand you might want to check out or prodigy curious about you go to the website, right? You don't reply. Okay. You go to the website, you check it out for yourself for real.
[00:14:19] So that, yeah, people, buyers are already hopping between your channels. And then what happens on the brand side, the go to market team side, there are two groups. There are the sales leaders and the marketing leaders are just operating in silos and demand gen has been no different, right? We've tried to do retargeting and stuff, but really we've just been single laning, like a bunch of SEO and pay media stuff to the website.
[00:14:41] Maybe we're doing account lists that cross over. But then there's the Rev Ops and Marketing Ops people who are thinking in complexity and often too much complexity. They think, okay, I'm going to think about, okay, should we send the cold emails first and then run the ads or run [00:15:00] the ads? And how long should they run before sending cold emails?
[00:15:02] And it's no. It's not that, it's not a Rube Goldberg machine you need to build, you just need, yeah, like you said, you need to be consistent across multiple channels for a long period of time. Because two weeks is not when all your buyers are buying. It's all throughout the year. I just learned about a company that has a fiscal year close in May.
[00:15:20] Who does that, right? Summer November, summer February, summer January, summer December. You need to be top of mind when those times roll around, maybe they get a windfall budget or they cancel another vendor in the middle of the year. So it's slow, consistent availability but the entire world of VC backed forecasts and projection models is antithetical to good nurturing strategies over multiple channels for a long period of time.
[00:15:49] No, that's a great way to put it. And one of the hardest things with outbound and with sales and everything is any company who [00:16:00] their goal with outbound or an SDR team is. We need appointments and we need them now. The game's already lost. If, and we deal with this at Ledium all the time.
[00:16:11] Somebody hires us and how quickly can you book an appointment? Because we need revenue. This is already a, a lost game. Now we're going to, obviously that's our job and we're going to do it and we're going to be most efficient, and we have a team in place, and we have the tools in place, and we're going to run as fast as possible, and hopefully book as many as possible, and there's no guarantees, and by the way, just because we book them doesn't mean you can close them, so there's a whole nother dynamic to that variable as well.
[00:16:40] But if the goals are to book appointments because you need the revenue, then the goal's already lost in our mind because you're not going to be able to book them. You're already behind the curve, your goals for what Allbound can do of building a pipeline, building the brand, building the cyclical process is already gone, you're already so [00:17:00] far behind that you're looking at, oh man, like we have to make up so much it's We use baseball analogies a lot.
[00:17:08] You're in the ninth inning and you're down 12, zero. So you're coming to us and you're essentially saying, Hey, we already have two outs, you gotta, you better win the game for us and you have one out left. And that's why a lot of times outbound and a lot of times SDRs get a bad light to their name. Because the expectations are so wild and that's why dial more, call more.
[00:17:31] And that's why a lot of expectations on sales tools are so hard to, even though an outbound email pushes site traffic to the site. It oftentimes loses traction there because, okay, who cares? Let's just keep dialing, keep emailing. It fell to the cracks. I know that was a little bit of a tangent.
[00:17:48] I want to back up to one thing you said in that all bound kind of conversation about service Bell in tech, we're going to get lost in a bubble that everyone wants to [00:18:00] be a founder and everyone wants to start a company. And that's the goal, which is not true. And being a founder, I've learned that. And. And we live in this bubble outside of this bubble, people enjoy jobs.
[00:18:14] My brother himself, who's 22 and graduated college. And he worked for us for a time. He said, I don't want, I just want, an 80, 000 job for the next 30 years. I don't want stress. I don't want to work on the weekends. When I leave the office at five, I'm done. If I have a retirement and a home and a family, that's it.
[00:18:31] It's that's the majority of America, by the way, we live in this really weird tech bubble where we all think. In this sales development, sales tech, that everyone wants to be a founder, everyone wants to go to YC, everyone wants to raise money. Everyone wants to be a millionaire, but it's not true.
[00:18:47] And. When you said, hey, I found a product and I drool about it where I can go work for someone who has a product market fit and the timing's right and it's [00:19:00] early stage and there's demand and I can go, do new strategies and tests and actually enjoy the work and test new things and be working with the founders.
[00:19:12] It's like that mind boggle of, Hey. Not everyone wants to, be a multi millionaire. Sometimes it's, I want to work for the right team. Who's doing some awesome stuff. And that's what I dream about and drool about and have an awesome product that's actually doing cool things and that underlying word, because that product market fit is the killer.
[00:19:36] A lot of people have product market fits that don't exist and that's the rut you get stuck in. And that's just fortunate that service bell is cutting through that noise and that's what you found. I know that's another tangent. Yeah, I got three kids really young and they're the best part of life, right?
[00:19:54] And creating a world that and an understanding for them that is full of joy and peace is absolutely [00:20:00] top priority, right? And work being fun is helps me be a better dad, right? And a better husband and those things matter so much more than this tech bubble. So yeah, I honestly, I don't work on the weekends.
[00:20:13] I don't work long hours. I think that prioritization experimentation and good time management are the way for us all to get to a healthier spot and make better products for better people. But as it is, you're right there, the last couple of years, I think more people are setting up boundaries because they realized this industry doesn't have your back, right?
[00:20:35] You get axed, your work is not your family, you get fired, you don't get fired from your family, at least, unless you really want them to, right? But we need to have these healthier cultures and I worked for some unhealthy cultures and some decent ones before this, but there are many companies with very unhealthy cultures that basically boil down to how workaholic is the founder and can [00:21:00] They replicate that workaholism in enough people, quickly enough, for the company to scale rapidly enough to reach some ridiculous valuation, go public, everyone get their payout, and we'll all be happy.
[00:21:12] But that doesn't happen for most companies, so we're ending up with just a bunch of good, young, intelligent people getting real frustrated. And I think that's one of the biggest, sales transformations. And from the early 2010s to, 2024 is that workaholic all nighters. And obviously now I'm in my thirties with a two year old and you see, okay if you, even if you, as an agency, if you lose a client, okay, it's not the end of the world.
[00:21:41] There's always tomorrow, whatever happens. You have to take a backseat. Talk to me about this. So with all that being said, with the, the transformation to a less work environment, a little bit more Zen, family life, it's become noisier, even with all of that, it's [00:22:00] become noisier, even the tech space.
[00:22:03] The development of tech became more no code, low code with no code, low code became more sales technology with more sales tech, and then obviously with AI and chat GPT pushing a whole new, different boundary you saw really through COVID YouTube kind of this YouTube generation move over to, my worst nightmare moving over to LinkedIn and, a young 23, 24, 25 year old.
[00:22:30] YouTube monetization, moving over to LinkedIn and becoming quote unquote thought leaders on LinkedIn. And now we have all of that kind of colliding and it's made. Technology thought leaders outlining what should your sales stack be, or you're prospecting architecture be if you're an enterprise company, a startup company, what's your thoughts on go to market prospecting architecture, what should it look like through all of the [00:23:00] noise?
[00:23:01] Yeah, tons of noise. I agree. And I think a lot of that is because. Some companies are desperate, are finding that presenting a strong front is the best way to go. There's also just lots of clever content producers out there who know how to use automation to go quick and and use video really well and that kind of thing.
[00:23:21] I'm sure we can name names, but the I think we also have to remember that you and I have pretty much the same LinkedIn feeds probably. So beware the algorithm, right? There's just too much content getting produced. My M. O. has been like, I'm not gonna put it out unless I think this is actually has some utility or is gonna make someone giggle, right?
[00:23:40] Those two things, we need to laugh more and we need stuff that's actually useful. Those feel like good North Stars. Now that question of what should we do about go to market architecture is on everyone's minds. And I know this because in the background, behind the LinkedIn scene, what's happening is the enterprise grade [00:24:00] RevOps geniuses of the world are watching this dumpster fire and going campaign really work?
[00:24:05] And I'm having conversations with some of them. And and generally my guidance is there, there is a ton that needs to be automated. So coming at it from an account based marketer lens list creation and management, let's say you do an event, you get a list back, what does that list have?
[00:24:22] Kevin, these lists have first name, last name, email, and company. Who knows if the email is right? There's no company domain. This is one of the first things I did with clay. com. I plugged in like a Google search automation, which is super cool. So it searches Google and I gave it like an industry that the event was related to that company name and basically told it to find the first domain that came back and 95 percent of the time it was the company's domain.
[00:24:49] So I didn't have to manually clean a thousand company names into domains. I could actually then do stuff with it, right? Run matches in CRM, all this stuff. So there's a, there's like a broad [00:25:00] sweep of things that should be automated that no tool really presented an easy way of doing. And people will say yeah, Phantom Buster has been around and Phantom Buster is a great tool and I use it for LinkedIn post engagement scraping.
[00:25:12] But. There's a lot of these sort of workflow based tools that just don't let you work in a table. Working in a table is really simple, right? We work in sheets and Excel tables all the time. I think because it's fundamental to being human is thinking in terms of I have a relationship between these columns and rows and I have details about them and it's just clear.
[00:25:33] So I think that's honestly what Clay empowers. Now I don't think that go to market architecture reinvention is limited to Clay. But I do think that a lot of the other players I've seen force you into a frame of working. That they envisioned as the way to do GTN. And I love that with Clay, I've got so much freedom and flexibility.
[00:25:54] The other big question that's attached to all this is what do I do with my STRs? Don't go [00:26:00] fire them. What you need is to serve them good accounts and good leads. I just watched what's it called? Glen Gary, Glen Ross, right? Oh, yeah. Yeah. The Glen Gary leads. The good leads like salespeople rightly have always complained about getting junk accounts and junk leads.
[00:26:17] When there's all this tech for scoring and intent and all this stuff and marketers have been sitting on Marketo insights for whose video your websites for a decade, right? There, there's all these tools that should be feeding into sales activity, but instead, 90 percent of sales teams are just pulling fresh cold lists and plugging away at them.
[00:26:36] Hammering down the door like it's door to door sales era. So there is a lot that should be automated. That's like the sales enablement pieces and marketing enablement pieces. And I would start there to anyone who's listening, who's looking at this and wondering what should I rebuild?
[00:26:51] You should rebuild everything that isn't the last mile touch point to start and build it around your best hypotheses around your [00:27:00] ICP, who's a fit, what makes them a fit. Don't get grandiose with crazy algorithms. Just, good criteria that you see in your customer base that you want to repurpose.
[00:27:11] No, that's great. I have so many opinions. I don't know. This isn't a podcast about me, but Clay's great, right? Clay, look, agencies and what we've been doing, we've been doing it for forever, right? We've just been using humans and we've know how to outsource and use data researchers and Ukraine and Serbia and where else, and just do manually do research.
[00:27:34] And Clay obviously allows you to automate a lot of that, what was manual research for a lot of businesses. It's still manual research. There's no cheat code. And I often say that there's no easy way around saying are you a fast, casual restaurant who has more than seven locations less than 10 and did more than X amount of revenue?
[00:27:54] And I also need a, B, C and D in the POS system and X, Y, Z. And I need you to call in and ask them this [00:28:00] question. There's no chat GPT answer around those. And by the way, that's a large percentage of the market. Like that falls outside of this, Oh, you can just automate everything. So the one disadvantage we have with a lot of the noise is that.
[00:28:16] You would think that you can do it. No, a lot of the market still has to do traditional sales or traditional outbound. You can use the tools to alleviate a lot of the manual work you were mentioning, which is use the tables and the technology to clean up, process a lot of the data as you need it. That's the advantage of GPT where we see the biggest advantage.
[00:28:40] Is the data side, clean up the data. If your addressable market, you've researched it. Now you can validate it, verify it. But also if you're writing sequences and creating sequences, let's say you're creating sequences for two different tiers or segments, different in different industries, and then different personas within those [00:29:00] industries.
[00:29:00] You don't, you can now create one sequence that has multiple different variations of variables inside of it. And then you can have, Clay add a variable like add a oh, this is a CEO and based on their title, you can actually say CEO. Now, if this is if CEO or if operations, if marketing, and you can process their natural title based on LinkedIn and have it return marketing.
[00:29:28] So you can actually have those instead of a human doing it manually and process it much quicker. Where I get frustrated is when you get into the results, right? Oh, you can have it write the email for you or write the first one to two sentences for you. And we've tested this and you've probably tested it.
[00:29:47] Now the results don't come out. You end up having to grammar check every little line to make sure it sounds right. And so there's a fine line between what you can do and can't do. Yeah, I agree. I'd rather [00:30:00] use back when I was VP product for AI startup, I was always drawing the distinction for people between AI for analytics and AI for invention or creation, right?
[00:30:09] Generative AI is is useful sometimes if it's accurate and it's a very hard thing to ensure, right? Cause yeah, the, you then do manually cross checking and referencing, but. Clay, gin, Chad, GBT are great for summarizing existing material. Yeah. And when do you need that? You need that for notes on calls, right?
[00:30:29] We use Sybil. ai for recording and love. It's for the call recording summaries. That are all AI generated and and I was sharing with them I envision a ton of other uses for these, like plugging automatically into notes fields. And how many teams would benefit from better notes fields on every account and contact, like that should be just table stakes, but and to your point, I think that's a data quality data cleansing problem where something like Clave.
[00:30:53] There's lots of other options too, I think, but you can basically plug in and fill gaps that prevent your [00:31:00] teams from being as successful as they should be, right? Maybe you bought, that's the Glenn Gary leads thing again, but maybe you paid for context clues from certain intent or signal provider, right?
[00:31:10] Plug that in and have it summarized in a simple paragraph. And then in a cold call opener, your reps are able to say, Hey, look, we got your info because we heard you were interested in this. Now, is that accurate? Or should I fire my data provider? Everyone loves that line, right? That kind of stuff is gold.
[00:31:27] And I think this is why Clay currently has a huge audience that is in small agencies and small teams is because. In those teams, they're trying to scale outbound to the point of looking or acting like producing results, like a much larger GTM organization or do it, so they don't have to work 24 hours a day, but have enough clients to make a living, right?
[00:31:49] That those kinds of dynamics are driving clay use cases that are interesting and probably excellent in some cases, but I think for most of established companies and [00:32:00] enterprise organizations, you need to take a look heavily at. The gaps in your data, the gaps in your workflows that are taking too much manual time and basically free up your marketing and sales organizations for what I call out the door activities, stuff that gets in front of customers.
[00:32:16] Imagine how much time SDRs spend on list creation, that should be solved. I think it circles back to, and we obviously deal with a lot of clients, you obviously do too on the sales side and on the marketing side. And unfortunately what a lot of these tools are doing, it's over complicating. And solving problems a lot of times that a lot of organizations, whether they don't have, don't know they have, or don't even necessarily need to solve yet because it's not a problem they necessarily have yet.
[00:32:50] Salesforce is a great one. It's such an archaic system, so hard to use for a lot of SMBs. SMBs still use it. HubSpot, probably way too cumbersome for a [00:33:00] lot of SMBs. Obviously they've made it so affordable and dumb not to use for an SMB, SMBs use it. And that's one of Clay's, I think, one of their larger issues, our client, like the dozens and dozens of net new clients I speak with on the SMB side, never even heard of it, never even heard of Outreach or Apollo.
[00:33:20] Let alone a product like clay, let alone sales force sometimes. And that's where I say we're often stuck in this bubble. And obviously we follow the same feeds. And when you get out of that and it's solving for problems that a lot of companies don't even. necessarily have in that regard. And obviously you guys are solving for a lot of problems and is built in, our B2B is that, website tracking one and we activated it just to see what it did on our website and when it's active and our free trials running out.
[00:33:53] And I was like, man, cool, but we don't use it. Like I don't do anything with it. And it was like, [00:34:00] It's cool, but was it really solving a problem that I had because we're such a boutique agency, it wasn't really a problem knowing that one extra person, we don't need to increase our sales or decrease it, and I wonder if that's a majority of the market or the minority of the market for a lot of businesses and I wonder how businesses deal with that give and take.
[00:34:25] Yeah, no, I think one thing that all sales tech has to keep in mind, and most don't is that the CRO did not have a budget until outreach. io created it, right? Started hammering at CROs saying look, you guys could have your own email thing. You don't need to try to use Marketo, like then outreach.
[00:34:46] io single handedly lands the world in Spamageddon, right? And now, all of this, there's deliverability tag, there's email automation tag, and there's the email writing tag. Now, everyone's trying to automate within the same little [00:35:00] terrain, right? Your option now is go big or get out. And for us, that means all bound for clay.
[00:35:08] I do think there are ways to make a CRM last workflow set up that. So CRM first is how most companies work. They drop everything in Salesforce and then do a ton of stuff. It's very expensive, very cumbersome. Salesforce is like a black box, basically. Let's pay homage to the players who are here to transform workflows in a very large way or these small SaaS players who want to just take a 10, 20, 30 a month thing and, and be happy with that, like Loom and that kind of stuff or Sendspark.
[00:35:37] I think there's a lot of players stuck in the middle ground where they're half free imagining things, but it's not big enough. They're not really able to unseat the other sales tech inside of accounts, which means they're just scrambling for a little bit more budget from the CRO, which the CFO is not going to have anymore.
[00:35:52] Like they're done with the sales tech bloat GTM tech bloat. Especially in the mid market. So I think the wisdom for founders who [00:36:00] would just be like, you need to differentiate enough to like truly replace, you And improve on GTM workflows, processes, and data because yeah, you're right.
[00:36:12] There's a very myopic tunnel vision thing here, but every company has data quality problems. Every company has has revenue needs, even if it's not problematic and every company is going to be hit by deliverability issues, and just. How do I find and connect with prospects that, that I need to, right?
[00:36:31] Let me ask you this one thing we see on our side as everyone tries to automate, take the human out of sales. One thing we see the sales orgs that are winning for our clients are the ones with the most sales interaction. The sales pipeline or the sales activities that have emails Manual activities the ones with video, the phone call steps.
[00:36:57] Those are the steps that [00:37:00] get by far, probably 80 percent of outbound prospecting conversions for us with all that being said, what I'm still surprised at 10 years later is nobody does video. Nobody still does it. There's still little video activity. Yes, like in 2017 and 18, obviously we started to see a vidyard and those come up, but look at prospecting emails today.
[00:37:26] Maybe I get a 0 percent of my prospecting emails have a video like what is going on. Obviously, service Bell is heavy video, which I've always loved. Talk to me about your guys's belief in video and everything around it. It's a good question, right? Where is video? The matrix being video is accessible and video is useful.
[00:37:48] Video is not always accessible. You can't put it in a bunch of emails because of deliverability, right? You're going to start getting popped out or it opens to a link and links are bad, right? Like. All this stuff, it makes it hard to just [00:38:00] spam the world with with videos, LinkedIn, you can't do too much, right?
[00:38:04] And you gotta play really safe with the LinkedIn game now. And there's people who claim it's successful for them, and I'm sure it is. Let's just think about a content funnel or an experience funnel. I don't need my first touch point with a brand to be video. I need it to be like, Oh, I saw the website.
[00:38:17] I saw an email. It gave me a nice clean description. It was clear. I understood it. Oh, clarity. Now where video we see become really powerful. Is in let's just say sales meetings, right? Are always video, right? So somewhere between a description of the company and meeting with a salesperson where does, where can video creep up the funnel for us?
[00:38:41] That's obviously when someone lands on the website and we reach out with a chat message and say, Hey, you want to get into a meeting right now? And they're like, what do you mean? And we're like we can do this the service bell way. And now you're in a beautiful video call. That's this level quality.
[00:38:54] And you're meeting someone and it's around the world, it's fun, and the other thing for us is in open opportunities, we [00:39:00] get alerts when open opportunities visit our site and then all the time, our reps are just hopping on. Oh, they're in our deal documents, right? They're reviewing right now as someone we don't know.
[00:39:09] Oh, let's go multi thread, right? Just like that. Our deal cycles for 10, 20, 30 K deals are 17 days on average, Kevin. Just because we're plugging into, I would say face to face is really the goal, whereas video leave behinds, I think, have less utility than everyone thought, when you're in a podcast like this, you're in a meeting, you're in a service bell call on the website you're having a conversation and you get to see body language and faces and that's helpful, right?
[00:39:38] Humans like that. We're basic animals, right? But video leave behinds always strike me as weird when I get them. Yeah. Like trying to put my name in there or, if it's AI automated at the beginning, that's less interesting to me than if someone was like, record a video for me. I don't know exactly why those haven't taken off, but I imagine it's a multitude of factors that comes down to deliverability when it's actually useful and meaningful and [00:40:00] what humans are really seeking, what buyers are really seeking from video engagements, which is relationship.
[00:40:06] Even you bring up the deal cycle. Are we. In 2018, we saw Vidyard, I think it was Vidyard one of their agency clients, they did a proposal, when they had a proposal out, they, that agency would put together a custom video, like a meet the team video that they would send that client, we started to do it, 70 percent close rate.
[00:40:25] Where it was, hey, cell phone and stitched together. So you can see it. Obviously, we stopped and we were victim, right? We stopped for a couple of years because, oh, it got too got too much work to do, that 30 minutes to get, five people together to stitch a video together took too long to do.
[00:40:43] I think that's one of the problems with outbound. Instead of that extra 30 minutes, Yeah. To focus on a higher close rate with a quality and close, we would say let's just do more quantity, because, the, eh, let's just make up for it with more [00:41:00] quantity. And that's the interesting, cross, Yeah.
[00:41:03] How our minds think we won't just do that extra time. Because there is a way to do video that we found in outbound and that's, don't do it in email. One, do it. If somebody opened an email and connected with you on LinkedIn, then send a video, because then they're more likely to open it because they've already opened an email, they've already connected with you, and you're more likely to have a response and a conversion, and the time warrants the effort because you're more likely to have a conversion.
[00:41:31] And if you're actually sophisticated enough to measure that out, then it actually will probably pay for itself in leaps and bounds. Yeah, I do think there's a case for that. In fact, we do that in our follow ups from calls and stuff. We drop in looms and those are effective too. I think the the the quantity versus quality thing is super interesting, right?
[00:41:50] Because quantity has always been around, but we call it advertising, right? Where, and it has its place, right? It puts signposts in front of people so they know the name [00:42:00] and they know what it's about, or maybe they see a discount or something like that. I think if you're going to automate email and we do some of that testing with it right now with smart lead and clay and all that stuff if you're going to automate it, though, you have to think about it like advertising your subject lines have to like.
[00:42:14] Make the brand name stick. It could just be your brand name. It could be the competitor's name, just real simple stuff. Don't try to get too fancy. You probably won't get a crazy amount of meetings off of it. I'm new to the game, but but my theory is that this is now an ad channel. Because the moment the SDR, moved from a relationship builder to a mass producer of content and touch points. They moved into marketing. No, you, I have been saying this for years outbound. This is how we sell to every one of our clients. Outbound is no different than digital marketing with Instagram, Facebook ads.
[00:42:50] It is an impression game. You have LinkedIn, phone and email. It is no different than Facebook, Instagram, and LinkedIn. That is [00:43:00] what we claim. And the way we frame it is. You might be a TikTok advert person. I'm an Instagram advert person. Instagram doesn't necessarily know that at front. You might never convert on a cold call.
[00:43:11] I might never convert on an email. You don't know that at the front. There is some discovery process to your audience at the same time. And so you're going to learn that through the process at the same time. That doesn't mean that you don't advertise to your audience. But it also means you have to know your audience.
[00:43:28] If you're targeting CEOs you have to know, what channel might they like versus the other, are they more phone or linked in because your audience might be multiple different personas and those personas might like different channels. If you're targeting, 65 of Fortune 500s, that's a completely different market than 25 year old, marketing managers.
[00:43:50] That changes the entire game. That is how marketing thinks about digital. That's how sales people should think about our channels. I know we are going [00:44:00] long with this podcast, but I love it. I have one more question because you mentioned competition. How do you guys look at competition? I know you threw a little bit of, a call out at one of yours, but how are you guys are creating so many different product lines within your product line.
[00:44:14] How do you see competition and kind of embrace it? Yeah. It has to be something to be embraced, right? Either you can take their customers because you're that much better or they're just good validation. Apollo just released website visitor tracking, right? Great. That proves that this is going to become an established part of everyone's stack.
[00:44:37] Right now you cannot play the outbound game unless you have website level tracking for company level tracking on your website. And I think that's smart because even if it's just odds in your favor game, which all of outbound is, let's be real, right? That's going to tip the odds in your favor to some extent.
[00:44:53] And that means there's a clear time when people should just be using Apollo. I don't want the [00:45:00] customers who have Apollo and aren't going to do anything but use Service Bell for site tracking to plug into Apollo. That's not really a great use case, and how much money can I realistically charge them, given what Apollo charges?
[00:45:11] What we really believe is happening is GTM teams and leaders are getting really smart about this multi channel concept and needing to break down silos between marketing activity and sales activity to support that we are doing that inside our app, right? So that marketing and sales between our dialer and our chat and the first party intent are making these handoffs between each other.
[00:45:34] You can make a call and service bell and say, Hey, go visit our website and switch to a video chat, right? With that person right there. We do it all the time. People say it's the best demo I've ever gotten. Best cold call I've ever gotten. There is no other product in existence that can do what I just described.
[00:45:50] There, there's a bunch of ways where we have strong competitors that on the dialer side, on the chat side what we do is we make super detailed feature [00:46:00] lists 80, 90 rows long, and we say, okay, these ones are table stakes. These ones are. Differentiators. Let's hammer those out first.
[00:46:08] And then there's these weird ones that are clearly vanity ones, cute ones, that they just plugged in because it was easy or they thought it was cool, that kind of stuff. And those we'll do later, right? What we've found is that a lot of times people want a beautiful Workable application in which to operate.
[00:46:23] If you're an SDR, you don't want to spend all day in an ugly dialer that looks like it was made in the 90s. But that's most dialers. They're hard to use. They're confusing, right? If you want a chat platform, you don't want one that makes you feel yucky. It's not on brand and all that. So you want a beautiful and consistent you want to get good alerts and all that stuff.
[00:46:41] Building a beautiful product experience. Shout out to Daniel the founder, right? Service bell. Often we win deals because people are like, this is the same and it's prettier, and we compete on price too. I think those things keep us going and make it a lot of fun because, yeah, often there's okay, here's one feature we need to go [00:47:00] build and that kind of thing, but we produce super quickly.
[00:47:02] So two to four weeks away, like what? Do you want to get locked into a year with a competitor that's not keeping up, frankly, in a lot of cases. Yeah, that agile, that's, I know at some point in growth, that agile ability goes away because it just has to, because you reach that phase, but that's so understated in these early, early growth days.
[00:47:22] And you guys aren't early anymore. Obviously it's been around for years, but that's not something to take for granted as a customer. And I know it because of our partners as well. Look, I don't know when somebody is listening to this podcast, but I just know because I follow you the SDR relief fund do you want to spend a minute to talk about that?
[00:47:41] It depends when you're releasing this, but yeah, we'll probably run several rounds of these SDR relief funds. Basically, we have a public sales floor, just like Nooks or Oram. We have a virtual sales floor in our dialer. We have a public version that we're going to host for a couple of days. It's next week right now is recording.
[00:47:56] May 8th, May 9th, Wednesday and Thursday from 830 [00:48:00] Pacific to 130 Pacific each day and a different service bell rep will be there. You show up, you authenticate with LinkedIn, accept our terms of service. And you say, hello, give us your work email. If you're a U S based current SDR or BDR, you get 20 bucks, right?
[00:48:15] That's how it works. Eligibility requirements in terms of supply, you can check them out at servicebell. com slash SDR dash relief dench fund, but yeah, no, thanks for this yet. I'm really excited about it. We think SDRs have a hard grind in front of them. A lot of companies are not product market fit.
[00:48:30] They're pushing really hard, working really hard. And not many people know about our dialer. So we figured we'd, solve two problems at once. And look at this one passed you by just because of publishing. And then when you're listening to this Evan, where can people find you so they can see, everything about ServiceBell follow you because your videos are, awesome.
[00:48:47] So people just need to follow that in general and obviously follow the news on ServiceBell. Yeah, thank you. On LinkedIn is great because I guess that's where the world happens until someone figures something else out and I'm excited for that day. But yeah, [00:49:00] that'd be great. Evan Dunn on LinkedIn. Happy to connect.
[00:49:03] Perfect. Until next time. Thanks everyone.