... Your answer is value prime solutions, a sales training and marketing optimization company leveraging the value selling framework. visit www dot value prime solutionscom and start accelerating your results. You're listening to the BB revenue executive experience, a podcast dedicated to helping the executives train their sales and marketing teams to optimize growth. Whether you're looking for techniques and strategies or tools and resources, you've come to the right place. Let's accelerate your growth in three, two one. Hello everyone, and welcome back to the v Tob Revenue Executive Experience. I'm your host, Chad Sanderson. For those that don't have time to listen the entire episode, please check us out at be tob REV EXECCOM and if you're finding value in the podcast, please rights review on Itunes and share with your network, share with the family, get the message out there so others can benefit as well. Today we're lucky to have with US Alex Rosenblat, VP of marketing with dated dog, a company that focuses on providing cloudscale monitoring for dynamic infrastructure and applications. What makes today's interview extremely exciting is we're going to be focusing our conversation on the importance of having a very well trained sales team, what that entails the value that results. Obviously this is a subject near Je to my heart. But less we can buy. Say, Alex, thank you very much for taking the time. Welcome to the show. They shed gonna be on. So, before we jump into the top of the day, we usually like to start kind of upload, you know, footloads and value. Here I like to ask our guests. You know, if you look back across your career, was there a defining moment that you go back to over and over, lessons that you learned, something that change the course of your career? If so, what was it and what lessons did you take away from it? Yeah, so, earlier on in my career I was more technical and I guess what really got me started on on the sales of marking path, even though I didn't sales engineer previously, when I was in Grad School, I try to start a company with another student and we were both technical. My cofounders actually even more technical than I was. So I took out more of the product management roles, trying to find Beta customers and we actually were able to get a really strong prototype together that worked and it was really advanced technology. And what happened was that we couldn't get anyone to even try it out for free. Couldn't give it away. So yeah, and I mean like we'd show people a demo, like we I was actually I got pretty good at prospecting, so, you know, I could definitely get in front of the CEO and then we could show them a prototype and he be like wow, this was great, and then we'd be like so, you want to try it out, literally, will do it for free. You just have to connect us with people in your company to get it set up, and we'd always get the like well, I don't know, maybe next quarter. You know, we're kind of busy right now. So that that's really when when I started to notice, well, I think I'm having a problem selling. where I think everything kind of came to a head was that we were talking to an angel investor and I you know, he also...
...took a look at the prototype that it was great, but when he started asking us about how we would sell this and saw, you know, I think probably a lot of blank looks on our face. Said, you know, okay, guys, I could just give you a million dollars today I've got in the bank. You know, it would be like clean money, and I think that you guys have an interesting idea. But if you could only spend that one million dollars to get customers and to give a lot of them, what would you do? And my cofounder and I looked at each other and kind of shrug our shoulders and that that was kind of, you know, the the punch in the nose that I'm like, wow, I have no idea what I'm doing. And anyways, from then on it didn't feel good stuff the cross in the area that I was completely clueless about. So that's where I started to get really interested in sales and marketing, doing a lot of my own research, talking to people that were in the domain. And then right out of Grad school I got into a product marketing room and was lucky enough to start working under some very experience sales and marketing people and they basically taught me everything from the ground up. Excellent, and then totally makes sense why, as we were prevent for the show, you wanted to talk about trading sales teams and why it's so important. I'm curious one of the things that we kind of set back and forth in emails just you know, there's always this tendency for sales leaders to want their reps, you know, to reduce their time, to readue their ttr, hit the ground running, get him in the field, and I understand that. I mean makes it make s complete sense. You want more bodies on the ground generating revenue, but it create some challenges, right. So I was wonder if you can help our audience understand your perspective on that, perhaps shared an example of where that's caused challenges for you. Yeah, absolutely. So I think that most sales leadership, their first reflexes go, go, go. You know, the most valuable time is the number of hours that the people on their sales team have. So, you know, if it's an inside sales team, you want your people on the phone, especially during business hours. If it's a field team, you want them in front of customers on site. So anytime that you are taking people away for anything to in order to that they're not on the phone or that they're not on the onset out of customers, a potential customers site is time that you are not making your goal and, as everyone knows, for salesperson if you make it surpastor goal, really good things happen. Well enough times you're going to probably find another job. So I can I can understand, like the anxiety and the desire to really want to maximize the amount of time that people are doing their their job. The thing is especially for products that are very niche or very technical or really require a lot of domain knowledge in order to connect with the buyer. If your people don't really know what to say, what to ask, what they heat, what they're actually hearing when someone's talking, you're not going to get very far. I mean the the way that I keep on seeing it is that there's a wall and if you have an untrained sales team and you're just saying go, go, go, it's like the literally to keep on running against the wall and bouncing off and a lot of a lot of sales...
...teams are are incentivized for their metrics. I don't I don't know how to make the verb for that, but they're especially observed, ingraded on kind of check mark kind of stuff. How many calls did you do? How many emails that you say how many meetings were able to arrange. You know those those numbers are pretty easy to game. You could do a hundred calls and have a hundred or stations and make your numbers. None of those conversations would have amounted to anything, right, because you have a new idea what you were talking about. So, you know, I think that after running your into all enough times, the thought is you got to take a step back and try to figure out how do I get over this wall? And there might be a lot of ways. I mean you might be able to, you know, build a ladder, bring a ladder, make a human ladder, fly over, use a pogo stick. I do it's an analogy, but you know, all of those ways of getting over it. That, for me, is what the training is, teaching people how to get over those walls that they find with the buyers. Because if a rep did not come from a particular space or it's a new kind of product or it's a new kind of audience, they're going to have to learn all that stuff to really get good at their job and to be effective. Without a doubt. I mean there's and there's multiple layers of information that you have to train the sales reps on right. There's there's the foundational what is the sales methodology and process that your organizations using for scalability and measurement? But then there's also the product knowledge, right. Yes, and if we're looking at kind of a rainbows and UNICORNS, a perfect world, you know from your perspective and in an extremely technical industry that you're in, what would that ideal sales training program look like? Well, I can go a little bit into what we do and how it's subdivided. So, yeah, you're definitely right on the money that there's kind of the product market, the contextual training about who you're selling to, what they need and what you actually have to offer, and then there's there's the nuts and bolts of actually selling and selling effectively. And the former is something that I think is probably be suited for a marketing team. Marketing teams tend to hire people like product marketers who have do main expertise, are at least have full a lot of time to dedicate to sitting down and really researching something and finding a way to make it digestible for the masses. You know, a big part of a product marketing job is education. And enableming. I think that the ladder part, the actual salesmanship, that's what I often call it. That's something that I think ideally needs to come from sales management. They might have a certain way of doing it, they might have, you know, good examples. At the end of the day, a manager is only as good on the sale side as the people that are working under them. So it's really on them to certify that, at least in the nuts and bolts of the day job, you know, asking discovery questions, negotiating contracts, trying to navigate an organization and get the right people on a call like those are skills that the sales manager really needs to be training on and often we certify their team on. So when you guys did you approach this? Do you have a teer training program that you guys employer? We do indeed. I can talk about it again from the CON said and product and market piece of it, since since I do run the marketing team, I always keep my year on what's going on from the sales enablement...
...part. I've I've had some sales experience, so, you know, it's good for me to have a good idea what's going on the other thing that I like to know what the sales team is training on is we will change the format of what we're presenting from a product market perspective to fit what's being trained on in from the sales teams. So, for instance, you know they want to do a certain kind of lesson and they need to personas we will go and make like backstories for some prospects or some customers and have it bap to the exact kind of lesson or the exact kind of role play that the sales teams trying to do. So we try to fill in those gaps and make things real or chop what we're shop up what we're doing and see if they can fit alongside what the sales team is being taught from the process perspective. But what we do, for for our new hires, when someone joins, is we have a new hire training that's basically meant to go from you've never heard of a computer before. See you are understanding, you know what the base on technology is, where the problems come up that that our product solves, how our product solves them, and then gets into the dynamics of the market. You know, and and we even finish up with a little bit of process stuff from the marketing side. You know what we do to get people aware of our company signing up. So that's where some of the people that you're going to call on have actually come from. So within two to three days. The point is that any salesperson should be able to get on the phone and have an introductory five at tend to conversation and understand what the person is is actually expressing or saying on the other side of the line. Excellent. So with those back for a second. So you talked about personas, and so that's a great way for sales and marketing to, you know, make sure they're on the same age. I'm curious when you guys, when you generate those personas, do you do it from a CX standpoint or or a buyer standpoint? Both meeting like a person that you may be selling to your buyer persona may be different than you're actually user persona, and I'm curious if you guys differentiate in those at all and and if so, you know how you get that information to build out those personas. Yeah, we definitely do. We get the information from our general knowledge of all the customers that we have now and the interactions that we had we were still start up. So you know, when something happens with a certain customer, like it kind of gets shared or everybody knows right, everyone knows, you know, feature requests or new uses for the product that no one had thought of before like that. That makes the rounds. You're pretty quick and it's great because we're really reactive to our customer, to a prospect's needs. So we take a lot of that experience and again, taking those general patterns and and making up, basically weaving together some of those different strands into a new story, is almost identical to to what you probably encountering your run of the mill person that that needs to use a product. Bars going back to something else that you were saying, you know, some often times the buyer and the end user of the product is the different people, and there might even be several people in between that that have the best interest in the product. And and we will definitely do personas and and and again, also negotiating your...
...contract or something that's going to happen up at the top, walking someone through really quick demo or try to really figure out what the technical problems are, something that would probably happen on the on the end user side. So we definitely do make personas for all the levels where you typically have to interact with people from the company and get a thumbs up. Gotcha it. Is that something that the sales team, you know, keep with them or reference as there as they're doing there about calling and their prospecting or interacting with the accounts? Some of the you guys updates, I mean just much like the product will evolve and change, you'll have to continue to kind of reinforce with them. Right, there's the chance that as the product changes, as you're offering involves that you're targeting different types of people, right, like a CFO persona to get the money may be different than CTEO or, you know, vpyt type of personas. That's something you guys update and continually go back and reinforce facility. Yeah, I think that again, because we've been to start very fast growing startup, we've keep kept on getting requests for new and different kinds of scenarios to train on our personas. So I'd say that, more than anything, oftentimes personas get superseded because maybe a general training gets split up into three more specific aspects and and then we make something tailored to each specific training. That was kind of an outworth about what used to be done. So I think that, more than having to maintain refresh, we keep on refining and as we refine I feel good about it because, you know, it's kind of like any sport or any other activity. The more you focus on one thing and he repetitively work on that one thing, better you're going to get. So that that's been our experience so far. Excellent. So, and with training in general, I mean not just sales training, although I know that's what we're focused on. There is a you know you mentioned earlier. If you pull them out of the field, they're not doing what what they're supposed to be doing, or what I would do. Executive is expecting to do right, make more calls, we infront of more customers. Is the importance of sales training and making sure that that entire sales and marketing team is aligned. Is that something that is driven by a couple of people that day to do, or is it is part of the DNA? Is something that the company as a whole understands. The important of you mean making time to get those at hours of knowledge in the People's AIDS right. Yes, so I was lucky enough that I joined the company before a sales team was formed. So, you know, I just started doing new hire trainings and we started working in some more advanced trainings that we do as well, and that was that was just the way the things were done. So different from maybe other organizations or people that are getting into a sales or marketing leadership role where that might not be part of the culture. They have to change the culture. Because I was in relatively early on, we just made the culture that way from the GETTO. So that was always the expectation. Aside from that, you know, I think that I to make sure that that it's worth it. If we're going to try to make a training, I definitely get the green light from my counterparts over on the sales team. So actually going back to that, to the earlier experience that I talked to that about...
...when I try to start a company, if the story continues on, we when I started to get better at sales of marketing, we actually pivoted around and try a couple of industries and we actually stumbled across an industry where I started to get people offering money for the product I was describing on the phone side, unseen, like they needed it. We unfortunately were a bit burned out by hand. So we said about the phone. But but, like, it's funny because I didn't realize until I had more sales marketing experience how extraordinary that was. Someone who had never seen this thing was offering me, in some cases, large amounts of money. I think I got offered Eighteenzero to be part of an early Beta, and I didn't mean offer in early Beta. Yeah, I just explain what the product did. So I mean, like with with those experiences, though, if the if someone really, really really want something, you will know they won't immediately take out their check book or their wallet or the equivalent, which and the equivalent for a sales leader is their team's time. So you know, if we're going to pitch something that we think should be trained on because we've we've overheard some conversations or seeing some, you know, messages go around in our chat room with people not really understanding something, if the sales leaderships like Oh, yeah, I totally need that, please like give it to the immediately, like we know we're going to get the time for it if they're a little bit lukewarm on it. Like that's where we really have to explore and, you know, maybe we got it wrong, maybe we observe something and there's problem with something else. So I think that's the number one part. After that, I sit down on my product marketing team and we spect out how much needs to be covered for the knowledge to get into people's heads, how much time it's going to take. And then also what we've gotten really into now, once we got more staffing on the marketing side, we do testing and certification. So not only are we going to say we're going to need five hours for this or six hours or two hours or what have you, we have a certification program where someone has to take a test. We like to do role play tests, basically world exams, which because if that's the closest to the actual interaction, sure that that someone's going to have to have to show the knowledge off and we will certify people. So I'm then we let the sales leadership know who is certified and who is wasn't. So this wasn't just a flash in the PAM training. This was a training that happened and we can basically guarantee that somebody got certified because we're pretty stringent. I mean we pretend to be customers when we're doing role playing and if a customer would have been shaking their head or said like I'm out of here, we will fail someone for the same reason. And did they get the opt to go back and work on there, you know, the areas of deficiency, or is it? Yeah, is it? Is it like, you know, you're at the end of the plank and you either pass or you're out. Oh No, absolutely, will keep on running trainings and if someone didn't pass, will possibly collect all the people that didn't make it and do another, another run throughout it again. For us as a marketing team, the goal is to have a really knowledgeable, well verse sales team that knows the product, knows the customer, knows, you know, what kinds of problems the customer often runs into, can connect all the dots and can make everything good for the customer that they can help them out. So you know that that's our goal.
You know, again, I think that a lot of it often times is will power thing. We definitely have reps that really, really want to learn and they will, you know, like pull the equivalent of a hall nighter. Essentially, they to get that knowledge or do independent research, and there's some people they're like, well, you know what, I'm addes sting, I have to do this. So you know the I think the attitude that a salesperson also goes in with makes a big difference towards her success. Oh, without a doubt, without a doubt. I mean, when I work with clients and teach classes, you always have you can see it right. There's about a third that are excited to be there, a third that are kind of uncertain and then a third they're like, why the Hell Am I in here? Right? Yeah, we always you know, I always started the classes that I teach with. Look, I can. I can teach anyone how to be a better sales person. If you're willing to take one step, just take one step towards me. I'll make up the distance. But if you're not a willing student, you just you just not going to learn it. It's a waste of your time and a waste of mind. So let's find somewhere else for you to provide some value. Yeah, I mean I think that the one thing is that myself and the product markers I have can be a little there attached or just a touch spicy. They have someone. Yeah, I mean, I mean they do it someone like that. We are a team of people that know the product into the customer quite well. That's why we're putting these trainings together. You know, you just challenge someone. Okay, you're in a situation with X, Y and Z and some one asks this question. What do you do and what do you say? And you know if you do the wrong answer, hey guess what, that might have been a great customer and you didn't know how to answer it. So they might move on and look for something else, right, yeah, I mean the opportunities that you know, the number of times that you're going to be allowed to get in front of that ultimate buyer. Right, the power person can be limited. So you've got to really know your stuff, you got to really do your preparation, you gotta you know, have to show and build that credibility and trading is critical to that. So I'm curious, you know, we've talked about kind of two or three days when they start and they do the product training, they go through the oral exams. I'm kind of curious how how do you guys reinforce it as the product of aalls and is there a set way of going back and talk to them? Are Doing more training? Is there a set schedule for that? How do you guys approach that? Yeah, so we also do a demo certification training, which is pretty involved. It's a number of hours of classroom training and a Repston practice. But when we certify them, like they know the product, they know the use cases, they canser the top twenty most freaking questions that come up really well. They can handle questions they don't know the answer to really gracefully. So it's a lot of work and we, you know, we celebrate it, like we keep a list of everyone to certified on the demo and they to get a nice plaque. And what we started to do is that we started to build out advanced trainings, but you have to be demo certified first, because you get to kind of like a baseline level of knowledge with the Demo train that we do in terms of the product in the market and the customer. And if you didn't go through that, the advanced trainings, you know it's kind of like Spanish, one thud and one Spanish one und two to two and one to two hundred two, like you can't, he can't go into one hundred and two or two one until you pass that first class with all the basics. So we keep on doing that and, of course our product keeps on involving itself, involving super rapidly. So whenever we hit a point where, whatever version of the...
...demo script that we train people on just had, there's there's a lot of new things that we really want to show to everyone, will draw a line, make a new version and we will do a basically a recertification. I mean, you know, a lot of other a lot of other things in real life do that. Like you have to get your your driver's license, you know, reopt to your passport, reopt every now and then take a new picture because because you might look a little bit different from the last time. So now we're actually doing the same thing. We're reuping people. I'm away dis greatest knowledge and you know, we've spent a lot of time making some of these new features or they've come from some, you know, a lot of customers requests. So we really need to be able to have people show them, explain them really well and take any questions from them. So we keep people sharp by this re certification process that sons, you have give a built in feedback mechanism for the trainees. Is are surveys, or you guys debrief with them or, you know, executive leaders should be reefs with them after the training you see how effective it was. How do you guys measure the success in the training and get the feedback from the Chineese built back in? Yeah, now, I know. We we have post training feedback forms. So we send those out and and of course we gage them. You know, actually interesting about that. You know, I feel like it's kind of a pattern thing. Every now and then you kind of get like a curmudgeon. That was about something. But you know, it's really hard if you've had fifty responses at all seemed to be in the same band of then one person that's just, you know, kind of off the charts. Is sometimes it could have very you know, they might point out some good things, but by large sometimes that was just them. But yeah, I know we send feedback forms to everyone and then we also get a lot of qualitative feedback. So I have regular check ins with the sales leadership and something that I ask is, you know what if you guys heard. We know, like is anything this soon is I can have to change. So we react to that, of course, a lot as well. So I the two things that would really, you know, make us have to look into something. We change it around Redo. It would be a pattern of recurring pattern from user feedback or, you know, sales manager coming and saying, Hey, you guys are not training it all on this really important thing. Or everyone keeps us saying that this this, you know, particular segment, like they didn't get it at all. So we take both of those pieces of feedback. Okay, so let's pivot a little bit more specifically about you know, Your Business as your challenges. I'm I'm curious when when you get up in the morning and you're getting ready to go to work, what's the top business objective for you at data dog these days? I feel like it's a lot in the start up. It's not. I mean we we recover a lot of different areas, you know. I think at the end of the day we've made a product that really fits the market and, as I mentioned before, we're very reactive to what customers and prospects request and what they say that they need. So if our product is so so, I guess, widely applicable to people that that needed. It's about how do you keep on getting in front of people and making them aware that such a product exists, so they didn't know about it before. So I guess, you know, I wake up every day and think of like, is there a pocket...
...of people? Is there? Is there a group that I was not aware of or that there might be another way of getting in front of that? I haven't thought of the Fort and you know, in terms of branding and Lee Generation, we're always trying out different things to get in front of people. But I'd say that that's that's the big part of it. The sales enablement piece obviously factors anyway, because once we find these people and they're interested, they want to find out more. We better have you know, we better be ready to talk to right and so if you so getting in front of people, when you guys do that, you have I'm assuming there's marketing campaigns go on and you have the out sales team that's doing that in prospecting as well, or is it one hundred percent? You guys are trying to get as much attention and awareness and drive the inbounds. You can pass them the sales as there a you know, a team approach to driving awareness and trying to get those meetings. or where is the last majority of that responsibility lie? Well, add we're very pragmatic organization, so we'll go with whatever works. So so, yeah, no, I mean we do a lot of in baut marketing, a lot of content or even even if we do add campaigns, we're not going to do any fluffy, you know, like Hey, we'll solve your problems. It'll be very, very specific, and we were very acrimonious about targeting. So whatever we're saying, this very specific is also going to match up very specifically to what you're looking for. And you know, by saying something, we are doing some some mouthbound calls, trying to once again, to say the right thing to the right person and really, you know, do our research. You know, someone should should welcome the call because if we did everything right, we should be pretty close to hitting the nail on the head for something that they were probably looking for anyways. Yeah, that's a great point. I mean it's one that you know, there's still people out there that are debating whether or not the phone is dead. Right and I just blows my mind. I don't like to turn cold calling right, because if you're doing if you're using all the tools at your disposal, it shouldn't really be cold. It should be this should be more warmed up than anything, and that ability to do the research and interacts them target them effectively is kind of the becoming the bread and butter of says I am marketing teams right. So, yeah, I'm kind of curious. What do you guys have? You have a tool set that you're using, that you've that you found to be particularly effective, or tools in general for a marketing standpoint that you're really fond of? I'm always looking to, you know, keep my Paul summer the what's going on in the text on. Not specifically for research, I mean I think for researcher, to who you would always do really try to learn about someone. I guess I want to go back to the common think were just talking about about the phone being dead. I don't think the phone is dead, but I do think that general social skills are are on the decline and and maybe maybe you know this is how it's always been, but I do think that the fact that you know a lot of people are. It's very easy to give anonamous comments on blogs or, you know, tweet anonymously or just, you know, boil everything down in two hundred forty characters. Actually takes away, you know, like it's very easy to have a oneside conversation right now and and being a good, you know people person in a good conversationalist, does take a lot...
...of practice. So I know, I am thinking like you know, before people would have had to have a two way conversation all the time. They were the tech out you know, the telephone, the Telegraph, like usually it was a two way conversation. And even before that, like you'd go maybe to the local to the local watering hole or something and have a conversation. That's that's how you found out about stuff, and and that seems to not be happening. Is Often. So I think people are are losing the social muscles a little bit. Well, without a doubt, and I think part of it too. I mean he's a if people are using the tech that's out there correctly, right, the systems of action like outreach, that ioh or or anything you liked a navigator, if you're using them correctly, the tech should really provide scale for you to have more of those two way conversations right. You should get you in front of more people so that your calendar is filled up for them because you're working at scale. I have seen far too many sales reps in some marketing people that are just too afraid of the rejection that comes from Buddy's somebody saying, oh, no, I don't need that, or no, I don't want to talk to you right now. where? I don't know where that I don't know. Maybe I would do it, says a marketing too long and my skins too thick. But I don't know where that sensitivity comes from, because the end of the day it is about, you know, two people working together solve the problem and that shouldn't be daunting. I don't think. Well, you know, I can't give a little tip maybe for anyone else that that is feeling that way. You know something that that I personally look and again, going back to just the ability to have a conversation. He's trade shows. I think the trait shows are the best. It doesn't get better than that. You have the person in front of you, you're talking to them, you can gage their reactions and their facial expressions and and you can tell whether whether they like what they're hearing or whether they they're trying to get out of there and like signaling their friend to get, you know, for help or something. Something that we also do with our team a lot as that we we go to a lot of trade shows and we definitely try to make it so that brand new people will will be staffing or booth and it. They'll be out there talking to potential customers, to you know, maybe two other vendors. I mean, like they'll get out there and build. There's no other way. Like someone's in front of you, we have to talk to so into the deep light of the pool. But you know what, it's just like someone that's, you know, that maybe just learned how to swim but doesn't really feel, really feel confident about it. You only kind of kick around for like a minute or two and then you realize, oh wait, I mean I know how to swim right, and then stressing, I guess I can't reemphasize, you know, trade shows, person to person reaction. You know, I think that for any salesperson that's first getting into a new space or your company, one day at a trade show, chatting with people, seeing what they're reacting to, starting to see the patterns when they all say that they have the same problems. That's probably worth the equivalent of like a month or two on the phones. So I mean I'm a big propording to that. If it maybe someone listening on the call is isn't in sales managing but he's a sales person themselves. You can take yourself to events a really easy way meet upcom I think it is fantastic. I think that most niche areas, and probably you know for big sales and you're probably sewing some sort of...
BEDB product. So I think a lot of you know business areas or other niche areas will probably have a meet up or two around you and you show up have that conversations with people. Yeah, it's not as painful as as people seem to build it up to in their heads. I mean you have conversations all the time, every day, right, you with your mailman or where the bus's starbucks. You know, it's the same thing, right, it's just doing it a little bit more purpose than focus on a different thing. So it's yeah, that's a great insight. So let's talk about trends for just a second. Our listeners are big on you know, like I said, there's that debate on is the phone dead? Everybody was talking about Ai. Will that replace sales people? I'm curious if there's a trend, whether the sales are marketing that you kind of got your eye on and you're excited to see how it plays out. I don't know. You know, that's what I haven't been thinking of and again, being a pragmatist and also being a fast growing start up, the concern is very much on the here and now and maybe like looking into the horizon rather than what's passed there. I think that one thing it's been interesting since I've been doing marketing. Said, I think if anything is dead or dying, it would appear to be email marketing, and I guess that that does apply all so to the sales around. If you're going to do like a mail merge or you're going to try to set out a lot of a lot of emails, I think that, you know, everyone's just wised up to the email game. I think that even five, six, seven years ago, you know, having having an email marketing strategy, you're probably more of a cutting edge company to someone that was in the mainstream. Now I think it's got past the mean streaming, like every company will be sending you emails. So you know, that, in my mind, actually re emphasizes the need to be discovered in a place where people are looking for you, whether it's a trade show or you know, if you do have if you do get somebody on a call and you do kind of kneel with the fans, keeping them up at night, within the first five or ten seconds it's talking to them. But I do think that the email and again because it's so easy to send out. You know, a single person, the company can set up blast that goes out to their entire database, and then when you have thousands or tens of thousands of companies doing that against the same people, there's way too much noise. You can't find a signal without yeah, and Stam. Mean, I can tell you that I've probably only open one of every maybe thirty, what are the equivalent of email blast emails that I get, and that's only because it happens, you know, the subthing line happens to it's something that I'm focused on at that point and the real name of the game, I think, is personalization and it's finding ways to use that tech to enable that true human connection that shows the interest and that you have done your homework and that you know you are not just treating them like a number. You really have spent the time to understand them as a person, to get back to that human connection totally. And you know, I think people have wised up. By law you have to have it on subscribe link when you spend that an email blast. So you know, I think people kind of scroll down, they see little and subscribe, like even when people try to have you seen people like you really like great text, so that it's there, you'll ignore it, like. I don't think. I don't think anyone's getting full nowadays. Yeah, without a doubt, without a doubt. So let's change direction in...
...a little bit. I like to ask all of our guests kind of two standard questions towards the end of each interview. Right. The first is simply your vpam marketing at growing start up. That makes you a potential prospect or or target for other sales professionals. And we talked about email. You know email marketing not being effective from your standpoint, but I'm curious if you can help our audience understand if somebody were trying to sell to you or get your attention, what? What would build the credibility with you? What would make you what? What paths could they use to engage in that conversation and what? What do you think would be effective? Yeah, I mean, I think trying to be really specific about what you're doing. I get countless cold emails and cold calls. Rive no idea what the product is. You know, I even get a lot of directmail with like sometimes some really expensive stuff that's been sent over. I opened it up. I have no idea what that company does. And if I don't know what that company does, you know how's it supposed to help me? I think I think that the best tactic that anyone that would be trying to sell to me would be like literally boil down what, how you're going to help me in two to three words and make that the subject lient. You know, I have to scan through my email before I basically want on the delete everything before. I don't know, but there have been two or three in fact, I will tell you the best prospect of email I got. He was a recruiter who I ended up using, and this person had seen one of the roles that I was recruiting for on the website and sent me three anonymized resumes of people I fit that description. Nice. So understanding and need being specific in the response. Yeah, I mean for me, I was looking for this role. I got an email saying here's three potential candidates for this role. You know, for the for the role, you know the role name, and the emails like two sentences. Hey, I saw you looking for this role. I just finished up a search for another company for this exact same role. Here are three anonymized resumes. If any one of these works for you, launch it. Email me back and I can connect. Give you the actual name of get you on a call for it was. It was dynamite. It was great, like and and sure enough, you know, I've been slogging through trying to get candidates for this role. I needed help. This is this is much earlier on the company when we were when we didn't have like an HR team to help out with that sort of thing. But like that was huge and you know, the the recruiter was right on the money. I was spending a lot of time looking for this role. I wanted good candidates for it and she offered up three nice excellent. Okay. So last question. We call it our acceleration inside. If there's one thing you could tell sales, marketing or professional services people, one piece of advice that you can give them that you believe would help them hit their targets these be more successful, what would that be? Of Why? I would say the number one thing is empathy. Empathy, okay, excellent. You know, pack that a look before me. Yeah, if you can't feel or understand the problems or the pain or, you know, whatever's going on in your in your prospects life like, I think you're gonna you're going to find it very difficult to try to figure out what their problems are and to move along to see if what you're offering helps them. You know, with that and some of the best sales people on men, they'll disqualify themselves. So talk to...
...someone, figure out what's going on and say, Hey, you know what, my product can't help you, and then they'll sometimes you can give recommendations. Say you're actually looking for this kind of product. Here's a couple that we heard from somewhere, customers that they like a lot. I mean that the empathy is really looking at for the the other person, the person talking you, trying to help them, trying to figure out what ails them, if you will, rather than looking out for yourself because you really want to make that deal, to make your number. That's a great point. I mean that empathy component is unbelievably important, especially as we as we find ourselves trying to get back to that human to human touch. Right like it's about not necessarily me, it's about the other person and you need it if you have a consistent way of uncovering that. I've seen sales ar to be extremely, extremely successful with that approach, but it is, I'll be honest, it's rare, especially when you have, you know, kind of going back to us talking about revenue executives wanted to go, go, go. They can feel that pressure and then have a tendency for that to kind of fall by the wayside. Takes a little bit more purpose and focus, I think at times. Yeah, well, you know what, I can cycle that all the way back. I mean there's different places where people are really good and had having you feel what's going on in someone else's shoes. I mean, you know Oscar winning movies like the drama that has everyone, you know, reduced to tears in your seat. You know, really, really good books like you get in that persons shoes. So I think at the goal you know, tie right back to sales enablement at a very high level. Weather you know it's a marketing team trying to do training on the product or the market or the persona or sales team or sales leadership trying to do practice on different pieces of the sale or different sales skills. I think that if you can evoke that same kind of like putting someone in in the customer shoes, then you know you're doing a good job. That's that's probably more importantly, getting any specific details right about what you're teaching. Excellent, I said. Will thank you for that very much. So all right, everyone, that is it for this episode. Please check us out at the BB REV exactcom. Share the episode with friends, family, Co workers and please right review on itunes. We want more people be aware of what we're doing here. Alex, I can't thank you enough for your time to day's in an absolute pleasure to have you on the show. Fakes a lot chatters. It was a lot fun to chat about all the stuff excellent. Again everyone, thanks for listening and I hope everybody is enjoying Alex's valuable insights. Until next time, we have value prime solutions with you and your team, nothing but the greatest success. You've been listening to the BB revenue executive experience. To ensure that you never miss an episode, subscribe to the show and Itunes or your favorite podcast player. Thank you so much for listening. Until next time.