Sales Management Podcast
Cory Bray, 8x author and co-founder of CoachCRM, digs into hot sales management topics.
Sales Management Podcast
82. Fixing Sales Development Training with Gabe Lullo
Sales development training broken? It doesn't have to be. In this episode of the Sales Management Podcast, we're joined by Gabe Lullo, CEO of Alleyoop, to uncover and remedy the common pitfalls in sales development training.
Welcome to the Sales Management Podcast, your source for actionable sales management strategies and tactics. I'm your host, coach, crm Co-Founder, corey Gray. No long intros, no long ads, let's go. Fun episode today. I've got Alleyoop CEO Gabe Lulo with me here and we're going to talk about why sales development training is broken. He works with tons of organizations to build their sales development organizations from an external perspective and he's seen it all. People come into him with things that are broken, trying to figure things out, stuck in the mud, and we're going to see if we can't get you all some actionable takeaways coming out of this episode. Gabe, good to see you.
Speaker 2:Great to see you, Corey. By the way, huge fan of yours.
Speaker 1:Happy that we're here and it's going to be a great conversation. Man, I can't wait to get into it. Yeah, excited to have you. All. Right If you had to distill it down to one thing and you say look, this is why companies aren't getting the juice out of their orange when it comes to their internal sales development teams. What's happening? And then I want to extend it to some of the things that you guys have figured out, that you're doing over there and how you help people.
Speaker 2:Sure, well, it's three things, but if I had to take the three no, you can go with three. Three's, fine, just don't Okay, all right. So three things. Well, firstly, it's the recruitment side. It's the people side. Right, people are not being vetted correctly. People don't know what they're looking for when it comes to sales development. They think it's an entry-level role and they just hire bartenders, like I was a bartender before, I was an SDR 25 years ago. But I will say they're just hiring someone and hopefully they just go cold call a list.
Speaker 2:So it's really the people problem first, and then the list, really a second, and set which really leads to sales enablement. They're not being enabled correctly, they're not getting the right data, they're not getting the right tools, they're not getting the right, you know, support. And then, finally, it's the culture and the training, it's the retainment. You know, there's a point I think it's 68% of SDRs who start in that role aren't there after 12 months. I mean, that's high. 68% of SDRs are no longer in the role they started with within 12 months. That's by the bridge group, which they know everything, and so the turnover is really really high and that is, you know, a problem. And so, you know we've kind of cracked the code. Our retention rates, three and a half years. You know our reps are constantly always, you know, having the best tools and we figured out, like, who to hire so we can find the right people.
Speaker 1:Okay, let's stack rank these three. So we've got recruitment list, culture plus training. Yes, I've got my guess. I guess it's probably recruitment's the thing where it's dead on arrival if you go fishing in the wrong pond 100%.
Speaker 2:That's why I put in that order right, because it all starts with recruitment. We don't hire any SDRs that have any less than two years of experience, have any less than two years of experience, and so there's a million profiles on LinkedIn right now with sales development or BDR, business development, rep titles, and a lot of them are being displaced, but no fault of their own, and they're great candidates, they're great people and they're actually good at what they do. But the biggest thing is cold call reluctance. Right, I don't want to train that, I'm not. I always say I'm not here to motivate you, I'm here to find motivated people. If you look at it from that perspective, that will really cut about 60, 70% of the people that you should be hiring.
Speaker 1:Well, there's a myth out there that if someone's been in SDR, bdr, for two years, then something's wrong, because everyone that's in that role, in their experience the hypothetical world that exists out there wants to be a closer, wants to be in a sales role as opposed to a BDR role Sounds like that's not true.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I wrote a newsletter today actually went out about where the SDR career path doesn't have to be SDR AE. They can go into RevOps, they can go in recruitment, they can go into marketing, they can go in client success, they can go in partnership development. You know, the SDR role is a great gateway role for a lot of different positions but it doesn't have to be SDR AE. I have eight SDRs right now that have been SDRs for over a decade. One of them's a grandfather of six grandkids and he loves being an SDR and he's great at it. Was he an AE before? Yeah, there's a lot of companies that move them into the AE and they go back to SDR. Sometimes they don't like the long sales cycle. They don't like the high pressure. Maybe they're not a relationship builder. They like that transactional role. There's SDRs that make more money than AEs right now in some orgs. So it's not always A plus B equals C when it comes to their career path.
Speaker 1:Got it. So there are specific things to look for. It sounds like immediate gratification being able to turn it on and turn it off without having to worry about building this long-term rapport relationship with somebody.
Speaker 2:Yeah, for sure. I mean yeah, truly transactional. Yep, exactly. And again, you can build career paths that allow for forward, upward mobility. When it comes to SDRs, it doesn't just have to be an AE, got it?
Speaker 1:How do you get somebody? Okay, so here's the question You're looking for people that have two plus years experience. Does that have to be two plus years of sales development, b2b experience, or are you also pulling people out of working at the mall, at T-Mobile or doing fundraising inside their college? What is your opinion on that? Because people have to start somewhere.
Speaker 2:I would say cold calling, outbound phone activity or prospecting activity. I do like interviewing people who've been in the mall working at Verizon. One of our top guys used to do that seven years ago and now he's a SDR manager now today. But yeah, that would be it. But anyone that is in a prospecting outbound motion, that cut their teeth and has gotten punched in the face a hundred times a day on the phone is someone I want to talk to again. I don't want to train that. The phone, you know, doesn't weigh a thousand pounds. If we can figure that out first, right.
Speaker 1:Right, right, right. Okay, got it. So from the recruitment side, that's number one.
Speaker 2:What are a couple of questions that you'd want people to ask during interviews to vet that out? Well, I mean, I look in their background and details of what they were doing prior to. Specifically, I ask them about technology and tools that they've used to verify whether or not they actually know what phone dialers are and phone systems look like. We ask them questions on what would you say to someone if they said this, which is usually an objection that they would be dealing with in their space or industry.
Speaker 2:I want to be able to know. Like I don't want to train them, you know, with seven to 10 objections that they're going to deal with, I want them to come to the table knowing I know what I should say when someone says send me an email, I know it's all the same.
Speaker 1:It's always the same. No matter what your widget is, it's always. I'm busy Send me an email price. I have something, whatever it is.
Speaker 2:We've broken it down to 10 objections. We got this down to a science. So there's 10 things SDRs will hear and we can parachute an SDR into any industry, any vertical, any persona, any audience and within 72 hours, they could be booking meetings all day, every day, because they know those 10 objections. They just have to switch out a couple of bullet points. That's obviously on brand, but the reality is is there's only 10 things you'll ever hear, and if you know exactly what to say in response to those, you're going to be setting meetings with the right people.
Speaker 1:Yeah, you're creating. You're creating a playbook for athletes. It sounds so you're playing basketball, you've got to.
Speaker 2:That's what, that's literally our game that's.
Speaker 2:that's our, our slogan is you know we're the ultimate assist. Right Not to be self-serving here. But you know, gamification is another point. You know everything that we do in sales in the internal culture, environment side of it, which is that third point, is very gamified right. So all of our teams, all the people we actually the names, we have team captains, we have coaches we have met. So it's very important that we are always competing in a friendly, healthy competition. You know, throwing spiffs all the time, doing all different types of stuff to keep the carrot in front of them. That's how salespeople are motivated and then we use that to our advantage, not in a manipulation but in an incentive basis.
Speaker 1:Okay, this is fun, so let's do this. Arguments for and against. Do SPFs work? And for anybody that's listening, explain what a SPF is before we jump into the forenames. Yeah.
Speaker 2:SPF is an incentive or a commission or a one-off incentive that you'd be able to give to somebody for doing something great, and they absolutely work. They absolutely do. All of our managers have a SPF budget, so they have a budget and they have a certain dollar amount that they can literally do whatever they want with for SPFs and it's we're throwing out, you know, a hundred dollar, you know pair of tickets to a concert or we're. We're going to be giving away a big screen TV for a social media blitz this month and I again, it's not always, you know, we actually have. We have surveyed all of our reps to see what motivates them. This is also a uniqueness about our culture. It's not always spiffs, it's not always money. It could be PTO, right? Hey, we're giving away two days of PTO this month for free whoever does this, this and this, and it's motivating, you know, and people run through walls for that type of recognition and it's great and it's actually a lot less expensive than potentially, you know, throwing commissions or bonuses out there.
Speaker 1:Yeah, things that people wouldn't spend their own money on. They love it. I like giving people lottery tickets, because a lot of people spend their own money on a lottery ticket but they say, oh geez, this is great, I got a chance to win $200 million.
Speaker 2:Hey, listen, man, we had this situation where a young guy started in our company and we were giving away TV and he literally did. He got second place in the contest the month before and he was so bummed out. I said, man, you're so close, we're going to do the same contest this month. And he won and he gave a big screen TV. Now, he came from very, very, very published background. He gave his big screen TV to his mom for Mother's Day. He lives in Jamaica and it was like the most. She videotaped it and sent it to all of us in the company. It was like the greatest, like I was crying, like it was emotional, it was amazing and it was just, but where he came from and what he was able to do, and that gift, it was epic and it, you know, reinvigorated the entire company and it was $300 TV and it was amazing. Yeah.
Speaker 1:And everybody rallies around that. It's a story. You've got your morning news human interest story going on right inside the business For sure.
Speaker 2:And it's a recruitment model. It's a great recruitment point. People come hey. I saw that post we put on LinkedIn. I want to work at a company that does things like that. It's really the little things.
Speaker 1:Yeah, that's cool, so we're digging into culture a little bit. You mentioned competitiveness, too, you mentioned. So let's we're digging into culture a little bit. You mentioned competitiveness too. Yeah, where's where's positive competitiveness? Where does the line start to be crossed a little bit when it comes to sales development teams? Cause I imagine if somebody is in there just fighting for their life, it becomes annoying at some point and it can rub some people the wrong way and I'm the most competitive person in the world, so I love this. This isn't a gotcha question. I'm just genuinely curious how do you monitor that from the perspective of somebody that is competitive and does want to win?
Speaker 2:Yeah, I mean, I'm a big F1 fan, so Formula One for those who don't know what it is. So we do stack rankings right. We look at it and we look at every metric, every single you know analytical thing you can possibly look at. So, but we rank everyone in the company and we recognize them on our sales meetings at the end of the month and we take a look at what everyone is doing and you know people don't want to be in the bottom 10% of the company. But it's not a fear tactic, it's not you're going to get fired, it's, you know we. We're here to support you, put you on an improvement plan to get you where you need to be. But the drive that it takes to be at that top 10, and we recognize it heavily is really what matters and that's what we do with the competition here.
Speaker 1:When someone's in the bottom 10%, how often is it that they just don't really want to be there and that's a moment for them to self-realize that?
Speaker 2:It's funny. I would say the majority of the reason why someone's in the bottom 10% is their attitude, and it does change. We've had scenarios where we're wondering what the heck happened. The guy was in the top 5% for four months and all of a sudden he dropped down to the bottom 10 and we uncover and peel back the onion and we realize, oh, maybe there's something happening at home, or maybe he's just getting burnt out, or maybe this or that is occurring. That may not even be out of work, but it's usually. They're just coming to the table with a piss poor attitude frankly, lack of a better word and we check that. And we I mean these are humans, we're not replaced by AI yet. So we are figuring out what's wrong and we dissect it and then we hopefully correct it. And it's funny when you look at it from that perspective. Versus everything else, it's usually fixed much faster and it gets out of that scenario much quicker and it's exciting to see.
Speaker 1:What advice would you give to a junior manager that's dealing with bad attitudes and they don't know what to do?
Speaker 2:I think you need to know your people, right. You need to know what motivates them. You need to know their why, right? What actually is their motivation for spending eight to nine hours a day with you and not their family? And if you're fully aware of that, you'll know whether or not their attitude has changed. Daily, weekly, monthly one-on-ones are super important. And call listening you can hear it in their voice it's just tonality. The best thing that our sales managers hear is like yeah, I was listening to your calls today and, man, it sounds like you're totally off. What's going on, and it opens up the dialogue with that rep. But listening to those calls but not what they're saying but how they're saying it usually is a good indicator that something's the bad attitude the laziness, the, the depth of the questions, things like that.
Speaker 1:You can tell if they're just going through the motions or if they're really engaged and trying. That's interesting. That's a leading indicator before it starts showing up in the results or before people really start noticing it. That's where you can really get ahead of it when things start to emerge.
Speaker 2:Yeah, and we're a fully remote company, but we used to not be right, so we used to be in the office, we used to see everyone and you can tell whether or not someone's having a good day or not day just on their body language. But what we did do is we implemented a virtual sales floor. So, because we're fully remote, that human to human, face to face what I call belly to belly interaction is gone. But we figured out how to way to replace it as best as we can, which is through a virtual sales floor. So, literally, when everyone is calling in a sprint or in a power hour, you may call it. We can see everyone's face making calls and it is fun and motivating, but we can tell whether or not something's off or not off just based on that alone.
Speaker 1:Interesting. How often do you do that? What's the percentage of somebody's workday that they're in the virtual sales floor being able to see their peers?
Speaker 2:So it's unique because we're a very phone outbound phone shop. Like our phone is king for us. So we're still using the phone and it is our number one weapon. We make 7 million phone calls a day I'm sorry, a year.
Speaker 1:I heard some dudes on LinkedIn say that doesn't work anymore.
Speaker 2:I heard some dudes on LinkedIn say that doesn't work anymore. Yeah, it's probably selling outbound emails.
Speaker 2:See how that's working, but yeah you know we use all the channels. I'm not pinpointing one or the other, but phone is important. So we actually do what we call a sprint schedule. To your point in your question, six hours a day we're prospecting and then two hours we're not, so they're in a sprint throughout the day, six hours. We also have a lot of breaks, so we don't like burnout. People aren't working all day long, they're working for an hour and then they're doing a break, just like you would work out at a gym, right, or just like you would try to do anything physical. So that's how we do it. So we prospect for an hour and then we got a 15 to 20 minute break and we do that throughout our entire day.
Speaker 1:How much time over the course of 24 hours do you think somebody could actually phone prospect if they were pushing themselves?
Speaker 2:Wow, over 24 hours with breaks, yeah. So if I'm sitting.
Speaker 1:Yeah, so let's say that breaks don't count as part of the time. Let's say that I hypothetically live in Argentina and I'm not around any family or friends right now and I what's? What's the human brain's mental ability to do this from an energy perspective, a focus perspective? I'm just curious if you have any thoughts on that, because this whole idea of like, oh, we've got an eight hour day and you can't do everything for eight hours and so we cut back to some percentage of that, it sounds like you're number six, which is a great number. I'm just curious if you or anybody else has thought about this from a human capacity perspective and what we can do before we really start to experience burnout, because burnout is a weird thing. It comes way faster for things that we don't like doing. For things that we like doing, it doesn't come nearly as fast.
Speaker 2:So there's lots in pack there, and I think the quick note is that I wouldn't want anyone on my team making cold calls consecutively for more than two hours, literally, because I think that'll just drive you nuts. I think you need a break. I think you need a quick, you know, walk up. You need to walk around, like my Apple watch tells me to stand up every hour, right, so you just need to get away from it, and we do. I like to do my one-on-ones, doing a walk and talk, right, literally getting away from my desk, getting on an audio call and just chatting while we're walking on outside or something. It's a great way to have a conversation, but at the end of the day, getting people away from their desk is the way I would do it. Yeah, so I think that's the answer to your question.
Speaker 1:I love it so blocks no more than two hours, but it sounds like probably less than that. Realistic, we do them one hour blocks and then space them up with physical and diverse scenery physical movement, diverse scenery physical movement, diverse scenery, so you can experience.
Speaker 1:I love it. Yeah, this aligns with cause I. Anytime I'm doing something, it doesn't if I hate it, I don't want to do it for too long. If I love it, I can play. I can play pool for 12 hours. Now, I can't just sit there and do drills for 12 hours. I don't want to. Now I can't just sit there and do drills for 12 hours. I don't want to. You know I know.
Speaker 2:Yeah, absolutely, but that actually that was a point that I was thinking of when you initially asked the question about loving what you do. It's another part of the recruiting process. Like most people say, no one likes cold calling, but that's actually not true. There's actually a lot of people out there that don't mind it. There's actually some people out there that like communicating on the phone. People actually like people Not everyone does, but you know there are people out there that do, so find someone who loves it.
Speaker 2:Now I'm not saying you want to do it for eight hours a day or 24 hours in a day. Um, there's a lot of other things out there. But there's money motivated people out there and if they know that and they're usually very analytical people so they can calculate okay, for every single phone call is going to make me X based on statistics. It's very motivating, especially if you think like I do, and you probably think the same way. So I figured out at a young age when I was in SDR if I make every single phone call, I make equals that amount of money. It was almost always, like you know, playing a game with yourself where you're just at a lot like a lottery ticket. Just pulling money out of a cash register is how I thought about it.
Speaker 1:Yeah, every time I dial somebody they might pick up. Every time I buy a lottery ticket it might hit same thing?
Speaker 2:Yeah, exactly, and you have those statistics and the odds. You know your pickup rate, you know your meeting conversion rate, you know how many meetings are going to close, you know your closing rate, you know your commission rate, and then you can start calculating. And it gets to be fun at that point, in my opinion.
Speaker 1:Okay. So imagine this you're interviewing somebody and they tell you that they like cold calling, but you think that they're not telling the truth. Yeah, are you seeing in their body language, their tone or the words that they use that indicates to you that they're not telling the truth?
Speaker 2:Well, it's always in my follow-up and we actually have something funny. We call it Gabe's gauntlet. It wasn't self-named, it was named by my founder of my company, and now it's a thing. But we actually take people through a mock phone call before they're hired. So we send them a call script, we give them the words that we want them to say and we take them through a mock script. So not only do we ask follow-up questions when they say they like the cold call, which would be what do you say about this? What do you say about this? How do you handle this? Tell me about a time where you having a bad call and you turned it around. So I always ask for a lot of examples to dive deep into that. But on the flip side, as an actual test, we give them a script and we do a mock call, and then it's interesting, it's not just ending there. We actually give them feedback and if they're going to be able to take that and run with it and do something positive, and then we actually do it again.
Speaker 1:Love it. Yeah, interviewing for coachability on the fly is pro move. Everyone should do that. Please listen to Gabe, run your own gauntlet, and if your name starts with a G, brand it like that I love it. That's great, all right. A couple other things based on your what you teed up at the top. We talked about list and training, so let's get a list next. Yeah, what makes strong lists? Where do?
Speaker 2:people get it wrong. Well, not every data company is equal, right? If you're going international, you want to look at a Zoom info. If you're looking for specific data sets, you may want to look at other companies. There's a lot of different data providers out there and right now there's a war on data. It's getting pretty competitive. There's a lot of market share being taken from other companies, so you can really get data at good price points. Good data, good price points, score leads.
Speaker 2:A lot of people just think, okay, let's pull a list and assume that the data company is right, and then you just start calling on them and then they wonder why their connection rate's like 4%. You can actually score leads and see who's picking up, who's not picking up. We call it reachability. And you want to get really fanatical with your sales operations or your sales enablement team to make sure that you're fine tuning and fine tuning and fine tuning and fine tuning, so that every time you do a round of calls, you're calling better data and you're filtering out that data correctly. So that's the best way to do it, in my opinion, and it allows you to have higher connection rates, which, of course, equals more connections and conversations.
Speaker 1:Yeah, and how hard is this? It's very hard. It sounds you're stuffing me through it and I'm thinking, oh, you know, you're explaining it very concisely, but, at the same time, massive amounts of data, especially when it involves people that move around from company to company and companies that change their name and get acquired whatever. Lots of moving parts.
Speaker 2:Here's my analogy. There's a lot of companies out there that are probably listening that are SaaS companies or software companies. Software as a service. The amount of time, energy, money that you put into your engineers and your development team and building a robust software that is best in class, feature rich and highly competitive to the marketplace that's the same exact amount of time and people that you should be investing in your rev ops or sales enablement for your outbound motion. I don't know if that puts you in perspective. Yeah, you're building a product A hundred percent. So I mean, if you think and in our world that's literally our product, like it is our product, it's what we sell. But even if you don't hire us and you do this yourself, you still have to treat your sales operations as if you were treating a software development team for building an actual solution or product.
Speaker 1:Yeah, that's interesting. So the analogy tell me if this tracks. The analogy is that the engineering team they contract with Amazon Web Services for the hosting and CloudFlare for the security. Well, you're going to go out and buy XYZ data provider. That's like your software team buying Amazon Web Services. It doesn't create a product, it doesn't keep the product continuously improving and it certainly doesn't provide feedback around how people need to change, coach, modify behaviors over time. It's just cornerstone of it.
Speaker 2:Yeah, and we're a power power user. We're a huge client for many, many, many. You know we have over 100 SDRs on our sales floor and so you know we have a lot of data needs and we pay more for data because we're sharing that data with our clients, so we actually have to pay more for it than just someone buying it directly. But on the flip side, even with all the amazing data companies that are out there who are spending millions to have great data, we're still seeing 70% of it is good. So 30% of it just off the bat is just bad, and a lot of people are moving jobs, a lot of people are getting laid off, companies are not in office anymore, people aren't using main dialers and secretaries.
Speaker 2:It's a very different world. It's hard for those data companies to have good data. Now, 70% you can do a lot of damage with 70%, but how much money do you want to spend on wasted time on 30% of that data, not even knowing if it's good or bad? You keep calling it because people don't know there's, they're not there or they don't know how to get it out of a sequence, and all of those things are really important to think about. Yeah.
Speaker 1:Got it and it sounds like owning that internally requires some kind of competence. So do you suggest that people do sales operations, revenue operations, whatever they want to call it in-house? Or is that something where you want a hired gun to set it up for you, that set it up 50 or a hundred times and then operate it in-house after that? Or do you let little Johnny go on Modern Sales Pros and ask three questions about how to do it and then try to figure it out from scratch?
Speaker 2:I mean, I'm an outsource guy, so I look at it from this perspective. If I was starting a company from scratch which a lot of companies come to us to help with that from the sales side I would outsource anything except for the thing you're good at selling. Whatever your actual product is, specialize on that. That's your product. Everything else, outsource until you can own it and have the bandwidth to do so and the expertise to do so. I'm not saying live that way forever, but do you want to have an in-house accounting team to do your books or do you want to have a CPA firm to do it? Until you can have a company strong enough to hire your own, it's the same thing.
Speaker 1:That's my favorite analogy for outsourcing. It's a super slippery slope. So who does your taxes? And even if they do your taxes, who does your audit that other accounting firm? Exactly Because a lot of companies one person do the books, maybe they do the taxes too, and then somebody else does the audit and all of a sudden they're like oh wait, a second. Maybe we shouldn't build all of our training and playbooks and rev ops and everything from scratch internally.
Speaker 2:Yeah, exactly. I mean, if you think about it, the most mainstream outsourced departments are recruiting staffing. There's thousands and tens of thousands of those, and usually it's outsourced in the beginning of a company accounting, for sure, hr, for sure. And then marketing, like, do you are you going to build your website? Like, do you build your own website? No, probably not. If you want a good one, no, you're probably going to outsource that. Okay, well, why not outsource sales, development, rev ops, list building, right, all these other things that are probably much more important, valuable and so, yeah, those are the. Those are the ways that we educate people who are skeptical about outsourcing until they aren't.
Speaker 1:Yeah, and then you can bring it in. Yeah, Because if you've got a sales leader early stage that owns sales and upsell customer success account, whatever you want to call it. And then you also say hire three SDRs and build that out, that becomes three jobs, and is that where you want the person focused? And then the other question with sales leader internally do you want them focused on fixing what's broken this quarter or do you want them one to two quarters ahead and so they can actually grow your business?
Speaker 2:Yeah, and the ultimate pain to bring us kind of circling back to the beginning of the call is setting up those three SDRs and then in six months having to do it all over again. I mean that's the hardest part is because now they're gone, because either a competitor gave them 5k more in their base across the street, or you made a bad hire and you realized it, or three they want to be an AE tomorrow after they signed the contract to be an SDR. So you're going to lose them in six months. So you're going to do it all over again. Wow, that's really that's expensive.
Speaker 1:For all of those reasons that are going to be net new to them, because they're not dealing with 100, like you are Okay.
Speaker 1:And then the last thing. So we talked about recruitment, we talked about list, we talked about culture, and then culture and training was combined in a bucket. What are you seeing people get wrong when it comes to training folks up, especially in the world where they're not hiring the folks that you described, which can come in and you give them a couple of data points and they can run a meeting with whoever you want them to, in whatever market. I don't think those people are the ones that are always getting hired. So what are people getting wrong with training?
Speaker 2:Yeah, I think I wrote this last week week too about the difference between training AEs and SDRs.
Speaker 2:The problem is usually it's a VP of sales or CRO who's hired first, which I think is a completely wrong thing to do. But at the end of the day they're usually training those SDRs like they're junior AEs and it messes up the entire training methodology. Again, you want to make sure your SDRs are being trained the right objections. They want to make sure that their job is to get the meeting and not the actual sale. They're training them with the BANT and all these other types of training methodologies that are great for account executives and closing deals and building relationships, but they actually backfire when you're trying to train it on the front end of the sales cycle, which is where that SDR is sitting. So that's the problem is they're not wanting to train or not capable of training. They're just training the wrong stuff to that specific SDR because it's not designed for them to do that. You have to treat an SDR training as SDR training and most don't know how to do that or treat it separately.
Speaker 1:I love that. They take whatever content oh, we've got our target market content. Here you go, let's train you up on target market. And they don't create a flavor of it for each role. So you have sales, customer success, SDR everybody going through the exact same thing because that's all that. Whoever made it had time to build, If they built anything. Otherwise, they just sit through the same lecture and somebody talk I mean, you know more than anyone.
Speaker 2:You wrote books on this. The reality is the SDR function is still about a decade old. It's still very new. So when it comes to being mainstream, there's been appointment setting and cold calling for decades.
Speaker 1:I'm just saying 1953 is where I get that point.
Speaker 2:Yeah Right, but the SDR, which was born out of the SaaS space, which is still relatively new to the world, and there's a lot of companies that have no idea what the sales development even is, still there's still an old school AE, does everything, full cycle sales. So when you institute an SDR role into that life cycle, it really has to be looked at as a specific thing, versus just kind of like a junior AE. I get this all the time from CEOs who are asking for our services like well, how do we know that your SDRs are going to know my product like the way we know it? I'm like they're not supposed to. They're the trailer to the movie. They're not supposed to. They're the trailer to the movie. They're not supposed to be the expert. If you want them to be the expert, you're not understanding what we do Now. Are they going to be knowledgeable? For sure, are they going to be able to facilitate questions and be informed 100%, but if you want them to talk about pricing and the invitation to a call, you're missing the boat.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I always. Why are you talking about the product? That's the question, and rarely, if ever, is a SDR on a cold call talking about product the right answer.
Speaker 2:Exactly, and there's a lot of people that think that that is something that they should be prepared to talk about. And again, it's about training them the right way, because when you do train them the wrong way, and they're becoming product experts, we all know. You know, prospects who are confused are going to do nothing, and that's not obviously a good spot to be in.
Speaker 1:Yeah, exactly. And then things like Bant, for example that was that came out of inbound leads for high value enterprise tickets. And then everyone says, oh, go read Predictable Revenue. That was published in 2011 about something that happened in 2005. So if your teams are reading that book, some of the things in the book are fine. Sure, not knocking it yeah, totally, but it was about what happened in 2005.
Speaker 2:Right, and look what Salesforce did when that book it's about that book. So they had a good marketing, they had good branding, they had an entire go-to-market strategy for marketing, which a lot of these companies don't have, or they're in such amount of competition they don't know how to do and so it doesn't really matter. So, yeah, I totally agree with you and that is true.
Speaker 1:They're moving people from Siebel, goldmine and ACT three on-premise CRMs into the cloud, right, and your company whoever you out there listening to this is probably isn't moving somebody from one of three old school competitors that barely function, that are doing 20% annual maintenance licenses for on-premise software that's in a closet next to the women's bathroom, which is what all those were onto the cloud of something new and innovative. A lot of times, especially in the software world, much as people don't want to admit it, your product is the second iteration of the third generation of something that's existed since the seventies, right, yeah, it's probably better. It's probably faster, lighter, cheaper, swifter, whatever. But the question then becomes what pain does someone have because they use that older version? And then that's the one thing that we can narrow in on and figure out okay, why the heck would it make sense for this person to enter a sales process with us? Book that next step and boom, you've got your sales development job done.
Speaker 2:Yeah, and like to your point, unless your product is drastic and dramatic, like Salesforce was to those other companies you're talking about like fractional, marginal, small, different, a differentiator between all the other companies that are doing what you're doing. So there has to be a totally different approach.
Speaker 1:And I just don't think there's that many companies now that are drastically different, and of the ones that are, I think Elon's the CEO of all of them SpaceX versus NASA, sure, the boarding company versus, you know, bob with a Bobcat, but but everything else it's, it's incrementalism. Even if you look at the, the large language models, ai is taking the world by storm, but how many large language models are there? There's double digits now. At least that all work Yep, and they all have APIs, yep.
Speaker 1:And man, a lot of people, a lot of companies are getting smoked because they don't realize I guess they don't realize whatever on their product roadmap, that, wow, just creating parity with someone else nine months in the future isn't going to be enough for us to hit our growth goals. Yeah, exactly, I'm with you, man. It's a tough world out there, all right. So when it comes to inspecting, training, certifications, recertifications, assessments, activities, what do you see the best organizations doing to really solidify things? And so it's not just hey look, I told you these things in March. You obviously know them now, and so I'm just going to set it and forget it.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I mean I always say inspect what you expect right. Getting a HubSpot certification or going through outreachio training and getting those certifications to be considered a good cold caller no offense, it's BS, I mean, it's just great information for sure, but it doesn't tell me you're capable of doing those things right.
Speaker 2:Yeah yeah, yeah, but it doesn't tell me you're capable of doing those things, right? Yeah, so the best. I mean Steve Richard actually I think he coined it or or or actually has a copyright on this one but it's called call camp. We do call camp twice a week internally with our company and we and that is a an amazing amount of time that we take everyone off the phone and the entire company. Think about that. A hundred reps times. You know, two hours is a lot of time, right, if not prospecting, if you add it up.
Speaker 2:But what we do is we all there's a company sit on the call and we go through good calls, bad calls and ugly calls and we listen to what is being said on both sides and we literally dissect it like a brain surgeon dissects brains.
Speaker 2:We dissect every word, every pause, every nuance, the tonality, the silence, which is really important, and we look at those calls like a scientist and we unpack all of that and that's really where that certification and those trainings and the result of those trainings come out. And again, it's all there for good, positive feedback. No one goes in there feeling embarrassed or feeling, you know, negative. It's not a negative thing at all to expose someone. It's always there for learning and it's really the best way for us to get people to be better. And then we do it through osmosis, because everyone hears it and says, oh yeah, I'm taking that and stealing it. And usually we see, you know meetings booked within one hour after a call cam from like seven other people that dealt with the exact same conversation that we just dissected, and it's really effective.
Speaker 1:I love that. Okay, you, you just breeze through this because you've got it figured out. But for those folks out there that have anxiety around, well, I can't show little Timmy's bad call because he's going to get embarrassed and his feelings hurt and things like that. How do you approach the conversation with the team, with the individuals, to get everybody level set to look hey, we're going to fail in front of each other. It's part of life. We're going to get better together and that's what we're doing.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Well, I think the biggest thing is is we don't put the new people and throw them under the bus on these calls by that design. When they see and we use veterans, we use the experienced people, and when we do it all together right, and they see everyone else and the actual results of the training that we do live there, um, everyone just feels more comfortable and it's like, oh, okay, yeah, this is just what we do and the positive response and everyone sees the results too. So we have a scoreboard, so everyone sees the positive results when they walk out of it. So a month after being here for a month and you to your call, you're actually going in there like, okay, I'm going to learn a lot today, as opposed to shit, I can't handle all of this pressure.
Speaker 1:So I'm a month in. I've been to these every every week, twice a week. It's my ninth session. I have seen what happens and I have become comfortable with it, with these veterans setting the standard for me. I love that. Yeah, that's exactly how we do it. Yeah, that's phenomenal, because then there's really no excuse and you say, hey, look, we're here to get better and watching game films one of the only ways to get better, and watching game films, one of the only ways to get better 100%.
Speaker 2:And again, we say we actually call it game film too, because, again, we're huge into the analogy. But what's interesting is you can do that with a small team, right? You just don't have the numbers. So if you have like a two-person, one-person, three-person SDR team, if you're trying to build this yourself, I appreciate that and I applaud you for doing so. But that type of training, that type of ecosystem we call it, or environment, is very hard to create without big numbers, right, when you have a hundred people on a call and you're in the background watching everyone else do it nine times until you're up in a month, that's a lot easier to do than well, you got to do it tomorrow because you only got two people on your team, right, yeah, I get it. So you're got two people on your team, right?
Speaker 1:yeah, yeah yeah, I get it, so you're going to be on the spot quicker if you're on a smaller team. Exactly, yeah, that's what I'm saying. Okay, so on the game film topic, I love this. What motivates someone to watch their own game film or to watch peers game film? I, I get that. You've got the two hour, two sessions a week. That's awesome. In the interim what interim. I know some people will never watch other people's game film or their own. Some people consume it, like it's Netflix, which is awesome. What have you seen drive motivation for extra game film consumption?
Speaker 2:Well, it kind of starts with me a little bit, because I talk about this a lot. I always used to say when I was in SDR, my steering wheel was my best prospect. So when I drove to the office and to and from the office every day, I would just be talking to myself. This is before cell phones were cool, right, and I'm literally the guy in the traffic saying, hey, why is that guy talking to himself? Now it's okay because everyone's on the phone, but I would literally be talking to myself on the way to work, talking to my steering wheel, pretending it's a prospect and that is the best. That's your like. That's reviewing of your own game film.
Speaker 2:I would literally put in you know my AirPods or my iPod, you know my own calls, and I'd listen to my own calls over and over and over again. And it's just like that game film concept. It's practice, drill, rehearse. You know what I mean. If you focus on studying what you're doing and what you're doing needs to do better, it's going to help. So we ingrain that as well. Everyone should be listening and reviewing their own calls and we get them thinking that day one.
Speaker 1:I love it, especially in sales development, because you're only going to use one or two openers. You're going to have a consistent way to do next steps. You said there's only 10 objections that your team ever hears.
Speaker 2:And calls are three minutes. It's not like it's going to be. You're not spending a 40, watching a 45 minute demo like this, right For 40. And you're not wasting a ton of time doing it. You listen to three or four calls. You just spent 15 minutes and if you just master that piece of it very surgically, you're going to be okay. Do you ever play chess? I like chess. I'm not as good as you probably are. Well, there's with.
Speaker 1:In chess there's three phases. I'm just saying this for everybody's benefit. In chess there's three phases of the game. There's the opening, there's the middle game and there's the end game.
Speaker 1:The opening the way that I was taught was pick one opening with white, pick one opening with black and just stick to it and play the same thing every time. And what happens is you realize these patterns and you say, okay, well, when I make these three or four first initial moves, my opponent. So if I'm white, I'm usually playing Nims of Fitz Larson, hyper modern opening take my bishop to B2. But that's not the point. The point is that when I do that, there are a finite number of things my opponent will do. And if I play that same opening, enough, I see everything and I see it over and over again.
Speaker 1:And I go back and watch my game film on chesscom $10 a month on chesscom diamond subscription best money anybody can spend out there Love it, and especially if you've got that competitive. This is what I do to take a break, man, if I'm sitting there and I'm a little feeling a little burnout or a little edgy, I play a game of chess on my phone and then all of a sudden doing something that's even more mentally taxing, reduces that mental tax or whatever I was working on, but in that same opening, over and over and over again, it's just like doing a cold call. There's very few variations once you get into it, especially compared to the end game and the middle game, which have unlimited variations.
Speaker 2:Right, that makes a lot of sense. I mean, we break it down kind of like an English teacher would right. It's just like your intro, your body right and your conclusion. Like that's how you look at the script and it's like if you use the same intro and you use the same conclusion almost all the time, then you know exactly what to respond. It's like you know taking the pitch right. If you see a curve ball, you know how to hit a curve ball. Because you know how to hit a curve ball.
Speaker 2:You practice a thousand times right, but yes, but you know it's a curve ball right. Okay, there's only a few pitches out there that you're going to see Similarly here there's only a few objections you're going to hear. So if you say the intro and the outro very similar, and then the body is when you start to get a little nuanced, that's how we look at it.
Speaker 1:And you can do that with a mirror. You don't need technology to do it Right. Talk to yourself. Your steering wheel is your. Your steering wheel is your.
Speaker 2:Your steering wheel is your best. We'll call your steering wheel, yeah.
Speaker 1:I love that man. All right. Well, gabe, this has been an awesome episode. Love chatting with you, getting to know you better. Anything that you want to send people to, what do you want to plug?
Speaker 2:well. My LinkedIn is my way of communicating. I post every day. I have a newsletter out there as well. Usually it's a video post. If you like video, a lot of copy as well, but I'm hyper responsive and if you have any questions or want to ever connect or just kind of kick the tires, shoot me a note on LinkedIn. Gabe Lulo and I love to chat, and what's the best type of company for Alou? Any company that is looking to build an outbound function when it comes to sales is really our sweet spot. We're actually industry agnostic, so our best sweet spot is we have no sweet spot.
Speaker 1:I love that. Yeah, it's wild how many people say that. And when you dig a layer or two deeper, it makes so much sense, because a lot of times people will try to put you in a box. They're like, oh well, that's too broad. No, it's not too broad, because I know what he's talking about. So everybody don't take that as-.
Speaker 2:Listen, I'll give you an example.
Speaker 2:I have a guy who right now is selling basketball units that throw basketballs back to you, and he got $250,000 from Mark Cuban on Shark Tank and we're booking meetings on his calendar. And then we've also built the entire sales development team from when Zoom Info was in its infancy stage, and so if you look at it from that perspective, it's very vastly different and we can support you and build a custom team. We're custom, yet scalable. So that's what vastly different and we can support you and build a custom team. We're custom, yet scalable. So that's what we do.
Speaker 1:People that sell things that need folks to talk to, and so companies can focus on what they're best at, they can focus on their core competency, instead of trying to build all of this stuff from scratch internally.
Speaker 1:Well, gabe, thank you so much Really appreciate your time today and everybody else. I didn't have any free offers today, today and everybody else I didn't have any free offers today. If anybody wants a free copy of Five Secrets of a Sales Coach, shoot me a note freestuffatcoachthearmcom. And we'll see you next time on the Sales Management Podcast. You.