Latest / Cyber Go-To-Market Talk: The Cybersecurity Podcast About Cyber Sales, Marketing & Revenue Growth / How to build outbound - Kevin Hopp, CEO and Founder of Hopp Consulting

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How to build outbound - Kevin Hopp, CEO and Founder of Hopp Consulting · Cyber Go-To-Market Talk: The Cybersecurity Podcast About Cyber Sales, Marketing & Revenue Growth

0:32
SPEAKER_01: Pipeline generation, filling the funnel, prospecting.
0:35
SPEAKER_01: Call it what you want, but it is hard these days to get enough high-quality opportunities into the pipeline.
0:42
SPEAKER_01: If you're struggling with this, just know you're not alone.
0:46
SPEAKER_01: But what do we do about it?
0:47
SPEAKER_01: My guest today is an expert on a skill some may say it's an art that has been around for decades.
0:54
SPEAKER_01: Most don't do it because mentally they've convinced themselves or been told by others it just won't work.
1:01
SPEAKER_01: But it can work and work very well if you know what you're doing.
1:06
SPEAKER_01: Kevin Hupp joins me today to talk about cold calling.
1:09
SPEAKER_01: Don't go away.
1:20
SPEAKER_01: Welcome to the Cybersecurity Go to Market podcast.
1:23
SPEAKER_01: We tackle the big question: how can cybersecurity companies grow sales faster?
1:28
SPEAKER_01: I am your host, Andrew Monahan.
1:30
SPEAKER_01: Our guest today is Kevin Hupp, the founder at Hupp Consulting.
1:33
SPEAKER_01: Kevin, welcome to the podcast.
1:35
SPEAKER_00: Thanks, Andrew.
1:36
SPEAKER_00: Glad we were able to reconnect.
1:37
SPEAKER_00: And I know we've done a podcast before together, and uh I'm no stranger to the podcasting game, to sales development, or cybersecurity.
1:45
SPEAKER_00: So this is gonna be a great conversation.
1:47
SPEAKER_01: Yeah, I'm looking forward to this.
1:49
SPEAKER_01: You know, uh when I think of someone who is spent their last few years, if not their whole life, but certainly dedicated to the last few years of their career, their business, and what they do towards cold calling, I think about you.
2:01
SPEAKER_01: You know, I've seen you, you know, do training online.
2:04
SPEAKER_01: You do obviously do a lot of consulting.
2:05
SPEAKER_01: I've actually also seen you, Kevin, do live cold calls on lives, I guess LinkedIn Lives or Link or uh YouTube Lives.
2:13
SPEAKER_01: And I think that takes a lot of balls to go and make live cold calls.
2:15
SPEAKER_01: So I certainly value someone who does that.
2:17
SPEAKER_01: And I saw somewhere, and you tell me if this is wrong, I saw somewhere that says you've made over 600,000 cold calls in the past five years.
2:25
SPEAKER_01: Does that sound about right?
2:27
SPEAKER_00: Yeah, I mean the numbers have just continued to get a little bit bigger.
2:30
SPEAKER_00: One of the like I I'm mostly a trainer and a coach, right?
2:34
SPEAKER_00: Like that's where my most the biggest value that I I think I can provide to companies is, but because I've been so publicly, you know, being the call guy, the guy who like can actually make the calls, I get people who come to me and saying, like, hey, I I want you.
2:48
SPEAKER_00: Like, I need you to sit down and do it.
2:49
SPEAKER_00: I'm like, look, you you don't walk up to Michael Jordan and say, I need you to make free throws for me, but I'll do it.
2:55
SPEAKER_00: It's just gonna be like expensive and I don't guarantee results, and like you get what you get, and people really dig it.
3:00
SPEAKER_00: So I still make calls to this day for clients, is my point, right?
3:03
SPEAKER_00: Uh, when people need an ace, they don't have time for training, they don't want to put an ounce of effort into it besides like one hour onboarding with me, I'm here, you know.
3:12
SPEAKER_00: So I I make a lot a lot of calls.
3:14
SPEAKER_00: I've I've I've made hundreds of thousands of cold calls because I use technology to make that go faster.
3:18
SPEAKER_00: Some people think like, well, that takes five years of dialing.
3:21
SPEAKER_00: No, dialed like no numbers and all that, right?
3:24
SPEAKER_01: Yeah, I think that's uh that's an important thing, is that these days, you know, when I made a whole ton of cold calls, you know, 15, 20 years ago, it's a very different game than what it is now.
3:34
SPEAKER_01: So we're here to learn about uh what it means to do cold calling today, how relevant it is today, things like that.
3:40
SPEAKER_01: All right, well, let's uh get into the business end of this.
3:43
SPEAKER_01: But before we do, stay tuned for the end of this episode when Kevin's gonna tell a couple stories.
3:48
SPEAKER_01: One about a compromising photo at a at a conference, and the second one about his first job in retail with uh questionable names of stores.
3:58
SPEAKER_01: So look out for that at the end of the episode.
4:00
SPEAKER_01: But Kevin, let's talk about uh our situation here.
4:02
SPEAKER_01: So we've got our company, Cyber Donut.
4:05
SPEAKER_01: Regular listeners will know about Cyber Donut.
4:07
SPEAKER_01: They're an early stage company in cybersecurity.
4:09
SPEAKER_01: We got a sales leader, we got a marketing leader, we got some sellers, and uh we got 20 paying customers, and now we're ready to go for growth.
4:17
SPEAKER_01: We've got some Series A funding lined up, and the sales leader and the market leader have got their heads together and said, you know, we need to choose the pipeline.
4:25
SPEAKER_01: Let's go and do some serious SDR BDR type work.
4:30
SPEAKER_01: Um, so let's talk about what they should be thinking about to go and build this function and get the benefits of a really strong and robust model.
4:38
SPEAKER_01: First question is should they be insourcing or outsourcing this at a start?
4:44
SPEAKER_00: To start, I would outsource it.
4:46
SPEAKER_00: Why?
4:47
SPEAKER_00: Because the barrier to going with outsourcing, and by the way, my career in my career, I've I've been a SDR manager, I've also been uh running an agency.
4:56
SPEAKER_00: I also ran an agency that did outsource.
4:58
SPEAKER_00: So I've done the in-house and I've done in-house and out-house, I guess you want to call it like outsource and in-house, right?
5:03
SPEAKER_00: Like I've done I've done it both ways, and I've had extensive experience in both ways.
5:07
SPEAKER_00: If you're getting started and if you're cyber donut, you have 20 customers.
5:12
SPEAKER_00: 20 customers in you know the cybersecurity space is you know, it's a grain of sand.
5:18
SPEAKER_00: Right?
5:19
SPEAKER_00: Like if you have a product that is really gonna be applicable, that you're gonna go raise a bunch of dough, someone really believes in that.
5:25
SPEAKER_00: We need to, we need to really nail down what markets you're gonna go after and why.
5:31
SPEAKER_00: And 20 customers, in my opinion, would not be enough of a sample size to then say this is where we're going.
5:37
SPEAKER_00: So with an outsourced agency, the biggest benefit is you turn it on quickly.
5:42
SPEAKER_00: The second benefit is you can test things with them because you can turn them off at any time as well, right?
5:49
SPEAKER_00: This agency, they usually work in either short retainers or month-to-month, something like that.
5:53
SPEAKER_00: So really good use of your dollars would be to say, here's assumption number one.
5:58
SPEAKER_00: Let's go test it.
5:59
SPEAKER_00: How many meetings can we get?
6:00
SPEAKER_00: And what happens in those meetings, and what happens in those calls, and we learn from that, right?
6:07
SPEAKER_00: Then once we start seeing conversion rates over the course of three to six months, we can say, All right, cool, I've got this model.
6:13
SPEAKER_00: I'm paying this outsourced agency all this.
6:16
SPEAKER_00: My next step would not even be to in-source BDRs at this moment.
6:20
SPEAKER_00: I would say, how do we create demand generation?
6:22
SPEAKER_00: How do I get a marketer in here to take this market message I've established that we can have that customers like and build me a funnel?
6:30
SPEAKER_00: And then I'm gonna go get two SDRs, and the SDR is gonna work the marketing funnel with some outbound.
6:35
SPEAKER_00: But now we've got this engine that starts to churn.
6:37
SPEAKER_00: The water's falling on the wheel a little bit, and you're like, okay, cool.
6:39
SPEAKER_00: Like I got something for them.
6:41
SPEAKER_00: Like the old model, the model I got hired into when I in 2016 is I raised 20 million.
6:47
SPEAKER_00: Let's get nine warm bodies in here and let them figure it out.
6:50
SPEAKER_00: You know, again, a sales problem, just hire salespeople.
6:53
SPEAKER_00: It's not easy, right?
6:54
SPEAKER_00: It's really not.
6:55
SPEAKER_00: So, so yeah, long story short, I'd say outsource first, really nail your market message, get get more data.
7:02
SPEAKER_01: And with an agency, right?
7:04
SPEAKER_01: A good agency, and tell me if you if you think I've got this wrong, they have a process to as they bring people on to get them trained up in how they do this.
7:12
SPEAKER_01: They'll have a way to onboard you so that you know, in probably a couple of hours, you can be on board as a company and they know how to use your messages and their frameworks.
7:21
SPEAKER_01: So your time to get going is so much quicker than going to try and find people.
7:26
SPEAKER_01: And you know, early stage company like this won't have, probably won't have the expertise in how to run that team, right?
7:31
SPEAKER_01: It's going to be whatever the marketing leader or the sales leader think is the best way to do it, who may or may not have experience doing this, right?
7:37
SPEAKER_01: So I feel like I'm kind of on board with you, right?
7:40
SPEAKER_01: It's the fast way to do it.
7:41
SPEAKER_01: What about managing your outsource with your agency?
7:44
SPEAKER_01: How close do you manage them?
7:45
SPEAKER_01: How close are you kind of there with them on the day-to-day?
7:49
SPEAKER_00: Um, so I think part of the beauty is you don't have to be there in the day to day.
7:53
SPEAKER_00: That's part of like why you would want to go with an outsource thing.
7:56
SPEAKER_00: It's like, hey, I'm gonna pay you X amount.
7:58
SPEAKER_00: They usually have some sort of guarantee of productivity, if not like outcomes, which is like we're gonna have X amount of conversations, we're gonna work X amount of contacts, we're gonna share with you what's happening.
8:09
SPEAKER_00: What I think, I think the big like when I ran my agency and the customers that got the most value out of the engagements, were not the ones where it was just a CEO who would sit there and say, You said you'd get 12 meetings, you got 11.
8:23
SPEAKER_00: What are we gonna do about this?
8:24
SPEAKER_00: You know, we had those customers and they were the worst, right?
8:28
SPEAKER_00: Because what you really want to do, like the thing that a lot of people miss with an outsource agency is why didn't those conversations, like all these other conversations, convert?
8:38
SPEAKER_00: What's what's like the real problem over here?
8:40
SPEAKER_00: Bad data?
8:41
SPEAKER_00: Are we targeting the wrong people?
8:42
SPEAKER_00: Are we saying the wrong thing?
8:44
SPEAKER_00: Are your reps like trash?
8:45
SPEAKER_00: Is it like, you know, try to get in the weeds on why things are not converting because that will inform what you really want to know, right?
8:53
SPEAKER_00: So you want meetings, everybody wants sales meetings, but if you can figure out why you're getting those meetings and why you're not getting others, then we start to build a formulaic approach, which we can then use people to multiply.
9:04
SPEAKER_00: But you got to figure that equation out to then add people to it and get the results you want, right?
9:09
SPEAKER_00: And everybody does the opposite.
9:11
SPEAKER_00: They do the opposite.
9:12
SPEAKER_00: They bring the people in and say, Oh, yeah, figure it out.
9:14
SPEAKER_00: Yeah, this is your job.
9:15
SPEAKER_00: Figure that out.
9:16
SPEAKER_00: And then they fire them in eight to you know, eight to ten months when it doesn't work out the way they want it to, and it's you know, a vicious cycle in VC bad companies.
9:24
SPEAKER_01: And then you were saying before, once you've got that that wheel going, once you have the model starting to repeat nicely and you can see some pattern, that's when you might say, Okay, let's bring a couple of folks.
9:35
SPEAKER_01: I maybe could you hire them from the agency, or would you have to go and get your own and bring in two or three folks yourself?
9:41
SPEAKER_00: Well, you know, some agencies do like the the walk-to-run model where you can hire the reps that were working there.
9:48
SPEAKER_00: And I've I've seen some of those agencies work beautifully, honestly.
9:51
SPEAKER_00: I used to I used to talk crap about that because that wasn't the model I used.
9:55
SPEAKER_00: But now as a consultant, I've been in conversations with people who are like, hey, we've we've been outsourcing this, and we're gonna bring in five of those SDRs to make our SDR team from one or two to seven overnight.
10:07
SPEAKER_00: And you don't have to train those five people, they've already been trained, right?
10:09
SPEAKER_00: Now, there's always a big cost associated with that, like because the agency's making their revenue two ways.
10:15
SPEAKER_00: They're making the revenue on you doing the you paying them on a monthly retainer, but then they're also gonna charge you a recruiting placement fee.
10:22
SPEAKER_00: There's gonna be a recruiting fee.
10:24
SPEAKER_00: So I guess the answer to your question is like if step one, go get marketing.
10:29
SPEAKER_00: Like, don't expect sales to take all of in like your whole go to market is outbound sales, and I'm gonna hire these rock star BDRs, I'll get out of nowhere, and they're just gonna produce because I know what the message is and I know what the market is.
10:43
SPEAKER_00: Get a marketer in place that understands demand generation and demand capture, right?
10:50
SPEAKER_00: Do they understand how to build what I call the watering hole?
10:53
SPEAKER_00: There's a few ways to hunt for zebra.
10:55
SPEAKER_00: If you're a lion, you can wander the Serengeti and you can be the fierce lion and hope that you're gonna run into the gazelle or the zebra, or you can go to the watering hole and the zebras are gonna come eventually, right?
11:06
SPEAKER_00: Like a good marketer creates a really good watering hole, and that's a place that attracts people that have the business problems that you solve, right?
11:16
SPEAKER_00: So I think like that's a that's a part of the modern go-to-market stack that's becoming more and more of a must-have.
11:23
SPEAKER_00: If you don't have a quality marketer that can produce a high number of MQLs, and I'm not talking just about like inbounds, talking about MQLs.
11:30
SPEAKER_00: Just tell me that Andrew downloaded an ebook or a white book or a white paper or something.
11:36
SPEAKER_00: Tell me that Steven attended a webinar we hosted.
11:39
SPEAKER_00: Those sorts of things help outbound teams convert at a much, much higher rate as opposed to just ripping lists out of Zoom info or wherever and just calling.
11:47
SPEAKER_01: Yeah, yeah.
11:47
SPEAKER_01: I think that's a that's probably a big change from 2016 when you got hired into that company where you've probably just left saying, go make your list and start making some calls.
11:57
SPEAKER_01: I think these days a lot of organizations understand that they should be part of a process.
12:01
SPEAKER_01: But given what you said then, should should your first hires, when you're insourcing it, should they be working for sales or working for marketing, do you think?
12:10
SPEAKER_00: I think they should work for sales.
12:12
SPEAKER_00: And it really depends.
12:13
SPEAKER_00: So I've seen it go one of two ways, right?
12:16
SPEAKER_00: They'll work for marketing if the marketer is a revenue-motivated marketer.
12:22
SPEAKER_00: In the from what I've seen, remember, I'm a sales guy through and through.
12:25
SPEAKER_00: So I'm talking about the other side of the fence here.
12:27
SPEAKER_00: What I've seen from the actual clients and customers I've worked with is there are marketing leaders that are, you know, brand, message, you know, market narrative, deep industry veteran, knowledge in the space, but they're like big brand marketers.
12:42
SPEAKER_00: And then they're marketers that are like these tacticians where they're like, yo, I'm gonna get you 300 MQLs, and here's how I'm gonna do it.
12:50
SPEAKER_00: And we're gonna have ungated content, we're gonna work dark social, and we're gonna do these and da-da-da.
12:53
SPEAKER_00: And they they have this like revenue-minded approach, revenue marketing.
12:57
SPEAKER_00: It's kind of like this new title that I see more and more.
12:59
SPEAKER_00: Um, if you have a revenue marketer who's leading up marketing or a heavy voice over there, the SDR BDR function should probably roll up to them because the SDR BDR function is that like tip of the spear, which is you know, actually killing the zebras, right?
13:14
SPEAKER_00: Like you can bring the zebras in, but without someone to go do all that work, the stuff no one wants to do, talking to strangers, um, they should roll up there.
13:22
SPEAKER_00: If you don't have one of those and you have the visionary CMO who's a brand marketer, whatever, which is sometimes they're the co-founder, sometimes they're something else, but they're not the tactician who really cares about the X's and O's and how many MTLs you call today, then they should roll up the sales because they're going to be supporting sales' number, right?
13:40
SPEAKER_00: But I I think, you know, correct me if you're seeing something different, but what I'm seeing with like the best SaaS companies and the best cyber companies is they're taking this revenue marketing approach, they're making that more of an integrated function with sales.
13:53
SPEAKER_00: So the sales leader and the revenue marketer are are on the same team, which is so against, you know, traditional, you know, markings over here and sales over here, and you know, they kind of hate each other.
14:03
SPEAKER_01: Yeah, it's when they come together like that, like so different from 10 years ago, that you could actually get some good results, right?
14:09
SPEAKER_01: It seems like if you're gonna hire someone to as part of your your demand gen or your demand capture, you better be part of it together as opposed to finding out after the fact there's campaigns going on that your your callers or your follow-upers could could actually uh work with.
14:24
SPEAKER_01: It seems like such a disjointed approach these days when you see it work well, right?
14:28
SPEAKER_00: Yeah, yeah.
14:28
SPEAKER_00: I mean, it's just interesting.
14:30
SPEAKER_00: Like they're like when I was at SDR, the marketing department was very, very touchy about well, we drove these leads, you know, and they they were all about the inbounds because inbound was like the only metric they looked at.
14:43
SPEAKER_00: They were just looking at how many demo requests can we get a month.
14:46
SPEAKER_00: Well, there's a lot of value in these people that if you have good content, if you have authentically good content on your website and in your blog and on webinars, dude, you it's the watering hole.
14:58
SPEAKER_00: There's there's zebras, there's gazelles, they're all there.
15:00
SPEAKER_00: Not all of them are gonna self-identify right away.
15:02
SPEAKER_00: But part of my methodology that I teach SDR is to go have these curious business conversations with people where you can uncover all sorts of stuff, right?
15:11
SPEAKER_00: And the traditional marketer over here is sitting over here saying, Well, they're not gonna buy today and they're not gonna buy soon and they're not coming inbound.
15:18
SPEAKER_00: Well, that's okay.
15:19
SPEAKER_00: As a sales development professional and as a full cycle AE or whatever, I just want to have more conversations with people that could buy my stuff at some point, right?
15:28
SPEAKER_00: And allow us to do what we do best as salespeople, which is build trust, build rapport, build that relationship so that when the time does come, you're top of mind.
15:37
SPEAKER_00: Instead of just making the only metric of success for marketing, how many people raise their hand to get a demo this month?
15:42
SPEAKER_01: So it's interesting what you said right there, Kevin.
15:44
SPEAKER_01: So what I've seen over the years is people who don't have the experience, let's say, in how to have these potentially awkward conversations early on with someone, well, they tend to default to is well tell them this and tell them that and pitch them this and pitch them that, right?
15:59
SPEAKER_01: And you said something interesting there, which was what I really want to have is a discussion on a conversation.
16:04
SPEAKER_01: So talk talk to us about the difference between the two.
16:07
SPEAKER_00: Yeah, yeah, absolutely.
16:09
SPEAKER_00: So the methodology that I teach sales teams, I I gotta, I gotta like actually patent this.
16:15
SPEAKER_00: I don't have it patent, but I call it conversation first prospecting, which sounds a little bit redundant, but at the same time, a lot of the old school approach to how to do sales is to call people, tell them what you sell, and say, You interested, right?
16:30
SPEAKER_00: Like, hey, hey, I've got the world's greatest cup.
16:33
SPEAKER_00: Are you in the cup market?
16:34
SPEAKER_00: It's like, huh.
16:35
SPEAKER_00: You know, that's uh that's a really transactional, kind of weird way of going about it.
16:39
SPEAKER_00: And that's a lot of the sales training I had coming up.
16:41
SPEAKER_00: And I've evolved into thinking, and now I've put into practice, and now I've helped dozens of companies adopt this mentality and mindset around your outbound salespeople should be curious about two things really every time they talk to a person that could be a prospect, right?
16:58
SPEAKER_00: One is business problems.
17:00
SPEAKER_00: Business problems.
17:01
SPEAKER_00: Business problems are why people buy stuff from other businesses.
17:05
SPEAKER_00: You don't buy stuff because it looks cool or because it, you know, because it's it's it's the shiny new object.
17:11
SPEAKER_00: Like that's rare.
17:12
SPEAKER_00: It does happen sometimes.
17:14
SPEAKER_00: You see some companies that are able to create the shiny new object pitch in a way that is just incredible, right?
17:19
SPEAKER_00: Like I think of Drift.
17:21
SPEAKER_00: If if anyone's familiar with Drift, back when they really went to market in like 2018 and 2019, like they created a category overnight.
17:29
SPEAKER_00: Like chatbots were this like little add-on thing that were sold on websites, and they're like, chatbot is your main channel.
17:35
SPEAKER_00: And it like the shiny object of shiny objects for marketers.
17:38
SPEAKER_00: It was it was sick.
17:39
SPEAKER_00: It's cool to watch from the outside.
17:41
SPEAKER_00: Um, the two things that you talk about are are business problems and then valuable solutions to those problems.
17:47
SPEAKER_00: Now you notice I didn't say APIs and software platform and integrations and blah blah blah, which is all the crap that people always want to say.
17:55
SPEAKER_00: Oh, hey, what's up, Andrew?
17:56
SPEAKER_00: I'm with uh Salesforce.
17:57
SPEAKER_00: We're the number one CRM for you know sales and marketers.
18:01
SPEAKER_00: We got a thousand APIs, you got a few minutes, I can show it to you next week.
18:05
SPEAKER_00: It's like, dude, that's advertising.
18:07
SPEAKER_00: Like I think salespeople should be able to have these consultative business conversations, but that also requires something of me as the sales rep, right?
18:13
SPEAKER_00: I have to understand what's going on in your world and what might be going on in your world and ask you about that.
18:20
SPEAKER_00: And I gotta be ready for that conversation.
18:22
SPEAKER_00: So this conversation first approach actually requires a lot more of the salespeople.
18:27
SPEAKER_00: And what you find is if you can adapt that mindset with your entry-level salespeople, your mid-level salespeople, they turn into better senior salespeople.
18:36
SPEAKER_00: They they turn into better closers because they've been having these business conversations all the way along, as opposed to, yeah, my SDR job, I just sent 2,000 emails a day and it was brutal, and people told me to F off, but then I hit my quota, and now all of a sudden I'm a high-ticket closer.
18:51
SPEAKER_00: Like that doesn't really work very well, right?
18:54
SPEAKER_00: And and the things that I was good at when I was an SDR, I've been promoted to AE, was hitting my quota, sure, but it wasn't grinding to hit my quota.
19:02
SPEAKER_00: It was doing things that hit my quota that proved that I understood the market.
19:07
SPEAKER_00: I understood how to sell what we were pitching, and I understood how to talk to buyers.
19:11
SPEAKER_00: And that's a lost art.
19:12
SPEAKER_01: So that puts more of a pressure on the organization to properly onboard STRs than not just say, here's our data sheet and five, so I don't know, whatever, talking points, right?
19:23
SPEAKER_01: You can understand your buyer.
19:25
SPEAKER_01: You gotta say, this is the ICP we're going after, and this is their fears and frustrations, this is their hopes and dreams, this is what kills their jobs, what's set on fire.
19:33
SPEAKER_01: They gotta really understand these people, surely, right?
19:36
SPEAKER_00: Yeah, I mean, that that is a huge part of it.
19:38
SPEAKER_00: And, you know, uh, I saw a post today on LinkedIn talking about this, and I almost like, I was like, dang, I'm gonna I'm gonna post that next week.
19:45
SPEAKER_00: Because it's it's the the concept of business acumen.
19:49
SPEAKER_00: It's probably the most like under taught, under you know, laid out things for salespeople.
19:57
SPEAKER_00: And the best salespeople are actually just really smart in that they pick it up along the way, right?
20:03
SPEAKER_00: So I mean, I in my career I've seen two types of like ace salespeople, right?
20:09
SPEAKER_00: One is like the like the bulldozer, right?
20:12
SPEAKER_00: Like the the bullheaded, they just try harder than anyone else.
20:17
SPEAKER_00: But when you talk to him, when you meet him the first time, you're like, oh shit, this is the number one guy.
20:21
SPEAKER_00: Like he's not even smart, like he's a he's a he's a dummy.
20:25
SPEAKER_00: He tries harder, he tries way harder, puts in way more effort, pushes every button every time he can.
20:31
SPEAKER_00: The other one that I've seen lead sales organizations, and this was like when I worked at Vonage Telecommunications, like 600 salespeople, right?
20:38
SPEAKER_00: Uh, not 600, but we had like three, four hundred, like a lot of salespeople.
20:42
SPEAKER_00: The number one guy there, smart, really smart.
20:45
SPEAKER_00: Didn't work harder, he worked smarter.
20:47
SPEAKER_00: He was connecting dots, he was getting deals done by creating synergies.
20:52
SPEAKER_00: And that comes from being curious, right?
20:55
SPEAKER_00: Like two a few of the things that I instill in SDRs when I work with them is curiosity, right?
21:01
SPEAKER_00: Like if you don't care about the people you're calling, don't call them, right?
21:04
SPEAKER_00: Like I think I think people who make outbound calls and do well at it are are two things, right?
21:09
SPEAKER_00: They're interesting people who are interested in the people they call.
21:12
SPEAKER_00: Interesting, and you're calling interested people.
21:15
SPEAKER_00: And when you get that kind of dynamic going on in a in a cold conversation, that's where you get magic.
21:24
SPEAKER_01: Kevin, let's learn a little bit more about you.
21:27
SPEAKER_01: Uh, I've got a list of 35 questions here, and we're gonna pick them out completely randomly.
21:32
SPEAKER_01: I've got a a next generation AI tool that uses polymorphic advanced encryption to protect the algorithm to make sure that when I spin this wheel through these 35 questions, the the questions that come up are completely random.
21:47
SPEAKER_01: So, you ready to play the game with me?
21:49
SPEAKER_01: I was born ready.
21:50
SPEAKER_01: Let's go.
21:51
SPEAKER_01: All right, let's spin the wheel.
21:58
SPEAKER_01: All right, Kevin, number 32.
22:00
SPEAKER_01: How did you first make money as a kid?
22:03
SPEAKER_00: Well, I guess I didn't make a lot of money as a kid, if that's uh an answer.
22:09
SPEAKER_00: Like if we're talking defining kid, like you know, before high school, I I did not really do a lot of work.
22:16
SPEAKER_00: My parents didn't believe in like the the chore like allowance system.
22:20
SPEAKER_00: Like they I would always have a little petty cash in my pocket to do stuff, but like I wasn't like working at home to do enough to get$100 to go buy something.
22:28
SPEAKER_00: Like it was like 10 15 bucks in your pocket when you go to the movies.
22:31
SPEAKER_00: Um First job ever was at Chick Sporting Goods when I was 15 years old.
22:37
SPEAKER_00: So everyone might be thinking Chick Sporting Goods.
22:40
SPEAKER_00: Never heard of that.
22:40
SPEAKER_00: Well, they sold to this company called Dick's Sporting Goods.
22:44
SPEAKER_01: No, really?
22:45
SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
22:45
SPEAKER_00: Imagine being 15 years old, and you gotta explain to your friends that you're you're working at Chick's and now it's gonna be dicks and chicks and dicks, and you know, this is a this is a safe for work podcast.
22:55
SPEAKER_00: So we're not gonna we're not gonna elaborate on the joke, but that was my first job as a cashier at Chick Sporting Goods, then turned to dicks and I'm sure there was no ridicule whatsoever from your friends about all that stuff.
23:05
SPEAKER_00: I mean, I I thought it was hilarious, you know.
23:08
SPEAKER_00: I thought it was really, really funny.
23:10
SPEAKER_00: Um, so I I did that for for a while in high school.
23:13
SPEAKER_00: My favorite job, and this is really relevant to this.
23:16
SPEAKER_00: Yeah, the job where I made the most amount of money as a kid before I like was in college or of age, I worked at a Christmas tree lot.
23:24
SPEAKER_00: Christmas tree lot jobs are the best because you're walking around Christmas trees, it smells great.
23:30
SPEAKER_00: Everyone who goes to get their Christmas tree, it brings the whole family, everyone's happy, they bring dogs, you know, you give them free apple cider, and they're like, oh my gosh, and you throw the tree up on the thing and tie it down and hand you a$20 bill.
23:41
SPEAKER_00: And it's like, it was the best job ever.
23:43
SPEAKER_00: I worked there for three three seasons in high school, and I made like, you know, what I what I used to call, I used to call it Kanye money, like Kanye West money.
23:51
SPEAKER_00: I made like$1,200 in a month.
23:54
SPEAKER_00: And at the time, you that that feels rich, you know, because like I think I had$200 in my bank account, and then you make$1,200 in one month, and you're like, yo, what am I gonna do?
24:02
SPEAKER_01: I need a financial plan or no.
24:04
SPEAKER_00: Yeah, yeah.
24:05
SPEAKER_00: I got snacks on stacks, so that that was a fun job.
24:08
SPEAKER_01: All right, let's spin the wheel again.
24:15
SPEAKER_01: All right, number nine.
24:17
SPEAKER_01: What is the most embarrassing or memorable moment in your sales and marketing career?
24:24
SPEAKER_00: So I this is uh this is a this is a good one.
24:28
SPEAKER_00: Uh when I was an SDR, I worked for a Series A startup here in San Diego, and they raised some dough and they did the thing that you did back in 2016, which is let's go hire a ton of people.
24:40
SPEAKER_00: And they hired like 35 salespeople in six months, right?
24:44
SPEAKER_00: Yeah, they had no SDR team, and then they went to having a team of 12, like in two, three months.
24:49
SPEAKER_00: And I was one of those 12, uh, the second cohort they brought in there, and I excelled at it.
24:55
SPEAKER_00: And which is really weird.
24:56
SPEAKER_00: I gotta tell this part of the story because it's really important that like I was a really, really good SDR, and cold calling was probably only about 15 to 20% of my meetings.
25:05
SPEAKER_00: So my creativity and the way I treated it like an AE pipeline was why I was successful as an SDR, which is funny because now I teach this approach that is very radically phone-centric, but we didn't have dialing tech, we didn't have great list building tech, we didn't have great resources at all.
25:21
SPEAKER_00: I was just hustling out there.
25:22
SPEAKER_00: So, because I was so good at being an SDR, I got to travel.
25:26
SPEAKER_00: And I and I was the first, pardon me, first like non-closer to ever travel.
25:31
SPEAKER_00: So I traveled with to the AE's to a conference.
25:34
SPEAKER_00: Now, at this conference, we had a booth, and the booth had a big TV in the middle, you know, like conference, they kind of do that.
25:41
SPEAKER_00: And uh part of this, you know,$12 million injection, they hired some marketing firm to make a video that's like explaining how our software helped customer journeys or whatever.
25:51
SPEAKER_00: Well, there's a part in the video where there's a guy, and he's the main character trying to explain what this software does and all that.
25:58
SPEAKER_00: There's a part in the video where he's naked and he's just standing there like this, and it's like it blurs out his junk, so you can't see it.
26:06
SPEAKER_00: So I go to this conference and I'm like, I feel all cool about it, and da-da-da-da-da.
26:11
SPEAKER_00: And my buddy texts me, he said, Did you see what you know the marketing gal just posted on Twitter and LinkedIn?
26:18
SPEAKER_00: And I'm like, No.
26:19
SPEAKER_00: So I open my phone, I look at it.
26:20
SPEAKER_00: It's me standing in front of the booth, like right here, talking to somebody, and the naked guy right behind me.
26:26
SPEAKER_00: And like, it was like zoomed in on just me and the naked guy.
26:29
SPEAKER_00: And it was like, ah, sick.
26:31
SPEAKER_00: Like, this is great, phenomenal.
26:33
SPEAKER_00: Thank you.
26:34
SPEAKER_00: And I mean, when I got back into the SDR pit, someone had printed it out and like taped it inside of my little cubicle.
26:40
SPEAKER_00: Like me and the naked dude.
26:42
SPEAKER_01: Exactly.
26:42
SPEAKER_01: What sort of conference was this that you went to?
26:45
SPEAKER_00: It was a it was a professional conference.
26:46
SPEAKER_00: It was um, I'll tell you which one.
26:48
SPEAKER_00: It was GainSite's Pulse Conference.
26:50
SPEAKER_00: So GainSite makes customer success software.
26:52
SPEAKER_00: It was in Oakland.
26:53
SPEAKER_00: It was, you know, and the whole point of that gimmick was to make it, you know, people walking down the the hall go, oh god, naked guy.
27:01
SPEAKER_00: You know, kind of a gimmicky thing.
27:02
SPEAKER_00: So uh yeah, yeah, just being an associated, you know, thinking I was doing a great job and then being associated with the naked guy, that was embarrassing.
27:10
SPEAKER_01: No kidding.
27:11
SPEAKER_01: I mean, it it's funny, you know, we talk about conferences a lot, and you know, you have to do something to stand out, and you have to go with, well, some people might get upset, but some people are gonna love it, and you have to kind of understand that the more different you get and the more out there you get, you'll be polarizing.
27:26
SPEAKER_01: But uh, you can get the get people stopping and going, what the heck?
27:29
SPEAKER_01: That's you know, you just got at least got someone to stop and pay attention just a little bit.
27:34
SPEAKER_00: Yeah, that's right.
27:34
SPEAKER_00: That's right.
27:35
SPEAKER_01: All right, let's spin the wheel.
27:36
SPEAKER_01: One last question.
27:43
SPEAKER_01: All right, what is the story behind you getting your first job as an SDR?
27:48
SPEAKER_00: Okay, that's a that's a that's a good one, I guess.
27:51
SPEAKER_00: I told you the first part of the story.
27:53
SPEAKER_00: The first part of the story is I was an early stage hire at a company that had just raised a bunch of money.
27:59
SPEAKER_00: Um, I guess the the like the the real story of like how I got that job was my first job out of college, I was the first hire at a tech startup.
28:08
SPEAKER_00: First hire, not first sales hire.
28:10
SPEAKER_00: So it was like me and the CEO back to back.
28:12
SPEAKER_00: And we did that for about 18 months.
28:15
SPEAKER_00: And then my buddy told me about this thing called equity.
28:18
SPEAKER_00: And I'm like, what do you mean equity?
28:19
SPEAKER_00: He's like, Well, you have a salary, right?
28:21
SPEAKER_00: And I'm like, Yeah, and it's like, do you get benefits?
28:23
SPEAKER_00: He's like, No, not yet, but the CEO says they're coming.
28:25
SPEAKER_00: And I was so young, I was on my parents' benefits, didn't matter.
28:27
SPEAKER_00: He's like, Well, at least you're like the first employee, so you're gonna get a bunch of equity.
28:30
SPEAKER_00: So I started the equity conversation with the CEO, and then he he let me go the next week.
28:35
SPEAKER_00: I was just like, Yeah, no.
28:38
SPEAKER_00: So it was, it was it was a whole roller coaster, right?
28:40
SPEAKER_00: I got like kicked to the curb very unexpectedly, and um, it was kind of a bad time of year for hiring, right?
28:46
SPEAKER_00: So it was like end of November and started interviewing for product management jobs.
28:52
SPEAKER_00: I started interviewing for customer support jobs.
28:55
SPEAKER_00: I got two different customer support job offers because when I was at this first startup, I was the chief everything officer, right?
29:02
SPEAKER_00: So I admined Zen Desk, I admined our HubSpot, I admined our you know, product management software that we were using.
29:09
SPEAKER_00: We were using Jira to do product management, and like I would be in the meetings with our fractional CTO and the CEO and trying to like give feedback and I'm talking to customers and I wrote all the copy on our website and I, I, I, I, I, right?
29:21
SPEAKER_00: So I did all this stuff.
29:23
SPEAKER_00: And the question that I, you know, was left with when I got kicked to the curve is like, how do I go find that job again?
29:28
SPEAKER_00: Well, those jobs are tough, right?
29:30
SPEAKER_00: Oh, I'm hiring Jack of all trades.
29:31
SPEAKER_00: Like, you gotta pick a lane, right?
29:33
SPEAKER_00: You gotta pick a lane.
29:34
SPEAKER_00: And I had mentors in my life that told me, hey, like if the sales part of what you did wasn't hard, if it if it came easy to you, and and you're a talkative guy, Kevin.
29:44
SPEAKER_00: If you know me, you kind of know I'm a talkative guy.
29:46
SPEAKER_00: Why don't you try getting a sales job?
29:48
SPEAKER_00: I'm like, I don't know, I don't know.
29:51
SPEAKER_00: And then I got these customer support job offers, and they're like, you know, a low base salary with like a questionable bonus, maybe.
29:58
SPEAKER_00: And then I interviewed for an SDR job, and they're like, here's your base pay, and then here's what you're supposed to do with this.
30:03
SPEAKER_00: And it's like way bigger, you know what I mean?
30:05
SPEAKER_00: Like, oh my god, I can make X amount of dollars a year, and it's so much more.
30:09
SPEAKER_00: And so the money was a big motivating factor.
30:12
SPEAKER_00: And then um, yeah, got in, got in early.
30:14
SPEAKER_00: But part of why I got hired at that company was my early stage experience, right?
30:19
SPEAKER_00: Because they they were hiring me, they hired 12 SDRs without an SDR manager, they had no manager.
30:23
SPEAKER_00: How on earth did they manage all?
30:25
SPEAKER_00: Dude, it was it was because it was like silly, right?
30:27
SPEAKER_00: It was a terrible decision, terrible decision by the executives.
30:31
SPEAKER_00: Let's just uh pretty much warm bodies, let them figure it out.
30:33
SPEAKER_00: And the guy who ran enterprise sales would meet with us like every other week and be like, what are you working on?
30:38
SPEAKER_00: What's going on?
30:38
SPEAKER_00: How can I help?
30:39
SPEAKER_00: And we're like, well, we don't know what we're doing, you know?
30:41
SPEAKER_00: And it was like a whole thing.
30:42
SPEAKER_00: So, anyways, that company, that company went under.
30:48
SPEAKER_01: I would imagine when you're consulting or when you're talking to CEOs, CROs, one of the things they're thinking, the back of the mind is, you know, I'm I'm hiring people who are two years out of college.
30:59
SPEAKER_01: How much business acumen can they truly have?
31:02
SPEAKER_01: How can they have a really valuable conversation if they're, you know, still trying to make their rent every month and trying to figure out what they're gonna do when they grow up?
31:11
SPEAKER_00: Well, it's it's not um the simple answer is you don't need to know everything.
31:17
SPEAKER_00: You need to know what you need to know, right?
31:20
SPEAKER_00: And this is where you get like some of the eight sales influencers on LinkedIn that have worked for one, two companies in ten years, right?
31:28
SPEAKER_00: They have this like myopic view of how to do sales development or how to do sales because that's how they did it at their company for years and years and years.
31:39
SPEAKER_00: And inside of a company, I do believe that the best cultures are a little bit dogmatic, right?
31:46
SPEAKER_00: That means that means we all walk around and believe we have the same system of beliefs about our role in the market, our role in the space, what we're doing, what our competitors are doing.
31:59
SPEAKER_00: If you can create like a dogmatic culture around we are the best and we know why, then you get confident people who can lean forward and have challenging, opinionated conversations, which is really how good sales are made.
32:13
SPEAKER_00: Uh the challenger sale, teaching, tailoring, and taking control of the narrative in these selling conversations.
32:19
SPEAKER_00: But that comes from a dogmatic understanding of what you do and why it's why it's valuable.
32:24
SPEAKER_00: Right.
32:24
SPEAKER_00: So to answer your question, like, you know, this person is 25, how are we going to develop business acumen with them?
32:30
SPEAKER_00: It's less of like overall business acumen, and then it's more of they need to know what's going on with your company, you know, with what they sell and what role it plays.
32:40
SPEAKER_00: They don't need to know everything else.
32:41
SPEAKER_01: Right.
32:42
SPEAKER_01: So they need to understand the point of view of the company, why it exists, why it's so important, maybe how others might view it or not view it, things like that, right?
32:50
SPEAKER_01: As opposed to being some they can read a PL statement from every public company in the world.
32:54
SPEAKER_01: A little bit different skill set.
32:56
SPEAKER_00: Yeah, that'd be a very different skill set.
32:58
SPEAKER_00: So so what you find, right?
32:59
SPEAKER_00: Like back to this idea of like some of these influencers have this myopic view.
33:03
SPEAKER_00: It's like it's one thing to do really well at one company for a long period of time.
33:08
SPEAKER_00: It's another thing to serve a lot of companies in a really valuable way.
33:11
SPEAKER_00: So if you get a guy like me who's you know never had a full-time job for more than about a year and a half, I've always jumped around and I've then I went into consulting, it's the longest job I've ever had, about six years.
33:21
SPEAKER_00: But I've helped 70 companies in six years, right?
33:25
SPEAKER_00: Um my breadth has gone massive, right?
33:28
SPEAKER_00: So I understand all sorts of stuff.
33:30
SPEAKER_00: And you have to have kind of a propensity for that, I would argue.
33:34
SPEAKER_00: But you're not trying to get, I'm not trying to like make me in every SDR.
33:38
SPEAKER_00: I'm trying to build the tendencies and the approach to the conversation based on their market, their solution, what's going on in their world.
33:47
SPEAKER_00: And they should be curious.
33:48
SPEAKER_00: You know what I mean?
33:49
SPEAKER_00: Like the best SDRs are the ones that you don't have to tell them that they that they're lacking knowledge.
33:54
SPEAKER_00: You don't have to tell them that they have gaps in their game.
33:57
SPEAKER_00: Like they they they figure it out, right?
33:59
SPEAKER_00: They're reading books, they're they're they're put they're attending webinars, they're they're they're trying.
34:03
SPEAKER_01: They tend to be the ones that rise up a little bit as well, right?
34:05
SPEAKER_01: They just stand out a little bit, they they elevate themselves.
34:09
SPEAKER_01: Let me ask you about something I've seen in the last um probably a few months actually.
34:13
SPEAKER_01: I don't know why, but it feels like certainly my Instagram feed, my Facebook feed, and I don't maybe my LinkedIn feed is just flooded with uh AI-based SDRs, like fill your counter, you know, a hundred meetings a week kind of thing, right?
34:30
SPEAKER_01: And you don't have to do anything, you have to press a button and the the magic happens.
34:34
SPEAKER_01: I mean, obviously ridiculous.
34:36
SPEAKER_01: Um but you know, it opens up a bigger question, like what role well, maybe it isn't anything, but what role does AI AI play in this world, right?
34:46
SPEAKER_01: If people have this mindset, this is all so simple, I just have to feed in two or three talking points and press the button, it's all gonna happen.
34:53
SPEAKER_01: You know, maybe it is the right thing to do.
34:55
SPEAKER_01: So where's AI gonna affect how we do outbound and and prospecting?
34:59
SPEAKER_00: It's a great question.
35:00
SPEAKER_00: So what people don't understand about AI, and all I know this is gonna be verbal, but I'm gonna do the video for the video feed here.
35:08
SPEAKER_00: I'm drawing a little graph, you know, X and Y axis.
35:11
SPEAKER_00: What people don't understand about AI is that, yeah, right now the pushback is well I'm a relationship builder, and you know, I don't see any robot making a relationship with Bob like I can't.
35:24
SPEAKER_00: Like, there's no way I'm getting replaced.
35:26
SPEAKER_00: Like, I I believe that cohort of salespeople that think AI will not replace them is very over overemphasized.
35:33
SPEAKER_00: Like, AI will replace a ton of salespeople.
35:37
SPEAKER_00: Why?
35:37
SPEAKER_00: Because a lot of sales is asynchronous communication, and asynchronous communication can be done better, faster, and cheaper by a robot.
35:45
SPEAKER_00: And this is the curve at which AI innovates.
35:49
SPEAKER_01: So for those listening, escalating, escalating curve.
35:52
SPEAKER_00: It's called it's called an exponential curve, right?
35:55
SPEAKER_00: So, you know, right now, call it we're right here, about halfway up that curve.
36:00
SPEAKER_00: And and in this span of time, call it three, four, five years.
36:03
SPEAKER_00: When did Chat GPT launch?
36:05
SPEAKER_00: Like the first LLM publicly available?
36:07
SPEAKER_00: Two years ago, three years ago, right?
36:09
SPEAKER_00: So if this is two years, two years from now, oh my god, we're off the we're off the chart to the up up and to the right.
36:16
SPEAKER_00: So people that think that AI is not going to come for sales don't understand what AI does.
36:23
SPEAKER_00: AI can process information and generate dynamic outputs based on the inputs much faster, cheaper, and better than humans.
36:33
SPEAKER_00: Now, my argument would be that today, this is right now, this is you know April 2024, we are close to parity with what AI could do with an SDR, right?
36:45
SPEAKER_00: Most sales development jobs are just sending emails and following up on one lease.
36:52
SPEAKER_00: Like that's most SDR jobs.
36:54
SPEAKER_00: Is that right?
36:55
SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
36:55
SPEAKER_00: Oh yeah, oh yeah.
36:56
SPEAKER_00: I mean the amount of SDRs I pick up the phone every single day is very, it's probably only 10% of all SDRs.
37:02
SPEAKER_00: Wow, I'm shocked about that.
37:04
SPEAKER_00: Yeah, I mean, there's lots of SDRs because there's a lot of SDR leaders that, you know, their whole model is built on this the MQL flow I was talking about, right?
37:12
SPEAKER_00: So it's like, well, if Sally just sends the email to Andrew after he attends the webinar and he says, Yeah, I'll take a demo.
37:19
SPEAKER_00: She gets paid 150 bucks and she gets you know one towards her 17 she needs for the month or whatever it is, right?
37:25
SPEAKER_00: And that kind of stuff makes it so you have no motivation if you got the phone.
37:29
SPEAKER_01: And I think I think there's other feeling in the industry that you know, cold calling is dead or code calling doesn't work.
37:34
SPEAKER_01: I was on a call with a client last week and one of the reps said that's completely dead.
37:38
SPEAKER_01: And I was like, really completely dead?
37:40
SPEAKER_01: So if that if that is a feeling that people have, uh the managers of the of the leaders think that, of course, there's gonna be little requirement of their people to go and make some calls.
37:50
SPEAKER_00: That's right.
37:50
SPEAKER_00: That's right.
37:51
SPEAKER_00: So so on this curve, if we're if we're right here, I'd say we're pretty close to like, you know, uh an AI bot today can go send thousands of messages that are somewhat customized and get a very similar response rate than an SDR, right?
38:07
SPEAKER_00: So when you're paying a fully loaded$90,000 a year with you know uh benefits and all that crap, right?
38:14
SPEAKER_00: Um because the SDRs are getting such an abysmal response rate, like outbound email and outbound in general.
38:21
SPEAKER_00: I mean, we're talking about if you get 1% response rate, you're a rock star.
38:25
SPEAKER_00: Like, dude, the the the machine can do that better.
38:29
SPEAKER_00: And it can do it right, right.
38:30
SPEAKER_00: I I'd say we're at parity, just about.
38:32
SPEAKER_00: And there are not a lot of quality go-to-market solutions around this.
38:35
SPEAKER_00: In fact, I'm seeing what you're seeing, which is like the early wave of this is is nauseating, right?
38:41
SPEAKER_00: These companies that are saying, get get a hundred meetings a month, get this, get that, and it's like it's it's it's mini-guns.
38:49
SPEAKER_00: I mean, they're they're minigunning your entire market with your name and ruining your reputation.
38:53
SPEAKER_00: So there are not a lot of good tools for this.
38:55
SPEAKER_00: There really are not.
38:56
SPEAKER_00: And I get asked to advise on companies around this, and people want me to hawk their products and stuff, and you know, I won't, I'm very, very skeptical about it still.
39:04
SPEAKER_00: In in about a year, you know, a year and a half, maybe less, we're gonna get to the point where AI will get better than the SDRs.
39:13
SPEAKER_00: Why?
39:14
SPEAKER_00: Because machine learning, that some of these AI tools that are spinning right now, they will improve over time.
39:20
SPEAKER_00: It just gets better.
39:21
SPEAKER_00: So when we reach that point, that's when you start to see like a, you know, right now we're seeing a headcount reduction of 60 to 75% across most sales orcs when it comes to outbound and top of funnel.
39:31
SPEAKER_00: It should go, it'll go to 80, 90 percent.
39:34
SPEAKER_01: But in that model though, Kevin, in that model, that means that any old Tom Deck and Harry can get access to this tool that's gonna go and do a great job and then we're gonna flood everyone's inboxes and LinkedIn inboxes and things like that.
39:45
SPEAKER_01: Is that not how this is gonna be?
39:47
SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
39:47
SPEAKER_00: Well, there's always going to be the barrier of knowledge, right?
39:52
SPEAKER_00: There's always going to be that barrier of who knows how to really operate what AI systems want.
39:57
SPEAKER_00: This is part of what I want I'm trying to shift my consulting into, right?
39:59
SPEAKER_00: Like I I believe this is the future.
40:01
SPEAKER_00: I believe that this exponential curve is something that I want to ride to, right?
40:05
SPEAKER_00: And I think about how can I use AI in my business as well.
40:08
SPEAKER_00: Um, it's we're we're a long ways away from, you know, long ways meaning three years, from one click of a button and you know, all your prospecting is done for you.
40:19
SPEAKER_00: But there are so many tools right now that make it so easy.
40:22
SPEAKER_00: And the biggest problem, if I'm an STR or if you're a sales leader and you really think about what are your reps doing every day, if the answer is asynchronous communication, meaning not calling and talking on the phone, not actually live communicating to people, I would be figuring out ways to get AI to do that.
40:41
SPEAKER_00: Because there's there's gonna be really good AI bots.
40:43
SPEAKER_00: And I think you know, the best AI systems are going to be able to not just be outbound, right?
40:50
SPEAKER_00: Like think about how good a an LLM could get if it was attached to your Gmail, it's attached to your CRM.
40:57
SPEAKER_00: So now it's seeing all the outbound emails, but it's also seeing the inbound ones.
41:01
SPEAKER_00: It's also reading all the chats on the website, and it's also seeing all the emails sent everywhere, and it's learning, and it's learning, and it's learning, and this curve is going so all of a sudden it can handle inbounds way better than SDR.
41:15
SPEAKER_01: So the message for a leader right now at Cyber Donut thinking, okay, we need to do some of this, is is what?
41:23
SPEAKER_01: We need to augment the people that we work with, we need to recognize it might be a couple years away, or or what?
41:29
SPEAKER_00: So if we're just talking about outbound, you don't need to go hire 20 people.
41:34
SPEAKER_00: Don't need to go hire 10 people.
41:35
SPEAKER_00: You need to hire one or two people that understand how to use this tech, or you need to go figure out how to use this tech because you could set up an email minigun system in five minutes.
41:44
SPEAKER_00: I've got reach out to me.
41:46
SPEAKER_00: I've got three vendors I recommend for this.
41:48
SPEAKER_00: You can spin up really clean outbound email at massive scale powered by AI in minutes.
41:54
SPEAKER_00: That's not gonna be the only answer.
41:55
SPEAKER_00: And someone needs to monitor all those inboxes, and someone needs to train the AI, and someone needs to, right?
41:59
SPEAKER_00: So you need a few people, but the modern SDR is gonna know how to do all that.
42:04
SPEAKER_00: But the one skill that's never going away is the ability to have a cold conversation with a stranger, right?
42:10
SPEAKER_00: And that's what I teach.
42:11
SPEAKER_00: So there's a place in all of this for cold calling, but it it's not calling one by one, and it's not a call center environment, it's using technology and process in a way that your reps are calling the right people at the right times, and that's kind of what I help people out with.
42:28
SPEAKER_01: I love that.
42:28
SPEAKER_01: So yeah, it feels like the the threshold is moving from asynchronous to synchronous, and a human being's willingness to have a conversation with someone who's not another human might be a little bit away, or for us to replicate it and seem like it's a human might be a little bit away still.
42:45
SPEAKER_00: I I I do not believe any of these vendors saying they could do AI cold calls.
42:51
SPEAKER_00: If if it's so good, then then do it.
42:54
SPEAKER_00: Do it live, do a live demo.
42:56
SPEAKER_01: Or even close, Kevin, right?
42:57
SPEAKER_01: Three years, five years.
42:58
SPEAKER_01: I guess at some point it'll come, but it seems like we're quite a bit away still from that.
43:03
SPEAKER_00: I mean, but how many actual buyers like do you really want that to be the brand impression when you reach that CISO, that VP of IT, and they say, Is this an AI bot?
43:14
SPEAKER_00: And then the bot replies, Yes, but I'm trained.
43:17
SPEAKER_00: Not everything I need to know.
43:20
SPEAKER_00: God damn it.
43:21
SPEAKER_00: You know, the the they're gonna be so mad, right?
43:24
SPEAKER_00: So I I think we're really far away from I haven't heard anything cool.
43:27
SPEAKER_00: So I think customer service jobs are completely gone, right?
43:32
SPEAKER_00: Like when I'm coming inbound and I I just need help with X, Y, and Z.
43:37
SPEAKER_00: If there's a really good AI, I'll talk to it.
43:39
SPEAKER_00: It's very rare that the AI does a good job, but yeah, I think I think you don't need ever a human to take customer service stuff anymore.
43:46
SPEAKER_00: It's an inbound set of criteria.
43:48
SPEAKER_00: They know the information.
43:50
SPEAKER_01: I feel like the bar is quite low as well in on some of the customer service and directions they're competing against.
43:55
SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
43:56
SPEAKER_00: So I've heard some demos, I've heard some actual demos online of customer service bots that are AI on the phone.
44:01
SPEAKER_00: They're slick.
44:02
SPEAKER_00: They're slick, but it counts on not being a BS filter.
44:07
SPEAKER_00: The whole the nature of the relationship, because it's an inbound call, not an outbound, is the the BS filter is down.
44:13
SPEAKER_00: With cool calling, that BS filters, I think it always will be.
44:16
SPEAKER_00: That's my my theory.
44:18
SPEAKER_01: All right, Kevin.
44:18
SPEAKER_01: Listen, this has been an awesome conversation.
44:21
SPEAKER_01: Um, really, really enjoyed it.
44:23
SPEAKER_01: Our our leadership at Cyber Donut is better informed to spend their$20 million wisely and start generating some pipe.
44:31
SPEAKER_01: If uh company, except for Cyber Donut, wants to get in touch with you and taught you what's the best way to do that.
44:36
SPEAKER_00: Uh definitely uh LinkedIn.
44:38
SPEAKER_00: Hit up my LinkedIn um or Kevin at hopconsulting group.com.
44:42
SPEAKER_00: I got a website too, hopconsultinggroup.com.
44:44
SPEAKER_00: Uh, but LinkedIn, I find myself there all the time.
44:47
SPEAKER_00: That's kind of where my my market lives, and uh I gotta be present there.
44:51
SPEAKER_00: So reach out anytime.
44:53
SPEAKER_00: Awesome.
44:53
SPEAKER_00: All right, thanks a lot.
44:55
SPEAKER_00: Cheers.