Leslie Venetz: Why Your B2B Outbound is Killing Your Brand

Speaker A: Hi, I'm Laura.

Speaker B: Hey, I'm, um, Stefan. And you're listening to Attributed, a podcast library by DreamData.

Speaker A: The purpose of it is to store and share all the knowledge that we have gathered across DreamData employees through our LinkedIn Lives, podcasts and webinars.

Speaker B: The typical topics you'll find here can be stuff like marketing, sales, B2B ads, operations, social selling, maybe.

Speaker A: Welcome to the Dream Dealers podcast. And Leslie, sorry to do this, but we're going to do this again. So you have 15 years of enterprise sales experience and broke into the JP Morgan's, the Walmart's, like, the logos I don't dare to dream about through your sales experience. So how did you become that expert that everybody knows of, knowing how to break into the B2B outbound?

Speaker C: Yes. Yeah, the. The TLDR folks, is that it was. It was born from naivety. When I very, very first started, I had just moved from a, you know, town of 60,000 in Montana to a city of 6 million in Chicago. And I didn't come from a family of folks that were, like, moving and grooving in the corporate world. So I genuinely had no real conception of, like, how big of a deal the people I was calling on. And so I got this first job calling on chief financial officers of Fortune 500 companies. And I just approached them as regular old humans with this mentality of, oh, you know, they just put their pants on every morning one leg at a time, like I do. So there, there was some naivety that allowed me to show up and communicate with them just as a person would to a person person, rather than putting them on a pedestal. And I'm, I'm so grateful for that early career naivety because it also taught me that the most important thing I can do is understand the human element of what I'm asking them to do, because I'm not just asking them for budget. I'm asking them to expend their social capital to advocate for my product or service, to spend their limited budget on this instead of something else to push it out and onboard it for their team. It. It really allowed me to understand how much I was asking of individual people rather than just like job titles at X, Y, Z company. Um, and it, it really, it changed. It fundamentally changed how I thought about sales in that job that carried through the rest of my career.

Speaker A: I love that. I love, I love you putting that people aspect. But at the same time, you spoke about vulnerability before we went live as well. It's like at the time when it was a recession. You had to speak with people without exposing that. It is a hard time for a C level person to push in any type of a change. That's, that's very impactful.

Speaker C: Yeah. I mean in 2009, I, I every listening point at that time but some, some folks certainly were and selling to the CFO Persona, they were, they were so alone, they were so scared. Like it was a, it was a really scary time for them. And I had to find a way to, to express that, to show that I understood how hard things were for them without explicitly calling it out because they are still CFO's company. Like it's really, you're gonna mess up. Right? But it early in my career allowed me to some of my misconceptions post in, you know, sort of manipulative personality to a seller, heavily on curiosity earn conversations with folks that were stressed and scared and busy at maybe the most tumultuous time in the entire career.

Speaker A: There you go. And somehow I don't know how we're going to talk about that. We went from that type of human selling into a totally robotic. Just send as many emails and make as many calls to the various people and it will work out. State yesterday one of our Gen Z sellers in the kitchen was looking into our CEO who used to be a seller as well. It's like, so Nick, how did people used to sell before Zoom? Like how did people really actually connect? Did you guys like most of the times travel? It's like huh, huh. Yeah. Okay, so let's do the ABC of sales. Because a lot of people are just jumping in to that type of a sea of just legacy outbound, that everything is just very, very orchestrated to be the same. So you say that most of B2B outbound today is legacy and high volume, low value and so on. So what, how is it really affecting brands right now? Being into that stage was like how do we actually sell nowadays if it's not that volume?

Speaker C: Um, so something really interesting came up when I was doing research for my book around trust because I, I wanted to figure out what the real impacts were of like reputational harm of, of breaking that trust that we have with our prospective customers and our customers. And the data was, was shocking. Um, I should have, I should have had at the top of my mind for this conversation. But it was something like um, Aeon ranked reputational harm to the brand is like the number seven overall risk to B2B of all types of B2B companies globally. There was a, uh, McKinsey report that showed something like, you know, US businesses lost 4.8 billion in revenue because of reputational risk issues. And so when we connect that back to sales and marketing, to the revenue function, the folks that are most often the front line of the business, right? Like when, when folks think of most B2B brands, they're thinking of the people that they're interacting with, the people they see posting on LinkedIn, the people cold calling them, the people sending them emails. So it, it is the function of the sales and marketing departments to uphold, uh, the reputation of the organization of, of being somebody that, you know, a B2B buyer would want to even engage in a sales conversation with. And what's happening instead is that we have always had this weird dichotomy between taking a, uh, quantity or a quality approach. Like I've spent so much time reading about it and researching it, and I still, still don't quite understand why we have this very black and white. Like you either do quality and you spend an hour researching before you pick up the phone once, or you send, uh, out 5,000 emails a day when you and I know that the magic actually happens in, in finding a balance between those. But we have so many folks that have been doing that quantity outreach for so long and they claim it works because they send out 30,000 emails and they get three opportunities from it. And they don't talk about the 3,000 people that unsubscribed or blocked them, or the people on Reddit writing like nasty posts about how they're being harassed by XYZ company in their email. Right? They don't talk about all of that reputational hunter, because what they're actually doing is spamming like that. That isn't sales. Sending out 30,000 generic emails, that is not sales. And with the advent of AI, those outdated historic quantity spam practices now are being done at a scale that is disgusting. It's kind of unfathomable.

Speaker A: That was my next question. It's like you just give a, uh, superpower for that type of infinite outbound of messages that seem to be different. So that's, I think that's where the different comes in right now. Because before in time, if you were doing quantity, you were sending more or less the same messages, just changing the name and the company. But now when AI is able to jump in and change the messaging but it's still spam, then it's like steroids for anything. Quantity.

Speaker C: Yeah, I see a couple things happen with those spam emails, um, because I think so there's a, um, term in deliverability in email sending called SpinTax. And so that was what folks really used to focus on to keep their deliverability score high, meaning keeping the probability that their emails would land in a primary inbox high. And it was rotating things like subject lines or putting, you know, form fill for the person's name. So everyone was a little bit different. Um, and now AI is extraordinary at Spin Tax, right? Because does have this really incredible ability to pull bits and pieces to quote, unquote, personalize every email. But a couple of things are happening. One is that most of the personalization being used is either very disingenuous or completely meaningless. And so that pops, uh, up in either pulling out a trigger. So maybe the email is like, hi Lara, I see that you're the CEO of ABC Company. Anyways, here's my widget. So they're getting the trigger, but they're not connecting the dots to tell the prospect why the trigger would matter to them. Or it's just reading the news like, hi, I saw that you are the VP of uh, sales at ABC Company. Yeah, I know that. It's, it's, it's my job. Like, I'm aware. You don't need to send me an email telling me that. So, so they are pulling in these personalized points, but I had a LinkedIn post maybe a week ago that talked about the difference between like stating something that's true. Mhm. And personalization. And a, a lot of what I'm seeing is that AI is pulling something that is true. Mhm. And then pretending like it's personalization. But there's, there's nothing in the email for the actual reader of their email. Like there's nothing in it that gives them value, provides insights, connects the dots between the true statement and the solutions being solved by the vendor. So I think that's one huge issue. And M, then the other is that all of the emails sound the same.

Speaker A: Yeah, yeah.

Speaker C: Uh, LLMs are just like, yeah, they're, they're just statistical average generators. And so now we have just thousands and thousands of emails going out that all sound like they're written by the same person.

Speaker A: No, goal number one, let's reduce that. That's insane. How many times people have to click, this is spam. Don't do it. So it hurts your brand, so don't do it. Because people do click, this is spam. And you wouldn't even hear back from the person, but they would click the button. Your deliverability is in trash. So let's speak about that. Like, how can brands address this right now? Okay, nobody wants to do massive outreaches. Everybody wants to be personalized. But the first step, let's talk about product versus problem. Because you can personalize kind of. We can speak about that too. But so if we are looking into problem, product versus problem. So people should stop pushing product, start solving a problem. But how does that change the way marketing and sales teams should start writing their outbound messaging from what they're doing now?

Speaker C: Yeah, one of my absolute favorite strategies to roll out with clients is a personalization at scale strategy where we are sending the same, more or less the same exact email to everybody in a list. But the catch is that the list is very small. And so we're doing a few things beforehand. And I think this is what makes the difference, is that we are. I use a five filter method. And so, um, generally where I start, folks, if they're kind of new to this sort of approach to list building and territory management, is doing four firmographic filters and then a demographic filter. So that might look like doing like not just an industry, but a sub industry, meaning not just consumer packaged goods, but pet food and then doing a revenue band. So not anybody that's over 500 million, but saying, you know, 500 million to 1 billion. Because that allows us to start making assumptions about what companies at that specific growth stage are looking at. Maybe it's geography, maybe it's employee count, but using those sort of firmographic filters that are almost always easily accessible within CRM or within data tools. And then one demographic filter, meaning you are only sending it to a, um, job title. So death to the finance executives like you, people in the sales space like you. Right. Death to that. You can use very similar copy. And just the simple pivot of talking only to the CRO or only to the VP of sales enablement. And even though they're both sales leaders, they care about very different things. So using the 5 filter method and then taking a step back and asking yourself, based on the challenges that companies at this growth stage are going through, based on the pressures on a, uh, VP of sales enablement, based on the dynamics of the market and the customers in the CPG pet food space, what are things that I know are true that I believe my product or service can help solve for? So the first thing that we have to do before we even get to writing the copy is asking some questions about what is most important to the people that we're sending it to. So really starts with that, like ICP creation. Territory management, list building piece. And then it's a heck of a lot more easy afterwards to be like, oh, I don't need to be like, hi, I'm your account executive at XYZ company. We sell our product because, you know, something that matters to the person that you're reaching out to and you can just talk about that thing that matters to them.

Speaker A: Yeah. So that's another tip. I love this one a lot. And anytime I look at the copy, it's like, do we say we? Do we say you

Speaker C: or uh, it's such a great audit. For anybody that's looking to do an audit of their emails, like 100%. Do what Laura just said. Go through your emails and if it is predominantly like I, we and our language or my versus like you they them language. See how you can pivot some of those sentences around? Generally I look for like a one to three ratio. So I'm not saying like you can never use I or my or we are our. But I, I try to limit that language to one usage per every like two to three times. I'm using the, the you, they, them.

Speaker A: You use the time to understand what matters to them, not to you. Like, uh, we tell this you are a sales leader. Do you want to buy? It's like, no, I get this every day. So for that type of trust, for them to say yes to a meeting or at least to say yes to read your email, that's already. Is like earning the trust of reading that email hashtag.

Speaker C: You're in the right.

Speaker A: Exactly. So you talk about that. Earn the right to their time and even consideration to open up your email. So what do they need to prove to the buyer before they move into that trust phase?

Speaker C: Yeah, one of my favorite, uh, exercises that I love walking folks through, like not just my clients, but it's something I always try to incorporate even into like my sales training or my sales keynotes. Um, is a fabs exercise and I cannot even take credit for this framework. It is, um, like an old Zig Ziglar sort of. It's derivative of a Zig Ziglar thing. Um, but it came from. Do you remember being taught Aida like back ages ago in marketing school? Attention, interest, desire, action. Have you ever heard that before? Right. It is like a super, super old marketing framework. When I was doing the research for the book, I think I, I came up with it being like 130 years old or something. So it has been being, it's, it's used forever, but the foundations of it still work. And so this is why I love sharing fabs with people, because I have them go through this exercise and anybody can, like, you know, book, book, market this podcast at this point and come back to it later to do this exercise. So write down one feature. Fabs. Features. Advantage is benefits. Write down one feature that you either pitch most often or you believe is the one that people buy most often. Write down just that one feature, whatever comes to mind first. You don't have to overthink it. Then write down the number one advantage of the feature and don't beat yourself up for this. But the first thing you're probably going to think is, oh, it saves them time, it saves them money, it reduces their risk, it makes them money. Advantages always tend to be those kind of like superficial generic advantages. When I audit my own inbox, that's what I see in about 80% of emails. Um, if people are moving past just feature dumping and actually using any advantage, it's still the generic ones. The same things that all your competitors can say and that are not specific to the recipient of the email. So write down your feature, write down that first generic advantage, and then to uncover the benefits that you can start using to shift from that product centric to problem centric language, just repeatedly ask yourself why, why would that matter to them? What impact would that have on them? Why would that change the way they work? Why would that change their life? How would that change their life? And you start uncovering some of those human elements, right? Like, oh, well, if they get this program project done faster, it actually means that they will get a bonus. And it actually means that the person on their team that they've been trying to get promoted, they'll have a stronger case for why that person should get promoted. Because they have now this, you know, this, this great use case. And so you, you're able to much more easily come, uh, up with content for your, like, you know, phone or email talk tracks. If you start by going through that simple exercise.

Speaker A: So you would tie in some of those closer to personal benefits into some of the sequences of the emails.

Speaker C: Uh, I would, yeah, I would. I um, mean, you, you probably can't get as specific as like, hey, buy our product because you're going to promote your employee. That, that might be a little bit too specific, but just the, the exercise of really taking the time to ask yourself what would this mean for this person in this role in this department at this company? Like, what would the knock on impacts of reducing risk or saving time or making money or not losing Money. What, what would that mean beyond just the superficial? We save you time. And that gets the wheel spinning a lot more easily.

Speaker A: Very interesting. Okay, um, I'm thinking about the middle steps that you're taking also through this type of exercise. Because starting from, well, everybody wants to reduce risk. If it saves cost and saves time, great, we can sell the product. But then there's a personal benefit. But there is also the path in between that, uh, I guess you would be able to use for those sequences too, that there are things that they need to do today. I don't know if, let's say you're selling to somebody in finance and there are some sheets that they have to move around that they don't trust the data anymore and stuff like that. Like smaller things that might end them up, uh, fired or not trusted in the company. A personal benefit. But, but those in between steps they would recognize because it's personal, because the list is so short. Like if it is an analyst, they would recognize that this is for me. But if they are a cfo, I don't care. My analyst does. This is kind of delivered to me.

Speaker C: Totally. Yes, perfect example.

Speaker A: Very exciting. And it also takes my wheel spinning as well, how this can also be used not just for outbound, but also for general sales discovery too. Because that in between is what matters to people.

Speaker C: For sure. Yeah, yeah. I even use it as some of my, uh, content for writing on LinkedIn or like writing my blog posts. Um, some of my most successful posts, not successful in terms of impressions, but successful, successful in terms of bringing in inbound leads or when I write to a really specific Persona. So like, I serve a lot of, like cybersecurity SaaS, companies. And so when I write a post and I think specifically about the outcomes that matter to that type of company and I write with that in mind, sure enough I'll get a lead or two from that post. So it might not do numbers, but people see, see themselves reflected in that context.

Speaker A: That's the only thing that matters. Earning the trust, like you don't need to earn the trust of the masses because they will never trust you. They will move on next second to another one. But if you earn the trust from the ones that actually will come with money and book a, uh, meeting with you, that's the only thing that matters. Love that. Love that. Leslie, let's talk about the dark funnel and signal based selling. Because everybody talks about signals now. We have, I don't know, like a new category of signals, signals based for marketing and sales. So like There's a lot of interest because people come with money after it. So you teach that we need to use the dark funnel to both categorize your prospects and then how should they change their messaging as soon as they have categorized. So talk me about the categories that you're looking into but also how can they change the messaging accordingly?

Speaker C: Yeah, um, let me go back to the example that I was, was giving with like the five filters to be able to start develop your list. So once you have mastered that sort of initial level of segmentation, that's when it makes a lot of sense to add on either just sort of uh, maybe like more advanced filters like technographic ones. Oh, if they're using Salesforce in addition to these filters, what else does that tell me about the company? And that's a great time to start adding on signals as well. So let me give you an example of what not to do and then let me give you an example of what to do. What isn't working with signals is stating the signal, uh, out loud and then forgetting to explicitly tell the prospect why that signal has meaning in the context of the solution that you're solving. And so you see this a lot with folks getting a raise, um, like a new funding round. Congrats on your Series A. Like we help early stage startups do blah blah blah. Our solution when the, the right type of email would be like generally after folks raise a Series A they have pressure to hire quickly while also maintaining tight profit margins and the result is X and the, you know. Right. So you, you're able to shift it to be like hey, here's an insight and observation that based on my expertise selling this solution to this market I believe to be true. So it allows you to go away from just again like stating a truth. Congrats on your raise. Congrats on your funding to sharing an insight. Um, and that is how you start the trust building process. I'll share one that I'm using right now. Um, I spent like two full weeks sort of like reimagining and rebuilding my Done with youh advisory product because I like it was working, people were getting roi but I was experiencing a lot of scope creep. So I, I knew that I had built something wrong, there was something broken for me to constantly feel like I had to over deliver. So I was like okay, let, let me reimagine this. And as part of that process I went through a bunch of my case studies and assets I built and just emails of the moments where people were like oh my God, like, this is amazing. This is so valuable. And what I realized is that the most important, I don't, um, not important, but maybe like some of the most exciting work I've done that's made the biggest impact that also makes me money is companies that are going through a phase of rapid acquisition of other companies either to grab up market share or to grab product capability. So they're buying other products or they're buying market share. And so then that leaves them with a dilemma of either how do we create now a new single source of truth for like processes and languages when we're smashing together multiple, multiple teams, or how do I upskill my team to sell this maybe more advanced product or like a multi, multi line product? So now that's a signal for me, it's not a signal because I was like, oh, I want to sell to people that are going through acquisitions because they have more money. It's a signal because I'm like, oh, here are some assumptions I can make about what these organizations are going to struggle with at this time based on my research and the expertise I've done.

Speaker B: So.

Speaker C: So I'm not like, hi, I've seen that you've been acquiring companies. I help people do this. Instead, I can say, generally during a time of rapid acquisition, this stress is occurring. Here's why, here's how other folks are solving. It's from stating the truth, stating the fact, and being able to lead with insight.

Speaker A: Very interesting. And that goes into the ICP list building too. So as soon as you build that niche, niche, niche icp, you will also have that niche value proposition that you can match up with it.

Speaker C: Bingo. You know, and Laura, this is such an important thing to say because, um, so often when we talk about ICPs, I think, I think sellers imagine that they have IP all ICP. There is like one ideal customer profile. And when I talk about icps and I think that you have a similar view, I'm talking about multiple different groups. And the reason that I think every seller has multiple icps is because when you make this pivot from product to problem selling, they're ideal for their own reasons. So it's not about you saying that they're ideal for your reasons because you want to sell to them. Each of them becomes ideal based on this unique and specific need that they have and the benefits that they care about most. And that also means that your ICP evolves as the industry changes or your product evolves or even your understanding of their needs evolve.

Speaker A: How does that go hand to hand? With marketing as well. Because if you're taking up your website then ad copy, ICP and that type of a niche value proposition, how much of it has to be broad? How much of it does have to go down into more niche problems between marketing and sales?

Speaker C: Yeah, it's one of the reasons that I think that marketing and sales need to be the bestest of friends. And it's one of the reasons that throughout my career I have always viewed marketing as a trusted partner to the extent that I've had the privilege of working on some cool campaigns where we've really like blurred the lines between what has historically been demand gen and, and uh, lead gen. So I think marketing's job is to create copy that very effectively communicates one to many.

Speaker A: Mhm.

Speaker C: Right. So it's the top of the net where you're like oh, like that. That's interesting. Like I, I'd be open to learning more about that because it sort of feels, feels like it's in you know, the, the periphery of what I care about and sales job is to create copy that feels one to one. And so I think that it is, it's a bit of a handover. Right. Like marketing can't be too specific because they need to be that top of the funnel to get as many eyes and as many interests as many MQL's generated uh, as possible so that sales has the opportunity then to then pick up the baton and ask those questions about what do I believe the needs are of this particular type of prospect, what do I think matters most to them and then how can I find a way to communicate with them one to one in a way that leads with problems that I'm solving rather than just product or feature dumping on them.

Speaker A: I love that it's also easier for sales to adapt real quick. Say we see something working in terms of one message rather than having something changed on the website or content and so on because, because that totally just requires the whole flywheel.

Speaker C: But you know, one of my favorite things that I've done with uh, with marketing was a um, ABM campaign. And so we had obviously like our website that, that was our website. Um, but they made custom landing pages for me by industry and it was, it was so cool. It was such a fun campaign to run. And so it was, it was, it was kind of in the middle. Like it wasn't strictly one to one because we were still talking to like it or like telecom as an industry, but it was a little bit more niche than like hey, we serve finance and Telecom and pharma and cpg. Um, and people loved those websites. They ate them up. Because even that is an element of trust building where they see that you've done a little bit extra work to understand and prioritize the industry that they've built a career in.

Speaker A: Yeah. And how do you build that type of close alignment? Because you speak about this. Oh, marketing built this. This was fantastic, and so on. But it doesn't really happen in all the corporations. Like, while you're small, it's pretty easy. But from you've been in both seats and from a sales leader's perspective, how can marketing shift and help? And the other way around, how can sales be there to collaborate with marketing closer?

Speaker C: Um, a few thoughts on that. I think. One is that I am in a, in a slightly privileged position in that I literally got a marketing degree. I owned marketing as like a, you know, head of sales across the entire revenue function. So I, I think one of the traps that people fall into, and I see this with sales as well, but they're like, oh, I've accepted experienced marketing, so I understand marketing. Like, I get right. Like there's just this assumption that it's like somehow like an easier job or that they could just do it. And I think because I don't come to the table with that assumption because I know how hard and nuanced the job is, that that puts me a step ahead. So maybe my first invitation, um, to sellers who want to partner sales leaders that want to partner more closely with marketing is checking some of the assumptions that you have about the job that they're doing and the profession. So I think that's one, um, I think another one. And it's perfect because the title of this, you know, of this podcast is attributed is being very watchful of the harms that attribution can do. Having now gone through both the, uh, you know, the Great Recession and the sort of recessionary activity around the pandemic. I have watched marketing be sort of the front line of who gets caught twice. And so as a sales leader having the understanding that part of the reason that they fight so hard for attribution is because they know that they need those numbers to at least fight in good times, fight for budget and fight for like the, the, you know, projects that they want to roll out, but in bad times they need those numbers to protect their job security. So I like, I think that, I mean we always talk about attribution and blah, blah, and so great, like there are some problems with fights for attribution and just a lack of understanding that like we're all rowing the same direction. And sure, like sales might be the first phone call and then the person goes to the website and sees great marketing copy and then they attend a webinar that marketing hosts, but they never come inbound until the salesperson proactively. But like, it is all of those touches. If we look at buyer psychology and behavioral science, it is all of those touches that stack together to ultimately build enough trust that somebody is willing to engage in a buying conversation with us. Agree.

Speaker A: And that's what um, real signal selling comes into the picture because, well, they raise funding and oh, somebody changed the role. It's a good external signal that they might be looking for a solution. But at the same time, if you have been building up brand for these types of roles for the companies that these people usually work at, then it earns the trust for you to reach out and say, oh, now you have changed the role. You have this problem. And actually we do that and you know, about us. Uh, so should we talk? That's, that is a lot of trust building that has to be done so much more in advance. And you touched upon the very painful subject of delivering MQLs and making sure that they actually convert. So you have been in, into, in, in both roles but also in the sales role where marketing said ta da, like here's my catch and then they don't close. So how, how can marketing shift to provide highly valued leads instead of the TADA of mql? Is that not great?

Speaker C: Yeah, um, a couple of things and I don't, I don't necessarily think marketing needs to shift so much as maybe the, the overarching revenue leadership needs to make a small shift because I, I really do think marketing's job is to like get the most, most possible pertinent eyeballs on the, the product or service the company as possible. Um, and if they get overly obsessed with like, oh, we can only, you know, it's only worth doing if we're attracting this one particular type of people. They're going to end up excluding some of those people by default. So I, I do like a slightly broader take, but a couple of things. One is it is the responsibility of the CRO, cco, whoever your head of revenue is, to have such crystal clear criteria of who is ideal, of who is a qualified lead, that there aren't MQL discrepancies happening. Like, I don't care how many times m, a person clicked on a webinar, downloaded a white paper Whatever. If they are a coordinator at a $10 million company and our criteria is manager level and above, 50 million and above, they are never an MQL full stop period. Like, I think like they're just the wiggle room has to be removed. And the easiest way to remove that is to have extraordinarily clear and explicit criteria. That's coming down from the CRO. With that being said, I don't think that we should ignore those leads. That's a perfect opportunity to use AI and to use automation to continue to nurture them. And the way that I think about it, for my own outreach, um, because I will like having done so so much enterprise selling, I will run influencer campaigns like myself as a salesperson. And I don't ever want to talk to these people. Like, I don't really even want them involved in the sales process. Like, if I can have fewer people with their fingers in the pie at the decision making table, that's better. But my goal is I finally reach that cfo, that CPO Chro. And they go back to their team and they say, have you ever heard of Leslie or have you ever heard of this company? And the team's like, mhm.

Speaker A: Oh my God.

Speaker C: Yeah. They actually have a great newsletter. Oh yeah, I've attended some of their webinars. Yeah, I actually got a couple emails from Leslie that were so insightful. So that is another step in that trust building process. Right. In creating this like trust ecosystem. And in my own experience as a seller and a sales leader and certainly helping my clients, I've also found that it decreases sales cycle length and increases acv.

Speaker A: Yep. Because they trust you. And whoever they turn around and ask do you trust this person or this brand? Then it's much easier if they have been exposed to it. Love that. This is great. And when now most of the companies zig with AI with outbound a lot, let's do much, let's do bots and AI SDRs and so on. How does a human centric approach help brands cut through the noise and stay ahead of everything? That is just too much.

Speaker C: You know, I was at a dinner last night with, with 18 other revenue leaders. Um, and one of the questions was, what are your plans for 2027? And I said get out of here, 2027. Like, but something I heard over and over again was, oh, we want to figure out how to do less with more.

Speaker B: Mhm.

Speaker C: And so I get it, I get it. I understand the pressure is, is real to incorporate AI, to incorporate more automation, to figure out how to do less with more.

Speaker A: Yep.

Speaker C: The very important strategic question that needs to be asked before we layer in any of that tech is where is human touch going to make the greatest impact? And if we do that with a, with a focus on our prospects and our customers versus what we find most convenient, what streamlines our process most, we're, we're going to get better outcomes. Because I think that's like, that's one of. I'm seeing it a lot in CS too, where they're trying to cut humans out of the CS process as much as possible. Where everything's just like automated with chatbots and automated videos and there's a, there's a place for that and it certainly is, is valuable because people do want to self serve, they do want async. But when somebody wants to be able to talk to a human and you've so fully removed humans from the process that they like cannot speak to a human person, that's going to cause serious retention issues. Like so I think it's, yeah, it's just about asking that question like yeah, we do understand that we need to use m more AI, that we do need to use automation.

Speaker A: But

Speaker C: where is it going to have the biggest impact for our prospects and our customers to keep a really personal human touch in the process still.

Speaker A: Yeah, yeah, it's hard. It's really, really hard nowadays because you have to figure out how do you both do it fast because everybody's doing it fast, but also personable. So those results don't come in half a year, they come probably next week or in a month. So both sales and marketing professionals right now have a very hard job on like doing.

Speaker C: Let me give folks a quick example of actually how I'm trying to figure this out for my, my own business which is a little than the like big B2B sales orgs that I serve. But for my own business which like is heavily dependent on content, right? Like I run 100% inbound lead flow. I'm putting out a lot of content. Especially now I'm putting out content with a lens on like an AEO and GEO focus. I show up in a search. So I am figuring out how to create like really robust cloud master prompts and to use cloud cowork to, to like cut parts of that content creation process out. So I'm still writing all of my own content, I still ideate it, but I do it with a little bit of the support and I do it with a little bit more structure. So I'm, I'm Um, using and I, I batch create all of my content and I schedule all of my content. Right. So I'm using AI and I'm using automation to cut time off of what's happening behind the scenes. But I don't then just work less on content. I use the time I bought back to be in the comments, building real connections and community in the comments. Right. So it's like, okay, I only have, you know, let's say it's 10 hours a week to work on content. Where is my human, my personal touch going to make the biggest impact with my audience? And so I made the choice that it was to be in the comments in real life having those conversations.

Speaker A: Yep. And that's where you show up as a human because there are a lot of bots there as well. So if we were to leave our audience with one more final very practical advice. Marketing leaders reviewing the sales copy tomorrow, what is it that they should be looking into of the sales copies that should stop damaging the brand?

Speaker C: Well, I think first off still your little audit, um, that we talked about with looking at the amount of like I, my we our language versus you they them language, I think that's a really good place to start a really easy audit to start with because it begins the conversation of uh, oof, how much of this is seller centered and company product centered versus centered on the, you know, the problems, the outcomes that matter most to our prospects and our customers. So I would start there and then, you know, beyond that, I would start a conversation about segmentation of the territory and about the idea that there are multiple ICPs, not just one, um, so that you can start pivoting to building a value prop for every unique icp, um, just to make it easier when you're writing copy in the future to nail that value prop messaging.

Speaker A: Uh, I think this is the hottest take of our whole conversation. Seriously. You can still use a lot of that AI copy as well, as long as it is valuable for the exact people you're speaking with. And if the list is 10 people in four companies, well, let's use that.

Speaker C: And I use AI to figure out what's going on in the market. Like I'm not an expert in all of the markets that I sell to. So I don't use AI to write the emails, but I sure as heck use it to be like, and what's going on with the people these people sell to and what's going on with the regulations. And so I am using it to amass this research and to, to help me understand a space that I don't exist in so that I can better connect.

Speaker A: Fantastic. Great. Leslie, thank you so much for your insights today. Really appreciate you coming over. Stefan, thank you for letting us take over your stage for the day. And we're going to come out with this as both snippets for LinkedIn so people can interact and see you as well. But if people wanted to catch up with you and talk to you more about the the copy, how do you do the lists and so on, what's the best place to find?

Speaker C: Yeah, so I, I post content daily on YouTube and on LinkedIn and I'm at Leslie Vanettes on both of those and I'm still on TikTok if you want to find me there at SalesTipstalk. So if you're looking for daily BTD sales advice, make sure that you follow me. If you're a founder or a sales leader and you want to learn more about me working with you or like coming into your company, pop me a DM and we'll hop on a call and kind of talk through what, you know, what you're working on right now and see if it makes sense for me to help.

Speaker A: Thank you for that. Thank you very much for joining us. Thanks everybody for listening in and follow attributed podcast. Thanks.

Speaker C: Thanks everybody.

Speaker A: We hope you like listening to us. Subscribe to our podcast and the ones that we have been guests on and

Speaker B: if you have any feedback for us, uh, just do like let us know and should there be a guest that you think we should be talking to, then like pitch us.

Speaker A: We're looking forward to seeing you.