Using the phone to drive d2c sales - with Jason Weiss

Speaker A: Okay, cool. We're live. Um, today I'm joined by Jason Weiss who is the, uh, sorry, he was a sales expert and he's been building out sales teams for D2C brands and ah, really excited to go into this topic because it's not one, I think that uh, is popular anymore and for some reason is a bit taboo and DTC circles. But we're going to talk about using the phone, the telephone to build um, D2C brands. How it's a missed opportunity maybe for a lot of brands as well, and how this could be a weapon in your arsenal to convert more customers. So Jason, why don't you give us a quick intro because we've not done a podcast together into your background in the industry and then we'll go into this topic.

Speaker B: Yeah, sure. So I've been involved in sales for 25 years, um, with a major component of that being direct to consumer. For the last 18 specifically I've been working with CPG in the supplement and beauty industries selling you know, um, one of the largest private label or the largest private label prostate product in the us Super Beta Prostate. I've worked with Force Factor which is one of the largest um, sports supplement brands on their D2C side and I, I've put a big focus on building and creating sales teams um, for every company I've been at. My sales teams have done seven and eight figures in revenue at 200 ROI within the first um, and that's through systems that I've created over the years that really leverage a lot of the data that we pull in through E comm and sort of re engagement of lapsed customers and abandoned cards and things like that. And you know, it's been a, it's been a wild ride to say the least.

Speaker A: So we've got a very similar background because I'm from supplements consumer packaged goods myself. Um, so it's going to be interesting to go a little bit deeper into these topics. But let's start with using the phone. Like why is it such a powerful sales methods? Well it's fairly obvious, right? Like it's always been historically something that's used. But why is it like fizzled out? Why is it sort of became

Speaker B: had

Speaker A: this thing attached to it where now all of a sudden you can't call customers? Where's this came from and why is it sort of an underused thing that you can bring back?

Speaker B: Yeah, so in my opinion there's really two major pieces that really, that really kind of put the phone to the side the industry, the first is regulatory. You know, the, the ftc, the FCC in the states has put a lot of rules and regulations into place specifically because of bad actors that um, hinder a company's ability to make these dials. It's not that they can't make them, it's that they need to understand the intricate rules. And at least in the states you have not only the federal rules and regulations, but you also have state level ones you have to be aware of when you're making dials. Um, for instance, there's several states that don't acknowledge an existing business relationship even with a financial transaction for consumers. So dialing them puts you at risk. So there are four or five, six states I think it is now that we completely scrub from our lists for reasons like that. Uh, the second is it if done improperly it can be extremely costly, uh, with very low roi. I mean let's be honest, it's also a lot cheaper and easier to send emails and sms, which is picking up right now, which has its own sort of regulatory challenges. Um, social media and these other sorts of channels that exist have put the phone uh, in the background because it's harder to run a phone campaign than it is to run some of these other campaigns because you're dealing with a lot of people. It's personnel based.

Speaker A: Yeah, that's really interesting. I think as you said, it might not come across as scalable because as we know, you know, a lot of email and SMS are just huge broadcast campaigns and so the low cost to run them and automated as well. But you know, we always say in email and even SMS now that personal connection of, and uh, the conversational approach that you see deployed by a lot of the marketers these days is the way to go. And obviously what better way to connect with a customer then just pick up the phone and speak to them directly?

Speaker B: Yeah, it's, that's one of the reasons I love the phone is when you have, we'll use abandoned carts as an example. It's hard sometimes to understand why that make some inferences based on how long they were on page, where they abandoned in the process and these types of things. But on the phone when you get an objection, you have the objection and you can respond to it appropriately. You know, it's, there aren't a lot of companies that have funnels that deal with specific rebuttals, the entire process through the ordering. Whereas with the phones that's exactly what you have when you do say a win back campaign for lapsed customers. When you get Data on or ask specifically, you know, why aren't you reordering? You now can work on that where there are a lot of companies that aren't very good digitally and sort of collecting the information on why customers are lapsing and then providing unique and personalized approaches to get them to re onboard. You know, think about the win back campaigns you've seen. A lot of them are specifically tied around discounts. Hey, you haven't ordered in a while here, get a discount. You know, right now I happen to be selling a lot of pet supplements and those types of messages are extremely tone deaf if somebody's lost a pet, you know. So when you make those phone calls and you get those types of, that type of information live, you can react accordingly. So it's a little bit more um, what's the word? You uh, can transition easier into what these challenges are.

Speaker A: This is really interesting. Let me ask you then based on, as you said, it can become very expensive using the phone. Right. Like you've got to pay someone for the time and the staff to actually go ahead and do that. Um, not to dispute the ROI of it, but where's the best way to start prioritizing using this technique? Because we mentioned like abandons and courts compared to for example a win back campaign which could be you know, ROI negative I suppose.

Speaker B: Yeah.

Speaker A: If you were to go into a brand tomorrow, where's the quick wins where you could implement these techniques?

Speaker B: Yeah, so that's a great question. The, the number one campaign I always move into is uh, subscription decline reclamation for those customers who, whose auto ships aren't going through. That's the first and foremost. There's one exception to that. If you're a CPG or any company that's using a free trial as your acquisition model, um, that will not be the first campaign I run because there's a lot of low value free trial customers out there and it completely destroys the ROI of that campaign if you're not segmenting it properly. So there's, there's that caveat. But other than that, that's the easiest. The, the second one that I go for are all of your straight sale customers who, who especially when it comes to, again I'm um, you know, CPG supplements customers who should have hit a reorder point and haven't. So I ordered a 30 day supply of a product. It's been 45 days. I'm going to reach out, I'll reach out earlier than 45 days but I'm just using that as an example. Once um, they lapse the more. The longer they stay without your product, the less likely you are to get them back. Those are the two sort of biggest ROI pieces. The third and one of my favorites is the abandoned carts. I've had a lot of success with those. And while the ROI on the forefront may not be as high as those other two campaigns I mentioned, those new customers can build LTV over time. So to me, it's a forgotten piece of the phone dialing. There are different rules because you don't have a financial transaction. Uh, we talked about the regulatory earlier, so you have to be a little more cognizant of that. You have a shorter time frame to reach out to these customers, um, and speed to lead win. So how long ago they abandoned is going to be a huge sort of piece of that also. So you need to have something in place to make sure you're calling in a. In a very short time frame.

Speaker A: Super interesting. And how do the customers react if you do pick up the phone and speak to them? Because this is not like a conventional technique for a lot of brands. Right. Is there an element of shock? Are they annoyed? Are they surprised? Like Happy? How do they generally respond?

Speaker B: Uh, neutral to Happy? There's very few. And, uh, this is true of all, like customer service and sales. Right. You always get a few angry people and that's always going to happen. But. But for the most part, the calls go fairly well. I'm a big proponent of scripting. Um, I don't require my team to read the script every single time, but it's provided as a guideline. So if you have a good intro, um, as with any sales call, you know, you'll. You can sort of combat those challenges of why are you calling me? Um, the decline campaigns probably have a few angrier customers. You know as well as I do that A, some companies aren't very good at disclosing their auto ships. B, a lot of people sign up for auto ships and don't remember. Um, C, a lot of people think they canceled and they didn't. So, you know, there's some struggle and challenge with that campaign, but. But overall it's well received. Um, I think one of my favorite calls, and this one doesn't have the highest roi. One of my favorite calls or campaigns to start up is a welcome call where we call the same day or next day after their initial order and thank them for ordering. We use this for a, customer retention and B, we do try and upsell or get them on the subscription at that point as well. Cross selling also. But that's something you really only see from kind of, uh, the higher end premium brands. Right. The last time I received a welcome call from a company is it was I bought my wife a Burberry trench coat. You know, you don't, you don't see it without those premium brands. So it's, that comes as a very welcome surprise to customers because now I've ordered a product and now I'm getting a phone call saying, hey, thank you so much, we appreciate your business. And my goal when I run that campaign is to be break even. I'm not looking for it to, you know, 200% ROI out the gate. I'm looking for it specifically to improve retention and watch metrics in those groups.

Speaker A: So you've gave us a lot of use cases now for everything from pre purchase consideration to retention to win back. You mentioned you're a big fan of scripting, let's say, and run through a scenario here where I'm on the website, you know, I'm shopping for pet supplements and um, I abandon the course. Could you run me through like a basic script, um, of how you would approach it, given that you have my phone number and I abandon that court?

Speaker B: Yeah, absolutely. Hey, Adam, this is Jason calling from Pet Products Anonymous. I see that you were on our website and you were looking at our canine multivitamin. I see you didn't complete your order. I just wanted to see if you had any challenges on the website or if you had any questions about the product specifically.

Speaker A: Uh, no, I got busy. I went on Amazon and stairs and just completely forgot about it.

Speaker B: Yeah, and that happens to a lot of our customers. Obviously you're pet owner. What kind of, what kind of animal do you have?

Speaker A: I have a labradoodle.

Speaker B: Awesome. And what brought you to the website today? What specifically is going on with your labradoodle that, that concerns you?

Speaker A: He has, um, he's old, he has anxiety. So I'm looking for some specific supplements that would help with this.

Speaker B: Yeah, that's great. You know, what a lot of people and pet owners like yourself don't realize is they'll take a multivitamin every day, but it's not something they think about giving to their dog specifically because, well, all that nutrition should be in the pet food that we serve. And the reality is even the top level pet brands are missing a lot of micronutrients that help support the health of the pet. Um, you know, even the top level AAFCO certified misses a bunch of stuff. And if it's heat processed. You're destroying a lot of those micronutrients that aren't actually making it into the product. With our product, it's cold processed. You get these nutrients, their specific measurements. So let's do this. Since you hit our website today, I do have a special that most of our first time customers use. And it's when you buy two bottles, which is a six month supply, you get a discount of X, Y and Z. And the total for that will only come out to 1, 2, 3. And I'll go ahead and uh, set your account up for you. So Adam, can you just give me your last name so I can complete your account?

Speaker A: I love that uh, you got me at the sale right there and then I love the way you like anchored um, in put the questions there though, because I think sometimes, you know, you get a lot of these sales calls and they're really shitty and people just start to like vomit all over you. But you specifically like dug in there and tried to find out the objections and solve the customers pay in that way.

Speaker B: One of the things I love about the content you put out, you specifically talk about like um, exit surveys and post purchase surveys to gather more data on the customer. It's the same concept, right? The more you know about the customer, the more likely you are to close the deal. And at the end of the day, if there's not a match between customer and product, you want to know that too, right? There's times where people are going to call in. You know, you mentioned anxiety specifically. You'll notice I didn't really talk about anxiety because you had other issues as well. I'm not going to talk about anxiety if my product doesn't do anything for anxiety, uh, and things like that, it might not be a good match, you know, if I'm not, if my multivitamin, say doesn't provide joint support. And your issue is, my dog is old, he can't even get up the stairs anymore. There's not a match there, you know, so that sort of congruency between need and product is a huge, huge piece and it doesn't go away. It's probably a little bit more marketing for me than some of the salespeople sell them. Anyway, everyone needs multivitamin and in theory, while I agree with that, it's always hard to pivot, uh, customers into newer products until you've proven the existing product or the original product that we're interested in.

Speaker A: Given the time that you may spend on the phone to try and convert someone and obviously trying to do this at scale, do you have a limit within the scripts? For example, like, you need to close this person within 10 minutes, or do you just let the conversations flow naturally? And I know a good salesperson generally will, like, try and steer things towards the direction, you know, that they're hoping to, to take it. But, yeah, how do you manage that aspect? Because some customers, right, like, have nothing better to do than sit on the phone all day as well.

Speaker B: Yeah, it's absolute. Absolutely true. And, and, you know, one of the things I train my team on and work with them is unlike most call centers, I don't put average, um, talk time as a main metric, because I am asking you to sell. And at the end of the day, some calls, you can close in two and a half, three minutes. Some calls take 12, 15 minutes. What I tell them is you need to, especially for those longer calls, take a step back and make sure you're still on task. Right. If you find yourself talking about the weather or talking about your local sports team or something like that, you both grew up in the same neighborhood, you're off topic. I'll be the first to admit I don't like selling on rapport. Um, mostly because I come off very abrasive to a lot of people. But it's, it's, it doesn't work. It's not how you sell. You know, the, the biggest, one of the biggest myths in sales is people buy from people they like. I like a lot of people I've never spent a dollar on. A lot of them are salespeople. You know, I've bought from people who have products that I want that personally I didn't really care for, you know, but it's. If you stick to emotional benefits of the products and, and sort of that they're gonna buy again. It's, it's old. It's cliche at this point. They buy on emotion. They justify with logic. Those are, those are the pieces you need to hit. And, you know, sometimes you can do it in three and a half minutes, sometimes it takes 15. I'm cool. You know, I'll usually check in, um, if I notice somebody's on a call for like 15, 20 minutes, I'll usually check in around that piece to see, hey, is everything okay on that call? Because sometimes they can go off the rails. That's one of the reasons why I'm not 100 scripted here with my departments is customers ask questions that you can't always prepare for.

Speaker A: Yeah, no, I think you've dropped a lot of really Interesting insights there. I want to touch on one in particular that you said people, um, buy from people they like. I would agree that that's not true. I think, you know, it's, it's just said too much these days. Or I suppose a, a similar one to that would be people buy from people. Ah, what's your, how would you reply to someone who said that?

Speaker B: You know, it's, it's, it's very similar to the thing like there's no Such thing as B2B you're selling to a person. Well, you know, the data doesn't say that. The data says that if your company has 100 plus people, you're going to be having seven decision makers you have to deal with. So you're not just selling to one person, you know, people, to people. It's, it's an obvious piece of sales. But at the end of the day, while a specific person is the one that's going to get you across the finish line to close a deal, it's the product that got them interested in the first place. And that's where you need to keep the focus, is the benefits of those products. Because, you know, even, even when someone like, if I were to give you a personal story about the dogs I have and why, you know, your labradoodle should be on product, you know, some people argue, well, that's a personal story. Yeah, but it's a personal story about the product. It's, it has nothing to do whether it's, whether it's my dog specifically or one of the customers I just spoke to or one of the other, you know, testimonials, um, we have online. It's the benefits the product yield that generate the sales. And that's true in marketing and that's true in phone calls. And, and that's the point. You need to get across a hundred

Speaker A: percent agree with you. And not to toot my own horn, but someone inside our company said to me the other day, you know, it's easy for you to do sales because people like you. And I said, it's absolutely nothing to do with that. That's just a bonus. You know, them able to build a relationship, it's because they like what I'm saying and they agree with it and they want what we have. If I come across as likable, you know, that might make both our jobs a bit easier. But that's not the reason that the sale was done in the first place.

Speaker B: Yeah, I do think there's times where that sort of likability and Friendship can help when it comes to say, especially on the B2B side, retaining customers. Especially if your contract is coming up and are you going to vet out other vendors or you're just going to roll into a renewal on the D2C side. I don't think that's true. You know, a lot of these companies who still have phone based customer service and that is, you know, there's less and less of those people that are, that are offering phone based customer service. But the odds of you speaking to the same customer service representative, you know, 6m months apart is so slim. Based on staff size, based on retention. I mean it's one of the highest turn positions in the, in the world quite frankly. Um, you know it's, you don't have a typical relationship on the D2C side, customer to specific agent. You have it on the, on the product level. I would argue you don't even have it on the brand level. A lot of times I've spoken to so many D2C customers where they didn't know what the brand name was. They were super Beta prostate customer, they didn't know what new vitality was. And that's true of all the companies I've worked for. You know, it's, people put a lot of stock into branding. Um, but it's the product at the end of the day that's gonna do the heavy lifting.

Speaker A: 100 agree with you. Nothing more else to add on that point. Before we finish, I want to get your approach on win back campaigns. There's been a bit of back and forth on LinkedIn I've seen as well, people saying they're generally not effective, they're sort of low roi, not worth focusing on. Run us through how you would approach a win back campaign and we'll specifically stay with the pet supplement example. As you said, maybe you got to like 45 days, you consider them lapsed or about to lapse. Would you book those people like anyone beyond that point in a win back campaign?

Speaker B: So you know there's, there's a couple of campaigns I run that kind of fall into the win back category. Um, the straight sale one that I specifically mentioned. Where they should have reordered and they haven't is obviously a win back and that's fairly simple. We call, you know, there's five to seven business days to ship product or whatever your normal shipping time is. If they bought a 30 day supply by day 30 they should have ordered. If they haven't ordered on day 30, there's an issue I'm calling on day 30 because it's going to take a week to get the product. So you're out, you're going to be out for a week. Yeah, I'm calling on day 30 for subscription cancellations, for uh, voluntary subscription cancellations, not declines. Those are a little bit different. Um, the logic behind contact strategy, a lot of times can be dictated and it depends on the size of the company and how much segmentation you're willing to do can be dictated by reason for cancellation. If you're gathering that information. A lot of companies try online surveys. You know as one, if it's phone based cancellations you have a little bit more accurate data in my opinion. But how long post cancellation you call is going to be an important piece. 1 When I was first starting a win back campaign and I'm going to be completely transparent, the first time I started a win back campaign for um, autoship cancellations, it took two years to lock in the offer as well as a contact strategy that worked. It was a lot of testing, it was a lot of pausing and starting and stopping and you know, my CEO was bullish on it and took me forever to get that going when I first started. Um, what I will tell you is the number one customer you are likely to win back are the ones who canceled because they were overstocked. And you need to set your timing based around how much average supply these people who are canceling have left. You know it's, it's in an ideal world if somebody says I'm um, overstocked, I canceled, you'd capture that data. But we're not in an ideal world and that's very, very granular. Your segments are going to be so small it's not even going to be worth it. So what I've seen in um, in the CPD industry for farm for Nutraceuticals specifically, If you're selling 30 day supplies at a pop, the average customer who cancels from overstock has between three to four months supply left. So I'm calling 90 days out and when we call 90 days out we'll get, I still have one or two bottles left. That's when we start talking about shipping time. Um, I'll admit I know you're not a big fan but a lot of my win back campaigns do have discounts built in. Um, so we will work on closing with a discount if necessary. Um, but for, for those types of consumable products, probably 90 days out is, is where you want to be. Again with some exceptions. You know, I've Had, I've had advice when I first started from third party call centers I was going to leverage as a vendor who were like, we want the data in real time. We're calling them back as soon as your phone call ends, you know. So it was a lot of testing to get that going.

Speaker A: Sounds like there's obviously a lot of scripts in places at different parts of the company customer journey. Sorry to um, to try and capture people and bring them back. But yeah, this is super interesting because you know, there's just not any focus in any of the brands I've worked with, to be completely honest, on using the phone. And I've always forced. Right. Like when I look through all the data we have on them, we've got everyone's phone number and I was speaking to one of our strats just not too long ago saying, you know, I wonder if we just picked up the phone to these people how receptive they would be and how much more effective it might be than, you know, trying to communicate with them on mediums that sometimes they're not even engaged. Engaged on.

Speaker B: Right.

Speaker A: Like not everyone's opening emails or sms. So at that point you're gonna spend on Facebook to retarget them anyway. Why not get allocated towards someone picking up the phone and trying to call them directly.

Speaker B: Yeah. What I will say is one of the more interesting tests I've run in my career is I worked for a company that was, that was um, very, very heavily E com. Some of my companies have been more traditional media like TV and radio. But this one was very, very heavy into E comm and they had a decent um, abandoned cart series. You know, they would send out, I don't remember it was like five emails. Nothing um, would go out for 30 minutes because you know that 30 minute window we had so many people come back and reorder that it was worth waiting, whatever the logic was. But one of the first campaigns I started was abandoned cart phones and the CMO at the time challenged that the cost per order and we were paying on a cost per order basis. So if they didn't close any deals, we didn't pay the third party center anything. Um, it was cheaper to get them because the CPOs for, you know, email are so dirt cheap. Um, prior to me coming on board we were getting like uh, one and a half, 2% abandoned card recovery or something like that. With me on board and with the phones on board, we were doing like 7 or 8% total. And when we dropped the phones, the email um, conversion actually was Lower than they had last expected. So many of the conversions were coming from phones. Um, the test, which was supposed to be a month long, lasted about a week and I was told by the CEO to turn it back on immediately. Uh, it was, it was very, very successful. And it gives you that halo effect. I think you and I were chatting about that in a thread recently too. Um, you know that halo effect is completely understated by a lot and underestimated by a lot of people. Having these multiple channels of reach out is a huge piece of it. And you know, we know, we know from, ah, I know from, from research. I have people, I call that then click through the email and ordered even though the phone call prompted the original order. It's, you have to do it, you have to do it 100.

Speaker A: It's also why I think it's just stupid to silo each channel and go, oh, you should do email instead of the phone or you should do SMS instead of email. No, you should do all of them and you should look to, for all of them to complement each other. Because it's all about ads, uh, and violence. Staying top of mind as well is very important. Through different channels, people like to communicate in different ways. There's no reason why you can't combine all of these together.

Speaker B: Yep, it's the most siloed company I worked with. Had reorder pricing for customers who've ordered before, catalog pricing, had web based pricing, had phone based pricing, and then we had a postcard, uh, direct mail campaign. And we had these five different price points for every single product. And it took us forever, years before we finally started aligning everything. And you know, it was like, well wait, I called on the phone. Why is the web price different? We had a product that uh, we were selling for on the website. It was selling for 49.99. The phone offer was a free trial up front, but it billed monthly at 69.99. So like if they all went online, they're like, why am I paying $20 for more? You can't, it's hard to explain. Well, because you opted for the free trial so we can charge you more. You know, it's, it's, it's a bad experience. It's a bad experience.

Speaker A: Yeah, no, I agree with you. By the way. I just want to clarify, I'm not against using discounts, especially not in a, in a win back campaign. I think if it's a uh, last chance saloon to grab someone then I mean, why not? Because you're probably going to Lose them anyway. So I don't see any, any downsides most of the time. So you isn't good then.

Speaker B: The biggest trick for discounts and win backs is what comes next. It's how are you going to treat that customer moving forward? Um, for me, for what it's worth, if they opt into the subscription, we'll lock them into that price. But if they don't opt into the subscription, we're going to go ahead and you'll be billed regular price. And we try our best to not train customers to wait for that phone call. Also, it's obviously not 100% accurate but you don't want to train customers and I know this is something you've talked about, you know, you don't want to train customers wait for that discount. We had an email campaign. It was the most profitable email campaign we had at the end of every month. The last three days it was 25% discount. It was the same customers ordering over and over again for the last three days of the month, you know. And that brought in 70% of the email revenue. Yeah, you know it was, it was hard to. Actually one of the more successful campaigns I ran on phones was when I found out they were doing that. I um, I pulled a list of people who'd ordered from that email and I just called them at the first half of the month and you know, we closed a lot of deals from there. And subsequently email revenue was down that month. But I think when you took the two departments together we ended up net positive ROIs on the, I'm sorry, AOVs on the phone are typically higher also because you're, you're more nimble. Um, and that's something I'm really, really proud of. You know we have auto ship sign up rates, subscription sign up rates that are 2x our website, we have AOVs that are between 30 to 50% higher than web based orders. And that's how you make back a lot of the ROI on the more expensive campaigns.

Speaker A: Oh absolutely, yeah. Ah. If you can converse with someone over the phone or in person, then definitely the AOV is going to be higher. The same way you go into like a store. Right. Like the upsells that this just more subtle as well.

Speaker B: Yeah.

Speaker A: You know like an email just gives you the chance to walk away. But actually there's something really powerful about when you put something on someone in person. Some, a lot of people find it hard to say no as well. And it's not necessarily about bullying them into a sale. It's just the way it's framed, right?

Speaker B: Yeah, oh, absolutely, absolutely. You know, it's, you never want to pass. And I've worked with, again, I've worked with, you know, hundreds, if not thousands of sales agents at this point in my career. It's never about bullying them into the next move. It's about walking them down that path and making sure it's a right fit. I've worked with some bullies before. I mean, I worked with one guy and I remember, you know, we were able to use prior payment methods and he's like, you just have to say okay. Just say okay, sir, sir, sir, sir. Just say okay. You never want deals like that. They don't work. It's just a return. It's a chargeback. It's, you know, it's a complaint. It's not worth it.

Speaker A: Exactly. Final question before I let you run off. How about leaving voicemails if someone doesn't answer? Um, is this something you do as well?

Speaker B: I only do it for the decline campaigns because there's um, they're more likely to call back. Especially I use scripting that that makes it sound like you need to call us back today. Um, but for all the other campaigns, no, the re reason is it slows down dialing. You know, it's another 30 seconds that you can't dial the next number. The number metric to be successful in these campaigns is dials. It's the foundation. You know, you can't sell 100 customers if you're not dialing a thousand customers. So you need to, you need to get your dials in and the return rate on voicemails. And this is by the way, only for D2C. I'm always leave voicemails for B2B but for D2C no.

Speaker A: Wow, man. Um, that's grueling. Yeah. Files and dials. Hopefully that's not per day. Or is it it?

Speaker B: No. So on a D2C basis, my guys will make between 250 to 300 dials in an eight hour shift. Um, and for what it's worth, we also dial by hand. We don't use auto dialers. Um, it overcomes some of those regulatory challenges we, we've mentioned and I've always been this way. Um, it's, I am, I'm a cruel taskmaster with dials to the point where when I speak to new phone providers, they're like, oh, you must be using an oil dialer. I'm not. No. You then your number isn't right. Like I don't want to go through the conversation it is. My guys are happy. They stay with me for a long time. Like, you know, their fingers aren't literally bleeding, but, you know, it's. It's one of those things people have preconceived notions of how many dials you can make in a day. And not based on reality, it's based on some number from some, you know, rotary phones, maybe. I don't know.

Speaker A: Yeah. So, look, I love sales. It's, um. I think it's probably one of the hardest skills to master. But once you do, and at the end of the day, right, like, the more you do anything, you get better. Right. I think a lot of people are weirdly fearful of sales, but for me, like, I sort of ended up in sales in our business just by default because I was the one who enjoyed speaking to people. But now I've learned sales, I actually feel like a way better marketer as well, because through speaking to people, you actually know the real, you know, emotional triggers to make someone buy. And it, it helps you improve so much of business because you're speaking to people and you're learning out about human psychology all the time. Yeah.

Speaker B: I think one of the biggest challenges in sales overall is poor sales management. You have a lot of salespeople that are out there floundering because they're not trained at how to do their job better.

Speaker A: Yeah.

Speaker B: You know, I look at, especially in the SaaS industry, a lot of these guys hire 2, 3, 400 SDRs, and their response rate is awful. And I get the emails and forget about the ones that go to spam. Like, they're bad emails. They're bad emails. Nobody's there helping them. Nobody's there helping them. When I have my B2B teams, the first thing we're doing is we're measuring what cold emails work. You know, if you have a cold email that works from one of your SDRs, every SDR should be using the cold email that works. If they're all sending out their own stuff, how are you going to get results? Why would you have somebody who gets a 20 contact rate or a 20 reply rate and then somebody who has a 5%? Why not just give the same email to the 5% person so that the whole team has a 20 reply rate? It's, it's. There's a. There's a lot of missteps there.

Speaker A: There is, there is. And I'm not. Not. How can people contact you if they want to learn more? Anything related to sales? LinkedIn email.

Speaker B: LinkedIn is fine. Uh, my personal email address is Jason Swiss28gmail.com. I'm happy to respond that way. Um, you know, and answer any questions. I love talking about sales. I've been in it for a long time. I probably talk too much about sales, my wife would say. But, you know, without sales, I definitely wouldn't be married right now. So there's that. That was a big deal. That was a big deal to close.

Speaker A: Good stuff, man. Well, thank you very much for your time. Much appreciated. Yeah, if anyone's got any questions for Jason, feel free to drop them in the comments here and I'm sure he'll get back to you. We'll give you a tag on LinkedIn, but we're going to round things out for now. Thank you very much for your time and I'll speak to you soon, mate.

Speaker B: Thanks for having me, man. It was a pleasure.

Speaker A: Cheers.