SaaS Sales: The Playbook Every Founder Needs to Scale

Speaker A: If you're looking at that, your rep and your company is speaking the most and the customer isn't, especially at the very beginning front, you're doing it wrong. Like you want to get. The whole thing is get that customer talking, get them to explain to you the pain points. And if you're talking the most, I'm like, it's not going to end well.

Speaker B: Welcome to SaaS App Building B2B Web Applications, the podcast where we share real world stories, practical advice and tech insights for those building or thinking about starting a tech enabled business. I am your co host, Aaron Marchbanks

Speaker C: and I'm Justin Edwards. Each week we bring you the stories, strategies and insights you need to build your SaaS or tech enabled business smarter, not harder. Let's dive right in.

Speaker B: Hello everyone and welcome back to SaaS that app. So glad to see you again. With me, as always, across the microphone and in the heated environment of Mexico is Justin Edwards. How are you doing, Justin?

Speaker C: Doing pretty well. We're supposed to be 95 this afternoon and somewhere like 80, 80 plus percent humidity, so.

Speaker B: Oh, so it's cooled off.

Speaker C: Sweater weather. Sweater weather. Looking forward to fall? No, it's good, it's good.

Speaker B: We're getting all of the thunderstorms that are being shoved this way due to that sort of weather. So it's been inside for me for a while now. But it's at least pleasant. So I'll take the overcast and rain and decent temperature for the time being. Also joining us today, we are excited to welcome Tom Stearns, who is the founder of Stearns Consulting, and Peter Cleary, who's the senior manager at Akamai Technologies. They also happen to be the co authors of Graphic Sales how to Build a Prospecting Playbook, where they argue that most companies don't actually have a prospecting, uh, problem, they have a playbook problem. We're going to get into some of that today and many other things. But gentlemen, thank you so much for joining the pod.

Speaker A: Thank you for having us.

Speaker D: Great to be here.

Speaker B: Absolutely. So, first thing is for Tom, I think I'm noting this correctly, that you have a degree in, or at least studied fine arts.

Speaker D: Yes, I have a degree in fine. Fine arts from St. Anselm College and Peter's got a history major. And yet we're both in sales.

Speaker B: It's a common path. I myself have a degree in fine arts, vocal music performance specifically, which really set me on the path for computer technologies.

Speaker D: Well, I can tell your voice is something special, Aaron. You've got a great Voice so I can see where it came from.

Speaker B: Did you have like a specific area of study there? Just fine arts in general or.

Speaker D: Yeah, so fine arts was a blend of like basically art history and studio arts. So I did a lot of drawing, painting, graphic design. I did take some extra graphic design courses. Cause I thought that might be where I could find a career. And it's actually where I started and then drifted through marketing and into sales and now here we are 30 years later.

Speaker B: Amazing.

Speaker A: Yeah.

Speaker B: My daughter also, she is an actual artist, so she is legit like you painting and drawing and mixed mediums and all that kind of stuff. She is studying that as well. So I'm. I too am getting an education in that because mine is all on the musical side of things. So you guys and Tom, you specifically have spent a lot of time helping SaaS companies over the years kind of figure out what's working and what's not working in their go to market strategies. So just kind of diving right in. From your experience, how often would you say the real issue is something that the company accidentally built into its go to marketing strategy when they maybe didn't really mean to or went about it the wrong way?

Speaker D: I'd say most of the time, Aaron, they've kind of fallen into their ways of doing things. And it's often a deconstruction that we do. When I work with clients, starting with the ideal customer profile and setting the groundwork, which is where the idea for the book came is, that's a lot of the work we do. Uh, strip it down and put the building blocks together properly and then accelerate from there.

Speaker A: Yeah. I think in the book we always open up with Eli Stone is the artist who draws the stuff. But Tom and I, these are real life experiences. We try to use the comics as the uh, this is one what not to do. Right. This is real life things that happened and you shouldn't do this. And one of the things Tom and you know, we talked about, we wrote a story based off of some of the interactions. But one thing I knew like when I was running, so I worked for a company called Level 3 and I was a sales engineering director for the Northeast. You'd have new presence come in and like we're going to increase sales. So let's sell down market or let's sell this. I'm like, you can't just say that the product set and who we're buying to. There's a science to what we're going after. And each time somebody would do that, like we failed but we would tell them like, you're going to fail because you don't have the product set, we don't have the marketing material, the training hasn't been there, you haven't hired the right people to go after this marketplace. So there's so many different pieces that we're missing. But people were looking at the numbers and like, hey, if we sold down market, we could pick up our sales, we could pick up our shares of that marketplace. I'm like, it's not as simple as doing that. That's why Tom and I talk about the playbook is you really have to think about this is a science of how to set this thing up properly to make sure that you can be successful.

Speaker B: Yeah. You spend a lot of time in the book and in a lot of your posts you're talking about, you know, more activity does not equal more sales. I mean, that's kind of a fundamental principle. Right. And that used to be more the case. You know, it did used to be the whole spray and pray of shotgun approach to sales. You know, if I do a lot, I'm going to at least get a little.

Speaker D: Right.

Speaker B: So talk to me about how that approach has shifted over the years and into what it is that you are centering some of your messaging around where it's not so much the case anymore. It does need to be much more focused. And how do you get to that focus?

Speaker D: Yeah, so I think depending on the size company, right. So if you look at the smaller SaaS companies, the startups, the scale ups, the founder or the founding team, they understand the customer like deeply. They really understand, they built the product for them, like they're deep in the understanding. And what we often find is that as the company scale, the understanding of the customer gets further and further, further away and that you're bringing in more salespeople. And like Peter said, sometimes you're just saying, hey, we need a bigger total addressable market. Maybe we'll go after this vertical, this industry, or we just need to do more of this. And they're missing what was intrinsic to what the founder knew. They're missing the science of deconstructing that and saying, no, these are the attributes of the company, the buyer that we solve the problems for. And they're not just vertical based. They're often like deeply embedded in your data. So when you get big enough, like you have to mine the data and say, hey, these four or five attributes are really what matter. And that's your building block of like, okay, this is their world. And Then you have to teach your sales team how to understand that world, how to target that world. And that's not. I mean, it can become volume over time, but at first it has to be that deep knowledge. And that's why it's the first chapter in our book, Aaron the Ideal Customer Profile. And Peter paints a picture with a story there of how it was often done poorly. And that's where we try to go with it.

Speaker A: I think the piggyback on it. When I first started out in sales, that's the sales director, one of the things was like 5 after 5, go knock the door. At least 5 doors after 5 o'. Clock. Because 5 o' clock is when the assistant left to the secretary left. So you can get to the decision. That's how old I am, right. To go there. Because it was like at volume, volume, volume, volume. And as Tom mentioned, what's changed is the customer is more educated. Right? So they got the Internet, they're doing a lot more research. So just calling people and introduce yourself and saying, I could do something different. You need to know what their business problems are. Because the customer does. The customer's looking. They know what the business problem, uh, they've already done the research and are looking for it. So you have to be on your game when you talk to them and get them live. It's not just, hey, would you be interested in hearing about me? Because I can solve your CRM issues or whatever they are. You have to like, here's what your problem is in their industry. Or you might have, I saw this. Like, you have to do a lot more research to have a lot more educational conversation with the customer because the customer is better educated themselves. You're starting a deeper conversation. So when I was growing up, it was knocking the door and introduce yourself and introduce something new because the customer didn't know anything about it. The prospect didn't know anything about it. Now they do. So you're leapfrogging past that point and saying, I need to know more about this customer even before I talk to them. That's where the change has happened, is that you're now a lot more knowledgeable prospecting base. So you have to be better at your targeting calls.

Speaker B: And I would say that that's paid off in spades, at least with people like myself. I mean, I too, I could date myself. I won't. But the whole notion of I have a solution that I'm bringing to you and I'm going to make it fit to whatever problem that you're having. Instead of working in the other direction. And that. That always was a huge turnoff to me because, as you say, they don't know what my actual problems are. I get that you have a product or a thing or whatever it happens to be, and you're trying to make it fit to me, what I need to know is that you understand my problem and that your solution does actually fit. And over the years, I've talked, uh, myself out of probably as much business as we brought in just because I prefer that approach. And I like being honest with our clients and saying, you know, we're not a good fit for you and what you're trying to do here, or have you thought about it this way? That doesn't really include us, But I don't know that you've really considered this approach or this sort of a thing. And so I really appreciate the approach of get to know your client, get to know their issues, and then work backwards from there. And the answer might be, it's not us, and everybody being okay with that.

Speaker A: That's a huge point that we talk about, too, is like, I, uh, hate the term fail fast, but understand the situation quickly and move on. And if you do the right thing by customers, they could call you down the road. I mean, that's what the great thing about sales is. How many times you just got to call it the blue. And like, holy cow, this is because you set the foundation before. But the other point I want to make there is so, again, how old I am transitioning the mentality. And we had this whole program, we have a comic about it. They call it, uh, I used to call it a target account profile, kind of the icp. But the big part of that education to the salesforce and to my engineers was stop talking about products, talk about the solution. I'm like, you are not allowed to mention product name to the customer for the first meeting at all. You have to find out the solution. And so we had the slide deck built, and we had this guy in the corner that was the customer saying, what's in it for me? I'm like, everything has to be towards finding out what the business thing is and what this is solution for. Stop talking about product sets. And I got to tell you, that was just hammering people constantly because they just love telling about the products. They love telling you what we can do for people. Like, find out what the pain point is

Speaker C: real quick. This episode is brought to you by Delta Systems, which is what Aaron and I do when we're not talking through microphones. To you, the people of the Internet, we've got a really, really great software team here, and we love to work with cool people on cool projects. So if that sounds like you and you've got a problem or you're in some kind of a jam, go to deltasystems.com grab a time with us. We can beat up on your problem together. And if there's a fit there, amazing. We'll help you out. So Deltasystems.com, grab an appointment, and, hey, maybe we can work together. Um, do you find that comes up a lot with founders where they're just so in love with product. It's their baby that they built, and they just want to show off a gajillion features and all the cool stuff that their little baby does, and they don't focus on why the customer would care about and what it does for them.

Speaker A: Yes, there is a cartoon in there. We're, uh, meeting with Fidelity, and we brought in the cto. We'd been with the company from the start, and he spent so much time talking about building the fiber. So Level three is a fiber network provider. Building the fiber network. They're telling stories about building this huge infrastructure and how great it was and sitting down. And I remember looking at the Fidelity people, like, they have no idea what it has to do with anything that we're talking about. Like, he was just so excited to talk about how he built the company, how great it was, and how things. Stuff. I'm like, but it has no relevance to what they're trying to solve for this. So when he sat down and he actually. The funny thing, the comic is because he then opened up a USA network and started reading it, didn't pay attention to anything else. I'm like, yeah, you just want to talk about what you loved, about what you did with the company. And it has no relevance what this customer wants. So, yes, it does happen. It does happen.

Speaker D: I see that quite often. Yeah. I work with small companies to enterprise. And the small ones, the founders are like, they're the biggest asset to the sales team. Right. You love when you can get the founder, the CEO. Uh, but typically they're going to demo every feature.

Speaker A: Right?

Speaker D: Um, they're going to talk about everything and how often the deconstruction process will be. I've got salespeople, and I'm like, why is. There was an hour meeting with a customer and 45 minutes of you were demoing features, and they're like, oh, yeah. We were taught we had to hit every single feature. And I'M like, well, we got to get rid of that.

Speaker B: Please know.

Speaker D: Right?

Speaker A: Yeah.

Speaker D: We need to find three problems and then demonstrate three solutions to those problems. That's all we need to do in a demo, if we need to do a demo at all. So, yeah, a lot of founders are in love with their own products, so they got to talk about everything.

Speaker C: I am a founder. I'd love for you guys to workshop this with me as well, because, like, this is the structure of our demo calls and I think maybe we're doing okay. So we book a 30 minute demo. I try to get the customer to talk for about 25 minutes of that. How do you bring people in? What is your process? What are your pain points today? What are the things that you're spending a lot of time on? And just basically give me to tell them their story and everything that's going on with them. Then at the last five minutes or so, we pop open and demo two or three things that exactly explain how our product might solve the things that they've been telling me about and their pain points and problems. Is that pretty close to what you recommend for folks? What tweaks would you make?

Speaker D: It's 100% spot on. Absolutely. And depending on how much time you might need, more time for the demo. So you can always book the next meeting from that. But yeah, it's exploration I like. The only thing I would tweak in that, Justin, is try to focus on their aspiration first. Like, hey, where do you want to be? Like, if you had the ideal solution for what you're trying to solve six months from now, what would that look like? So you put them in a positive mindset and then they will take you through all the reasons they can't do that today, which are all the problems you're getting, but you get to leave them with like, that, hey, this person's gonna fix my problems. They get. We think about the positive as opposed to, like, tell me everything that's not working. It's a slight tweak. It's a nuance.

Speaker C: No, I like the reframe. It's really cool.

Speaker A: Yeah, it's smart because it puts them on the road of like, hey, I can get to where I want to be. This person's gonna allow me to do that. So that's great. But the other thing to think about, Tom brings a lot of tools into, like, helping people understand their things. And I know that, Tom, I think you might have shared it on LinkedIn or I saw it from before, but you can see on these conversations, how much, who's speaking? If you're looking at that your rep and your company is speaking the most and the customer isn't, especially at the very beginning front, you're doing it wrong. Like you want to get the whole thing is get that customer talking, get them to explain to you the pain points. And if you're talking the most, I'm like, it's not going to end well.

Speaker D: Yeah, yeah. Look for the talk time now, a lot of the tools today. Yeah, I don't know if you use Fathom or any kind of meeting request, but they'll give you a visual of the call. I'll just look at visuals to assess a sales team and they all have. There's a complexion. Of course there are exceptions. But yeah, like Peter said, you want to see like a little bit of you at the beginning and then you want to see like a long bar of the customer talking, which it sounds like you're doing, Justin. And a couple blips in there where you're asking follow up questions. And then if I see that it's like, okay, great, we've learned a lot. So then by the time we're talking about the solution, we've got a full picture. And that's what you want to do. Because if you jump into demonstrating early with a little bit of information, you may have missed big points that really matter. And then the customers now they're going to fight you back on. You're like, oh, but this is what's different here. So the whole visualization helps for me anyways, I do a lot of call coaching.

Speaker C: So there's a super, uh, famous book came out I think in the 1920s, maybe older than that. Basically this is the natural flow over of that which is how to win friends and influence people. Right. So it's been 100 years. Do you have a take as to why we're still having to beat home this lesson? Is it just anti human nature? We talk about this. It's been my whole career and it's like the answer is always the same.

Speaker A: Well, first off, in a hundred years people will mention about a graphic novel. So they'll mention our book. The same branch.

Speaker B: Yeah, there's that aspiration, right?

Speaker C: Yeah.

Speaker D: Peter has a lot of unfulfilled aspirations, but yeah, so it's funny, Todd Capone's the sales historian. He's always writing about like the 20s, the 30s and how yeah, most of selling hasn't really changed because it's just human nature. And for some reason we keep falling Back into all the bad habits. And one of the things with technology I think we like to talk about is that AI will accelerate your bad habits. But if you uh, build a good foundation. And now AI is wonderful I think for the research aspect. So if, you know, if you've done the work on this, uh, these are the attributes of my target account profile, my ideal customer profile. And you know those well enough, you extracted what the founder really meant, you know, really understood. Now you can use these tools to find the right companies with the right signals and attributes so you can take some of the research away from the rep. But if you've done a poor job there and now you've got AI, uh, pulling the wrong data points, pointing you in the wrong direction at scale. And then some companies are using fully automated outbound email and really destroying the reputation because they got the foundation wrong. So powerful tools, powerful mistakes. It's no different with AI in my experience.

Speaker A: So I think also one of the big things is Tom and I talk about this a lot. There's a misconception about sales as an art versus sales as a science, right? So I think all these books are telling you is there's some art to this, but this is science. The playbook is a perfect example of like, listen, a lot of people think that you have to be the extrovert and you can sell a uh, popsicle to the woman with white gloves or a chocolate popsicle with white gloves. Like this is like people are born to be salespeople. That is not the case. And I think that's why there's these books and these things still are out there is because we really educating people getting into sales, like you can learn and this is science to this. There's data here and certain things help you become a better salesperson. But you do not have to be this super extroverted salesy person to be successful. You just need to follow and be intelligent and due diligent about it. And there's a statement I always say about sales. Sales is one of the easiest, hardest jobs you can do. What I mean about that is it's very hard to follow the day in, day out scripting of what you need to do. But what you need to do is pretty simple. Like it is laid out there for you. You follow these things. I'm like, I know what I need to do. It's just doing it uh, is hard. Getting the rejection a hundred times a day, that's hard. But you will be successful if you follow the science behind this stuff. So I Think to your point. The reason why there's so many books written about this is because people's mentality and thought process of sales is that it is very art specific and you have to have some type of magic that you're born with to do this stuff, but you don't. Sales is a very teachable skill set.

Speaker B: I think the other thing too is that people who do find some success early with the approach of I have actually spent the time to do some research. I do have an icp. I am in a vertical that I deeply understand. There is a particular approach to those clients at that point in time. But as the ball moves down the field, that approach is not enough or it's not right anymore. So now you know you've gotten some traction, you've reached a point where you're trying to scale. I won't say that you've exhausted your vertical or your potential client base or whatever that happens to be, but you now have to shift the emphasis into. Peter, what you were saying, into the data. And so let's say that we are now that far down the field. So especially for the founders who are listening, but just people in general, what are the types of practical data points or what are some practical things that people should shift or do as a sales team, as a go to marketing approach at that point that differs from what you've done before but get you further down the field now successfully.

Speaker D: Often like we've got a founder that's doing a lot of the selling and then they're getting too big to. They can't do the selling anymore. Right. They have a team and they need to back away from that. Is that a fair context for a stage in a company? Yeah, I think what needs to happen there is that what the founder knows has to be extracted, starting with the ideal customer profile. So that would be a, ah, clear definition of what companies buy from us and why. What are the data driven attributes? So the founder might know. But. But what can be done very easily if you're tracking any of this is using AI or just reporting on what are the 4 to 5 attributes that make that company a great customer of ours. And they can be a multitude of things. So those need to be extracted and so they can be modeled against the total addressable market, which sounds simple, but when say a founder now gets investment, they get a series A and they've got to scale up. How narrow can we make that ideal customer profile? Because what I often see is that they don't really look at the four to Five attributes. Or they look at them and they're like, oh, that's every company in America. Or that's like these 12. And it's millions of companies. So you have to try to narrow the focus down because the salespeople that are going to come in, you need to make them as expert as possible as quickly as possible. And that takes time. So if you can narrow and say, you know what, we actually can sell to these four different verticals, uh, or these five different verticals, but each vertical is massive. How can we narrow that to say like this vertical with these attributes is only 1,000 accounts or 2,000 accounts and they're really a good fit because of X, Y and Z. Now you have the ability to simplify teaching that rep what they need to know about the end user and the buyer. And you can point them in one direction, they can become expert. What took you maybe your life to become a founder and build these solutions for this particular company? Think of someone walking off the street that's never sold your product before. How much do they have to learn? So I do this with every client. It's like, how do we narrow that field as much as possible? There might be other verticals. That's certainly appropriate.

Speaker B: Yeah, that's kind of my question. How do you get your potential sales team to those data points?

Speaker D: Yeah, well, you try to extract what makes a company the ideal for you and then you model it against the rest of the market and see, like, how can we take a segment of the market that's similar. I'm using vertical or an industry, because often they're similar, like language used within a vertical. Often people will move from one company to another within the same vertical. So when you think about a target audience, say banking, hey, we can sell to banks and we can also sell to insurance. Well, let's start with banks because people that worked at one bank for five years might work somewhere else. It's likely another bank. So we've sold the one bank and they might know someone at another bank. So it makes your targeting a little bit easier to expand upon and build your network into that. And it's easier to teach a rep. Like the language of a bank versus bank insurance is different, might have the same problems. But let's start with what's similar so we can become more expert, call in similar titles, people know each other and then you can build into a team, into insurance in six months. Am I explaining that well, guys, or is that just confusing?

Speaker A: Peter, here's what I've seen. Two high end Things. So how to expand it is and I kind of mentioned it before, a lot of times you're going to go off the rails by the top dictating to the sales team. There has to be a flow of knowledge coming up. There's many times we've expanded, uh, different areas because the field has seen the pain of the customers and said, hey, we have the capability of doing this over here, which we didn't think about before. And it's a repeatable, simple product set we can do that's within our capability. We might not offer today, but we can do it. So there's when MPLS again. Dating myself, how old I am, when MPLS first came out versus VPN MPLS came out and it was taking over. Everybody was buying that Cisco was pushing equipment. Everybody was talking about switching over to this MPLS infrastructure. Fortunately my team, we were looking at talking to customers and the customers really were confused about do they need to go to this or not. And when we started to get to the pain points in the direction they were going, they would need more bandwidth to meet more locations. And we actually uncovered that private lines would be better for them. It was just too expensive. So we were able to create a product set that met the needs from a pricing standpoint as well as the throughput, solving the problem. And that product ended up being for the next five years the top product that everybody was selling. And we kind of by sitting listening to customers and then having our CEO listen to us. He flew to Boston because we came up with this design and he's like, this is really good, let's tweak this. And they kept on building upon it. But he was listening to the field tell us we can make this is a market, this is where the direction is going. This is the pain points the customers are seeing. This is what we need to do. So that bottom up is really important to expanding your presence because if you're like I said before, if you're saying we want to go down market but you don't have the product set there, well, you're not going to be successful. The sales teams are not going to understand why they're selling it, what the point is. So that's really important is to listen from the top up. The second and this is where it becomes that top down problem is the founders tend to become bespoked, they like to customize. Yes, we can do that for you. We just need to do this.

Speaker B: I don't know what you're talking about. That doesn't sound right at all so

Speaker A: you have to focus on repeatable process and simple like you cannot customize. And that's one of the founders problems is we can do this, this is business we want to win. So let's do this for this one customer and then let's do this for this other. Like if you wanted this success, you have to be able to bulk load this and bulk sell this and it has to be repeatable, simple process. So those two things are huge.

Speaker C: Do you have any tips or frameworks for trying to identify if this is a gap? Like our product probably should do this, but it doesn't. And we're losing sales because we're missing a feature that our ICP actually want wants versus oh, uh, this customer wants everything in a bag of potato chips and is asking us to customize and pollute our product offering. How do you think about that as a company who wants to win a business and wants to bring in the cash flow?

Speaker A: It's a complicated answer. And the reason it's a complicated answer is because if you go down many roads, your CRM tool is being used wrong, right? So salespeople hate to fill it out because it's being used to judge to them or they hit their sales numbers. So not filling out certain things, you want to have that knowledge from the field. So it's basically how do I get there? I'm going to use a real company. How do I understand that I cannot break into Amica because amica I'm not solving their problem. But I keep on telling product what we need to do to win them. But it's just, it's not resonating and I'm not getting into the right people. So you have to have a way for the field people to be able to put that information succinctly into a tool salesforce or CRM or whatever to be able to then have people flush it out and look at it. So that's the biggest problem is people open up Jira tickets because of bug issues but you don't really know what the big problem is. So you have to have a way to have the field communicating what they're seeing and listen to them. Because sales frustration engineers, those folks that get frustrated because we know what the customer's pain points are but we're not going the right direction is because those, the engineering teams, uh, whatever teams are not really listening to the field. The field is going to tell you what the customers are feeling.

Speaker D: I think there's a loop there too. I mean it's like one thing I Tell sales teams is sell what's available today. Right. You can collect what the field is asking. Right. But your job is not to customize anything. Right? We don't have the resources to customize, but like Peter said, capture the information and analyze it. Hey, we've got 34 requests in the last six months for this feature. And so now product is like, well, maybe we should build that, but we also have these others. So how many requests? But then also maybe some outside analysis. Let's do a survey to the broader market to see if that really matters. So I think, Justin, it's like as much data as you can collect both through those conversations, the broader market and analyze it and what it would cost to do. I have a client right now, Swimtopia. They're a, uh, small company growing and they have this problem all the time and there's a lot of discussion, collection of data points and sometimes it's like an educated, ultimately an educated guess, really quick story.

Speaker A: So Tom and I have a good friend who was a CRO of a medium sized company and he tells the story of they had tremendous amount of growth and success because they brought in the sales rep who was having good success. And John basically started looking into his numbers and like, oh, you're selling to a different vertical than we had before. And then he wanted to meet with a couple of his customers to find out why did they buy from us. Like, what do we solve for you? Then he built a whole program around what that sales rep does and promoted that person to run, uh, hey, this is how we're going to attack this marketplace. So it's just having the wherewithal to say, let me pay attention to the positives that's happened out there and see if there's different ways we can do this and experiment, but experiment quickly, like, don't push it and say we have to do this, but let's test it out. Did it work? And let's why did it work? And then expand upon it.

Speaker C: We've had a couple situations recently where there's like a feature, sometimes they're kind of big features where it's like, well, it's on the roadmap. It's something we want to add, we want the product to do that. It's been part of the vision since the beginning. And this customer is not going to close unless we add it. And we can move fast enough to add it for that customer. And that customer is bringing a good chunk of money which we need to keep our business alive. And so those are like the no brainer decisions where it's like, okay, cool, this is on the roadmap, I can close the deal. So those are easy. But then we have other customers who come in where it's like, well, it would be cool to win that business. But I don't know how I feel about this feature. Top to bottom. It's not really on the roadmap. And I think trying to avoid, especially as a creator and a technical person, that falling down the rabbit hole of I can always bespoke, I can always customize because I like to build things and trying not to fall into that trap so that you have something, like you said, that's repeatable and sellable in a way that's packaged like a package. Makes a ton of sense.

Speaker A: I have a guy I work with within my company, within Akamai, his whole team, they're very, very intelligent people and they do some great things for some really large customers. Every month we meet because I'm like, what are you doing? It's great that you solve this and the customer's happy. Now everybody wants to solve it. And now I don't know how to. If we're going to support this stuff. This is so good. This is, it's great. You've won us all kinds of business. How do we repeat this? This is. You've done some great work that probably should have stayed in the lab, but

Speaker D: yeah, I would say too. This may be slightly different topic, but in my experience, companies go through stages obviously, right? Your startup and then your Series A, you're scaling and, uh, I find that there are different needs and there are different stage operators, if you will. Like if you're founder led and now you're hiring your first salesperson. Uh, you don't need to build like massive amounts of infrastructure all that. You need a type of person that can work in that environment. But then where I'm often brought in in my business is that Series B or a mid market or enterprise that's got a division that's broken. What we need to do is build to scale. So this is again, the playbook. Came out of writing a lot of playbooks the last couple years where we had to fix a couple of teams. So we had to narrow the focus, right? What are we selling? How do we make it simple? Who are we going after? How do we make it simple? Maybe we have different teams for different segments of the market. Right? Because my goal is that to get good fast, it's simplified and that's what if you are a founder, it's like, hey, and, um, you can't afford to keep personalizing or customizing your product, right? You need a salesperson maybe that you screen. If they're the first salesperson, say, look, do you have experience selling in this environment? And then also quiz them on, like, could they control the customer's conversation? So it wasn't a reaction. And like, oh, yeah, we can customize.

Speaker B: Right?

Speaker D: We want a salesperson that one can wear a lot of hats, but also has the discipline to say no and to sell what's available today. So it's a lot of skill set. You know, depending on your stage, those operators, if you're like hiring, right, look for operators that have performed in the stage you're in for want is maybe a good way to help combat that. Like, hey, maybe you get stuck in Justin, right? Because now you're talking to the customer and the sales guy's like, hey, they're not going to buy if they don't have all these features. And it's like, is that really the customer that's demanding it, or is it the salesperson that is just saying yes to everything versus showing them the problem, what we'll solve and how much value it brings with what we have today? Yeah, we might do that in a year from now, but let's get in now. We're a great price. We're going to solve 90% of your problems. We'll add that now, next thing, maybe next year.

Speaker C: The customer is always right is like a trope, right? But it's also like, the customer is one organization. My customers are, uh, 2,000 organizations. I have over a thousand other examples of how people are solving this problem. And maybe I can blend my history of building a product in this space where I'm seeing the scale and I'm seeing the different problems in all these different organizations. You actually need me to advise you a little bit that what you're asking for doesn't make any sense. And I'm here in the sales process educates you that what you're doing, doing a. It's causing a problem. It's making my product not the right product for you. And maybe it's just unnecessary and bad for your organization because I have a thousand other people who are successful who aren't doing that. And trying to pipe that expertise back into a sales process, especially if you're in a new space, is challenging because you risk overplaying your hand, right?

Speaker D: Yeah, yeah, absolutely. But you are the advisor, right? You're the expert, and I love that example is we can show you how everyone else is doing it. That puts you in the center of their universe. And they're like, okay, now we'll trust you to tell us what we should do. That's ideal.

Speaker C: We have that sometimes at Delta where people show up and they want to tell me how to run a software project. And I'm like, you may be better at running a software project than I am. I'm not even saying that you're not, but you need to go hire someone for your team that's going to run the project how you want to run a project. Here at Delta, we do things differently and you're going to have to lean on. I know how to work with my team, and I've done a lot more of these projects than you have, so. So, like, let's learn from me, suggest how we can work together better and all that. But you're not going to come in and dictate how we engage with clients. It just. I can't scale that for one. And B, it's probably just not the right North Star anyway.

Speaker A: What you're saying is you got to work with the customer and it's going to be a partnership. If it's not a partnership, it's not going to work out. When I was in my New York team, the GM was really good. We just introduced this target account profile, so we call the ICP Target Account Profile, because I didn't know ICP existed. So we created this to pay up a profile and the story behind it and how we want to talk to them. And basically I had really prescriptive. I'm like, these are the questions and things you want to talk and ask. And so they had this opportunity they wanted to close, but they were having a tough time closing it. So they brought me in to say, okay, show us what you mean by this new approach. And so when I talk with the CEO, we're talking about their business. And I brought up like, okay, how many applications? So this is, again, how old I am. Like, how many applications are running over your network? The guy goes, three. And I'm like, I don't think it's three. I go, I think there's more. You have this bandwidth demand. You got latency issues. He goes, we're only running three. He's like, I know my business. And I said, I'm sure you understand what you need to know, but. But I'm positive you're running more than three applications between all of your locations. And so he's like, okay, I'm going to Call. He got really upset. He's like, I'm going to call my chief engineer and he's going to come in and tell us. And so a guy comes in and the CEO goes, how many applications are we running between all of our office? And he's like, I don't know, 60, 70, uh, there's everything. And the CEOs like, what? He goes, yeah, everything is running over this network. He goes, oh. And they go. So I go, he might be good to sit in this meeting and let's have a. And so that conversation completely changed. And the CEO was like, I had no idea. I'm like, but that's the learning lesson. After the meeting. To the team's like, this is the conversation we want to have with the customer. I go, the customer might think he knows and he's going to tell you. And if you just take this knowledge and walk away, we would have failed them if they won the business because it wouldn't set up properly. But you have to push the customer into the right direction and it's okay. You don't just have to say yes and believe them. You actually have to question and let them lead them down to an educational standpoint.

Speaker B: Yeah, there was something that I think, Tom, you said, but it just kind of glossed right over. And it's a big thing for us as well is having more information is better. Now, that statement in and of itself I one, uh, hundred percent agree with. It's how you act on that information and something that we haven't got into. But where I want to go with kind of my last question and a little bit of time that we have left based on having more information, which I agree is critical. Feed that CRM. Take those call notes. I happen to be opposed to metricing people based on that sort of stuff for a lot of reasons, partly because they just don't want to enter that stuff in. But once you get that information, it is going to be a lot, especially in this day and age. And that's good. But this is something where I think AI can step in and help you. You said it, Tom, earlier in the call. You know, AI is not going to fix a weak foundation. It's going to make a weak foundation weaker. It's going to amplify what it is that you already have. But saying that we fundamentally have a decent foundation and we do introduce AI at a critical time where we are gathering all of this information. I'm curious what you all have seen out there as some of one, the mistakes that people are Making at that point where they're throwing information at an AI. And on the flip side of that, some successes that you have seen with a similar approach.

Speaker D: Yeah. So pointing AI, whether it's something that you're building yourself or there are tools out there and have been for a number of years, by the way. Well before AI there were a lot of tools that would look at the CRM, study the, you know, most sales teams have sales processes, stages and conversations at certain stages. So a lot of the stuff is logged automatically. Right. At least like, like emails get logged and meetings get logged. Like you said, not every rep is good at it. But if you can point your analysis tool at your CRM with any kind of like base level of sales deals in a year, you probably need a year's worth of data at least it's going to tell you things like, oh, we lost 30% of the deals when the CFO, uh, wasn't involved in the conversation by now. Right. We find that deals accelerate more quickly when an end user joins a demo here. Right. So these are the data points I think we're looking for to understand what's really going on. So a lot of reps can tell you what they think. That's one that's the old fashioned way. I still do that like, hey, tell me what a deal looks like. Work from the backwards forward. I do that like when I interview a rep to see how they moved it. There used to be software that was, would give you strike zones and scorecards of like, hey, this deal is at risk because there's been no activity and there's only one person involved in this and you've got it to close in 30 days. It's statistically impossible based on your last year's sales deals. So like all that analysis, uh, so AI now you could just point Claude at your CRM and give it some prompts to be like, tell me what deals and slice and dice at. So that I think it's. You still take it with a grain of salt. You still talk to the reps after to verify this. But any manager that's got a year's worth of sales data and the CRM can start to do this analysis and look for patterns, then theories and then verify those and then run tests against them. That's sort of my favorite use case of using AI properly and I see a lot of companies do that and have done it. I used a tool back in 2012 that is still around mediafly. It's changed a lot. It used to be called Insight Squared and anyways, it did that before AI and now AI, uh, you can just do this yourself with Claude. So that's my favorite use case. I see a lot of companies doing that all the time.

Speaker B: Trust but Verify still works.

Speaker D: Trust but, uh, Verify. I'll pass it back to Peter. It looked like you had something to add there.

Speaker A: There's two things, especially the tools and stuff. One thing I'm always hammering my teams about is start with the outcome. What is the outcome that you want to come from using this tool? So, so define that, what we're going to measure. So, and why do we want to measure that? And you got to get the story down, right? The story that I'm kind, uh, of leaning into with AI is that what AI does for me is it localizes my information and it localizes my development. What I mean by that is before we had a CRM tool that the company looked at and they wanted certain specific outcomes. I can change that now and I can show benefit to me as the individual user. So I can use AI to give me information specific to my business while other people are getting other information from it. So I want to use my CRM differently because AI is going to tell me, okay, how many calls did I make? Or I can build it to give me the information that I need, but I don't have to go to IT to develop it. So within my team, we now focus on that mentality. Like, hey, before I had to do a business case to save me two hours of doing some type of work, and I'd have sent it to it, and it would take a look at it in two months and say, it's not a priority because it's just for you. Well, now I can do it just for me. Now I can actually have this work done just for me. It took me 15 minutes, right, to have a script from Claude to tell me how to do it, and I'm done. So to answer your question, capturing the information is really important, and there is an abundance of that information. But you can start creating gems and little scripts and AI tools to feed what you want. As long as you're defining what you want the outcome to be, then you can start measuring that and using AI to pull the data specific to me as an individual. And I think that's huge. That's a big change where what AI is taking us is allowing me to build something for me by business specifically.

Speaker B: Absolutely. Yeah. And it's a whole can of worms now I would love to be able to get into, but we are at time. And so I hate to say it, but I've got to wrap this up here, everybody. We have been talking with Tom Stearns and Peter Cleary. Among other things, they are the co authors of Graphic Sales how to Build a Prospecting Playbook. Guys, how can people get in touch with you? And any closing words for our audience?

Speaker D: Sure, you can find us both on LinkedIn, the books on Amazon globally, and any other digital booksellers. And my website is Sterns IO and

Speaker A: as we said during the call, this book is so much better than when Friends and Influence. How to Win Friends and Influence People. So buy this book instead of that one.

Speaker C: Yeah, don't pick up that rag. That one doesn't even have pictures. Geez.

Speaker D: Right?

Speaker B: And it's so old. It's definitely out of date, right?

Speaker A: Exactly.

Speaker C: I think my granddad read that, uh, kind of dusty copy in an attic. No, pick up the graphic novel, man. Do the right thing. Awesome.

Speaker B: Uh, Justin, thank you as always as well. Always a pleasure and always fun.

Speaker A: Thank you.

Speaker D: Thanks, guys.

Speaker C: So much fun, guys. Thank you.

Speaker B: Thanks as always to our audience. If you like what you're hearing, send us a note, shoot us a comment, let us know if there's other things that you want to talk about, and we will catch everybody next time on Sas that app. Thanks all. Thanks for cruising along with us on Sas that App. We hope you grabbed some insights that were inspiring, actionable, or at least entertaining.

Speaker C: If you enjoyed the show. Don't forget to subscribe and leave a

Speaker B: review until next time. Keep building, keep growing, and keep those apps Sassy.