The Transaction

TT - 041 - Scott Barker - Full Episode
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Scott Barker: [00:00:00] if you even have the thought of an excuse as a sales leader, as a seller, as a marketer, you're already dead in my books.

in a sea of sameness, I'm more and more convinced that whatever product or service you sell, At the end of the day, they are really buying you your job is to provide value to that network in any way you can, thought leadership, being helpful outside of your role, data, benchmarks, whatever you can do, even if you're early in your career.

You can find ways to be valuable.

Introduction and Guest Lineup
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Craig Rosenberg: Yesterday we had Brent, Adamson, Scott

and

Scott. Um, should we do Scott B. Scott a and uh, we're like,

Scott Albro: We're going to. need

to.

Yes.

Craig Rosenberg: He's like, tell, we're like, tell us a story, dude.

Maggots on a Plane Story
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Craig Rosenberg: Have you, did you ever hear the maggots on the plane story with him?

Scott Albro: I've

never

heard that.

Craig Rosenberg: So years ago there was an Atlanta flight. Yeah. That it's on Google as, uh, Sam's found it, where?

Basically, the flight got grounded because there was maggots infesting the entire plane, like falling from the, uh, overhead bins, and [00:01:00] they had video of it, and there's bread in the back, just, I mean, it was like, okay, well, that's not a good one, but it was a funny story, so we took it, but, uh, anyway, yeah,

so,

Scott Albro: what was the source of the maggots?

Craig Rosenberg: so they found out later that someone had left their food in the in there.

It was, you know, who knows what kind of food. And the maggots took over and, and then infested the flight. So,

Scott Albro: Wow.

All right.

Craig Rosenberg: I was like, you know, when you clean the plane after, you should probably take the food. I mean, there's other things, but I mean, who knows? To me, that's a best practice. But, um, [00:02:00]

this is a fun fact.

Vancouver and Sun Valley Discussion
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Craig Rosenberg: So you're in Vancouver, right, Scott P?

Scott Barker: That's correct. Yeah.

Craig Rosenberg: One of the greatest cities. It's actually, would you say it's an underrated city? What do you think of that?

Scott Barker: I would say it's underrated for sure. Yeah. It's, uh, I'm always surprised how many few people have actually been here. Uh, when I, when I talk about ever, it's always on people's lists, but people don't make it, make it up here too often.

Craig Rosenberg: Yeah, it's amazing. And then Sun Valley.

Introducing Scott Barker
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Craig Rosenberg: So for the listeners, Matt, we have, uh, Matt and I had talked for a while about having Scott be a co host. So we have two Scots today, no Matt. Today's hosts are me, obviously, and then Scott Albro, who will call Scott A from here on out. Um, and Scott and I have done multiple businesses together.

He's been a guest on the show and is now a advisor to early stage companies across a lot of [00:03:00] different things that they're trying to do, whether they're building their business, whether they're trying to get their founder brand out and probably eventually going to come back to me with another amazing idea of a company he wants to start.

But if there's anybody that we should talk, go to market with, it's Scott A and then Scott B is Scott Barker. Dude, you've been around for a long time, by the way. And in terms of being out there and a guy that we should listen to. And then, I mean, seriously, man, like I was like, First of all, by the way, when people have advisor stuff on their LinkedIn, it's impossible to get to their experience.

I'm like looking through them going, holy crap, dude, this dude's doing a lot of stuff. And then I remember all the, uh, things you would do back in the day at outreach as well. That, by the way, is a long run. If you, if you look at the timing there and now, you know, I get to listen to you and see you on GoToMarket now and, um, and you're, uh, still doing work with Max with the GoToMarket Fund [00:04:00] and, um, you are a B2B thought leader.

Your show is great. Very actionable. Like incredibly actionable, which Scott, when we did Topo used to yell at me all the time for actionability. Uh, even like an email I would write, he'd be like, is that actionable? And so like I could tell he would want to be on the show as you come on with all the actionable things you see.

So dude, I really appreciate you spending the time to come on with us for, with me and Scott a, so I appreciate it.

Scott Barker: Pumped to be here. And yeah, thanks for the, the kind words. It's been a fun journey. I feel very, very fortunate. And, uh, yeah, this next chapter at GTM fund has just been. A ton of fun. I can't believe it's been four years since we started the fund. And yeah, the, all the media stuff we do is super creative to, you know, it's all, it's all a flywheel and, uh, it's, uh, it's super fun and the guests, uh, the guests make it easy.

I just, I just, [00:05:00] Hang out and ask some questions. And luckily they're always smarter than I am. So it's great.

Craig Rosenberg: Yeah. Well, I got you two guys on, so I'm going to queue up. the questions and, and, and, you know, probably be a fly on the wall too. And my guests today will help make my life easier. But, um, so we have our big question that we ask, which I'll get to in a sec, Scott B. The first one though, is what we like to call the Matt Amundsen feature enhancement for the transaction 2.

1, which is, uh, before we go with the big thing, uh, and tell us, we just want to hear a story and a, an amazing go to market story. We started this with Brent threw us for a loop with Maggots on a Plane, but uh, this is a free flowing show. If you want, if you have something that could top Maggots on the Plane, bring it.

But, uh, any, you know, it could be heroic, it could be funny, you know, whatever that might be. Like, you know, you hear so many stories. We'd love to hear, uh, one before we get going.

Scott Barker: [00:06:00] Maggots on the plane. It's going to be tough to, tough to beat, you know, tough, tough to beat. Um, I'll, I'll share a, a funny one.

Funny Fundraising Stories
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Scott Barker: Um, and it is in, it's still go to market. So, you know, I have to be a little careful with. Uh, what I talk about in terms of fundraising, but you know, GTM fund, we're a venture fund.

So of course, part of that is, is fundraising. Fundraising I've come to understand is, is maybe the purest form of, of sales. And, um, one of our largest, um, Investors now, uh, in the, in the fund, um, you know, a big institution. I don't think I can say their name quite yet, but, um, I got introduced to one of our, um, through one of our founders and they were nice enough to fly out.

They flew to Vancouver, um, and we ended up having, uh, lunch. And I, I like [00:07:00] pickles. Um, uh, when I eat a sandwich, I want a pickle. Um, and so I ordered pickles for the table. They forgot our pickles. Um, and I was kind of choked. Um, and so I kind of made a big deal of it with the server to make sure we, we got our pickles and ended up bringing a big plate of pickles.

It was kind of like a whole thing. Anyway, this meeting goes, you know, quite well. Um, And I end up, um, sending kind of a recap email, uh, to the team with like next steps. I'm like, okay, here's, here's what we got to do. Here's where the relationship's at. Um, and I think the title, uh, said something along the lines of, uh, X company next steps and one lonely pickle.

It was just a kind of flunking around. Um, and then the, um, I can't remember what transpired, uh, but I think it was one of my other partners, um, just decided to forward that email to what we'll call the prospect at this huge institutional fund to funds. [00:08:00] And because the email itself was like, it was a fine email.

It was like, you know, here are the next steps. And they're like, I'll let you share those next steps. But I'd forgot that in the title there was and one lonely pickle. Uh, and so this very serious financial institution that ended up turning into. Multiple million dollars started with, uh, uh, pretty funny.

One lonely pickle was the subject line. So, um, we joke about that a lot. Um, so you can make, you can make funny mistakes and humor and things sometimes actually work to your, your advantage.

The Importance of Humanizing Sales
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Scott Barker: So humanizing yourself is okay.

Craig Rosenberg: yeah, I know I

Scott Albro: Absolutely. Hey, that you, you have to nail the subject line. I mean, that's just good copywriting, right? That's

nobody, nobody opens the email without a good subject line. So, and Craig, you and I actually have a related story. Um, and we can't name names on this one either, but Craig and I once worked with a CEO who's actually a very well known [00:09:00] CEO. And he used to have this trick. Uh, when he would be introduced to someone and if the person had a name that was, you know, a little bit hard to pronounce or, uh, associate with the spelling of the name, he would spell it out phonetically, like sound it out. So he wouldn't, he'd write, he'd spell the person's name correctly.

And then in parentheses next to it, he'd do like the phonetic spelling of it. I think that's what it's called. The phonetic spelling of a name. This person's name, um, ended up being a pretty disturbing swear word. And, uh, so he had this in this draft email and forgot that it was in there. Forgot to change it and sent this email to this prospect with the phonetically spelled out curse word name. It was totally fine. Like the guy totally understood and forgave [00:10:00] him, but like another example of like email copywriting gone wrong.

Craig Rosenberg: I've, I've thought about that where, like, Is the outbound and or customer engagement strategy to purposely completely F up your email to them? You know, like I, I had this one place, Scott B, you're nodding your head. I'm going to give you this one, then let you go, which is, uh, you know, a lot of times you're going back and forth, let's say after a meeting and like, Um, you know, you, like, so they sent, like, so Scott's the CEO.

Let's say Scott did the meeting with the sales rep and sales rep's like, how'd you think that go? And he writes, That dude's smart as shit. Like I cannot believe it. Then you accidentally forward that to the prospect that you're talking to. I'm like, that's a brilliant play. It looks like it's a mistake, but actually it's like a great way to compliment them, which you could not write by the [00:11:00] way, in an email to them directly, like

purposeful, but you might as well.

Anyway, I write that down. Everyone, Scott B you're

Scott Barker: I love

Craig Rosenberg: head. What do you got?

Scott Barker: No, no, no. I love it. And I think, I think where we fall down is like, So that play is great to use like once or twice a year, but you can't just like take that and everyone's now going to be like, that's a fucking great idea. Let's go do that. And we're going to do that to like everyone. And like as soon as it gets out there and it feels disingenuous, then you're harming yourself.

So like it's, it's about in, in a sea of sameness, I'm more and more convinced that whatever product or service you sell, At the end of the day, they are really buying you and you have to show that you're an exceptional person. Um, and usually exceptional people are dynamic. They have a sense of humor. It can be sarcasm, can be whatever.

And like, so tailored to that specific prospect, like, yeah, like have some fun with it. People want to do business with people that are, that are [00:12:00] actually human beings. And if you can tie that into showing that you're incredibly capable and also a good time, you know, that's. That's what you want.

Craig Rosenberg: Yeah. Love it. All right. So here's the big question.

Big Question: Market Misconceptions
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Craig Rosenberg: We'll start the show and then we'll, we'll go from there, which is, uh, so what's something that the market thinks is right or doing right? Could be approach methodology, et cetera, or it could be multiple, right? Most people do, you know, one to three, Um, and they're actually wrong.

And, uh, what is it and what should they be doing differently? All right. I'm going to set you up and then I'm going to lay back and hear what you have to say.

Scott Barker: Um, do you want me to kick off or Scotty, do you want to go?

Craig Rosenberg: Oh, sorry, Scott B. No, Scott B. And then Scott A. Scott A's probably got a long list too, so we'll have to see how this show goes. But he's a host, man. He's

Scott Barker: Yeah. Yeah. Okay, cool. Cool. All right. Um, so I have, I have many. I'll try and keep it to two.

Overcomplicating Pipeline Generation
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Scott Barker: [00:13:00] Um, the first right, right now what I'm seeing is the market over complicating Pipeline generation and closing new business. I think we all overcomplicate what that means and how to do that.

Um, and I'll, I'll give some examples a little bit later on, and this comes from someone who is a go to market tech and process nerd, uh, I have. You know, I've been selling since I was 18 in one form or another. Golf Spa, packages door to door. A one call close environment where I'm making 150 a day. I've been a BDR in software.

I've been an IC in software. I've built out teams. Uh, I've built out sales development teams, uh, sales teams. I've been like a one stop shop for like a VP of sales, VP of marketing, MVP of CES, where I'd like sell something and if I needed marketing materials, I would create those and then I would actually deliver the campaign that we sold.[00:14:00]

Uh, and so I was constantly trying to like over engineer things. And I think this last stint, um, raising these last two funds has reminded me what it actually is to me. To sell and to build relationships and I'll get into more examples, but that's number one is I think we're overcomplicating everything.

Everyone's looking for the next tool. That's going to solve their problem. How do we do AI and how do we automate absolutely everything? And I think we're just, we've, we've got lost in the sauce a little bit. Uh, so that's one that I'll go into. And then number two is, um, everyone is woe is me right now saying that closing revenue is the hardest it's ever been.

Excuse my French, but f that. It has always been incredibly hard. Um, the ZIRP era was the anomaly, not the norm. You know, you talk to anyone who's walked into a building and tried to sell a Xerox printer. Not easy You [00:15:00] talk to people who were trying to sell stuff before email was a thing. Imagine if you didn't have that form of communication.

Not easy. Um, but what we do now have is a built in excuse because the market is bad and there's an overproliferation of tech. And so when things get tough, we always have this sort of built in excuse and you can blame something. And you know, if you even have the thought of an excuse as a sales leader, as a seller, as a marketer, you're already dead in my books.

It requires full and complete accountability. And I think We've got this built in thing that makes us not have to have that, that accountability. Um, so those are the two things that I'm, I'm happy to dive deeper into them.

Craig Rosenberg: Albro, your reaction?

Scott Albro: I, I just totally agree. I mean, um, I'm a con I tend to be a contrarian thinker and it sounds like what Scott B's talking about is, is just having exercising the little bit of [00:16:00] contrarian thought here. I mean, the group think out there right now around go to market stuff is incredible. Um, just to piggyback on Scott's first, first observation, like boy, if you look at a place like LinkedIn, like all the talk now is about automation, quantity, right?

Tools, technology, you know, like what I would call like cheap plays, right?

The Human Side of Sales
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Scott Albro: Like tactics that can, Quote, scale, and there's very little talk about the human side of sales right now. Like less than I've ever seen. There's very little talk about the enterprise, right? Um, that stuff just isn't talked about anymore.

It seems like people aren't paying attention to it or they're just taking, taking it for granted. I think that's a real problem, by the way, if you're gonna complain about not being able to close business. You sure as hell better be really good about the human side, on the human side of selling, right?

Like that's where you make your money. That's where you close [00:17:00] deals, you know, clay or whatever it is, or, uh, law growth machine or whatever. I mean, the, you know, there are all these tools out there now that do not close business for you, right? It's still the human side of selling that closes business for you.

So totally agree with Scott's comment.

Scott Barker: Yeah. And so I'll, I'll, I'll paint the picture a little bit. And these are some of just my, I try not to pontificate on things I learned like three years ago, five years ago, because things move so quickly. So these are just like real things that I'm kind of caught remembering or getting reminded of now, and.

You know, I think a lot of people see, um, all the stuff we do on GTM now and the podcast and all that. And they're like, Oh yeah, Scott's out there like being a marketer and an evangelist. And you know, the truth is that's like 5 percent of my time. You know, the, the vast majority of my time is in a selling function.

Uh, I just wear a fancier hat and we [00:18:00] call it venture capital, but I'm, I'm selling, I'm either selling an LP to give us money or I'm selling a world class founder who has 14 term sheets. And in a sea of sameness where every VC fund looks the same, why they should take my dollars in this round. So it's always selling.

What's interesting, um, in VC lands, which has brought up all these reminders is There are restrictions, um, around fundraising and we're not like a small fund anymore. I can't put exact dollar amounts, but we're talking latest one is, you know, many tens of millions of dollars. Um, I have never done that before, but I did know how to sell.

So let's go give it a shot. Um, but what you learn is you. are not selling a product, which is difficult. Imagine selling, but you're not selling a product. You're selling yourself, you're selling your team, and you're selling a vision, which regardless of if you have a product or [00:19:00] service, I still think you should be selling that way.

So that's one. Number two, you actually can't tell the market you're selling when you're fundraising. You're not allowed to market it in any way. There's no marketing, no solicitation. So imagine being in a position. Where you don't have a marketing function, you literally cannot go outbound. It's illegal to do that.

You will get slapped by the SEC. Um, and then that's two. And then the third is because it's such a long term gain in venture, they're coming on a 10 year journey with you. So talk about building trust. Like it is.

Building Trust in Sales
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Scott Barker: The number one thing is being able to build trust in a short period of time. And I think if you do have a product and service, but thought in those ways that my job is to sell myself, my team, and our vision, a magic play, the thought experiment that you [00:20:00] don't rely on marketing, you can't solicit in any way.

And then remembering that the job is to build trust in the shortest period of time. I think regardless if you're fundraising or selling any product or service, those are incredibly, incredibly important. And it reminds me of this thought experiment that I used to do. This was back in 2015. I was running a, uh, a BDR team and we would always do like Kind of an initial discovery call.

And then we would pass it over to the, to the AE. And, you know, I used to try and get my team to be like, okay, can we make this 30 minutes? Can you make yourself so knowledgeable about the problem that you are solving for a prospect that they would be comfortable with paying you for that 30 minutes? Um, forget about product or service.

They would pay you 30 minutes because they're going to show up and they're going to learn so much from you. [00:21:00] Um, That they would be willing to pay you some sort of consultant fee for that 30 minutes. And that's how you should be thinking about this. This is not just qualifying someone so that they can get to the next step.

I want them to think you as a valuable person. They want to spend more time with you even after the, the demo and all of that. They're going to ping you and be like, Hey, I had another question over here about something you said. Um, so I think that is the game that, that we're all in. And I think we, we over. We over engineered on like, let's build sales skills and let's build all these methodologies and let's make sure we're going through all this like process. But like, what about being an actual expert in the area? Like become that expert and magically people will want to talk to you and you need people to talk to you when you're, you're selling something

Craig Rosenberg: You know, Albro was, uh, I've now figured out it's Barker and Albro. And [00:22:00] by the way, you guys could start a law firm with that. Oh, you're throwing Rosenberg in.

You're on Wall

Scott Barker: There you go.

Yeah.

Expertise in Sales: Lessons from Topo
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Craig Rosenberg: so, uh, So like, at Topo, So, um, so Scott would always build the deck around expertise and, uh, I remember like early, I mean, it was everything the whole time and early, you know, like, uh, we, we evolved with the sales team and like, you know, some of the earliest, you know, one of the reps we had before it'd be like, well, we have to tell them what we do.

I, I, you know, I would, you know, how, how do I tell Scott about it? I'm like, dude, he's converting at like, a 95 percent rate, like you got to let it do it. And then by the time we had these like really great experience reps, they were begging Albro first time to get them on there and do the value add. But there's a couple of things we learned at Topo.

Now we were selling expertise, so it's a little bit different, but maybe not. What you're saying is. Like, can we learn [00:23:00] from your world in selling to LPs? Uh, can you learn from what we did at Topo? So we found a couple of things. One is we had a, like almost, uh, I would say the, the numbers were extreme. That for conversion, the conversion was incredibly high.

If someone had a meaningful engagement with us and our content, it didn't mean they read it. It meant they went to an event. that we put on, or saw one of the guys speak, or one of the people speak, uh, that converted higher. So they would come in, those people would come in with having already ascribed some value to our expertise. Then the first call, Scott, and what he would train the salespeople to do, I don't know how many slides were in the deck, Scott, but like, yeah, we would say, hey, here's who we are. But then he would have, I think, We would constantly be updating current challenges in the market, [00:24:00] right, Scott, that we were handling. And if we knew enough about what they did, he would, you know, I remember I used to have to do, help give him, you know, extra slides that he would request at like 10 p. m. The um, you know, if they were looking to go to the enterprise and he'd say, okay, well, here's the story I want to tell them about that.

What expertise can we deliver? And it was, it was incredibly effective. Uh, so the opposite, if they didn't engage, if they didn't come in understanding anything and didn't engage with our content, it was really hard to get things off the ground. And by content, again, I don't mean that they read a research paper, although that We would always try to get them to something.

And when they did that, then we'd come in with that. But then everything we did was, um, fully, just fully baked with expertise. Uh, that converted. What didn't is if they didn't have that basis or the sales rep went right in, even if, if someone came in and said, Hey, I want to get an ABM [00:25:00] consulting deal done.

If we dove right in, we'd still lose that deal. Right? Because,

and that was something, Scott, I don't know if you want to talk about that, but that,

and I know you won't let me compliment you, but that was your genius. It's very similar to what Scott's talking about here. I

Scott Albro: yeah, totally. I mean It's you pointed out, like, it's easier to do at a research and advisory firm than it is at a SAS business or a technology company. So, but, you know, a couple things to add there. One is like, If, if you spent time with it, the salespeople were easy to convert. You had to educate them and tell them there's another way, right?

You don't just have to pitch the product, but they actually ended up gravitating towards selling insights or expertise, right? They actually liked it. They got it. It wasn't hard to get them to do it. And one of, one of the things that made it easy for them is Craig. Remember we built that insights library.

It was just a Google sheet with a list of [00:26:00] like. Hundreds of different insights that we had about go to the go to market function and we had We have the insight in like, uh, just think of it as like column B and column A was like the trigger. Like if you hear or see this, share this insight. And there were hundreds of these in this Google sheet.

And so salespeople could just, you know, on a discovery call, they, you know, this is pre AI. This would actually be cool to do with AI now, right? But it's like, you hear this. You hear this when you ask this discovery question. Great. Take them towards this insight and tell this story. Right. And that totally worked.

The, the only other thing to bear in mind there, um, I always thought it was a little bit tricky to then pivot to, Oh, and by the way, here's what we sell. Like we're, we're not just here to share expertise with you.

Like, We do want to make money from you. That, that was always a little bit tricky and there are different ways to pivot [00:27:00] into that conversation.

But yeah, that totally worked for us. And Scott, it sounds like that was something that worked for you. Agreed.

Scott Barker: I mean, everything, I think I, I think my point is I, that. If I'm a software company, I would sell how Topo sold and buy the way I have a, a SaaS product, you know, uh, like you lead with that education and, you know, you guys, you know, grew up in this area. I was fortunate that at the beginning of my career, I learned from folks that, you know, Grew up in what I call in the age of true digital transformation.

So whether it was the mobile trend or the cloud trend, when you were going into organizations and the leaders I learned from, they were going and they were not pitching some like incremental gain, Hey, we're going to get you this like 4 percent efficiency gain over here. And, you know, there's going to be some time saved over here.

Those little incremental, um, gains. [00:28:00] Sure. You, you can trust. Some rep who just knows about their product with that. But if you are pitching someone on the idea of, Hey, we are going to completely digitally transform your business, and we are going to take you in the cloud, and it's going to touch every single part of your business, well, you have to be a different breed of seller to be trusted to do that.

They have to see you as an exceptional person that is smarter than them, at least in this area, and more capable of them. So I think it just fostered this, like sales in my eyes was more of a, um, respected profession because you were actually the person that was like, take my hand, I'm going to lead you into this new era.

And what really excites me right now is we're on the precipice of another true. Maybe the most important technological shift that, that we've ever seen. And so the, the chance to be that again, and we can't have sellers [00:29:00] thinking the same way that they have over the last five to eight years, because those, they're not going to build that, that trust and be that trusted advisor that will be ushered them into this, this new era.

So we have to up level, I think all of our, our sellers in, uh, A pretty meaningful way. And I'm excited because I think it's going to uplevel our profession again. And people are going to be excited to sell again and not be like, Oh God damn, I got to hit my dials and send my emails.

Embracing Change in Sales
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Scott Barker: Like that's not fucking sales.

You know, you're an agent of change, you know, uh, let's be agents of change again. And that's really fun. It's also harder because you have to have a point of view beyond just your company's point of view. Like, what podcast did you listen to? Like, what did you experiment with on ChatGPT? What did you learn about this business?

Because like, your company can't empower you with every enablement material out there. The world's moving too fast. You got to do it yourself.

Scott Albro: Totally. Yeah. I mean, I call that just being a student of the game. Right. And, and, you [00:30:00] know, look, some people don't want to be right. Some people it's just a job

and, and,

that's

Scott Barker: And AI will replace you. That's fine. We got lots of tools for that.

Craig Rosenberg: way. That's great.

The Concept of Opinionated Software
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Scott Albro: By the way, back to your point about like, Hey, I share insights. I share expertise.

And then I pivot to this idea of. You know, and by the way, I happened to, I happened to sell a software product that, that embodies that. Right. I think that's a really important point. You know, Craig, you know, Javier Soltero. I first heard about this concept from Javier Soltero. the best product person I know and a damn good founder and CEO as well.

He's had multiple like huge outcomes, ran big product orgs and go to market orgs at places like Microsoft and Google. And, um, but he once shared this idea that this was like mid, I don't know, like 2004, 2005 of opinion. He called it opinionated software. And the idea was like our software [00:31:00] products, we should build software products.

That embody the best practices that we actually believe in. And I think it's a, it's a really powerful concept that often gets lost. Right. And there, there's some simple examples of this, right? Like Zendesk in the early days, you could not customize Zendesk. They had an opinion on how you opened and closed a support ticket.

And that is the way that you did it, right? And hopefully that Zendesk sales org and marketing org for that matter, prior to getting to the product, they were sharing best practices and expertise and insights around how to handle a support ticket, right? And that makes that segue or that pivot into, you know, Hey, I need you to buy my product now.

That much easier.

Scott Barker: Yeah, yeah, I love that.

The Importance of a Strong Point of View
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Scott Barker: That's actually one of the questions I ask when I'm talking to, you know, new founders and we're looking at an investment. is like, what is the point of view on your, what's, what is this, [00:32:00] whether it's an AI agent or software, what, what point of view does it have? Um, because I think we are going back to this idea of like tech with an opinion, like it's showing you the best way to do it.

I think for a little while we. Went the over customized route and even in like the outreach days, it was kind of like, no, you can do it whichever way you want. And we'll, we'll, we've got all these different ways. And I think having that, that strong point of view and, you know, the last thing I say in that bridging that gap, um, when you have, you know, you, you give, uh, and you lead with expertise and thought leadership and a point of view.

I think we've all been in scenarios where we have a, uh, a friend who has maybe made Health a priority over the last three months, or they just went to some Retreat in Costa Rica and they came back and they're like glowing and they don't really have to tell you um a bunch of stuff they'll give you a little bit and you naturally lean in and you're like What happened?

What are you doing? How are you? How are you getting [00:33:00] these results in your personal life in this case business results? um, i'm very confident that when done well, like the You The question they ask is going to be them leaning in. They'll be curious to

learn more on

Scott Albro: Yeah. How do I do this? Yeah. Yeah. Totally. That's a great point.

That's a

great point.

Craig Rosenberg: By the way, on Zendesk, you know, those early days when, um, they had, uh, support managers in the sales pit. I remember Sib telling me about it. Jim Sib was the leader and he was like, yeah, I think it was like one to five. Like literally, they just had these guys in there so you can get on. and deliver peer based expertise, you know, while on a call, you know, and, um, that that sort of falls, you know, just sort of piggybacking the, the Zendesk example.

The, um, I, I love, by the way, the, the point of view thing. I, it's, it's so interesting now that I'm sort of in this world too. It's like when the, [00:34:00] when the founder can articulate that they built something for someone, uh, it's, you know, just to go to market. flow can be a lot easier than you build something and we're trying to figure out who it's for.

And like, um, it's, you know, to build a point of view, you really need to, to, figure out, especially now with AI, it's only a few, like, Anthropix and OpenAI. Everyone else, you, you've got to find your AI. niche or your new soft, you know, whatever it is you're trying to do. Like, who, who is this for? And, um, and, and when you can understand that you can build a real POV.

Overcomplicating Pipeline Generation
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Craig Rosenberg: Um, what, what other things, you mentioned on your over complicating comment, um, which was your first one,

um, pipeline.

How are we over complicating pipeline generation? Tell us more about that.

Scott Barker: Yeah, so again, I'll try and speak through just my lived [00:35:00] experience right now. Um, is the staring down the barrel of a ridiculous, you know, many tens of millions of dollars numbers. Um, and also none of my. You know, some people listening to this might be like, Oh, well, it's easier for you to get connected with people because you have this like brand or whatever.

So you can just like ping people. Well all my network is like go to market operators, right? I had then had to go and build a brand new network, which was family offices, fund to funds, ultra high net worth individuals. I didn't have those folks. They were not in my network beyond a few that were, you know, VCs from the outreach days and things.

Um, and so, I tried it all. I tried cold outbound. We, we tried like every outbound pipeline gen trick known to mankind. Um, and I've been around a lot. Um, and you know, the, the, what I learned was there was [00:36:00] absolutely no shortcuts and it, it ties into this trusted advisor piece. The only thing I could do, and it took a long time is.

I would try and get in front of the people that I needed to get in front of and network with and in a non transactional, non commercial environment. So first I just needed them to know Like, Hey, Scott kind of knows what he's talking about and he's a pretty valuable node in my network. And so it was trying to find ways and it's different for whatever product service you sell.

But you know, for, for me, it was setting up an initial, initial call just to see how I could be valuable for them. And everyone wants good deal flow. We have good deal flow. Well, I can send you. DealFlow. I can send you other maybe LP introductions. If any of your portfolio companies are having go to market challenges, I can, you know, use our network.

So that was my initial sort of pipeline was just like [00:37:00] making, getting my network to a place where I had at least a decent enough amount of people that kind of had baseline respect for me. Um, and then I went and mapped out kind of our ICP, the people that I thought were the highest likelihood to invest in our fund.

You know, started with a list of 150, went down, had some really honest conversations with ourself and be like, no, here's the 25 I'm going to focus on. Focus, I also think is an absolute superpower. Um, quick side anecdote, you know, when my reps were struggling back in the day, And they had a week to hit their, uh, quota.

Uh, this is when I was running the same, running the BDR function. Um, I would take their account list from 200 down to 10. And that seems like, oh, you're, that's going to hurt them. You know, uh, it was mind blowing that within that week, if I shortened and just gave them 10, They [00:38:00] would get opportunities in four of them because they cut out all the noise.

And I said your only job in this whole world is to try and get a meeting with these 10 people. Can you do it? All of a sudden, creativity explodes. They don't do the normal process. They're using their actual brains and they make it happen. So focus is a superpower.

The Power of Warm Introductions
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Scott Barker: So, um, and then it was all a warm introduction game.

And so I would go back to this initial network. And the key is. It's doing the research, which is easier than ever with ChatGPT. We have all this tooling to go really, really deep on why I believe this person should talk to me. And then secondarily, this ask I'm about to make of this introduction, how can I make it a give for them versus an ask?

Because I'm asking them to, you know, Give out some social capital on my behalf. How can I make it a gift? Uh, maybe that's inviting this person to a dinner that we're going to be having in their city. Uh, maybe that's inviting them on the podcast that we have. [00:39:00] Um, maybe it is, Hey, I saw that they had a portfolio company.

We have a similar one. They might be going through the same challenges. Uh, I would love to wrestle with them and see if I can help them. So making it a win for that person, giving the introduction, again, this is a lot of work. You could spend like four hours, uh, doing all this research and figuring out your path of least resistance to this person.

And then how you make that person feel like it's a, it's a, a give not an ask. Um, and then, you know, those introductions happen. And that was like the only way, um, And I think that is the, the way to do outbound, whether you're fundraising or you're just a BDR. And so it's, it kind of comes down to three jobs.

Your job is to increase your connectivity to your ICP. You can do that through content, you can do that through communities, through events, your job is to provide value to that [00:40:00] network in any way you can, thought leadership, being helpful outside of your role, data, benchmarks, whatever you can do, even if you're early in your career.

You can find ways to be valuable. And then third is like finding win win ways to turn that value into revenue and farm introductions. And your job is just to make sure your social capital bank account is always higher than your ask, uh, bank account. Um, but if I was running, if I was trying to create Pipeline today, it would be all warm introductions.

That's all I would do. Unfortunately, it's hard to scale. It's hard work. It is built on trust. And it's not beautifully repeatable and scalable as, you know, sending a hundred, you know, uh, somewhat custom emails a day and, and, and doing some cold calls.

Scott Albro: Hey, Scott, listening to you talk about that. What one thing. I find interesting and tell me if I'm thinking about this the right way. It seems like in, in the VC world, like the, the [00:41:00] currency is really connections and the network and introductions, right? And it, that doesn't seem to be the case in the world of SaaS sales.

I mean, is that, is that a, is that a difference as you think about these two different worlds?

Scott Barker: Yeah. Um, it, it is, yeah, I guess the currency is like, yeah, access and network, I guess. And I guess my learning is The currency is both in the, in, in both in SaaS and in VC. It's actually the currency of everything that we do, I think. Um, we just forgot that in SaaS because we have so much fancy tooling and we were able to drive results without having to do that.

That hard work and now we're back to the hard work and we're realizing, Oh shit, I don't, I didn't do the work to have the access. I didn't do the work to have the point of view. I didn't do the work to network. That's always been the currency. We just, I think we were able to use technology to get away from that.

And now [00:42:00] everyone has technology. So no one has an advantage. And we're back to that currency being true again.

Scott Albro: Yeah. Yeah.

Craig Rosenberg: By the way, you guys, during the, while you guys were calling, Sam sent me a text. I'm gonna read it. It's amazing. Because Scott A will enjoy this. Are you playing with a bottle cap or something? The mics are picking that up.

Scott Albro: And was it,

Craig Rosenberg: I'm p Huh?

Scott Albro: it true? Was

it true?

Craig Rosenberg: Playing with a bottle cap?

Sam Guertin: That was like 20 minutes ago. Oh,

It was Scott.

Scott Barker: I don't think it makes noise. Maybe. And that was me.

Sam Guertin: was, it was something on the desk.

Scott Albro: Sam

is guilty. Guilty of profiling. Albeit profiling accurately. I might

add,

but.

Scott Barker: you've got some incredible, that's a gift. This is an actual bottle cap. Like you should be in Hollywood, like making sounds or something. The ability to pick that up is wild.

Sam Guertin: Yeah,

Craig Rosenberg: Um, yeah, sorry, I just had [00:43:00] to thro I love, uh, I have my associate, Mark, loves to send me, uh, texts during calls and I always read them to the person. It just drives him nuts. So like I was on a call and he wrote, who is this guy? And I wrote, it was Neil Harrington, who I love to put on the spot. I go, Neil, stop talking for a sec.

I just want you to know, Mark just sent me a text asking, who is this guy? And he's like, what? I met him. Anyway, sorry, that's a Rosenberg.

Um,

Sam Guertin: so used to Craig, like, opening a packet of crackers or something

and the mic just picking all of that

Craig Rosenberg: I get hungry, you know, I gotta eat.

Scaling Founder-Led Sales
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Craig Rosenberg: Um, so, hey, by the way, I wanted to get, uh, Albro, do you mind, I'm just going to, uh, Scott, uh, B was talking, uh, one of the things I've learned from Albro that's been working recently. I know it sounds like I'm doing a tactic. I just feel like it's relates, which is building your, particularly with founders, [00:44:00] right?

Early stage, you're building your reputation. On LinkedIn right now and then going and then DMing from LinkedIn from the founder. If you've built that reputation and that platform, uh, leveraging that to reach out. So in many ways, that's like a credibility trust building exercise that's happening for many on LinkedIn and then being able to turn that.

So it's not a network play, but it is a, uh, trusted advisor play, but Scott, that's a decent high level. Albro,

Scott Barker: Yeah.

Craig Rosenberg: level. yeah,

Scott Albro: yeah, totally. Totally. Um, I, I think, um, you know, the, the founder, everything that Barker has just described, If you think about it, the founder is, is the best person to go do that thing, you know, state a point of view, [00:45:00] tell a story, however you want to describe it, and then use that as a wedge to start networking into a community of people you care about, your ICP, however you want to describe that.

The founder is like, a Secret weapon for an early stage startup when it comes to doing that scott's talking about something different though, which is okay How do you keep doing that? Once you're starting to scale and it's super, you know, I was I I actually did this little founder brand workshop for a company yesterday They're doing really they're absolutely killing it doing really well And they're having this problem because the founder was so good at that And now they need to get the sales team to be good at it, but she's kind of reluctant to like, give it up, right?

Like, you know, and they're, they're not investing the appropriate resources in making sure that the sales team's empowered and enabled to go do it at the individual rep level. Their ideas on how to, on how to do that and best practices [00:46:00] on how to do that. But yeah, the founder brand is a perfect example of what Scott's talking about, particularly, in the early stages of the business.

Scott Barker: Yeah. I think, I think that's, it's a great call out. It's almost like this, this way of selling is. Is scaling founder led sales. So this is how founders, what I'm describing is how founders sell. And then we try and over engineer and, and, and then turn everyone into the same scalable, repeatable thing that doesn't work very well.

We know it doesn't work very well. So I think it's about like. Giving folks the autonomy. And this kind of goes to the kind of accountability piece. The second one is, is like, you know, if, if I didn't have a case study and I needed a case study, I would call that like people, there's a reason I'm an entrepreneur now and doing my, my own thing.

People didn't always love it, but like, if I needed a case study, I would call the customer and get a case study and build it [00:47:00] myself. Um, you know, if, if there are things. That are, that are stopping you from doing your job. It is nobody else's problem, but your own, you have a number to hit. You should look at this as your own business, your number and your, your, your target accounts, that is your business.

So what do you need to do? I bought all sorts of technology for myself early in my career because my company wouldn't buy it for me. Like all of these little things in like spending a little bit of money here or there, or spending your weekends doing something. Like it is about full accountability of doing whatever you need to do to own that piece of business.

And I think when you start thinking like that, then you naturally are more like a founder led sales. Um, and you, you are invested in, okay, the founder can do this and that's because they know the story intimately well, and they have the credibility. Why don't I spend the time to learn that story just as well.

And it doesn't [00:48:00] matter that it's not exactly your story. You can. You can switch their story a little bit that ties you into it more. Um, yeah,

it's, uh, But, but, but I think that's great. By the way, one thing to look at in an early stage company, whether you're an investor, a salesperson thinking about joining the company, is if the founder is not out there telling compelling stories and networking themselves, It is highly unlikely the average sales reps going to be able to do it, right?

Scott Albro: I mean, this is, this is something that starts in the early days of a company. It's truly founder led. Yeah. I can't think of an organization where, you know, the sale, the sales team writ large, like created the story from scratch, started networking the right way, et cetera. Right. Without the founder having done it first.

Craig Rosenberg: No, that's actually, you guys have created a new selling methodology, [00:49:00] which is founder sales for reps.

Cause there's there You guys, as you were talking, I'm just sitting there going, it's so interesting because like, and Scott P I'll take your experiences. You know, the thing about the sales engagement market when it came out was that the reps could, like a founder, provide their personal story on why they joined and it would work, right? They'd say, you know, I'm sitting there working at dot dot dot company, you know, and I can't do that. And part of the founder thing is that story, as Scott said, you lead into the point of view with your own personal story there. The sales engagement group like, uh, category, they had that built in advantage and it led to like a really great connection early on to the buyers, right? Um, that's,

Scott Barker: you shouldn't, yeah,

if you don't have that personal story, you shouldn't be at that company, right? You should have been inspired to join this, [00:50:00] this company. Um, and yeah, we had it, So I had it at the sales hacker days. And one of the greatest things I could say was, and this was true early in my career, I kept getting promoted, um, really quickly and I had all these gaps in my knowledge, so I learned, leaned on sales hacker to fill all these knowledge gaps and it was incredible, helpful resource for me.

So when I joined to run revenue and partnerships, I would say that here's my personal story. It helped me get promoted here. And like, I literally stood up this article and, Brought in this tech stack that I read from this person and this person and it fucking worked. Um, and you know, I could, I could really believe it.

And then same at, at outreach was like, Hey, you're on this call. Um, because we ran you through, uh, an outreach sequence and 80 percent of our pipeline is built, uh, on outbound sequences sent by outreach. Like what an incredible. Story. And that doesn't have to come from the founder, but it's, it's taking the time, sales is the art of [00:51:00] like storytelling.

So, you know,

Scott Albro: Yep.

Scott Barker: the time to build your, your story. And, and I will sit down and rewrite my story on like a quarterly basis based on the things that I now learned. And sometimes you can only connect the dots looking back and be like, Oh, interesting. I learned that from there. And this is, this is why I do this.

And then I can tailor that to. whatever I happen to be, you know, focused on, on solving, but, um, I'll share this, this quote that I, that I love, and I think we're getting back to simplicity and sales, and that's not to say it's not hard, it's actually harder to do simple things extremely well, but there's this, uh, Quote, it's from a, a boxer, Vinnie, uh, Vinnie Pazienza, and it was made, made famous on, uh, a recent movie, In This Blood, and this reporter, uh, asked him a question, and he go, and the question is, what's the biggest lie you've ever been told?

And uh, he goes, it's not that simple. And the reporter goes, why not? [00:52:00] And he goes, no, that's the biggest lie I was ever told. That it's not that simple. It's a lie. They'll tell you over and over and over again. And she goes like, what's not that simple? And he says, any of it, all of it. That's how they get you to give up.

Uh, they say it's not that simple. Uh, and she goes, so what's the truth? And that it is that if you just do the thing that they tell you, you can't do, then it's done and you realize it's that simple and that it always was. And I think like, we need to bring that back of like, It is simple, but it is really hard to build authentic relationships.

It is really hard to become an expert and you can have every tooling known to man, but if you can't figure out your story, figure out how to build trust and earn the right to solve the problem, you're fucked. But I think we're going to automate everything and then get back to those core things. That makes.

You know, scaling companies

and, and, and selling really fun.

Scott Albro: yeah.

The Value of Human Skills in the Age of AI
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Scott Albro: Yeah, uniquely, [00:53:00] those are all what I would call like uniquely human skills, right? Like the ability to tell a good original story, the ability to establish trust, the ability to earn the right to ask for something. These are really human things. They're going to be, ironically, more important than ever in the world of AI.

And, you know, someone was asking me about like, Hey, what happens to Gartner group or a Gartner analyst in the world of AI? I was like, they're going to be more important than ever, right? Because people are going to want to hear from like real authentic humans who have deep expertise on this. So we can argue about how deep the expertise is and that type of stuff.

But Gartner analysts are going to be more valuable than ever.

Scott Barker: Totally. Yeah. AI is not here to give you a contrarian point of view. It's, it's to tell you the aggregate of all the data that's out there. That's going to be the opposite of contrarian. It is going to be the, the agreed upon thesis. So if you can look at a, Problem, solution, [00:54:00] service, technology, and connect the dots in a way that's maybe contrarian to what others are thinking.

Like, AI can't do that. Won't do it for a very long time.

Craig Rosenberg: All right. Well, there we go. We got a, we had a mic drop quote and then a finale on uniquely human. So that's what I like to see. And, um, it's really awesome that Scott B was the bottle cap culprit and not me. It makes me feel good, man.

Cause I mean, I

Scott Albro: that's

Scott Barker: I, I, I fidget from time to time. It's not a good

Craig Rosenberg: man. It's amazing.

But anyway, uh, so two, as we come off, so one, that was a great. Uh, that was excellent. And I'm so glad I got Albro's first, uh, uh, co host guest co host session out of the way, uh, Sam, he did a good job.

Sam Guertin: Oh, definitely. Yeah. A

Scott Albro: I said I would, I actually made a personal commitment to myself a year ago that I would never [00:55:00] do a podcast. Now I've done a bunch of podcasts and I'm actually a co host of a podcast. Yeah, anyway, I'm

Craig Rosenberg: Uh, yeah, no, I love it. And then Barker, thank you for coming on. I, you know, just so everyone knows, um, your, your podcast is amazing. Um,

you know, uh, it's just, it's really actionable and the stories that come out of it are great. And, and, you know, that's why. You're continuing to pick up like the pulse of the market.

So it was great to have you on. I'm just really glad we were able to make it work, man. And thank you for coming on the transaction.

Scott Barker: Thank you. That was a ton of fun. I appreciate you having me on.

Craig Rosenberg: All right. [00:56:00]