The Transaction

Wait, Jen, before we start talking about anything else, we've got to talk about your comedy career.

I don't have one.

No, but like, we just love the comedian angle.

And yeah, I mean, well, at least I do.

Matt, you know, you never know with Matt.

He told me that he liked it right when we started.

Oh, yes, that's what I led with.

Yeah.

Oh, you did?

Damn it, you didn't hit record.

So do you still get up on stage?

Well, I'm actually going on stage in a month.

I'm doing this comedy show called Mortified, where you go on stage with an artifact from your childhood, and you perform it.

And I have an eight-page letter that I wrote my sister when I found marijuana in her room.

And I was very upset.

And so I'll be performing my eight-page letter.

Oh, my God.

That is a great.

I'm so glad that was our lead-in story.

What an amazing idea for an event.

Yeah, it's really fun.

Everybody goes up there with like drawings and like diary entries.

It's really fun.

From ABM to PLG, from Meddic to Meddpicc, the world of business is constantly evolving.

We'll cover the who, what, where, when, why, and most importantly, how you get The Transaction.

I'm Matt Amundson and he's Craig Rosenberg.

Let's get started.

Oh my God.

All right.

I love it.

You want to know why we wanted you on the show?

Yes.

Well, A, we think you're awesome.

But B, as we think of the mix of content, like having someone like you that's on the operational front lines right now, with all the seemingly all the changes happening, we wanted your perspective here because we've had a mix.

We've had Brinker and Esteban Kolsky, we talked about from that perspective, and then we have a lot of raw sales perspective and marketing.

But we wanted to fill the gap on what's happening on the front lines of operations, and you're one of the best we know, and you're also incredibly engaging and clearly willing to get on stage and bring an eight-page letter that you wrote to your...

Of course.

Sure.

So that's why you're here, and we've known you now for years and watched your stuff, and we just think you're great.

And I just wanted to say that, Jen Igartua, Igartua?

Igartua, you nailed it.

Yeah.

Welcome to The Transaction.

Thank you very much.

Thank you for having me.

Yeah.

It's a pleasure to have Jen on.

So Jen, CEO of GoNimbly.

The first time I ever interacted with GoNimbly, I was running marketing for a company called EverString, and we're a very small shop, very small marketing department, and we used the GoNimbly team to outsource basically all of our marketing and sales operations, and they built a beautiful machine for the marketing and sales teams to work off of, and that's how I first met her.

I think she's probably more famous, though, for basically building the PLG motion for the team at Twilio, but us EverStringers, we still believe.

We still believe.

Yeah.

Welcome to the show.

Thank you.

The way we like to start the show is we ask this big question, which is, what is something that the market things are doing right, an approach, methodology, best practice, whatever that is, and they're actually wrong and they should be thinking about it differently, and what is that and what should they do about it?

That's how we start the show.

We're going to now pass the microphone to you and let's see where this goes.

Love it.

Then Craig, I did bring some glasses for you.

Oh, everyone knows someone sent me glasses very early on in the show.

It was me.

It was Jen.

So, I think the big thing that kind of, I'm seeing a shift.

So, like you all talked about, we started our GoNimbly about eight years ago.

Before that, I was working for a company called Blue Wolf.

Anybody that's kind of been in the Salesforce space for a while probably knows Blue Wolf was the kind of the big services partner, very focused on sales operations and Salesforce.

I was the first marketing automation hire.

So, I've been in this space where I've been very focused on top of funnel, marketing automation, lead handoff, and also realizing that anything I did there was affecting sales and Salesforce and I couldn't really do it in this silo.

And, you know, what I'm seeing now is kind of a shift.

Like I start off my career doing lead scoring programs and handoff and, you know, nurture campaigns and all of that top of funnel work.

And the standard was to basically build a lead scoring program that scored you from 1 to 100.

And then we create a threshold of like, I don't know, 70.

And that's all the leads that went over to sales.

What I'm seeing really successful and really changing is changing that kind of like what I would call like an algorithmic scoring, you know, model.

Some of them are fancier than others, but giving somebody a score and really doubling down on this idea of like a playbook instead.

So I'm not scoring someone from 0 to 100 to see how ready they are for sales.

I'm scoring them specific to an outcome and that means it doesn't stop at top of funnel.

I can also score you to figure out if there's an expansion opportunity, if there's a churn risk, if there's an onboarding risk.

And some of our customers, and I can talk a little bit about intercoms because they've okayed a story for us and they have a couple of really interesting examples, but they're pretty myopic.

Like we're going pretty detailed into what are we looking for?

Or what's the play?

And then it kind of brings me to my second, there's like two kind of hot takes, which is we're doing a huge disjustice to the sales team.

So in that identify the playbook, also really enabling your sales team to understand like what playbook are we running?

And so we're getting myopic in our definition of a lead scoring around a playbook, and then also enabling our team on that specific playbook and how to approach that customer.

And if I compare it to what used to be is, oh, I have identified a lead, there are a score of 70, lead source webinar, good luck sales team, go book a meeting.

Like that's dead.

So the way we thought about lead scoring before in the, in was you, a score hit a threshold, go crazy, go get them.

Yeah.

Okay.

And what you're saying by saying outcome focus is no, can we look at scores and look at likely outcomes and then create playbooks against the way that score, you know, like based on the scoring, it will tell you this is a likely outcome, run this playbook.

Yeah.

And you can think about it.

Like it's very, it ends up being a lot of the interesting examples end up being very PLG focused.

But I'll give you a very tactical example that I think is really cool that Intercom ran.

So Intercom, they essentially help teams scale their support function, right?

And so they actually look at customers, like their customers that are using Intercom that also have a low CSAT score.

So essentially Intercom is supposed to help you create really great customer success outcomes.

So what happens when your customers are in, like your customers' customers aren't happy.

And so they have a whole play around that.

And they layer it on with things like, and also a growing support team.

So it probably means that your support team is growing beyond their means or, you know, like also a ticket count going up.

And so you're mixing all of these signals to basically give your sales rep this really amazing alert, this really amazing alert that says, hey, here's a customer, their CSAT score is low, but their ticket volume is going up and their support team is going up.

So the business is doing well.

So here's a play around that.

And probably the play there is, go pitch them our Intercom Fin AI solution, because that's going to help with scaling this team and increasing CSAT score.

Adi, go do this thing.

Matt, admit you used to do that.

Of course I did.

Of course I did.

Yeah, like I was at a company that wrote a 100 page ebook on do that.

Okay.

Yeah.

So I'm sorry.

It was fun.

So I got a couple of questions, Jen, real quick.

So sorry, because these signals are not standard inside of Salesforce.

So now you're talking about peering into a different world in order to generate these scores.

So are we talking about pulling data from the warehouse?

Where are we populating all this information?

Yeah.

I mean, we're looking, it's funny.

I don't want to throw another acronym, but I'm going to do it for the sake of answering your question.

Sometimes when we talk about like product led sales, I think you could say data led sales and like, just make it more broad because I'm talking product usage, but there's no reason that I don't layer on at marketing engagement.

I could layer on, people could obviously raise their hands and ask for a call.

I can layer on third party intent data.

I could layer on that you're searching G2 for competitors.

Like there's all of these data points that I need to bring in.

And great, I've got step one, I've got a bunch of data.

I then have to figure out how to translate that.

So I've got this sort of translation layer of taking data into insights.

A lot of times that does happen outside of Salesforce, most of the time it does.

And what we're sending into Salesforce is the actual signal.

And that's kind of the third piece, which is like, how do we hand this off in a great way to the sales team?

And then ideally, and this is, if we want to get nerdy, spoiler alert, you need to create a bunch of custom objects.

But from there, how do I create a system that I can actually report on so that I don't just send things over and go, hey, look, it's kind of working.

What we built over at Intercom and a few other places, we can, and we did this at Twilio pretty early on, we can tell you which signals are converting.

We can tell you, hey, here's Playbook A, and it converts higher than Playbook B.

Love that.

So that is a changing, of course.

In addition to we're evolving the way we think about scoring and the way we're executing or creating next best action from our sales team, we're also evolving the places from which we are getting these signals, and then we're evolving the methodology around how we deliver those signals.

So this is like, you know, people talk about, hey, there's an old Playbook and there's a new Playbook.

To me, this feels, this whole motion feels very central to what the new Playbook has to look like.

And it's got multiple variate.

I mean, I mean, she's talking about, like, we're, you know, these three signals come together, you're running this play.

That's like, there's a lot of plays in this Playbook.

I mean, it's like, yeah.

Yeah.

And it doesn't stop at new business.

And, you know, it's the same framework you can use to route, like we talk a lot about, like, routing leads to sales, but you can route whatever alert you've come up with to the appropriate team.

It could be the onboarding team, it could be the CSM, it could be the AM.

It's all very specific to what does this customer need.

And we talk a lot about that as operators and even as go-to-market, you know, leaders.

And it's rare that you actually see folks really putting themselves in the customer's shoes and saying like, what do they actually need?

That's why I give that Intercom CSAT example.

That's amazing.

That's like your customer isn't getting value out of your platform.

Let's go help them.

Like you could do that with slow response time.

You could do that with like, hey, there's no peak moment you've had, like the customer's unhappy.

You could even do that with things like, hey, our champion or our most active user just got deactivated.

Like we're about to lose our champion.

Like this is something that you can use throughout the entire life cycle.

But it does take a company who is very willing to go deep and design thinking frameworks and really think about what the customer needs at any point.

That's amazing.

So I got one comment then one question.

Okay.

So one thing you triggered me on, Matt, remember Ashley Welch we had on and like her big thing with us was like, well, do you as a vendor understand your customer's customer?

Yes.

And what they want.

And interestingly, the Intercom example, there is this play here, which is like, you know, instead of just thinking about our customer, with Jen's customer's Intercom, which would be like, well, if you get scores, you know, you just have this.

She's saying, well, what about that?

You know, we can learn a lot about what the customer's cost is happening in their business and be able to do something about it.

So I think that's really amazing.

All right.

So the we've been sort of locking in on signal selling, signal based selling.

And and I think this is very similar.

And I think that let me give you my thoughts based on what you just said, because Matt and I are going to write something on it because we're talking about a lot and like and but you just gelled everything for me, which is signal selling will fail as well if it's just a trigger to go.

Yep.

Yep.

And what you're saying is, so let's so I'll give a front end example, job change alerts or some other business trigger tracking that you're doing.

Along with, I don't know, but we did job, not job change alert, job postings.

Let's just make this up.

You know, new building opening and so and so showing, you know, that they're growing.

Maybe some content consumption, aka intent data or engagement data.

You know, that's kind of the storyline on a signal-based selling narrative.

But what you might say there, I'm going for it here, Jen, is you would say, well, it's not just the signal.

It's what do the combination of signals mean and what playbook do we run against?

Yes, yes.

There's basically four things, I think.

As we're building this, one, you need a trigger notification system.

So that's the stuff you're talking about, which is like, we're going to notify a rep that something has happened.

We need the second thing is we need to give them access to actionable insights.

So we need to tell them like, hey, here are the insights, the data that's really accessible to them.

A lot of people miss that.

I'll tell you a fun little story about that after.

Then number three, you need a streamlined workflow.

Here's my alert, here's what I do next.

Something that's very obvious for the reps, that's going to give you the most insights to actually know what's working.

Then four, which I think is the thing that you're calling out is missing, is a tailored sales play.

It's like we're not just saying, here's your lead, here's why.

We're also recommending, hey, here's the play that you should go after.

Have that, ideally, it's data-backed and it's got lots of templates and all that good stuff, but we're recommending what to do next.

Okay.

Well, you were going to tell a story on it.

Okay.

I was working with a company that was fairly early stage, earlier than we typically work with, but they were going from sales led to AE led, and they had hired a class of four or five AEs.

They were getting started probably their first year.

Of course, they're seeing a huge drop in conversion from their CEO and founders selling to their rep selling, expected, but it was pretty big.

And so we did essentially a secret shopping, and we listened to a lot of their calls.

And the CEO was basically like, well, why aren't they talking to them about their usage?

Because they had a PLG motion.

Why aren't you bringing up what they're doing in the product and what's going on there?

And the answer from the reps was like, oh, we don't have access to that.

It's like, he's like, why not?

It's like, I don't know, we don't have logins to their product data like you did.

You were able to do that.

And it's this thing that's like, that's a huge cliff, right?

Like when you see a C-level founder cell, they're going in to the product, they're analyzing, they're really understand their customer, and they're showing up as an expert and telling them, oh, you should be using these three features and like, this is gonna get you, you know, really far.

And an AE is going in blind.

And so, like that's the real thing that we need to give to them.

Your sales team is going to ask for a lot more than they need.

They think they need the raw usage, they don't.

They need basically summaries of what's going on.

Yep, yep.

Yeah, I think, I mean, I think you're laying this out perfectly, which is, there's a lot of places where a process like this falls down.

Okay, it falls down when you just pipe in raw data and it's something that people can't understand.

It falls down when you pull all that data together and give it some kind of alphabetical or numerical score.

It also falls down when you give them all the information, but don't tell them what to do with it.

So I think it's like, those are the three things that you have to check off.

It's, do I have the signals?

Can I deliver the signals to the place where our sales team actually works, which is generally Salesforce?

And then can I give it to them in a way where it can be actionable?

Like, hey, not, here's a bunch of rows or columns or data consumption numbers, but something that actually makes some kind of sense.

And then can I deliver the playbook to them afterwards?

And to me, that feels like the real next stage of what the go-to-market playbook is going to look like.

What's really interesting about this is like, this is kind of the B2C playbook that's existed for a really, really, really long time.

And now it's just finally making its way to B2B.

First of all, your guys' microphones are way cooler than mine and it's pissing me off.

We need to get you on.

I mean, Jen's microphone reigns supreme.

It's practically wearing a crown.

Thank you.

Damn it.

Okay.

Really quick.

So number one was we have to have a trigger alert system.

Now, Matt's saying that reps are in Salesforce.

I believe that's true.

Yeah.

But is that what you mean or do you mean other things too?

No, we typically recommend pretty strongly that it goes into Salesforce.

And I do think there's very cool products out there that are trying to have like another inbox for your sales team where you go in and you see these sort of like PLG or PQLs.

The reason I don't like that is we're creating an even bigger silo between our funnels where there doesn't exist one, where we now have this sort of sales led funnel and you've got this kind of lead gen model and then you've got your PLG motion and your PLS motion and they're all living in different places when your customers are engaging with you in all of them.

They're going to events, they're signing up, they're talking to sales.

And so I don't love the go into this other product to find your PQLs because a PQL can be an MQL and an MQL can be a PQL.

And it's actually something we worked really hard with the both intercom team.

We actually did at EverString and we did at Twilio and when we create this sort of custom object, we named it the wrong thing.

And I'm sorry to tell you, Matt, that I was, I made a mistake as your consultant back then.

We called it an MQL.

And that's pretty myopic.

What we called it, what we ended up calling it for intercom is a go to market touch.

And it was just like, hey, this needs a follow up.

So it could be an MQL, it could be a PQL, it could be whatever you want.

And we can tag it so that you can get insights into which funnel and which funnel activities.

But what we're doing is we're saying, hey, there's a human led moment that is necessary right now.

And we don't want our sales team cherry picking which one because they only like PQLs.

And what these other products are doing, and I think there's like a peak at the beginning.

So you get yourself a PQL platform and you go in there and you're gonna have this huge volume of like really fun PQLs that you didn't know about before because your team wasn't even looking.

And then that trails off.

That goes away pretty quickly.

The same 50 are gonna come up every month because you're just basically doing an activity you should have been doing long, like, you know, for a long time.

And I'm finding our customers that are using these products have a pretty immediate peak and then it sort of dies down.

Because it's not going into Salesforce.

Because it's not going into Salesforce because you're, there is this sort of universe.

And I think almost every company is missing out on expansion opportunities from existing customers that are yelling to be sold to, that like just nobody's doing that data analysis.

But once you do that, once there's like, I don't know, these 50 very easy expansion opportunities, then it trickles because you've just worked them.

But these new tools that elevate those have a really amazing first couple of months and then it sort of dies down.

And I feel bad for them.

You know, I'm rooting for them, but they need to solve the whole thing.

They need to say, here's the, like what we're basically building, but we build it in Salesforce, which is, here are all the alerts for everybody.

New business expansions, churn, everything that our team needs to execute on, that systematically we're identifying.

And that's what our tools are smart at.

We have to identify.

But our sales team and our CS team, et cetera, need to go after it.

Okay, I get it.

And I, so cool.

So you guys are in agreement on that.

I'm in agreement on that, except that even though for years, I've always had people use Salesforce, I was always the worst user because I had to go in there.

That's not surprising.

I think we, I think it's all over you.

Yeah, that was not an insight.

Okay.

So, but we're talking about sales.

Do you, as you set these things up, do you run mark?

Like, is there a case for a signal or a trigger, whatever, or a set of signals, creating a marketing play versus a sales play, or does everything go to sales and they, and we figure it out from there?

How do we look at that?

Yeah, I'm not typically creating a notification to go to marketing.

I think that it's the same concepts.

You're just doing segmentation and you're running kind of nurture campaigns or running events for certain to like elevate those customers.

So I could give you the same premise.

So if you're finding some of these signals are not ready for a conversation, but they're ready for an email, like you can certainly do that.

We of course want, I'm going to keep using the PLG examples because they're easier, but you could do this in anything.

But if we're seeing customers not adopting certain features that we think are very sticky and good for them, we of course should be sending nurture campaigns.

And I actually think that marketers are pretty good at that when they have the space to do it.

I've seen some pretty amazing trial campaigns and kind of like free to paid plans that look a lot of your usage and who you are and what industry and give you relevant content.

It's not that different than what we're talking about right now.

We just want to go the more and more specific our cohorts are.

Obviously, the more engaged our customers are going to be because it's extremely relevant.

The Transaction is presented by Ringmaster, the go-to branded podcast team.

You know, when Craig and I were thinking of starting this podcast, we had all the ideas in the world.

But you know, all the ideas in the world won't get you a great podcast.

That's where Ringmaster comes in.

They handle the creative, book guests, and do all the production for the podcast so we can focus on what we do best, talk to one another, and our amazing guests.

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Okay, cool.

All right.

So these things go into Salesforce.

We gave them, there should be a custom object where they can get their hands on these GoToMarket touches.

Yep.

And then, but so the outcome driven analysis, do they see that?

Like, so like when I go in there, that was number three, right?

We're going to open the black box to them.

Is that okay?

Yeah, I'm typically sending an alert.

And what that alert will say is like, hey, here's a GoToMarket touch that you need.

It's going to be connected to an account, always.

And then most of the time with a contact with an individual.

And then I'm going to say what the target outcome's going to be.

So, hey, this is an expansion, GoToMarketTouch, and I'm going to also give you what we call qualification signals.

So it's usually a grouping, maybe two or three of the major ones.

And we're going to say, hey, for example, there's really high usage here, and we give them the raw data.

So we might say, hey, there was 8,000 conversations that happened and the usage count is growing by 25%.

This typically is a good chance to pitch our AI product.

Or another one that we use a lot is there's overage.

So, hey, they're at 110% or even maybe they're at 90% of their usage, but they're six months through their contract.

Go have a conversation.

You could also add a, hey, they're comparing us to G2.

We see this as a risk with our competitor.

And that's going right to them.

But again, there's summaries and they're specific.

One of the things that we got great feedback on is we're not just saying, hey, they're like hidden overages.

We're saying specifically they're at 112% of their limit.

And all of those click out to playbooks.

So we say, hey, here's your relevant playbook.

Right on that object, that's where the workflow happens.

So it's got statuses like a leader contact status and you can convert it.

And it converts to an opportunity and it takes all that qualification signals, like all of that information and ties it to the opportunity.

That's how we can report on which signals actually convert to revenue.

When you talk about the playbook, does that then start to exist in another platform, something like Outreach, Salesoft, Apollo, something like that?

It links out.

The playbook itself tends to be either in like a confluent or a notion or an enablement platform and a content platform.

If we're recommending a sequence, then it links out to an Outreach or a Salesoft or a Gong.

Okay, got it.

Kick it off from there.

That's signal-based selling, dude.

That is signal-based selling.

Now, one of the things, and I know you said in the start, but that Matt has definitely trained me on.

The data goes into a cloud data warehouse and then comes back out, right?

Yes, correct.

Yeah.

This is something that in my career has changed quite a lot.

When I first started and whenever we would be do a big tech map, we would draw Salesforce right in the middle, a big old circle, and then we would connect everything.

Then everything pushed into Salesforce and then the rest of the applications would feed off of that.

Now, the middle is a data warehouse.

We're going to draw a big old snowflake in the middle, and then we're going to put the relevant data in the right places.

Sometimes companies are too small and then yeah, just use Salesforce as your single source of truth and pump it in there, but eventually you're going to find that Salesforce, one, is expensive for data storage, and two, it's not the best at reporting and connecting multiple sources like a data warehouse and a BI tool will be.

And so the only downside here, one, obviously it's technically more complex.

And Matt, I'm sure you could talk about the integration tools that you can pop in here since you've been in that space.

But I think the other thing is, and revenue operators and even go-to-market leaders will feel this, you now have either a systems team or a data team owning that.

So we are getting more complex when we're talking about rolling out features or being really agile here, because we have another team that we're incorporating.

It's sort of the kind of when IT starts taking over, things do become a little bit slower.

It's that same thing that will happen here.

Okay, I'm going to say this was the very intense what the market's not getting around.

They should be doing today because that was amazing.

That was amazing.

Yeah, I'm so excited about this.

I mean, by the way, before I even talked to you, just the idea of to use because the other thing I felt like is we just used content consumption as a signal for years.

And that doesn't tell the whole story.

There's plays you can run, but there's so many other amazing things.

And the ability now to, as Matt likes to tell me, when he started to analyze Snowflake data, he's like, dude, I'm looking at data that I never correlated before.

And we should all be really excited about it.

And then you come on and you actually have put this stuff in play, which is amazing.

So thank you for that.

OK.

So let me ask you.

So the SDRs.

Well, first of all, let me ask you this.

There's a lot of controversy on LinkedIn about SDRs.

Yeah.

And so is part of your story, does your story help SDRs and make them more stronger?

Or is this something along the lines of what some people are talking about killing the SDRs?

Or is that like not even a topic?

Yeah.

Hey, so you know what's funny is I know that LinkedIn has a lot of content around the SDR being dead.

My clients aren't saying that.

So, you know, I don't know.

I think it's one of those things that it catches a lot of attention and it might have been a little bit of a misnomer in what we thought AI would do in the short term.

And I do think the role of SDRs has been changing even before AI.

It's like the expectations of the customer are increasing.

They don't want to be qualified on the phone in the same way.

So I think a great SDR is needing to become really quickly a product expert, especially in a PLG motion, where they need to be able to show up almost in an education, you know, cycle to really help the customer get the most out because the customer has already played around with your product, etc.

So I don't think it's dead.

And I think one of the things that, you know, AI or our ability to consolidate signals and be much more prescriptive in what we want the next step to be, it's setting them up.

We should be making them look good, right?

And they can pick up the phone and have that same pitch, but with data, with insights, you know, etc.

And so I don't, you know, I think most of us, I always talk about this one thing, and I don't know how our brains do this.

But when the two of you get into your inbox every day, how quickly do you delete all of your sales emails, like, and your spam and all your marketing?

Like, I just literally hit delete so quickly, and I never miss an email.

Like, we're so good at seeing when somebody actually wrote me an email that was for me versus a sequenced email.

Like, we just are really good at identifying that.

And so, you know, I think more than ever, we want to have a conversation with a person.

And we want that to be really relevant to us.

So, I think that's what we need to do.

We need to enhance our sales team.

So, a tactical example, can we help the SDRs do account research in an automated way so they can pick up the phone and have a great conversation instead of pretending that I'm going to go automate chat bots and fake, you know, bots?

Support has been doing this.

And I don't know how often you guys yell at a fake little robot that's even when they're saying the right thing and we're all mad at them and we're like, can I talk to a person?

It's the same kind of premise.

I think as buyers, we've already told the market that we want to speak to experts and we want to buy from people.

So, can I sum this up?

I'm very intrigued because, by the way, I've stopped listening to the LinkedIn SDRs or that thing and cold calling.

But I do want to talk to you about Outbound.

What I'm going to sum this up, which is, actually, by using AI and automation, we will save the SDRs.

Yeah, I think that's fair.

Yeah, because the problems that they blame the SDRs for are our fault.

Yeah, we told them to email 3,000 people at a time.

And then they did.

And then now we're mad.

And now, what we're saying is, we can use data to make good decisions on approach, right?

Messaging, the right plays, the appropriate sort of playbook there.

We can cue them up so that, in a scalable way, so that they can have meaningful human interaction with these folks.

And that is not going to kill them.

That will save them.

And one of the misnomers is, if you look at all our old timer friends, like, we got this guy, Dave Brock.

But, like, you know, when he put out something after our show, like, a couple of the OGs came on, they're like, yeah, like, AI going on and amplifying bad practices.

And I think that's part of what's wrong with the argument, is that's, although you could, I guess that happens.

I'm sorry, there are people that are using AI for the wrong reasons.

But a different way for them to look at it is actually not, is to kill the bad practices.

Like, what if we did the call with the right person that, and we did understand enough about what to talk about and when to talk about them.

Doesn't that make us better?

And the answer to that is obvious, it's yes.

Yeah.

Okay.

And the activities could be very similar, right?

Like, we're still, ultimately an email might still go out, right?

Like, an email might still go out and it might have been generated primarily through AI.

But in the way that we're talking about it being very specific, the reason why a lot of these qualifications signal fueled outbound, which is essentially what we're doing and it is to existing customers, we're giving them an insight about their business that they didn't have before.

We told them, hey, your tickets are growing, your team is growing, your CSAT score is lowering.

You're very similar to a lot of our customers that have had success in this area.

Can I have a conversation with you about how we can help?

Somebody needs to go have that conversation and it needs to be really relevant and really smart and really help your customer.

How do we create more of those people that are capable of having those conversations and how do we increase that ramp?

Because I can give that now, give that insight, consolidate research, give them the data that they need at their fingertips to go have a really interesting conversation.

Again, when like, what was my expectation?

Maybe that same email would have gone out a year ago, but my rep has to go on and wing it.

I'm trying to fix that.

I'm trying to fix making you look good on the next call.

It's like, I think I have a strength in that because that's what we try to teach our consultants all day.

But how do SDRs become more of a consultant as opposed to just trying to sell their solution?

Well, the other thing that I think is beneficial about the system that you're talking about is also determines when it should be an SDR versus when it should be somebody who's not an SDR, whether that's marketing, automated campaign, or whether that's a cam, or whether that's somebody in support, right?

If we can start to pull together these signals, we can determine not only what the playbook should be, but who should be running the playbook.

Yeah.

I mean, imagine there's no reason why we can't send a notification to an executive.

Like, hey, this needs, you've got to see, I don't know, you've got a C-level individual playing around in our platform at an enterprise level company that, Craig, you're connected with.

Do you want to take this call?

Like, we could get to that level that, like, I know your relationships and I can tell you, go have a conversation, you're already buds.

Like, this could go in a lot of places, but it's silly, and as marketers, it's the same thing we've always done, right?

Right person, right time, right message.

Like, we're right back there.

It's always, like, kind of going back there.

Okay.

Interesting.

You know, Matt used to be one of the best SDR leaders I ever knew.

Oh, thank you.

So, like, so Matt, so you would agree with all of this?

I definitely do.

We may not be, you know, we, a system like this may be shrinking a gigantic SDR team to something that's a little bit more efficient and streamlined, that may be the case, but, like, I still don't think SDRs are going away.

The other thing that I would say is, like, as Jen pointed out within her client base, like, they're not getting rid of their SDRs.

The people that I'm talking to that are having success with their SDRs are, the SDRs are getting on the phone.

Right.

They're getting on the phone.

Like, and that is the one piece that we're just not gonna be automating out anytime soon.

And I think even once we do, people will definitely know it's a fake person, even if we try.

I think that there is a place for perhaps a system where the SDR email outreach is automated, and then the BDR sits on top of that motion and just does calling.

I don't know that it's like robo-dialing, but I think it's more like intentional calling.

It's interesting.

I was just reading a post on LinkedIn about this, and it's just like as BDRs have just automated all their process through SalesLoft and Outreach, and then gone on to become account executives, they've sort of lost that ability to not just have a conversation with somebody, but be really discerning about who the people that they choose to spend their time with is.

Hopefully, a system like this can help with that process, but at the same time, a BDR needs to look and be thoughtful and say, hey, Jen's a CEO of a company, awesome.

But it's a services company, and we only sell to SaaS, or we only sell to Biotech.

So like, okay, even though this is a great title, I know that this is not within one of the verticals that we serve, so I'm gonna move on from that.

A robo-dialer is just gonna be like, well, CEO, boom, let's dial it through.

Like, let's see who we can get ahold of, and then they call Jen, they bother her, they spend 10 minutes trying to convince her to buy something that's not made for her business, they get off the phone, they go outside, they smoke a cigarette because they're all stressed out because they just got told off by a CEO, and now there's a gong recording that they're gonna have to pay the price for at the end of the week.

You know what I mean?

It's like, can we just use a, can we create a better system that just solves that problem and then still maintain the humanity?

Craig and I love talking about the human nature of go-to-market, don't we, Craig?

I like that you pronounced humanity, by the way.

I don't know if you know, you said it like manatee, you said humanity, it was weird.

I've been spending a lot of time in Florida, sorry.

The human, humanity, humanity?

I like the way you said it.

I like humanity.

Well, if I can pick a little bit on that, because I do think, to your point, we might automate fully the outbound piece.

And if I can play a little game with you, I don't know, go back 10 years in time.

We did do that.

Marketing owned all outbound.

That's true.

We used to do that.

And we used to do it pretending to be a sales rep.

We implemented it over at Zendesk where for free trials, we had basically a fake SDR that would email, based on, hey, do you want to book a call?

I'll book a call with you with my AE.

And then we would book with a real person if they said yes.

And so we're going a little bit, like we're taking it possibly, maybe this is a crystal ball moment.

I don't know if it'll actually happening, but like, do we take that back from SDRs?

Maybe they don't email out the first touch.

Like, do we take that back?

And this becomes a marketing led initiative, similar to the way we automate product onboarding and free trials and we have nurture campaigns.

Why wouldn't we be doing the first touch on outbound and waiting for them to reply?

Why is a rep doing this?

If we get good enough, because the idea of why we were giving it to sales teams is because they were going to customize the message.

Right.

They were going to have a template and there was a middle bit that they were going to populate and be real smart.

And that middle bit became smaller and smaller and smaller till it became not there.

And we started emailing everyone.

So if we're now using AI to automate this, then like maybe we are just fully automating it and it's becoming owned by marketing again.

I'm not suggesting marketing needs to own SDR teams, but are we sending SDRs the replies?

And maybe they're no longer sending that initial touch.

And then they're continuing the conversation.

I think there's a lot of ways to play with this, but the amount of money that we're paying these teams to pull a list and push to outreach and then allow a sequence to happen, you know, I don't think it's the best use of our time and we're kind of ruining our reputation in the process.

I agree.

I agree.

Speaking of playing games, is it okay if we dovetail here for dovetail office?

Please, pivot.

Pivot, we like to call it pivot.

We call it a pivot, yeah.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

I'm a little pivot-averse right now, so I'm gonna...

So I have been playing a game with you, Jen.

Yeah.

It's called Side Effects.

You've been playing it?

That's awesome.

We have family friends.

Our family that lives in San Francisco likes to come down.

We have a good time playing that.

It's time for me to get the booster shot, that's for sure.

So if you're like, wait, what the heck are you talking about, Matt?

Is also a board game designer.

One of which I own, which is called Side Effects and is a ton of fun to play, especially over a couple of cocktails.

And I'd love to hear the story of how you got into this.

Yeah, amazing.

Yeah, so this is a little side hustle that through some great luck and success and hard work has become a real little business.

I think we might do half a million dollars in sales this year.

Unbelievable.

Wild.

Yeah, wild.

So it started off, we just did a Kickstarter.

A friend of mine, Jade, had an idea for a game.

He knew that I really loved board games.

And every party that I have ends up having some sort of game component to it.

And I grew up with a family that really loved games.

It's a little sob story.

But when I grew up in Spain and then I moved to the US when I was about 10, didn't speak English and kids were not very nice.

And so me and my mom would like every weekend would kind of watch game shows and play games.

My mom's a lovely lady.

And so I've always had a real real obsession with games.

I also feel like it's human nature to play.

Like there's just, we are play animals.

We really love engaging in games.

And so he came to me, we kind of play tested it, went through the whole motion, did a successful Kickstarter.

And then now that game is translated into tie, check, French, French.

French?

French.

You guys know French.

And Japanese is coming up next.

And we're selling through kind of big box, like Barnes and Noble is like a huge lead source for us.

I just used the B2B term, our lead source.

That's just sales.

And the funny thing about making this whole game is I'm used to dealing in thousands, right?

Our customers spend a lot of money with us, very thankful.

And they sell very expensive products.

And so when I was making this game, I was working with a factory and they were like, hey, do you want to do like a linen finish for 10 more cents?

Like 10 cents, yeah, add it on.

Do you want to add gold foil?

It was like 25 cents.

Yeah, give me that gold foil.

Do you want a magnet?

It's only a dollar.

Yeah, add it.

And at the end of all that, they told me that it was the most expensive card game they had ever made.

And I was like, oh, that's not good.

I'm not, that's not good for my margins, is it?

And then we since have done a retail edition where we cut all of that.

But our first Kickstarter edition with like gold foil edges and stuff is like a collector's item.

Like people really hold on tight for those because it'll never happen again.

I learned my lesson.

That is amazing.

I am so jealous.

Yeah, you're still creative.

Yeah.

Thank you.

Matt, thanks for throwing that in actually at the end.

Normally we jump to it and start, but we had all the comedian sort of plays.

I mean, when you're dealing with Jen, it's like, where do you start?

Where do you stop?

There's so much to talk about.

She could fill a podcast with B2B insights.

We can talk about comedy.

We can talk about her board game business.

It's just the perfect guest.

Oh, you guys are too nice.

There's thing, by the way, I'm just going to say this then, because I just listened to the Cause a Glow podcast we just did, Matt.

One of the things you pointed out is there's these people where you can't wait to go hang out with them.

Yeah.

Jen's one of those because there is no conversation she can't have.

Agreed.

And that's really helpful because I'm all over the place.

She can handle it.

I feel the same.

And her energy level, although I'm a lot older, she can keep going and keep the fun going for a long time.

There's a whole lot to unpack there.

That's great.

Craig, you stay up late.

You can hang.

I appreciate that.

I appreciate that.

So, anyway, Jen, this was amazing.

We're going to have you on again.

We didn't even mean for that, but you topped off a couple of other podcasts we've had talking about Signals and whatnot.

So, it really came together and that's what we'd hoped for from the show.

So, it was fun.

We learned a lot about games and comedians and on Signal-based go-to-market.

For us, that's the ultimate.

So, thanks.

Thank you, Jen.

Thank you.

It was awesome.

Just great to hang.

Side Effects.

Side Effect.

It was also an awesome podcast.

It was.

I agree.

Thanks for joining us for another episode of The Transaction.

Craig and I really appreciate the fact that you've listened all the way to the end.

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