The Transaction

You know how you should think about this, you guys, is like, some of our, I mean, we get surprised with new guests, and we're like, holy crap, that was amazing, right?

But like, you know, in terms of like our, our initial grab of people, it's like, when you're at a conference or one of those things and you see Kosoglow, you're like, dude, I can't wait to talk to that guy.

It's true.

I mean, honestly.

Whereas there's other people at the conference, you're like, hey, what's up?

Oh my God, hold on, I see someone over there, I gotta go, I gotta go to the bathroom.

I gotta go do a call on the phone with, you know, it's like there's certain guys, you know, where you just, you know, it's like Doug Landis we had on the show.

It's like when you see Landis, you're like, dude, let's go hang out.

What's happening?

Yeah.

And generally there's a line of people that you have to get through in order to finally get to either Mark or Doug.

So, you know, and it's worth the wait.

It's worth the wait.

I got an awesome story about Doug Landis.

The first time I met him, he was the chief storyteller at Box, and I went up to him with my rep and I was like, Doug, man, chief storyteller, cool title.

I was like, yeah, thanks.

I was like, well, tell me the story.

He's like, eh.

I was like, no, dude, like, tell me the story.

He goes, it's not that good.

I was like, whoa, what?

You're the chief storyteller and you won't tell me the story?

What's going on?

That very much polluted my first interaction with Doug.

But since then, we've made up our good buds.

That's awesome.

All right.

So, you know, for the audience, you know, today, our guest, really one of the most amazing, you know, we weren't kidding when we started the show.

He's one of the best conversations you can have in B2B sales and marketing and startup world.

Look, we both, Matt and I, look forward to always talking to him.

And that always makes for a great show.

But the thing that we watched Mark do was start as a commission only grinder at outreach and go build, you know, a hellacious sales tech startup, man, through to a big company and through like literally, it was grit strategy, everything.

And they were so transparent that we were able to sort of watch Mark do his thing along the way.

And it was just an amazing, amazing run.

And that's really, you know, like it's cool.

Like there's a lot of us where it's like, it's how we talk about it.

And with Mark, it's how he talks about it and how he did it.

And so, and now he's off doing amazing things again.

And he's sharing a lot on LinkedIn, which is awesome for me and for Matt.

Like we get a lot of stuff, but like today's guest is our boy, Mark Kosoglow, and you know, one of the best guys in the business.

So, man, I just want to thank you for coming on.

My favorite way to endorse Mark.

Oh, this could be good.

I like this.

Where are we going?

I got him that story too.

Uh-oh, uh-oh, uh-oh.

Is the people that I know who are sales reps, who worked for Mark, love Mark.

Love the guy.

Love the guy.

And one of the things that is always a challenge is when you lead a department that was as excellent as a department that you led at Outreach, it is really hard to perform at that level and have reps that would literally step in front of a train to protect you.

And that is the endorsement that I get from people who have worked for Mark.

So not only is he a high-level operator who drives results at the highest level, some of the best sales results we've seen in SaaS in the last 20 years, but also the people that work for him just absolutely love working for the guy.

And I think that that is the strongest endorsement that you can get as an operator.

So that's the way I feel about Mark.

Man, that's making my day.

I'm about to cry.

No, that's very meaningful to me.

I like for people to like me.

And I know that's not supposed to be something that you're supposed to like, but fuck it, I like it.

But I do only have one regret for my time at Outreach is, despite my constant hounding, I never got Matt as a customer.

So there's still some unfulfilled business.

Oh, yeah, man.

Matt, let's have that conversation here.

Let's talk to your objections.

You know, actually, before we ask the question, but that is a really good point.

You know, there's two things that I sort of picked up in just years of asking people, like, what do you look for in a sales leader or a leader, right?

So Greg Alexander, I don't know if you remember that guy from Sales Benchmark Index, his big thing was, you know, they hired enterprise reps and he'd say, well, look, if you get enterprise reps, enterprise rep, you tell them or her, send me your 20 customers over the last five years.

If you want to send me 50, that's fine.

And I'm going to choose one.

And you're going to be able to call the CTO or CI, you know, depending on what you sell.

And that he's like, that will prove to me that they really did build relationships with them.

And then, right, it was really interesting thing.

He's like, yeah, you know, if you, if these, if we're going to go targeted enterprise, like, I want to know that, like, they can get a C-level person that they worked with on the phone.

Really interesting.

And then two was Sue Silverman, my old boss, he used to say what you just said, Matt, about sales.

You're just like, he's like, my big, he's like, my big thing is, if I hire this person, is, is everyone who worked for him, maybe 30% would not go.

This is 70% of people that work for him are knocking on the door saying, I want in wherever Mark goes or wherever who goes.

And that's just awesome.

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.

So let's start the show with that, with those just endearing intros of my guy.

I mean, I just love this guy.

So let's dig into it.

So the first question we always ask is, you know, what's something, whether it's a best practice methodology or a way of doing things, that the market thinks they're doing right today, that they're actually, they're wrong or they should think about it differently, what would that be and what should they do about it?

I have two kind of areas right now that, well, let me call it three that I feel interesting about.

One of them is a problem I helped cause at Outreach, which is when I started Outreach, it took seven touches to get a meeting.

At my Hay Day at Outreach, it took 15.

After COVID, it now takes 20 to 25 touches to get in touch with somebody.

Guys, we fucked up.

That is a sign of messed up, not how do I figure out how to hack domain deliverability and all this other stuff to still do the volumes that it now takes for Outbound to work.

The economy is screwed.

That's number one.

Number two is, these new sales rooms, I don't get it.

I can talk to you about why I don't get it.

Everybody thinks they're running to these sales rooms.

I think it's actually probably the inverse of what's required to actually work there, and I can talk to that.

The last thing is, Adam Robinson and I have a little beef on LinkedIn right now.

Ooh, we love beef.

God damn it.

That's the greatest news of all day.

We love Adam, too.

So this is great.

I know.

So he's talking about inbound led outbound, and I'm saying, no, that's called marketing.

There's no need to make it more complicated and confuse everybody else that's out there looking for silver bullets.

And now it's devolved into a discussion of what's better, bootstrapped or VC funded success?

Like what's better, given your founders $5 million or feed in providing for hundreds of families?

So it's been a very fun debate.

I've respected hell out of Adam as a human, as an operator, as a founder, as a CEO.

I just think we're having a really fun public debate, discussing our sides and our perspectives.

And so, but the whole inbound led outbound, person level, de-anonymization stuff to me is like a very, another very dangerous route.

Just like these new AISDRs to me are going down another dangerous route.

Okay.

Matt, do you want to do...

Is that enough ammo, Craig?

Is that enough ammo?

Now it's, I mean, these are, these are big.

Why don't you start with number one?

Cause I want to talk sales rooms.

Oh, do you really?

Yeah.

Yeah.

Well, the big question is, so, so, well, first of all, what do you mean that, uh, we've, we fucked this up on the touches?

Start there and then let's, let's solve it.

I have a funny little phrase.

Uh, a lazy man's better is more.

So if I want better results, what do most sales leaders do?

They ask for more activity.

They don't actually do the hard work of figuring out how to do better.

And when we, when we moved from that, like into that Zerp era where it was just more, I need more, I need more, I need more, I need more.

We started to clean things up.

I'll never forget at Outreach, we had a guy that we called Vlad the Destroyer.

And Vlad the Destroyer was the first person that sold, sent a thousand emails in a day.

And he broke Outreach in the very beginning.

We called him and we're like, yo Vlad, you're not, that's not what it's built for.

But we, it helped us mature our infrastructure.

And then a couple of months later he sent a thousand or 10,000 messages in a day or then he went up to 100,000.

He kept going up until finally we kicked them off the platform.

But that mentality of Vlad the Destroyer is the mentality of most revenue leaders, send more emails, make more phone calls, do more stuff on LinkedIn.

And that is lazy.

What's better is better.

How do I take the same amount of emails and get better results?

How do I send less emails and get better results?

And unfortunately, we've been in a place coming out of that Zerp era where it was easy to always add more, and it was cheaper to add more than to do better.

We've now switched over into the how do you have to figure out to do better, and most people don't have the skill set anymore to do that.

So that's where we're in trouble.

We fucked it up.

We hit the easy button.

Easy button automation.

Mash, mash, mash, mash, mash, mash, mash, mash, mash.

And now we've mashed it and it's broke.

And the playbook, Craig was simple.

Right person, right message, right time, right channel.

If you've done that since the beginning of time, you are successful in sales.

Guess what doesn't work now?

Right person, right message, right heart, because we have completely obliterated the landscape.

Yeah, yeah.

I mean, I've felt that way being an ex-Marquetto employee, right, where Marquetto sort of armed marketers with the ability to do more and more and more and more and deeper levels of personalization as an evolution from the old email service provider days.

And so now I'm like, as a marketer, I'm like, God damn, it's so hard to get people to engage with marketing now because there's so much of it happening.

And there's this interesting sort of side effect that occurred from, you know, Mark Ketto and the other marketing automation players and outreach and the other sales acceleration players is like, yeah, it made it even harder to get a hold of people because all of a sudden, you know, there was just a massive explosion in the amount of emails hitting people's inboxes.

Yeah, it is a problem that our need for growth and what is the, humans always choose the path of least resistance.

More is easier than doing something better and now we've maxed out more.

And so now think about what's happening.

We have these companies that are kind of the second generation of outreaches where they're warming up inboxes and all this.

I mean, like, where does it end?

Are we going to warm up like a thousand different domains so that we can send email from a thousand domains?

And I wonder if we're sending a hundred emails from each domain every day.

We're sending a hundred thousand emails a day like it.

Yeah.

What is the end game here?

The end game is this.

Or this is where people are thinking is.

What I'm doing is I'm hoping I'm hoping I get that person to engage.

I have never in my life hoped to engage somebody.

I did the hard work to figure out how to make sure that they were attracted to talking to me.

And that's where I think that everybody's doing things wrong.

Sales is a numbers game.

But unfortunately, there's two sides to that coin.

One is if you don't do enough, you won't get a result.

The other one is if you do too much, you won't get results.

And we are on the other side of the sales number game formula.

We need to dial it back in to like that cool zone, that Goldilocks area where we're doing a good amount of work.

We're working hard every day, but we're not like going nuclear on people.

And the other interesting side effect of both market automation and sales acceleration is people got really good at using Marketo and got really good at using outreach, but they didn't get really good at creating messaging or content or engaging emails, right?

They're just like, no, no, no, I know how to get a lot out and I know how to set up triggered workflows.

I know how to create if then statements inside these platforms and I know how to like automate it for social or I know how to automate it, the dialing aspect of it or whatnot.

People became scientists and they stopped being creative sellers or creative marketers.

Yeah, I read Jeffrey Giddemer's Little Red Book of Selling and very early on in my sales career, and it's a very weird, interesting book, but the TLDR of it is, unleash your creativity, be different.

Don't zig when everybody else is ags.

Like Josh Braun says, be the red X in the sea of white circles, right?

Like, and that's how I've done my whole entire career, right?

Like I've recently, you know, I joined the exec team at Catalyst.

We did the personality profiling and then we got into little groups just so you could experience the different personality types and stuff.

And, you know, every other group, we did a group exercise and every other group got a big bag of skittles.

And the exercise was like, now make a house out of the skittles.

That was the prompt.

Well, I looked around and, you know, you could experience how different people worked inside that group project.

But everybody was doing like the second grader, blue sky, red house, yellow sun, green grass, flowers.

I was like, fuck that.

I took all the blue skittles and made a blueprint.

And then I made furniture inside the blueprint, like it was like a designed house, right?

And we won, right?

We didn't win because we did more.

We won because we were creative, different and interesting.

And that is what will never die in sales or humanity.

Do you know who gets the date?

The person that's the most interesting.

Do you know who wins the deal?

The person that's the most interesting.

Do you know the person who gets to, you know, cut my lawn is the one that does it, that talks to me about it the most interestingly, right?

You know what I mean?

And we're wired as humans to gravitate towards things that we're interested in, but we've gotten less interesting because we've gotten lazy, and we do more less interesting stuff instead of less more interesting stuff, which will be, and you know, people bang on the personalization drum, that they've missed, they've missed what personalization is, and it's not a line about where I went to college or something stupid like that, which you know, that's overplayed, but like that's what we're doing right now.

Yeah, yeah.

That was great.

That was great.

What is, I know we've got two more things, but yeah, I do want to beat on this because I think the follow up to this is what everybody wants, right?

Because I think good operators know that what you're saying is true, but they don't know how to systematize the right process, the right types of behavior.

So, are you seeing people do that well?

Are you doing that well right now?

Like, what is the counter to, I'm going to send 100,000 emails and hope that I get two meetings out of it, to, I'm going to focus on 10 accounts and still get two meetings out of it, and they'll probably be better?

Well, I think that there is a percentile of sellers who just do this, right?

In marketers team, right?

They'll be like, listen, I know I got 100 accounts in my patch, but I only care about 7 of them, and they'll get in to all 7 of them and crush it, right?

So what that takes is, one is, you have to be okay with scarcity.

Like you have to have that mindset that even though I'm only working on 7, if I do it really well, it'll pay off, right?

And a lot of people can't cross that bridge.

So the first thing that you have to have is the right mindset.

The second thing you have to know is you have to have business acumen.

What those people do is they take a lot of different data points and they find the patterns in it.

They find what's interesting in those data points, and then they present that in a really interesting way.

So I think we need to train people on how to have more business acumen.

Like here's a perfect example.

I remember I had a group of young AEs that I was trying to help with prospecting.

And we were like, I was like, well, you need to have a reason why you're excited to go after this account.

They're like, well, they have 500 sellers.

I'm like, no, no, no, no, no.

That is why you are selfishly interested.

Why are you intellectually interested in this account?

And they're like, well, I don't know.

Like they don't have any sales engagement software right now.

And I'm like, no, that's not it either.

I was like, let's go look at their LinkedIn post real quick.

Their company LinkedIn post.

Well, guess what we saw?

We saw a LinkedIn post about, here's our new buyer's guide on how to buy RFP software or whatever it was.

And here's this, this like business acumen kicks in.

I was like, you know why somebody creates a buyer's guide?

You know why marketer creates a buyer's guide is because the CEO says, we're losing competitive deals and we're that people are buying on the wrong criteria.

Let's influence the buying criteria so that we can influence the conversation.

They probably have a competitive problem.

Let's talk to them about what their competitive strategy is and how they can implement it with outreach.

Boom, got the meeting in one email.

You know what I mean?

Like that's the stuff that we have to be teaching people.

Like, listen, is it going to be hard?

Yes.

It's going to take a lot of time.

Yes, but I can tell you what, right now, it won't work.

Spending more time trying to hack all of the systems that were put in place because of all the crap that we've already done.

You know, I did a funny post the other day, but right now, there's companies that have AI that will warm up all your inboxes and do all that kind of stuff.

Do you know what's going to happen?

Google is going to create an AI that can tell when you're doing that shit.

And then it's going to be one AI battling another AI, and who can be the trickiest and the smartest.

And that's how World War III gets started.

And we all get replaced by robots.

But anyway, that's what's going to happen.

And I've thought about, maybe I should create a company that's just like, I'm the AI watchdog.

I'm the AI bloodhound.

Like, if you try to AI me, fuck you.

No.

All right, so that makes total sense.

And one thing we had, the podcast comes out today with Dave Brock, I don't know if you know him.

And he's really big on business acumen.

And we're like, Dave, like, sure, you can say that.

But how do you train it?

He's like, well, there's really easy.

One easy way to do it is like, literally he has this thing.

What do you call it?

It's like app named after the Colbert questionnaire.

And he's like, he's like, here's 20 questions.

Just I don't care if you get a deal.

Go talk to your market and learn about, you know, these things.

And he's like, you'll learn more from just having conversations and asking questions about what their life is like to build business acumen than you will, you know, reading books and all those things.

And it was really cool.

It made a ton of sense for me.

I've actually recommended it to a ton of people.

Just the one thing I will say that I've seen a lot of that's really good is people honing in on their ideal customer profile.

And often that being a group of similar folks that you can actually gravitate to, whether it's vertical or whether it's use case or whatever, that you can learn enough to have the business acumen to sort of read something and to be able to go do something with that, whatever you've learned in a compelling way.

But you do have to do that.

You know, it's funny, I always thought that when I joined a venture firm, I would get less emails.

I get a ton, a ton.

I still get people tying back to UCLA, which I tell, Matt went there too.

I tell people, I was right back.

I graduated UCLA in Pauley Pavilion and half of my friends didn't even show up and their parents were in the audience.

They thought they, that is a lot of people.

That doesn't do anything for me, okay?

Like there was 10,000 people in Pauley and it was like, there was like, that is just not a tie.

Now, if I was in the Marine Corps in a particular regiment and you were in there, yes, like that's a good one.

But like just automatically looking at my LinkedIn and figuring out that it was UCLA is not, it's not going to work.

So I think that's dead on.

And what I like about what you said too is like, I mean even just bringing up Gettemer, right?

These old school guys have been talking about it for a long time.

And it's always been the right thing to do.

And from a marketing perspective, Mark, we've had some folks on that have very similar philosophy to you on how they market, you know?

We had this kid on from...

Commissar.

Yeah.

And he, dude, that's how he approaches marketing.

How can we be the red X?

And I just think it's a good lesson overall in how you present yourself to the market, whether it's via marketing, sales or CS.

If we can evolve from banner ads to Instagram ads that show me exactly the stuff that I've been looking for and I'm interested in, then we can do this in sales too.

It's the same evolution.

We're in the banner ad era right now.

We need to move to the personalized, I look at your data stream and understand who Matt and Craig are.

And I serve them stuff that they may be interested in, in an interesting way.

And rather than just putting an ad, you know, like I have a game I play with my little kid, one game on my phone, that's it.

And the ads, I'm just like, these ads are fucking horrible.

Like this is the equivalent of Pray and Spray in B2B GTM is this ad.

But then I get an ad every once in a while and I'll be like, oh, this, I actually, I'm clicking into this because I'm actually looking at this right now.

This matters to me right now.

I want more information and now I'm engaged because it's interesting and relevant.

But you know, listen, those are hard problems to solve.

And I guess what I'm saying is, is five years ago, we didn't need to solve them.

We could figure it out.

You better start solving it.

Yeah, yeah, totally.

By the way, have you been tracking me on my phone?

Because I buy so much stuff off Instagram.

I had those ads work for me.

Yeah, I've been working with a firm and same thing.

They've done a bunch of studies on the Instagram stuff and they're like, their ad effectiveness is through the roof right now because they just really dialed it in and it's relevant.

But like you said, your kids get on there for half an hour and the next thing you know is you've got to spend two months unwinding SpongeBob water bottle commercials.

Ha ha ha, I saw it.

Oh, yeah.

Craig, show us what you're drinking.

Show the audience.

I'm having this.

Oh, I thought it was SpongeBob.

No, no, it is.

You got to turn it.

It is.

You got to turn it.

All right, now I'm screwed.

Now I'm screwed.

Okay, so let's go to number two.

Because look, man, you guys, I was a sales tech analyst for years, and I didn't know that people were talking about sales rooms.

This is the second time that we've had a podcast person bring it up.

I don't understand.

Is it the talk of the town?

Because I'm not talking about it ever.

People are talking, talking about sales rooms.

No, somebody called me that I hadn't talked to in a long time, and they were like, oh, I was at this event in Chicago, and I saw this demo of this sales room, and I was like, this is the future.

And I was like, yeah, a lot of people talk about sales rooms.

So that's part of the reason why I wanted to go a little deeper here with you on the topic, Mark, just because I want to be informed by your thought process.

Because a lot of people are talking, and I haven't really formulated a full opinion.

It's not technology that we use at my current company.

But I am hearing more and more people talking about it.

So I'd love to get your thoughts on where you see the upside and where you see the pitfalls.

So I always like to take it back and not talk about the thing, but talk about what it does or how it works.

So let's talk about the motion.

I'm a seller, I have my first meeting, and what am I going to do after that first meeting?

I'm going to send a follow-up email, maybe with the deck I used or something like that.

Then I'm going to get into another meeting with somebody else, and now I got a gong recording of the demo.

What do I do?

I email that.

On and on and on.

Over a while, different people come into the conversation, different people leave, and different information is trapped inside certain people's inboxes and unavailable to other people or blah, blah, blah.

So the concept is, let's put everything like that into one place so that it doesn't matter if you're leaving or coming or there the entire time.

Like you can get what you want.

That makes sense, right?

Except for when you flip the script and you think about the buyer.

Yeah, I agree.

Yeah.

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

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So, let's say that I'm a buyer and I'm looking at Okta, Auth0 and WorkOS.

Now, I have three reps that send me three different digital sales rooms.

There's always this concept of a to-do list in there.

What person is going to save all three of those links?

Remember which one is which?

Go here for this one.

Nobody's going to something outside their normal workflow to do stuff.

Really, honestly, is it that hard for me to search in my Gmail for everything that Matt sent me in the last 60 days, and get it in my inbox, and forward a couple of those to people that want them?

Is that really that hard?

It doesn't seem like it.

That's where I'm lost on the concept.

I get it from the salesperson's part because again, it's easier to just post the deck here, post the gong call here, and then I can see what people are interacting with, and what people are entering, and what people are.

And so, I understand the seller perspective a ton.

What I don't, I think it though, it creates a, I don't know if worse is the right word, but I think it doesn't create any better of a buyer experience because everybody looks at it in the terms of what I'm selling, but in the buyer's mind, what if I got eight vendors I'm doing, now I got eight of these digital sales rooms to deal with, like then it's not working at all.

So that's kind of where I'm at.

I just look at it like what I want to deal with that, and if I'm buying software, no, I wouldn't.

So I'm going to give you real world live, like this is happening right now.

I'm currently in a sales cycle.

It's technology that I'm evaluating.

It's literally I'm going to either buy it or not buy anything.

I'm not looking at multiple vendors.

I just heard that this product does something great from a coworker.

Oh, I think this will solve your problem.

It's pretty lightweight.

Whatever, try it.

And so did the first call and actually the sales rep did a fantastic job on the follow up.

I was like, this is a really good seller.

The thing that she did that was different that I hadn't seen before.

And, you know, I haven't been buying a lot of software in the last couple of years, but a little bit here and there is she sent me an invite to Slack.

And she's like keeping all the information like pinned in the Slack and stuff.

And that's I like it.

I like it.

But because that but that's a UX you're familiar with.

It's part of Mark's point.

You're not making them go through another experience.

She's going she's using the experience you prefer to do this.

I like it in Slack, too, because I'm there.

I'm using it like it's fine.

It's in my workflows.

I know it, but I don't need another place to go, another website to go to figure things out.

So what's the counter to that?

Like some I mean, people like it for some reason.

And it seems like pretty hot.

So like where is this advantageous to use?

Listen, I get the benefit of like there's a common place.

I can see what people are doing.

I think, but I think like once I kind of took the buyer's perspective, I went all the way.

And so I think the counter to the seller room is the buyer room.

So imagine, Matt, like you as a buyer said to your sellers, if you're engaging with me, you put your documents here, all of you.

If you could do a gong thing, you put your shit here, all of you.

And you make everybody you're evaluating put things into the buyer room, and then you'd sell AI, hey, here's my buying criteria.

And then AI is just analyzing the shit out of all the emails, all the phone calls, all of the decks, all of the websites, and automatically giving you how well people stack up to your buying criteria, where your holes are, where you need to find things out.

That is what actually should be being built, is a buyer's room, where you can bring everything in and get it all analyzed and be like, okay, I need to figure out this and this from this vendor because I really like the guy, but I don't have these two important bits, versus, oh yeah, I'm a seller, come to my room so that I can track you and see how people are calling.

That sucks that you did that because you asked Mark first, and that's what I would say too, is that the real, if this is a real thing, it's got to be like, I don't know, like Anaplan or someone who deals with the actual buyer and gives them an RFP room where they can put their things in there and they go to the seller and say, you can put everything in here or it automatically takes from Slack.

That is what will work.

And then that, by doing that, then you're constantly working with the buyer for the experience how they want to do it.

That's the issue, man.

I totally, it's really about, if this, that seems like it should be a sales room.

It's not.

You know, and like, so there is something interesting about the collection of materials if you're in a competitive buying situation.

To be able to go to a seller and say, you know, please send the recordings, email this and it'll go right in, send your materials here and we can run comparisons.

That's what should be made.

Now, who's going to make money off it?

The per, you know, hey, like it's not, it may not be sales tech.

It's not sales tech, wire tech.

And you know what?

I took it one step further, Craig, in our current nuclear environment of mass emails call everybody.

And I was like, what if I took it one step further?

What if I created a place or a universal email address and phone number for every company?

And all cold callers and prospectors hit up that number and that email address.

And that thing just ingested every vendor that was reaching out with outbound to figure them out.

And then when I, as a buyer, I'm like, hey, you know what?

I really need a new vendor for marketing automation.

I go into my little guy and gives him a, you know what?

In the last six months, these are the 17 vendors that have reached out to you about marketing automation.

Here's the ones that we've gone in research.

Just so you know, these are the top three recommendations based on like their pleasantness, their tone, you know, the information they get, how helpful they've been, what their website says, blah, blah, blah, that we think that you should go after.

And you know what?

I said of starting the project at zero, I'm starting it at 55 miles an hour and I'm ready to like accelerate to a hundred.

That's like a buyer's tool.

And now guess what?

Like, instead of sending an email directly to Matt, that may or may not hit his inbox, that he may or may not read, at least I can talk to this always on buyer, would be a phone, you call them to have the AI talk to them, have them send videos, have them send whatever.

But that AI is just, you can now create like this really cool plan to see that AI to make sure you're one of the top three vendors when they're looking to buy.

That sounds like insanely cool, versus let's pepper them with ads and cold calls and e-mails until they're ready, hoping that we're like in their brain, right?

Or that we can like flip the script.

I don't know, maybe I'm overthinking it.

No, no, that sounds great.

Can we, let's take up something Matt brought up.

I want to go back to Slack.

Yeah.

Because Matt, I, you know, I saw, I think you haven't talked to him yet, but a startup that came in and is basically saying, you know, people don't want chatbots, but they like Slack.

Yeah.

So they're essentially created an app that puts Slack on the website and says, hey, if you want to talk to us, just Slack us.

What is Slack these days?

I mean, like, is that, like, I love that the seller did that with you, Matt, because you live in Slack.

I think Slack is like, there are people who like using Slack way more than I do.

I think sales generally loves using Slack.

There's parts of my job in marketing that I like Slack for.

I'm not the biggest lover of it.

But what I will say is, like, over time, your Slack can become pretty overwhelmed, right?

Like, you can, you know, the external networks that you're connected to can become overwhelming.

And like, I mean, I gave up on trying to be at Inbox Zero years ago.

And like, in the last year, I've given up on trying to be at Slack Zero, or Notifications Zero.

So it's, there's a little bit of it there.

But the thing that I do believe, and this from like sales team experience, is like, when our sales team is in a Slack with a prospect, those sales cycles tend to go a lot better.

And part of that has to do with the fact that if, you know, if you've got a prospect who's doing an evaluation and they're in a POC, or if they're using a free trial of your product, and they feel like they can Slack you and get an answer ASAP, as opposed to sending an email and having to wait, which I think most of us like just anticipate if we send an email, we might not get a response for 24 hours.

It just makes that POC or that trial process way, way, way, way smoother.

Yeah, I did a post today actually about this exact thing, which is, you know, super complicated tools are dying because you can't use all the features anyway.

And tools that are outside your normal workflow are dying.

So I would suggest that maybe digital sales rooms are an OK idea.

I think they become OK plus.

But maybe if this goes from a C, they go to a B if they're in Slack, because now at least I'm in a workflow that that person already has versus creating a whole other workflow that they have to go outside to figure out.

But that's the thing is like you guys know Mike Mollinay from Branch.

He's starting a new.

Yes.

And it's all about Slack based CS.

Now listen, I hate Slack.

Slack is designed to make you be in it all the time, and it's always disrupting my concentration and stuff.

And I'm OCD, Matt, maybe more than you.

I still do inbox zero and Slack zero.

It's a tax on me to do that.

I can't stop it though.

Maybe I need to take some meds or something.

But if it's in my workflow, I am 10X more likely to do something with it than if it makes me create a new workflow that I currently don't use.

I'd rather adapt a current workflow a little bit than create a whole new workflow.

Yeah.

Yeah.

By the way, for your guys' enjoyment, I have 5,671 un-viewed emails in my Gmail.

Is that bad?

That's fingernails on a chalkboard.

Sorry.

Okay.

Let's go to number three.

I forgot what number three was.

Well, can I say how many are in mine?

Oh, sorry, Matt.

Please.

I'm an inclusive host.

Go.

13,292.

No.

Let me give you my numbers.

These are because I've been on this podcast for 39 minutes.

In my personal email inbox, I have four, and then I have five in my professional email inbox.

That's it.

Son of a gun.

That's awesome.

All right.

What was number three?

Do you remember?

Yes.

Number one was the Mass Blast.

Yeah, Mass Blast.

Two was the digital sales room, and three was, wait a second.

I can't remember what number three was.

This is the hardest part of podcasting is landing.

It's landing the plane on like, I got three points.

It was the inbound led outbound, Adam Robinson.

Oh, yeah.

The battle between you and A-Rod.

Yeah.

A-Rod.

A-Rob.

So, you don't love the inbound outbound concept that he's rolling with.

We're seeing a lot of that on LinkedIn.

It seems like people are doing it, but it is a reaction to how hard it is to engage with people.

Yep.

And so if you took a pure outbound program that wasn't doing some of the stuff you talked about and number one, they're failing, right?

Because they're just trying to send more and actually, I would argue conversion rates go down when you send more and you get roughly the same results and it's just bad look.

So they are reacting to that and they at least have an indicator that someone will have some name recognition when you reach out.

But you're not against that.

You're saying that's what marketing is supposed to be doing.

And that's how this is supposed to work.

That sounds like just good marketing.

That doesn't sound like inbound, led, outbound.

Like if somebody comes to your site and signs up a demo form and you reach out to them to schedule a demo, is that inbound, led, outbound?

I don't think anybody in their right mind would say that.

But that's the same exact thing.

Whether they fill out the form or don't, you're doing the same thing.

Also, again, my sci-fi fandom leads me to take things to the extreme.

I start to think, Craig, all right, let's say that right now you go to somebody's site, and every once in a while you get an e-mail that's like, hey, Craig, saw you on her site, blah, blah, blah.

Interesting.

What happens when thousands of companies are doing it, and now you're getting dozens more e-mails a day of people that are all saying, hey, we're on your site, and now you got competitors going against each other.

You got people competing over the same budget, whatever.

What if you're an employee at a company and you're doing a little job hunting because you don't like your current job, and now your inbox is overwhelmed with companies that are trying to sell you stuff because you're just looking for a job?

What if you're here at mom's house and your stepdad is a CFO and you're doing some stuff as a 20-some year old at home, your stepdad all of a sudden gets barraged with CFO with emails because they think the CFO is on the website when it's just the 20-year-old home from college.

This is like, this is, I'm sure there's technical complexities that will get worked out and all that, but like ultimately, it feels a little bit when you take it to scale, something that could be just as bad as what pray and spray is.

It's just a different flavor of it.

And I think the ramifications could be even more dangerous because now people will stop going to websites because they don't want to get, or they can do everything in incognito mode or whatever.

I don't even think that that matters actually with the way the tech works.

But they'll figure out a new kind of way of doing it.

And then you'll get even less signals than you're getting right now.

So I think you need to do it.

I think it's good.

I just think that it's not a cure-all.

It doesn't need a new name.

And you've got to be careful with what it looks like at scale.

Yeah.

You know, the way you're headed, this talk track, is one that's always been fascinating to me since I started in tech back in 2010, which is like, for a long time, you know, demand gen funnels, sales funnels, sales process, you know, things like MQLs, SQLs, qualification calls, discovery calls, demo calls, like, they've all been sort of constructed in order to meet the needs of a sales and marketing function, but almost never to meet the needs of the buyer.

And over time, you've seen pieces of this sort of kind of go the way of the dodo, right?

Like, very few companies now have this concept of, hey, look, if somebody requested a demo, I'm going to put an SDR in front of that, have that SDR get on the call, qualify them, make sure that this person actually deserves to speak to a salesperson.

Then I'm going to have that salesperson do a discovery call, make sure that this person actually deserves to get a demo, and then give them the demo, then make sure this person deserves to get a proposal.

And all that stuff is kind of going away.

And so everything from, I don't want to download content with my email anymore because I know a BDR is going to follow up with me.

And then I'm going to have to jump through all these hoops and blah, blah, blah.

Like, I think the point you were making earlier around like how far is this stuff going to go on an unrelated topic, but it works here as well.

It's like, how far does this go?

Do I not want to even go to a website anymore?

Where can I successfully view this stuff without having somebody come barking up my tree just because I was trying to learn something even if I have no idea whether or not I'm ever going to buy it?

I guess there's not a question there.

Just a sad state of the direction that things are going.

I have my next post, which is going to be called Pretty Woman Demo Philosophy, which is, you know, Julia Roberts walks in your store and you know what?

You judge her and you don't let her try on the clothes.

And guess what?

She comes back later with her, you know, millionaire benefactor who buys her everything in the shop.

Like, that's, we've duly Robertized the demo, Pretty Womanized the demo thing, and we judge people and have a couple calls.

But yeah, no, I remember at Outreach, I created, I think, a very super interesting, very different demo deck for my young transactional sellers.

And it was a deck that wasn't meant to be shown.

It was meant to be co-created with the buyer on the call.

And so we would come in with a hypothesis, but then the next slide, and you had to show it in edit mode, not slideshow mode.

So it would, the next thing would be like, what are your three problems?

And I would make the reps type them in to the slide.

And then the next slide, it would be like little sliders.

It'd be how big of a problem is it?

And they would slide the slider over in the thing.

And the people would be like, no, it's not really a three.

It's more like a four.

Oh, yeah, a four.

Tell me why it's a four.

And then the next thing we would do is we would have this little area that would say, well, here's customers that we think are like you.

Which ones do you think are like you?

And then they would tell us, and we had this whole deck and the whole purpose was to be interactive and to build a deck at the end that our buyers like, oh, you know what?

I helped build this.

This is filled with information that's useful to me.

And it wasn't meant to create questions that we can input data into the CRM, which nobody's going to even look at or use.

It was meant to be a living document that was co-created and gave the buyer what they needed out of a deck to follow up with, not what we wanted them to have out of that meeting.

And so, you know, that was a wildly successful deck for a long, long time that we used at Outreach.

I think that would be a wildly successful deck today, man.

Wow.

I'd love to sell, I'd love to buy from somebody that ran a sale cycle that looked like that.

Yeah, the co-create, by the way, I'm so glad we pivoted to this, because I was wondering where we were going to go on the InMount OutBout.

So that was a good pivot by you, Matt.

I'm going to give you credit.

Also, I don't know what a Dodo is.

So that's saying I'm going to go look it up after.

It's a bird that's extinct.

Yeah.

It went extinct?

Yeah.

The poor Dodo.

Yeah, I know.

We'll bring it back.

Where have you been living?

I feel like that is like, I feel like if I told my 14-year-old is extinct like a Dodo, he would know exactly what I'm talking about.

Oh, you're accused of being 13.

No, worse because he's saying is 13 would know.

I've heard the saying, I just didn't do any deep dive into the Dodo.

I just got to admit.

Topo was a service company, so it's a little different, but the concepts were the same, which was we always felt like, could we give the buyer a deck after the first call that they could use for themselves?

You know, like Outreach also had a metrics point of view from a pyramid standpoint that if you built it with the buyer, they could use, honestly, like they could use for their internal meetings.

Because the truth is like what you just described, Mark, is something that they could have for themselves.

And if there were, like for Topo, we used to do something similar and we would give them ideas.

We'd say, look, like here's your, here's what we learned and here's like three ideas for you.

And if you want to go execute them, come call us.

No, I was kidding.

No, but you know, they would have this deck and like, there was multiple moments where like, let's say we did get a deal and I'd go in there and our stuff would be in presentations to the executive team without even, you know, it just came from the sales process.

I think, you know, as you think about co-creation in the sales process, I just love that idea.

I just hope everyone who's listening picks up on what Mark just described.

That's something they did together.

And I just think it's great.

Now, I do want to defend qualification and discovery as long as it's to be helpful.

Like an example would be if you get on and you do the process that Mark just described, you know, salespeople are trained to figure out based on no matter what they say, how to get the deal.

But truthfully, like if you take Matt Dixon's point of view, you might say to them after having that conversation, you know what?

You don't need us.

You need to go look at this.

If that's the case, then we should love the sort of gait.

We shouldn't think about it as a gaiting process.

You know, maybe that's our issue, is we think about whether we're going to let them in the store versus can we use this process of asking about their challenges and what they're trying to do and where their priorities lie and actually make a relevant recommendation to them, whether it's to buy with us or not.

Yeah, yeah, I mean, I was just, the way I was thinking through it is just that, like, I request a demo and now I have to, like, tell everybody why I'm worthy.

And then there's the discovery process is just like, hey, somebody put the big hot light over my head and asked me 20 questions and, like, didn't tell me anything about about their product.

It's that's the stuff that's, you know, largely gone away.

Yeah, I think that's true.

I'd say, like, one is if they come in and request the demo, go straight to the sales rep, number two is give them what they want.

And you got to limit your discovery to the point where you can help them and be relevant to what you're going to show them.

But you're right, like, there's too many situations where you go on and they're shot.

You know, it's like the prisoners in Guantanamo Bay have a better time than, you know, some of these folks go on to discovery process.

If we were smart, we would measure, you know, and have some benchmarks like I'd say if like 10, 20 percent of your conversations are ending with you saying, we can't help you with what you're doing, you're probably doing it wrong, right?

And then I think the other thing is, is what is your job as a sales rep?

I always tell my sales reps, this is your job.

Your job is to help people make confident decisions.

If they go for us, great.

Yay.

High five.

If they don't go for us, one of two things happens.

Either they pick the right vendor for them and it works out great.

I'm excited for you.

High five.

I'm glad I helped you in that process.

If it doesn't go good with their other vendor, guess who they come back to?

The person that made them feel confident.

There's literally no downside for the buyer, for you to just, like I used to call it the stink of desperation.

People call it commission breath or whatever.

People can smell it a mile away.

But I don't care if I win deals anymore.

I just want Craig to think, man, Mark was sure helpful and I feel like I'm really making the right call.

If it's for me, I'll get enough.

Sales is like baseball.

If you hit 300, if you have a 30 percent win rate, you're a Hall of Famer.

Yeah.

Awesome way to end the show.

Killer soundbite there.

Dang it.

That was great.

Yeah.

He has a lot of soundbites.

Actually, you had some soundbites too, Matt.

That was pretty good.

All right.

Well, Mark, honestly, dude, this was fun.

It's so much fun.

Yeah.

Next time I'm at a conference, just everyone clear the path.

We're hanging out.

Let's go.

Yeah, let's do it.

But this is what the show is all about.

This was The Transaction and that was a great conversation.

So thanks, buddy.

Thanks, Mark.

Appreciate y'all.

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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