In this insightful episode, we dive deep into the evolving landscape of sales and the importance of authenticity and nurturing in the sales process. Our conversation with a seasoned sales expert sheds light on why traditional sales tactics are no longer as effective and how sales professionals can adapt to the current market dynamics.
Key Takeaways:
Episode Highlights:
This episode is a must-listen for sales professionals looking to stay ahead of the curve and master the art of nurturing in a sales environment that values authenticity and long-term relationship building over immediate results. Join us as we challenge conventional sales wisdom and provide actionable insights for thriving in today's competitive market.
Joey Gilkey:
Negative comments are more powerful than positive ones.
Andy Mewborn:
Talk about the shit that everyone's doing wrong.
Joey Gilkey:
Meetings aren't nothing, but they aren't everything.
Andy Mewborn:
You're not doing sales anymore. You're mastering nurturing.
Joey Gilkey:
Dude, 100%.
Andy Mewborn:
Well, hey, dude, what I want to I think would be great to chat about today is you're probably talking with like VPs of sales or companies that don't have a VPs of sales like what's going on with the current market, how people are doing outbound, right? Like what are people totally screwing up? I love your LinkedIn content, dude. I'm inconsistent these days, but yeah, we need to get you more consistent, man.
Joey Gilkey:
But the hard part, man, it's just like, yeah, I'm building like a legitimate business. So it's like, it's hard. Content's gravy for me. Cause like, we're good at outbound and the content's always gravy. And I have, I scheduled a post for like 1130 today, but, Um, yeah, I'm, I'm inconsistent, you know, cause I'm like actually trying to build something like, yeah.
Andy Mewborn:
Yeah. Which is an excuse, but it's tough. Yeah. Well, I can give you my system, man, that I do to be consistent. Like I still ride on the content.
Joey Gilkey:
So I still ride on the content. I have to ride mine, dude. Yeah. No, no one's going to. I'm too abrasive.
Andy Mewborn:
Yeah. Well, that's what I love, man. Cause you know, I, you know, my dad growing up, my mom's a fiery Latina from Mexico and my dad was a. Right. So I kind of like know the abrasiveness, like that's the way I go in that environment. So like, you know, I'm like, oh, this guy does not fuck around. He just says what he thinks. And like, personally, I don't have the guts to like be that serious on LinkedIn. So I give you for having.
Joey Gilkey:
Actually, we could probably save that conversation for the podcast. We could talk about that. That'd be fun content on why it is I am that way. Because I have a legitimate philosophy behind it.
Andy Mewborn:
Yeah, let's get into it. I want to hear what's the mindset. Tell me, man.
Joey Gilkey:
So for me, there's a really good book called Power vs. Force. It's a really good read. I have a faith background. Which some people would be shocked by considering how abrasive I can be online sometimes. But I do have a faith background, believe it or not. So reading books like Powerverse Force is really challenging from a philosophical perspective, but there's really good stuff in there. And so there's this whole element of frequency, right? Like everything puts off frequency, right? The table in front of me puts off a frequency, right? Low, but it does put off one. But different emotions, traits, feelings, characteristics also put off different frequencies. And so some are positive, some are negative, some are more, some are less. But love is the second highest frequency, right? What's funny is low frequency stuff is usually the negative things we associate with. So depression, anxiety, anger, all those kind of things are not in the same realm, right? So love is number two, but number one is like substantially more. And number two, and it's shocking, it's this trait of authenticity. So whenever someone is in a state of extreme authenticity, they put out this incredible frequency, which tends to attract people. It also repels people, right? It's a high frequency that can kind of do both, right? So I do think that there's an element of, I do live a very authentic life. I think part of that is I was pretty insecure as a kid. And there's something, I don't know exactly what happened in my life around the end of high school, into college, where I really grew into this, like, I'm just unapologetically me. But I still struggle with it a little bit. And there was this guy who I really looked up to. I was friends with him, but he's more of a mentor than anything. And we got a little tiff over something. And, you know, in my head, I just blew it up proportionally. Dude, this guy, he, like, I love this guy, but he's probably thinking all these crazy things about me and like, You know, I just don't want to be that way. Like she's my dude. And so I called him one day about four months after not talking to him. Right. Cause it was just a pretty bad, you know, little blow up for both of us. But I was like, listen, G like, man, I'm so sorry. Like I stepped out of line. Like, I love you, man. I just don't want you to think bad about me. You know, show him in. I love you too. He goes, but as much as I love you, I don't think about you. Oh, Ooh. And to me, like at first, I was like, ah, dude, like for real. Yeah, I'm thinking about it all day. Yeah. And he goes, you know, man, he goes, the thing is, it's like, I'm a 45 year old man. I've got a wife, two kids. I'm running this big organization in San Diego. Like you're important in your sphere, but like, and you're important when you're in front of me, but like, you're not important outside of that to me enough compared to my other priorities in my life. And so it really hit me of like, people don't think about you or care about you nearly as much as you think they do, except for the immediate people around you. And so what that did is it unlocked something in me that really freed me up to just be like, dude, just be you. Like no one cares at the end of the day. And if they do care, awesome. But like that's cherry on top. And so I think that that is just, it's taken me into the, you know, the minor success I've had in my career. I think also it helps. I've made my money, you know, in the terms of like, my bills are covered for, hopefully forever, but yeah, I can be canceled or whatever you want to call it. And it will, I will, I will sleep the same that night as I do any other night. So I think that's probably where it comes from. And I think that my content is just the way that I communicate can come across abrasive, but I think that it also comes to the tension and I do genuinely care about people and I care about making changes and I care about shifting people's perspectives. I do think that people are in a enslaved in their minds. And sometimes you got to jar them awake a little bit to get them to actually see the value behind the message. Cause there's so many people that put out really great content on LinkedIn, but nobody pays attention. And therefore their value is not being seen or distributed. Whereas I think that, you know, I can be a little bit more abrasive and people pay attention and it gets clicks and views. And, uh, my, my value can sometimes, Distributed more.
Andy Mewborn:
So yeah. Yeah. No, I think you know in in a way like that is The way to like let's call it grow quickly Right or like get attention quickly because you pretty you start to get an attention pretty quickly I believe just from on your stuff right and yeah, and I think it is taking that like almost abrasive or I look at it as like contrarian, right? Like I just see like, okay, it's like contrarian. Hey, you think this, it's actually this, but it's in your, it is in your authentic voice, which I think is awesome because I can see, I can like read that voice and be like, oh yeah, he's being real. Like this guy's not like, he's not trying to, you know, skew anyone in the wrong way or whatever. And honestly, You don't even have to be like, what's great about that is you don't even have to be some crazy. You don't have to do any hacks per se. You don't have to be a crazy good writer. You don't have to do this. It's just a change in the mindset that you're doing.
Joey Gilkey:
And there is, unfortunately, when the market gives you feedback, like you do develop a little bit like, all right, well, if I do it, if I, if my hook is this way, the way I like to explain it is like, I just like to throw, I'd like to throw rocks at beehives. You know, like the hornet's nest. Cause what it does is it takes, it takes all the negative comments are more powerful than positive ones in a lot of ways because, uh, when they comment, I can kind of like jar back with them a little bit. We can kind of spar in the comment section. Well, as you know, like the more engagement is going on in your post, the more people want to see it. And so it brings, it brings the other hornets from the other nest. Like, Hey dude, you screwed my other hornets nest. You screwed my buddies over there. So I jump in. And the good thing is like, yeah, it does drive inbounds. Um, and so that the people I want to talk to see through all of it and then look at the message and they're like, Oh, that's helpful or sharp or whatever. And they, they always come in the dance. It's the people who don't like comment or share that are typically your best customers. They're the ones who are kind of just watching, you know?
Andy Mewborn:
Yeah. The money's in there. So there's, there's like the money's in the lurkers, man. Like I'll tell you that just being in that LinkedIn game for a while, building LinkedIn products that it, uh, like the money's in the following, don't you? Yeah, you're pretty good in like the, the, uh, yeah, dude, the freaking, the, the money's in the lurkers, man. And, uh, like we've had, we have this like community of like 4,000 plus like LinkedIn creators. Right. And that's like, I have a whole lesson on that. Right. Cause everyone's like, Oh my gosh, like people aren't liking commenting and dah, dah, dah, dah. And I go, how many people viewed your last post? They're like 800. I'm like, dude, if I told you that you could walk into a room right now, and talk to 800 people and deliver your message, whatever message that is that you want. It doesn't have to be that good. And 800 people will see it. Would you take that if you're running a bit, you would be, you go fucking crazy, right? Dude, you would be pumped. And so it's this like comparison trait of like, Oh, but like this person's getting X amount.
Joey Gilkey:
And you do it every day. You know, if you do it every day and you get 800 people, like it's not going to always be the same 800 people.
Andy Mewborn:
Yeah, it's crazy. And so I think that that shift in perspective is different. Right. And the other thing I want to bring up here is one of my you kind of reminded me one of my favorite quotes and people are gonna make fun of me because I say this quote all the time, but it's like about this authenticity, which is and I forget who said it, but it's a love me or hate me. There's no money in the middle. That's good. Yeah. It, it's amazing, man. I just like, so every time I'm like, Ooh, should I post this? You know, I'm going to be scared, whatever. I'm like, I just think about that.
Joey Gilkey:
The loneliest place for your content to live is an obscurity.
Andy Mewborn:
Yeah. Yeah.
Joey Gilkey:
And it's like, you're obscure. It just doesn't get seen whether it's good or it's bad. It doesn't matter.
Andy Mewborn:
And people really hate indifference, dude. Like they hate when you're indifferent. Right. Like I think that, no, just say what you, Don't say I think, just say the thing, you know?
Joey Gilkey:
People are extremely attracted to someone who has a spine or conviction about them. You know, I think conviction is authenticity, right? Like, you know, this is one thing I have to train a lot of my, my team on, especially those who, who engage her more on the account side. And they, you know, we've got decent clients and they want to kind of bend to the client's will at time. I'm like, listen, man, like at the end of the day, like you have to be willing to kind of Challenge their way of thinking and that's gonna require you to have conviction because the opposite of that of not having conviction is typically people-pleasing They tend to look at people-pleasing as a good thing, right? That's what people be happy. It's like yeah, but happy doesn't make them money, right like and so Having conviction about you is authentic and therefore if you're a people pleaser then naturally you're in a state of inauthenticity at all times which is just not where it's, it's not a place where you're going to stand very strong. So yeah.
Andy Mewborn:
Yeah. Yeah. The conviction part is like, it's, you know, um, I would say one of the greatest traits in say, I had a sales leader I worked with and I asked him the question and I was like, Hey man, like, what do you think is truly like a great trait of a salesperson, right? And this guy's been around the block. He's worked in multiple, he's in his fifties, right? He's been successful, seen it all. One of the best sales leaders I know. And he goes conviction, man. It's like believing. And that is why when anyone, when any salesperson asks me like, oh, where should I go next? Or like companies I should go work at or whatever. I tell them, do you have conviction in the product? Because if you don't have conviction in the product, that's going to seed into everything else you do as a salesperson. So you need to believe it works yourself, right?
Joey Gilkey:
100% agree with that. Yeah. My stack ranking would be conviction, intuition, and discernment are the top three traits of the best salespeople.
Andy Mewborn:
And then intuition. How does someone... Do you think that's natural or do you think that's like built over time?
Joey Gilkey:
I do think that there is, you know, there's a lot of winning the lottery with, with DNA and you know, like I am fortunate to, I grew up poor first half of my life and then we kind of moved into like the middle class. And then my dad's continued his career since then and become very successful. And he's the number one private sales, uh, national sales director at Home Depot. And so still to this day for 15 years running has been that number one position drives half a billion dollars of revenue a year just in sales. And, Um, and so I do think that it is learned, but I do think there is an aspect of there is a lottery draw for some, but that is not an excuse for you to, to not develop intuition. Intuition comes with repetition experience. And so when you drive a car, like you intuitively know how to drive the car, at least most people, hopefully at this point, you know, not to drive a car. So intuitively you can drive home and not think about it and drive fairly, fairly well. Uh, you know, the potholes, you know, you kind of know where cops spend their time. So maybe slow down a little bit, like intuitively you just have an idea of the route. And so in sales, you know, the way I like to explain it is I'm a rockstar process of a rockstar salespeople. It's kind of our, our, our motto. And so I'm a, I'm a big believer in, in process, but I don't believe process needs to be this, uh, complete sequential do this, then this, then this, then this, and this, I think there's an element of that. But the way I look at process, oftentimes, especially in a sales process, is it's more like guardrails on a highway, right? Guardrails don't look that important, but they keep you on the highway. And they keep you in the direction you need to go. That's meant to be process. And it's different than saying like, no, process is a lane, right? Or it's like, hey, you gotta be in this lane, you gotta go this speed. That's more that sequential do this, then this, then this. But intuition and discernment is, So with, with, with process as your, as your guiding light is, okay, the guardrails keep you going. Or you can say the external lines are the little bumps in the, on the right off side of the highway. They keep you on it. They keep you going where you need to go. But as a good salesperson, you need to know which lane to pick, when to speed up, when to slow down, when to kind of move over and so on. And so I think, I think that's where like that top tier salesperson lives. is they know like, all right, generally I need to be here, but I can kind of pick where I need to go based on where the prospect's at or whatever.
Andy Mewborn:
Yeah, yeah. That's a freaking amazing point. It's like process with a level of autonomy almost, right? Like, but like, as you mentioned, different lanes of the autonomy, there's still, Hey, everyone's going South. You're still going South, but there's the, there's a little bit of that autonomy, which I also think is where people really, their output is the best, right? Right? Is when they have some level of autonomy. I just think in life, people do best when they have some level of autonomy. No one likes to just be like, you need to do this, this, this, this, whether it's relationships or work, right? Like, yeah.
Joey Gilkey:
Autonomy allows you to make the mistakes you need to make, right? Cause I'm a big fan of like, dude, go make the mistakes. Like there's more learning in the mistakes than there are in the successes. Oftentimes it's, it's, it's like in, um, you know, when I'm, when I'm working on a company who has a lower win rate, right. I oftentimes don't say, okay, well, what can we tactically do to increase that win rate? I say, no, let's first look at, if you're at a 15% win rate, let's look at the 85 loss rate. Like, why'd you lose? Right. Cause, cause your losses are where the learnings are. There's a far more gain in paying attention to the 85% than there is in paying attention to what you did right in the 15%. You do both, right? But it's like, there's a lot, there's a lot of meat on the bone in that 85% of losing that you can learn from. And I think that in autonomy allows you to find those potholes in the road that finds, you know, the, the checkpoints where the cops are kind of sitting with their laser and all that kind of stuff. And so I think you have to have that and you got to learn. Um, obviously any good sales organization is going to have pretty rock solid process, but use discernment in the in between.
Andy Mewborn:
Yeah, yeah, no, that's awesome. And what do you for so those are the qualities of a good salesperson in like for you, what you've done is you've kind of changed the one thing I saw that you posted once it was that I'm still trying to like wrap my head around is the way you're actually thinking about compensating some of these, like SDR specifically, I think you were saying, whereas most of the time they get paid on like, if they get a meeting booked or whatever, and you had different ways of looking at that. And I want to talk to you about this because I come from, it's so funny, I come from outreach, right? I was one of the first employees at outreach, right? So building the first version of it, you know, Yeah. Um, on the engineering product side. And then like, I spent like seven years, this whole predictable revenue model. Right. And so I see your stuff and I'm like, shit, he's right. He's right. Then like time things change. Right. Like, it's like that what got you here won't get you there anymore. Um, and so like, yeah, I just kind of want to hear let's, talk about the shit that everyone's doing wrong and how you're basically changing or flipping that on its head to actually align with where the market is today or with how teams should be functioning.
Joey Gilkey:
Yeah, it kind of boils down to this one statement that is meetings aren't nothing, but they aren't everything. Talking specifically about SDRs, but it has a massive downstream revenue impact as well. And so, yeah, right. Meetings aren't nothing. So we're not saying that meetings don't matter, right? It's kind of ironic because the company we bought, which is FundReady Leads, which for those who know Ryan Reiser, you know, he's always said like meetings don't matter. It's like, no, no, no. Pump the brakes, guy. Meetings do matter, but they don't matter as much as we think they do. To your point, like I think that we hire and fire, we set quota around, we bonus around this meetings portion of the market, right? You know, there's a certain type of person that takes a meeting from a stranger. There's also a certain type of company in a certain point in their buyer's journey where they will take a meeting, but they'll take a meeting with everybody, but that's usually three to 10% of the market tops. And so if, if we are just incentivizing and creating plan and quota around that small percentage of the market, then we're not capturing the rest of the market, right? There's 30% that'll never buy, right? The whole chat homes thing. But there's 30% that's not now. And there's 30% that's not thinking about it. They're unaware. They're either problem unaware, solution unaware or product unaware. And so it is, it is, I believe it is now the job of the SDR to not necessarily push the meeting, but it's to identify and segment out the market. Right. So outbound success is, is the fundamentals at scale consistently over time, right? That's the four levels to it. You've got to get, you've got to do the fundamentals. You've got a systematic, you've got to create a system to where you can do the fundamentals at scale. If growth is a metric for you that you care about, you've got to do it consistently, right? Repeatedly day in, day out the same way over and over again, obviously paying attention to where you can kind of pivot and move, but then you got to commit over time, long, long time. And so part of the fundamentals, there's really four elements to it. There's list, message, rep, professional followup. That's it. So list, we have to really hone in on our TAM. Who is our TAM? And not just anybody who can buy from us ever, right? There's certainly segments of the market that are better buyers for us either now or in the future. So getting the list strategy right, not just account identification, but also account coverage and contact mapping. So I don't know if people are familiar with Challenger. People are usually familiar with Challenger Sale and not as familiar with Challenger Customer, which I think is a better book than Challenger Sale. But Challenger customer talks about like, who are the key influencers in the account, right? There are multiple ways, multiple chinks in the armor, if you will, to find entry points into an account. And so we need to be able to have account coverage of who all those potential people are. And so it is account identification, who are the right accounts. It is also, yes, who's my key buyer, likely, C-suite, VP level, whatever it might be. But there's also, I look at it as like three tiers. You've got your key buyers, your buying committee, and your frontline members. Your key buyers have their name on the contract of the check, right? They're the ones who tend to, they have to be, you know, raise their hand, thumbs up for the, for the solution to move forward. The buying committee either has to be thumbs up or thumbs neutral to you. They cannot be thumbs down, but they, you know, they can influence it negatively. They can influence it positively. Um, and they can also stay neutral and the deal can still get done. Um, and then there's frontline members, which they're not going to influence the deal, but they're going to be impacted by your solution. And so that's where you can go and gather Intel on the account. Okay. So in my case, we go and we build, you know, outbound apartments, you know, that's an elementary level of what we do. But for us, it's important for us to talk to the SDRs, the AEs, the sales development managers, the VP of sales in some cases, VP of sales have less authority than they've ever had currently. Um, they're not handling a budget anymore in most cases, which is odd to me, um, considering they're supposed to be. leading the sales department. But there's a lot of folks that you can talk to that you can then take that information and intel and you can go upstream with it back to the key buyer to the buying committee. So all that goes in a list. Then there's messaging, right? So the fundamentals of messaging is you got to have unique positioning, you got to have a compelling ask, and you've got to have repeatable scripting, right for SDRs, right? You got to have repeatable way to, you know, again, guardrails into how we're going to communicate that message to this list. After message is rep, right? So it's the statistics, at least according to the bridge group is it takes three and a half months for a rep to become autonomous from an activity perspective. So that's what we call ramp. It takes 14 months to hit quota attainment. Unfortunately, only 43% of reps are hitting quota. Um, I think it's actually lower than that. I think it's like 28 according to Salesforce, according to rep view, it's like 43. Um, and that's, you know, it's only a handful of industries there.
Andy Mewborn:
I know one specific company just on that point that like 90% of reps aren't hitting.
Joey Gilkey:
It's wild. It's just plummeting. Part of our pitch deck is we show them the trajectory of production from a quota attainment perspective. And so you got to have all that for the rep. And then the last part is professional follow up. So this is all of this brings me back to your original question on why meetings aren't everything. So professional follow up is I think that we have to exit the predictable revenue model, where it's SDR, AE, SDRs do all the front load and they set the meetings for the AE, the AE sits on their ass and they wait for meetings, they complain about the leads, etc. They don't have quota either. To where we have to have self sourcing AEs, but they're not self sourcing cold, it's not the best use of their time. What they need to be doing is self-sourcing off of the segments of the market based on where companies are at. And so we call those activated accounts. So whereas you might be able to book eight, 10% of the market, great. You can also activate 30% of the market. And that's where the professional follow-up comes in, where your AEs who are far more product aware, far more market aware, product and market alignment, they can have a more intelligent, deep business acumen driven conversation with that 30% of the market, but it requires them to follow up. And so, I think the SDR's job has to shift from, we just set meetings and get no's, to we have to identify who's willing to take meetings, who's in market now or soon, who's a not now but eventually, who's not thinking about that we can create intrigue, interest, intent, or information out of. And then pass that smaller segment to the market, to the AEs and say, hey, we've already worked them, we've talked to them, here's the context of the conversations, AEs go do professional follow-up over and over and over and over again. That's why I think meetings don't matter is because you can go capture a lot larger percentage of the market if you create a strategy around the other 90%.
Andy Mewborn:
You know, this reminds me, have you read that book, Sell Like Crazy from Sabri? It's really good. Sabri Subhi? Yeah, Sabri Subhi. And he has that same chart, which I think he got from someone else that I love. that is the same concept you're talking about, which is 3% of your target market at any time is ready to buy. You know, 37%, and I had a post on this, 37% is like not problem aware, not solution aware. And so if you look at that, that means 97% of people at any one time are not ready to buy, right? Like not ready to buy. Yet we target 97% of people like everyone's ready to buy, right?
Joey Gilkey:
And that's assuming even the 3% is a weird metric because It's assuming that that 3% want to take a meeting, right? There's still people who are buying, but they don't want to take a meeting. And so what's your strategy for those people when you have a conversation and what's the follow up look like there, right? And so I think oftentimes we're pushing meetings for people who aren't ready, but could be soon. If we did a different approach than just shoving them on a meeting, they'll disqualify you. They'll, they'll jump out. You have a bad taste in their mouth or they're like, eh, we already know we're not going to work with Whereas I think that if you looked at it more like, yeah, let's set the meetings we can set, that makes sense. But let's also just have very solid conversations to activate accounts. And then let's create the strategy on the back end of those activations based on the context of this conversation. I think the SCR, I think we need to literally just change the title, right? It's no longer a sales development rep. I think it's more of a market development rep. You've got to develop the market, understand where people are at, what are the segments in the market. And then from there, Professional sellers the AEs of the world who have a lot more product market understanding are then to follow up with that market segmentation So that's that's at least our approach. It seems to work Yeah, yeah.
Andy Mewborn:
Well, I I've been preaching to of like the like which is very along the similar lines Which is you're not doing sales anymore. You're mastering nurturing
Joey Gilkey:
Right. Which is 100 percent. Yes.
Andy Mewborn:
Like it's not sales. You're again, 97 percent not ready to buy like in, you know, if it's 97 or actually 95, whatever. But you're mastering nurturing, man. Like keeping people engaged. Like I saw Jason Limpkin had a tweet like a month ago or something. And it put it in perspective. And he was like, look, I'm looking for a specific type of product. There's always three or four versions of the same kind of product that are pretty much feature parody. One rep follows up with me every couple of weeks with a piece of valuable information. The rest I haven't heard from. Who do you think I'm going to buy from three months when I'm ready? You know what I'm saying? Like, it's like, holy shit. And what we're worried about the now, now, now versus like the plant, the seed water, the seed, you know? And it's like, how do we, how do we do more of the planting and the seed versus the like, Hey, I want to get the plant now, you know, like versus, versus, yeah. Yeah.
Joey Gilkey:
You know, what's interesting is we focus so much on activity volume to get the meeting. Right. So we know the statistic, it takes between eight and 15 touch points to get a meeting.
Andy Mewborn:
Okay.
Joey Gilkey:
Yeah. But what we don't pay attention to is, is follow up post meeting to that point with Jason's post is the statistic that just came out and is alarming. And this is, this is the epitome of why I found is failing or it's the reason 80% of deals require five or more followups post meeting, right? Once it's opportunity. So 80% of opportunities require five more followups. 71% of reps are doing one or fewer follow-ups. That's not including the percentages doing two or three or four, which is still less than five, which is required or more for 80% of deals. And so mathematically speaking, we can't win at outbound if that is what our organization looks like. And so the follow-up nurture game is by far the lost art, I think, of B2B sales, whether it be inbound or outbound, it doesn't matter which channel it is.
Andy Mewborn:
Yeah, I was working. This is crazy, man. I was working with, I won't name the organization, but let's call this person John, right? I was working with John at Acme Corp. Good old John at Acme Corp, right? And, you know, we just launched a SaaS product, which is basically to help with follow-ups and marketing and sales. Good deal's brand is sick, by the way. Thank you, man. Yeah. It's awesome. It's definitely not enterprise, you know, and some CMO, you know, like higher level were like, yeah, they're not going to take you seriously. And I'm like, look, I don't really care. Like more people like it than say they don't like it. And like, if I do it the same, I'm just going to look like everyone else. And that's not memorable.
Joey Gilkey:
So, you know, have you seen a, have you seen our brand at all?
Andy Mewborn:
Yeah. I saw that too. And I was like, okay, we're on the same page.
Joey Gilkey:
We call it the f*** you cheese mascot. Well, we call them the F.U. cheese in like in certain contexts. Yeah, it's the follow up cheese, you know. Yeah. But realistically, we have we have some of the same icons. So like right now on the website is doing this, but. We have some of our collateral once you're deeper in the process that he's doing this. And so, yeah, especially when we show like market comparisons versus our numbers and benchmarks, we usually have like market comparisons. This is what's, you know, like, all right, 4% connect rate, 11% meeting booked rate, 55% show rate, whatever, whatever. And then you show our numbers and you look at like, okay, here's what downstream impact looks like. If you don't take just meetings on the approach, And then you show like weighted pipeline difference at the end. And he's just at the end just doing this. It's our middle finger to the market.
Andy Mewborn:
Has anyone called you out on that? Like, hey, I think there's a mistake here.
Joey Gilkey:
We have had, you know, and we work in mid-market enterprise. We've had a few, you know, call it management level people be like, is he flicking us off? I'm like, no, no, no, no. Let's be clear. He's flicking off the market. This is, yes, correct. No, no, no. If you work with us, you guys will have a metaphorical middle finger to the marketplace. You don't have to actually have a real middle finger like us. So people will push back a little. They'll push back. They're just kind of like, oh, that's funny.
Andy Mewborn:
You're like, okay. Oh, that's so good. Something similar, like on our website, it's Mexican Day of the Dead. So we have some like Spanish words incorporated in there, you know, throughout like, like basic ones that like a lot of people would understand, not everyone, but like most people would be like, oh, I've heard that, you know, or like, que bueno, like, Cerveza, and I'm talking really like a gringo right now. But what I mean by it, I've had literally like five people reach out to me, like, um, do you have an English version of your website?
Joey Gilkey:
Yeah. One of those like, uh, Google translate at the top. Like, do you want to read this in English or Spanish? Yeah. Yeah.
Andy Mewborn:
And I'm like, I'm like, It is like 99% English or English. It's just a couple of words. And like, oh, yeah, it's just like, please put it in English.
Joey Gilkey:
And I'm just like, it's like a feather test. Like if you don't get this, your intellect is probably not good enough to work on this anyways. So let's round this up. It's my litmus test. Yeah, it's my litmus test, man.
Andy Mewborn:
Like, no response. Like, no response. So, yeah, it's funny, dude. But going, shoot, where were we going before we got on this whole like brand?
Joey Gilkey:
We were talking about meetings.
Andy Mewborn:
Oh, meetings. Oh, the nurturing. Oh, I was gonna tell you a story. So it's time with John, John and Acme Corp, right. And I basically give part of that pitch to right now, right? Where I'm like, look, you're not nurturing any of your people. How do you nurture? Like the best way to do is with content. How are your teams creating content? They're like, well, marketing does it all. And then I go, well, marketing is in a, how long does it take you to get one asset? Three weeks. Okay. Well, if it takes you to get three weeks to get one thing, and you're needing to follow up multiple times with all these opportunities, what are you going to do? And they're like, we don't know.
Joey Gilkey:
And then you've lost the deal at that point.
Andy Mewborn:
Yeah. Yeah, exactly. I'm like, okay. So then I go, here's how we can help with that. Right. And put the solution. But anyways, I go as a test, I go, go to your gong real quick. And they pull up their gong. I go, go to your closed lost ops. And they pull up their closed loss ops. And then I go, look at how many touches are on all of your closed loss ops. And then they scroll, and they scroll, and they scroll, and they're like, oh, my God, none of these closed loss ops are being followed up with, like, at all. And I'm like, point, there's my point, right? Like, how do you create a process around that where you're not saying, hey, let's get on a meeting, get on a meeting, get on a meeting, but templatizing content that like your marketing team starts that you can send them whether it's case studies on one pagers or whatever it is and then following up in that way and then doing soft ctas where you can like ask for the meeting via the content so it's not the rep bugging him right and so they go okay that makes sense but going back to my point it's like i bet you can pull up 99 of people's clothes lost ops and they're gone and they're literally a majority will have zero touches on them
Joey Gilkey:
I can promise you 71% is going to have one or less. Yeah. Yeah. Wild spots that too. So widely accepted.
Andy Mewborn:
Yeah. Which is crazy. Right. It's like it's, it's almost like we need to reeducate people on like how buying goes. Right. And it's, it's hard to, This is a contrarian take, but it's hard to say someone's good at sales when they don't understand how people buy, right? So like, if I hear someone that's like, oh, yeah, I'm a great sales there. And I go, well, you know, most people aren't buying right now. What are you doing for them? They're like, nothing. And it's like, are you actually great at sales? Because you don't understand who you're selling to and how they do it. Right. And yeah, it's just I think it needs to be a re-education where most people in SaaS, I think there was this golden age, right, of like, what, 2010 or 2012. Yeah, it was predictable revenues, kind of sales wars. Salesforce, there was like that thing, you bought outreach, you had this, this machine, where if you had it, you had a, you know, having been in that era of building it, you had this machine where you could do more volume, you could get more out. And that was a, that was, that was an advantage. But now, if everyone has that, then there's no advantage. And that's where I think a lot of these people were educated to. So I think we need to sit down and be like, okay, well, if now everyone's a commodity for software specifically, how do you stand out in the commoditized world? And we'll get into that. And one thing that I think is going to be this big trend is this... I see sellers The way sales is going to have to be done is more towards like the closest comparison I can see is almost real estate agent, to be quite honest. And this is an idea I have it. Feel free to be like, oh, that's dumb or not. But I see it where like real estate agents are selling commodity. Right. And what are real estate agents doing? Well, I talked to a friend and he goes, he's doing a lot of content. And I go, hey, dude, why are you doing so much YouTube content and stuff? Right. Like, why are you doing your own your own content? And don't you get leads from your company? He goes, well, look, If my brokerage sends me a lead, I split my commission with them 50-50. But if I source my own lead, I get 80-20. And so he goes, I'm incentivized to do my own content. So that made me think. Holy shit. I think this is where that you mentioned self-source AEs. And I think this is a good segue into that. Like, how are they going to have to self-source? And I think part of what they're starting to realize is, holy shit, I got offended for myself. And I got to start to maybe create my own content, become my own mini marketer in a way.
Joey Gilkey:
Well, I think it's a great, the real estate is a great analogy. So let's take that brokerage, for example, that's sending leads. If you want to stand out and be top 1%, top 10%, right? hopefully of earners and producers. If, if you are dependent upon the organization who sends out leads, they are sending out leads to everybody, which means that assuming you have a relatively similar close rate as everybody else, even a better one, like 15% versus 20%, you're not, you were like everybody else, right? You were just waiting for the meeting. You're waiting for the lead. And so, you know, if, if, uh, an organization has a thousand leads that distribute equally across their, their team, Well, you're gonna have the same amount of abats. Well, the only way that you're going to increase your take-home is one of three ways. Either get more abats, get better at the abats you have, or have substantially larger order sizes, ACBs, LTVs, right? The only way you're gonna outproduce anybody else. Otherwise, you're gonna be of the average like everybody else because you are given what everybody else is given. And so the easiest thing to manipulate is certainly you can get better at sales, right? at your win rate going from 15 to 20 or 20 to 25, whatever it might be. Um, there's a, there's an interesting phenomenon that happens. We call the 26% rule where it's pipelined win rate order value. And so oftentimes we think about, okay, well, how do we, let's just say hypothetically, I'm a 10 million dollar business. I'm going to go to 20 million this year. And, uh, let's say we started last year. We got to 10 million this year. I just blew up and then we want to go 20 next year. So I'm going to go double again. Well, if we keep our leads, our win rate and our order by the same, assuming we don't have like MRR or whatever that's recurring or ARR, we're going to get the same result. And so we're like, okay, well, if you do the exercise and saying, okay, great, well, let's just talk about leads. All right. We've got a hundred leads. That's pipeline and a hundred leads. Uh, the, you know, average order value is let's say, let's say you're a hundred leads at a 10% win rate with a million dollar order value. There's your 10 million. So pretty easy math. If you ask someone, okay, well, how are you going to get a 20 million? They said, Oh, it was, You know, like double lead volume is natural, right? So they'll say, okay, well, I need to go from a hundred leads to 200 leads. Okay. Well, that's hard, but it's doable, right? So, okay. Well, what's another way you can do it? Well, uh, I guess we can go from 10% close rate on a hundred leads to 20% closing on our leads at a million dollar order value. That's that'll get us there. That's very hard.
Andy Mewborn:
Yeah.
Joey Gilkey:
Or keep leads the same, keep the win rate the same and go from a million dollar order value to $2 million order value that gets us to 20 million as well. All three of those are very difficult. However, the 26% law is if you impact all three of them by just 26%. So if I go from 100 leads to 126, if I go from a 10% close rate to 12.6% close rate, and we can get our order value from a million dollars to 100, you know, 1.26 million, 20 million happens. And so it's easier to make, it's easier to make incremental gains across a couple of different categories than it is to make massive gains in any one.
Andy Mewborn:
Hmm. And what are you of those three? How would you prioritize those? Like if someone gave you that right now, Joey, that's just for numbers sake, the same numbers. Where would you like, how would you prioritize it?
Joey Gilkey:
I'd probably look at win rate first. I'll look at win rate first. And I was okay. Great. 10% is not great, which means I'm losing 90%. I wanted to lose the 90% to your point. Maybe I'm not following up enough. Great. Well, that's If I follow up, you know, the prescribed five times that, you know, the statistic says like surely there's two and a half percent there, 26% gain on my 10%. So I can go to 12.6%. So let's start there. Right. I've already got leads in the door. I'm not nurturing them the way I should. I'm not stewarding my leads the way I could. So on. That's, that's an easier game. Um, the next is, is your pipeline. Right. So, okay, well, I got a hundred leads that are handed to me. Could I go self-source an extra two a month? That's 24. So call 2.1, 2.2 leads per month additional on my own time. Well, then I'm going to go from a hundred leads to 126. Right. And then at that point, it's great. The better you become, the more pipeline you have, this is the ironic part. The more pipeline you have, the better you are at winning, the more risk you can take with your pricing. Right. it's a simple supply-demand economics, right? If there is more supply in the pipeline and there is more demand because my win rate's gone up, then surely I can manipulate pricing. Now, when I manipulate pricing, let's just say I do go from 1 million to 1.26 average order value, I might, I'm not gonna lose my lead volume, but I might drop a little bit in win rate at that point, because I've just, I've increased pricing that may be disqualified a few people. Okay, well now I work back on win rate. And so it's just, it's this constant game of lever pulling And the goal is just how do I make incremental gains across the entire org to have exponential growth, right? Like if we just continue to do what we're doing, we might just slowly grow, which is good. But I'm a hockey stick kind of growth guy. Like I want to see exponential gains for not that much more lift. And so if I can do that, then that's what I'm gonna do. So in order, win rate, pipeline, order value, and then back to win rate, pipeline, order value.
Andy Mewborn:
Yeah, the trio. Man, I love the power of three stuff when it's just like, It's simple but not easy, right? Like it's simple. But you know, do a lot of sales leaders think like this today?
Joey Gilkey:
No, no. I think I think like this because I'm a business owner. I see the all-seeing eye. I look at the P&L. I understand where money goes, where it comes in from. And so I think that I have had that fortune. Unless you've managed a budget or managed a P&L for a business unit or a business, I think it's hard for you to understand holistically how all this works. Yeah. And I think oftentimes, here's my other theory in the market. This is not proven by any means, but I do think that there is an aspect of with the boom that we have seen in the marketplace, there has been a substantial demand on talent. Um, and as organizations have shot out and growth, I also think Silicon Valley is a large contributor to this because they did not care about profit, right? And so because a lot of these tech companies, they trade on revenue, they don't trade on profit margins. So it's a multiple of revenue. Well, if it's a multiple of revenue, then it's just, let's go acquire revenue at all costs. We don't have to care about the other metrics. Let's just blunt force grow. And so that just means more, more, more, more technology, more data, more reps, more executive salaries, and so on. The challenge with that is that that means there is a higher requirement for talent, right? And to the supply and demand. you know, economics aspect on the talent side is now there are more roles to fill. And so we are letting people who are probably not as qualified, take certain roles, you know, entering into sales, right? The whole like break into tech sales now and get a $80, $90,000 salary in SDR, whatever. Right. But the same thing happens for sales leadership. I think that some VP of sales have found themselves in a VP of sales because they were a good AE, right? And they're not, they don't know how to build the car. They don't know how to drive the car. They were just a passenger in the car and they'd perform pretty well in that seat. And then they move them over simply because supply and demand. We need a VP of sales. Well, Jimmy's our best performing guy. He must be best to lead the organization. And so you have people who have. I'm not gonna say immature or ignorant business acumen. I would just say they don't have the full picture because their experience is not mapped to it. But at the end of the day, they show up to a VP role, you know, like, and they just take what they're given, right? And so they're told that meetings matter. So they're going to set their quotas for their sales reps as meetings. They're told that revenue matters more than profitability. So they don't pay attention to cost to acquire customers much. And so I think that unfortunately, we, the industry have set them up for failure in a lot of ways. And I think that the industry is correcting itself right now. Thank goodness. But that's, that's my philosophy. And I don't know if that's the correct one or not, but I think time will tell.
Andy Mewborn:
Yeah. Yeah. I definitely see that. And I see like, you know, I think the self-sourcing AEs, like I know a couple of buddies who pretty much just Adam Robinson, another LinkedIn guy, I don't know if you know Adam, a good friend of mine. I know he pretty much cut his old like SDR team and like he saw no difference. Right. And so but again, he's different. He's an e-com, Shopify, a whole different business model. So it might depend on that stuff, too. Right. And so his AEs, he was like, you're going to prospect now. And I see this like what I'm seeing is companies are like, yeah, we need AEs to prospect more. Right. But then the incentives aren't aligning with what they want them to do. And so, you know, that Charlie Munger quote, rest in peace, Charlie Munger, but it's like, hey, show me the incentive and I'll show you the outcome. Right. And it's like, and I was part of this kind of machine as well, where, you know, you'd hear managers say, hey, like prospect more, prospect more, like the CEO saying prospect more. And they're going, I'm getting paid the same, you know, like I'm still getting a salary. Why am I going to, and we have SDRs. What's my incentive to prospect?
Joey Gilkey:
Right.
Andy Mewborn:
And so I'm wondering, how do you think this kind of self-sourcing AE trend is going to work out? Like where is it going to fall? I don't think that we should get rid of SDRs because as you mentioned, I think we have to change. They have to evolve. They have to evolve, right? And I think most people, they don't want to do the hard work and helping them evolve. And they're just like, well, let's just cut and make AEs prospect. But where do you, how do you think this is going to kind of change from this AE perspective?
Joey Gilkey:
So a lot of this, actually, this is part of our, you know, our, our pitch is I think that there is a massive change or shift in the marketplace with a massive change or shift in the marketplace presents a threat to the majority of organizations. But the good thing is, is if you can solve for this, then where there are threats, there are opportunities. So that's the positive, which means there will be winners. There will be losers to be far less winners and there'll be far more losers. The threat to the marketplace is outbound profitability. Right. So we're just unable now that we care more about profit than we ever have. We are unable to get costs to acquire a customer down. And there's so many statistics. This is not just Alpine, by the way, this is demand gen. This is everything else, right? Demand gen CAC is atrocious right now. Um, but, but I think that that's the change in the marketplace. The pain is that we can't hit our number, right? The pain is that whether your number is top line or bottom line, companies are just missing both. And so that's the pain they feel because outbound profitability is a problem. The reason outbound profitability is a problem is I think a number of things. One is I think sales rep costs inflation. SDRs are more expensive than they've ever been. AEs are more expensive than they've ever been. I think that their sales tech stack bloat. I think far too many companies are throwing licenses at the problem and all it's doing is digging a deeper hole. You know, we call it the sales acceleration industrial complex, right?
Andy Mewborn:
Yeah.
Joey Gilkey:
We believe that VC money went into all the tech companies and all the tech companies put all that money into marketing and UI, UX, and promises. Companies buy into it, hook, line, and sinker. They add to their tech stack, more licenses. While there's more reps, reps cost more money. And now there's more licenses to pay for, for all those reps. And so that's a problem. And then there's obviously decreased deliverability, right? So email opens and responses are dropping. Cold call, you know, 7.7%. Three years ago, it's probably sub 3% on average today, just three years later. And so you've got more spent plus less production equals a very, very slippery slope, right? We call that the more is more dilemma, right? And so what we like to say is the famous last words of revenue leaders is more is more, right? If I just keep spending more, eventually the tipping point will happen and more revenue will come out the bottom. Yeah. And so I do think that it comes back to the fundamentals of the scale. Now, to your point on the self-sourcing AEs, if you are going to keep SDRs, if you don't have an alternative to the SDR, you have to go full cycle AE, right? My caveat is then don't keep SDRs the way SDRs are currently set up, right? Change the model around the SDR, turn them more into market development. And then make your AEs not be full self-sourcing to cold leads, but have them be self-sourcing to warm, or at least segmented market that's already been talked to. Find the hand raisers in the market who aren't willing to necessarily meet, but there's intent, intrigue, interest, or info, we call it the four I's, and follow up with them accordingly. We call them hand raisers or shoulder raisers. They're kind of like, yeah, yeah, yeah. You know, like follow up there. And so I do think that the true evolution is moving the SDR to more market development, And then moving AEs from just being sit on your ass and wait for meetings and just high ticket closer and get, it's almost like they have to overlap now. It's like market development creates the segments. So SDRs creates the segments. AEs got to dip into those segments and self source off of that smaller cream of the crop list. And then I think if you combine those two things, then you win. And I think you will win big, not just from a revenue perspective, but a profitability perspective.
Andy Mewborn:
Yeah. Yeah. And, you know, with that being said, I, too, think with the involvement of the SDR market development and then the also the AESL sourcing is like the incentives have to change, too. Right. And this goes back to what you what you were doing, like you pay based on like reply or something like that or like completion. Yeah. Yeah. And what do you mean by completion when you do that?
Joey Gilkey:
So for one, SDRs don't need to be cold emailing. Period. With the tech we have today, with like Smart Lead or Instantly or some of these auto-rotating inboxes, there is no need to have an SDR who clicks a button and types some copy. Get a copywriter and get an email deliverability person and let them be your email team for all your people, for all your AEs. Right, so let's just take that out. Now, I think that market development is best done on the phone because you can have bi-directional conversations, you can uncover hidden intents, you can uncover valuable information that's not publicly available. You can create intrigue for the market who's not thinking about it, right? That 30% that's not thinking about it. They're not aware. You can make them aware through a conversation. You can ask probing questions, and then you're going to uncover some interest, right? And interest doesn't always mean a meeting. Sometimes it'll send me something. Sometimes it'll say, follow up with me in two weeks. This is interesting. I think that's where that has to move towards. And so the model that we have built is we give a base, right? Just like anything, I want to make sure their bills are covered. you know, at least nominally. And so our model is 48,000 flat base forever, unless you move up. Right. Um, now what changes is, and for the record, our SDRs talking about cost inflation, our SDRs OTE is about 144,000 a year, more than anywhere else in the market. Um, now we also have a different, we have a little bit of proprietary technology that kind of helps with that with formative leads. But, um, the way that we comp is off of a completion. So, Most people comp off of meetings, right? Their quotas are on meetings. Ours is around completion. So a completion is defined as I got the person I intended at the account that I wanted to break into all the way through the cold pitch. And I segmented them to where they're currently at the market, right? I pay between five and 10, depending on, you know, how, uh, earlier you are with us, it's between five and $10 per completion. And those outcomes for completions are not me, not now. Yes. Meeting. or activation, right? One of those four I's I mentioned. And so I don't care if it's a meeting or it's a not now or it's a not me. I'm going to pay $10 because that's data. That's the market development side of things. That's the data. I'm paying for the data to segment the market. And so they, SDRs love that, right? So to the point of like three and a half months to ramp, 14 months to quota, 18 months to churn a rep, we're not going to have that problem. They ramp in month one. They're hitting quota in month one, and they don't churn because they're making a lot more money. And there's, there's not pressure on unnecessary metrics, like, like meeting quotas, right? Their metrics are around completions. And so we're going to solve for keeping high quality reps who are very good on the phone around for a long time, who are making the money that they want to make that they can't make anywhere else. And I think that changes the SDR model. And indirectly, because you're segmenting the model and you're forcing AEs to do professional follow-up on the segments, that changes the AE model. So that's, that's how we comp things.
Andy Mewborn:
You know, it works. If you look at that at scale, you know, I love that, but how everyone says that term, but yeah, in an organization like a fully fledged organization. The problem, there's so many problems that occur when you have the incentive of the meeting, right? Like get the meeting, get the meeting. Cause then what happens is, is you probably know, it's like the SDR gets someone who wants to take a meeting. The AE goes, dude, this is not qualified. This is trash. This is trash. This is this, this is this, this is this. And so I like that because what happens then is it's like, no, we're just trying to fit them in the right hole or like in the right pocket of where they should be. Right. And it's almost like a more truthful, like representation of where someone's at versus saying, Hey, because I get paid on a meeting, I'm going to make you take this and I'm going to hold it down your throat. And then you're saying no. And then your manager gets involved and they're like, well, you know, taking the meeting, man, like what's going on. And it just creates, I think it's a culture killer too, man.
Joey Gilkey:
Oh, it's a huge, I mean, it's the 18 month turn. It's it's, it is a culture killer. And I think that, um, I personally think, that when we force meetings, one, it's a culture killer. Two, like the statistic is the statistic. Like we look at the bridge group study, which a lot of us would say is a widely accepted sales development rep study, 55% show rate across the board. So even if you set 10, five and a half are only showing up. Okay. Well, if the five and a half show up and your AE complains about 30% of those, well then realistically you paid all this money or you set quotas or whatever around meetings to really get like three people instead of the 10 you set. Yeah, it's not a really good business use case So I think you're right one they force bad meetings to the meetings don't even show up even if they're good ones Necessarily and you and I both know that he's sitting on their ass and they're not gonna follow But if it be the 45% that'll show up right there and play. Oh, dude, it's gonna even show up So well, did you like we talked to him? There was a level of intent there because we talked to him and he's willing to take the meeting Did you follow up? No, it's not my job. Well, okay, well get fucked. Yeah. Respectfully. Respectfully.
Andy Mewborn:
Dude, well, this has been a great conversation, Joey. This has been awesome, man. Well, Joey, it's been real, man. I'll let you know when this stuff all comes out. I'll send you a couple of clips. We do a bunch of bullshit. Cool.
