Removing the Barriers to Sales Success

Darryl Praill : How's everybody doing today? Darryl here at... I'm recording this middle of the afternoon and I'll be honest with you, it's a Monday. Mondays are interesting. How are your Mondays, guys? I got to ask you that. How do you approach your Mondays? I did a post today on my Monday morning where I was actually at a coffee shop. Now, I don't go to a coffee shop all the time. I used to go to coffee shops nonstop. I loved coffee shops. And now I'm not working the phones anymore, obviously, because of my leadership roles. So I can do that. You might not be able to do that, but the lesson's the same. I took a photo and I was actually, what I was showing was that I was planning my day, planning my week, planning my success. I thought that was cheeky when I said that, right? I thought, whoa, look at me, I made something funny. But the point being, I was showing you could see that I was at the coffee shop, you could tell it was a coffee shop. I had my iPad open with my magic keyboard. That's the most expensive, stupid ass keyboard in the world. I like it, but I don't recommend it for everybody, just if you're curious. But it is kind of cool. It was a treat. And I had my headphones out and of course, I had my phone because I took the photo. The phone's part of the gear. And I had a new toy. I had a new toy that was in the photo and I'm going to explain it to you in a second. But the point was, the post was saying, Here I am, I'm planning my week, I'm planning my day. I'm planning to be successful. I'm planning what I'm going to accomplish, what I'm going to do. Because I have goals and objectives that I need to achieve for me to have a job that is, A, pays the bills B, keeps me employed, C, sees me being successful, which I think I can share that everybody probably wants the exact same things. Would that not be true? So for me, if you haven't figured it out by now, because I can be a little bit high octane, I am easily distracted. I know. You're probably shocked when you hear that. I equate myself to Doug from the movie Up. Squirrel. That's me, right? If there's any kind of in notification on my phone, on my computer, I need to go do that. And that completely takes me away from the task at hand. Another good example for me is when I'm in a meeting, maybe I'm in a prospect meeting, I'm doing discovery call, or maybe I'm in a sales meeting, or maybe I'm in a senior leadership team meeting. I historically would have my iPad in front of me taking notes, like a good little boy, but again distractions. And before you know it, you're down the rabbit hole and you really didn't hear what they just said for the last two minutes. And then they say, what do you think Darryl? And you're scrambling to come up with what the hell to respond without looking like a complete and utter idiot, because you are because you weren't paying attention. So I always talk about being self- aware and if you're self- aware, you can address your own shortcomings. So I am self- aware that I have this tendency. So I recently went out and spent a little bit of money and you don't have to do this. But what I did was I bought this new device called a Remarkable. And Remarkable is just an E ink tablet. And it's got one thing. You use a stylus, a digital pen, and you take notes and that's it. Now, there's different brands. I went with the Remarkable product. There's other brands out there, but the other brands, they try to be an iPad. Oh, you can do email, oh, you can run certain apps, oh you can get these notifications. And I've already got an iPad. And that's part of my problem is the distractions. Remarkable is just notes. In other words, the reason I bought the Remarkable was because it's distraction free. So now when I'm in a meeting, I can be very intentional about taking notes on my Remarkable. I can then go back after the meeting's done and I can update salesforce. com or I can update OneNote or I can update... I use a to- do app called TickTick, but insert your favorite to- do app you want to use, there you go. And then I can write and I'm not just hearing it, I'm transcribing it. Right? So now it's really physically in my being. I have consumed this and I've internalized it. And it forces you to slow down a little bit and actually be more present and listen. That's me. So in the photo you saw the Remarkable, and of course, as you might imagine, the post got lots of people ignoring everything I said and wanted to know about the Remarkable. So it seems I'm not alone. All right. Why do I bring this up? Other than saying, Darryl you have a inaudible problem and you're spending way too much money. Because you can do the exact same thing with pen and paper, I want to be clear on that, all right? And, Hey do that, don't have to be me. I brought it up because what I'm seeing, and I see this on my team and I see this out there is too many people are not physically getting the results they want, and when you drill down on it's because they're not putting in the work needed to do it, the activity, the investment, the research. So today's theme is all about, what do we need to do to get stuff done and what's holding us back? All right? So it's not really a self- help show, it's not really a best of gear review, it's really more of a process, best practices. It's not really time management. It's just, what are good habits? What do you need to know about yourself and your tendencies? What do you need to do to offset that? What are common mistakes you see? Now who's the right people, who's the right person, who's the right expert to talk about that? Well, you may have heard of this little firm called Predictable Revenue. They are the world's foremost experts on outbound sales development, small little company. And I love it because their tagline is for leaders who want to aggressively go after new business. And if you've heard of them, maybe you have, maybe you haven't, maybe you've heard of their podcasts, the Predictable Revenue podcast, maybe you've heard of one of their hosts, this incredible woman, her name is Sarah Hicks. Or if you go on LinkedIn, it's Sarah Jane Hicks. So that's important when you're doing that search, you got to get the right one. And best of all, she's Canadian, like me. So Sarah, welcome to the show.

Sarah Hicks: Hey Darryl, thank you. What an introduction?

Darryl Praill : Well, I was pretty intimidated because you guys are pretty epic and I'm like, this is going to be a good conversation today. So I want to know though, I mean, do you guys have the same amount of snow that we have going on here in Ottawa? I suspect you don't.

Sarah Hicks: We absolutely do not. Although it has been a particularly snowy year for us in Vancouver, that's still nothing compared to what you're experiencing right now. I can guarantee that.

Darryl Praill : At the time of this record, we've gone through over a week of having protests in our city, downtown.

Sarah Hicks: That's right.

Darryl Praill : How's the protest going on at your location? A little more quiet, I assume.

Sarah Hicks: Yeah. A little more quiet. We certainly don't have the concentration that you guys have, but we've had the people coming through. We've had a little bit of blocking happening downtown. The honking, the flags, all that kind of stuff. And I've seen now that it's even taking place internationally in a bunch of places. So this thing's picking up steam.

Darryl Praill : Yes. Once again, Ottawa's a trend setter. Look at that. All right, let's get going. Let's talk about you. So before we get into it, tell us a little bit more about you, about Predictable Revenue, set maybe context for us so that when we go forward and have this conversation, people are seeing better where you're coming from and why you are an expert of all people.

Sarah Hicks: Yeah, totally. So like many people, I stumbled into sales development, not the thing that I thought I was going to do, not the thing I got my degree in. My degree actually was a bachelor of fine arts in theater, in acting, which I will say absolutely lends itself to this role and to sales and to leadership, all those things. So very useful, but definitely not what I thought I'd be doing. But I did start working for this company, Predictable Revenue, which actually was the offices on top of the bar that I was working at. So that is why I knew where that was. So started working for Predictable Revenue many, many years ago now as an SDR. So I was the outbound, the only outbound SDR there at the time, prospecting. At that stage, it was a pretty early stage company, not a huge sales team, all of us just in this little Gastown Vancouver office. So I had a lot of freedom as an SDR with how I went about my prospecting. I was given great support, great tools, great content. Other than that, told to go out there, figure it out for myself, see what worked, see what didn't, come up with new strategies, all that kind of stuff. And I did, and I experimented a lot. I made a lot of huge mistakes. I sent some terrible emails with bad copy and terrible automation. And I sent some better emails with great customization and eventually landed on a nice repeatable approach, which always tended to involve heavy, individual research, grabbing cool customization content and tying it into how I thought we might be able to help with that prospect with their company, with their goals, all that kind of stuff. So I did consistently really well in that role. And so in time, got to move into the SDR management role, which I actually did on our client facing team. So at Predictable Revenue, we have two sides of the business. One side where we coach you, help you build out your internal SDR function or sales development function. The other side of things we actually take on the prospecting for you. S you come to us, we build you a pod of SDRs, we prospect for you. So I was an SDR manager for some of our pods, which was very cool because it meant that I got to help develop the strategies to prospect for dozens of different clients in different industries, which is not an opportunity a lot of people get as an SDR manager. Usually you're prospecting for your company and your company alone. So that was amazing. Learned a ton through that about how some of the strategies that I had used for myself didn't actually work in every field and you do have to be very agile and flexible, come up with new stuff. So I did that for a while and then the next step was to take those learnings and be able to impart them on those companies that are looking to build it out in house. So now I've been our lead coach since about August of 2021. So I'm now, yeah, teaching companies who are building or scaling their sales development function, how to create the playbook, create the strategies, create the tactics that work for their market, their personas and their growth goals.

Darryl Praill : All right. I'm going to encourage everybody, one of the episodes you may want to listen to on the Predictable Revenue podcast, so you want to find it, predictablerevenue. com/ podcast. It's pretty straightforward. They had a recent episode called Will Improv Make You a Top Performing Representative. So building on Sarah's background. Check that out. And if you want to, we also had a reminder folks, on this show, we had Gina Trimarco from Sales Gravy. So she of the Jeb Blount family, shall we say of sales family sales gravy, who's had her own improv troop for forever, had a similar conversation. There is a lot of value in that experience and storytelling in just the theatrics that really do come across in a successful sales rep. I love it. That's just a little plug for the podcast, little plug for one of our episodes, little plug for Sarah. All right. With that said, we've demonstrated that Sarah's got the experience, she's got the exposure, she's got the visibility into what works and what doesn't. So let's start. What is hindering reps, Sarah, from scaling and getting the results they want? I talked about, for me, part of my big distractions was I'm Doug from Up and I just can't focus. I'm easily taken off my game. Talk to me, what are the issues here? If I'm a rep that you're seeing over and over again, and then we'll go into, how can we fix that?

Sarah Hicks: Yeah, absolutely. So one of the key hindrances that I see tons of reps face is not leveraging the tools that they have at their disposal to be able to automate certain things that can and should be automated. I think there are a lot of spaces, maybe SaaS being one of them that is pretty accepting of technology. We're pretty good at adopting it, pretty good at using it, so we're pretty good on that front. But in a lot of cases maybe where somebody has come from a more traditional field sales background, or they come from a space where using tech in sales is not very common, or even they're just new to the role and haven't figured out how to use those tools. I see those guys just not manage to use those tools to help them scale their activities. And so what ends up happening is these people are sending a lot of one off of everything. They're making a call, they're taking notes, they're having to track that individual activity and that they're having to set themselves a manual reminder to follow up in however many days. And they don't really know how many days, so they set a random three day, but then they remember this person told me to reach back in two weeks, so they set it for two weeks, and then the task gets lost and it never happens. Or the same thing over email, they're sending an ad hoc email and then maybe an ad hoc follow up. And then when do you stop following up? I'm not sure. So you just keep prospecting this person for a hundred days and then they never reply or maybe they eventually do. But whatever's happening is it's all ad hoc. It's all manual. There's no real system. There's no real process. And it requires a whole lot of thought process to go, okay, who's this person? When did we reach out last? When am I supposed to reach out next? How does that fit in with the rest of my day? Oh, I also need to be prospecting new people. It's just too much. If you're thinking about the minutia of the tasks, you're not thinking about things like, how can I make a great business case with this prospect? How can I show them the impact of my tool, my process, my whatever, on their day to day or on their business. So your brain capacity shouldn't be spent on literally just managing your task load. So leveraging automation in the best way possible is how you solve that.

Darryl Praill : Clearly, and folks, I should be clear in this, this is not a VanillaSoft infomercial. VanillaSoft is a tool. It's a tool that can fix this, but again, we focus on sales, so we cover all topics. So, Sarah, I want to be clear in this one, is not advocating VanillaSoft, although, it's a wonderful tool. If you haven't tried it out, go to vanillasoft. com. That's my plug for the day. I want to explore this more because I'll be honest with you, Sarah. I see this a lot. Again, I shared how my own self- awareness, that I need to resolve it. But hey, did I get this tablet, five years ago, or what have you? No. I have been a victim of distraction for years and years and years. What I see all the time when I talk to reps in my one on ones, when I talk to them in sales training and a group sales training is, they all nod their head. They all know that they need to do certain, you use the word scale, that's a great word, a scale. They need to take their activity to scale, right? They know that. Intellectually, they know that emotionally. Yet, they either don't use the tools... And the tools can be the most basic thing, guys. I've talked about time blocking. Let's just start with the basics. From 10 to noon, as an example, I'm going to prospect. That's a pretty basic thing to do. The tool is your calendar. You reserve that time. It's as simple as that. So they go through the motions, they say the right things, they nod their heads and they don't do it. Now, many of those people who are guilty of that were probably shutting off this podcast right now because they don't want to be lectured to. I get it guys. Don't shut it off. Think of this as an intervention, think of this as a, Hey, we're just going to share some tips and tricks, and if it helps you, use it, don't shut it off because it's affecting your success. All right. So my question to you is, why? Why do they do it? Why don't they utilize some of the tools available to them? And then we can get into what are some of those tools?

Sarah Hicks: Honestly, I think because in some small way, what they've been doing before has worked. They've managed to book meetings.

Darryl Praill : Oh, it's good.

Sarah Hicks: What they're not aware of is that they could be booking so many more on such a more consistent basis if they were employing these tools. So a perfect example, I've got two kind of extreme examples from clients. On the one side, we have a client who's targeting huge and enterprise, tough to reach decision makers, usually a data leader of some kind, very account based approach. So the emails are being sent very one off, the calls are happening very one off, and at a slower pace because there's a lot of research that's happening. And we see that, we want that with account based. But what we lack is the ability to follow up on a nice repeatable basis if we're sending just those one off emails. So what ends up happening is we maybe drop off after one to two total outreach, maybe two follow ups, one follow up. And we see in the data that a lot of reps drop off about that one, two, maybe three follow up mark, but what we see in terms of customer journey data is that customers tend to only convert on average much further down than that. Especially with outbound. You're reaching out to these people cold, they don't know they want you. So they're on unlikely to read one email from you and go like, oh great, let's go, let me convert, let me have this conversation. So you need to get yourself in front of them a number of times in order to convert them. Now, there will be the random people that you happen to catch in the buying window. The 5% of people that will respond to that first one or two emails, or pick up that phone call and you convert them then and there. And I think that makes people think like, oh, this works, let me keep doing that. And the flip side, this opposite example from another client was they were just doing a ton of calling. So it was pretty low, average deal size, an ICP that doesn't sit at their desk, in front of a computer, they don't answer emails, so it was a lot of phoning. And they were managing to get a lot of these people on the phone, and so they were converting a lot of people through the phone. No sequences whatsoever though, because they were like, whatever, just call them, I make note when I'm going to call them back. But as I alluded to in my little preamble about what goes wrong with this, there was one case where somebody had literally been calling the same person for 100 days. Now, maybe eventually that's going to convert, but is it not a better use of your time to start talking to somebody new who might be more likely to convert? We do see that there's a drop off. You want to reach out to people for two, maybe three, maybe four weeks, then you let them go. Maybe you re- sequence them in a little bit. That's okay. Come back in 90 days. But there's no use trying to reach out to the same people who haven't responded for years. So those are two different sides. And I think why people keep doing it is because they are getting meetings. Even if they're not getting enough, they're getting meetings. So they think, why fix it if it's not broken? Because it doesn't feel broken.

Darryl Praill : I love that. I love that they're saying it isn't broken. I love that, effectively, one of the things you said was, what I'm doing now works for me, so why would I change? And I love you talked about the, for lack of better word, the half hazard approach, right? Where, sure I'm doing lots of one- offs, but I'm not actually doing proper follow up, or, I am doing a lot of touches, but the accounts aren't a high probability account where I could be focused on a much more better fit and give up on those ones. You may not be aware of this, I've shared this before. It's been a while since I've shared this. Not too long ago we worked with University of Ottawa at Telfer School of Business. And they actually approached us and they asked for all of our data. And so this folks is not a vendor, a research initiative that I'm about to share with you. We gave them the data. We gave over 400 million records of data over several years. They cleansed it up to about 130 million records. And then they did their own analysis and then they did a peer review and it got challenged and then it was published, in academic cycles. But this is what some of the net results came with, is that most sales reps do two to three attempts only and then give up, which is exactly the number I think you use. They said on average and depending on which data or industry you're in, but on average, to your point about the prospects react much later, there was a need of nine to 12 touches before they would finally react. I always use the example of, the guilt overwhelms them because you've harassed them so many times, they finally just want to get you off their case or they're like, you've earned my call back, child, way to go. And it varies by industry. Insurance was 18 touches, right? And other in industries are less, so it can vary. And folks, if you want this, it's actually on our website or just ping me and I'll send you the study so you can look at it, and a lot of it talks about what people prioritize. What did the audience, the buyers, why would they take a meeting? What was said? What did they value? And by the way, what they valued was that you understood their business. Number one, was that you understood them and their business, not that you understood your product. You understood their business and them. All right? So it wasn't a feature pitch. It was an actual conversation about the challenges they face with their jobs. The study goes on. The data shows that. So if I'm listening to this now... And maybe you're listening to this and you're going, I'm guilty of this, or maybe you're listening to this folks and you're saying, I'm not guilty of this, I do a lot of activity. But part of what Sarah's saying is, Yeah, but you could be more successful if you did some of this. What are some of the tools you've seen work with your clients to help fix some of these behaviors?

Sarah Hicks: Yeah. So this is something that Nick Casale of Sendoso said recently on one of our webinars, and I think it puts a nice, fine point on it, but anything that a trained monkey could do, you shouldn't be spending time doing. And there are lots of tools that can help you do this. Like we were talking about, you can be doing things like blocking your calendar just so that you get reminders as the simplest level. And many of you guys probably have access to sales engagement tools of different kinds. So that tool, you want to leverage that. And you definitely are going to need some human touch in your sequences. Maybe that's in your call tasks, maybe that's in a manual email that comes up top and you look for that customization content, but you absolutely can rely on automation for your follow ups, if, and only if, like Darryl says, it's very specific to that person, their company, and you understand them. Now you can scale that. It doesn't have to be specifically to Darryl at VanillaSoft, but if I do my research into the types of things people like Darryl in his role care about? I can find a nice common ground for that. And similarly to the type of company in the type of industry who VanillaSoft is targeting, I can group that. And that's where we talk about segments. And if you can write that nice relevant messaging per segment, you can automate a lot of that messaging. We still see better results when there is customization or personalization, so I would say, use that in your first touch or use that in your phone touches, but then let the sequencing tool, whatever that might be, take care of some of that follow up, because then that way you really rely on best practices. You build your cadence that lasts as long as Darryl was talking about there, where it has that maybe 12 to 16, however many touches, you test on your own market, of course, to find out where that sweet spot is, but then you've got the cadence that gets you all those touches. You can actually track results in a consistent way if you're relying on these types of tools to send out that outreach because they're tracking things like open rates, reply rates, conversion. If you're sending these one off ad hoc emails, you never really know why somebody converted, where in the customer journey they convert, what types of copy work best and what don't. If everything's just totally random, then it always will be random. You'll never be able to develop this fine tuned, validated practice with the way you're going out and doing your prospecting.

Darryl Praill : So what's really interesting here, Sarah's getting to a couple of things. One thing she's talking about is just using the tools over and over again. Actually letting the tools guide you, hold your hand, and ensure you're scaling. The big word here over and over again is scale. I will tell my reps that I will take quality over quantity so they don't need to do a hundred dials a day, they could do 10 dials a day. If they're having three or four conversations, that are good conversations, I'm thrilled with that. But if you're not having the conversations or they're not progressing, consequently, either the list you're targeting, the segment you're targeting is a bad segment. Sarah alluded to that, we're going to get into that into a second, or you're not doing the right activity, or we haven't talked about this, you're not mixing up your channels. Now it's implied when you say the word sequences or cadences, but the whole point there is that it's multi- channel so not just email. Too many of you hide fricking behind email. Stop it. It's email. It's social. It's text. It's video. It's a phone call. Remember phone calls. They still work, man. And you can call a mobile line just as much as you can call a landline. So you got to mix it up because you don't know what they'll react to. So it's that whole element of being intelligent. Now let's go back to what we talked about recently on one of our other episodes. We're talking about the actual looking at your benchmarks, looking at your data, understanding how many conversations do you have, and how many activities led to that conversation, which channels are leading to those conversations for you? So which ones are underperforming, which ones are over- performing? And then you have to do that analysis yourself so that you can actually understand where do you need to improve or do more of. And then it goes on. How many second conversations am I having? Does it drop off there or not? Again, part of that is using the analysis to inspire you and what you tools you need to use, what tactics you need to use, to get better. It's not a numbers game per se. But in this case, I would say it is the numbers game. But when I say numbers, I mean analytics, I mean analysis, I mean benchmarks. Those kind of numbers. The tools are the facilitator. The numbers tell you what's going on. And then as we start out the whole conversation on you need to be self aware where you need help and then embrace it. If what you're doing now is having success, bless you. But what if you could have more success? Well, let's do an AB test. On the A side is what you're doing now, on the B side is what Sarah's telling you to do. Let's see how it goes. And if Sarah's right and you make more money, isn't that a good thing? You made a reference to segments and having conversations and what I'm thinking you're saying is, reps need to better understand their personas. But can you tell me more about that?

Sarah Hicks: Yeah, absolutely. So time and time again what I see is when I ask a rep, who's your ideal customer? Who are we going after with this messaging, this call, whatever, the sequence will say, they go, well, we can work with anybody who... And honestly that in itself is a red flag. Anybody who? Mm-mm(negative). I don't care about anybody who. Who are the specific people that you can work with? And if you had them in a room live and you were about to go and chat to them about the impact that you'd have on them, would the conversation be exactly the same, regardless of title, regardless of the type of company that they come from? The answer is typically, no. Personas, which are the roles that we're speaking to, that exist under that umbrella of the ideal customer profile, which is all the companies we can work with, each of those personas have different priorities, they have different day to day task that they execute in order to achieve their different strategic goals, they have different hindrances and pain points and obstacles that stop them from achieving those goals, and those are the things that they care about. So when we are writing to anybody who does whatever that we can reach out to, the only commonality we can actually rely on there is that we are selling them our tool. So that's where we end up writing about, Hey, I'm Sarah Hicks from Predictable Revenue. I just want to introduce myself. We help people achieve these types of things, could be one of these five bullets, and so I'm going to bullet it all out for you to try and cover all my bases. Would you like to have a conversation about that? People have already stopped reading. You need to speak to their pain points, their priorities, and how you can help them achieve their goals. It doesn't even matter how exactly you do that at the very beginning. With cold outreach, our intention is not to try and get somebody to commit to buying my thing right here on that cold email. It's to open the door, start the conversation and be able to have a further conversation to determine if there's a fit. So the cold outreach is just about, Hey, I've done my research on your type of persona. Here's what many people that I'm speaking to who do your same job at your same type of company are telling me. Here's how we could create a positive impact. Here's how we could remove that barrier. Would that be worth talking about. Maybe. A lot more likely than just talking about the features, the product. They don't even know if they want it. So what that means is that you to be able to look at your greater ICP, drill it down to all those personas. Now you likely can come up with what I call umbrella personas. So for instance, if you're speaking to a VP of sales versus a director of sales, likely the conversation is quite similar. So you can create these little umbrella personas that are the groups of personas that care about the same things. And then you need to do your research into each of those umbrella persona and say, what are challenges that they're facing in 2022? You can even Google this type of stuff. Tons of useful stuff pops up and it's much simpler than you think it is. You can look at the likes of Forbes Crunchbase. See what kind of trends are emerging in their space, insights on their space. You can look at job postings to understand what are they actually tasked with doing at the types of companies that I'm reaching out to. What is the experience that they're required to have before they come in? And as you ask yourself all these questions, you start to build yourself an actual, well- rounded idea of the person that is doing that job. And then you can align your messaging with, you're doing this job, here's why it sucks, here's why I can help you make it suck less and achieve your goals faster, more easily, all that kind of stuff. And that's what you really want to be focusing on.

Darryl Praill : So let's recap kids, because we've had these conversations over and over and over again and you'll see how it all kind of comes together. Let me restate what Sarah just said with slight different approach. I've said to you before over and over again, you need to know who the buying committee is, right? So when you get someone on the phone, you can simply say, when you've made a purchase like this before, previously, historically, who all was involved in that decision, and they're going to say, Oh, well, there was this person, this person, this person. And the buying committees in today is, if you listen to Gartners, anywhere between five and I think 12 people now who's involved in the buying committee. It's huge. Each of those people, you can categorize them into personas, like Sarah's point, maybe there's a director of sales and there's a VP of sales. Okay, so there's a sales persona. And you can get a little more granular. The pain of a director is different than the pain of a VP, but generally speaking, there's a lot of overlap there. So when you ask who the buying committee is, because you should be asking, because that's just sales one on one, it's part of your discovery process, but you should start the whole process by having a good idea who the buying committee is by default. Because now you're going to segment because you're going to target each persona is a member in that buying committee. Next she talks about, Sarah, made a great point of talking about making specific to them. And we've used the term before in this podcast it's not enough to personalize, you have to make it relevant. Relevant. So she used the example of saying there's five pain points. We typically help people who have paint point A, pain point B, pain point C. And I love that she said, I've stopped reading. Because you know what? She's a thousand percent right. I've stopped reading. And if you're sitting here saying, Well, I don't know how to make it relevant. Then my friend, as we talked about this before, you don't understand your persona, you shouldn't be selling yet. Pick up the phone, talk to your customers, and get into their... Call 10, call 20, you've got them. And figure out what they're all about. So an example, she talked about a sequencing tool, so let's say... In fact I'll share what I tell... If I'm selling a sequencing tool VanillaSoft to my prospects people think automatically, well, you're selling it to the sales leadership. No, no. Yes, I'm selling to sales, that's one persona, but I'm also selling to marketing, I'm also selling to rev ops. So when I go to marketing, I'm not going to say, Hey, do you wish you're making more calls? I'm going to go to marketing, I'm going to say, Hey, are you getting a lot of pressure to demonstrate ROI on your marketing spend, even though you're doing a really good job of creating a large volume of inbound MQLs? And all of a sudden they're going, Yeah, that's relevant because I am getting heat and is pressure. Then I can say, Okay, our clients have seen one of the biggest impediments, that ROI, is as simple as sales doesn't respond to your MQL fast enough. Are your sales guys falling fast enough? We're seeing on average 36 hours. No they don't. Okay. So we could get that down. Say to an hour. I can prove for you that your sales reps will close us more deals and you'll have more ROI on those MQLs. Is it worth the conversation between you and your head of sales, about how this works? It's relevant now. I didn't go and say, Hey, my tool has got this great widget. Didn't pitch anything. I made it relevant. That's what Sarah's talking about. So not only is it scaling, which is how she opened the conversation, but it's when you get there, it's actually making sure you connect with each persona and make it incredibly relevant to them. Folks, Predictable Revenue can help you with that. You heard her say that this is what they do every single day. Sarah, what's the best way for these guys to call you, to reach out to you, to connect with you, to learn more about what you do, and maybe just maybe if you can help them?

Sarah Hicks: Yeah. So best place is going to be LinkedIn. Like Darryl mentioned Sarah Jane Hicks on LinkedIn. So please shoot me a connection request. I accept every single one and send me a message and I will be so happy to talk you through this kind of stuff. Like Darryl mentioned, all day, every day, this is what I'm doing is drilling down with our clients, figuring out who their personas are, how we can speak to them in the most specific and relevant way possible so that they can in turn scale their outreach and meet their goals. So I'd love to talk to you about this.

Darryl Praill : All right, folks. How many of you grabbed a piece of paper while you were listening to this and wrote notes? Or were you multitasking? If you were multitasking, you might want to go listen to this podcast again. That's Sarah. I'm Darryl and this, my friends, is another episode of the INSIDE inside sales show. We'll see you next week. Take care. Bye bye.