Welcome to ChannelWaves, the podcast where channel leaders share success strategies, best practices, and emerging trends, brought to you by StructuredWeb. Here's your host, Steven Kellam. Welcome everyone, to ChannelWaves. StructuredWeb's view into everything channel. I'm your host, Steven Kellam. Very excited to have Andrea Sittig-Rolf, Chief BlitzMaster and CEO, founder of BlitzMasters, joining us today. Welcome. Thanks. Happy to be here.
So maybe you could tell everyone, some of the listeners. Well, I'm going to back up for a second. I think most people in Channel know who you are, but there may be some listeners who don't. Maybe you could tell us a little bit about BlitzMasters. I know it's about effective appointment setting. Right. But that could be a pretty broad range. Maybe you could tell everybody a little bit about that and maybe a little your background as well. Sure.
So I started the company 20 years ago after running blitzes for a data cabling company in the Seattle area. And when my boss called from Austin, Texas, kind of out of the blue and said, what's going on in the Northwest? Your numbers are off the charts. I'm just looking at all the regions across the country. The Northwest is on fire. What's happening? These blitzes? And I just kind of told them about it and we he said, keep up the good work. I can see the results on the bottom line.
I thought, why would I keep up the good work for this guy? This could be a business. I could do this full time. So that was 20 years ago. The rest, as they say, is history. And in a nutshell, we help channel marketers grow their business with partners through sales, enablement Blitz Workshops that bring same day results. Okay, so how does that fit in the market today? Right. I work for a marketing company, by the way, I love what you do and I think it's incredibly effective.
But how does that fit in the market today? Right. Very interesting. One point, I was on a podcast just the other day and they were talking about doubling down on marketing right. And doing something non-intuitive. I think that probably ties pretty well into what you do, and it's probably not a bad idea. Yeah, well, I think now what's happening is people need to get back to basics.
There's obviously a lot of layoffs that are going on in tech and outside of tech, and this whole idea of marketing is still very important. But you have to talk to people. You're not going to sell anything unless you have a conversation. So it's bringing back that human connection, getting back to the basics, picking up the phone, making those calls, booking the appointments, and getting the pipeline full of those opportunities. But so much of it is just talking to people now. I agree.
So I think we had talked about it before. It's really the last mile, right? You can do all that marketing, you can create all that awareness, you can create all that value and even those leads, right? But at some point, somebody does have to talk to somebody. Yeah. And that's kind of where we fit in. We call it the last marketing mile. You've done all the social and the email and maybe text campaigns and then now you got to call people. Now you got to make that call, book the appointment.
So we're sort of at the last marketing mile and at the very beginning of the sales process, because what we teach folks to do is to get that first appointment to start that conversation or to start that new relationship. What's the goal? Right? I think this is where people I'm going to back up for a second. Sometimes when people hear what you do and I think when I first heard what you did and first met you, I wasn't sure really, what is that goal, right?
Is it once again tying very closely to that marketing or is it just sitting down with a bunch of people doing a bunch of telemarketing? And maybe you can talk a little bit about what is really the goal and maybe even how that has changed, right. With marketing coming down the funnel to the sales funnel and sales going up the marketing funnel. Right, yeah.
Well, the goal is really just to book the appointment and that's a little bit of a paradigm shift for folks who are used to calling and then they start selling right away. And you have to keep in mind you've interrupted someone's day, they're in the middle of something, chances are, so you don't really have their undivided attention. And the best way to get hung up on is to start selling. So the idea is to make it short, less than 90 seconds.
Probably the whole purpose is just to book the meeting and it makes it easier for the salesperson, the prospect appreciates it because you're not taking their time. Then the goal is to set up that future conversation, whether it be through zoom or in person or at an event. You're not taking a lot of their time. Now you're booking that future time when they're going to give you their undivided attention. That sounds pretty simple, right? Yeah. But I'm sure there's challenges along the way.
So what's some of the challenges that are out there? How do you guys work to overcome them? We could talk about trends maybe a little bit later. Yeah, well, the big challenges, things like getting past the gatekeeper, handling those objections, getting the voicemail return, it's all sort of the roadblocks that sales reps run into when they're making those calls and trying to book those appointments. So, great tips in terms of gatekeepers. You can call before 08:00 a.m.
Or after 05:00 p.m.. A lot of times gatekeepers are gone. You can get right to the decision maker or when the gatekeeper answers the phone. You can ask for sales. You're not going to get screened from asking for sales or even accounting. You can ask for another department and then from there get transferred to your decision maker and then with objections, I'm not interested, we're all set, I'm too busy. Call me back.
There's all these objections that you hear and we've got some great tactics to handle those objections and get appointments. And then we teach the eight second voicemail. The purpose is just to get that return call. Not to sell anything on voicemail, but just to get that call back. So we really help with the roadblocks that sales reps run into when they're making those calls. So what does the engagement look like if someone's working with you? Is it small engagements, large engagements?
Maybe you can talk a little bit about your average customer, what sort of customer they are, and what sort of engagements look like. Sure. So we do this what we call single partner Blitzes, where you just have one partner, it's just one team. They could be in one physical location or they could be spread out. And then our more popular program, we call it Blitz Anywhere Multi-Partner because it's actually many partners with lots of sales reps spread across the US, Canada. Sometimes Latin America.
So it can be as small it could be as small as a single partner with five reps. It could be as large as 50 partners and 1000 reps. It just depends on what the vendor is looking to do. So, yeah, it really just depends. But in any case, the goal is to book the meeting, get as many appointments as possible, and the value props are always based on the sponsor. We tweak it, we customize it so that all these techniques are applied to the value prop of whomever is sponsoring it.
So two questions, how does someone know they need you? And then what sort of organizations are most successful? Actually, three questions. And if they're not, what do they need to get there? Right, so, sorry, that's a lot of math, Steven. Okay. All right, so how does someone know that? Let's start with how does someone know they need you? Usually it's a pipeline issue.
So what we've tried to do in terms of our branding is we want to be known as the person to go to the company to come to when pipeline is an issue. Who are you going to call? BlitzMasters! Let's get that in there. Have you actually used that? Ghostbusters. But I mean, I think that's trademarked, but have you actually we have a video about that. We've done with who are you going to call? BlitzMasters! So, yeah, if you're having a pipeline issue, you need leads, top of the funnel.
That's the area where we help so that's when people know they need us, we need pipeline. How are we going to get there? And who we're going to call, and that's when you need us. I'm going to take that video from you. And when we promote this, everybody on LinkedIn, we're going to use that video. Right. I think that's actually pretty cool. So who's most successful with this? Right. Because, take it a step backwards for a moment. Everyone has a pipeline issue. I've been in sales a long time.
Even if you got a big pipeline, you always need it to be bigger. And if you got a small pipeline, you have a big problem. Right, but how does anybody not need this, from my perspective? Yeah. I guess the only time they wouldn't need it is if they have more leads than they can deal with, more business coming in than they can deal with, not enough product to fulfill orders. Right.
There's some of that going on, but once the whole supply chain thing is fixed and not an issue anymore and you need that pipeline, then yeah. And there isn't really a particular profile of a partner or a vendor that's successful. It has more to do with how involved sales leadership is, which can sometimes be tricky because a lot of times the vendors we work with have relationships with marketing. Right.
And yes, marketing is definitely involved, but we need to talk to sales leadership because it's their reps who are participating, so we need them to be really involved as well. Well, I would think, having been a former partner who was heavier in sales, we were good at marketing, but we were heavier in sales as far as what we had as a partner. We had and we were $10 million MSP. Right.
So we weren't huge, but we had great technicians, great support, strong salespeople, and we're starting to do the marketing. So from that perspective, you'd have been talking the vendor would have talking to the head of sales and marketing, which is pretty much a sales guy. Right. I think that's an easier fit for partners than actually trying to get them to do marketing, which has been very interesting as of late. Yeah.
And the idea with BlitzMasters, we position ourselves as a tactical, practical part of a broader strategy. We're not the only thing that you're going to do, but it needs to be a part of the mix with social and digital and all of the other things that people do to generate leads. Having that sort of that calling piece is an important part of the mix. Not the only part, but it's an important part. Sure.
Since the goal is to get an appointment and you said it's to get it fairly quickly, is there any product that doesn't work? I mean, there's some pretty complex solutions out there in our market in particular, and there's some pretty simple ones. Does it matter if the goal really only is to set that appointment?
Yeah, that's such a great question because it doesn't this is just about setting the appointment, starting the relationship and starting that sales process, whether you sell supplies, ink, toner, which is obviously a very quick transactional type of sale to server storage software, even if it's a three, four year sales cycle, you have to start somewhere. And so that's what this is. It's booking the appointment.
Even if it's a long sales cycle, you still have to get in the door and you've got to start somewhere, basically. So it works for any product. It's just some products are going to have a faster ROI than others, just based on the sales cycle. Sure. Is there any geography to this? Right? Are you North America? Are you global? What's the size of the organization that you can work with? And then how fast can you turn something around on this? Right?
Someone calls, we get three or four people call you in. What sort of capabilities can you handle? And can you do it globally? Yeah, we can do it globally. We can do it in English, and we can do it in Spanish. So we've done virtual and on site programs actually all over the world, but again, just in Spanish, just in English. And then we need 30 to 45 days notice not only for runway, but just for availability as well.
I do have four BlitzMasters, so technically we can do four programs on the same day. Okay, but the runway piece is important. The prep is really important. What do you think appointment setting looks like in the next couple of years? Because we've had the virtual side, because you've had COVID, and now people are getting back out there. So what does that trend look like? Are people continuing to do more virtual training? Are they moving to inside pieces? Is it a blend? Kind of.
What have you learned from that? And where do you think this is going to go? Yeah, I've actually been doing my research. I've talked to about 25 of our top customers in the last, I don't know, months or so because we are going to bring back our onsite programs. When I started the business 20 years ago, that's all we did was on site. And then twelve years ago, we started doing them virtually.
And so we had a mix before COVID and then obviously, the last two and a half to three years have been only virtual. So Blitz Live is our live program where we send a BlitzMaster, and the BlitzMaster is on site. But what I found out with these conversations is that so many of our customers and partners and vendors don't have a critical mass of people in one physical location. Offices have been closed around the country. Some of our biggest customers, they've closed 14, 15, 16 offices.
And people are working remotely, and they're saying, well, the only time we would do a live program is if you came in for a QBR or as part of sales kickoff, where we're already bringing people in. And so I don't think there's going to be a huge demand for the onsite, not like there was before COVID where maybe half of our business, but we want to be ready for when it is. And then, of course, there's a lot of interactivity, coaching, role play.
We got to think of COVID friendly games to play on site where people still feel safe. And so we've come up with some ideas there. But I think that the virtual step is still going to continue for a while, probably. Do you see in the future appointment setting becoming more important for the final mile of the marketing pipeline? Do you see the need for this services growing? Right, yeah, for sure.
Because again, you, you have to talk to people and especially if, if a lot of the training is going to continue to be virtual, you still need that human connection of having the conversation, reaching out to people. I mean, I had people 20 years ago when I quit my business to start this, say, oh my gosh, don't quit your job, no one will hire you. That's so old. Like cold calling, of course, 20 years later, it's like, I love seeing those people now. Like, remember when you said that?
Of course, I'm like, hold my beer, like, watch this, because it just ended up being this fantastic business. And I continue to be asked that question, is it still relevant? Does cold calling still work? That's a way better. Sorry, I'm going to go back and Christopher, you can pull this back in. Is it still relevant? I actually know it's relevant today. Is it going to be relevant in five years? That should have been the question that I asked you.
Yeah. God, I hope so, because I still love it, so I sure hope so. But yeah, I just I don't see how you're ever going to get away from the human to human connection and talking to people. I don't know how sales is going to work without that. I suppose there are some transactional sales where you don't need a salesperson, but in our business and the industry in the channel yeah. You still need to have conversations and picking up the phone and calling people is a great way to start that.
Oh, one last question. It wasn't the last question. Does it matter what vertical it's in? I didn't even think about that. Right. Maybe we can take it in two directions. There's B2B2C and there's B2B. And in the B2B, obviously you've got everything from hardware, to software, to cybersecurity. Is it working better or do you see it working in a particular industry or vertical better than others? Yeah, I call it industry neutral.
It works any industry, you're just booking an appointment, it doesn't really matter what you sell on the back end. But like I said, we do take the value prop of the vendor or of the customer, and then we weave that into the training, into the technique. So it's specific to that customer. But whether it's sled commercial, whether it's veteran reps, new reps, inside, outside, it works for everybody, because, again, you're just getting the appointment. You're not selling anything that day.
And so the mantra that people in technology won't pick up the phone is wrong. it's very wrong. Okay, you just got to give them a reason to pick up a phone or just be persistent or both. Yeah, it's all the above. Yeah, you need to give the salespeople a reason to pick up a phone because they're reluctant. But usually the reluctance is because they don't feel confident, they don't have the skills, they don't know how to do it.
And then you've got to give the prospects that you're calling a reason to pick up the phone, which is where our voicemail techniques come in that are highly effective at getting those return calls. So, yeah, just all the way around. We just need people to pick up the phone. Pick up the phone. There was a book sorry, I didn't write that book, but there was a book called Just Pick Up the Phone. Did you see that? It was just I'll find a copy, look it up. There's one called. Just Pick Up the Phone.
So how do people get in touch with you? What's the best way for people to reach you? If they want to discuss this, they want to find out a little bit more about what you do. Blitzmasters.com it's all right there. Okay, fantastic. Well, Andrea, thank you for joining us. We really appreciate it. Listeners, thank you for joining us. And to everybody, have a great day. Thanks so much. Bye.