Sales Insights Unboxed with Allon Massil

Brent Peterson (00:02.814) Welcome to this episode of Talk Commerce. Today I have Alon Massil. He is the founder of Datalix. Alon, go ahead, introduce yourself, tell us your day-to-day role and maybe one of your passions in life. Allon Massil (00:15.317) Sure. Hi everyone. My name is Alon Massil. I've been a VP of sales now for gosh, eight plus years and recently co-founded a company called DataLix, which is a sales prospecting tool that helps sales reps work more efficiently. And, you know, things that I like to do aside from work is hang out with my wife and kids here in New York. We're based out of Long Island. Big, big avid fan of working out. just to kind of get the stress out like most sales people and big movie buff. Love the movie lines. Brent Peterson (00:59.726) That's awesome. So what is your favorite movie? Allon Massil (01:04.153) That's a tough one Hard to pick a single one. I'd say maybe like top three would have to be rocky, too Because Stallone wins it in that one. So that's a classic. Although I don't know if anybody even knows about the rocky genre anymore the departed gotta get me some of that Leo DiCaprio and Jack Nickle Nicholson and Probably good fellas if I have to say Brent Peterson (01:31.998) All right, I'm a big fan of Goodfellas as well. Good, all right, so before we get started, and we're gonna talk about prospecting and data and how to find customers and all that fun stuff, but before we start, you did volunteer graciously or have all been told that you would listen to a joke and all you have to do is say, should this joke be free or do you think at some point we should charge for it? So here we go. Brent Peterson (02:01.778) I found my girlfriend is really a ghost. I had my suspicions the moment she walked through the door. Allon Massil (02:13.12) I think you can charge for that one. That's a good one. Brent Peterson (02:14.722) All right. I think you're number four out of like 220 episodes that said we can charge, so I appreciate that. So Alon, tell us a little bit about the reason why you started Datalix and tell us a little bit about the platform and maybe the solution that it provides. Allon Massil (02:37.649) Yeah, sure. I mean, look, if you're in sales and if you're in SaaS sales, you know, there's really two things that you need to focus on, right? Whether you're an AE, an SDR, BDR, or whether you're a sales leader. And it comes down to building your pipeline and then working the pipeline to close deals, right? And one of the tried and true ways to build pipe is to do outbound sales or sales prospecting as it's known. Right. And I think, you know, over the years, you know, on LinkedIn, on different websites and blog articles, you hear people saying, you know, outbound is dead and cold email is dead. But I would, I would say the numbers tell a different story. I think, you know, I've been in multiple SaaS startups as a sales leader and outbound always accounted for anywhere between 30 to 50 percent of. new bookings revenue, right? So it's just one of those things that everybody hates doing. Everybody knows it's a grind, but it's essential to achieving, you know, your sales targets, company sales target, you know, hitting your numbers. The biggest challenge, I think, over the years has just become more and more difficult, right? It's already a grinder's job. You gotta kind of find... You know, your TAM, focus on your ICP, figure out the buyer personas you're gonna go after, figuring out what to say to them. But over the years with the enhanced spam filters on, you know, G Suite and Microsoft products, and just everybody gets inundated with emails every single day, it's, you know, those open reply rates have dropped. So, you know, anybody that prospects, whether you're an STR or a BDR or an AE, that prospects have had to roll up their sleeves and work harder. Right. And by that, I mean, you know, doing more research on the companies, doing more research on the contacts, trying to find something relevant and compelling to talk about in your email and then tie that to the value that your company's product or service can provide. And it's become really difficult and, and really time consuming. And, you know, that's really what brought me to the idea of data licks is, you know, Allon Massil (04:57.233) You have so many sales tools out there. You have call recording software. You have CRMs. You have lead gen tools. You have sales engagement platforms to help you with sequencing, but no one's really focusing on creating relevant targeted messaging. And that's really the goal that DataLix is aiming to solve for, right? Helping sales reps prospect effectively in an easier and faster way. Brent Peterson (05:27.502) Yeah, I mean, that's such a great point. And people focus on those end pipes, you know, like for sequencing or even call. How do you make the calls? People are so focused on that part of it, but they don't often think about where do you get the data. And in my previous role as well, I ran a sales team. And the hardest part was to come up with that data. Talk a little bit about that challenge. And I know that let's not talk specifically about your platform, but like in other platforms, you, a lot of times you are, you involve a bunch of different tools to try to put it all together and then try to mix it up and figure out how it works. That data, how is it that people can get that data in a great or easy way? Allon Massil (06:18.193) Yeah, 100%. And you hit the nail on the head. I mean, there's so many, as I call them, silver bullets out there, right? You get that blog article or that video, that LinkedIn post to tell you, oh, this is what you need to focus on. Make sure all your cadences or sequences are 12 steps and you have at least three emails or four phone calls or whatever. I'll kind of like, fast forward. I don't want to spoil the movie, but there are no silver bullets when it comes to sales prospecting. It's using best practices. If you think about it from that perspective, you need to create a message to your buyer persona that's compelling and relatable. You need to talk about something they would want to pay attention to. And so that's where the data piece becomes really important because you need to identify data points that are relevant to your buyer persona. Now I'll give you an example. If you are... a digital marketing company and you're trying to provide your SCM services, web development services or maybe email development services to Shopify merchants. You need to be able to identify if they're running on Shopify or if they're running on Shopify Plus, maybe how many employees are in the company, maybe who they're currently working with. You need to identify this information so that you can then... create a tailored message to say, hey, my agency is actually Shopify plus certified or my agency is certified by Klaviyo. And that can get people to pay attention to your message. But the point that you're saying is there's lots of tools out there that can try to get you this information. The challenge is some of them are point specific, meaning they can just get you company information such as, you know... pharmacographic data, maybe employee size, estimated sales, industry. Then you have other tools that maybe give you more technographic information, right? Things like, okay, are they running Shopify or Shopify Plus? And then you'll have other tools, so they'll give you contact information. So the list of tools the salesperson has to use starts growing and growing and growing. So first you have a challenge of, okay, I got to learn and use multiple tools to pull this data into my CRM so I can try to create a message out of it. Allon Massil (08:43.569) And then the second challenge is how good is the quality of that data? Right. The biggest, I think, um, risk a sales rep faces when they're pulling this data from a third party app and creating a message is what if that data is wrong? Right. What if they are no longer on Shopify or Shopify plus, and now they're on Salesforce commerce cloud, or what if they're no longer on Magento and now they're on big commerce? Or what if the person you're reaching out to is no longer in that position? Maybe they got promoted or they left the company three months ago and you get a bounced email, you get that message that this person's no longer here. That's another big challenge for sales reps is they have to learn to use a variety of different apps and they have to then trust the quality of the data that they're pulling. Brent Peterson (09:31.486) Yeah, I mean, that's such a great point because I think, you know, 10 years ago, the old school way was you would buy a list from somebody and hopefully that list is good and then that BDR would go through the list. But the challenge there too was like the list people wanted to sell you a minimum of 2000 or 10,000 contacts and like if, okay, it's okay if you're going to spam them, right? But nobody does that anymore either. Allon Massil (09:39.758) Right, right, right. Allon Massil (10:00.413) Sure. Yeah. Brent Peterson (10:00.418) So if you're gonna call them, how do you get through a thousand contacts in a month? Like that's a challenge. Allon Massil (10:05.893) Yeah, and I'll give you more than that, right? I think that you're touching on two problems because that pain point hasn't really gone away. I mean, if you look at big contact data providers out there in the market, right? They get pretty expensive, right? So if you're an emerging startup or even if you're a mid-size company, with the way the market in tech has gone through a bit of a contraction over the last 18 months, you, a lot of sales leaders, myself included, are looking for tech consolidation, right? How can I do more with less? Where can I find a tool that provides multiple product features or multiple offerings in a smaller invoice? And so I think that's a challenge. Number one is trying to lower your budget because there's so many different sales tools or flashy toys out there. And then the other challenge is you hit the nail on the head. Okay, you get into a lead gen tool, right? And now it's showing you that there's a thousand potential contacts or companies you can reach out to. How do you prioritize? How do you figure out what to go after first, right? So again, these are the things that kind of been ruminating on for the last few years, because I've seen it with my own sales team, right? You got a hundred leads that came in over the weekend. Which one do you go after first? Or you have... you know, 500 accounts that are assigned to you, which do you target first at any given week? And then more importantly, why, right? So task prioritization is also something that I don't think a lot of companies are, or a lot of solutions I would say, have solved for, but definitely a lot of sales teams are thinking about more and more, right? Because they need to work more efficiently. Brent Peterson (11:56.442) There's a buzzword around now that's called a cold email. It used to be spam, but now they call it a cold email. Explain the difference from us sending an email to somebody versus going through a big system that sends it in bulk. Allon Massil (12:11.373) Yeah, sure. So the warm cold analogy, the best way to think about it is this. If you have a website, right? Let's just say I'm selling shoes at aloneshoes.com. If somebody comes to my website and they sign up for something, maybe they sign up for my newsletter, my blog, maybe they buy something from me. And when they did that, they provided their contact information. Right. Those are called. inbound leads or essentially warm emails. They're people that have engaged with you before, whether it's on your live chat, on a form, purchased a product, et cetera. Cold email, otherwise known as outbound email, is people that have never heard from you before. So the best analogy I can give you is if you, if I had an actual alone shoes as a brick and mortar, if you walked into my store, and a sales associate greeted you, that's warm. If I'm outside the store in a chicken suit, dancing with a sign, trying to get your attention to come into my store, that's cold. So anybody that I'm going after that has never heard of me or never engaged with me in the past is typically considered a cold email. And that's where you have to use specifically designed email tools or sales tools that can provide that level of functionality, otherwise you risk of being out of compliance in terms of can spam and certain regulations you need to follow. Brent Peterson (13:43.582) Yeah, and that's where you don't just bulk email 2,000 people or 10,000 or that's where you really the idea of a cold email is where you get a contact and you try to talk to them via email rather than hitting 1,000 people. The same would apply to just cold calling, right? I think that the robo-dialers are also now. Allon Massil (13:49.635) You're right. Brent Peterson (14:10.966) getting restricted and it's just such a bad practice that the only people that seem to do that are people that are trying to sell you extended car warranties. Allon Massil (14:21.609) That's it. And like you said, the challenge is for every one person, for every one sales rep who's trying to do the right thing, I'm trying to reach out to you. You've never heard from me before, so I'm sending you a cold email. So I really want to research who Brent Peterson is, what his company does, maybe who they're working with today, what they may be looking for to make my messaging relatable and targeted. There's no way. not 99, there's 999 other sales rep who are just doing a copy and paste and filling your inbox and my inbox and everybody else's inbox or LinkedIn inbox etc. with so much essentially junk mail, right? It's messaging that's promoting their product or services without doing their homework, so it's not relatable to me. Half the mail I get doesn't even apply to things that I would need. People are so just pre-programmed to hang up a phone if they don't recognize the number or they get an email from somebody they don't really recognize, they just delete it, they don't even read it. So it just makes, it exacerbates the problem for the people who are actually trying to do the right thing in their approach to sending cold email. Brent Peterson (15:37.43) Give us, so there's other examples or other ways that people can use this data in a targeted fashion. Like for example, LinkedIn has the ability to upload a list and then target those companies based on that list. And I think a lot of people overlook that way of targeting customers. And a lot of times they don't necessarily think about how are they going to find the customers that they want to target. Walk us through a scenario of how out- Allon Massil (16:08.357) Yeah, I mean, there's a variety of different ways. If we, you know, when you start peeling apart sales and how to be relatable and how to be more targeted, you know, you got to look at the company and the person, right, that's what I've always trained my sales team to do. Right, first look at the target account that you're going after. Who are they working with today? Do you have any customers that would be compelling logos that are either similar to the companies that are working with, or maybe they are stretch customers, logos that they are. kind of like esteem themselves to get to the next three to five years. Second, look at their partnerships. Who are they partnered with today? Are they working with any customers, partners I mean, that you have a partnership with, right? If someone's a Salesforce partner or a Google partner or a Shopify partner or an attentive partner, right? That's another angle where you can kind of share a mutual path. Look at their competitors, right? A lot of times, for me, if somebody sends me a cold email and they're talking about, hey, we work with X, Y, and Z competitors, and those are competitors in my space that I'm actively competing with on a regular basis or my team's competing with, that's going to perk up my ears. That's going to get my attention. So when we're thinking about sales and we're thinking about how do we get people's attention, how to be more targeted, there's lots of different ways. Think about... customers, think about competitors, think about partners, and then of course think about your network and connections. Brent Peterson (17:41.61) Yeah, I mean, that's such a good point. So we have a few minutes left here. But let's talk a little bit about how your platform has put some of these different tools together to help people to succeed in what they're trying to do. Talk a little bit about the vision you had around it and how that all came together. Allon Massil (18:05.177) Yeah, I mean, it really comes down to like, how do we, you know, sales reps, they have it, they have it rough. I got to tell you, they're always expected to hit or crush their number, regardless of whether the product or service they're selling is, is any good, or it's working. And I think, you know, a lot of people don't understand that there's a lot of time spent, right, preparing. an email or preparing for a phone call. And that's really what I'm trying to solve for or what we're trying to solve for with data lakes, right? How to help make that research and personalization faster, easier, more effective, right? So as an example, like the thing is that was mentioned, bringing multiple tools into one UI, into one tool, having the ability to look at from a graphic data for a company, and technographic data for a company, and identify if the company's running of any of your competitor software or competitor apps, and identifying if there's any partners who are currently working with that target account. So being able to consolidate all this information into one app is something we're acutely focused on. And the same thing on the contact side, right? not having to go and use another tool to find contact information like mobile phone numbers or emails, being able to get that or source that in that same tool. And then the actual personalization piece, this is, and the task prioritization, these are the things that I'm excited about. How do we make it easier for sales reps to A, figure out which accounts or which contacts to go after first, right? By identifying things like, hey, there, it looks like there are. their employee size is going up, they're hiring more people, or maybe a leader is new in a position and so they're open to making some technology investment, or maybe somebody's recently left and the account now is at risk, so you need to notify your customer success team. So what we've done with DataLix is we've combined the ability to provide company data, both firmographic as well as technographic, along with contact data, mobile phone numbers, direct... Allon Massil (20:26.685) company phone numbers and email addresses. And then we layer on top of that, task prioritization. So we have dashboards letting the reps know, here's what you should focus on first, as well as that personalization, right? So all the data that we're collecting and we're refreshing on a regular basis to keep it high quality, we are feeding that into our AI engine to help you create or to create for you really, a personalized targeted. message you can send on email or on LinkedIn to that buyer persona. So just making the sales reps life a little bit easier because gosh, it's, it's tough out there. I gotta tell you. Brent Peterson (21:05.802) Yeah, I can't agree with you more. You mentioned partners, so talk about that layering of partners. Allon Massil (21:15.181) Yeah, absolutely. I think, you know, there's been a lot of talk about partnerships in the last few years, at least from my peripheral on LinkedIn. And I think the key thing to, you know, for sales reps to hone in on, because partnerships tend to be run by a separate partner team. But I think there's so much like synergy there that sales reps really need to be close to their partner teams. And DataLix can help you with that because If you're going after a target account, right? Maybe you don't have an open opportunity with them. Maybe you just want to try to get their attention. Wouldn't it be great if you can identify that, hey, they're actually a customer of one of our partners, right, before you reach out, so that you can then potentially reach out to your partner manager or reach out to that partner directly and ask for a warm introduction, right? So this way they're more likely to respond. when you pitch your product or service, right? Or just identifying that information using an app like Data Lake so that you can craft your message saying, hey, I see you're a customer of XYZ, which is a partner of ours, right? This is who we work with them, other accounts, name drop mutual logos. And then this is what we've been able to do for them. I'd love to get some time to talk more and see if there's an opportunity to provide value for your organization. The partnership thing is really not, and I hate to sound cheesy, it's not tapped or not mined to its full potential. And I think the key there is the willingness of AEs to step a little bit beyond their comfort zone, identify partnerships in their target accounts, and then either work closely with partner managers if they have them in the organization, or reach out to the partner directly and get them involved, right? It definitely helps keep that cold email a bit warmer, which is the difference between somebody opening and replying versus not. Brent Peterson (23:17.922) Yeah, and I think that the idea of a partner manager role is, it's been around forever, but certainly since the pandemic, then that role has become more and more important. And in the day to day, any technology company has a partner manager now. And this is a great way to make sure that you're being productive as a partner manager. Yeah. Allon Massil (23:43.689) 100% Brent Peterson (23:46.814) Elon, we've already gone through. We targeted 15, 20 minutes and we're already at 25. As I close out the podcast, I give our guests an opportunity to do a shameless plug about anything they'd like. What would you like to plug today? Allon Massil (24:02.901) Well, look, for me, I want to first of all give a shout out to every sales rep out there. Your job is difficult, whether people recognize that or not. And really, my shameless plug would be that if you need help with prospecting, whether that's identifying accounts you should be focusing on now versus later or whether that's help with personalization and making it easier and faster for you, check out datalix.com. That's really it. We offer a free trial. You can try it out. We have a Chrome extension that can help you as well uncover company and contact information. And we integrate with all the major CRMs out there. So if you have any questions, check us out, hit us up on live chat, or you can just message me directly and we'd be happy to help. Brent Peterson (24:48.15) That's awesome. And I'll make sure I put all those in the show notes. Elan, thank you so much for being here. It's been a pleasure speaking to you today. Allon Massil (24:55.834) Thanks, Brad. Thanks for having me.