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Welcome back to The Predictable Revenue Podcast. I'm your host Collin Stewart. Today, I'm joined by Second Sound Guest, Josh Schwartz. He's the head of Sales Acceleration Practice over at Galatzejmountain. I'm excited to have him back on the show. Josh, welcome back. Hey, thanks, man. You know, I just kept watching the last one over and over again. I guess you guys caught that in somebody and just wanted to have it. I just like looking at the best stats.
I was actually considering I was like, should I just wear a blues jersey and a blues hat? It was our prediscosion. They're not making the playoffs this year. We got to hold back a little bit. If you started the episode wearing a blues jersey, you'd end up wearing a penguin jersey or a connox jersey by the end of it. You could be traded.
Before the episode's out. I'm excited to have this conversation today. We're going to talk about Josh's journey as the first sales hire at a company called Top Ops. This goes back a little while. I think the interesting piece to this is for founders or people that are early in sales added that a startup. We're going to talk about targeting his process. We're going to talk about how he built out some of the process.
We'll get into pricing packaging and bringing method in from the madness. I think that's going to be a common theme here. If you're a founder and you're running sales for the first time or you're just trying to build something, there's so many things going on.
I have time to do it right. This is going to be a really interesting story if somebody who's got plugged into a pretty interesting startup in the early days and then had to bring method in from the madness. Talk to me about you get the job at Top Ops, then what happened? I just sort of know this much. I almost get this here. We started top though. What that business was was originally called J. Everland now for him. And then also we started a company called Powstand Whitix.
I came in to maybe his third venture, had a friend that convinced me to come there. I was working in the mortgage industry before that and wanted to get in software. So anyway, that's how I ended up there. And what it was is predictive analytics and for forecasting plug into Salesforce. Yeah, so that's the idea. Like you plug it in. It shows you your top opportunity. Is it kind of gives you a better view into forecasting like today would be the equivalent would be like clarity.
So if you're familiar with that tool. So what did you have when you got started, you know, your high will be hired as was a SDR BDR AE all of the above sales person. Yeah, I think so they hired me basically as an SDR. We've kind of full around the name a couple times to try to figure out like what was the best way.
You have to communicate that to the outside world and we flip the name around a few times, but my job listed set appointments pretty much and eventually like you have asked us those over whether that was, you know, to the founder, you know, sometimes or like eventually we had hired this like enterprise AE guy and then we had like a part time like fractional BBS sales on staff to.
And basically what I was handed when I walked in is they handed me the book, predictable revenue. They were like, hey man, like figure it out. Yeah, so shout out to Eric Ross back. They actually came in and did some work with us to love the book read it up a bunch of times love the product more revenue guys as well of course.
And so anyways got into the book and they kind of just were like, hey, figured out. So yeah, so the question was like, okay, who do you target? Right? Because like my job is to book meetings and when I walked in there, I was like, oh man, this is so easy. I came from a role, you know, so I'm more good.
So you did it all like you and so the phones, you did the pipeline, you did all the stuff and I thought the B and SER would be easy. I was completely wrong. I definitely out of the gate had no idea we had no technology didn't know what Salesforce was had mates and cold calls like, you know, in my day, but not to let that level and it was in like sales technology was definitely on like this forefront of like changing, you know, into like what we see it as today, right with outreach and going and sales law and all this stuff.
So, so. In there's like you know, who are they? I hope to for a year. I'm telling you, I don't know. It's like, how do you choose what needs to come on how to do any of those things now. those things. Yeah. So Colin, I imagine you guys have been in that situation a few times. What's a twice? What's a twice? So when you're trying to figure out what comes next, where do you start?
Yeah. I mean, so I learned my lesson early on and I think back on that a lot, but what we had basically did was we started to go to conferences and talk to people and things like that. But it was so silly that we owned the only integration that we had actually was with Salesforce. And I learned very quickly after going to a conference that was for like SAP or something like that. Am I talking to people and like booking meetings with them and like us talking to them afterwards
that there was no fit there at all. And I'm sitting there going like, okay, well, if our only integration is with Salesforce, like I got to find companies that use Salesforce. That was my goal. Okay. So back in the day, like there was a couple of ways you could do that because there were no like ways to like find out someone's technographics. So what I did is I did two things. Number one, I went to Salesforce's website and I looked at every single case study, you know,
that they had with the company out there, right? I was like, all right, at least I know that they use Salesforce. So I can find out that information. And then the second thing was, and LinkedIn was like pretty new back then. It was like 2014, but you could at least run like a search for Salesforce admins, just like regular LinkedIn, not like I'm dead in sales navigator, nothing fancy. What I did is I found every single like Salesforce admin on there started like requesting to be
their, you know, like their friend on LinkedIn or from a connection standpoint. And I had like a this running list that I was writing down of all the companies that were out there that used Salesforce. Okay. And then that took me to list building. So back in the day, we had inside of you. And for those who don't know, that was kind of like the thing after data dot arm and before sale and all these other things like people's email addresses and phone numbers and
kind of like do like a mass export of a list of the company and to Salesforce. So that's what I started doing. And just from there, like at least you had a some like knowledge of if these people have the tool that you integrate with, but I didn't know like really like who to target. Like we had some idea like maybe it was like an executive or like what size of company to really be going after. So really we just started like plugging away like one by one emails and call some of these people
to try to figure out like who were the right people to talk to. And what I've learned is like really easy to set a meeting with like a Salesforce admin, but not the best person for us to be talking to. Harder to set a meeting with you know, VP sales, CRO, but good people for us to be talking to. But at the time, I got comped on meetings. So as you can imagine, Colin, I was like, hey, I'm going to do what I got to do here and you know, try to mix it up a little bit, but you know,
just call Salesforce admin. So that's what I was doing. What we did next was there was this tool out there called tout. If you guys remember this one, you remember town. Oh yeah. Oh yeah. I loved it. And I hated that it messed with your it changed the way your Gmail looks. Yeah. And any tool that messes with the way my Gmail looks, I instantly dislike and it not that it was a bad app and streaks CRM or whatever they've got a great app to. But I hate it. I hate it. I personally
hate it. As a professional, I'm like, hey, it's a cool tool. And I love what they're doing. But don't mess with my Gmail. Like I just it's one of those things. It's like nails on a chalkboard for me. And tell me just tell me was a big offender of that. I mean, like things would change and move around. And I just couldn't get couldn't get over my one little, you know, blocker. No, I still follow like, I think his name was AK, who is the thing like AK, yeah, TK. Yeah. Okay.
Later. Yeah. Yeah. Do you think he over and I'm as well. I just like those little two options was and there was like, yeah, we just taught and what we honed in over time was that, uh, if I could send it, this is terrible because I've never do this today. But if I could add like 50 people from those companies that I like found out that that use Salesforce like into a tau, basically like sequence. And I timed them to go out at like eight or nine o'clock
warning. Like I could walk in to work at nine or at 10 and I could walk into like four or five meetings that I'll I had to do was schedule them. Which was this, this is the golden days of of the predictable revenue, like send an email, like book meetings, that type of thing where all you have to do is get like a little creative, you know, talking about the issues with problems
and you could book a ton of meetings. And that's where it all started, my friend was just figuring out like, Hey, we got to find out who use the Salesforce and then just blasting out, you know, it's on the emails, you know, from the info we could get from inside view. Totally. No, the advice here obviously isn't go back in time to 2014 and use cold email because yeah, short of inventing a time machine, it doesn't seem likely. So as it applies,
totally. I mean, you're helping tens hundreds of companies do something similar now. How is how is the targeting evolved from, you know, 2014 to now? Like would yeah, I know the access to data is better, but yeah, talking about what you're doing now to kind of help founders build out
that profile. Yeah, I mean, I just had an example with this the other day where, you know, we just got started with one of the companies and you know, we're talking to them about their ideal customer profile and, you know, trying to help them understand their total addressable market, all this good stuff.
And they showed us a list that they had built. They spent a couple weeks, you know, four or five reps building out like their target list and, you know, they've got a meeting every month to basically do this. And what I realized very quickly from talking to the founder is that, you know, one of the key integrations like the key integration that they have, which is Shopify or Shopify Plus, that they
did not use any sort of targeting dependent upon that piece of technographics. And I cannot tell you how, you know, technographics is and like if you have an integration like where you should be starting and where you should be targeting is definitely there, right? We can always say like, it's above five billion or, you know, 100 employees or less and you can have all of these, you know, determining factors. But starting with technographics and where your integrations are is like a key
place to start. You also see that really help with like the adoption curve as well. Like, where's your technology at on an adoption curve? Like you can think like CRM, marketing automation, sales engagement, you know, call recording tools like where they were at and where they were adopted. And if somebody, if you're on that curve or a similar curve like that, right, then you can ask for long,
they already heard tools by mix, right? So that's just building lists and cold calling and then setting meetings and realizing these guys aren't a fit really hone in and ask yourself like, who should I be targeting? What technologies should we be integrating in? Where are we at on that adoption curve? Are we targeting the right people? And doing all of that work around personas and jobs to be done first before you ever do anything is a really great way to start without wasting any time.
Totally. Otherwise, you send your only SDR to an SAP conference when the only integration that matters is Salesforce. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, no judgment on the founders of top ops. Like, obviously they did a great job. And, you know, yeah, things could have been a little bit better. But the it's hard to look back at it experienced 10 years ago and say, oh, well, when you know better, like, I look at the things I did 10 years ago. And I'm like, wow, that guy
could hardly even spell sales. We're sharing the stories here today. Like to share and help learn, as opposed to like throw any particular founder anything under the bus. Yeah. Yeah. No, for sure. And we're thinking about like, you know, founder, led sales and like how to get, you know, that information from a founder, like who just intrinsically knows something. Right. And that's what I like to always imagine. And like my head is like, the founder intrinsically knows something.
They know where to go. And they don't always tell you why or like tell you or like can communicate that to you in some way. Right. And like being able to pull that out of them and ask the right questions to determine what those things are can help you get it from them to help you get to the point where maybe it's, you know, VP, let's say else. And then it's then there's a sales team or whatever that is. Right. In that process. So I like to think about the analogy that the sales
rate like the revenue team or chart always exists. Right. Link. You've always have a CRO. You always have to VP sales, a director sales sales manager and a E and SDR and account manager. That whole of the board chart always exists. It's just in the early days. It's the CEO that's at the top. And all the other roles are underwater or underground. And because they're underground, the CEO's got to do them. And as you progress in that kind of founder journey, you kind of get
another layer above ground. And it's not always the like, I definitely don't mean this to say like you should hire a CEO or a CRO first is going from like founder to like, you know, first hire. Right. Yeah. Probably isn't going to work so well. I've seen a few people do it. It has work well for them. My thoughts are like, obviously, you know, you want to replicate yourself by
backsing me your time to quote my buddy Dan. And I like the idea of hiring an AE first kind of getting that piece off your plate or an SDR depending on what your sales skills are as a founder. But I'm a huge fan of myself as closing that for closing that first million bucks and revenue as the founder yourself. So I'd love your thoughts on, you know, is that check with you? And then who's your who's your first hire? Yeah. Yeah. I don't know like what the what the line is.
Because I think a lot of times it depends on like the deal size. And like you said, the awareness of the founder on like where their gaps are, could not speak enough, you know, about that like the the batter's awareness like, what am I good at? Where are my gaps? You know, what do I need? And honestly, I think you're right. It comes to a point where we need them to do other things. Right. They need to be focused on other areas than just biz dab and just sales.
Right. They've got a lot of other things to do around product or marketing or whatever the things are that they're good at. And eventually what also happens is we need to scale that, right? We can't just have that one guy who were dependent upon and think about that from the valuation standpoint. That's a lot of times what we care about, right? It's like if we're dependent upon the founder to sell this product, how much is this company really worth?
Right? Because it's all dependent upon him, not the, you know, not the process. So we have to be able to extract that out of them. Who do you hire first? Yeah. Great. I think you made a great point. It's like, you know, where your gaps are. Now, I think, you know, personally, if I'm a, if I'm a founder and I want to have, I just want to have more conversations at first.
Right. And think it about taking away the tasks from you that are the, are like the least, not necessarily like the lowest value, but like some sort of common denominator like that, right? Like, should you be spending all your time cold calling or should you be spending all your
time talking, you know, and like working deals through the sales process? So like if it's me, you know, I'm trying to find somebody either in marketing that's going to drive inbound leads, like right to me that are booked or I'm going to go find somebody, you know, that's, that's going to work outbound and hand stuff to me that's already set up on a, on a platter.
Right? And that allows me also, like if I hired that first one that's more like an SDR role, to advance that person in their career and in the business as well and kind of coach them, you know, to to a point that I like. The only downside to that is, is that you have to spend the time with them to coach them and all that stuff. Yeah. Yeah. Right. Yeah. Yeah. Sorry. You cut up for a second, but I think I know you're going
the minute. Yeah. No, I just seem like, yeah, maybe maybe you disagree because I think you said like an AE would be your first tire. Maybe you want somebody that has more experience. But you also got to think about the cost here, right? Like, yeah, something at that level, maybe a costy more of an equity, maybe a costy more cash and maybe don't have a lot of cash. Yeah. I mean, it's all about trading off for time, right? To your point, like, what is the right time?
And I think it comes down to like what stage of the business. So yeah, I'm a big fan. I'd try to get two million bucks myself because I mean, I've been there. I've done that. And the million dollars is just a, it's a nice round number 83,333,333 cents in the year and mother recurring revenue equals. I've done that journey a couple of times. Yeah. I stared at that number for a very long time. Yeah. I mean, I think that you're certainly right there at trade-offs. And like,
I think I would do it because I know how to hire and train and ramp an AE. Yeah. It's totally context-dependent of where you're at from a demand-gen perspective as well. You know, like I'm a big fan of your first customers should come from the customer development process. And then your next customers should come from referrals from those first customers. And in some cases, that's going to get you to close to a million bucks. In other cases, you're going to have to add in demand-gen,
you know, in between there. And so, you know, it depends on the capacity capability of the founder. I do think no matter what sales hire you bring on. And I'm, I promise I'm not trying to do like a sneaky ad for our services. But the mistake I've seen a lot of founders make is like, I'll just hire a BDR. And if you're coming, if you're not coming from sales or sales development, just hiring a BDR and giving them predictable revenue, isn't going to work at yes, I realize it worked
for Josh. But Josh, an exceptional person, easily running go to market for like a hundred companies and billions of revenue. So as much as is, you know, you're, you're going to be not, not going to brag about it. But you know, this guy knows a shit. And so the question is, can you hire a Josh and do you want to rely on maybe hiring a Josh and somebody who's going to turn into a Josh or do you want to do risk it and find somebody who maybe get some, I don't know, fractional help
around like supporting that SDR. Because it is a high, I would say it's very high risk to just hire an SDR if you're a founder that didn't come from sales. Thoughts? Yeah. There's no doubt about that because I seem to go, I seem to go both ways. I've seen, uh, the top like a like you just said, like hire, I'd say like most of all and when I've seen over the years as I've got really deep into hiring as well as you have to find somebody that's willing to do the work. Yeah, and especially
early stage startup, they have to love startups. They have to be passionate about it. They have to have that CEO like mentality and, um, you know, it's just a good example. Like one of the companies I do, consulting for like we were looking at hiring somebody and we got somebody deep into the process and like they were from IBM. Now my dad worked for IBM for like 40 years. It's a great company, nothing bad to say, but like throwing somebody that like has an MBA that worked at IBM for five
years into like a 10 person startup. No, it's not going to work. Like that person's literally going to come in and be like, uh, hey, where's my help at? You know, like where's somebody to make my decks for me? Like where's this? And like that's just not the situation, you know, in a startup. And I think you get to find somebody that's willing to like not say, hey, that's not my job.
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. 100%. Can we sidebar on IBM? I, I had a teacher in uni and I'm writing the next particular revenue and one of the ideas that we're going to write about is the, this idea of the selling fee. And I, my, my professor came from IBM and he had this idea of the selling fee.
Now he's added some things to it. And but I think the original inspiration was from one of the IBM sales trainings or the sales, like I remember the IBM being like, you know, the be all in all of sales training companies or companies that would train sales people. So that was the place to work that 30 years ago if you wanted to get into sales. This is the idea of the selling V or like structuring your sales process call. Does that ring any bells? Is that
sound familiar to you from like an IBM perspective? I don't, I don't know that one man. Uh, um, you want to teach me right here right now? Like let's talk about the selling day, man. I mean, offhand the idea. And this is, there's, um, an amazing old sales book called High Philosophy Selling. I think it's back here somewhere. It's high velocity selling and it's, it's fairly old like I read it in college. So it's, it's, it's, it's a, and it wasn't a new book
when I read it. So you know, it might have been like in the 90s, uh, kind of published, um, maybe even earlier. Anyway, the, the idea behind the selling V is that the, uh, you need to earn the right to pitch. And so you're not allowed to share anything about your product. And I'm paraphrasing and skipping a bunch, but you're not supposed to share or talk or pitch or try and sell
your product until you reach the point of mutual understanding with the prospect. And that mutual, the point of mutual understanding is where I, the salesperson understand the prospect. And I have paraphrased it back to the prospect to say, this is where I think you're at. And they have confirmed with me that yes, you know where I'm at. So I understand you and you understand that I understand you. And until you get to that point, there's no pitching, no selling, no
anything. Yeah. Uh, I think it just reminds me of Richard Harris, man. Like back in the day, that was always his thing, right? Like earn the right to ask hard questions. And yeah, you got to understand the current state before you can start to make suggestions. I mean, that's, that's the worst type of salesperson, right? It's like, or even like consulting or anything like it, you know, in my business, it's like, try to tell somebody what to do or, you know, give them advice
and it's like, you don't even understand. You know, I'm like, my business, like, I'm not going to listen to you. Yeah, it's some of the worst advice, you know, that you'll get, you know, somebody who doesn't understand. 100%. Yeah. Anyway, I appreciate the kind of teacher on the selling via. I wasn't trying to like work it in. I was just always curious. It's, it's legendary for their sales training and trying to track down like the classic IBM program stuff is online
is very challenging. I've got some different stuff printed in a binder, but I've been trying to find like the catalog. I want to see the resources, I want to see like what they used to do. Got any binders kicking around? No, I think, you know, they're, they're famous for the Bant stuff, you know, for when I understand, right? Pick up the phone call, see if they've got a budget.
It's not a, you know, so thinking about like qualification matrix and things like that is what it always makes me think about, you know, IBM, honestly, is like, you know, how do you sell and in what order and what things are you looking for? And, you know, obviously, there's a lot out there today. There's the Bant's, there's the Anum, which is usually my favorite and medic and
MedPick and all the other things that are out there. But that kind of actually goes back into, you know, our discussion around like founder, lid sales, you know, it was like, how do you, how do you design, you know, a sales program, you know, that has sales stages and discovery process and, you know, what order do you do those things? And how do you ask those questions? And I think this whole IBM idea around Bant, like I think we all agree like, you can't do that
anymore, right? You can't just call somebody up and say, hey, do you have an active project? Right? Especially, yeah. Business that we're in where, you know, a lot of times it's, it's, you know, leading edge or not quite leading edge, but it's something new that you have to educate somebody about, like they don't just have, you know, a budget that you're, you can just call and ask
about, right? Well, then, I mean, sales cycles are so much longer. I think so many people are, at least something I've seen a lot of is reps, and maybe not as so much frequently, but, you know, last year or kind of pre 22, 23, turn down, where, you know, reps didn't want to have a conversation with somebody unless there's a project in the next 90 days. And look, you know, our job is to book meetings for companies. And then a number of reps that I had telling me that a meeting wasn't
qualified. And I was like, oh, tell me why it's not qualified. Oh, they don't want to buy anything right now. It was like, well, that doesn't mean they're not potentially a good fit. That just means the timing isn't right. It means you need to continue to work them, you know, for the next, yeah, I don't know, until they're ready. Sure, sure. That's like the whole education process,
right? That's actually why I love Ann. I'm going to why it's so good for like developing, you know, early stage, you know, founder led sales type stuff is like just define for me who the authority is, right? Like even going back to the story from top of strike, who's the authority in the business that's going to make this decision that helps me build my list or you're no who I'm reaching out to, right? It's the VP of sales, whatever that is. Okay. All right. Second
thing, an animated need. All right. What's the need? And how are you going to qualify that? How are you going to find out what their need is? And I think I really like draw a line right there, right down the middle of anum because after that is urgency and money and like, urgency. If you do two thing, and dig into pain and like help them understand their motivations, like to your point, Colin, right? All of a sudden, it's like, oh, maybe 90 days is different,
right? But that's the whole like educate them on why whatever you're doing or whatever you're selling actually like makes sense for them. And yeah, there's, I think the issue that we get in there sometimes is like trying to force something, you know, that just like isn't quite there yet versus just like letting that sink in, letting them try to do it internally first sometimes with finding out how painful it is. A lot of different reasons why, you know, time is not right.
I both love and hate qualification frameworks. I love them because when used properly, they tell you how much you know about an opportunity. They tell you how thorough your rep has been or in the conversation. Yeah. Yeah. Exactly. What I hate about it is reps, reps, weaponize it to say, yeah, it's not a good fit. Yeah, I don't want this to impact my close rate or I don't want to do the work to turn this into a real opportunity. It's not going to close right now. I will be here in six
months. So it's not a big deal. I look at an amendment. I'm like, or, you know, a bent, you know, the authority piece like it doesn't actually, I don't think the authority piece actually matters. If you find real pain and you can quantify it, then you may not have the right lead card, you know, you can work your way up the organization. You also know if you're full cycle rep or you're working big deals, you can prospect and go to somebody else and go around them. Go to a different
department. Go up, go down like there's a real pain there and it's worth solving. Like go find it. Yeah. And you see the one or the days like, you know, with a lot of the LinkedIn influencers and like how they talk about this. Like I think maybe even something that the big enterprise companies are good at teaching maybe IBM and SAP and things like. I was like, I'm pretty, I'm going to round. Well, here's what I know about your business and like
why we should talk. And if you do things like that and you don't skip the hard work, it's going to work. I can tell you right now as somebody that's at that level, go do those things. You will book meetings with high level people if you do those things first, right? Understand the business and then reach out. And just like the active. Very silly. Back in the day, I worked at this tutoring company and I just remember like the phone rang all the time. Okay. Like so the
foot, you can imagine being a sales rep. The phone rings, you pick it up, you sell stuff. Right. And this one guy, like I just could never forget this. He would pick up the phone and ask them if they were ready to buy basically. And if they were not ready to buy, he would basically like run them off the bone as fast as he could. Yeah. He does a lot guy like we basically had to come up with a framework for like how this is
just so silly. How to answer the phone on an inbound lead when the phone rings and somebody really like it basically like if you didn't hear the credit card tapping in the background, he would basically hang in up on them or run them off the phone because he thought, you know, hey, like the phone's going to read again. I'll just pick it up. And that's the first thing you will get in the box. You know, he's not wrong. You know, if the phone kept ringing and you're
wasting your time, it's like a good idea poorly used. Oh my god. But if you knew behind the scenes, like all the work and like the money that was spent to drive to make the phone ring, you know what I mean? Like 100%. A lot of all the works as I'm working there. It was all theory and no like, hey, here's how you answer the phone. It like actually reminds me of like when you see the stuff today like about public education where they're like, I don't know how to do my taxes. I don't
know how to get a job. But I know that. Lob what lava versus magma is right because lava is out of the ground and magma is underneath. But like it's literally like that with like the sales training program there, you know, like they did no idea how to onboard somebody and like how to teach them how to answer the phone and like like set expectations about what that call was going to
was going to be. Yeah. But that would be a lot of war stories, my friend. No, fair enough. I mean, like this is I think this is how companies can struggle to build out and professionalize a scale like a sales organization. You know, I run into a lot of teams and they're like, there's no playbook, there's no this, they're not and they're they're incredibly successful. But you look at your like man, you're successful because you have such strong product market fit. Your sales execution
is pretty sloppy, but the product market is just driving it over top. You know, it like imagine your your buddy picking up the phone and it's like, if the phone was ringing off the hook and nobody was answering it, then he's probably in the right spot to just be like, hey, do you have a you rate you want to buy now cool or not? Okay, hang out. Because five seconds later, you'll answer the
next one. And I think there've been so many teams that have been like this. The product market fit or the additional cash committed from the sea has kind of covered up a lot of the inefficiencies on the sales execution side that now that that kind of financing has dried up. It's maybe exposed to some gaps. I'm curious to, you know, if we go back to the top up story, you know, you start off as NESTR, then suddenly you've got to move into this into more of a sales role.
Learning from the founder, hey, what has worked for you in documenting that process? I'd
left to understand what you did, how it went for you. Yeah, you know, they're basically the story was at some point we had figured it out and there was a small team of us as like SDR's, if there was a career for us and a couple of AEs, but like at that point, I was actually booking so many meetings like no job like five like five a day, something like that to the point where they're like, hey, man, like how about you just run the first calls and like understand
like a qualify because this is a lot, you know, this is a lot going on here. So I'd actually been like previously trained in Sandler a little bit and so I was like, you know, what I'm gonna run these first discovery calls and I'm gonna start doing demos and things like that. So anyways, that's what ended up sort of to happen there was like, I was like, okay, I'm gonna figure this out. I stopped like put my head down and like wrote myself like a script and like what I thought it should be.
It's not a great way to do it. But after running that call so many times, you know, like I figured out like what were the best questions to ask somebody to help them like open up to me to where I could find pain, right? Like I was just always so focused on like trying to figure out what was that like specific thing that they could tell me that I could like latch on to to help them and to like sell them this
this tool, right? Now today that's so much different, right? Like for example, like over the past two days, I'm running sessions with one of the companies I'm working with and literally asking hundreds of questions to the reps to the founder. You got a documenting like many, many pages of documentation just around like what are the what are those questions to ask? Like what are the pain, you know, things that we're looking for? You know, how are you opening up the call?
Talking about like the qualification matrix, like how do you know if we should like if the meeting is worthwhile of taking like or like I I I favorite questions to ask reps these days is like when you get a lead, what makes you excited? Like how do you like and like what are those things? One of those
attributes of that that gets you excited to actually take a meeting with them. But that's more like on what I'm getting into today is like really helping them understand like the ideal customer profile, what gets them excited for a meeting like hey, why is it qualified to enter into stage one versus
stage two? What are the actions and questions that you're that you're taking there? And I think it's really a balled over the years to help document those things, but honestly, maybe I just started with I'm just gonna ask I'm start asking these prospect questions and see what what sticks. Yeah, totally. I know like to organize mine into like I guess I think when you start to document the questions and then you hand it off to a rep, it's very easy to turn into checklist mode,
right? You're just sitting there, you're like you got your duly or your scratch batter, you're whatever in front of you or your list, your Google Doc, you're whatever, you're like okay, tell me about this, okay cool, tell me about this, okay cool. And I've been on the other side of those calls where it's happened to me, but you can hear the paper crumbling in the background and
yeah, yeah, and those aren't good conversations. And so I think the, I mean, we can go on attention about how active listening is so important, but I think finding a way to structure the conversation or the questions, the conversations in a way to lead in, you know, to to borrow from Aaron, you know, squirrels love pizza, but if you throw a pizza at a squirrel, it's gonna run away.
And so instead, if you take off a little piece of pizza, you put it down in front of you back away, you earn a little bit of the squirrel's trust, the squirrel's like, I he's not trying to kidnap me or whatever, he's not gonna throw the pizza at me, he's just gonna let me eat it abided at time. And I think that's the, the same in the kind of sales process as you can't go and be like, are you ready to buy? What's your credit card number? Right? Yeah, you can start with like, okay, tell me,
help me understand your context. So I like to organize it until like context of the buyer, easy questions around like their job, their responsibilities, you know, what they're doing, that leads into the pain question around, okay, help, let's understand what is the progress that you're trying to make? And then the deeper question there is like the impact on the organization, let's quantify that pain. And then like, when you say impact on organization, how else, who
else is impacted here? Yeah, start to get some of that buying center, like understand who the people are that you need to be talking to as well. Yeah. Yeah, those questions. I love that that process too. Like, yeah, I think about it as in my current state, I understand current state. And like some of the best reps I've ever seen that I've listened to,
you know, thousands and thousands of calls on course and don't doubt that. Yeah, and I've literally been told that my best friend is chorus before and people laugh about it and like, it is true. You know, if you only knew the amount of time so that sat down at dinner with my headphones and, you know, in the Boston restaurant listening to, to chorus calls, you'd laugh. But yeah, the best ones I've always hear is like, honestly, like, where they do enough research
ahead of time, like I had this one gal that that worked for me. And I'll never forget this line. The guy hopped on to the call with her and she said, you know, your voice sounds so familiar because I just spent the past, you know, two hours like listening to podcasts that you were on. And like, just like in that like small little piece that she said, I like opened up like immediately because she proved to him, you know, that she did her research. Now, of course, she said,
she like took a quote out of like one of those things and like started a conversation with it. But like you could tell just from that like opening, like bonding and rapport that she did a research, she knew him, she knew the company and like proved to him very fast. By the questions that she asked at the open. So that's always like number one, like I teach people like how do you prep for a call? How do you do the research? How can you do it quickly? What things
do you look for? And that's like all of this like bonding and rapport section. And typically like in our call prep sheet, there's like three to five things that you need to put in there and like you order them, like what order you think that they're going to go well and I always joke around and tell people this like if you just put one and it bombs your screw group because like then your bottom and rapport. Or is out to the call well? People on the air you talk to or or you can
commence. I think it's a good way to put it. Yeah. So anyways, that's that's the start. It's winning rapport and then current situation. So like once you kind of get them going and you have a connection, it's like all right, now tell me about what you're with the company. You know, how does that relate to this? Now why did you take the meeting with us? Did you do any research on it ahead of time? And that'll get you into like a little bit of a flow where you can intro
the business a little bit. And then in that intro, you talk about like the typical pain points that you help fix. And then ask them like yeah, is it safe to assume that you've already got those covered, which is like this negative ask thing that Josh Braun talks a lot about. And then they say of course like no, yeah, of course, I haven't fixed all those yet. Now cool. Now you have the permission to ask more discovery questions that are more pointed about like what the issues are
that you help solve. Yeah. So that's like a really good workflow to help open up a discovery call and earn their trust. And just yeah, get it going. I think it's a good way to put it. Yeah, fair enough. I haven't done the key the that kind of the reverse so can I assume you've got these covered. And it always feels to me like like car salesmanship. And I don't mean anything negative
to Josh Braun. It's just like a it's a trick to get going. And I'm like I'd rather make the genuine connection of like, Hey, you know, I understand that they're on the call to make some progress. I just want to understand what the progress is about. Yeah, and obviously there's yeah. Yeah. And then what's yours? Maybe a little bit better on goal calls too, because you have
a short amount of time for them to agree. A hundred percent. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Big change. I guess I'm thinking through the lens of like a discovery call where you know, they've embedded to you or they've agreed to take a call. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So yeah, if that's the case, yeah, switch that up in your right. So it's more helping them understand like the, you know, examples.
I can see this work really well too, where they'll like a rep will basically like tell a story about a case study and start at the top of like, well, here was the problem that they had and what we were trying to solve like here was the outcomes. Yeah, it was that sound familiar type thing. But either way, you know, however you like to open it up, you know, it's it's once again, we're back to like what are the needs and what are the problems that you know, you help solve. So
love it. I know we want to talk about productizing a little bit, but I timing wise, I think we've spent quite a bit here. I'd like to kind of finish by talking about how we put all this together into a playbook. And we've talked a little bit about how we structure the sales call. I mean, the from targeting to figuring out like making sure that you're going after the right people to making sure that you are in the discovery call process, you were qualifying the right people in
your helping start, manage the conversations to yes, we can help this person. How do you go and document that so that you go from, you know, the founder has been selling. Now you're the first wrap or you're the, you know, first sales later, what's your process for? I guess documenting that and then teaching somebody else how to pick up that process from the founder bit left off.
Yeah, yeah, documenting the sales process and like, we think we talked about this earlier, like pulling that out of the founder's brain is, you know, a not an easy task to do. The first thing that I always like just want to do is just start recording calls. Okay, so
it sounds weird. At least you used to do back in the day. We had a lot of pushback on this, but just get the founder to like every single call that he does, like get it recorded, whether that's just like a zoom recording or use going or chorus or, you know, the thousand other tools that are out there these days to help understand like what exactly does it they're doing. They're not always going to be like the best of the structure, like things that we're talking about,
right? But what they are really good at and just like intrinsically good at too is like being excited about whatever that topic is. And then like they usually also have like these little like sales tools that they're using like inside of those calls that they might not even like tell you about or they might show you, but you might not realize like how important they are to help guide
the discussion. Yeah, so I just had one of these recently where actually two, where we're trying to determine like what package they belong in and what package they belong in is actually determined upon like how they answer like specific questions and you can anyway, that's one. And then another one was, you know, basically like determining like if helping to determine if they're fit or not based off of these the sales tool that I saw them is like in a spreadsheet
or they ask questions to determine. So anyway, it's like to answer your question more directly, it's like start recording all their calls. Okay. And then start to break that down into like segments of like what those call types are or like what are they trying to accomplish before they feel like it should be moving forward. And like we always call like traditionally that's like your sales stage or your forecast category, right? Because like you'll definitely even start to tell you
like I have to do multiple calls like to really understand the business. Okay. Everyone loves to call that first stage like discovery. Yeah. And then what I'm trying to figure out from there is we call like everybody calls it like entrance or exit criteria. I love exit criteria better. And yeah. And then it's like mapping that more closely to what what indicator did you get from the customer that you should continue to move forward. Um, you know, HubSpot I think does
a really great job about this. They talk a ton on their blog about like their sales process and things like that. And like just an example would be you after your first call, you know, sending them your recap email. And if they respond that they agree to what you said, bingo, you like you can move to stage two, which kind of goes with what you said earlier, right? Like agreeing that that you found the pain or the need and that it's worth continuing to have that discussion.
Yeah. And so it's just example of like the first stage and like the exit criteria. And then we should basically not like all the way through to the end. I mean, to the point where I even see I saw one the other day, it was like not just through closed one, but through successful onboarding, which I absolutely like the more that I see the more that I'm falling in love with it. Because I see a lot of cracks between, you know, people that get that sign the document but never get
onboarded correctly or they have long onboarding times low. They're not getting a lot of value like at first and then it causes churn. And what I love about like extending that sales process in a CRM and like having those opportunity stages past blows one, because then now it actually helps me understand like the cycle times in those stages, which are onboarding, which I just I can't talk
enough about how much I love that actually. It is a very customer centric mentality because you're you're looking at the customer or not that you're looking at the this through the lens of the buyers journey as opposed to the lens of the sellers journey or what my company does to this customer. Which I think has a huge change in impact on the kind of mentality of this sales team. The goal is not to just hit the number. The goal is to help onboard customers successfully from, you know,
we've never met them too. We found some pain we can help with too. We are solving that pain in a way that they're super happy with. Yeah. Yeah, like anybody that ever thinks that sales is like a bad job or that we're bad people or whatever. Just like you're looking at it the wrong way. It's how we're helping people. We're helping companies. Right. If you think about it in that way, like you're trying to find somebody, right, even with like your targeting all this all the stuff that we talked
about earlier, right? Like, you're the right company, finding the right people, finding the right technology, going out and reaching out to them and like understanding who they are. But this is in a trick. We're not tricking these people to buy stuff. What we're doing in like what this profession is is helping somebody's life eat better. Yeah, making them look good inside of their business because they bought some. In cool that helps them buy company. If all of us out here
could have that mentality, we could maybe have a little bit of better reputation. You know, as well. I love that, man. I feel like I could we could keep this going for days and never run any things to talk about. Closing it out, how do we if we take all of the things we've talked about today, how do you think about training that next rep? So we've documented the process. We've recorded the calls. We've got customer verifiable outcomes for each exit and exit stage. How do we
take all this and train the next rep at it on how to do it? Okay. So a couple of the couple documents and things that you should have out of that, right? You should have a bunch of recorded calls from your founder that this next person can be able to listen to. You should be able to have what I like to call like the call of fame out of that as well. Where there's like clips that you've taken out of those recordings that are like good examples of how to do things like this is the good example.
Yeah. You should also have a process document lined out with your sales stages and exit criteria that come from all of those to help them understand, you know, when I move, know my sale when I create my sales opportunity, then also how do I move it from stage one to two to three, you know, to four and when and why? So that's a easy way. And then from there, I love this like what we call like certification programs and this works not just in founder, let's say else, but in all sales,
it's basically like, and I did you get it. It's like this checklist of things that they're supposed to have on those calls, not necessarily like, hey, ask this question, but more of like, like a structure like this is what this.
Sure, I'm a cool show like the feed sleep by them on those and what that looks silent by clay acceleration for me, which is the hubspot book right Mark Romeroch is that like you have this little score sheet with and like in Excel file and you share that with them and say like, hey, here's all the things I expect from you and you run mock calls with them on every single call
type until they get it right. Yeah. So that's what I would expect from the founder. And if they can't do it on their own, then they should bring somebody in like me or a fractional person that can document those things and do all this stuff for you and then train your first person on how to do that. Now on the other side, Colin might say this person should be able to do it on the route. Yeah, I don't know. No, I mean, it depends. Right? You know, the typical consultant answer when
you're trying to give advice, it's going to broadly apply. I love the checklist approach. I love the, I love check listing all the things because it's not a, it's not that you want to bring a checklist into a call. It's that you want to teach the rep the good habits. And I mean, go, I'm a big fan of the checklist manifesto. I can't remember the guy the author's name, but like huge,
huge book, great book on making sure that you're consistent. And you know, I know the book comes from like the airline industry, but to sales is not about doing any one thing amazingly well. It's about doing a whole bunch of little things right consistently. And I think having this checklist program, put that on a wall, put that right behind you. Seriously. Yeah. No, and there's another component to that too, which is as that team grows, there's this piece to where we're all speaking
the same language, right? So if I have like this, this like first call, like checklist and they call like a the third thing that you're supposed to do is you're supposed to have like we talked about earlier, Bonnie and report or discovery or we talked about mutual action plans and our prep call, like having a mutual action plan and and knocking that out. What that happens to is like that call fame is like here's how you do a good be it being a. All right, here's a
reasonable of a mutual action plan. We can actually reinforce that and have the same language. And everyone's talking the same thing. We can share those in Slack. We can share them on our sales meetings. And everyone's doing the same stuff just because we have this little checklist that we started. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. It's amazing. The, you know, I was working with a rep who was previously very good and you know, for six months, did an amazing job jumped out of the gate.
Great job. Then had a had a problem around the kind of six month mark, seven month mark. The results went from like a hundred percent to like 20 percent. You're like, what's going on? And I listen to a few calls. You're like, oh, you forgot some of the best practices. Like, yeah, let's get a checklist together. Let's find this. Let's find that and a couple of tweaks. And they're back to back to normal. But had we not found those tweaks, this rep would have been
out of a job or selling it 20 percent of the quota. And I, anyway, that's not really a, that's not great. But a very simple checklist can be a huge savior win. Especially I find reps at that six month mark. Yeah, the first three months, you're so excited about everything. You absorb everything. And there's all of this new energy that you're going to be great. And then, you know, the next three, as you're getting out of onboarding, you're still like,
okay, I'm on my own two feet. The six months, your confidence kind of builds to a point where like, I can forget some of the old things. And then I see the six month dip. Pretty consistent. Yeah. I would say like, I have one more piece to that puzzle, which I think a lot of a lot of companies still make this mistake. Now we talk with, you know, a lot of sales trainers talk about this,
which is like using sales decks like in the wrong way. And if you can marry kind of like your checklist into like actual documents that can be used on like a Zoom call and like be shared with somebody. And for example, like this whole mutual action plan, you know, thing where like you're pulling this up on a call, right? And you're getting you saved like your last five or 10 minutes of your hour long call or your 30 minute call, whatever to run through your mutual action plan. You know,
with with the prospect. Yeah. How often if on that mutual action plan, it says, you know, like we're having like them document the next step, how often are they going to forget to ask for the next step if it's sitting right there? You know, or like how often are they going to forget to ask the discovery questions? If it's in this like slide that you're sharing with them, right? And like the
rep can see it so can they. Yeah. So I think the one piece that I'll like push here at the end is like for all the sales enablement people and sales trainers and CEOs and things like that is like, can you make your sales part process transparent enough to where like you can actually share a document live on your screen with a prospect and make that part of it and part of the sales
process like that is very, very helpful honestly. He 100% agree. 100% agree. I mean, it comes back to our previous conversation, the customer success element starts with really strong expectations in those are set in the sales process. What I love to see it like there's this whole thing like where when a deal gets closed, you know, from that from the closer AE whatever, you know, a lot of times that deal gets like passed over to onboarding your CSM or like the account management
team. And they have to like resell the deal or they have to ask a lot of questions again, mission never really have to do that. But what that I think is force a lot of onboarding teams to do is to have like really great documentation about the things that they need
to onboard a deal. And what have seemed like just work absolutely beautifully, especially in enterprise sales is if you take that like onboarding like checklist and hold it forward somewhere to like about the middle of the process where you've already done discovery, it could really help you like in the sales process. And it could also help you onboard deals and that and to help your customers get value much faster than they would if they have to like redo all of this stuff or
if you haven't done it yet. I mean, a simple example is like, you know, if you're an enterprise sales and you're in software, it's like getting the user list and the count early. And this kind of goes back to your point of like who's in the buying team? Well, like guess what a lot of times they're also the users. And if you can get that early, that's that's perfect. Or like what are the integrations that we're going to have to talk about? Like are we going to be working with HubSpot
or Salesforce or Marquetto, whatever, right? And any of those checklist items that the CSM's or onboarding team has or beautiful things to pull forward in the sales process too. I love that. I love the integration of the kind of customer into the sales process. I think this is something we've seen in the last number of years. And I think it's going to be something that's going to continue even farther forward as we become a little bit more buyer centric.
Yeah. Yeah. And that's that whole idea like way back in the first predictable revenue book as you're writing your third one now, selling through the sale, right? Like it becomes just like this thing that happens when you close the deal because you're already you're so focused on the customer and you're already so focused of getting like having them have like a successful outcome or onboarding that's just like an hour thought. It's like, oh yeah, I was just assigned that. It's like, oh yeah,
that would be great. Thank you so much. You know, totally. Josh, I always appreciate getting a wait at time, getting dispensable time with you and talk sales. Thank you so much for coming on the show and sharing about the, you know, the top-offs journey, the things you've learned along the way. Yeah, always a pleasure, my friend. Yeah, I always great talking to you, man. And this whole time, I've had my little dog here, you know, with me in my lap too. So it's been three of us having this
great conversation. Love it. All right, well, thanks again, man. And thanks everybody for listening. We'll see you next week.