Ep # 183: The Sales Psychology Behind Better Outreach, Better Coaching, and Better GTM ft. Zac Blakely (CEO & Co-Founder, Foundations)

Zac Blakely 00:05 If I don't have access to that data, how am I going to be able to zoom in? Because if I have six reps, I'm not gonna be able to tell the difference of a 6% conversion rate from one rep's cold calling to the other. So I need to have that information, and then I need to know what to do with it. Intro 00:18 Welcome to Across the Funnel, where we dig into concrete Go-To-Market moves across sales, customer success, and account management so you can build revenue that lasts. Brought to you by Hyperengage and Dextego. Ioanna Mantzouridou Onasi 00:34 Thank you so much, Zac, for being on Across the Funnel. It's a pleasure to have you here with us today, and I'm excited for our conversation. Zac Blakely 00:42 Me too. Yeah. Absolute pleasure to join you guys, I think, on episode 173. Congratulations on your consistency. I know that's, having launched a podcast before and only getting to like 35 episodes, I realized how difficult it is to get into the hundreds, so congratulations. Good for you guys. Adil Saleh 00:59 Thank you very much. Appreciate it. Ioanna Mantzouridou Onasi 01:01 Thank you. Yeah. So we wanted to start a little bit with your background, Zach. I mean, you've done a lot in your career, and you're still very young. You're now the Co-Founder of Foundations, so we'd love to learn more about what led to this company, why you built it, and basically how the different experiences you had prepared you for the responsibilities you have today. If you can walk us through it. Zac Blakely 01:28 Sure. Sure, yeah, I'll do my best to try and have a unique story, but also not get too into the details here. I think ending up at Foundations, where we are, was a bit of a labor of love. I always wanted to be an entrepreneur. My dad always pushed me into doing that as a young kid and always said, you know, try and find something. Carve your little slice, make some freedom for your family. That was always something he talked about. Early on in my career, I found that I loved sales. Actually, one of my first companies was a painting business, and I found out I was exceptional at selling the projects. What I struggled with was staffing the projects, the operations, all of the other things behind being an entrepreneur that were difficult. It's like, I really liked sales, so maybe let's zoom in on that. So then I moved up to the city, actually started in door-to-door sales. Believe it or not, I chose not to take a formal education route. I got into door-to-door sales, was leading energy rebates, built a team of 300 people, and grew it all across Canada. I just fell in love with the psychology and the art of selling. And then from there, I took that into corporate, which was a big jump, going from door-to-door and running teams of 300 people and bouncing around the country, caravans out to communities and things like that, to sitting at ADP, the largest payroll company in the world, trying to figure out the corporate reality. Then I really started to love selling technology specifically. And then through there, I became the frustrated salesperson that was only working 20, 25 hours a week, hitting 200% of my quota, knocking on my boss's door, like, I want more responsibility. I want more responsibility. And he's like, what does it take to make you happy? I pay you all kinds of money and you never work. Like, why are you unhappy? I'm like, I don't know. I'm an ambitious guy. I wanna lead teams. I wanna do stuff like that. So then I went from sales in the IC role into being director and VP and working my way up. And then became responsible for building these initial sales teams and growing out these initial engines for organizations to get acquired. So I bounced around between a couple of organizations, built them out, built their Go-To-Market strategy, hired their team, and then was kind of like, hey, I'm not gonna be here for a very long time, like two years max, and then hopefully you guys can be acquired and I can move on to my next thing. Eventually, one of my buddies was like, why are you doing this as an employee? Why do you not start your own thing and do this? And so I tapped a couple of great friends I made along the way, and we started Foundations almost three years ago now, very soon. So that's the lead-up into it. Now we do that professionally for organizations, teach them how to sell, all of that experience trickling all the way through to also being a leader, and a lot of focus in technology. So that's the story, I think. Ioanna Mantzouridou Onasi 04:08 Wow. Yeah. Now I cannot not ask, what's the biggest, I would say, adventure you had in the door-to-door world? What was the door that opened and left you, wow, why am I here? Why am I doing this to myself? Zac Blakely 04:27 Yeah. So in door-to-door, it was amazing because what our leaders kept explaining to us was, think of the power of you being able to knock on someone's door and within 15 to 20 seconds, have them invite you inside to then buy something from you. Think of psychologically how powerful that is, right? This person did not know you, you approached their residence, you rang their doorbell, they answered the door, like, who are you? And then you disarmed them and then got them to bring them into their house and then later sold a contract, right? And those contracts were 15 to $20,000, and we could sell 'em inside an hour or so. So it was really cool. And so I actually took an approach to falling in love with that. I was like, can I get people to be engaged with me, to trust me, for me to give them enough conviction and credibility for them to invite me into their house? And so my goal kind of transitioned from can I sell the thing at the end to how many houses can I get into? How many people will bring me in, sit me down at their kitchen table, and we can have a conversation about anything? And so because of that, I have some stories that were unbelievable, where I would sit in people's houses for six, seven hours, family members playing backgammon and starting to play chess and all of these other things. We became friends. And through those stories, I have some really, really cool times, and then some times where it was like, why won't you let me leave your house now? Right? Those are some of the crazier stories I think that are a little bit funny. But specifically, I think my favorite learning lesson from knocking door-to-door was just being free and being genuine. I have one story I love telling, which was I knock on this girl's door, and she had algae-green-colored patio furniture, just algae-green-colored, dark, ugly, just the ugliest color you could imagine. And I was just kind of having a fun day. It was a beautiful summer day. So I knocked on her door, she answers the door, and I said, hey, I just gotta ask you, I've been walking around the neighborhood, and this is the ugliest color for patio furniture I think I've ever seen in my life. Who picked this? She starts laughing so hard, invites her husband down. They start bickering in front of me, and she's like, I told you we should have never got this color, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And then like 20 minutes later, I'm in their house, they've signed a deal, and we had this funny conversation. I still text with them all the time. I've gone over to their house for dinners. They've been introduced to my fiance and soon-to-be wife, and that was 15 years ago. So, interesting. I made a relationship in such a weird way. Ioanna Mantzouridou Onasi 07:00 You know, I also love psychology. You know I'm all about coaching too, and I watched a video yesterday I think you will really like. Going a little bit off topic here, but in short, it was an ex-CIA guy who was sharing the first test that they gave him, which was to show up at a coffee place and get a random person to buy him coffee within x period of time, like three minutes maybe. So he had to create that relationship and put that idea into the other guy without asking directly to get him to buy the coffee. It was all about psychology, how you build that bond out of thin air. How do you get this person to not only like you, but also buy you coffee? So the value of that coffee, let's say $3, you had to return times 10 in order for that person to feel like, yeah, you are worth it even if I just met you. So it's about that social capital. How can you add that value? As a seller, that's all we do day in, day out. We have to add value without making the person feel pressured to buy, making it their own decision. Right? So I fully agree with you that it's fascinating to me. There's nothing more strategic than being a seller, yet a lot of times people look down on that profession. So tell us a little bit about how you've coached reps throughout your career to have that social capital, lead with value, yet hit quota and not just build relationships to build relationships. Like, hit those numbers. Zac Blakely 08:30 Yeah. So first off, thank you for sharing that story. I love that story. That's a very cool one. I'm going to look that up. I play a similar game, which is always get the person that serves you to laugh or smile. If you can get the frustrated or annoyed mother that's early at the breakfast place at 7, 7:30, maybe a little tired, she's just serving away, can you get her to smile? Can you get her to interact with you, laugh with you, pick up her personality? Because if you do that too, I think it's a powerful skill. So that's a really cool story. And I think coming back to what you said lastly about sales and how powerful that psychology is, I saw an interesting video this morning that I thought was really cool, and I'll share it with you, which was somebody saying, you know, it's funny, we always thought sales was so simple and that it wasn't that smart of a task, but we thought computer engineering was the most intelligent task, right? Like, if you can develop systems and develop computers, that's the most intelligent task. How come AI has not figured out how to do selling properly, but the very first task that it figured out how to remove was engineering and programming, the very first task it was able to get rid of? So it's funny how we have this inversion of smart, right? It's like we've built it towards the engineer. The computer person is smart. But it's funny because that was the first thing that we were able to replace with AI, where sales, it's this very, very difficult thing that I think we agree on. There's always gotta be that human element in the middle. Ioanna Mantzouridou Onasi 09:55 A hundred percent. Yeah. I was just actually making a video earlier too. I was saying if you're Gen-Z now, lost, you don't know what to do in your career because everything looks like it'll be replaced with AI, just know that these human skills, negotiation, selling, will always be valuable no matter what you end up doing. So at least focus on those tasks, as you're saying, that AI is not replacing yet, and even if it will, it's not gonna be the same. Versus something about a line of code from an AI bot versus a human, it still will be the same. Zac Blakely 10:25 A hundred percent. Yeah. Ioanna Mantzouridou Onasi 10:26 That doesn't change. But the way you sell, the way you connect, your energy, this is something nothing can ever replace. Zac Blakely 10:33 Yeah. And even in an apocalypse scenario, right, I think salespeople would be super successful, right? We'd be able to get groups of people together, we'd be able to lead them, we'd be able to convince other groups to trust us to come into their environments and work and live with them, where without those social skills, when everything is devolved, we really struggle to find ways to work together. Those human skills become super important. Going back to your training and coaching question, I just fell in love with the psychology of it. I really leaned in early on in my career as an IC, trying to coach and lead people in sales. That's where it first started for me. But I noticed that there's kind of different groups of people in sales. There's the group of people like us, I think, that are in love with the art of it, the psychology of it, believe in the words that we use and not saying words like ‘just’, or ‘maybe’, or ‘sort of’, or things like that. And then there's another group that kind of ended up in sales, and they like it. It pays pretty well. When you sit down and you say, well, hey, listen, if you remove just, you'll have more conviction. And the person's kind of like, I don't know, that doesn't sound real to me. That might be voodoo. So I think there's these two different camps. And so to me, I kind of fell in love with that first camp. And so in the beginning, I was able to surround myself with people that really believed that there was an art to selling and wanted to adopt that and learn from that, adopt methodologies like MEDDIC and BANT, all these other things, but also bring on sociological and demographic, firmographic, technographic understandings of customers, ICP, et cetera, to really form a science around it. And because of starting a firm, I was able to insulate that. Now I own, I don't have to work with this other group now, right? If you don't wanna work, you don't believe in the sales side of sales, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, it's okay. I don't have to do what I used to do with my BDRs and kind of try to play the game. Now it's kind of, well, it's okay, you just don't have to buy our services. So I've gotten to really deepen that out, and because of that, we've been able to run down so many different rabbit holes, psychological, process, systems and technology. All of these things come together. It's just people, process, and technology, and each company from there also needs a different level of sophistication. And so that's been very fun. It keeps us on our toes, so we're not just coaching the same product to the same ICP. We're able to work in these different industries and really wrap ourselves around what makes a buyer in healthcare buy, what makes somebody, a CTO or a COO, move, or somebody in Europe versus somebody in North America, right? All of these different things change because there's, again, not just one through line. I'm sure if we studied the EU sales market and studied the North American sales market, there would even be a different psychology associated, and so it's always fun. Ioanna Mantzouridou Onasi 13:20 I would love to dive into more of the Go-To-Market side and what makes it very unique in a second here. I also know you had seen the extension we launched, Dextego, and I wanted to get your thoughts a bit about this compatibility ratio that we lead with because, to me, what I see all the time is reps on both of the sides that you talked about know their products inside and out, and the only difference is, again, how they communicate and how what they're saying is being understood from the other person. Because we can say the same thing, yet again, because of our compatibility and how we vibe, for a lack of a better word, with the other person, the result is different. So we wanted to basically give these insights to people before jumping on a call to say, you know what, this is the type of person you're about to meet. Adil Saleh 14:09 Mm-hmm. Ioanna Mantzouridou Onasi 14:10 With all the public information we can find about them, if you've talked with them before, also taking into account past conversations, and giving you kind of tips, what to do and what not to do. And with you, which I'm not surprised at all because it's very easy to talk to you, I had gotten a very high compatibility ratio, but I wanted to show you something here and get your real-time reaction on it. So we, 87% compatibility, Zac means that I don't need to adjust my communication style, right? Like, I can come to the call the way I am. You're very friendly, you're charismatic, right? I now know even before talking to you that I'm going to talk to a team player, basically. Like, you are an extrovert. You're easy to talk to. What I actually love here is in the ‘avoid these’, it said, don't hesitate from asking them how they truly feel about your product. And I saw that this morning, and I remembered, obviously, I asked you for feedback earlier, and I'm like, wow, that is so true. Like, you were so open to providing it. But I've seen sometimes where I had other people I was looking up to, and they're like, don't ask for too much, just get to a yes or no. And then I jumped on the call, and this exactly was the type of person I was dealing with, someone who was very quick, doesn't care, doesn't wanna add that value. So how do you teach your reps to quickly read the room and understand who they're dealing with? Do you think you can teach that, or do you think they already have it when you hire them? Zac Blakely 15:55 So I think that's a great final question, but I would say with Dextego, it doesn't matter. The thing before it was, maybe reps would come with a lot of experience, like great gentlemen, like what you have with Vince, right? He's been in sales for so long, knows the game so well, and then you've got junior reps. But also, in their junior years, they're still very mature and they have a great wisdom about them in social awareness. The reality is that as a sales rep, whether you come with a bunch of experience, that can work for you or against you. And if you come with not a lot of experience, that can work for you or against you. And with tools like Dextego, the thing that I really liked about your extension is that, to your point, there's a lot we can infer from the information that people are putting on the internet about themselves. But it's very, very hard to go through all of that and see a through line, right? That takes so long. Now you'd be looking at an account for three hours before you reached out, right? And I think with Dextego, the thing that's really nice about it is that you can see those little highlights of things to pull and things to avoid. I really also like the DISC and the OCEAN personality components along the bottom so I can understand because when you look at like a CEO, a lot of the time, this is a funny thing that I think a lot of people do, they say, oh, we're working with the CEO persona. Well, I know 20 CEOs, and they're all completely different people, right? Ioanna Mantzouridou Onasi 17:20 Yeah, exactly. Zac Blakely 17:21 Completely different people. So just saying that this title has a specific persona has a very small amount of merit, where the way that that person engages and acts and speaks and all those other things is really where it's important. And so I think that having your sales team have a solution or a system, whether it be Dextego or whether it be what we used to do, what we called three by three, where it takes three minutes and you find three things out about them that you could reference in a first introduction or an email, so then there's a cap on time and it's just, you know, go get your three things. So we have a mutual interest in motorsport. You live in Ontario, and you're also a technology founder. That's enough to start the path. Zac Blakely 18:01 But with Dextego, you can go back and forth with Tego, as an example, the one trainer, and can sort of work back and forth. Say, hey, you know what? Shorten this up. Maybe make this a little longer. Explain this. Stay away from this. And that's a great little practice to have that's near impossible to do with your reps on an every-outreach basis. Ioanna Mantzouridou Onasi 18:21 You know, Ryan Sargent, the guy who was in Manhattan. Yeah. He has this methodology of the two Cs. Lead with a compliment and one thing you have in common. It's kind of like these three by three you were saying. So it is for sure a well-known thing. You know, you have to find what you have in common, but I think now more than ever, it's so important to find it on a deeper level. Most people stop at, oh, we are alumni from the same school. Oh, we're from the same place. Yeah, so what? That's why I think it's important to connect more on the personal. Like it's how you perceive things, like, okay, we both like numbers. Let's talk about it from this angle. We both like storytelling, so let me tell you about a client that faced that struggle, how they fixed the issue. You know, I think we're missing that because unfortunately, having worked the last five years with so many intent tools, we are kind of programmed to focus on that signal too much, and we kind of have to unlearn what we've learned. But that leads me to Go-To-Market, so Adil I'll pass it to you to ask questions for that part. Adil Saleh 19:31 By the way, I absolutely love the psychology part, like how you're kind of relating it with people, because people are, that's why no way AI could ever replace a human brand because they're always changing. They can change. They have this capability of reasoning, thinking, all of that. So that part is also so hard to productize or operationalize inside these big organizations that you're working with as a consulting firm. So thinking of a technology-first business consulting firm, I know that you started three years ago. You must have had a slight idea on what kind of industry verticals that you're after. So could you walk us through a little bit about what industry verticals, segments that you are helping these sales organizations with, starting with sales, building systems for scale and all of that? Zac Blakely 20:20 Yeah, absolutely. So I think the first thing for us was the first comprehensive test. So we started our first six months, our goal was not to bring in a lot of revenue, if any at all. It was to figure out can we get outside of our network with our message, with our story. One of the traps I didn't wanna fall into, that I think a lot of services firms can fall into when they first start, is they immediately go to their network. The problem with that is you don't get the validation that there's a cold market that would buy you. And also, those people are too nice. They're friends, so they don't give you the really harsh reality sometimes that you need back from a customer that only has maybe a professional relationship with you. That personal blend can muddy things. So we started intentionally and said, we're not going through our network. We're salespeople. Let's cold call, let's cold email, let's do outreach, let's go to events, let's do stuff like that, and let's create a message that's compelling enough to get people to buy. And we were able to prove that inside the first eight months. For us, our persona broke out pretty specifically down into our ICP. It has all kinds of different intersection points, but high level it's technical founders that are in scaling companies. So the company is expanding, right? They have more than one business. This is a demographic component because they either have more than one business actively, or they have multiple businesses that they've started over time. Because one of the important things we recognized about our ICP was experience was paramount. When you speak to a 27-year-old CEO and you say, hey, listen, this is gonna be too much for you to stand up. Go-To-Market is very comprehensive. There's a lot of systems. You can't possibly stay on the edge of all of it. They go, yeah, yeah, yeah. No, no, no, we can. I can. I'll hire a sales rep. I'll hire a director of sales. He'll be able to come and do this. I'll pay him $120,000 and it'll be fine. And I'm like, okay. I'm just telling you that's the lowest-tenured, least-performing, generally highest-turnover role that exists, and you're asking this person to be a technology leader, a people leader, a strategist, an executor. It's not gonna work, but go ahead. So we experienced that in the beginning when we thought, oh, we would go to these early-stage founders and give them experience they don't have. The reality was they didn't value that experience, so we had to figure out that part of our verticals was also the person making the decision was that they've done this before. If they've done this before, they know that we are undeniably the most high-impact option that they have, recognizing we can get them to the outcome they want from a hire inside the ramp time that a hire would even generally have, right? And so that created a mental breakthrough for us. And our industries, we focused on revolutionary technology companies. They're either building their first sales teams, right, so they're injecting cash, they're launching a new product line or service, or they're expanding geographies. And we stay out of this super, super, like, we've had experience in healthcare. We've kind of niched out of that a little bit. We're focusing more on FinTech, cybersecurity, Web3, crypto and blockchain, as well as some of your other industries that, services industries could obviously, being a services company, we can help agencies a lot, software development companies. We've started to carve out a bit of a niche inside restaurants and education, so restaurant technology, education, things like that. But we stay away from some of the other, I would say, very, maybe not polluted, but very regulated, bureaucratic industries that are just very, very slow moving. Adil Saleh 24:07 Mm-hmm. Zac Blakely 24:08 We try to stay out of those a lot. Adil Saleh 24:08 A lot of red tape and so much bigger for sales cycle, big change management. Zac Blakely 24:13 It's hard to run tests. We can't. It's hard to run a market test with them because their buying cycles are a year and a half, two, three years long. So it's tough to do that. Adil Saleh 24:22 Yeah. So this is a growing pain that we see, I would say, from the mid-market to, I would say, small enterprises, is enabling their teams, especially these sales and post-sales teams, to be, I would say, AI-first, meaning like beyond ChatGPT, like building their vertical agents, building their workflows like n8n, and there are so many other technologies working in collaboration to enable and automate a lot of steps, a lot of stuff for scale. So I did see some of these, or one of your core offerings, like enable technology within the processes, you know, and make sure they're efficient, or operational excellence is done. So from a standpoint of, I know that consulting and business more in the past, it was more like, hey, sit on the top, get the blueprint, have their team, enable them a little bit, and get them up. It's more like a teaching or learning management sort of approach. So what is your approach as a consulting firm now? This is the big gap. Huge. Like every company, even we are a very small company, but as a tech business, we are thinking of building AI capabilities that can cut down the bandwidth and we can do things for scale because there's so much noise. So we gotta do it really fast and we gotta do it more, like when it comes to email outreach, all of this. So what is your experience at this current time? And because this gap is growing so big, internally, a lot of these GTM leaders across tech companies, they're not so much well-versed with technology, or they've been offset because they're not being able to enable this AI thing and automation and all of that. So what is your viewpoint on this and what is your current experience, maybe if you have some examples for the tech businesses that are listening to this? Zac Blakely 26:12 For sure. Yeah. So a lot in there, and I think you made a lot of great points. I think one of the big things is there's, as a sales leader at a scaling company, I think you can only really pay attention to either the operation in the organization or technology. I don't think the purview of trying to have expertise over both is possible. Staying up with the curve of technology, as you guys know, is very difficult. It's very trying, it's arduous. Everybody can do everything, but you've gotta test it, try it, break it, and find out that most people are full of it, or they're just maybe a little ahead of their time. The solution's not quite there yet. When are they gonna be ready? When do I use an incumbent versus when do I go with the new disruptor? Blah, blah, blah, blah. It's very difficult on technology. It's very hard to do. And there's a lot of practice that's involved there. So I think that's an area that I would say most leaders are really falling short of, or they're indexing too high and they're thinking technology is gonna solve all their problems, and they're leaving the human and organizational operational process stuff behind the curtain as well. And that's what we've seen with organizations, is generally when an organization is scaling, they either believe their people can get them there or they believe technology can get them there. I know that they would say they believe both will get them there, but they would index one generally quite a bit higher than the other. And we fill in the gap on the other side, realizing that that's just a complete fallacy. If you bring a bunch of technology in and you don't enable your reps to use it, you don't get feedback from your reps, you don't iterate on it quickly, you don't do things like that, and you don't have that sort of know-how on that side, you're not gonna build a great technology sphere. You're not gonna build an ecosystem. You're gonna build a giant shelf or filing cabinet of technology that your team is not going to use. Where on the other side, if you're just thinking that I just need to do role-playing and I just need to coach my team how to do cold calling and I don't need to worry about these different things and successes that technology is advancing, then I think you're leaving a lot on the table there. So we generally figure out, we have a program. When we come in, we do an analysis through what we call ADEPT. So it stands for acumen, data, enablement, process, talent, and technology. So we score you kind of like an RPG character, right? Where are you strong, where are you weak, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And then what we do is we position the fixes aligned to what stage you are as a business. So some organizations, you're in founder-led sales, so you only need a certain level of acumen to be able to get to building your first sales team. Very different than the level of acumen you would need if you had 18 reps and three managers and whatever. So what we do is we figure out what stage are you in, what in that stage have you completed, what's left over from other stages you haven't brought forward. Is that process? Is that talent? Is it technology? Is it whatever? We catch you up to that spot, and then we go, okay, great. You're in stage three. You're now ready to go to stage four, which is hiring your first middle manager or first middle management role, right? These are the things that we have to do to elevate our acumen, data, enablement, process, talent, and technology to be able to do that effectively. So when that person can land, they can be successful, not you hire that person and go, which is the general mistake a lot of people do, you hire that person and go, great. Now we can have a middle management layer. Can you build that for us? And it's like, well sure, but they're gonna spend their first six to eight months building that, having never done it before. So you need to build the environment that they can land into. And what I noticed over the last while was that expertise is something that people, it's becoming less and less something you wanna hire for. It's something you wanna buy, right? Like you're an expert with Clay, n8n, pulling data, building scrapers, building powerful data lead engines. I want a person that's an expert that's doing that, that's got Python scripts, got all these other things, does this all day long. I don't want to hire a person that's gotta look over that, look over HubSpot, look over these different things because it's hard to manage them the same way you can manage an agency. So we wanna deliver that as an outcome and then prepare them to be able to hire that person to be successful so they don't have what is one of the most expensive mistakes, which is high turnover, right? So it's really what are you indexing, what gaps do you have leading to the point that you are now, what gaps are stopping you to get to the next level, and then let us come in and fill in the gaps. So just like a consulting firm, we'll go, here are the gaps, here are the steps, here are the milestones, here's the timeline. But different than a consulting firm, we don't give that to you. We actually do the work. We resource it, we complete it, we give you the SOP, we document it, we train your team, and then we can either choose to go to the next stage or you can say, you know what, we're happy with this stage for right now. We'll come back to working with you guys in six to eight months. And then they just reduce down generally to a capacity where we're an advisory support resourcing partner that's on the bench, and then we come back in to take them down the path of growth, scale, advancement, et cetera. Ioanna Mantzouridou Onasi 31:05 Just one point here, Adil, real quick, because it's very interesting what you're saying, and I see it too. People wanna hire for expertise, but that creates a huge problem in the market, right? Because if no one gives opportunity to a younger person to learn, then what are all these people going to do? And then all these experts cannot be afforded, therefore they become fractionals. And then there's not enough market for all these fractional leaders. So how do you see that restructuring too? Like what should junior people that are starting now in sales do to develop this expertise fast enough so they do get a chance to be hired? Zac Blakely 31:42 Yeah, it's a really good question. I don't want to pretend to know the answer to what the junior people should do. I think that there's a reality that junior people have to come to, which is that I think early on in your career, you need to index higher towards exposure and experience. And you need to go to organizations that are gonna put you in the middle of that. One of the big problems that I see is junior people, they get started, they get a BDR role, and they are fully remote for a company that's somewhere else. That, to me, is pointless, almost useless because you're only gonna develop a little bit of skill in the cold calling, emailing sphere, but you're not getting exposure to the rest of the things. And early in your career, salespeople learn by osmosis. When I was doing door-to-door, my classic example was that the new person would sit aside in the car, they would sit beside my person that's been successful, that's been doing it, so they could speak back and forth. I would have a buddy system so that they would be across the streets from each other so they could watch the pace, the tonality, all these other things, the energy of the person that's been doing this for a while, and they could pick that up. Sitting at home just dialing into a wall all day, that's not gonna help you advance. So if you're making decisions early on, you have to go with organizations that are actually investing in you. They're not just paying you to do work. If you wanna become an expert, they've gotta invest in you. They've gotta put you in new scenarios, they've gotta give you a little bit of flexibility, and you've gotta learn the game a bit. So that's where, to me, I think some of these corporate roles, if you could jump into an ADP who's got a world-class training program, that'll put you through 30 days of intensive training and then put you in an environment where three days a week you're calling with other people right across from you and stuff like that, that's gonna go better than thinking that you being a BDR at a startup at the very beginning is the right play. You need to know more. You need to bring value to that scenario. Where in the corporate world, you don't need to bring a huge amount of value, we'll teach you that. And so you've just gotta be careful of where you take those first roles. But I think founders are being put, to the point that you were making, in a different scenario where they go, you know, I want to bring in a layer of expertise. I don't wanna bring in somebody that I have to coach, train, manage, do all these other things. If it's to become a salesperson and grow into being a leader, maybe I'll make that trade-off if that's the play. But if it's like build my CRM, or it's like integrate these tools, or it's run coaching and enablement for my organization, that's something that you wanna hire a professional sales trainer for or an agency for. You don't want to bring on somebody who's just a one-person show because again, even enablement has process, talent, technology, all these other things in the fold, so it becomes too big. Adil Saleh 34:37 Interesting. And you also mentioned earlier, of course there's consulting, and in this day and age it has to be technology-first. And you mentioned about laying down the foundation, and that's why you named it Foundations. I like that, by the way. So laying down the infrastructure for scale as identifying all the problems, all the gaps, whether it's technology, people, whether it's anything. So now what kind of tech stack do you think is your go-to if you were to productize? I know it's pretty hard for one segment, let's say talk about B2B companies that are mid-scale, having 15, 20 reps, post-sales, sales and post-sales altogether 50. So identifying the gaps, what kind of tech stack are you working through, and what for enablement, for the training, for the coaching, building the systems, integration, data, all of that comes into play. So yeah, would appreciate if you just, because a lot of these folks listening are slightly more interested because the tech stack, when it comes to Go-To-Market tooling, it's touching the sky. It's pretty expensive for a small-scale company. So on top of it, adding consulting costs and all this, how do you actually make it a value for money? I know that it's a long cycle, like three to four months, to build a foundation, and then whether they want to hire their VP of sales or head of sales or whatever. So could you walk us through a process, including the tech stack and everything? Zac Blakely 36:09 Sure. Yeah. So first off, from a services perspective, we bite-size it out so that organizations that are, you know, if you're looking for technology implementation as an example, we're not gonna charge exorbitant retainer fees on top of that, right? There's a lot of value we bake in because we have great relationships. Like when clients wanna move forward with Dextego, they get a great deal. We can help 'em implement it, we can do things like that. Same with a lot of other tools that we have. So we pass along that value, and we charge a nominal amount for that. So our packages are broken up into basically if you want revenue operations as a service, revenue operations and enablement as a service, or you want Go-To-Market strategy, revenue operations, and enablement as a service. They're broken into those different buckets so it can grow with you over time. So that's how we cover that from the services side. And then we have programs like our Power Up program that are designed for organizations that are much larger, with much bigger appetites and things like that, the Visas and the Shells of the world that we work with. But when we take that back down to technology, I think the first thing is you gotta figure out what does performance look like at your organization? And then you have to backtrack from there, right? So like, you gotta make sure you're getting those data points, and you've gotta make sure that you've got it from different perspectives because in the room there are different perspectives. There's the executive perspective of what they wanna see from a technology stack. Then there's the management perspective, the visibility that they need to be able to actually effectively manage, right, as well as the structure to be able to do that. And then to the sales rep, one of the things that's often forgotten about is that they can self-manage too. So you want to put them in a position where they can help self-manage themselves to an outcome as well. And then from there, once you have that sort of matrix designed of this person needs to see this, this person needs to see this, this person needs to do this, then from there we can start to piece together what that system looks like, depending also on what the client already has, what they've come with. So as an example, we worked with some clients, they invested a lot in Salesforce, they love Salesforce, they wanna stick with it. No problem. We'll work alongside Salesforce. Would I ever recommend at this point that somebody starts with Salesforce? Absolutely not, right? I would always recommend HubSpot personally. That's my, yes, I'm a HubSpot partner, but I became a HubSpot partner by implementing Zoho and Pipedrive and Salesforce and HubSpot and being like, no, no, no, HubSpot is the best. So I personally prefer HubSpot the most. It also is great because we build a lot of custom applications as well for our clients because HubSpot can't visualize everything super, super well. So we sort of create almost, imagine a cortex, a central cortex for each customer, that if HubSpot's not reporting a level of information or if you're using Lemlist for your outreach and it's not reporting a certain level of information, that it can all go into one system that can then give you the layer of information that you need. We sort of call that your sales brain, and we build that for these organizations. And going to the enablement question, for me it really starts with like, is performance there or is performance not, right? So at the beginning it's like, can we see that? Which I would say 99% of sales leaders can't effectively say at their level or at the reps' level. You have a forecast, but your forecast is kind of foo-foo. And the reality is that you don't, you're not factoring in all of the really important things. A lot of times, it's not built back from quota. A lot of the times, it doesn't take into perspective how long the average deal cycle is. A lot of times it doesn't take into projected activities or historical activities. It doesn't take into effect your actual conversion rates of each of those activities. So what we do is we make sure that you can have all the access inside of your sales brain for that information. So I can start with is performance there? Based off of the activities you've done and how many deals you're supposed to close over the course of the year, are you doing enough activities, factoring in the conversion of how often calls are answered, and then how often they go to a meeting, and then how often meetings go to a discovery, to a demo, to a scope, to a proposal, to a close? Are your 2,000 activities that you're doing actually gonna get you the 10 deals you need this month? If not, then let's start with, let's tweak what we need to do here. We need to pull the activities up, we need to blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, we need to do that. But if I have a baseline of what the other reps are doing, and say another rep, Ioanna, who's way better than me, she has 2,000 activities and she is closing her quota, okay, well where's the conversion difference? Oh, she converts way higher on cold calls. Okay, let's zoom in on your cold calls now and let's figure out how we can increase that conversion rate by 5% because I can't make you do 2,000 more activities a week at quality, but I can increase your conversion rates along the way. So now I can place training into that area, right? And then once you do that, you train that area, you document it, you show the rep the success that they have, you factor it into their new formula, and you show them how they get to their quota. So the idea is that to do management really thoughtfully, you need to have all of the information about the rep before you go into the call, and you have to make the prescriptive decisions of where you're gonna focus. You need to then tell them, using data, the story so they understand what journey they're going on so that they value it. And then after you're done, you need to ensure that you show the outcome. We did this training for the last two months. See how you used to get 6% conversion on cold calls? Now you're at 18%, which is funny, that's actually a real number from last week, one of our one-on-ones that we did. And it changed the game entirely because before it was, man, I'm gonna have to do an extra thousand activities a week for me to get to my number, and I don't even know if that's possible. Where now it's, wow, if I really focus in on bringing on these skills, I can do that same amount of work and get a better outcome. Now you have an engaged employee showing up to your training, to your enablement, to your whatever because they know what's in it for them. And we always, with our reps, tie it back down to a dollar value. Reps are always driven by money. You increase your conversion rate by 8% on cold calls, you're gonna make another $5,500 this year. How does that make you feel? All of a sudden now, that one-hour training session you have on Thursday afternoon, you're gonna care a little bit more about it and you're gonna take it a little bit more to heart. So it's about really breaking things down in a way that makes sense from the data. So that's where you need that foundation. If I don't have access to that data, how am I going to be able to zoom in? Because if I have six reps, I'm not gonna be able to tell the difference of a 6% conversion rate from one rep's cold calling to the other. So I need to have that information and then I need to know what to do with it. And from there, if the manager's looking at dashboards and they don't know how to coach, then we can coach them on how to coach and where to look. So it's start with the data, prepare the analytics, give the managers what they need so that they can show up and be prescriptive, and then remember that everybody needs different layers of visibility and everybody has different motivations. So whenever you're building a technical infrastructure, you have to make sure all of that's factored in. Just like when you're building a company, right? You've gotta build that stuff first. Failure to prepare is preparing to fail. So that's, for us, it's a long answer, but it's a long process and it's difficult to do, right? Adil Saleh 43:08 It was a long question too. Love that. So now I know the HubSpot part. A lot of these companies now, that's why Salesforce, the share has been cut down by HubSpot. They're doing some of their own AI capabilities and third-party workflow automation that a lot of these CRMs were missing, and now they're chasing each other big time. But SMB and mid-market has been tracked down by HubSpot. Now they're moving towards the early enterprise that was majorly captured by Salesforce for years. And again, to the point of user experience and automation across different data points, third-party data points that are available to the customer-facing teams is exceptional, which HubSpot is doing a lot better. So now, of course, the sales organizations, even post-sales, if you talk about account management, it's more like working hand in hand every single day with customers and across the journey for all the stages and everything. So keeping that in view, what is that number one thing that you would advise keeping in view of the change, the shift that we are seeing now? Account managers are more reliant on the data points, how they're translating into the actions and systems that are tying those data points together for them to have, for example, meaningful engagements, touchpoints, cadences, QBRs, all of that. So what is that number one thing that you would advise for account managers to be enabled with today, keeping this AI evolution and everything in place and you doing all of this, getting in the trenches with these teams? Zac Blakely 44:44 I think for us, I'll use an example of a client recently where we're developing client health scores with them, right? And it was everything for them was on the right side of the bow tie, right? So for anybody that's not familiar with the revenue bow tie, there's the beginning, which is your prospecting. And a lot of people like to think that it goes prospecting to close and then it's done. But a proper sales process starts with prospecting, it comes to the close, and then another side of this bow tie opens up, which is expansion, advocacy, referral, trust, all of these other things. To me there, everybody, I think a lot of people would have a different answer here, but to me, the leading indicator is usability, is usage, right? How often are they using the tool? Is this embedded in their day to day? That to me is the hardest thing to do, especially now when people have so many tools. We have like 20 apps on our phone. I've got 20 apps on my computer for all kinds of different crap, not just sales stuff, just all kinds of stuff. And so, how do I embed into somebody's routine, right? How do I get to the point where they're using me on a consistent basis? As that starts to drop, that's where I think a lot of the opportunity for account managers and things like that to intervene, get in there, provide information, et cetera, becomes really important. Usability to me is that sort of number one. As soon as that starts to drop off, you need to get in there. And to do that, I think you need to set up systems. And this is where I think sales has now started to expand because to your point, sales before I feel like was like engineering and product is over here, customer success and marketing is over here, sales sits in the middle, you're a blunt instrument, like, you know, smack stuff with a hammer and close deals, that's your thing. Where now, because of the way that sales is so integrated with technology, there's so much more that sales can do to inform product and customer success can do to inform product and sales, customer success to marketing. So technology is creating this glue that's connecting everybody in the business. And when I think about customer success, one of the big things is they've gotta work very closely with product. And in one example that we have recently with an EdTech company, it was able to help product understand how to develop the product. Because before, if they didn't have this clear feedback cycle with the customer success team and why they weren't using it, what their experiences were, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, it was very hard for them to understand what to push on the roadmap, what was the distraction, what was along the line. So if you are a customer success team, you need that same level of data that a sales team is using to decide who they go after and who they hunt. You need that same level of information so that you can go back to your team and you can explain to them, this is what we're seeing, this is what we're hearing. You go back to sales and go, well, maybe you're hard-selling this feature that isn't our best feature, and that's resulting in people not using it as often. Maybe there was a small shift in messaging or something. So customer success, to me, it's one of the most important components. And it's gotta be very integrated to sales, integrated to marketing, and then now more than ever integrated to product. Adil Saleh 47:53 Absolutely, because customer centricity is gonna be the next big thing. And all teams across functions need to work and have the customer as a center of everything. And of course every team has different KPIs, but when looking at the customer, let's say for the product team, the KPI is to build the right features, for product to make good decisions on the right features, even for that they need a feedback loop, as you mentioned. So it was, yeah, it was really nice having you, Zac, today. It was such an inspirational journey that we got to hear, from door-to-door. I know it could be really hard. I just started my journey cold calling 300 people a day. But even knocking on the door is the hardest, I would say, shape and form you can say, of doing sales or negotiation or engagement. So on that note, I would just recommend one book. I'm sure you already have heard of it. Never Split the Difference by Chris Voss, one of the FBI investigators you might know. So Ioanna Mantzouridou Onasi 48:52 Oh, He has it. Adil Saleh 48:53 You got it. Love it. So, you know, I tend to get back to this book every quarter to six months, and I get to learn a lot of things, so I always have it on my shelf. Love it. Yeah. So great talking to you. Great knowing you. Zac Blakely 49:07 Yeah, it was a pleasure. Thank you so much. That's a book you could read multiple times, for sure. There's always something new that you pick up. I'm working a lot on the labeling component. Adil Saleh 49:16 Mm-hmm. Ioanna Mantzouridou Onasi 49:17 Mirroring, labeling. And you know what's hilarious? Yesterday I was saying this to a friend of mine for something totally not related to sales, but this is the beauty of these skills. They're so transferable. Like, I'll give you an example. Think of a friend that tells you, yeah, I went to a weekend trip, and you say, weekend trip? And you play back the last parts. And then they say, yeah, oh, I went to this mountain and did this and this. So you do this anyway in day-to-day. So you might as well do it for sales as well and get to increased revenue, but this Adil Saleh 49:51 Yeah. That is everyday life. Ioanna Mantzouridou Onasi 49:52 This psychology, back to what we were saying, it's all connected. And showing up as a good human makes you show up as a good seller and vice versa. So yeah, thanks so much for sharing all your wisdom with us. That's how we all learn and become better at our crafts. And we hope to see you again in the future episodes, Zac. Zac Blakely 50:10 Absolutely. Absolutely. It was a pleasure. Thank you very much. And yeah, also congratulations on Dextego. It's such an awesome tool. I'm excited to continue using it and excited to be a great partner. And yeah, it's nice to be on a podcast where you can share thoughts back and forth. Sometimes it just feels like an interrogation. And I think today, you guys, today we got to share some ideas. But I do feel we could go for an extra hour, but I think we'll save the audience. Adil Saleh 50:39 Why not some other day? Zac Blakely 50:40 Yeah, exactly. Intro 50:41 Thank you very much for listening to Across the Funnel. If you got one useful GTM idea out of this show today, please share this with a teammate and hit follow. Explore Hyperengage at hyperengage.io and Dextego at dextego.com.