Welcome back to NetAppos. Stacking grooves. I'm here with Carl. It's Friday afternoon.
We're sitting around reminiscing about our week. And we got into a conversation around all the bad messaging and content that we're seeing in the market. I posted about this recently. Carl sees it every day with folks reaching out to him.
And so what we thought we'd do is have a conversation about this. And one where I wanted to start with asking Carl, what's going on here? Am I just getting grumpy as I get older? Has it always been this bad?
Or are we at a new heightened state of just poor communication, poor messaging within me to be marketing and sales? Can you help me out, Carl? What's happening? Yeah, I think a few things are happening.
And I think you're a little grumpy sometimes. Yeah, I'm grumpy too. I'm a little salty. And I think there has been an uptick, a spike in some of this poor messaging.
And I think this happens when the economy is potentially experiencing a downturn. I don't know whatever you want to call what we're experiencing right now. Like there's some friction. There's some slowing down.
There's some fear. There's some uncertainty. I think that creates space for desperation and whatnot. And I think again, you get the worst in marketing in sellers.
You get a worse messaging where people are just kind of begging for things. And just so it's going to get you at the wall. Maybe an example. I got a cold email.
It's like a maybe like 100th email nurture that I've gotten from a sales rep at a really cool popular SaaS company. And the email just said something to the effect of crazy. It was always at the end of May. So it's like end of the month push for some last minute bottom of the barrel deals, right?
And so the subject line of the email was like crazy made deal or something like that, right? Like you would see that like somebody selling me like barbecue or something. I don't know. Like it's something very commoditized.
And so or like a t-shirt or something. So anyways, and in the body of the email was essentially that like, hey, Carl, crazy discounts available now call me or text me. You know, and I just like, I was annoyed, you know, because I was like, guys rep can do better. Like what?
Like tell me something, communicate something to me, a value and I might be more interested. I don't want to discount. I want my problem solved, you know, like I just said what I want. I felt bad for them because it's like, what position do you have to be in as a seller or a marketer to be like resorting to these kinds of tactics?
You see the same thing in LinkedIn, right? You talked about this today. You talk about all the time on LinkedIn where you scroll through these ads and they're just like, so boring. They don't tell you anything.
They communicate no value. They just want you to click and hopefully you read the keyword stuff to blog and maybe you click through and give your email and then an SDR, you know, follows up with you until you unsubscribe. It's just, can we not do better, you know? What goes through your mind when you see this example, this outreach to you?
Like you said, this is a market leading company. And you know, the rep is basically dropping their shorts or whatever the analogy. Like as a sales leader, like when you see that man, you just have to be like, what are you thinking like in terms of the sales culture, the training, the lack of it? Like you have to just be disgusted or like what goes through your mind?
I know you have some empathy, but. Yeah, I mean, I do have empathy, right? Cause I don't know where that that rep is happening. But I do know that reps that are at or above quota and that have any measure of self respect don't typically send emails like that, right?
So it tells me like the rep is super behind. Now, is it because maybe they're struggling? Maybe. Is that their fault or their leadership's fault?
Could be a mixed bag, you know? Or is it that quotas are just way too high, right? Or is it that they just have nothing else to say? They just don't know what to say and they have to send emails and close deals and pay their mortgage.
And so, and that made me think kind of this week as I was getting, you know, kind of my daily barrage of like cold emails that come to me and the ads advertising that we see on LinkedIn and other places and specifically in B2B, you know, really makes you think like, does anybody really know what to say? Does anybody really know what they're talking about? And maybe that's that's the issue. Like nobody really knows how to talk to me like a sales leader to you, you know, a chief growth officer, right?
An executive, maybe like we just don't know what to say. So we just throw messaging out there and maybe that's what we see on websites too, right? Where product marketers, highly paid product marketers, set up these websites, build messaging. And the messaging is like platitudes, huge buzzwords.
It's like, I can only come to the conclusion that this product marketer is doing their best and they just don't know what to say. They don't know how to talk to their audience. They don't really understand their industry that well. And so what you get is buzzword suit.
I don't have another explanation for it. You know, what do you think? Yeah, well, I've seen this. I feel like I've looked at 10 different companies recently, kind of their messaging positioning kind of ad strategy.
And they all do the same thing. They all create some kind of download or ebook. We talked about this quite a bit where they can collect, even give it the sales. But when you really look at like what is underneath the hood, it's crazy.
It's like, there's this massive assumption that I create an ebook with a title that's like the top 10 things that marketers like to do on Tuesday. And then somehow when I fill that means that they can get the marketer can get this lead to Carl and they think I want to buy their product because I read something that has nothing to do with this company and what they do and the problems they solve and the products they sell. And I feel like it's using a poorly chosen word, a pandemic around like not being able to want to communicate the problem you solve in the value that you bring in your solutions. I'm not a loss of why marketers and salespeople don't just stick to the unique thing that their company is doing and the value of that and how it can change your life or your work habits.
I don't know where I'm trying to figure out where that started. Yeah, Cassie, I think like you've nailed it. And I think that my theory is the problem is they don't actually know what they're talking about. They don't understand their industry.
They don't understand what their buyers are really dealing with day to day. So I harp on this a lot on LinkedIn when it comes to business acumen for sellers, right? Like if I'm going to take a call with you, I'm only going to take a call. Like somebody reaches out to me cold, which I'm totally fine with it.
Call myself anytime. It's on rocket reach. It's on lose shots on communism. It's updated or I call me on zoom info.
What I find is that they don't know they don't know something that I don't know. So there's no reason for me to take a call. So again, so to go back to my point, there's only two reasons for me to take a meeting. I am buying that thing.
Like I'm in the sales cycle. So yeah, I'll meet with you and you just got super lucky because I'm either going to go inbound to the three people I want to evaluate. If you happen to call me in that time and say, Hey, we're doing this, your message could be pretty low value and I might just take the meeting, you know, you could call me and be like, Hey, Carl, you're looking for XYZ thing right now. You want to meet like that's a crappiest, most low value message ever.
But if I happen to be in an evaluation, then I probably take the meeting, right? The second reason I would meet with you is if you know something that I don't, you know, that's a big challenge, Cassidy, because like I'm not done, like I've been in sales in the marketing space for, you know, six, seven years, you even longer. So to teach me something new, you would have to really have an insight, like have an interesting perspective on something. I just don't think many sellers or marketers actually have that.
I have this, this theory that everyone in an organization should have enough business acumen, like their own space to be paid for their time, like consulting time. It doesn't matter if you're an entry level SDR or maybe like an onboarding specialist or your Cassidy, you know, the chief growth officer or your director of sales or your the CEO, you should have enough acumen in that space where somebody would pay you for your time. Now, maybe if like you're an SDR or like some other entry level role, maybe your time is only worth like 50 bucks an hour, right? Okay.
So that's okay. You're a junior consultant. And as you move up the chain in that company, like if you want to spend an hour with Carl or Cassidy or an executive or a director of VP, like their level of business acumen and consultative acumen is worth 250 an hour, $300, $400, $500 an hour or more, right? And I think organizations don't think like this.
They don't have enablement in place to really make their people like experts in the space. And then you know, you get some job, a lot of job movement. So you might move from a selling marketing software or martech to, you know, selling logistics. So that makes it challenging as well.
We have to continue to learn new industries. But that's again, my first kind of, you know, encouragement to organizations is do your people know what they're talking about? Would anybody pay them for their time to hear what they have to say? Do as anybody knows something that your customers don't?
I just think in most cases, the answer is no, the customer still knows way more than vendors do. And so vendors are always going to be in a, you know, in a position of lower status or just begging for, you know, meetings, et cetera. I love frameworks and you just gave a very, very simple one. In fact, you gave two really simple frameworks for us to think about.
On one hand, there's only two reasons Carl would buy anything for any of us to buy anything. One is what has happened to need it. And as you pointed out, yeah, lucky. And that doesn't happen very often.
Carl, you probably buy new technology. What one piece a year, one thing a year, maybe I try to convince you, let me buy a few more things a year, but yeah, I would say like one to three things a year is maybe a little bit more fair. Yeah. So that's where like high volume tactics, it's like, OK, well, if you send a crappy email to 10,000 people, there may be 50 of them, but can we do better?
So I don't know. Anyways, keep going frameworks setting aside the point that you love any piece of crappy technology, you can get your hands on setting that aside and the fact that you gave your number away and told everybody where they can find you, setting that aside. There's one part of the framework where once in a while, Carl might need to buy something. And there's another part of the framework, which is I would argue way more important, which is you have an opportunity to teach you something new, but the bar there is a lot higher.
And as a marketer, you're doing one of these two things. You're either getting lucky and you're capturing capturing the demand where Carl once a while wants to buy something, maybe once one to three times a year, or you're what we call trading the demand. You've taught Carl something new, which is a lot harder to do. There's a lot of things you don't know, Carl, but there's a lot of things you do know.
Yeah, and you have to make some educated guesses, right? Because there's a lot of things that I don't know, but I don't know that I don't know them. And even if I did know them, they're stack ranked in a priority. So yeah, you're right.
Like it is very difficult. But man, the opportunity there, if you can figure out how to train your sales org or your marketing team has that culture of what can we teach these people? That's new. What can we surface to them?
That's exciting. The fresh insight that again, you're going to dominate your market very quickly. People flop to those kinds of every time I open a cold email, I'm like begging for it. I'm like, God, maybe today somebody will change my perspective on something or like make me Google something because I want to learn more.
You know what I'm saying? Like something, and it just hasn't happened yet, but I'm still holding out. I mean, I love the fact that you're optimistic about the cold emails you get. I've given up.
Like I don't even look at them anymore. They're all horrible. I look at them. I give such a hard time to sellers that call me to in a good way when they call me and they're like, Hey, you know, like you're a new sales leader.
You want to, you know, you're probably trying to grow your team and this is that when they say like very generic things and they're like, would you like to take a look at, you know, I can schedule some time, take a look at it. They're just asking me for a demo. And I'm just like, I told the seller like three weeks ago, I was like, no, dude, I don't want to see that. Why should I see like, tell me why I should take this meeting and I'll take it.
I gave you such a hard time. He was a really good sport about it, but he didn't have a reason at the end of the day. The reason was just to show me his tool, right? And I was like, bro, I'm sorry.
Like I just I don't have 30 minutes just to see a demo. Like call me when you have something exciting that you want to show me or teach me, you know, so that's his challenge was he called me back in that case. Is this guy is the win for him? Just the fact that he would be able to show you the product.
I mean, in reality, is this guy, is he really want to close deals or is he really just trying to hit a collodaford demo? It's like, what's the story behind the scenes there? Yeah, I mean, the story could be, you know, different everywhere, but this was an SDR. So he was obviously even going to meet with him, right?
So I would have met with his AE. And yeah, I think for him, it's a book, the meeting first, he hit his first metric with me. So at least he got that done, right? So he got one call.
He was able to walk through the day or one connect. Maybe it's like the number of connections. You make a genetic connection with the director of sales. So like, okay, it's with the right person.
And so yeah, I mean, that's a part of it, right? It's just kind of that measurement piece that also gets in the way and chokes creativity insights, because insights take time. You can't make a hundred cold calls a day and also be researching and be a student of your industry, right? Like those two things, they fight against each other.
And so you have to choose which one it is. And yeah, I think companies just make the wrong choice there. So I'm gonna get back to this second framework, speaking of like non-obvious insights, which I love and it's this idea that when people pay for your team's time, if they're a consultant, I think it's a great way to think about whether your team has the expertise or not, to be able to communicate to the market. And that's really just simply asking the question, would somebody pay for your marketing team's time or your salesperson's time on the given topic that your company's trying to sell and talk about in the market?
What I like about this, and I want to kind of tie back to something that I've seen you do really well, and that is anytime I ask you about prospect, you know, a lot about that prospect very quickly. And so when it comes to like building your expertise and kind of what I would pay for from Carl, you have this innate ability to just really understand anybody coming in bound to us, what they do, why they're calling us, and you kind of have this ability to research this fast, even before you get on the phone with them. And you obviously the expertise when you come to like what we do in our selling to be able to have these conversations. Like, so how do you go about doing that?
How do you then learn not only what the problem is that your company solves in the product that you're selling, but also your ability to connect that not to whomever you're talking with quickly? Yeah, I think the first thing is maybe a negative thing. Actually, it's just kind of my pride. Like I just have an issue, not, I feel self-conscious, first of all, about not knowing a lot or enough.
I want to be an expert in the room, no matter what it is I'm talking about. So like there's this weird thing inside of me first that drives me to want to be an expert and a student of whatever fields that I'm in. So, you know, I just love business. I want to understand how businesses run, how they make money, they go to market motion, et cetera.
And so I think over time, because I've been in this kind of similar space, my whole sales career, I've talked to marketers and sellers and whatnot. So I've got a lot of time in the water when it comes to kind of the space. But I think I just love business and want to make sure that I am valuable on a call, right? And I hold myself to that standard, like, would you pay me for your time?
You always can tell when you're on a discovery call or some call and like, you're not bringing any value. You know, your questions suck like you, they're very, you know, hey, like, where are you from? Or like, what are you guys doing today for marketing? You know, it's like, I can see all those things already if in my pre-call research or I can look at your website, right?
One thing that we learned at HubSpot, which I thought was really good, really simple. One of the first things a sales manager will ask you when you're talking about a deal or a company that you're working or pursuing is the question super simple. It's how do you make, how do they make money, right? That's like as simple as that, right?
And I think we overcomplicate it. We're like, what is Carl doing? It's fair time. Let me creep on his Instagram and we find all these like little word Cassidy go to college and do I know somebody at his alma mater and like we try to find all these like fancy things that are gimmicky instead of just being like, how does refinance make money?
Okay. Services business looks like it costs us much. I know from my experience, I mean, it costs three to 500 grand a year. Probably takes this long to close, right?
Probably is a little bit more involved in a transactional SMB thing. So you can like reverse engineer into really imagining what it's really like day to day for that company to do business with other companies. And you like once you grease the tracks on going through that thought process and looking through a website, maybe converting on their form, seeing what kind of ads they're running on LinkedIn, you get a lot faster, right? You can process these data points in your own algorithm.
Like, you know, I like to talk about much more quickly and you come to conclusions that are actually super accurate. I always like impressed prospects when they don't tell me like what, because we're not under NDA or something and they won't tell me where they are at, like ARYs or something like that. And I'm like, well, I mean, with this many employees of this motion, this ACV and I guess at their ACV or something, I'm like, yeah, you guys are probably what, like 15, 18 million AR like, oh, yeah, yeah, actually we, we are good guests. You know, it's just like that gives me status in that call where it's like, I want to listen to Carl, like he knows what he's talking about.
I would probably spend time with him outside of the context of this sales call, just to kind of hear what he has to say and see what he thinks. That's where I'm trying to get. And that's where I think marketers and sellers need to get. And then he needs to start at the culture of the company instead.
Like everybody should be a junior marketer or a junior consultant all the way up to the industry leading consultants and thinkers on the space, right? So that's how I think. And that's what I encourage all sales teams to get to less enablement around the product and demos and all these things, more enablement around the industry. Like, because at the end of the day, you can close deals if you know what you're talking about and you don't know that much about your product or exactly what you do, like you can make up ground there and figure it out much more easily than you can make up ground when it comes to serious business acumen.
People just want to buy from people that know what they're doing and know what they're saying and know what they're talking about. So let's focus there. That's really interesting. I like this idea of starting kind of with the business driver first, because I do feel like most people try to start at the bottom, like I got to understand everything about my product.
And then I really don't understand and I miss the boat of like how to connect that to the value I'm driving for the business or the problem I'm trying to solve for a given prospect or client. I see this issue in the marketing team, but I see the other issue as well. And that is I find too many marketers who both don't understand the industry and kind of the target audience and they really understand what the company does in any great detail as well. In fact, I have one of my first marketing jobs, I was running product marketing for a division in a big company and the corporate marketing team would take pride in not understanding the products that the company was building and shipping.
Like it was almost like it was beneath them. Oh, you're running software for a division and you want to talk about the importance of your product and the problems that you solve. No, we got bigger things to do as a marketing organization. I was like, you know, back then I'm like, what the hell's going on?
I didn't know anything. Now, you know, X number of years later, I look back on that. I'm like, bunch of idiots, like no wonder we didn't do Wells company. Don't wonder our marketing was ineffective.
You know what the hell we did and what problems we solved. Why would anybody give you their money or time if you don't know what you're talking about? I mean, it's so basic that it makes me feel like I'm taking crazy pills when I'm on LinkedIn and seeing the advertising and seeing the sales outreach, right? And we talk to marketers all the time.
I love every single market who comes inbound to refine lives. I got nothing but love for them. I scratch my head a little bit when I ask very simple questions, like, what's your ACV and which verticals and I get puzzled looks where it's like, I don't know, you know, not sure. I'll get back to you.
That totally makes sense. If like it's a brand new marketer or something in their onboarding, et cetera. But like if you've been at your company for any amount of time, for the most part, do you understand what your business does? And I think that just carries so much.
You can see when people don't understand, it's so obvious to us, right? When we see a cold email or we talk to somebody or we see an ad, like your brain, it's like an instinct. You can tell immediately that they don't know what you're talking about. This doesn't sound like me.
This isn't me. This isn't, it doesn't feel. It's just, it's not, you know why? Because you and I cast you talk to each other all day.
So it's like the bar is really high. So if like you don't, if like, because I can compare my interaction with sellers or with marketers with advertising to the very intellectual and strategic conversations that I have with really smart people all day long. So if like you don't meet that bar, my brain is sending alarms. Like you don't know what you're talking about.
I can just go get better information from my peer group or my boss or my, the Slack group in pavilion or something like that, you know? That's a really bad place to start a relationship. If you're a vendor and you want to earn my dollars or in my time, you want to make a case for your software to my chief growth officer. And I don't feel like I'm confident that you know what you're talking about.
You're going to lose more deals than you win. You know, so yeah, that's, I think the biggest, to kind of circle back and summarize. That's the biggest issue, I think, with all of the surface level messaging issues that we see in the e-book downloads and the crappy ads that are just like, we're the best in the, in the category. Click here to learn more.
I think at the end of the day, it's rooted in these people don't actually know what to talk about. The good news is you can fix that pretty easily by just becoming a student of your industry. And there's no shortage of people that are out there or resources to be able to become an expert in your space very quickly. Train your team on the industry, train your team on how your industry makes money, figure out yourself, how your company makes money, understand what you do as a company and the value you provide in that industry.
This is a heart and soul of good marketing and selling. That's where you should be focusing most of your time, not on all the other things that we focus our time on. Well, say Carl, last piece of the other framework I love. Again, for marketers, remember this when Carl's going to, when you want to sell to Carl, he's either get lucky and he's in the market for it.
Most of the time he's not, at which case, and you got to tell Carl something he doesn't know and the bar to do that is high. And again, it goes back to business acumen and ability to do that. I love it. Well, say Carl, anything else?
You got to teach me to reach me Cassidy. That's it. I did learn one thing though, if you're an SDR, you're measured on calls connected. Carl will always pick up a phone so you could just like pick a rubber.
Unless it's like spam or something, if it's like a phone number from, you know, I don't pick up the local ones because I know that those are usually sales. But if you call me from like a random phone number in like Kansas or something, I'm going to be like, this is interesting. I better pick up. And then you have two minutes to tell me and give me a really good reason for why I should take a meeting and I will take the meeting.
That's what Carl doesn't spare time. He trains SDRs one call at a time. I love it. Thanks for hanging out Friday.
It was a good chat. We'll have to do it again. And that's a wrap for second growth. Like everyone later.