Transcription

• Speaker #0

  You've seen it all over LinkedIn. Use this silver bullet cadence to help your B2B business grow. It worked for us at, insert software as a service company here, because you know what? We sell it and it's great. But what if that thing that they're selling didn't work for your B2B business? What if the tech bros broke sales? We'll find out how right here on B2B Business Class. Welcome to B2B Business Class, your ticket to the conversations everyone's wanting to hear in B2B. I'm your host, Rob Gondlin, and we'll be taking you on one hell of a trip to new horizons in the B2B space. Whether you're just earning your wings or you're a frequent flyer, there's a seat for you here in B2B Business Class. We're cleared for takeoff, so let's get into the show. Welcome to B2B Business Class. I'm Rob Conlon. Our episode today takes us to Fort Collins, Colorado for a bit of sales training. I love sales. In fact, I often tell folks that I'm not a founder of a business, but rather just a sales guy who found himself in an opportunity to run an organization the way he wanted to. And my personal journey of sales has a lot of pieces, but one of the biggest ones was working for a B2C tech company. And since I've pivoted to B2B, I've seen a lot of talking heads who spout about process and funnels and you gotta do it this way. My guest today has one of the hottest takes I've ever heard in the B2B space about how the sass bros broke sales. She's Candice Edelin and she joins us today to unpack this take. Candice, thanks so much for being here. Welcome to the show.

• Speaker #1

  Thanks for having me. It's been fun. I'm looking forward to our conversation.

• Speaker #0

  Candice, when we first talked about having you on the show, I asked you what you wanted to talk about. And there were two wonderful first topics you gave us, but the third one. This third topic was an absolute banger, and that is that the SaaS pros have broken sales. It's a huge indictment of the industry. How did you arrive at this? What is maybe a highly unpopular opinion?

• Speaker #1

  Yeah, I think pretty controversial. So I think where I arrived at it is two areas. One is in working with a lot of small companies, mostly tech, a lot of companies that are like ERP resellers, Microsoft partners, who want to follow the model that the SaaS bros are talking about, which is hiring a junior BDR. who's, you know, fresh out of college, I always get a kick out of the entry level wanted with five years of experience kind of ads. They're looking for that cheap resource to just smile and dial. And then they do it and it doesn't work. And they can't figure out why. And I think that you've got all of these and it's not just that like I see it are you and I are getting pummeled in our inboxes as business owners. Like I did a screenshot one day of my spam box and there were three pages of spam with the subject line quick question.

• Speaker #0

  No. Yeah. Three pages of spam all with the same email heading.

• Speaker #1

  25 messages per page all with quick question in the subject line. Gross. And that's because SaaS bros have published these cadences. that are brilliant cadences for companies that are selling in a specific space. And I'll come back to that because I have huge respect for the companies that built these cadences. People just think that they can just apply these tactics to whatever business they're doing and they're just copying and pasting a cadence. And so I wind up in these cadences because somebody's purchased a list and my email, I've had this email for, you know, like... 17 years and it's out there. And so I get like a ton of, of spammy sales cadences and all the cadences tend to look the same. Like everybody's following the lavender tweaks now of what works in a sales email. And when everybody piles onto it, it all, it stops working because they're not doing it well. And so I, I think that that's what I mean by it. They broke sales as everybody's copying things that are. much more strategic than people understand when they copy those cadences. And I'm just getting deeply tired of seeing those cadences in my inbox, in my LinkedIn inbox, on the spammy phone calls that I'm getting. And I know that everybody else in my role is getting the same kind of crap all the time. And so it's just, it's disheartening to see it and it's frustrating, but I know it's not working for the sellers also.

• Speaker #0

  Right. Now, you mentioned a couple of names in there, Lavender and Gong and all these. And there's other companies out there that are very similar. Outreach is another one. Yep, I actually used to work with them at my old agency, which is kind of cool. Great people. Love them.

• Speaker #1

  We love their content. It's great.

• Speaker #0

  And I know both you and I tremendously respect those organizations. We know they're good people and things like that. In publishing their... secrets, if you will, is that the thing that you kind of think breaks it in this case? Or is it, is it something else? The, the, Hey, we've got this plan, but do, do people find that in and be like, Oh, this is my silver bullet.

• Speaker #1

  So that's what I think people do think is that it's the silver bullet. So, okay, let's look at Gong, for example. I mean, Gong has published amazing content on what works in a sales call, on what works in outreach and what doesn't work. They have so much detailed research and it's brilliant. They also came early to market to solve a problem that other companies had been trying to solve, but no one had solved well. And Gong brought a great solution to market to solve a very... existential pain point that we all feel. And it was an adoption process that didn't require ripping out a whole bunch of infrastructure. You could add it. It was additive rather than, so you didn't need massive adoption in the organization to try out Gong. A sales manager could put his or her sales team of three people on it and try it out before they did this big adoption. But Gong also did just an amazing job of branding. getting their message out there. They have a phenomenal marketing team. They have phenomenal product market fit. They are serving a very felt need and it's a bit, or at least it started as a PLG product led growth strategy. and so all of these things come together. Now, when they want to hire BDRs, they can go to a BDR and put the BDR on the Gong platform. So the BDR is experiencing the value of the platform, and they can have a conversation with you or me as a sales manager or a salesperson and really understand the pain points that we're experiencing and talk about the values of Gong without too much of a stretch.

• Speaker #0

  Got it. Now I'm detecting something there of, yes, when you work for Gong and you sell Gong, there's a match. But if you don't work for Gong and use Gong, what happens there, I guess, is the question. And is that perhaps why part of the process is broken, Candice?

• Speaker #1

  Okay, I'm going to switch the product now to Outreach because I actually have a specific example. Oh,

• Speaker #0

  perfect. Please do.

• Speaker #1

  So outreach did the same thing. Brilliant product market fit. They were meeting a very distinct need. Again, it's a product-led growth strategy. You can adopt outreach for free to try it out. Any salesperson can grab it. You don't have to rip out the CRM to put in outreach. So it's easy for people to adopt. I was actually on a Zoom call with someone who's a user of Outreach selling ERP technology. Outreach's market is salespeople and... it's salespeople selling to salespeople, which is a pretty solid value proposition. I mean, we're a lot easier to sell to than some people are. Now you take it to an ERP salesperson and they're going to try to sell ERP to CFOs. So what this person did is he goes into outreach. he does a list of manufacturing companies in a specific region of the country and was going after CFOs. And he says, I know who these CFOs are. I totally understand them. So I'm going to send, I put, he puts a thousand of them in a list and he runs a pre-programmed sequence against them. He doesn't do any research into the individuals. He's treating all thousand of these prospects exactly the same. And he doesn't even like page through three layers of those prospects to understand that some of them are consumer packaged goods and others are manufacturing bolts for steamships. You know, he doesn't know any of that. So he's going to send the same message to all of these CFOs. The other problem is if he does and he's going to cold call them too. Right. So now he's right out of college. smart, smart guy. But this guy has not worked at a bolt manufacturer selling to Navy yards on, you know, building steamships or whatever. I'm totally making this up. So now he's got to try to on his cold call or in his email, articulate a value proposition for much more sophisticated technology than outreach is because now he's selling ERP or supply chain management or something like that to. this company that's selling to naval shipyards. And how does he have that conversation? If he's never even visited a shipyard, he doesn't understand the technology that he's selling. And yet he's going to try to get a CFO of a bolt manufacturer to buy into his story. I've actually talked to BDRs that don't know what the word or the acronym AP means. accounts payable. Well, and if you think about it, they're not living in the world of accounts payable. So they don't even know what accounts payable really is or means or the challenges that can go into accounts payable. They don't have the stories behind that. They don't have the experience. It's unreasonable for us to expect somebody who's just gotten out of college to be able to talk to a CFO of a manufacturing company. about accounts payable.

• Speaker #0

  Right, because they haven't lived it. And to your point there, ERP, enterprise resource planning, even the software and stuff like that is mind-boggling big. It's not anything that you learn about necessarily in college, if I recall correctly. I don't. B2B Business Class is sponsored by Westport Studios, your beacon for B2B podcasting. At Westport Studios, we've helped companies just like yours build podcasts that unlock relationships that run deep. We're talking about the kind of... deep relationships that build lasting business partnerships and drive six-figure annual deals. We're talking about the kind of deep that turns your guests into friends and opens your network to a completely new world. We're talking the kind of deep where you want to introduce your podcast agency to your mom because she knows they've been such a big help to your career. Yeah, we're talking that deep. So whether you have an existing show or are looking to start from scratch, we'll help you create a B2B podcast you love that builds both deep relationships and impacts your bottom line. Sound like the kind of deep you're interested in? Visit us at westportstudiosllc.com. Now, back to the show. it's funny that you mentioned kind of how this fictitious sales dev that we're talking about takes this outreach or gong cadence or methodology and then literally like a meat grinder almost just starts feeding things into it. And, you know, you mentioned to me the other day when we were, you know, planning this, uh, this interview and things like that, that we both know as salespeople that roughly 3% of the market is in a buying stay, uh, state at any given time. But if this guy loads up his email list with a thousand prospects, other things aside from like, hey, you've got, again, your bolt manufacturers and your consumer goods manufacturers, which are completely different markets. He's just going to beat that list of a thousand people to death with. rather generic outreach, that's kind of awful. I guess the, how does that contribute in your mind to destroying sales and wrecking, you know, this whole thing?

• Speaker #1

  Well, I think it destroys it from the perspective of response rates. For example, when I, I don't cold call, but when I do LinkedIn outreach, I book meetings with 71% of the people that I can start a conversation with. And I get dialogues started with 65% of the people that I reach out to. In contrast, I've been researching this because I was really curious about some of these people that claim to get really phenomenal email success. So the way that they're doing this is they're plugging those thousand emails or those thousand people into outreach. They're actually on the other side, they're creating 5, 10, 15 different email addresses that they're going to be sending from. They have this whole process to warm up those email addresses because they know they're going to get stuck in spam. So they're trying to land in the inbox by warming up email addresses and just burning one email address after another. Because every time you and I market for spam, it starts to burn that email address. And the more people they get marked for spam, the more it burns out that email address. So outreach teaches this, Rob. They teach it. Like go get all these email addresses layered up. And the reason for that is because they expect to get, these are what people are bragging about on LinkedIn, a 5% response rate and a 20% positive response rate is what they claim. Now you have to break down those numbers to understand what they mean by 20%. What they're saying is 5% of the people will respond. 1% says, I'm interested. That means that 4% are saying, get me off your freaking list. Stop spamming me. now so if we take that that's that's one out of a hundred though that's one out of a hundred right so out of that thousand that he put into his thing he's going to get 10 people not 10 meetings but 10 people that will say something not mean to him

• Speaker #0

  right right maybe they're that might sound yeah let's let's talk further about that you know things like that not anything that's you know get me out of here oh that's okay thousand for one one potential because one person so you've alienated 999 people

• Speaker #1

  to get that one prospect. Now, go back to the outreach metaphor. All right. So for outreach, they have an almost limitless target audience. But this guy who's selling ERP to manufacturers, And maybe he's even like, I have a client who sells ERP technology to commercial equipment rentals, many commercial equipment. And then if they want to further narrow it and sell to medical equipment rentals, then that's a more narrow market. Most companies really need to target a narrow market because their solution will work best as a point solution that they can. rinse and repeat and sell it to the same type of company over and over again. They get better and better and better at solving specific problems that similar companies have. you can't burn your list because you'll be out of target market very quickly. Let's say there's, you know, 5,000 companies that meet your target audience criteria is plenty big enough if you take my approach. But if you burn one, you know, if you get one lead for a thousand burned, you're out of business in five days or whatever, you know?

• Speaker #0

  Right. That's a perfect example. There's a wonderful industry that I happen to be adjacent to because I have a number of podcasts in it. higher education marketing. There are 4,500 institutions across America. That number is unfortunately dropping because of some financial hardships and a whole bunch of other factors. But man, if we use that process against, you know, if we got everybody in the industry's list there, that's 4,500. Say we get 10,000 emails because everybody, you know, a director and a manager at each institution, we'd burn through that in less than 10 months if we were doing 1,000 a month. Yeah. And then we'd never be able to talk to anybody else in the industry again because it'd be like, this guy beat me to death with emails.

• Speaker #1

  Yeah. Yeah. You've alienated. Yeah. And their idea is, well, I can just recycle those leads and keep sending them. But you're going to be declining in reach every time. And I just don't think that it's good for your brand to alienate 97% of your market.

• Speaker #0

  Completely agree with you. Yeah. So follow up on that. If the belt fed version of that doesn't work quite as well. Is there a silver bullet sequence outside of SaaS for, say, maybe a niche industry like higher education marketing that is very small that would allow you to have a sustainable pattern in there from an email perspective?

• Speaker #1

  I don't think there is a silver bullet. I think that that's a myth. I love to mix my metaphors. There's no magic wand. There's no silver bullet and there's no easy button in sales. Because if there was, first of all, I would be so rich.

• Speaker #0

  You'd be both.

• Speaker #1

  I think that people want to believe that there is a silver bullet, that there's some answer out there. I want to believe that there's an answer. I just haven't landed on it. everybody's going to respond to me if I just have this one answer. But I just think that that's a fiction that we have been trained to believe. And I mean, if you look at, so I'm, I hate the LinkedIn bots, the automation companies that automate messaging on LinkedIn. and many of them now they've extended it to email too. So it's like pitch slaps galore. You know, if you look at their sales pages, their homepages, they all say, you know, in 15 minutes, you can get this set up and then just sit back and watch the leads come in. and just, you know, it's like this promise that I'm going to just get an automatic pipeline of new sales just rolling in and I don't have to do anything to get there. Who doesn't want that?

• Speaker #0

  Well, yeah. I just, I have this horrible mental image though of taking your email list and like feeding it into a wood chipper. And like the one thing that survives the grinders of the wood chipper is your one lead. And But you've destroyed the other thousands.

• Speaker #1

  You've destroyed a tree.

• Speaker #0

  Yeah, you've wiped out a tree and you've got this toothpick or whatever that you want. That's just wild. And again, the, oh, sit back, it'll all be there. But the hidden cost perhaps is that maybe how the SaaS pro mentality has impacted sales.

• Speaker #1

  I really think it has because people don't understand how much is behind what the SaaS pros are doing. to make it work on their side. And they, most companies don't have that kind of budget. Most of these SaaS bros have raised a ton of venture capital. They have stellar marketing teams and stellar sales enablement and training and all of that, that goes behind everything. So they've built this astounding foundation. They're very good at this. I have total respect for them, but when we come in and we want to build our little, you know, I don't know, three floor walk up in Manhattan. And I'm going to go try to put that on this ranch style foundation that the Sassbros built or vice versa. I'm going to try to put a ranch on that little tiny foundation or whatever. It's just going to, the house is going to topple. And I think that it's really easy to look at one little point thing that the Sassbros have published about, hey, this really works. and say, oh, I just have to apply that to my business and all my problems will be solved.

• Speaker #0

  Got it. So then let's put the shoe on the other foot here, other side of the coin. We know that SaaS bro strategies work in SaaS areas, which is great, fantastic, you know, square peg. square hole, right?

• Speaker #1

  There you go.

• Speaker #0

  Yeah. There are things that work, but Candice, tell me and tell our listener how you'd change what's broken and amend these tactics and these techniques to get that house and foundation kind of lined up, if you will, and the same size and the same square footage.

• Speaker #1

  So I believe it really requires a human to human approach where we stop treating people like numbers. So that thousand people that that person threw into outreach. They're nameless, faceless people. They're just a list of emails. They're numbers to him. They're phone numbers and email addresses. They're not people. When you have a limited target audience, when you need to build credibility with this audience and you don't have a SAS Bro marketing budget behind you. and you have to build trust with your audience. So this is not relevant to transactional purchases where somebody's spending 100 or 200 bucks and they're done. I'm not talking about that. I'm talking about enterprise B2B sales where you are going after, not necessarily just a Fortune 500, but you're going to a company and asking that company to change the way they do business, to adopt your tech. that takes a lot of trust from that company. And that trust is not going to be built over a pitch slappy email cadence or pitch slappy cold calls done by a college grad that doesn't understand what AP means. It's going to be done through conversation and engagement. I also am a very firm believer that we need to play the long game, not the short game. So if you look at that given target addressable market that anybody has, let's say there's 100 companies in that target addressable market. At any given time, only about 3% of your target addressable market is actively looking for a solution. So if we just target the 3%, we end up alienating the 97% that if you've done a good job with your target addressable market definition, then those 97% will be in market eventually. So if you treat all 100% like human beings, work with them to actually have one-to-one communication with them, build relationships. If they're not in market now, get them into your email nurturing and a cadence of nurturing, not pitching, not selling, but nurturing them, educating them, inviting them to events, drawing them into your world, helping them see the world the way you see it. You can become the trusted advisor. And so then when that 97% is ready to start looking, you're the natural choice. I was just talking to somebody yesterday about that, where he said that he took this approach with a company, educated them, had conversations with them, invited them to events, had them in an email nurturing sequence, three years. And just recently, they called him. They sole sourced because they already knew him and his company so well that they didn't even look at alternatives. And there's been so much business coming from this client that it's almost overwhelming the vendor at this point because they trust them. And that trust started at the very beginning of the contract because it existed way before that sales process actually began. So that's what I believe is if we can build trust, sales will get much easier, but we have to play the long game.

• Speaker #0

  Got it. Okay. So that is the key here is the long game is the antidote to the, what's been put out there by these, you know, kind of turn and burn kind of tactics that may not fit an industry in this case.

• Speaker #1

  Well, and if you look at it, the Sassbroads are playing the long game. They've been nurturing. That's why we're so aware of who they are. Lavender is a great example. They nurture all the time. They're brilliant at it. but people just take like this little piece of what they're doing and try to apply it without understanding the whole big package of what the wills, I like to call them at AdWords, Lavender have done. And it's like, for people who don't know, Lavender was formed by two men named Will and they hired a third guy, Will Aiken at one point, and everybody in the company changed their first names to Will for a couple of weeks. It was hysterical.

• Speaker #0

  It's very funny.

• Speaker #1

  It's the kind of funny. branding and relationship that they've got that people would even understand why that happened. You know, so like, there's so much behind it that, you know, somebody is going to go, oh, that's the clue. We just need to change everybody in our company's names to Will on LinkedIn and we'll suddenly get sales.

• Speaker #0

  Right. And I think that's exactly what you're getting at is that people pick up on these pieces, these pieces, but you need the entire package. And if you just have the piece, it breaks the machine, it breaks sales, it doesn't go into the right areas for your where your business is or whatever it might be. And so I think maybe are we are we too hard on the tech bros or should we should we maybe be saying to them, hey, guys, you need to make sure you tell the rest of the world that like this is a complete package. that they have to adopt.

• Speaker #1

  I would love for them to say there's more to it than this, but that's not their business model. And I have so much respect for them. Just stop trying to apply. a business model that doesn't match yours and assume that it's going to work for your business model. And honestly, I think even with them, they really do treat humans like humans. They don't pitch slap. They do publish really helpful information. I've never once been pitch slapped by an outreach salesperson. I don't get their crap in my email, my inbox. It's people trying to adopt it. These guys. I think that where they broke sales is by not articulating the bigger picture. Got it. And also, I mean, product-led growth and this whole freemium strategy, it doesn't apply to everybody. You can't do a big ERP implementation or cybersecurity implementation without a lot of thought and a lot of plumbing work and infrastructure work. what the SAS bros are doing is, is just bringing in like an outbuilding and putting it on your land. And what we're talking about is rebuilding a foundation and building a house. And so it's just, it's a different model. It's a different business and we can't necessarily assume that it applies everywhere.

• Speaker #0

  That is again, brilliant takes my friend. I just, I love having. this kind of discussion, because usually you see it on LinkedIn. Everybody's very rah, rah, let's get all around it. But I really think you've presented a tremendous... alternative take. And a lot of it, I think, is incredibly correct. You know, there's not that there's anything that I disagree with or anything like that, but like you really bring out some incredible points of like, you know, if you're just going to pick up part of this, you're not running their machine right, but their machine probably isn't even right for your industry in the first place. So maybe that is indeed how the tech bros broke sales. Lastly, Candice, and a bit of a gear change here. from your perspective, you know, you've been in sales for a very long time and you've taught a lot of people, but I would like to know who outside of your B2B career has influenced you the most in the B2B space?

• Speaker #1

  Two people, very different people. Jesus. and teaching us to love people and to treat people with kindness and respect, no matter who they are. And Dale Carnegie, who taught the same thing, really, you know, if you show interest in another person and engage with them based on what they're interested in, they're going to love you. And so like learning how to win friends and influence people, that book was a seminal book for me. It was just so, so critical.

• Speaker #0

  definitely it's it's one that's on my shelf right over there it's it's one of my favorites i pick it up every once in a while i've recommended it to people win friends and influence people and just it's a hundred years old if i'm not mistaken or 130 i think it was written in the 20s yeah 20s or something like that it's incredibly old book but the it's so funny that despite how far the world has come in the past century a lot of the things about just being human like you said earlier seem to just hold on. And I think that's really the core of what it is.

• Speaker #1

  People with respect, honor them for who they are, which means, you know, like, I don't know about you, but I get a little annoyed when somebody sends me a pitch slap that has nothing to do with my business. And they could have figured that out with 10 seconds of looking at my profile. And I'll get the answer from them, I don't have time. So you don't have time to treat me with a little inch of respect. But you want me to take my time to respond to you.

• Speaker #0

  Yeah. And you eventually want my money too. Like, man, like there's, there's a law of equivalent exchange there. I give you my time or I give you my time as a salesperson. eventually that evolves into something that you perhaps purchased the service I have to sell.

• Speaker #1

  And honestly, if you look underneath that, it's probably the sales manager's fault. Because they're telling them, reach out to 1,000 people. So of course they don't have time because they're measured on how many people they touch, not on how many people actually want to engage with them.

• Speaker #0

  Completely agree. Yeah, that's wild. Great stuff here today, my friend. Thank you so much for coming on the show. It's been great having you here. Listener, you can check our show notes to find more ways to learn and grow from Candice and her wonderful content and career around sales. I have a feeling we'll probably have you back at some point in time down the road to tell us about the time that you went 10 years without making a single cold call. Thanks so much for joining us here on B2B Business Class. We'll be back next time with another conversation to help your B2B career soar higher. Thanks for joining us for B2B Business Class. For more, subscribe and follow us on your favorite podcast platform. And if you'd be so kind, drop us a review. We'd really appreciate it. If you're watching or listening on YouTube, hit that subscribe button and the bell button for notifications for all of our content. B2B Business Class is a production of Westport Studios. Views and opinions expressed by participants of the show are those of the individuals and may not reflect the views of Westport Studios. Got a great topic to discuss or know someone who would make a great guest? Connect with Rob, your host, via LinkedIn or through b2bbusinessclass.com. We'll catch you next time with another great conversation on how to make your B2B career take off.