AI Won’t Replace Sales People… But THIS Will

0:00Seven years ago, I fired our top producer on our sales board, and he was number one about six months in a row. And I think that was six months too long. He showed up when he wanted to show up. He took a two-hour lunch. He was a jerk. Just because you're a great producer doesn't mean you're a great leader. Are you training people to come up to the top of the mountain with you, or are you just someone who's at the top flexing their arms and is just a jerk about it?

0:24Gabe Lullo:Sales people and SDRs come with emotional baggage. These big peaks in performance then troughs because suddenly I'm taking the rejection really hard. You just have to understand that, you know, it is a roller coaster, but the best way to have fun on a roller coaster is to keep the bar down. We are very bullish on cold calling. We do about 11 million cold calls a year. Do you think it will get to a point where we don't communicate on the phone anymore and actually it's more quick, fast, tech, social, whatever it may be? AI is incredible, but at the end of the day...

1:03Gabe Lullo:Before we get started with the episode, our books are now open. If you need help getting in front of the right people, finding your dream customers, or winning new business, we might be able to help. Why not outsource your sales to We Have A Meeting? Just go to wehaveameeting.com. Gabe, welcome to the podcast. thank you so much jack appreciate it and huge fan of both you guys and i'm super excited to be here you've got a gorgeous setup so i hope that people aren't just listening to this they're watching it as well um gabe big question who are you and what problem do you solve yeah i'm i'm an sdr that's been doing this a long long time that got into a position to be grateful enough to uh have a bunch of them in a company that I'm a co-owner of.

1:49So it's pretty exciting. What we solve really is go-to-market demand. We have a lot of companies that ask, hey, I have a broken system. I have a lot of AEs that need appointments. I have a huge enterprise company that we are constantly churning reps and we need a constant flow of SDRs on demand. So we provide those types of services for companies like that. Nice. Okay. And when these companies come to you, I'm sure you've been doing this long enough to kind of spot themes now. What are they typically doing wrong to get there? Yeah, I think the big thing is enablement, right? Anyone who go out and hire someone out of school or hire someone like myself that was a bartender, right, in college, and you wanted to get into tech sales or, you know, one of you into financial sales.

2:40And, You can hire SDRs, but supporting them, enabling them, giving them the right data, giving the right tools, giving the right training, giving the right management, giving the right KPIs and dashboards and analytics and a track to run on, that's where it gets expensive. And that's where you look at almost twice, if not more, the cost of paying a rep just to support the rep. and companies who try to build out an SDR function don't know that or don't realize it until they're down that road. And then they say, okay, whoa, one, this is not working and much more expensive than I thought it was going to be.

3:17So I need help. And that's usually what they're asking about.

3:20Gabe Lullo:So we know that a good SDR doesn't necessarily make a good leader and often over promoting an SDR, you end up with a bad leader, but clearly something's gone different in your journey. You're someone who's been an SDR and now a leader. What advice would you give to those people who are SDR level now, but have leadership aspirations? Yeah, it's a great question. Seven years ago, I fired our top producer on our sales floor. We had 80 SDRs in our office on our sales floor, and he was number one about six months in a row. And I think that was six months too long. The problem was he showed up when he wanted to show up.

4:01He took a two hour lunch. He was a jerk. You know, people asked him for help and support and what were you doing? He just didn't help them. So to your point, just because you're a great producer doesn't mean you're a great leader, right? And so, but I do believe great producers should be great leaders or at least great leaders should come from top producers, right? So it's a matter of which are you? Are you a great producer? And can you support and turn around and say, okay, I'm at the top of the mountain. Well, here's how you do it. Here's how you get there. Here's how you get there faster. Watch out for that rock on the way up.

4:34Like, are you training people to come up to the top of the mountain with you? Or are you just someone who's at the top and, you know, you know, flexing their arms and is just a jerk about it? So I think it's important that, you know, it's not about, you know, yourself. It's about serving others. You know, I was always taught when I was younger, like service to many leads to greatness. So if you can turn around and teach, you know, my mom is a school teacher. And so I learned, you know, the act of teaching. So if you could go out and teach people how to do it, and then if you can teach teachers how to do it, that's epic, right?

5:08So I've been able to find some amazing leaders that I can teach them how to teach. And that's how we've been able to scale the business.

5:16Gabe Lullo:So salespeople and SDRs, like any job, come with emotional baggage, but probably more so in this game, you're facing rejection and validation every day. So you've got to face that relationship. And often what people are seeing in their own sales teams is these big peaks in performance, then troughs because suddenly I'm taking the rejection really hard. what have you found works to create consistent, predictable SDRs that don't have that massive up and down in trajectory? Yeah, I think the two hardest things is exactly what you just said. And, and, you know, looking for grit, right, is the number one thing we look for, but it is the hardest thing to find on a resume.

5:58So you really have to get into face-to-face, you know, connection in the interview process and understand if they have the grit? And then secondly, to your point, do they have the ability to stay consistent and even keel? And it's a lot to do with training and mindset, right? You know, attitude is everything, but we do probably 60, 70 % mindset and attitude training within our company and 30 to 40 % tactical training. Yeah. Because you just have to understand that, you know, it is a roller coaster, but the best way to have fun on a roller coaster is to keep the bar down. But some people don't realize you're even on a roller coaster.

6:36And I remember years ago, I hired someone on a Monday. They didn't show up after lunch. You know, they left, they left a lunch and they didn't come back. So I still don't know where that person is. But we've been able to create a really, I would say, multi-tiered interview process. We're pretty rigorous about it. I'm not going to lie, but we don't regret it or shy away from it because we want people to come in and feel like, okay, I'm in a cockpit of a F1 car. And I know that what I have my hands on is pretty powerful. And they know that it's going to be a great ride. And it's very, very dangerous and thrilling to your point and the emotional rollercoaster, but you're also in an F1 car.

7:15How cool is that? So we have to get them expected to those results. There'll be leaders listening to this now, Gabe, who are saying to themselves, I am shit at hiring. I balls up the process. So you said there you have quite a strict process. I guess, what does that look like? What have you learned along the way that's helped you hire incredible salespeople? Yeah. So we're fully remote. I will say this was a very big and highly controversial decision that we made. And this is pre-COVID. So we were fully in office. We had two offices across the country, one in New York and one down in Puerto Rico.

7:53And so we were very bullish about in-office training and support and culture. We went remote with extreme preparation. So we looked at tools, technologies, and ways that we can create an in-office environment with a remote world. And so we've been able to invest in that, which is firstly. And then secondly, we also invest in technology to help us understand people and the grit piece and their ability to communicate and inability to communicate through the interview process. One of the things we do is we have them do video interview cover letters. So before they even meet with us live, they have to actually go through a multi-question interview on camera that are very specific questions customized to us to just see if they actually have a good sense of communication, tech stack, and what their personality looks like.

8:47Now, we also do an audition. So they actually have a cold calling script we give them and they have to audition for the role, just like you would have to audition to be an actor on a show or audition on America's Got Talent or British Got Talent. You have to really understand that that's what this is about. And it's a live audition. And we throw them curveballs and see how they respond. And if they can get through that, which is, of course, highly stressful when you got five people looking at you on a call like that in an interview, they can push through that. They probably can call a CEO and get them to say yes to the demo.

9:22I like that. And then we are entering a new era of outbound.

9:28Gabe Lullo:Four years in, we have a meeting as leveled up our entire offer. That's why multi-billion pound brands trust us. And we put meetings with Netflix, Spotify, Facebook, even Barcelona football club. We've helped close deals up to 950 ,000. We're doing it all. phone linkedin email direct mail there's a few weird and wonderful possibilities that we're keeping in our back pocket so if you're struggling to get in front of the right people at the right time inquire today so let's let's stick on that that working from home piece because we are fully in office and sometimes we get flat for it and i'll try and think of something controversial i and post on LinkedIn every now and then.

10:14It comes from my own learned belief and bias of, I remember having to sit there working from home and cold call and call people on the phone. And I just thought when I was working for someone, I just thought this is lonely. This is depressing. This is all those different things. But then you said funnily enough that actually 60 to 70 % of the training is all around mindset. So what does that actually look like? Yeah, I'm with you actually. I run a fully remote SDR firm. We have close to 175 SDRs right now running and I can tell you that I'm totally with you when it comes to in office. I'm old school, right?

10:53I grew up in office on sales floors, making calls, listening to people just by osmosis and getting trained from the people next to you in the cubicles in the sales floor. So I love it. So what we were able to do is create a structure that actually is controversial here too, right? And so we have all of our wraps on a virtual sales floor with camera on. And so we have pods with our managers and our SDRs where they're literally like this, the three of us on video, making cold calls in call blocks and sprints throughout the day. Now, that's not in an office, but it's also not on an island by themselves looking at a wall in their bedroom wondering if this is something that you want to do for another day.

11:35And so it creates a hybrid approach to that environment. And part of that training that we provide, especially for that attitude training, is daily encouragement, daily criticism, daily constructive training throughout the day, high-fiving when we get appointments, making fun of the mean prospects that say ridiculous things, and sharing your stories in real time. And so we create kind of like, you know, our mantra alley-oop is a sports analogy. So we create this sports on field, on court type environment throughout the day. And it's encouraging and people like it.

12:15Gabe Lullo:We had one of the podcasts once, Gabe, and we said, if you were interviewing a salesperson, what is the thing you could hear that would make you say, yeah, you're hired straight away? and she said if they said i'm a stand-up comedian on the side so if they were used to kind of get on a stage having that rejection and improvising it was like no-brainer like you've got you've got it we'll skip all the other stages for you what are those things that you could hear at that interview stage that immediately you're saying great tick tick yeah you're going to be just fine yeah i'd love that and i would agree with that it's interesting we hired a person just recently I will say we typically, very typically do not hire anyone who hasn't done the SDR function in some way, specifically with calls for minimally a year is our approach.

13:04But we make exceptions to rules for scenarios exactly like that. And this is a woman, her name is Macy. She's awesome. She was a basketball coach for quite some time. She then became a police officer. And then she also got hurt on the job as a police officer. And she applied to the role and we're like, what the heck? This is not at all the candidate that we typically would see. We hired her because she was a police officer. We hired her because she was a very successful basketball coach, right? And she is now one of the top five STRs in her sales floor consistently. So it's interesting. I think myself, Like I said before, being a bartender is an amazing asset to be in an SDR, right?

13:48It's your area. You're in a commission job, no matter what you're connected with people all the time. And you're spending a little bit of time with them before they go and sit down with dinner. And you're in a high stress environment and you have to get them excited to meet with you for about 20 minutes, right? So think about that. So those are definitely roles. I think teachers also are great. A good friend of mine, Brian, Brian Vidal, he used to work here. He started off selling door-to-door coffee, and he was a schoolteacher who didn't like making no money as a schoolteacher, unfortunately.

14:20And now he left us and became the Senior Vice President of Sales Development and Zoom Info, and became wildly successful in the role. So really cool to see these types of careers jump into this role, for sure.

14:35Gabe Lullo:so i suppose based on following up from that do you think a great sdr or a great salesperson is born or made it's a great question i think i struggle with this a lot um but i really do believe that they are made um but i do also believe their background which is them needing becoming made uh is super important you know i realized i wanted to make money for talking when I was 11 years old. I grew up in a very blue-collar town of Buffalo, New York. My uncle worked at the Ford stamping plant, stamping metal to bake cars. My cousin was working as a cook and smelling like fish and coming home at three in the morning.

15:16My other uncle was literally building houses and falling off a ruse and breaking backs, literally, to make money. I had to do a fundraiser when I was 11 to raise money for our local aquarium that was like going to be like closing their doors. And I sold more t-shirts at 11 than anyone else in our entire school system, actually anyone else in our entire school district. And I got like this really cool award for selling t-shirts. And I realized, oh my God, I can talk and make money and I don't have to lift heavy things. This is incredible. And so that, uh, I think, uh, it helps answer that question.

15:55So I want to talk to you about tech stack and that might sound quite boring but i think that so many sales leads i remember when when me and zach started and then we found out that there were data providers it was like what you don't always have to go via the gatekeeper this is this is mad there's a place where you can pay and get people's mobile numbers so i think for people listening they you don't know what you don't know so i'm i'm guessing there's some level of data i'm guessing there's some level of dialer But what do you think is important technology that you arm your SDRs with for them to be more effective?

16:32Yeah, I mean, you guys are this more than anything, right? Companies come to us when they're in their infancy stage. So we have this amazing privilege to see new tools, new tech, new companies before the market sees them, right? Because they're coming to us to help it bring it to market. So we were super lucky and grateful to see Discover Ord when they were infancy stage and be their founding SDR team. And for those who don't know, Discover Org is ZoomInfo. So we were the founding STR team for ZoomInfo. But we are also the founding STR team for Outreach and Sales Loft and Forum and all these really cool sales tools and data platforms.

17:08And what was exciting to see is that, oh, my God, as these new companies started coming to us, we started working with them as clients of ours. We realized their technology is quite incredible and impressive. So to your point, tech is everything. It's a pinnacle of our business. Like that enablement piece we talked about earlier, like you can get higher grade SDRs with great grid and you can train them the best you possibly can and give them an environment, whether it's in office or remote. But if they don't have the tools to become successful, it's going to be a hard road for sure. So data vendors are not also one in the same.

17:42We don't just have one data vendor. We have many because the ICP and the verticals we work with, the markets that we work with, data vendors can very much be different for each industry that you're in. And then tools like dialers and email platforms. See, we are not an email only company. We are very bullish on cold calling. We do about 11 million cold calls a year. So our focus is cold calling. And that's our big tool that we want to take. We use a lot of different dialers. So I would say the big thing right now, though, is that that one-to-one connection with scored data and very, very, very specific and strategic data that you're going after is much more powerful than spraying and praying, which was very much the game for years up until about three, four years ago.

18:29Nice. Okay. Well, I think it's about time, Gabe, that we spoke about cold calling from one cold caller to another. What do you think are the key ingredients that make a good cold call? Curiosity, right? Asking right questions. It's interesting. Everyone always said, Gabe, you could be a great lawyer. I said, now I'm going to go through sales. You could probably to make more money. But it's the same role. It's just you have to know what to ask. You're asking questions, just like you would ask someone on the witness stand. Questions that aren't offensive, but bold. Questions that are intriguing, but not taking too much time.

19:04Questions that don't put you in a position where you have to showcase all your cards because you're trying to get them to the next step in the sales journey. I always say we're the trailer to the movie, right? A good cold call is you're the preview or the trailer to the movie. It's punchy, it's fast, it's quick, it's intriguing, it's exciting, it's energetic. But if you tell everyone that everyone dies at the end of the movie on the trailer, no offense, probably just ruin the movie. So that's what we have to do. And that's how I feel a good cold call has to be. I know that's a general answer, but I think it's the most important part of it.

19:40Gabe Lullo:what do you think is the the right way of thinking about qualification for an sdo yeah i mean i don't believe in bant on a call you know budget authority timing me like i don't want to know if you truly have a budget now sure that's controversial but every ae or founder who wants leads you know unfortunately they want it on a silver platter with the credit card out on their hand and say okay i'm ready to buy um we have to set expectations with our clients and say that That is not reality. Do we want to know if they're the right person? Yes. Do we want to know if it's the right company? Yes. Do we want to know if there's pain and there's a need and it's a problem that is solvable by us, whatever that product may or service may be?

20:25Yes. So those are the things that we want to check off. And when I say right person, I don't mean final decision maker. Influencers, champions, I call them internal advocates are super important in the prospecting function to multi-thread multiple people. But you at least need to know that you're not talking to the janitor who unfortunately probably is not going to be making the decision. So those are the right things we want to look at.

20:50Gabe Lullo:Our book is out now. Sales is therapy is available everywhere for people who are looking to get better at communicating, asking better questions, closing more deals and bringing in more clients. Beware, it is not for the faint of heart or for closed-minded people. You can buy it in all good shops, links below. So one of the things that I think we've all noticed on this call is whenever there's a trend, there's a counter trend, right? So at some point, someone said, let's break up the sales role into these different fragmented parts, right? So SDR, AE, whatever else you've got as part of your process.

21:28Gabe Lullo:in doing that it feels like a potential con that we often hear about is the SDR function is very focused on just get the meeting in but by hook or by crook get that meeting in so long as we've hit our meeting metrics we're cool who cares if it closes further up the chain how do you solve that problem and make sure that's not a behavior that creeps in yeah great question I'm going to say some things that we do, I believe a little bit differently than the market. And it did not go over well when I said we're going to do this. Our companies, our clients didn't really love it. Our team didn't really love it, but I said, we're going to do it anyway.

22:11And here's why. Clients come to us, right? And they want to eventually do this in-house most of the time, unless they've done it so many times in-house that they absolutely do not want to do it anymore. but investors and companies really would like to bring everything in-house one day. Outsourcing forever is not usually the plan, but it doesn't need to be. But at the end of the day, our intention is to try to clone and represent exactly what they would expect if it was in-house. One of the things we do for that reason is we actually, our reps are all hireable. So our reps leave us on purpose to go to our clients to bring those reps in-house and grow their career.

22:48So that's one of the things that we do to be very transparent. Another thing that we do is we just don't send meetings over the fence, to your point. Because what happens is everyone is just going after the meeting and then your meetings aren't very qualified and they're not high quality meetings and then your clients don't like you for that reason. So what we decided to do is like, we're not going to just send you meetings. We're actually going to send you warm leads as well. Now, if you had an internal team with an SDR team in-house working with an AET and you had someone who was the right person, was the right company, did have some pain, just went on vacation with their family for three weeks.

23:26Or, you know, just hired 16 people and is onboarding a new team of people or just implemented a brand new technology that's going to take up their time for the next 90 days. Meaning timing is off. So if it's the right person, right company, right everything except the timing is off, that's a valuable lead. So we pass those leads to our clients as well. And it also makes the SCRs not have to go cutthroat for the meeting because one, that meeting is not going to show up. So that's a waste of time anyway. And secondly, that meeting probably isn't going to be the best meeting because the timing is off.