No new methodology in ten years

So that was good.

It's hard to replace a good face-to-face meeting with connections you make around the world. There's something about it.

Totally.

So yeah, it's good to have you on the podcast and—.

Yeah, looking forward to it, man.

For those of you who don't know Jake, Jake, you're the CEO of Scaled, but tell us a little bit about, you know, your journey and who you are, what you're about.

Yeah, sure. So I am, as you said, the CEO of Scaled. We're about a 40-person-plus revenue strategy operations and enablement firm. So what that really means is we're partnering with, you know, growing companies to help to set up the infrastructure, whether it's the operations or the playbook or strategic leadership. We do a lot of interim support from a staffing standpoint, RevOps, sales leadership, or you're a much more established company that's looking to modernize and really bring in, you know, best-in-class best practices.

So All of those things, you know, we help to provide and work with organizations to do that. We work with hundreds of companies every single year. And so I really get a chance to see the good, the bad, and the ugly of, you know, how people are building and scaling, you know, revenue teams today.

That's awesome. And that kind of brings us on to the topic of today, which is, you know, at Apprento, we're all about helping and partnering with organizations on the talent side in terms of how do you build, develop, and retain a world-class A-player sales team. You know, that's what we talk about all the time.

And, you know, I want to pick your brain on that because like you said, you know, through your business, you've been inside hundreds, hundreds of these companies and seen the good, the bad, and the ugly. So I want to pick that apart with you a little bit today and get your take on what should companies be doing, what should leaders be doing, and then also as frontline folks, what should they be doing?

To be world-class, to be A players? So big topic, broad topic, but let's see if we can unpack some of this together.

I mean, like, yeah, how do you just get to be like world-class at everything? Yeah, that makes— that's no pressure there. Yeah. I mean, look, there's a lot of different ways that you could skin this, you could say, right? There's a lot of different ways that I could go and say, you know, this is how you do it.

I will say that there's some characteristics of companies that I think are doing it right, whether it's at the company level or companies that are doing it right, even at like the rep or individual level. So I'll start kind of at the company level. Some of the core things that I see first is alignment across revenue teams.

Okay, and this might sound crazy or basic, but if you've got a marketing organization that's compensated on X, marketing qualified leads or whatever, you've got a sales organization that's compensated just on the first deal. You've got a success or account management team that's focused just on renewals and upsells. You don't create the through line that you're looking for.

And what happens is we get aligned, we get misaligned at the top where this person's like, look, I did my job. This person's like, I did my job. This person's like, I did my job. And we're not aligned. There's no incentive for us to collaborate. And so the companies that we see successful in 2022, 2023 are companies that think about that Okay, how do we align?

Do we just align everyone to revenue? Okay, makes sense. Maybe everyone's just aligned to revenue. Okay, great. Well, what's marketing like? What does that mean that marketing can actually contribute? And are there some leads that will then produce that lag of revenue? Okay, sales organization. Should our sales organization maybe have some component of compensation for reps tied to renewal or like if a customer actually uses the product?

Maybe, right?

I think more and more organizations are starting to think about, you know, it used to be the same sales rep did everything. They got the meeting, closed the deal, worked their own accounts. If you're in that world, you don't— alignment is just natural because you're like, well, I don't want to close this deal because this guy sucks and you know it.

As opposed to now, it's like, not my problem, you got to deal with it, Alex. And so I think it's that alignment, you know, and if you're on the front lines and maybe you don't have that, you can still start to think about how can I set my counterparts up for success? How can I make them successful?

You know, if I'm an SDR, I can say, hey, you know what, John, appreciate you kind of, you know, kind of walking me through this. Let me tell you a little bit about our product, what it does, how it might help you. And then I wanna introduce you to John. He's like a phenomenal, you know, rep.

He knows your space really well. And I'm excited for you to guys have a really productive conversation and then give me a little value too. So, you know, just think about those things. How can I provide a better experience for the customer as a part of this and really create kind of that alignment across groups?

So that's probably number one. Is that if the groups aren't aligned, it's very difficult to have a, you know, a really world-class customer experience and, you know, world-class sales process as well too. Yeah.

So it sounds, it's an interesting one because, you know, I've seen a lot of companies are not aligned and they get out of alignment very quickly, you know, and I guess the question that they often have is like, how do we get aligned? You know, is it that we put the marketing, the sales leader and the CS person, we put them in it, we lock them in a room for a few hours and say, look, figure it out, you know, figure out what you're measuring as a collective and how it all rolls up into a collective goal.

Is that in simple terms?

Yeah. What's most important to the business? You know, that's how I think about what is most important to the business right now. What are the things like, what are the most important things to the business? And how do we align those? You know, how do we align those things to the business that, you know, we— yeah, that the business says, hey, what are our goals?

What are we trying to accomplish here? Well, we're trying to do this, we're trying to do that. Okay, great. Right? We're trying to do this, we're trying to do that. Okay, amazing. Maybe it's new customer logos. Maybe your number one focus, maybe you're really early and you just want to go wide. Okay.

Well, maybe it's number of logos. How do I align my team to optimize for that output?

Yeah.

You know, and so I think it's just getting aligned on what's the right priorities for the customers. Right.

You know, I think you're bang on. I think a lot of companies don't think about this in enough detail. They don't get to like high fidelity on this stuff. They just think, oh, we need to grow. So like we've got a revenue number and that's it.

Exactly.

You know, or we need leads.

Well, or it's just like, well, I can't control that. I can't control, you know, like my favorite is whenever marketing's like, well, I don't control if we close deals. And the sales team's like, well, I don't control the leads it you send us that sh*t, you know? So like, at some point you have to say, look, at the end of the day, all of our jobs are X or all of our jobs are Y, you know what I mean?

Versus, yeah, everyone. So anyway, that's how I think about it is like, you've gotta have that alignment or at the rep level or the manager level, you can just think about how you could create that. Like, can you go across the aisle to marketing and say, hey, how can we better partner? Can you go across the aisle to your account management or customer?

Hey, how can we partner? And, you know, you can work yourself to try to create that alignment across teams, but I'll just tell you, it's very difficult to have a world-class process and a world-class customer journey if your different revenue organizations aren't aligned, you know, on the most important metric. And by the way, and I'm a big fan of that, like there shouldn't be 5 most important, there probably should be 1 and maybe 2 most important metrics.

Okay.

And too often people, you know, we get distracted by information or things that we can't impact that aren't as important.

Right. So you see companies that are not world-class, they're not A-players, they're actually trying to measure too many things.

Oh, well, that's a whole other thing. It's like we want to measure things just to measure them. It's like, cool, what are you going to do with it? We want to be able to see all the activity. I'll give you like my— here's my favorite example of where I think sales and marketing are just like just behave differently.

You know, marketing, if I go and spend $200,000 a month on Google AdWords, okay, I am of course going to spend 10 to 15% of that budget optimizing the Google AdWords for performance, right? Like, of course you're going to do that. You're going to create new variations of the ad, new calls to action, landing, all that stuff.

You're going to look at the data. But when it comes to measuring effectiveness of outbound, we look at it like every 6 months. And we like rewrite sequences. And so people want this data. Well, we want to be able to see what sequences are working and what sequences aren't working and how do we optimize?

Like, what are you going to do with it? Until you move to an always optimizing mindset, just like marketing already has, it's a waste of time. So make sure that, you know, if you are going to track KPIs and metrics, that you got a plan to do something about it. Well, of course we want to see it.

Okay, why? I get it. I mean, it makes sense. It's an important, it's an interesting number. What are you going to do about it? Okay. So instead of tracking it every day or week, maybe track it every month or quarter. Okay, cool. Makes sense. And maybe it's not a key performance indicator. There's a great book called, it's like Four Disciplines of Execution.

I think that's it. It's by Stephen Covey, Franklin Covey's— Stephen Covey. And he talks about this leads and lags. The lags are the outcome-based metrics. The leads are the metrics that you input that should give you the highest likelihood that are going to generate the outcomes that you want. And so I think just making sure that the KPIs and the metrics and, you know, kind of data points you choose to track are ones that are actually going to have an impact on the outcomes that you want and trying to limit that to like, what are the— what's the force?

What's the one thing? You know, if I said, hey, to achieve this, what's the one thing? Thing that would get you 80% of the results or whatever it is. And most companies have that. You know, most companies have a lever that is just not being pulled or not being optimized enough that could have a much bigger impact because they're trying to track too many things.

And so then they don't really know like what to track at the end of the day.

And you think this should be different in every business? So like in your business, for example, like what's your one key metric that's super important to your business?

Yeah. So for us, I'll tell you, and again, I'll just kind of like break it down. If you said what's the main one, I would say gross profit. And so gross profit for us is basically how much money we make off of a consulting engagement, just to like—.

Yeah.

Now we have 3 metrics that impact that. We have utilization. Is our team being utilized? Are we hitting our targets 85%? Project pacing. Are engagements pacing the way that they should? And project profitability. If you take care of those 3 things, if you have a team that's utilized and working, you have projects that are pacing.

Because what happens too, imagine if I staff someone on a project and they get behind pace, they just didn't work those 10 hours because the client was— that time's gone. I can't recoup that time. That 10 hours is gone from the week. I can't make it back up. Right? And then profitability. Am I looking into making sure, hey, we're maintaining proper margins?

If you do those 3 things, it equals gross profit. And so that's how we run our business.

So every business should figure this out and figure out, okay, what's your guiding light? Okay.

So don't have a million. If you just align, I mean, it is amazing when you simplify for your team and look at the CFO level, maybe you've got some other stuff you wanna track. That's fine. But when you get the business aligned around one North Star or a couple, you know, maybe 1 or 2, it's just amazing.

Their stress level goes down, et cetera. And then you teach them how to influence the leading measures. You know, for my team, it's how do my practice leads manage their day-to-day with their teams to those 3 metrics? And then guess what? Gross profit takes care of itself. So, you know, it's just a lot about simplifying for the business and understanding that most companies are trying to do 1 or 2 things really, really well.

And not trying to focus on doing, you know, 6 things mediocre.

Gotcha. Okay, cool. So alignment between your revenue function, crucial. Making sure that we're not being overly ambitious with all the things we're trying to measure and actually getting aligned around a North Star. Cool. What else? Where to next? Let's assume we've got those 2 things. What else do we need to do?

Yeah, so the other big trend, again, I've been talking quite a bit about is around this concept of customer journey and customer experience. And why I talk about this now is think about all the changes in the last 10 years. So 10 years ago, it was 2012. Okay. And it seems like it was 9,000 years ago.

Okay. 2012, Instagram just started popping. LinkedIn was a job site. Amazon, I don't think Amazon had next-day delivery or anything like one-click Checkout at the— that, like, on a website? Nope. Stripe? I don't— Stripe exist in 2012? Yeah, maybe Stripe was around. Think of all— like, think of our consumer behavior today. I mean, how many of you— I literally just did it this afternoon.

I needed to order some new, like, USB to USB adapt— USB-C to USB adapters. And, um, I picked the one, it said it was going to get here in, like, Monday of next week. Like, nope. This one's tomorrow. Bye. Like we are buying very well-known inferior products on a daily basis or products that aren't like the perfect fit, but they're close enough because of speed and ease of use.

Now let's— and by the way, every trend in B2C ends up coming to B2B. So this isn't an if, it's a when. If your process is built to qualify people and not provide a frictionless journey for the people that are educated, and vetted. I use this kind of very simple framework. I call it cold, which is someone who has very little to no knowledge of your company.

They just heard about you. Educated means like, you know, they've either— maybe they've like identified a project that they actually have or support. Maybe they already have a tool, but they know that that needs to be better. Something like, like, I'm, I'm, uh, roughly okay. Like, it's like a rough, like, I know a little bit.

And then there's vetted, which is like, uh, no, we've actually already met with your 2 competitors. We understand pricing. We're looking to make a decision in the next 2 weeks because we need this to be deployed by March. Right now in today's sales process, we treat everyone the same. You come in, you talk to this person, they try to qualify you or whatever.

And we're just not built for these different intent paths. I call it like intent-based discovery, which is understanding the intent level. Is this person educated, et cetera? You know, all those things. So That is where we've got to start. We've got to start to better map our customer journeys and think about, do I have a different experience for someone who's at step 3 already?

Because it used to be I couldn't get any information about a B2B product without talking to a salesperson.

Yeah.

I had to go talk to a salesperson because, you know, there was nothing online and most websites are still pretty bad at giving customers real information. But now I can go, I can Google you, I can go on G2. I can go on all these other sites, TrustRadius, like whatever. Like I can go and check out, I can learn all about you.

I can vet you before I even talk to you. I can go in a Pavilion community and I can go chat it up. And so people are coming into the process more and more educated and therefore higher, like further and further down the funnel. And sales is still stuck doing the same qualification stuff we were doing 10 years ago.

Right.

Literally. And I'm telling you, there has not been a single new methodology invented in the last 10 years. Challenger Sales, like 12 years old. Sandler's like 500 years old. Command of the Message is like 30, 20-something years old.

Yeah.

SPIN Selling is 20-something years old. Like, my friends, these were built for different times, and they— some of them have caught up, some of them have adapted. Medic and MedPic, I think that's also like 20— I think it was built in the '90s, Medic and MedPic. Right. Which is the one that everybody, like a lot of people love.

I mean, just think about that. Like the access to information has changed the way we have to think about building sales processes and methodologies, you know, and that's really where we've got to get to is we've got to get to a world where we're thinking of the customer experience, just like the, you know, Amazon and all these sites.

That's all they obsess over, the customer experience, because then they can know how to map a sales process to that experience that's tailored to you. We don't do that in B2B. B2B, we say, hey, here's our sales process, how do you fit into it? And that's gonna change. That's gonna change.

Makes complete sense. And it's interesting you say that a lot of these methodologies are so old, and then that you're right, there really hasn't been anything groundbreakingly new come up for it. There's no new discovery frameworks, for example, or qualification frameworks, anything like that. Are you saying that the journey is gonna move far more to digital and that companies are gonna have to really think carefully about the digital journey they create for that, you know, how did you define it?

That vetted buyer, you know, so it's gonna have to be a really tight digital journey and maybe they speak to someone right at the end.

Exactly. That's it, man. Yeah. We've got to realize that people like, again, people today want to consume information on their own time. You know, it's like when that, the old sales reps say, oh, can we hop on a call to— but no, just send me the stupid demo link so I can look at it and walk my team.

Like, no, I do not want to hop on a call. There's a bunch of stats. I can try to pull some of them up here. I just was on this webinar earlier. And, you know, again, like, I think it's like 90% of buyers prefer like a digital journey and then like want to talk to the sales rep when like on their own time.

I think that was Gartner maybe, but that's the way we're moving. Like, don't get me wrong, there's good old face-to-face. There's nothing wrong with that. There's still relationship building to sales, but I'm telling you, most people want someone who can provide value. They want someone who's— whenever they do get on the phone with a rep, they don't want the like, oh, hey, how's it going?

How are your kids? They're like, okay, can you help me now or not? Like, here's where I'm at. This is what I'm doing. Can you help me? And I think too many organizations right now are not built for that mindset. We're focused on qualification of people versus really understanding people and like where they're at.

So yeah, I think the way that you said it's spot on.

What does that mean, you know, to you? You talk about the difference between understanding people and qualifying people. Give me an example. Like I don't know, in, in terms of a question or questions, you know, it's like, what's the difference there?

Yeah. Yeah, it's a really great call out. And actually, the interesting part is sometimes you can ask the same question, you just have different intent behind it, right? Let's take it, let's take like a classic like timeline question, right? So if I'm truly trying to, if I'm just vetting you, I'm like, I might ask a question to the effect of like, hey Alex, you know, hey, so like, what's your timeline to, you know, get a project like this up and running or something like that?

Well, if I'm really trying to understand, I might say, okay, so, you know, we're having this conversation. You might have talked to some other folks. You know, how are you thinking about when you absolutely like need a solution in mind? Like, is this a need to have, or like, where are you kind of at in that like exploratory phase?

Right.

That's gonna help me to— that's gonna meet you a little bit more. It's kind of a similar question, but I'm really just trying to understand, you know, okay, like, where is this person? Okay, you're exploratory. Great. No problem, man. Let's, let's, I'm going to start you down my exploratory track and that, oh, you've already talked to my 2 competitors.

Okay. Well now let's accelerate the conversations.

Right.

Right. So I'm really just trying to understand where you are in that like intent and that again, are you okay? Well, this person, they've got a lot of research, like they're ready to rock. Let's go. And I just don't think sales orgs are used to like having to pick up the pace. We're used to like this step, then this step, then this step.

And why? Because my CRM forces me to do it because I've got required fields. You know, there's a lot of other things. My sales leader, you know, guess what? He grew up in this medic method, so I've got to use that, you know, like that's what we see. And again, I think what you're starting to see is that people, again, they care about, they are doing their research, right?

Are these people like perfectly educated? No, of course they don't know everything about your product, but they're doing enough to say like, hey, I think I know what I need. I'm pretty confident I know what I need. Can you help me to just understand if you can solve that need? As opposed to like this long drawn-out discovery, you know, process that we try to force everybody to go through the same process.

And I think that's that's the gap. Does your sales process? This is a very simple litmus test. Does your sales process have a way to fast-track buyers who are extremely educated and down the path of being vetted? They've already talked to the competition, or they've already established a clear like a. timeline and budget of when they need the impact to be or not.

And most companies, if they really are honest with themselves, do not have a fast track. They do not have an accelerated sales process. They've got one. And that's, that's the issue. We need to be able to meet people where we're at and put them on their journey. That's not like 500, you know, paths.

You're probably gonna need like 5. So it's not, you know, it's not that much more complex than we need to make it.

It almost, if you really simplify this down, it's almost just being customer-centric. If you have to sum up in a word, it's like that's ultimately what we're talking about.

Shocking.

You know, even just like how you ask the question, it's, you know, rather than I'm qualifying you for my criteria and I'm trying to find out whether you're a 1-month or a 3-month prospect, it's, hey, Mr. and Mrs. Customer, When do you need a solution? Like, when do you need this problem solved?

Yeah. When do you need it by? Like, because again, like too often in sales, this would be my other, you know, kind of just like more of a point to make is a customer doesn't care about a signed contract. A customer cares about the return that they're gonna see with the usage of the product, right?

Whether that's a true ROI, an efficiency ROI, whatever it ends up being. And so is your sales process aligned to where your sales team is focused on that as what the customer cares about, which is usage. The customer does not care about the signed contract. The customer cares about, okay, if I sign this, am I going to get the utility out of it that I was hoping for?

You know, is this going to move the needle for me the way that it was promised? So, and I think that's where a lot of people are struggling.

It almost sounds to me, and correct me if I'm wrong, but you need like separate pipelines for these different journeys. So you almost need like a an accelerated pipeline that has fewer steps in it. Like if we're doing, if we're thinking—.

Yeah, it's just like a basic decision tree. Yeah, it's like a basic decision tree. Like, okay, so if someone comes in here and we hear these things and we've got a whole criteria on it that I can, what I'll do, I'll send you a link that you can add to the podcast notes too, that they can kind of look at like the criteria for vetted, educated, and cold as we've defined it.

But you can define it however you want for yourself. But just says, okay, oh, you're this cool. So I heard these things, so now I'm gonna put you down this path. That's it. I mean, it's really, it's, I don't think it's, you know, again, it doesn't have to be, it's just some very simple if this then that, you know.

Okay, so in this call you hear one of these 3 things, they go down this path or this path. In this call, okay, now we need to really accelerate them. Yeah. And I think that you hit it on the head. It's like how many companies have an accelerated buying process or selling process for people that are extremely high intent?

I don't know. I don't know any. I don't know a single one. I think some might say that they are, but yeah, that's— I think that's where we're gonna head though. You're gonna have— here's the key. The customer is gonna force you to do it. The customer is gonna continue to force and say like, look, if you don't wanna go down this path, that's fine.

I'm just gonna go work with this other company.

Yeah.

You know, even though, hey, I like your product, I think it could be a really good fit. This is too much of a pain in the ass. I don't have time for this. Like, I'm just gonna go work with this other company that's not a big pain in the ass.

It's interesting you say this because I'm thinking of our sales process, right? And I'm thinking like, we intuitively do that. So if we have someone who kind of comes in and they're like, look, Alex and Scotty, we need someone tomorrow. Like, we've got 3 missing headcount in our team. We need people. You know, we're not gonna take them through the 3 steps typically.

Like, we're not gonna take them through all these steps. We're gonna, okay, cool. And we're gonna fast track their journey to getting that outcome because of the urgency. But we haven't deliberately built that. And that's the difference. That's what you're talking about.

You're talking about deliberately building this. But you know it intuitively, right? Like, you know, you know, and then, because here's what you can say. You can say, hey, absolutely. Okay, let's go solve that. And then in 2 weeks, let's set up a conversation to have a bigger conversation. Does that work for you, John?

Yes.

That's it. I acknowledge that you are here for this. No problem. Let's go ahead and set up another conversation in 2 weeks where maybe we can zoom out a little bit too. Does that work? Yes.

They'll say yes.

And that's all you have to do. Just that. Again, like, that's so, so simple. And it's like, well, you don't really know the need. Well, it's like, look, if 2 weeks into the engagement, I can say, you know, because we're both, you know, running services, I could say, look, you know, we started down this path.

I think we should pivot. Like, I know you thought the problem, and it's not that you shouldn't ask questions and do those things. And maybe, you know, okay, I know you wanna get started tomorrow, blah, blah, blah. You should still ask the follow-up questions to see if it's real, but if it's real, then why are you throwing up blocks?

You know?

So the other thing is where my mind now goes is we're probably still stuck, I think, as an industry, if we think about B2B selling as an industry, We're probably still stuck in hiring the wrong kind. Well, I say, I think I'm very confident we're hiring the wrong people because we're hiring these kind of very— what's the word I'm looking for— single way of looking at things type people where it's like, okay, you're an SDR and we're doing this and you're an AE and you're doing this.

And actually what we need to be thinking about is we need out-of-the-box thinker. It's a bit of a cliché, but we need someone who can go down 5 different paths potentially. We need someone who can follow 5 different conversational tracks. And I don't, I'm not confident that we're actually bringing those people in.

Well, I don't, well, or that the leaders know how to do it, right? That they, you know, you tend to repeat the sins of your father. Your dad taught you this thing, you do it this way. And then you're like, well, this is how it's done. And it's like, yeah, that's because again, just think about, okay, let's go back 10 years.

How now, how different was the buying process from a consumer standpoint between 2002 and 2012?

Yeah.

I mean, like, like, yeah, it was, it was a little, it was different, you know, like online was more popular, but was it that different between 2002 and 2012? Was it radically different the way that people bought things? Nope. Right? 2002 to '92, yeah, there's a little bit more technology. Nope. It's this last 10 years that is just completely, and then the pandemic just accelerated all this because there were so many of these kind of staunchy old sales leaders that are like, people will not buy $1 million, $5 million products without meeting someone face to face and blah, blah, blah.

Bullsh*t. Guess what? It happened. It happened. 2021 happened and people bought million-dollar purchases digitally with never meeting someone face to face. No wine, no steak dinner, no golf. And so we've, we've have to real— this digital trend, meet— look, Some people want and need to talk to a salesperson right out of the gate.

Amazing. Some people don't. Some people just want to go, let me go look at the stupid stuff on my own. It's shocking to me how few companies actually have an online demo. What the f— I can't go look at the product or click around online? Like, again, it's— we're stuck in this, like, I got to get them on the phone.

And that's how I was raised. That's how I was taught. No, Jake, you know, you don't. You don't go back and forth, you know, you gotta get them on the phone. And I'm like, and nowadays it's like, sometimes, yeah, but other times, nah, other times just send them what they asked for. Just say, great, here's this.

You might wanna note this and this. Let's set up some time on Friday for our like regular scheduled follow-up. You know, like I just feel like we've got to start to— that's why you've seen the rise of like product-led growth companies, right? Because they're giving away a lot of this for free. Hey, come in, try the product out.

Oh, you like it? Okay, cool. Now, now maybe we'll get a salesperson involved. You know, we've worked with some of the hottest PLG companies, Canva, we've worked with them, we've worked with a company called Mural, we've worked with a handful of others. So there's always that point where, okay, then a human needs to get in the loop at some point.

And like, what is that point? You know, in a PLG type buy, product-led growth, if I'm being too jargony for people, which is basically freemium rebranded. People would say that that's not what it is, but it kind of is.

So what does this all mean for the sales profession? Because, you know, I think there's— what we hear quite often is how salespeople are dead. Like, I've heard this kind of creeping up like, oh, we don't need salespeople anymore. It's all online. We don't need them. But yet, you know, if we look at the growth in number of people in selling, it's growing at about 4 or 5% every year.

So yeah, what does this mean for your B2B seller?

Yeah, I don't— look, there is a type of buyer who doesn't want to talk to a person and they'll just buy, right? I'll give you again, I've told this story. This is last December. We were trying to prepay some expenses. And so we wanted to pay for all our whole Salesforce license up months.

You know, we're not a big client. It's like $40 grand or something. And it took me like 3 days to figure out who our account rep was, talk to finally get that person. Hey, Jay, can we hop on a call? No, we can't hop on a call. Just sent, where do I pay?

How do I pay you money? The guy's like, here you go. He sent me, this is Salesforce, swear to God. He sent me a PDF I had to fill out. To buy Salesforce, I had to fill out a PDF with my credit card information and send it back to him. Isn't that crazy?

Dude, how does Salesforce not have a self-service option? Like, so again, and I know that I'm a little unique, right? And I said, look, man, I'm happy to hop on a call with you, Let's do that in the new year. Just like that other example, like, hey dude, just let me do this and then maybe you can upsell me later, but I just, I just wanna get this done.

Yes.

You know, and so it's not that salespeople are going away, it's that we need to realize that different people are different paths and want different experiences. It used to be everybody liked vanilla or like, well, the only option was vanilla. The technology wasn't there to enable some of this stuff. So now maybe I want sprinkles in my vanilla, you know, so we just need to be able to quickly account for that.

And I think, Yes. Will there, will there be a tier of customers that most companies should have where people can do some amount of self-service? I truly believe that even if you sell a product that's $100-something thousand a year, that there will be buyers. Think about buying a home. I cannot tell you the amount of people I know that moved to— I'm in Austin, Texas— and that moved here that literally looked at 5 homes digitally and bought one.

Mm-hmm.

You would be like, no, that's been a million-something dollars. And you're telling me you think people are too dumb to buy $100,000 software themselves? Give me a break. You know, like, so it's not about that. And then there needs to be a path for people to self-service or some version of that. The other part is like, I do think what it means to be a great seller really isn't that different, but it might be for some people.

And what I mean by that, what it means to be a great seller, if I think about this, Consultative, right? Okay. Let me really understand. Like you said, customer-centric, customer, like that was already like, they're really good about understanding the product, the use case, the buyer. Those were always what made a great seller, right?

So that's not necessarily like new, but it's gonna be required because nobody is gonna wanna get on the phone with somebody if like there's no value being added. If the salesperson doesn't know the space inside and out, doesn't understand the competitive landscape, strengths, weaknesses, and can't then therefore like give real value, you know, in the interaction, nobody's gonna wanna talk to a salesperson.

Mm-hmm.

What they need, they need someone to help them guide them through the process. They need someone to help to guide them through the process a lot of times and, you know, insert some salesmanship and things in there as well too. But that's how I look at it, man, is I just feel like You're gonna have to have the self-service path for people.

And then again, a person can talk to them after. And that more and more sellers are gonna have to look like A sellers if they wanna stay relevant. If your main skill is relationship building, I think you're in trouble.

Right.

I think if your main skill is like, oh, well, oh yeah, John's a good guy, I think you're in trouble in the next 5 to 10 years. I think there's a very high likelihood that type of seller's gonna be unemployed. They're gonna be used to making a few hundred thousand, maybe, you know, $400,000 a year, and all of a sudden find that they didn't adapt to understand how to leverage sales technology.

They didn't adapt to understand how customers' buyer behaviors changed and kind of develop some new tools in their toolkit as opposed to what made them successful for 20, 30+ years. And as consumer behavior evolves and we get less and less friction and we're busier and busier, it's gonna bleed into B2B. I mean, it's like I said, this isn't an if, it's just a when.

And so I think if I'm a seller today, I'm thinking about that. Okay, I've got this relationship building skill. I'm really good. Okay, cool. Check. Okay, man, I don't— outreach, this tool terrifies me. Salesforce, I don't know how to build reports in Salesforce. Like, dude, learn. You know, there's, I think, almost 1,500+ sales technologies now, man.

If you don't know You know how much more effective you can be if you just know how to use these tools correctly, right? And then 3 is how do I build rapport digitally or how do I give value without having to meet someone face to face? If I'm a seller, I need to develop all those tools or, you know, I run the risk of being obsolete in 5 to 10 years.

Yeah. You know, so it's interesting because a lot of the things that make the great salespeople great have not fundamentally changed.

Exactly.

But the bar To being like good enough to even be a sales professional is getting harder is kind of what I'm hearing from you.

It's like well, yeah, it's harder to be.

It's harder just to be okay now because you need to be able. You need to be able to do more things. You need to be a lateral thinker. You need to be able to use more tech. You need to be able to. You know, it's not good enough just to go for coffee once a month with someone and build a relationship and be nice, which I think.

You know, and it's interesting because New Zealand, you know, where I'm from, a lot of business is still done that way. And then Kiwi companies really struggle when they try and go offshore because they're used to everything, you know, that we always hear in New Zealand, oh, it's all about the relationships. And it's like, yeah, kind of.

Kind of. Kind of.

It's kind of about the relationship. No, it doesn't hurt. But I've had clients who don't like me. Like, I've had clients who don't like me when I was doing a lot of advisory work. And I've had clients say like, look, Like I wouldn't hang out with you as a friend. Like I don't really like you, but I trusted that you could solve my problem.

And that's—.

Yes.

And that's different, you know, it's not that we're buddies and, you know, that's okay. And I think a lot of salespeople, if they're still stuck in that mindset of like, I need to be friends and I need to build these relationships, like yeah, maybe, but actually you need to be able to do some other stuff too.

And if you don't do these other things, you're gonna fall flat. And that $200K a year that you've been comfortable on for the last 20 years, that's gonna drop because there'll be some young hungry kid who's gonna come through. He's just gonna outwork you, outsmart you, outtech you, and you're gonna become irrelevant.

Yeah. I remember, I mean, and this is 15, you know, this is a while ago. I remember when I was a frontline leader, my team, we were based in Phoenix, but we ran the Pacific Northwest territory. So we traveled up there a few times a month. It was like a hybrid team, like one of the original like hybrid where it's like mostly inside, but we would travel for, you know, big deals.

And I would tell my team, I'd go, look, you need to add— and again, this is 15+ years ago. I would say, look, you don't need another friend in Seattle. I don't need a buddy and I don't need a new buddy in Seattle. I got enough friends. I'm good. Now, I want to help people.

I want to see if I can help this person. I don't need a new buddy. If we become buddies, great. But it's not necessary. And, you know, like, that's what I would train my team on. Like, you know, like, look, if you focus on being someone who is of worth, someone who has value to give, you don't need to fall back on the relationship stuff.

And I think that that's what it is. You know, if you don't know your industry inside and out, you're not reading the trends in your space. Instead, you're just focused on my product, my product, and you're not focused on really becoming a professional and staying on top of the game. I think that's where people run into trouble because they think that the job is to make friends versus sales.

And I think that's the word there, and that's one we talk about a lot. It's It's professional. You know, sales, we need to get professional. You know, law, accounting, all these other professions, they're professional. You know, irrespective of who you speak to, like 9 times out of 10, you're speaking to a professional.

Sales, we're not. Like sales is still a little bit of the Wild West and depending on who you get, you might have a great experience or you might not. And that's not good enough. And I don't think that will be good enough in 5 years, you know, and that's That's something we've allowed for.

You hit it on the head. What we've— okay, there— accountants have GAAP, right? Generally Accepted Accounting Principles. That's in the US, right?

Yes.

I'm sure that New Zealand has the similar or maybe the same. And we accept that there in almost coding right now, we know that there's— look, there's people that can write really beautiful condensed code and people that can write code in a certain, you know, a little bit less like that. But in all, in every other aspect of a business organization, people follow a process and a system.

A company says, hey, this is how we write code. Here's our code base. Here's this documented. You write code like this. Sales has been able to operate as some rogue, you know, like, I'm just gonna do it my own way. Like, yeah. And we're like, okay, well, we can't crush, you know, that someone's like, bullsh*t.

Like, why isn't everyone just doing the best process? Everyone should be doing whatever the optimal process is and adding like their own 2 cents to it. Sure. That's fine. That's what separates, you know, okay from great. Right. I always have said that I can build an army of B players if I can get them to follow the process.

I can build an army of B players. The A, you know, again, like some of the other stuff is what might get you to an A. But we've got to realize that there are standardization of a sales process is not a bad thing.

No.

Right. Assuming we're optimizing for the best, you know, for truly the optimal customer experience. And if really, if you attack it that way of what's right for a customer, there really shouldn't be as much variability as there is because we should all be aligning on what's best for the customer. And that's where I think a lot of people are, you know, struggling.

It's a super interesting chat, Jake. And I could probably— I think we could go on about this for a while because I think fundamentally we think about these things fairly similarly. I really enjoy this. It's fascinating. I'm just gonna ask you the one last question we ask everyone who comes on the podcast though, which is knowing everything you know today, you go back to day one, Jake's just been given a phone, he's day one as a sales rep.

You know, what do you wish you knew? What's the one thing you wish you knew?

Well, I was fortunate, meaning, you know, like I did some telemarketing in college. So I kind of learned this idea of like a process and a script before I even joined the professional world. And that helped. I also really enjoyed stats for some reason. Like I wasn't that great at like trigonometry or algebra, but I really like gravitated towards stats.

And so I was always somebody who's really interested in using data to inform decision-making. And so I, there's, I've got, I had some kind of early wins in my sales career by just using data better than my peers and just like looking at patterns and just adapting. I'll tell you though, it did take me probably— I'll just kind of share a couple pieces of advice I got when I was probably, I think it was 27 or 28.

And if I'd known this earlier, it probably could have fast-tracked me even more. Same director of sales, 2 different scenarios. The first was around promotions and growth. And I remember I met with him and I said, I want to be, you know, this is my boss's boss. I said, I want to be a sales leader.

Like, that's what I want to do. I'd kind of like partially managed the inside team at the Tampa Rays for a little bit, but I was like, I want to go into management. And he goes, going into management isn't a goal. I said, well, yeah, of course it is. He's like, it's not a goal.

He goes, because I control it. I control if you get promoted because he's my boss's boss, and if he's going to hire someone, it would be him who hires that person. He's like, but what can you control? Well, you can control— here's what I look for. I look for activity. Are you constantly like leading by example?

Are you mentoring people around you? Hitting your sales numbers is the prerequisite. And I, for up until that point, I'd always thought like, if I just hit my numbers, I do really good, you'll get picked. But he helped to really completely reformat my brain to realize that if you wanna get promoted, you need to align to the unsaid expectations of everyone above you.

And they all have them. They just haven't told you what they are. Just ask them and they'll tell you usually, which is pretty great. So that was one. If you wanna move up faster as a, as a rep, align to what your boss's boss is looking for. What your boss is looking for doesn't matter.

She or he isn't the one that promotes you. It's their boss. So that was pretty eye-opening. And then the other one, similar timeframe, was around a sales process. I was naturally okay. I was very comfortable with discomfort. If you can't tell, like I've got a pretty thick skin. I can, you know, I sold long distance.

I mean, I sold vacation packages to get people to go to timeshares. Like, I mean, I got credit card numbers over the phone. You know, so I was seasoned coming into my first, my first job. So I had like a lot of like what you would consider like natural sales talent, I guess.

And I studied too. I read a ton of books. So I had a lot of techniques. Like I knew different techniques. I read the old school guys, the Brian Tracys, Zig Ziglars, those guys. And I mastered the sales techniques, but it took a little later to where I learned that sales is a science and a process, that there's actually a right and a wrong way to run a discovery process.

To explain what you do, to put a proposal together. And that was eye-opening. And same leader, different conversation. I just started at this company. It's probably 6 weeks into the job. There's 8 people in our training class. I was the second to last person who hadn't sold anything. And I'm like, what is going on?

Why haven't— man, I'm God's gift to sales. Why haven't I sold anything? And I'll never forget Evan. And I've told this story a bunch, but Evan, I was in, we're in his office. I was like, dude, I don't understand it. I think he had listened to a couple of my calls. He said, Jake, let me ask you this.

He goes, are you following the process? I was like, the script? Come on, man. But he's like, Jake, let me ask you this. We train 1,000+ people on this process. Do you think we're stupid? And I was like, no, no. He goes, then dude, he goes, drink the Kool-Aid and follow the process.

I said, All right. Well, you know, what I was doing wasn't working. And so I did it. And I literally, I remember I would read the script verbatim and people would just start to answer these questions. I'm like, what the f*ck? And then I would just read the stuff verbatim. And again, like, you know, I was working it in to be more natural.

And I'm like, oh my God, buyer behavior is very similar. And like, it was like the biggest light bulb of like, every seller should have a structured sales process that you can like, look, my discovery, these are my core outcomes. Then the next call, this is what I do. Like, he taught me that there's a process to sales.

And what did that do? Well, that allowed me then to master that process as a leader. I did get promoted like 3 months later, ran the top team for 2 and a half years, and out of 25 inside sales teams, then got moved to the field to get enterprise sales experience. And so then whenever I got, you know, the recruiter reached out for the head of sales at Glassdoor, I had a repeatable process and that's what anybody's looking for, right?

They want, do you have a framework that you can build a machine around? And so I would just, you know, kind of challenge every seller out there. I, you know, I wish I'd started that process sooner of really documenting what my process was. I was, they call it unconsciously competent, but that made me consciously competent.

And so, you know, take your career growth and your promotions into your own hands, have those conversations and Make sure that you have a process, a way that you interact and a process to execute against so that you can look at the different parts of your process and optimize what's working and what's not working.

So that would be the 2 pieces of advice I would give 22-year-old Jake.

I love how you gave 2. You know, you're such an overachiever. Jake, this has been brilliant. I've really enjoyed this chat and it's a shame we can't carry on, but Where can people find you?

It was a fun conversation.

Yeah, it was. Where can people find you? They want to connect with you, want to learn more about what you're doing. Maybe they want some help.

Where do they find you? Yeah, definitely. Yeah. Reach out to me on LinkedIn. That's probably the best spot. You can just type in Jake Dunlap. I'm the first one that pulls up. Should be, hopefully. And you know, like I said, make sure to follow. I put out, you know, 1 or 2 sales posts a day on different content.

You can also follow me on YouTube. We're doing a lot of video work on YouTube right now. Just type in Jake Dunlap Sales. And that's been growing like crazy. And you know, yeah, always feel free to DM me. DM me, reach out. Jake@scale.com is my email. Always happy to talk sales process, best practices, and help anyone I can.

Awesome, Jake. I'll chat to you soon. Thanks again.

All right. Thank you.