speaker-0: Afternoon, James. Thank you for coming on the True Conversation podcast. Awesome to have you on.
speaker-1: Hey Tom, pleasure to be here mate, good to catch up.
speaker-0: Yeah, really good mate. So yeah, let's get straight into it. You know, when I think of business development, I think of you to go on. It's like we know each other a while now. I know you've helped teams build out BD processes before, et cetera. You've been in this world quite a long time. It's obviously changing quite a lot, give us a bit of an overview of yourself and your role and how you ended up doing what you're doing today.
speaker-1: Yeah, of course. I guess I spent, now spent 12 years, best part of 12 years in like sort of helping people build BDR teams and AE teams. But like my, where I started was, used to be like hospitality and managed a restaurant and staff and that was all stressful. Went to a sales job in an office and it was at an SDR agency. And so like for eight years there, I learned to build high performing SDR teams specifically in like IT and tech industries. think I built nine different outbound SDR teams whilst I was there. I opened at the US office and built the first team that we had over there. like through that, see thousands of SDRs, trained hundreds myself. like, I guess what we started to see in the last five or six years was this like growth or this explosion of sales tools, right? And with the exposure I had to all our different clients. Me building different teams for them, working on different campaigns myself with those clients. Like I started to see just more more breakage and frustration and this like idea that outbound is really hard or is getting harder. And I, I'm not sure that's necessarily true. I think we've created an environment that is messier and more complex because of that mess. But the fundamentals are still the same. So that's why we built Stacky out of those. frustrations that I had to help people solve and make sense of the sales tech market. Because if you can do that and you can simplify and give people the right process back, then they can build the foundations and leadership actually get to coach and manage and sales people actually get to speak to prospects rather than switch tabs. And we can start to solve all those issues.
speaker-0: So yeah, I think that's a really good point in terms of like the tooling and did you think that obviously you can get too caught up in the tech and as it is developing now they are automation is obviously thousands of different tools you can buy. The fundamentals are still the same, right?
speaker-1: Yeah, absolutely. The number of times we go and like talk to customers and we talk to like VPs of sales or we talk to co-founders and, and SDR directors and we hear outbound is really hard these days or like outbound doesn't work anymore. we all, you can't say that and like, like really believe that's a hundred percent. Cause you know, for a fact, there are other companies that are doing it well. So what's broken or what's hard is that you've probably just not spent enough time. getting good fundamentals and good foundations in place for your team. So, you know, how to, how to objection handle, how to pick up the phone, structure a conversation, create follow-up and how to have that all track.
speaker-0: Cool, so yeah, obviously what you're saying James is there's so many tools out there nowadays in terms of AI, automation, loads of different tools you can buy and we have it all the time. You're speaking to these sales leaders, VP's of sales and they want to buy the next tool to solve the problem. But what you're saying is that although that's important, you need to start thinking of the fundamentals that actually get you the right results.
speaker-1: Yeah, absolutely. People love to say that, ⁓ sales tech, ⁓ our band doesn't work or cold calling doesn't work or email doesn't work. But it's categorically wrong because you know there are other businesses that are succeeding at it. So really what people normally, when they say that, what I'm thinking is like, okay, so is it a... like an internal training problem, internal understanding, like CRM structure, are the team like any good on the phones? Do they just like not have the right call structure? They've six months, we've all seen this, know like in tech companies that you've probably seen and worked with, like six months of product training before they even learn how to like structure a phone call, stuff like that. So you have to fix the fundamentals and whilst at Stacky we do advise on tech stack and the processes. Our goal is always to simplify. and peel, usually peel people's tech stack back first so that the teams can actually get better coaching on the fundamentals, get their time back, get their focus back so they build good habits and they build confidence in those fundamentals because without that you're never going to have a good process. You're never going to be able to scale.
speaker-0: Yeah, do you find that sometimes that step gets missed? So people, they're going to buy a latest tool, but they haven't got those fundamental building blocks below that, they're actually going to get the results.
speaker-1: Yeah, absolutely. Like, and like a key example of this is I did a webinar last year around, it was actually around dial infrastructure and connection rates. And I asked, this was, this was a group of like senior SDR and sales directors, people who had big teams, they've been in the industry for a long time. And I asked them beyond booking a meeting, what other good outcomes are your team monitoring for in their calls? And a good audience were, I didn't quite understand, like, Let me ask it another way. Are you tracking all of the follow-ups and are you going back to people that didn't take a meeting initially and like an even bigger section of the room didn't seem to understand that concept and like that for me is like one of the basic like fundamentals because If you don't understand that, all you're doing is you're scraping and shooting for that 3 % that are in the market at any one time, but you're just doing that with no previous knowledge every single week. And so you have to set up the CRM in the right way. You have to understand call structure and follow up. But people will go and they'll go and buy instantly and they'll fire lots and lots of emails out or they'll buy LinkedIn automation to start firing lots out. results they start getting from that without any of that follow-up stuff I've just explained. They'll think that is the, like those are their metrics. And so then to, know, the same goes for an SDR. If you have an SDR, book six, our SDR is book six a month. So if I need another 12 meetings, I need to hire another person or I need to hire, and you're just compounding a problem. Whereas if you pause and you really train people on really good fundamentals, I think most SDR teams can easily get to like booking double figures and perhaps beyond that.
speaker-0: Yeah, I guess that links to sort of how they're motivated and incentivized as well, because if they're driven just for that, obviously, everyone wants the meeting, the outcome, the bank qualified meeting, all those sort of things. But there's so many steps before that, that you're missing out so much of the early funnel pipeline that needs nurturing, especially in today's world with AI and all the research you can do. Like you said, most people aren't at that buying stage yet, are they? So How do you, if you're a sales leader looking to incentivise and motivate a team, what are the things you'd look out for doing that?
speaker-1: Yeah, so if you incentivize them on like, firstly, I always try and incentivize them on like qualified attended meetings. So that means they're gonna take care to book in the meetings at the right time. So then in order to book people in at the right time, you have to understand proper qualification and conversations with your ICP. And then the other thing you need to really train them on is just understanding their own metric. So you give someone a list on day one. 100 dials, 10 conversations, one meeting. So everyone's heard that if you have any background in cold calling. But that your goal is to slowly reduce the number of dials to those meetings, because if you're doing proper tracking, more and more of your meetings will come out of people you've already spoken to and just like helping them move the mindset and motivate them towards thinking about like me in three weeks, me in three months wants to come in and have it easier because me today has created follow up and stuck with conversations rather than just like not interested thanks and just motivate them to create their own like compounding effect, compounding effort. You people talk about like compound interest. It's kind of the same thing. Compound interest in speaking with us.
speaker-0: Every touch point is compounding the LinkedIn message, the connection, the email, the call a few weeks ago. It's all building up to eventually getting that meeting out of it.
speaker-1: Exactly. To really motivate that for the SDRs, it's hard to say, cool, you're behind target this month, but you're still doing the right thing. So I can see how many follow-ups you've created. I can see you are engaging with people. So you in six months is going to be really good when there's another person in the team who's just smashing it. That's why I go back to like just help them really understand the idea, metrics and their conversions, because the person who's smashing it isn't smashing it because they just got lucky that month or they did really well this month. They did it, they're doing it because of all, they've done all that stuff in the last few months and last few weeks. So I always, always try and just help people get a really good bearing on their own metrics because that, that means that then they can also like motivate themselves and understand they're moving in the right direction. Because I had, I had this three, or four times in the last quarter because of December's really busy, people find it harder to get people back on the phone and then come back in January. They think there's more people to follow up with and stuff. But if you know your data connect rate, say it's 100 to 1 FeasyMath, I've made 198 dials and I haven't booked a meeting. If you're listening back to them and your process is the same, you're right around the corner from probably two meetings. just got to keep at it.
speaker-0: Yeah, there's no in the process. then with that, also, it's quite a demotivating if you're doing that, you're not getting the results. But if you know you're doing all the right steps, it's proven system, you know, you're eventually going to get there. And it's the same when you're selling, isn't it? Obviously, the outcome is the deal. But it's all the little steps that build up to that that's important. And those those smaller wins that you need to recognise, right?
speaker-1: Absolutely. You have to do that and I think it's where, it's where like SDRs and BDR teams now find it hard, it's like when they're remote and stuff, it's harder to get that learning and that understanding and motivate each other. So I think it's become even more important that leadership need time and space back to give real coaching and real attention so that the SDRs who are remote, like learn all those metrics so they can start to motivate and understand their own process even more so than before.
speaker-0: Yeah, that's a great, great point. How was that changing? obviously, when me and you started this years ago, you'd be in the office and I a lot of companies do that. You'd have a team of SDRs, you'd have them all on the phones. was the atmosphere, the sales environment you're in. But now obviously, it's a hybrid approach and people working remote. How do you find the right people that are suitable for that culture?
speaker-1: Yeah, it's really hard. It's the easy answer. It's hard. I think it's always gone back to, and like it was the same maybe when we were hiring people into an office. People know that like the best SDRs are the ones who are hungry, driven, self motivating. They probably want to earn good money. Otherwise, why be in sales? I always remind people. And like they didn't mind some healthy competition probably, like all those sorts of things. But like, I think the thing that has changed now, if you have to hire them remote, I'd just really qualify on like ability or willingness to ask for help. Like it's so much more important. Like before, I always wanted to hire people who could do that. But if they had all the other attributes, I knew they're to be sat next to me. So I could, I'll help them anyway. Whereas now, like with that little bit more separation, I probably dial like the willingness to ask for help and the ability to take feedback quickly. I probably dial them up slightly higher, but Again, all the attributes there.
speaker-0: Yeah, rather than spending a couple of days, you know, really struggling or needing to adjust the message they reach out, but something's not working, how do we fix it? think. ⁓
speaker-1: exactly, like that willingness to make mistakes, minds say all those sorts of things which may be like cliches at times but you want someone who isn't worried about looking stupid by asking for help even if it's like a really simple... a marketing manager at one of the companies we work with asked, I spread a spreadsheet and they asked me to like make the column sizes wider I was like... my mind was like, you could just do that. But actually I hadn't shared ⁓ access the right way or whatever. So they see it, but they couldn't edit it. But like just that willingness to ask what it's probably quite like a such a minor thing. And yeah, you might look silly, but actually I was in the wrong. And it's just like minor like examples of that. I say I was a marketing manager, but for us to ask, they need to be willing to ask no matter how stupid the question is.
speaker-0: Yeah, and did you think the roles change slightly then in terms of obviously be a good SDI You've got to be good on the phone But you need to understand now data and automation and all the stuff you're talking around earlier around the pipeline Do you think that's changed or was it fundamentally you just got to be really good on the phone?
speaker-1: I think it's a little, probably a little bit of preference on that. I think if you want to progress into a management of any kind, if you want to progress to like rev ops, maybe you want progress to like enterprise focus, an understanding of all of that is really helpful because you're going to be responsible for tooling, reporting, multi-thread. You're going to have to have that good grip on everything. But if you're an SDR who wants to become a good AE... and you just want to earn loads of money. You can probably just be good at, yes, understanding ICP, messaging, objection handling, all these things, but you can just be good at the sales side of it. You don't need to necessarily know. It helps just for processes because you can sort things out and crack on faster. I think where people say it's changed loads is maybe because they haven't yet crossed that bridge to having maybe a good RevOps or an SDR leader who's capable of it. So I think maybe it's a bit of a yes and no answer.
speaker-0: It depends on your future career progression.
speaker-1: think so, and like make up of the rest of the team.
speaker-0: Yeah, yeah, it's similar to sales and if you're really good at sales and clothes unit, there's very few sales people that good at all of it. Yeah, you are good at closing or prospecting or proposal or relationship usually good at one or two of them, but not everything. So I guess it's similar. You could be really good data person really good on LinkedIn and email, crossing good emails. But then at the same time, you have somebody that's just really good at the phone and they just need the right data. And they're going to go and book you five, 10 meetings.
speaker-1: And that's like the exact direction we've moved our team in. three of us were all from ⁓ SDR agency backgrounds. So I know we can all cold call, we all book meetings, but one of us has much better skills around automations, APIs, AI tools and stuff like that. One of us is like the best cold caller. And then I can do a bit of both of those. I'm probably still like one of our better cold callers, but I'm also like operationally in the strategy. and stuff, can put it all together. We actually just said, well, let's all stop trying to all cold call and all prospect. And we've got, and so now one of the other guys is kind of like AI automation. People call him probably a go-to-market engineer. I prefer to call him like our AI and tech expert, because he's also really good at AI. But he just builds all of that, has that running in the background and feeds our other guy who's amazing at cold calling, who's also a good AI. And it just works so much better.
speaker-0: Rather than getting everybody to do everything and yeah, I can relate to that massively or with some of our clients They just they just want the right data with the right process behind them and just free their time up So they can actually get on the phone and close deals and do business, right? so what do you think's the biggest mistake people make then because obviously you built you beat you built stacky to help with this in terms of valuing the tools What's the biggest mistake people are making when hiring and building the SDR team? Yeah
speaker-1: Yeah, there's, we've kind of touched on like a few of them, but the main one, think, or the main, probably two. First one is actually the CRM setup. It's just not like set up or designed to favor prospecting. It's like, it was designed, it's great for customer management and it's great for managing once there is an opportunity and the deals and the customers. But like everything that happens before that. It's just not suited to like me consistently working through my list, trying to connect, have a conversation, put notes in, create follow ups. So they just have like... So what that means when they don't have that system, it means that the SDRs and BDRs are typically like finding data, finding accounts, chucking this in the CRM, giving it a blast, forget about it in a few days and they go and find more accounts. So they're just building a bigger, bigger mess. And that's when people start saying, oh, it doesn't work or it doesn't scale. like, oh, just building on bad foundations. And then the other mistake is just trying to give. And like, I think it actually comes from like with the best intentions, but companies trying to give SDRs really clever tools. They're trying to give them the clay was one for a while. I think luckily people realized, okay, that doesn't go in the hands of the SDRs.
speaker-0: Yeah.
speaker-1: but they try and give them a LinkedIn automation tool, they try and give them a scraper, they try and give them virtual sales rooms, they then give them a parallel dialer. And all of these tools are really smart and they're really helpful if used in the right way, if everyone understands the foundation. But actually what's happening is you're skipping all of that coaching and training and you're giving them tools that do something clever. Okay, but what about like speaking to 10 prospects every single day? Where's that gone? that, like, so people are focusing on the wrong metrics then as well. so like all of that, both of those things create the wrong metrics and activity monitoring. And the guys at Titan X and people like Jerry Hill do a great job of this. I know we both know Jerry. One of the main things you should just be focusing on is like how many conversations a day or an hour are your STLs having? That's like your North Star. There's so many people just aren't measuring.
speaker-0: And if they're spending hours each day building out workflows and trying to log into different platforms, just wasting their time, aren't they?
speaker-1: exactly. Then the other thing, this is what... Elijah woke who's great? SDR agency in North America, but actually in Canada and said the other day is like don't give drug users drugs and then tell them to be responsible with it. And that's kind of what a lot of like this S this sales tech space is like sales industrial complex is created in all these great tools SDRs now you better book loads of meetings and not break the email domain not burn your LinkedIn profile and not like tank our data connect rates as well. Well, they're just gonna, that's exactly what's gonna happen because you've given them too much. So there's like weird and wonderful things they can do. So they just keep testing things, testing things, testing things, but at no point is anyone giving any one thing enough time and focus to build the compound effect of pipeline.
speaker-0: Yeah, find that what's your thoughts on that in terms of data as well, because I found that a lot of times when I was in sales, it would always be we're buying new data, intent data, we partnered with the minimum and it was the same scenario where you would either give an access to the reps to build out their own data, or just bombarding them with too much. And actually, you're right, you probably got most of it in your CRM anyway, or the tools you have, but you're not using it right says.
speaker-1: that goes back to just like when I talk about like that CRM set up properly, everything I always try and have the teams I work with go back to like, like a clean list and giving too much data and then buying more data and buying more data, it should become, you build up this illusion for the SDR or BDR that what happens on this call doesn't really matter that much because I've got another thousand contacts to get through. And it's that like get through attitude that starts to just chip away at any of like the quality in their conversations because they have the solution that there's a massive ocean out there. I'm just going to find it somewhere else but you can't boil the ocean.
speaker-0: Yeah, I get that that boils down to the ICP as well, right? So obviously, if you're targeting booking meetings and you just book in meetings, but with the wrong personas, you sort of wasting your time. who needs to drive that discipline within the organization in terms of the ICP and who the SDR should be targeting?
speaker-1: That's got to go down to the leadership team and then that has to trickle down and be managed by the managers. The SDRs shouldn't be in charge of who they think the ICP is. They can give feedback on all of their calls and everything that's happening. If they're getting referred to other people, if messaging isn't landing, they can adjust their own call scripts. But in terms of who, the types of job titles and stuff like that and the ICP that they are adding to their list, that should be defined. by leadership.
speaker-0: I find that unbelievable that so many companies don't know that. know, like really, you know, even though with all these tools and all the information out of fingertips, they don't actually know who their ICP is. They don't really know who they should be targeting. So yeah, back to sort of like the tech stack thing and why you founded Stacky then obviously, what are the main reasons for that? What are the pain points you saw in the market to want to build Stacky and what exactly did you do?
speaker-1: Like all of the frustrations and all of the errors and the overlap the text rule the bloat the confusion This idea that outbound is getting harder all of that fed into why we built stacky and then a kind of like alongside all of those which is like actually happening to your SDRs and your AEs There's also then like I understand it I was in the same boat but the leadership have almost like this FOMO kind of like experience happening because everyone on LinkedIn if you believe it, like, accessing their pipeline every month just because they've used this tool or that tool. So everyone feels like they're missing out on things. when, and like it happens as well because there's then AI, there's pressure at the board for like AI, what are we doing with AI? What are we doing with AI? So then that gets pushed down. So then the leaders who kind of know maybe the SDRs and the AEs are just distracted and it's all a bit of a mess. They're like, oh, well, if we go and get this AI tool, it will help with this. And then I've released some of the pressure that's coming. down the chain and I've given the guys a shiny new tool. And so we just saw that happening time and time again and I think places like G2, Gartner, maybe Forrester, like a lot of the review sites and places people can go for like sales tech advice, they resell your intent data and then they are also like the biggest players with the biggest marketing budgets are able to just buy the top spots. So people were going to community, I think some of the best advice I see on sales tech is actually in communities that we're in and so we wanted to help people like understand how all these tools should fit together, where they've got overlap so that we can help them simplify which then helps to remove some of the the load the distraction and we just spent probably like the first three years of our business just building like really credible ⁓ I guess brand, like people now when they come to us, they know they're going to get like agnostic, neutral, honest advice rather than us pushing. None of our partners pay for the privilege. just naturally we get revenue shares on all of them, but we have partners like 10 or 12 companies in almost every category. And we'll make the recommendations based on that team's target market, CRM channels they want to work on because we spent 12 years building SDR teams and AEs.
speaker-0: And ironically, some of those companies you're talking around there, they have the best SDR teams, the best sales teams, the best data. They're very well funded. they have a very good sales outbound themselves, don't they? So they're selling into the marketing and sales professionals that are open to new ideas and technologies. So it's sort of a self-fulfilling thing. You've got to keep up with the Joneses and get the best tool and the best platform.
speaker-1: exactly it. I think that whole issue or perception just compounds and compounds. ⁓ Because I think like companies like Sales Loft and Outreach, guys at Nooks doing a good job with this, probably some others, Cobblinson as well maybe. They were all the first, like some of them, maybe like five years ago, but the companies that started like, created almost like sales influencers and stuff on LinkedIn by just pushing so much out there. So it became this, ⁓ yeah, we should do that, we should do that, we should do that. Kind of like, then they blew up and just created this environment where everybody thinks you need 10 different tools. ⁓ you need like probably three, four, then just consistent effort and like good tracking, good coaching.
speaker-0: So if you were to invest in three or four tools, what would they be? They're not necessarily names of the tools, but what sort of areas would you
speaker-1: So for me, would 100 % be, if I was starting from scratch, assuming we've already got the CRM covered, it would be most likely a waterfall data enrichment tool, or it might be like the regionally best one. Then it would be a dialer. good phone system that owns more of its own infrastructure and then third would be some sort of like enablement and coaching type platform like your conversation intelligence tools or tools like second body or hyperbound for like training because there's maybe a little bit of bias in there because my background's always been cold calling. ⁓ see it time and time again like if you can get the SDR teams better on the phone first before you give them anything else they're gonna perform better whereas if you give them the other stuff first and then try and get them to call, then it's just always going to be reluctant.
speaker-0: Yeah, I guess there's like few leavers you can pull isn't there in terms of like the data, making sure that's right. It's a connection, right, making sure you get through to them. And then when you do get through making sure the STR is trained and ready to go and make the most of it. It's so valuable. Now, if you actually get through and you get something on the phone, you've got to be able to deliver and get to the point quickly.
speaker-1: Yeah, like you'll know this like with the agency you're building is like the ability to understand the structure of a call really trumps your understanding of the product if the outcome you're looking for is like finding opportunities or booking meetings. Because cool, I like perfect examples when we used to, we prospected IT a lot so I worked on like a lot of virtualization campaigns. There's just like loads and loads of acronyms and stuff and
speaker-0: Yeah, yeah.
speaker-1: I still know that a supernode or a node is something inside either a virtual box or a SAN or a flash or something. It never came up, never needed. It's just not relevant, but the ability type structure of a call got me appointments. and this why our SDR team outperformed big global companies and their internal SDR teams who had more product training.
speaker-0: Definitely today then. With that process, obviously, you've been refining that over the years, but are you using AI now to help with that sort of thing? Obviously, now we can transcribe calls, record calls, have AI analyze these sort of things and compare different markets, different messaging. How important is that?
speaker-1: Yeah, and I think you're pointing to something there as well where like I think one of the best places for AI is in coaching and enablement not that it necessarily does it for your team and you know manager cool don't have to worry about anymore. AI is telling them how to be good at stuff. No, but and it's why I would go data dialer and then an enablement tool probably like one of these conversational intelligence or sort of AI training platforms so much all my calls would feed straight into it, train really good personas and then my team could just like practice with it every morning before they start calling real prospects and I could, I'd obviously coach and stuff as well and that's where AI I think can help with that efficiency. They can get, I can guarantee that they've had five or ten conversations in the morning before they even start picking up the phone. Whereas a years ago I'd have to hope they make a hundred dials and they start connecting to people before they start having the conversation. So those are some really good layers of AI. You can use AI to scrape your entire website and come up with cool scripts and stuff like that, which is okay, but again I would always just have human oversight to put it into this structure and actually don't give the SDR that access to the AI that's going to give them 12 different versions of a script. You need them to nail one, get really good at pitching in one way and then use their ability ability to ask questions, to navigate to other topics and stuff. If you have been 12 scripts, because AI said this persona would love this, this persona will love this, this persona will love this, they're just going to be more more distracted and confused and stressed out.
speaker-0: Yeah, so great for the research, great for sort of analysing the call script things, but that human element needs to come in at some point to sort of cut through all the noise and such,
speaker-1: Yeah, absolutely. You've got to give them direction at the end of the day,
speaker-0: Yeah, and how would you see this going in the next three years and because obviously is accelerating quite a lot I'm the same you look on LinkedIn. It's a lot around AI and then they create its tool and workflow and things and obviously, you know We're still booking meetings the traditional way on LinkedIn, but you know the all the different channels used to do five ten years ago It still worked but you can get a bit distracted by all this But where do you see it all going? You think it's the traditional ways are still going to work in three five years time. Yeah
speaker-1: like the There might be danger one day that AI can make a good cold call and replace that aspect of it. But I do think, and this is where I described earlier, where the three people in our team, we've adjusted actually who does what based on their skill set. But we're seeing already like the guy who's really good at AI understands tech and has the patience to sit and build like something that's going to monitor for signals and scrape lists and feed it to the cold caller. now basically books two or three meetings every single morning. I've been up so many calls, I don't care what you do for the of the day. I think AI is going to get better and better and be able to do targeting.
speaker-0: Yeah, good job man.
speaker-1: in the sense of finding the right targets and building the lists. Targeting this building, perhaps message and campaign ideation. And then you just, you can have one guy doing that to like a really high degree and then feeding five or six SDRs. And then those five or six SDRs, because they are... they've got more capacity and they can each be booking more meetings, they can feed even more AEs. I kind of think that's the direction I am taking the teams I work within. One customer, had two SDRs and their average like last year was, or was last year, maybe the year before, 12 meetings each a month, we adjusted it. Now their average is five, one just did 27. And so actually I've said to them, well, instead of hiring more SDRs, you don't need to do that because they've just doubled. You're going to need to or AEs, which is a much better net win for how they want to build that team.
speaker-0: Yeah. Yeah, so the more the better we can optimize AI better we can automate and get that process right. They're more efficient, the best yards are going to be in the more successful the team are going to be over.
speaker-1: Because again, like going back, like it means now the SDRs, and I think anyone who's like a good SDR team builder, probably good SDR coach, maybe like core calling coach, they're going to get more more work. Because if you get good go-to-market engineer type role, taking care of all of that, which is feed really good SDRs and those SDRs, they just need to know core structure, follow up and like consistency.
speaker-0: I get, know, for somebody that's really good at that and that's where their career wants to get, that's the dream, isn't it? From when we were starting, you've got a spreadsheet and a CRM with the wrong data and you're just literally calling into the abyss. To join a company now that has the right tech stat, that has AI, that has the data built, and you're just doing what you're good at and getting on the phone must be, you know, refreshing, right?
speaker-1: Yeah, absolutely. I think it's fun. The SDRs we see hitting, know, an SDR booking over 20 meetings a month, well that's their job. like, you know, when they start to get to like 30s, just... They love it and like they don't want and it proves what we've been trying to build with Stackey and everything we spoke about here is like they don't have the distractions because someone else is building lists, feeding it to them, doing like monitoring for them so they can just have conversations, make good notes, follow up. Yeah. And they just they just know they're getting more and more commission every month.
speaker-0: What are the main attributes for somebody like that? I guess it is somebody that's just money motivated that wants to book meetings at the of the day.
speaker-1: Yeah. Book meetings or book good opportunities. These days you have to preface that because so many people sell 50-minute meetings as that's good. Someone who's, guess, money motivated, wants to do well, enjoys that competition of how many can I book, how many opportunities can I find, how many conversations can I have. I think they're going to continue to probably be, they used to be some of the top performers, but I think they're going to just do really, really well. now and I think kind of thing like the gap between top performers and the bottom is going to be even bigger which means either the entry level or the standard for entry is going to be higher or they're just people going to have to really invest in like the first three months and have like a serious process and kpis to be like can this person get to the rest of the
speaker-0: I'll also say, do you find within, especially like enterprise, the ability to be able to really qualify a meeting and understand, especially in tech, right? Like it's not just looking at meeting numbers game. Like you get on the phone, like the SDR's role is not just to put that meeting, but to qualify it and get it ready to go. That's going to become the skill in my view.
speaker-1: And I think like when I say book meetings and I talk about book meetings, I think that sometimes people say, we're not just wanting booked meetings. When I say book meetings, I mean like qualified, it's an hour long, it's in the diary, there's a who it is, why it's there, what is potentially being solved and it could be something of interest in the next six months and there's like a reason for it. But again, it's probably one of like, that's like the fundamental stuff that we were talking about earlier. Like I think some people genuinely think someone that says yes, that's their job done. they said they were interested. Did they understand the whole thing? But I think because I spent so long at an SDR agency, where your deliverable is that meeting, that was just drilled into me so much and to my team so much that it's just one of fundamentals that think other companies lost when they realized you could build all these sequences and go crazy.
speaker-0: Yeah, yeah, focusing on the wrong things. And I guess, yeah, on that as well then. obviously, yeah, you've worked on both sides, but at what point would you either outsource this, because you go, right, we need some managed tools, we need good callers, we need to get going fast, we need to go to market quick. At what point do you outsource versus building all this in-house?
speaker-1: Yeah, I think like time obviously plays a factor in how quickly you need need pipeline and results Even if like you I think when people have you know They think they've got like plenty of time to make it work I always think like actually you should probably outsource some of it straight up straight away because if you are Otherwise, you're paying other people to work it out internally and like your SDRs to work it out Whereas actually an agency has everything set up everything good to go. They're ready They can start delivering fairly quickly and most good agents will help you map that into your own process internally so that eventually they can ramp down and you can as you ramp up your own team or like if you're building your own teams you get them focused on like the areas that return the most you know the process the verticals the ICP that works the best for you and gives you the best returns and you can try and scale outside of that yourself but that's a calculated risk so So you could also stick with an outsource agency to do that. I think it works in lots of different ways, most of time I'd actually say to people, rather than just build from scratch at a standing start, you're not going to get a return on the SDRs for a while. There's so much risk involved.
speaker-0: By the time you built the tool stack, hire the right people, train them up, you get any months into the project, right?
speaker-1: Exactly. I think people try to hire like two junior because it's maybe it's an experiment. It's the kind of like, I think the mindset that a lot of companies have. they want to, ⁓ SDRs we'll get, them 30k and we'll train them and they'll start to give us meetings. Like you should actually hire like a someone with good experience building outbound SDRs and AEs. If they're just a good SDR manager, I even not sure that's enough anymore. I think you need like a head of say or more senior who believes in SDRs and AE structures. That should be your first hire to then build an internal function because otherwise the SDRs, the graduate SDRs that you worked out or that you hired aren't going to work it out without a manager who knows how to manage an SDR team.
speaker-0: Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah. And you also need to have validated some of the messaging, the approach, like all that good stuff you need to do. It takes a while to do that, right? Whereas an agency would have that ready. They know what works and know what data to use. They know which tools to use. it's a bit quicker. So, yeah, just to be cautious on time, James, but just to wrap things up. So if you were starting, you had 90 days to build out like an SDR function, what are the three or four things you would do to get that in place?
speaker-1: Yeah, make sure the CRM would support like a clear list view for my team whilst they work and would track all of their notes and all the follow ups and had statuses to reflect meeting, follow up, emailed, more follow up, referral, wrong contacts. Make sure someone in my leadership team or myself had like a clear understanding of call structure, the lists, the ICPs, where are you going to get them from? So I get a data tool to then build those lists. those in and then I would make sure I also had, I'm about hiring and stuff like that, assuming you've got a recruiter or someone to do that, I'd make sure like I had an enablement tool and clear reporting on dials. connections, sessions, outcomes and meetings. If you can measure all of those and you know the right messaging and you have made sure you've got time in your calendar to do lots of coaching every single day, you're off to a better start than most.
speaker-0: Yeah, that's the foundations before you go and why you're hiring really good SDRs there that that's the foundations for success, right? Yeah, amazing, mate. And then so if people needed your help in terms of what both on, you know, helping build this out or advising on that, where can they find you and then also on the stacky side of things, where can they find you and get your help?
speaker-1: Yeah, absolutely. The best place to get in contact or find me, just LinkedIn is great or anyone's got a good enrichment tool, my number is very easily available, it's on everything I'm sure. So feel free to cold call me, yeah, stacky.io or build with Stacky on any socials, you'll find us.
speaker-0: Yeah, and I think honestly, you know, as founder to founder, what you built is amazing. It's not easy to break out of the corporate world to do what you've done and to also build a platform and, you know, to something like Stacky is such a useful tool that people need to start using, right? Because I've been there, I've been a leader where you're getting pressure to build all these tools and hire people and there's a lot going on and very quickly you can make a right mess of it. So I think it's really important to step back and review what tools you need. So well done with building that.
speaker-1: Thanks man. Really great talking to you, Tom. And yeah, I love everything you're building over there. So.
speaker-0: Cool. Thanks, James.
speaker-1: Hey Tom, pleasure to be here mate, good to catch up.
speaker-0: Yeah, really good mate. So yeah, let's get straight into it. You know, when I think of business development, I think of you to go on. It's like we know each other a while now. I know you've helped teams build out BD processes before, et cetera. You've been in this world quite a long time. It's obviously changing quite a lot, give us a bit of an overview of yourself and your role and how you ended up doing what you're doing today.
speaker-1: Yeah, of course. I guess I spent, now spent 12 years, best part of 12 years in like sort of helping people build BDR teams and AE teams. But like my, where I started was, used to be like hospitality and managed a restaurant and staff and that was all stressful. Went to a sales job in an office and it was at an SDR agency. And so like for eight years there, I learned to build high performing SDR teams specifically in like IT and tech industries. think I built nine different outbound SDR teams whilst I was there. I opened at the US office and built the first team that we had over there. like through that, see thousands of SDRs, trained hundreds myself. like, I guess what we started to see in the last five or six years was this like growth or this explosion of sales tools, right? And with the exposure I had to all our different clients. Me building different teams for them, working on different campaigns myself with those clients. Like I started to see just more more breakage and frustration and this like idea that outbound is really hard or is getting harder. And I, I'm not sure that's necessarily true. I think we've created an environment that is messier and more complex because of that mess. But the fundamentals are still the same. So that's why we built Stacky out of those. frustrations that I had to help people solve and make sense of the sales tech market. Because if you can do that and you can simplify and give people the right process back, then they can build the foundations and leadership actually get to coach and manage and sales people actually get to speak to prospects rather than switch tabs. And we can start to solve all those issues.
speaker-0: So yeah, I think that's a really good point in terms of like the tooling and did you think that obviously you can get too caught up in the tech and as it is developing now they are automation is obviously thousands of different tools you can buy. The fundamentals are still the same, right?
speaker-1: Yeah, absolutely. The number of times we go and like talk to customers and we talk to like VPs of sales or we talk to co-founders and, and SDR directors and we hear outbound is really hard these days or like outbound doesn't work anymore. we all, you can't say that and like, like really believe that's a hundred percent. Cause you know, for a fact, there are other companies that are doing it well. So what's broken or what's hard is that you've probably just not spent enough time. getting good fundamentals and good foundations in place for your team. So, you know, how to, how to objection handle, how to pick up the phone, structure a conversation, create follow-up and how to have that all track.
speaker-0: Cool, so yeah, obviously what you're saying James is there's so many tools out there nowadays in terms of AI, automation, loads of different tools you can buy and we have it all the time. You're speaking to these sales leaders, VP's of sales and they want to buy the next tool to solve the problem. But what you're saying is that although that's important, you need to start thinking of the fundamentals that actually get you the right results.
speaker-1: Yeah, absolutely. People love to say that, ⁓ sales tech, ⁓ our band doesn't work or cold calling doesn't work or email doesn't work. But it's categorically wrong because you know there are other businesses that are succeeding at it. So really what people normally, when they say that, what I'm thinking is like, okay, so is it a... like an internal training problem, internal understanding, like CRM structure, are the team like any good on the phones? Do they just like not have the right call structure? They've six months, we've all seen this, know like in tech companies that you've probably seen and worked with, like six months of product training before they even learn how to like structure a phone call, stuff like that. So you have to fix the fundamentals and whilst at Stacky we do advise on tech stack and the processes. Our goal is always to simplify. and peel, usually peel people's tech stack back first so that the teams can actually get better coaching on the fundamentals, get their time back, get their focus back so they build good habits and they build confidence in those fundamentals because without that you're never going to have a good process. You're never going to be able to scale.
speaker-0: Yeah, do you find that sometimes that step gets missed? So people, they're going to buy a latest tool, but they haven't got those fundamental building blocks below that, they're actually going to get the results.
speaker-1: Yeah, absolutely. Like, and like a key example of this is I did a webinar last year around, it was actually around dial infrastructure and connection rates. And I asked, this was, this was a group of like senior SDR and sales directors, people who had big teams, they've been in the industry for a long time. And I asked them beyond booking a meeting, what other good outcomes are your team monitoring for in their calls? And a good audience were, I didn't quite understand, like, Let me ask it another way. Are you tracking all of the follow-ups and are you going back to people that didn't take a meeting initially and like an even bigger section of the room didn't seem to understand that concept and like that for me is like one of the basic like fundamentals because If you don't understand that, all you're doing is you're scraping and shooting for that 3 % that are in the market at any one time, but you're just doing that with no previous knowledge every single week. And so you have to set up the CRM in the right way. You have to understand call structure and follow up. But people will go and they'll go and buy instantly and they'll fire lots and lots of emails out or they'll buy LinkedIn automation to start firing lots out. results they start getting from that without any of that follow-up stuff I've just explained. They'll think that is the, like those are their metrics. And so then to, know, the same goes for an SDR. If you have an SDR, book six, our SDR is book six a month. So if I need another 12 meetings, I need to hire another person or I need to hire, and you're just compounding a problem. Whereas if you pause and you really train people on really good fundamentals, I think most SDR teams can easily get to like booking double figures and perhaps beyond that.
speaker-0: Yeah, I guess that links to sort of how they're motivated and incentivized as well, because if they're driven just for that, obviously, everyone wants the meeting, the outcome, the bank qualified meeting, all those sort of things. But there's so many steps before that, that you're missing out so much of the early funnel pipeline that needs nurturing, especially in today's world with AI and all the research you can do. Like you said, most people aren't at that buying stage yet, are they? So How do you, if you're a sales leader looking to incentivise and motivate a team, what are the things you'd look out for doing that?
speaker-1: Yeah, so if you incentivize them on like, firstly, I always try and incentivize them on like qualified attended meetings. So that means they're gonna take care to book in the meetings at the right time. So then in order to book people in at the right time, you have to understand proper qualification and conversations with your ICP. And then the other thing you need to really train them on is just understanding their own metric. So you give someone a list on day one. 100 dials, 10 conversations, one meeting. So everyone's heard that if you have any background in cold calling. But that your goal is to slowly reduce the number of dials to those meetings, because if you're doing proper tracking, more and more of your meetings will come out of people you've already spoken to and just like helping them move the mindset and motivate them towards thinking about like me in three weeks, me in three months wants to come in and have it easier because me today has created follow up and stuck with conversations rather than just like not interested thanks and just motivate them to create their own like compounding effect, compounding effort. You people talk about like compound interest. It's kind of the same thing. Compound interest in speaking with us.
speaker-0: Every touch point is compounding the LinkedIn message, the connection, the email, the call a few weeks ago. It's all building up to eventually getting that meeting out of it.
speaker-1: Exactly. To really motivate that for the SDRs, it's hard to say, cool, you're behind target this month, but you're still doing the right thing. So I can see how many follow-ups you've created. I can see you are engaging with people. So you in six months is going to be really good when there's another person in the team who's just smashing it. That's why I go back to like just help them really understand the idea, metrics and their conversions, because the person who's smashing it isn't smashing it because they just got lucky that month or they did really well this month. They did it, they're doing it because of all, they've done all that stuff in the last few months and last few weeks. So I always, always try and just help people get a really good bearing on their own metrics because that, that means that then they can also like motivate themselves and understand they're moving in the right direction. Because I had, I had this three, or four times in the last quarter because of December's really busy, people find it harder to get people back on the phone and then come back in January. They think there's more people to follow up with and stuff. But if you know your data connect rate, say it's 100 to 1 FeasyMath, I've made 198 dials and I haven't booked a meeting. If you're listening back to them and your process is the same, you're right around the corner from probably two meetings. just got to keep at it.
speaker-0: Yeah, there's no in the process. then with that, also, it's quite a demotivating if you're doing that, you're not getting the results. But if you know you're doing all the right steps, it's proven system, you know, you're eventually going to get there. And it's the same when you're selling, isn't it? Obviously, the outcome is the deal. But it's all the little steps that build up to that that's important. And those those smaller wins that you need to recognise, right?
speaker-1: Absolutely. You have to do that and I think it's where, it's where like SDRs and BDR teams now find it hard, it's like when they're remote and stuff, it's harder to get that learning and that understanding and motivate each other. So I think it's become even more important that leadership need time and space back to give real coaching and real attention so that the SDRs who are remote, like learn all those metrics so they can start to motivate and understand their own process even more so than before.
speaker-0: Yeah, that's a great, great point. How was that changing? obviously, when me and you started this years ago, you'd be in the office and I a lot of companies do that. You'd have a team of SDRs, you'd have them all on the phones. was the atmosphere, the sales environment you're in. But now obviously, it's a hybrid approach and people working remote. How do you find the right people that are suitable for that culture?
speaker-1: Yeah, it's really hard. It's the easy answer. It's hard. I think it's always gone back to, and like it was the same maybe when we were hiring people into an office. People know that like the best SDRs are the ones who are hungry, driven, self motivating. They probably want to earn good money. Otherwise, why be in sales? I always remind people. And like they didn't mind some healthy competition probably, like all those sorts of things. But like, I think the thing that has changed now, if you have to hire them remote, I'd just really qualify on like ability or willingness to ask for help. Like it's so much more important. Like before, I always wanted to hire people who could do that. But if they had all the other attributes, I knew they're to be sat next to me. So I could, I'll help them anyway. Whereas now, like with that little bit more separation, I probably dial like the willingness to ask for help and the ability to take feedback quickly. I probably dial them up slightly higher, but Again, all the attributes there.
speaker-0: Yeah, rather than spending a couple of days, you know, really struggling or needing to adjust the message they reach out, but something's not working, how do we fix it? think. ⁓
speaker-1: exactly, like that willingness to make mistakes, minds say all those sorts of things which may be like cliches at times but you want someone who isn't worried about looking stupid by asking for help even if it's like a really simple... a marketing manager at one of the companies we work with asked, I spread a spreadsheet and they asked me to like make the column sizes wider I was like... my mind was like, you could just do that. But actually I hadn't shared ⁓ access the right way or whatever. So they see it, but they couldn't edit it. But like just that willingness to ask what it's probably quite like a such a minor thing. And yeah, you might look silly, but actually I was in the wrong. And it's just like minor like examples of that. I say I was a marketing manager, but for us to ask, they need to be willing to ask no matter how stupid the question is.
speaker-0: Yeah, and did you think the roles change slightly then in terms of obviously be a good SDI You've got to be good on the phone But you need to understand now data and automation and all the stuff you're talking around earlier around the pipeline Do you think that's changed or was it fundamentally you just got to be really good on the phone?
speaker-1: I think it's a little, probably a little bit of preference on that. I think if you want to progress into a management of any kind, if you want to progress to like rev ops, maybe you want progress to like enterprise focus, an understanding of all of that is really helpful because you're going to be responsible for tooling, reporting, multi-thread. You're going to have to have that good grip on everything. But if you're an SDR who wants to become a good AE... and you just want to earn loads of money. You can probably just be good at, yes, understanding ICP, messaging, objection handling, all these things, but you can just be good at the sales side of it. You don't need to necessarily know. It helps just for processes because you can sort things out and crack on faster. I think where people say it's changed loads is maybe because they haven't yet crossed that bridge to having maybe a good RevOps or an SDR leader who's capable of it. So I think maybe it's a bit of a yes and no answer.
speaker-0: It depends on your future career progression.
speaker-1: think so, and like make up of the rest of the team.
speaker-0: Yeah, yeah, it's similar to sales and if you're really good at sales and clothes unit, there's very few sales people that good at all of it. Yeah, you are good at closing or prospecting or proposal or relationship usually good at one or two of them, but not everything. So I guess it's similar. You could be really good data person really good on LinkedIn and email, crossing good emails. But then at the same time, you have somebody that's just really good at the phone and they just need the right data. And they're going to go and book you five, 10 meetings.
speaker-1: And that's like the exact direction we've moved our team in. three of us were all from ⁓ SDR agency backgrounds. So I know we can all cold call, we all book meetings, but one of us has much better skills around automations, APIs, AI tools and stuff like that. One of us is like the best cold caller. And then I can do a bit of both of those. I'm probably still like one of our better cold callers, but I'm also like operationally in the strategy. and stuff, can put it all together. We actually just said, well, let's all stop trying to all cold call and all prospect. And we've got, and so now one of the other guys is kind of like AI automation. People call him probably a go-to-market engineer. I prefer to call him like our AI and tech expert, because he's also really good at AI. But he just builds all of that, has that running in the background and feeds our other guy who's amazing at cold calling, who's also a good AI. And it just works so much better.
speaker-0: Rather than getting everybody to do everything and yeah, I can relate to that massively or with some of our clients They just they just want the right data with the right process behind them and just free their time up So they can actually get on the phone and close deals and do business, right? so what do you think's the biggest mistake people make then because obviously you built you beat you built stacky to help with this in terms of valuing the tools What's the biggest mistake people are making when hiring and building the SDR team? Yeah
speaker-1: Yeah, there's, we've kind of touched on like a few of them, but the main one, think, or the main, probably two. First one is actually the CRM setup. It's just not like set up or designed to favor prospecting. It's like, it was designed, it's great for customer management and it's great for managing once there is an opportunity and the deals and the customers. But like everything that happens before that. It's just not suited to like me consistently working through my list, trying to connect, have a conversation, put notes in, create follow ups. So they just have like... So what that means when they don't have that system, it means that the SDRs and BDRs are typically like finding data, finding accounts, chucking this in the CRM, giving it a blast, forget about it in a few days and they go and find more accounts. So they're just building a bigger, bigger mess. And that's when people start saying, oh, it doesn't work or it doesn't scale. like, oh, just building on bad foundations. And then the other mistake is just trying to give. And like, I think it actually comes from like with the best intentions, but companies trying to give SDRs really clever tools. They're trying to give them the clay was one for a while. I think luckily people realized, okay, that doesn't go in the hands of the SDRs.
speaker-0: Yeah.
speaker-1: but they try and give them a LinkedIn automation tool, they try and give them a scraper, they try and give them virtual sales rooms, they then give them a parallel dialer. And all of these tools are really smart and they're really helpful if used in the right way, if everyone understands the foundation. But actually what's happening is you're skipping all of that coaching and training and you're giving them tools that do something clever. Okay, but what about like speaking to 10 prospects every single day? Where's that gone? that, like, so people are focusing on the wrong metrics then as well. so like all of that, both of those things create the wrong metrics and activity monitoring. And the guys at Titan X and people like Jerry Hill do a great job of this. I know we both know Jerry. One of the main things you should just be focusing on is like how many conversations a day or an hour are your STLs having? That's like your North Star. There's so many people just aren't measuring.
speaker-0: And if they're spending hours each day building out workflows and trying to log into different platforms, just wasting their time, aren't they?
speaker-1: exactly. Then the other thing, this is what... Elijah woke who's great? SDR agency in North America, but actually in Canada and said the other day is like don't give drug users drugs and then tell them to be responsible with it. And that's kind of what a lot of like this S this sales tech space is like sales industrial complex is created in all these great tools SDRs now you better book loads of meetings and not break the email domain not burn your LinkedIn profile and not like tank our data connect rates as well. Well, they're just gonna, that's exactly what's gonna happen because you've given them too much. So there's like weird and wonderful things they can do. So they just keep testing things, testing things, testing things, but at no point is anyone giving any one thing enough time and focus to build the compound effect of pipeline.
speaker-0: Yeah, find that what's your thoughts on that in terms of data as well, because I found that a lot of times when I was in sales, it would always be we're buying new data, intent data, we partnered with the minimum and it was the same scenario where you would either give an access to the reps to build out their own data, or just bombarding them with too much. And actually, you're right, you probably got most of it in your CRM anyway, or the tools you have, but you're not using it right says.
speaker-1: that goes back to just like when I talk about like that CRM set up properly, everything I always try and have the teams I work with go back to like, like a clean list and giving too much data and then buying more data and buying more data, it should become, you build up this illusion for the SDR or BDR that what happens on this call doesn't really matter that much because I've got another thousand contacts to get through. And it's that like get through attitude that starts to just chip away at any of like the quality in their conversations because they have the solution that there's a massive ocean out there. I'm just going to find it somewhere else but you can't boil the ocean.
speaker-0: Yeah, I get that that boils down to the ICP as well, right? So obviously, if you're targeting booking meetings and you just book in meetings, but with the wrong personas, you sort of wasting your time. who needs to drive that discipline within the organization in terms of the ICP and who the SDR should be targeting?
speaker-1: That's got to go down to the leadership team and then that has to trickle down and be managed by the managers. The SDRs shouldn't be in charge of who they think the ICP is. They can give feedback on all of their calls and everything that's happening. If they're getting referred to other people, if messaging isn't landing, they can adjust their own call scripts. But in terms of who, the types of job titles and stuff like that and the ICP that they are adding to their list, that should be defined. by leadership.
speaker-0: I find that unbelievable that so many companies don't know that. know, like really, you know, even though with all these tools and all the information out of fingertips, they don't actually know who their ICP is. They don't really know who they should be targeting. So yeah, back to sort of like the tech stack thing and why you founded Stacky then obviously, what are the main reasons for that? What are the pain points you saw in the market to want to build Stacky and what exactly did you do?
speaker-1: Like all of the frustrations and all of the errors and the overlap the text rule the bloat the confusion This idea that outbound is getting harder all of that fed into why we built stacky and then a kind of like alongside all of those which is like actually happening to your SDRs and your AEs There's also then like I understand it I was in the same boat but the leadership have almost like this FOMO kind of like experience happening because everyone on LinkedIn if you believe it, like, accessing their pipeline every month just because they've used this tool or that tool. So everyone feels like they're missing out on things. when, and like it happens as well because there's then AI, there's pressure at the board for like AI, what are we doing with AI? What are we doing with AI? So then that gets pushed down. So then the leaders who kind of know maybe the SDRs and the AEs are just distracted and it's all a bit of a mess. They're like, oh, well, if we go and get this AI tool, it will help with this. And then I've released some of the pressure that's coming. down the chain and I've given the guys a shiny new tool. And so we just saw that happening time and time again and I think places like G2, Gartner, maybe Forrester, like a lot of the review sites and places people can go for like sales tech advice, they resell your intent data and then they are also like the biggest players with the biggest marketing budgets are able to just buy the top spots. So people were going to community, I think some of the best advice I see on sales tech is actually in communities that we're in and so we wanted to help people like understand how all these tools should fit together, where they've got overlap so that we can help them simplify which then helps to remove some of the the load the distraction and we just spent probably like the first three years of our business just building like really credible ⁓ I guess brand, like people now when they come to us, they know they're going to get like agnostic, neutral, honest advice rather than us pushing. None of our partners pay for the privilege. just naturally we get revenue shares on all of them, but we have partners like 10 or 12 companies in almost every category. And we'll make the recommendations based on that team's target market, CRM channels they want to work on because we spent 12 years building SDR teams and AEs.
speaker-0: And ironically, some of those companies you're talking around there, they have the best SDR teams, the best sales teams, the best data. They're very well funded. they have a very good sales outbound themselves, don't they? So they're selling into the marketing and sales professionals that are open to new ideas and technologies. So it's sort of a self-fulfilling thing. You've got to keep up with the Joneses and get the best tool and the best platform.
speaker-1: exactly it. I think that whole issue or perception just compounds and compounds. ⁓ Because I think like companies like Sales Loft and Outreach, guys at Nooks doing a good job with this, probably some others, Cobblinson as well maybe. They were all the first, like some of them, maybe like five years ago, but the companies that started like, created almost like sales influencers and stuff on LinkedIn by just pushing so much out there. So it became this, ⁓ yeah, we should do that, we should do that, we should do that. Kind of like, then they blew up and just created this environment where everybody thinks you need 10 different tools. ⁓ you need like probably three, four, then just consistent effort and like good tracking, good coaching.
speaker-0: So if you were to invest in three or four tools, what would they be? They're not necessarily names of the tools, but what sort of areas would you
speaker-1: So for me, would 100 % be, if I was starting from scratch, assuming we've already got the CRM covered, it would be most likely a waterfall data enrichment tool, or it might be like the regionally best one. Then it would be a dialer. good phone system that owns more of its own infrastructure and then third would be some sort of like enablement and coaching type platform like your conversation intelligence tools or tools like second body or hyperbound for like training because there's maybe a little bit of bias in there because my background's always been cold calling. ⁓ see it time and time again like if you can get the SDR teams better on the phone first before you give them anything else they're gonna perform better whereas if you give them the other stuff first and then try and get them to call, then it's just always going to be reluctant.
speaker-0: Yeah, I guess there's like few leavers you can pull isn't there in terms of like the data, making sure that's right. It's a connection, right, making sure you get through to them. And then when you do get through making sure the STR is trained and ready to go and make the most of it. It's so valuable. Now, if you actually get through and you get something on the phone, you've got to be able to deliver and get to the point quickly.
speaker-1: Yeah, like you'll know this like with the agency you're building is like the ability to understand the structure of a call really trumps your understanding of the product if the outcome you're looking for is like finding opportunities or booking meetings. Because cool, I like perfect examples when we used to, we prospected IT a lot so I worked on like a lot of virtualization campaigns. There's just like loads and loads of acronyms and stuff and
speaker-0: Yeah, yeah.
speaker-1: I still know that a supernode or a node is something inside either a virtual box or a SAN or a flash or something. It never came up, never needed. It's just not relevant, but the ability type structure of a call got me appointments. and this why our SDR team outperformed big global companies and their internal SDR teams who had more product training.
speaker-0: Definitely today then. With that process, obviously, you've been refining that over the years, but are you using AI now to help with that sort of thing? Obviously, now we can transcribe calls, record calls, have AI analyze these sort of things and compare different markets, different messaging. How important is that?
speaker-1: Yeah, and I think you're pointing to something there as well where like I think one of the best places for AI is in coaching and enablement not that it necessarily does it for your team and you know manager cool don't have to worry about anymore. AI is telling them how to be good at stuff. No, but and it's why I would go data dialer and then an enablement tool probably like one of these conversational intelligence or sort of AI training platforms so much all my calls would feed straight into it, train really good personas and then my team could just like practice with it every morning before they start calling real prospects and I could, I'd obviously coach and stuff as well and that's where AI I think can help with that efficiency. They can get, I can guarantee that they've had five or ten conversations in the morning before they even start picking up the phone. Whereas a years ago I'd have to hope they make a hundred dials and they start connecting to people before they start having the conversation. So those are some really good layers of AI. You can use AI to scrape your entire website and come up with cool scripts and stuff like that, which is okay, but again I would always just have human oversight to put it into this structure and actually don't give the SDR that access to the AI that's going to give them 12 different versions of a script. You need them to nail one, get really good at pitching in one way and then use their ability ability to ask questions, to navigate to other topics and stuff. If you have been 12 scripts, because AI said this persona would love this, this persona will love this, this persona will love this, they're just going to be more more distracted and confused and stressed out.
speaker-0: Yeah, so great for the research, great for sort of analysing the call script things, but that human element needs to come in at some point to sort of cut through all the noise and such,
speaker-1: Yeah, absolutely. You've got to give them direction at the end of the day,
speaker-0: Yeah, and how would you see this going in the next three years and because obviously is accelerating quite a lot I'm the same you look on LinkedIn. It's a lot around AI and then they create its tool and workflow and things and obviously, you know We're still booking meetings the traditional way on LinkedIn, but you know the all the different channels used to do five ten years ago It still worked but you can get a bit distracted by all this But where do you see it all going? You think it's the traditional ways are still going to work in three five years time. Yeah
speaker-1: like the There might be danger one day that AI can make a good cold call and replace that aspect of it. But I do think, and this is where I described earlier, where the three people in our team, we've adjusted actually who does what based on their skill set. But we're seeing already like the guy who's really good at AI understands tech and has the patience to sit and build like something that's going to monitor for signals and scrape lists and feed it to the cold caller. now basically books two or three meetings every single morning. I've been up so many calls, I don't care what you do for the of the day. I think AI is going to get better and better and be able to do targeting.
speaker-0: Yeah, good job man.
speaker-1: in the sense of finding the right targets and building the lists. Targeting this building, perhaps message and campaign ideation. And then you just, you can have one guy doing that to like a really high degree and then feeding five or six SDRs. And then those five or six SDRs, because they are... they've got more capacity and they can each be booking more meetings, they can feed even more AEs. I kind of think that's the direction I am taking the teams I work within. One customer, had two SDRs and their average like last year was, or was last year, maybe the year before, 12 meetings each a month, we adjusted it. Now their average is five, one just did 27. And so actually I've said to them, well, instead of hiring more SDRs, you don't need to do that because they've just doubled. You're going to need to or AEs, which is a much better net win for how they want to build that team.
speaker-0: Yeah. Yeah, so the more the better we can optimize AI better we can automate and get that process right. They're more efficient, the best yards are going to be in the more successful the team are going to be over.
speaker-1: Because again, like going back, like it means now the SDRs, and I think anyone who's like a good SDR team builder, probably good SDR coach, maybe like core calling coach, they're going to get more more work. Because if you get good go-to-market engineer type role, taking care of all of that, which is feed really good SDRs and those SDRs, they just need to know core structure, follow up and like consistency.
speaker-0: I get, know, for somebody that's really good at that and that's where their career wants to get, that's the dream, isn't it? From when we were starting, you've got a spreadsheet and a CRM with the wrong data and you're just literally calling into the abyss. To join a company now that has the right tech stat, that has AI, that has the data built, and you're just doing what you're good at and getting on the phone must be, you know, refreshing, right?
speaker-1: Yeah, absolutely. I think it's fun. The SDRs we see hitting, know, an SDR booking over 20 meetings a month, well that's their job. like, you know, when they start to get to like 30s, just... They love it and like they don't want and it proves what we've been trying to build with Stackey and everything we spoke about here is like they don't have the distractions because someone else is building lists, feeding it to them, doing like monitoring for them so they can just have conversations, make good notes, follow up. Yeah. And they just they just know they're getting more and more commission every month.
speaker-0: What are the main attributes for somebody like that? I guess it is somebody that's just money motivated that wants to book meetings at the of the day.
speaker-1: Yeah. Book meetings or book good opportunities. These days you have to preface that because so many people sell 50-minute meetings as that's good. Someone who's, guess, money motivated, wants to do well, enjoys that competition of how many can I book, how many opportunities can I find, how many conversations can I have. I think they're going to continue to probably be, they used to be some of the top performers, but I think they're going to just do really, really well. now and I think kind of thing like the gap between top performers and the bottom is going to be even bigger which means either the entry level or the standard for entry is going to be higher or they're just people going to have to really invest in like the first three months and have like a serious process and kpis to be like can this person get to the rest of the
speaker-0: I'll also say, do you find within, especially like enterprise, the ability to be able to really qualify a meeting and understand, especially in tech, right? Like it's not just looking at meeting numbers game. Like you get on the phone, like the SDR's role is not just to put that meeting, but to qualify it and get it ready to go. That's going to become the skill in my view.
speaker-1: And I think like when I say book meetings and I talk about book meetings, I think that sometimes people say, we're not just wanting booked meetings. When I say book meetings, I mean like qualified, it's an hour long, it's in the diary, there's a who it is, why it's there, what is potentially being solved and it could be something of interest in the next six months and there's like a reason for it. But again, it's probably one of like, that's like the fundamental stuff that we were talking about earlier. Like I think some people genuinely think someone that says yes, that's their job done. they said they were interested. Did they understand the whole thing? But I think because I spent so long at an SDR agency, where your deliverable is that meeting, that was just drilled into me so much and to my team so much that it's just one of fundamentals that think other companies lost when they realized you could build all these sequences and go crazy.
speaker-0: Yeah, yeah, focusing on the wrong things. And I guess, yeah, on that as well then. obviously, yeah, you've worked on both sides, but at what point would you either outsource this, because you go, right, we need some managed tools, we need good callers, we need to get going fast, we need to go to market quick. At what point do you outsource versus building all this in-house?
speaker-1: Yeah, I think like time obviously plays a factor in how quickly you need need pipeline and results Even if like you I think when people have you know They think they've got like plenty of time to make it work I always think like actually you should probably outsource some of it straight up straight away because if you are Otherwise, you're paying other people to work it out internally and like your SDRs to work it out Whereas actually an agency has everything set up everything good to go. They're ready They can start delivering fairly quickly and most good agents will help you map that into your own process internally so that eventually they can ramp down and you can as you ramp up your own team or like if you're building your own teams you get them focused on like the areas that return the most you know the process the verticals the ICP that works the best for you and gives you the best returns and you can try and scale outside of that yourself but that's a calculated risk so So you could also stick with an outsource agency to do that. I think it works in lots of different ways, most of time I'd actually say to people, rather than just build from scratch at a standing start, you're not going to get a return on the SDRs for a while. There's so much risk involved.
speaker-0: By the time you built the tool stack, hire the right people, train them up, you get any months into the project, right?
speaker-1: Exactly. I think people try to hire like two junior because it's maybe it's an experiment. It's the kind of like, I think the mindset that a lot of companies have. they want to, ⁓ SDRs we'll get, them 30k and we'll train them and they'll start to give us meetings. Like you should actually hire like a someone with good experience building outbound SDRs and AEs. If they're just a good SDR manager, I even not sure that's enough anymore. I think you need like a head of say or more senior who believes in SDRs and AE structures. That should be your first hire to then build an internal function because otherwise the SDRs, the graduate SDRs that you worked out or that you hired aren't going to work it out without a manager who knows how to manage an SDR team.
speaker-0: Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah. And you also need to have validated some of the messaging, the approach, like all that good stuff you need to do. It takes a while to do that, right? Whereas an agency would have that ready. They know what works and know what data to use. They know which tools to use. it's a bit quicker. So, yeah, just to be cautious on time, James, but just to wrap things up. So if you were starting, you had 90 days to build out like an SDR function, what are the three or four things you would do to get that in place?
speaker-1: Yeah, make sure the CRM would support like a clear list view for my team whilst they work and would track all of their notes and all the follow ups and had statuses to reflect meeting, follow up, emailed, more follow up, referral, wrong contacts. Make sure someone in my leadership team or myself had like a clear understanding of call structure, the lists, the ICPs, where are you going to get them from? So I get a data tool to then build those lists. those in and then I would make sure I also had, I'm about hiring and stuff like that, assuming you've got a recruiter or someone to do that, I'd make sure like I had an enablement tool and clear reporting on dials. connections, sessions, outcomes and meetings. If you can measure all of those and you know the right messaging and you have made sure you've got time in your calendar to do lots of coaching every single day, you're off to a better start than most.
speaker-0: Yeah, that's the foundations before you go and why you're hiring really good SDRs there that that's the foundations for success, right? Yeah, amazing, mate. And then so if people needed your help in terms of what both on, you know, helping build this out or advising on that, where can they find you and then also on the stacky side of things, where can they find you and get your help?
speaker-1: Yeah, absolutely. The best place to get in contact or find me, just LinkedIn is great or anyone's got a good enrichment tool, my number is very easily available, it's on everything I'm sure. So feel free to cold call me, yeah, stacky.io or build with Stacky on any socials, you'll find us.
speaker-0: Yeah, and I think honestly, you know, as founder to founder, what you built is amazing. It's not easy to break out of the corporate world to do what you've done and to also build a platform and, you know, to something like Stacky is such a useful tool that people need to start using, right? Because I've been there, I've been a leader where you're getting pressure to build all these tools and hire people and there's a lot going on and very quickly you can make a right mess of it. So I think it's really important to step back and review what tools you need. So well done with building that.
speaker-1: Thanks man. Really great talking to you, Tom. And yeah, I love everything you're building over there. So.
speaker-0: Cool. Thanks, James.
