The Sales Evangelist

I believe in doing BIG THINGS! You should be earning 6 figures easily as a sales rep. But chances are you are not...yet! Sales is the most important department in every company but many sellers are never taught how to effectively sell, much less how to earn their way to high-income status. My own career limped along until a company I worked for invested in sales training to help me succeed. Immediately afterward, I closed a deal worth 4X what the... I believe in doing BIG THINGS! You should be earning 6 figures easily as a sales rep. But chances are you are not...yet! Sales is the most important department in every company but many sellers are never taught how to effectively sell, much less how to earn their way to high-income status. My own career limped along until a company I worked for invested in sales training to help me succeed. Immediately afterward, I closed a deal worth 4X what the company spent on me and saw hockey-stick improvement in my performance. So I started a podcast to “Evangelize” what was working. Today I interview the world's best sales experts, successful sellers, sales leaders and entrepreneurs who share their strategies to succeed in sales right now: folks like Jeffrey Gitomer, Jill Konrath, Bob Burg, and Guy Kawasaki to name a few. They share actionable insights and stories that will encourage, challenge, and motivate you to hustle your way to top income status. If you’re someone looking to take off in your sales career and earn the income you deserve, hit subscribe and let’s start doing BIG THINGS!

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this episode is brought you in part by the following ts sponsors it takes a lot to grow your business a lot of audience attraction a lot of lead scoring and all the channel managing you can manage plus a lot of long days late nights and weekend a lot of wishing there was an easier way but with breeze hubspot new collection of ai tool it's easier than ever for marketers to track audiences increase leads and score customers fast which means pretty soon your company will have a lot to celebrate visit hubspot dot com slash marketers to learn more this episode is brought to you in part by blue mango studios imagine using a podcast as a lead generation source not only attracting your ideal customer but entertaining them and getting qualified leads to find out more go to blue mango studios dot com if you're struggling to close deals you need to try linkedin sales navigator get a sixty day free trial all on the house go to linkedin dot com slash t s e again linkedin dot com for sixty day free trial of linkedin sales navigator how do you take a company focusing on smb and mid market to go to an enterprise level of focus that's a big jump and oftentimes many companies can't make that jump and end up failing in this episode we're gonna tell you what you should do to avoid that fall and to help your sales team to be as successful as possible landing enterprise level clients check it out hey hey hey everyone welcome to another great episode of the sales of evangelist podcast i'm a host donald c the sales of evangelist and i'm so excited for another great episode i'm so excited to be here with you today and on this episode i'm talking with adam block adam is the chief revenue officer over at motive and motive did something really unique like i mentioned in a teaser chicken an organization focusing on mid level organizations and jumped up to end enterprise level the way they went about doing that was interesting and i know as sales leader listening to this episode many of you are looking at it well how can i get my team to go up market what is it that they did now i'm gonna get prep you adam is gonna share with you some things that maybe not be popular this is you know not like hey here's the email pitch that we did or here's the you know the sequence we use or the tools that stuff you can find that all the time but the actual structure the strategy and how they went about doing that that's what we're gonna tackle today if this is your first time listening to this episode whether you're an individual contributor or a leader i want you to go ahead and subscribe and i'll make sure we notify you every time we drop a new piece of content now if you've been here for a long time please go ahead and connect with me on linkedin tell me how you heard about the podcast and what you find best from it as we dive into the episode not only you get a chance to learn about some of the cool things that adam has done you'll be able to see why i brought him on a podcast he has loads of experience bringing some years of wisdom working for some pretty awesome organization and growing teams and strengthen them to be successful his backstory as you go on linkedin you'll see it tells why he is so awesome as you dive into this episode you get a chance to learn a little bit more about why would have decided to go upstream and to see how this can benefit you as a leader or individual contributor and your organization adam welcome to the show don thanks for having me so excited to be here with you oh i i am super pumped and the main reason i'm pumped because i always love stories where people are able to like you know peel back to onion or peel back the the wall and show us behind the scenes and in our previous conversation we had a discussion around this about what you guys did to go up market to where you are right now i brag about you a little bit but why don't you tell us a little bit more about what you overall the organization so that it can help set the frame for how you guys wanna to market sure so motive is an ai powered operations platform that's built for the physical economy industries like logistics and construction and energy and build services public sector to run safer and more efficient and more profitable operations and what's unique about motive is that we're the only solution that allows safety operations and finance team to manage their their drivers their vehicles their equipment and their fleet related spend in a single integrated system our ai is proven to be far more performative and accurate and responsive in in fast than any other provider so companies that you would know like fedex and hall and sent are reducing costs and improving safety and using mo so that's really kind of what we do as a business so you guys were clearly obviously you know you clearly have something of worth that's helping a lot of these organization but it came to a point executive team said they wanted to swim upstream wanted to go upstream talk to me about that what was that like what was the decision that made you all say we wanna go upstream and then we can go and tell you guys did that well it's a great question and it's a really great story and the truth is that while the executive team made the decision to invest in the the opportunity to go service the world's largest customers it was really the customers that took us there it was the market that wanted us to do this and so if you back up and you think about motive motive has been around for twelve years and we got our start predominantly in compliance for trucking for transportation and we serviced a lot of medium sized customers a lot of smb some mid market and kind commercial size but we weren't doing a ton with larger enterprise type customers but we still grew to hundreds of millions of dollars in arr we were servicing over a hundred thousand active customer accounts but what kept happening was that we were getting interest from larger and larger customers multinational customers and companies that were in other industries outside of transportation so going back to what i was talking about before agriculture oil and gas construction manufacturing food and bev energy utilities passenger transit and so this is what ultimately created the opportunity was our technology working well and the market having a demand for us to service a broader and larger set of customers this is no easy task to you know you because you you have people come to you which is great but then taking that outbound is not an easy thing to do i've done it worked and with many organizations similar to try it and it's it can be challenging talk to me you guys have been very successful getting up market now talk to me about what you guys did to make that happen what was he like your step one and you know guide us through that process yeah so the first thing was the decision to finally say as an executive team and as a board we are going to do this and that's a big decision and so we there were kind of three main things that took place here one was that we had to scale without breaking what was already working right there's a exactly doctor's oath which is do no harm right and so we had to make a commitment that yes while we were going to invest in infrastructure and architecture integration layer and we were gonna be much more responsive technology and and in a technology that market multiple hi keys with more complex organizations we had to promise and make a commitment to not abandon the customers that got us here so that was a big big piece of that investment and we also had to quantify you know what was the tam going to look like you know how are we going to measure success you know as we're approaching this market and we're investing in it and we're starting to scale and find great people how do we know that we're succeeding so we put in a whole performance management system and this was critical for us to be able to not only say yes we're making contact with the market but we know what the market is and we know that these contacts are turning into engagements and those engagements are turning into a forecast and that forecast is turning into arr so that folks can come here and they can do great as a salesperson i know that this is a now predominantly a sales podcast so we had to prove that right we to prove that yes you can come you can make a lot of money but it's because you're servicing a market that has great demand and that wants you but again it's starting with don't break something that's great that already exists here and i'll kind of touch on the next two and then be happy to answer questions about it the second is that we really had to rewire our business for the enterprise and i think this is really important because as i mentioned a moment ago this wasn't just re wiring the technology itself we had to think about well if you're gonna approach a construction company or a tree services business these organizations have different needs than somebody that's in food and bev they have different needs than somebody who's in public sector or transportation so we had to really understand and and bring in the subject matter expertise we had to rethink the way in which our operations were working because if you're working with an organization that has lots and lots of users and a longer scale rollout we have to think about how that's going to work versus a mid market organization that will buy one thing roll it all out of one time and they're good to go and we even rebranded our business which is kind of while to think about so we were previously keep checking and i was about three years ago three and a half four years ago we decided to re brand to become motive and again part of the reason for this is that we wanted to show to the world that we're a provider for the entire physical economy i mean we we're already working with many many industries at that point and so the name change just made sense and then thirdly we had to hire the right people right so it's one thing to make a decision to do it and make investments in it and decide you're not gonna do any harm with your current clients then you're creating the technology and the brand and all of the market research and the operation to support these customers and that all happened before we made the decision to build out the organization and we went out and found some of the top sellers not just in this industry but i would argue in all of technology success story hosted by scott d is brought to you by the helps hubspot podcast network the audio destination for business professionals success stories features q and a sessions with successful business leaders keynote presentations and conversations on sales marketing business startups and entrepreneurship one of the latest episode he had lisa a bill you on the podcast and it's all about why you should bet on yourself and she was going through entrepreneur journey and it just resonates so much with me sometimes we feel that we have to do the nine to five thing but sometimes you can choose to bet on yourself it was a really amazing episode i recommend you check it out listen to success stories wherever you get since twenty thirteen we launched this podcast the goal of the podcast was to share wealth of information and i feel that we've successfully done so as a natural product listeners like you would reach out and ask could i coach them could i train their team could i come and speak in an sk o could i consult for them and that is how we gain the majority of our business and still to this stay so in twenty nineteen one of our clients saw what we did and ask could we do that for them we experimented with it and we started a podcast production agency now we create podcast for some of the biggest brands in the world and it's amazing i would love to show you and your team how we can create podcast for you and use it as an entertaining source but also educational and a lead generation if you're interested go to blue mango studios dot com again blue mango studios dot com and our team could show you exactly what we did it's amazing the first one was one that that i really wanted to get into because it's tempting to go up market but when your whole business is built on say mid market and so forth like you're saying do no harm you could cannibal what you're doing and cause a lot of problems where you issue you know you the the revenue you have decrease and executive shareholders might get upset and i think that part is often overlooked and it's one of the mistakes i made in one of our organization before i was going for i abandoned what we were doing trying to go for a bigger group but i didn't do it right i didn't have that you i guess set it up properly to scale i don't if that makes sense and i i think that so when as soon as you mentioned my first one i was really wanting to double tip tap on that if i'm a leader listening to this podcast what should i be looking at to make sure i do no harm with my sales team if we're going upstream you don't wanna be a jack of all trades and master of none right this is something that i think is really important while inside of our business we have multiple segments and the segments operate differently right they have a different service profile for the different types of customers that we serve they have different quotas they have different support so our ecosystem think about a sales engineer or a business value team or you know a customer success support or something account management as a customer gets more complex and that's not always just the size of their account the way sometimes it's just for whatever the nature of their business and operation tech stack is they're very complex we had to make a decision that we were going to support customers where they are and by what they needed from us so as an example we decided to take certain pieces of our business and actually constrict the size of tam for that business and what that allowed us to do is reduce the book size for each ae or each account manager now sometimes that can be scary if you're an account executive right we're on sales and everybody wants to have all of this opportunity but the truth is that the best engagements are really really hard when you're spread too thin and you have too many customers to support and so our customer experience metrics went up our average attainment went up all as a result of making this focus to reduce book size and give better visibility into each individual customer account as opposed to trying to manage a whole lot with you know all this technology i think this is something that a lot of business get wrong right now so if you're curious on what i would coach other leaders to don't get sucked into this world of ai managing all your relationships yeah now don't get fooled by the promise of you know you're gonna measure everything and it's gonna tell you what customer is happy and what customer unhappy and that's the only way you know these companies especially in our business but we're talking about very critical physical operations these organizations wanna build a relationship with us and know that we're there support so i would say for anybody who's a leader today that's a big sort of it's an opportunity of course ai and the transformation that we're going through but i think it's also a huge dress did the brand change impact the existing i guess it probably wouldn't because you're going after a total new market so they didn't really know you at all as keep trucking right let's keep trucking yeah keep trucking yeah so we definitely were not as present years ago with larger and larger business i mean we're we're something nothing's me wrong we've had very longstanding relationships with some great organizations but with today of course we work with you know global multinational corporations fedex hall kona elevator right yeah davey tree and so so the brand of motive is much more applicable today than it was years ago but again keep trucking and kind of imply that we were only servicing trucking which was really not the case i mean the beginning it was but over time we've not only widened our platform to have a much bigger impact then we're in workforce management now we do a lot of asset tracking and equipment monitoring one of our new customers in fact it's tracking tens of thousands of assets it really has nothing to do with the transportation side of what they have and so the motive was just a much better sort of brand match for our market especially as you think about international you think about public sector which really doesn't have much transportation at all they have public works and school buses and other types of operations there so it just made a whole lot more sense to just update it everywhere and and it's pretty cool when i'm driving down the road i will see motive stickers on vehicles of course but you you do from time to time still see the keep trucking stickers on cars and so that's a little nostalgic for sure but that's pretty cool though is there any lessons that you guys learned with that re i put it down the infrastructure or rebranding adjustment which was point number two what you just have to hold a high bar right i mean the the reality for us is that we are in control of our own narrative as a business right nobody else there's no customer out there there's no competitor right they can create a perception which i think can be you know something that you have to kind of fight right is fear uncertainty and data out there but we're in control of our own company narrative and i think if we have a great product and we do we have a world class leading technology and so we let it speak for itself we encourage customers to test it and so that's what we did is and i'll give a sc of our ceo our cto our cp a lot of credit here where we've held a very very high bar for of the responsiveness the uptime the reliability speed of our technology when you have a great product dying know this sounds simple but it certainly makes it easier on the sales team right i mean you know we all have worked for companies where maybe this piece worked okay but it's my job to sell this thing and there's another side of this for us that i think is very special and that is you know one of our primary value drivers is that we are saving lives we are helping people get home to their families we are helping neighbors to stay alive friends and so it's really great to not only have a leading technology but to have one that is so mission critical that it's not only making sure that things get to where they need to be to keep society running but also saying people's lives along the way but the answer your question is you have to hold a very very high bar for your brand and your narrative and your technology and in our case hiring right so we did that same thing with hiring folks we have a model that we call rad or it's resilience accountability and discipline and so these are components that we aren't looking for somebody that has the background of of fleet or ass set or spend management something we're looking for somebody who is driven we're looking for somebody who has a high business acumen who cares about the customer problem and is willing to do the hard things even when they don't want to right which is kind of the definition of discipline and so these are things that i think we've done a great job of holding a very very high bar across the board here are you struggling to close deals b to b selling is tougher than ever before and that's why i will tell you about linkedin sales navigator listen up linkedin sales navigator is a sales intelligent platform that helps sales professional effectively prospect and engage high value customers drive higher revenue and increase sales performance sales navigator helps target the right buyers surface key signals such as job changes or which account you should prioritize and shows you hidden an ally so you can find those buyers that are most likely convert fueled by linkedin one billion members platform yes one billion sales navigator gives you the most up to date first party data enabling you to unlock conversations with the people that matter right now you can try linkedin sales navigator get a sixty day free trial at linkedin dot com slash t s e that is linkedin dot com slash ts s e for a sixty day free trial try it for yourself linkedin dot com slash t s e when this get started how do you find it in an interview because everybody sounds like they they'll say to talk you know say whatever i need on friday and monday comes in it's like who in the world that i hired this where's the guy that was here or gal what did you guys do in that interview process panel interviews multiple interviews i'm just curious to understand well it's still not perfect but it's pretty pretty good our attrition is low and our success rate is high with quota attainment and so and that's just in sales right of course our business has operations we have folks that are sdr so i'll back up for a moment we did overhaul the interview process we did this shortly after i started and part of that was what questions are we asking how do we put somebody in a situation if you ask somebody hey tell me about when you were accountable well that's not a situation right that's just them talking about some philosophical thing and it's you can get canned responses so what we try to figure out is how do i have a natural discussion with somebody and pull out of them indicators of where they have failed and what they did when they failed where did they succeed and where did they learn from that how do they get others to par that success what is it that drives this person because dom there is very little interest in leadership to motivate people right i mean it's it is very hard to motivate people i would say it's almost impossible right in fact you just wanna go hire motivated people that's the thing people guide lead teach coach inspire so that means that you have to test for you know how much do they want to succeed you know what is it that they are willing to do and so i don't think a one size fits all here i mean we have a panel interview and we try to put people a little bit on their toes but we're not trying to trick anybody right we wanna find great people that are interested in our business but there is one other thing that we did and that is we created it took a long time and that was internal opportunity for people to move up in their careers so it is not uncommon for us to hire somebody that might be a more junior and maybe they're coming out of college and they're gonna start off the career and as being an sdr they do well there then they become an enterprise sdr and they become a mid market ae and they become an enterprise ae and so this bridge program this farm system for us is something that we're very very proud of and so it kinda takes the guessing game out instead of hiring for multiple roles that might have a similar type of profile and background we usually introduce folks to one or two starting places and then we give them additional opportunity as they earn it and that way we've really seen a lot better success in the field i love this talk to me about where you are right now let's bring this wrap this all back together so how long did it take for your indicators that you guys first establish to show that we are at success at enterprise level was this a you know six month process a year or two year process that you might weird about yeah it's great question the first signals came about six month in and those signals were in the form of leading indicators though right especially in enterprise the enterprise and the strategic organization when i started here about two and a half years ago we had less than ten people today we have nearly a hundred and twenty in just that org so we are ten x the size or more than ten the size we five x the arr r of the enterprise organization in about seven quarters so it was a great performance by the team but it didn't happen right away right it took hit those first six to nine months was when we had to have the stomach for it as we were investing in the program and tracking the leading indicators things like market contact and meetings and demos and trials had something that seems to be common in our business is a proof concept or proof of value or a trial and then of course having a forecast and attainment so we had to track all of those all the way along we're coming off of q two twenty twenty five by far our biggest quarter that we've ever had as a business across the board and in fact the enterprise business in q two alone was bigger than the entire enterprise business just two years ago two and a half years ago when i started so you can see that like the momentum is there and it's really started to manifest itself into something that's much more predictable right we now have an enterprise playbook it drives growth it's durable by balancing growth and discipline and ambition and intention so that's where we are today and i guess to go one step further we're gonna be a public company i mean right now we're very very large organization we are kind of at the end of our private journey it's been great to us but with our scale and our robust growth and our strong fundamentals we're building a solid foundation that's gonna position us when the time is right which is coming up and that means really focusing on building this operational excellence and the predictability that makes for a great public company and so we are ready now and we have those issues way yeah that's amazing man well congratulations i know a lot of leaders listen to this is appreciative of these ideas what you're sharing here that can help you guys out if you were to bottle it all up in one major advice that you would give to one that's considering taking their team upstream what would you tell them with that one major piece of advice you have to be very intentional and one of the ways somebody is intentional as they are honest you have to challenge each other meaning that executive and bored level support and buy in is absolutely critical because everybody likes to do this right but as you and i know the technology graveyard is littered with organizations that have tried to go from down market job market and usually that happens at the first sign or second sign of adversity there's something that's gonna take place that is gonna make use it's gonna take longer than you think might take more money than you think maybe you lose a giant deal you were working really really hard on whatever it may be and so having that alignment and buy in an intention with the executive team and ideally the investors is critical i don't see how this would have worked without that support yeah i think that's when you spent a lot of time that at the beginning explaining that i figured that was it was probably pretty key and hard to go stream without that do you know it's high pressure remove fast but the reward has been absolutely fantastic for the folks here motive and for our customers and for our investors and so it can be very rewarding but it's that there are days where you know you you guys stick with it and you gotta be bold you gotta be disciplined gotta be rad right so listen adam i appreciate you taking a time to come on a show today folks wanna get connected to you or learn more about what you guys are doing a motive what's the best way for them to go about doing so go motive dot com reach out to me on linkedin i'd love to hear sn from all of you well we'll go ahead and drop that in our show notes adam appreciate you sharing this and peel in the onion back and shown us behind the scenes here it helps us all a lot so thank you donald thank you so much hey that was adam block i'm telling you this was awesome i'm fascinated the first point that he shared was around how they decided to go upstream and specifically how you make sure you don't mess up what you already have that's something that is real that is an issue that that i had i remember at one point with ts and well as talk to touch based on we decided to go up for a larger clientele and i started leaving the people that we work with from so long and the problem that i had was i didn't prepare it properly and we saw a fall off and then i was able to quickly rat and fix the issue that helped us get back and yes we started working with some enterprise level organization but i can tell you that first point i didn't do it properly and it was it was a little setback but grateful that we've learned over the years and got back up and growing listen a lot of great insights from this episode i want you to tell me or tell adam too what was it that jumped out to you to most what insight that you felt was more interesting to you as always i want you to thrive i want you to succeed every time we bring on guest like adam it is to do a simple thing help you to one build a better pipeline or two to accelerate deals to the pipeline faster this can help you to get up to that pipeline level with larger organizations but doing it right if you know somebody else that i should be listening to our podcast go ahead and introduce them to us i would appreciate that as always i want you to thrive i want you to succeed i want you to raise the level of thinking and as a leader i want you to smash it as a seller i want you to be successful but most importantly i want you to go out and do big things see you on the next one the sales of evangelist podcast is created by the sales of angela sales training organization it is produced by ts studios our podcast production manager is nancy paul audio engineer is j ob our video engineer is das k guest management is done by jill vid and christy vi our content writer is carl lisa gal our graphic designers y sa and i'm your host and executive producer donald c kelly yeah pod sales podcast network

31 Minutes listen 7/11/25

Should you email or call prospects? Which method is best for effectively reaching your clients? To find out, listen to my chat with Matt Tharp, the CEO of Hunter.io. He provides data and insights on why businesses should focus more on cold email than cold calling.Meet Matt TharpMatt might be perceiv... Should you email or call prospects? Which method is best for effectively reaching your clients? To find out, listen to my chat with Matt Tharp, the CEO of Hunter.io. He provides data and insights on why businesses should focus more on cold email than cold calling.Meet Matt TharpMatt might be perceived as biased towards email since he's the CEO of Hunter.io, but he was drawn to the company precisely because of its commitment to email.He enjoys working with fast-moving businesses that prioritize high velocity and product-led growth strategies. He believes this approach helps build a robust pipeline with marketing, while the sales motion supports and supplements that pipeline.Sales-driven models, heavily dependent on closing the next deal, can make it challenging for new sellers or businesses to find their footing. Relying solely on cold calling makes pipeline building particularly difficult, and the current business environment is only making cold calling harder.Matt shares his own experience as a decision-maker: if someone cold calls him unexpectedly, he's likely to get annoyed because it almost always interrupts something he's doing.Marketing Strategy for Email OutreachMatt and his team conducted research to determine which marketing strategy prospects prefer. The results showed that 61% prefer cold emails, while less than 10% prefer cold calling. He also found that individuals in the US prefer digital outreach 71% more than calling.To successfully begin email outreach, Matt suggests keeping two key things in mind:1. How you build and segment your email list.2. How you write your content.He advises against trying to reach everyone when building your list. Instead, personalize it and make it relevant to your target audience. Keep your audience segments under 100 contacts to help maintain message relevance.Subject Line TrendsTo create subject lines that generate clicks, Matt emphasizes the importance of addressing a problem the buyer is facing.It's better not to be overly playful. Instead, speak to a problem that prospects genuinely care about, and in the first one or two sentences, demonstrate that you are there to solve it. Then, explain how you will solve their problem. The final step involves adding a clear and easy call to action at the bottom of the email."Looking at current trends for business scaling investments, it's clear: phone calls are becoming less and less effective." - Matt Tharp.ResourcesIf you need help scaling your business with email outreach, consider Hunter.io (I highly recommend it). If you like more guidance with improving your sales skills, join my Sales Mastermind Class.Thinking about starting a podcast yourself? Learn more about Blue Mango Studios. Sponsorship OffersThis episode is brought to you in part by Hubspot.With HubSpot sales hubs, your data tools and teams join a single platform to close deals and turn prospects into pipelines. Try it for yourself at hubspot.com/sales.2. This episode is brought to you in part by LinkedIn.Are you tired of prospective clients not responding to your emails? Sign up for a free 60-day trial of LinkedIn Sales Navigator at

this episode is brought to you in part by the following ts sponsors it takes a lot to grow your business a lot of audience attraction a lot of lead scoring and all the channel managing you can manage plus a lot of long days late nights and weekend a lot of wishing there was an easier way but with breeze hubspot new collection of ai tool it's easier than ever for marketers to track audiences increase leads and score customers fast which means pretty soon your company will have a lot to celebrate visit hubspot dot com slash marketers to learn more this episode is brought to you in part by blue mango studios imagine using a podcast as a lead generation source not only attracting your ideal customer but entertaining them and getting qualified leads to find out more go to blue mango studios dot com if you're struggling to close deals you need to try linkedin sales navigator get a sixty day free trial all on the house go to linkedin dot com slash t s e again linkedin dot com for sixty day free trial of linkedin sales navigator should i email the prospect or should i call the prospect like that is the question which one is gonna be the most effective for the prospect you reach now to right now or in general which one is best for sales cold outreach we'll answer that one this email i mean in this conversation check it out hey hey hey everyone welcome to another great episode of the sales of evangelist podcast i'm your host donald c the sales of evangelist and i'm so excited for another great episode i'm so excited to be here with you today and on this episode i'm calling maybe i'm talking to matt thor he is the ceo of hunter dot io and if you don't know what hunter is i highly recommend you check it out we're gonna talk a little bit more about in this episode but it's a great way to be able to find email addresses and it's one of the things i recommend in our training programs to a lot of our clients as you're starting off doing our outreach go ahead and check out hunter you can use a free version you can get email addresses get verified in a simple and easy to use but hunter dot io and there's at the end of this episode i tell a story about how my wife use it and was able to land to clients for our podcast if this is your first time listening to our show this show is designed to do two things one teach you how you can build better pipeline with amazing episodes and guests like this one and two how to accelerate deals to our pipeline faster as we dive into this episode in particular you're gonna hear the idea of what works best phone call or email and how you go about utilizing that avenue so you can have better cold outreach reach you're gonna love this one i'm telling you hello matt can you hear me i guess i can donald you know i'm i'm doing this pitch on a phone but i think i should've have probably done it via email yeah i feel like you would've have gotten my attention a little better with that dang it man how are you doing matt welcome to the show man good good good see you no as as folks can hear from what we've talked about in the setup there and the teaser today we're gonna be tackling the conversation around email and i brag about you guys and hunter some of the cool things that you guys do so they kinda know about that so i set the stage already for you matt awesome the idea though you are allergic from what i heard to cold calls i want you to but you you know there's a caveat to this but tell me a little bit more about your feelings why you feel emails so much greater effect for sales reps and cold call and there's some of the reasons that could you know make a difference but for generally speaking talk to me about that yeah right on okay first off a little bit of backdrop obviously a ceo of hunter i have a vested interest in email being successful so like my bias is right up in front i'm not gonna hide that however one of the things that brought me to hunter and one of the things that made me so excited about the brand and the business was a commitment to email and there are certain things about cold calling that for me personally just didn't make sense anymore i like fast moving businesses i especially like going towards you know a sort of high velocity product led growth type strategy and so when you're doing that i find that often you're building a pipeline with your product you're building a pipeline with your marketing and your sales motion is really more about supporting that and then supplementing that and so i really like sort of high velocity low touch sales processes in my businesses that's typically what i like because you can build a much bigger flywheel and i think you get the ability to build a more robust more repeatable pipeline and one of the challenges with sales driven business is it's so dependent on the next deal and especially when you're early as a sales rep or as a business you may not have find that pitch it may not be turnkey yet and so the challenges is i think for new businesses or businesses that are transitioning from my founder led sales is that is a hard period of time for a business and if you're dependent on cold calling it's rough it's rough on the reps it's rough on the receiving end of those calls the infrastructure is challenging because let's all face it if you're not getting a mobile number that number is probably useless most of the time and so i just feel like not only that but we've all gotten really good at that little glass rectangle and looking at a phone number we don't know and declining that call right so everything about the current environment is sort of working against cold calling yeah the one newer one that you haven't even thrown in there yet is apple which comes in effect in the next what come on couple months and i don't know what it's gonna look like i mean did an episode on it but this the idea there so go back to mobile if you don't have a mobile number god bless you but now all mobile numbers the seller going to have to give a pitch to an ai if they're not in that phone and that is that ai is gonna be the new gatekeeper to get access to that person i would answer so as if mobile numbers weren't hard enough geez right as if you didn't already have almost every available technology to screen here calls before apple's getting ready to make it even harder and i think yeah what like as a consumer you're not mad at that no i love it right but as a professional who's trying to reach people it's a real pain and so but you get it right the momentum of the industry is moving in a direction where cold calling is becoming increasingly less productive and less efficient and less frankly the output is less it's just it's less you can make less of a machine out of it now that said it is still something that can work sometimes and especially if you've got a really high contract value or really high touch business if it's a relationship building business there is a place for call so i'm not i'm not like against phone calls in general but i think if you look at the trends and if you're a business you're trying to think of like where do i invest in trying to scale up my business where do i invest in sales growth how do i make this a more repeatable machinery i think what we're looking at as a world where phone calls are becoming less and less effective over time and i think that's gonna continue into the future and that's why it's not like i'm like all biases on the table it's like yes i'm pro email but i think there's also the reality it's like me personally like this is the other thing i'm at the end of the decision maker too and if somebody gets through to my phone and i didn't like request that call i guarantee you they are interrupting something i'm supposed to be doing right and i think that's a terrible way to start a relationship because it's not on my terms at all i picked up the phone maybe i was waiting for a call i thought that was the call it's just like it's more and more there's just more bad situations than good so that's the whole reason all joking side that's really what's behind dog success story hosted by scott d is brought to you by the helps hubspot podcast network to audio destination for business professionals success stories features q and a sessions with successful business leaders keynote presentations and conversations on sales marketing business startups and entrepreneurship one of the latest episode he had lisa bill on the podcast and it's all about why you should bet on yourself and she was going through a entrepreneur journey and it just resonates so much with me sometimes we feel that we have to do the nine to five thing but sometimes you can choose to bet on yourself it was a really amazing episode i recommend you check it out listen to success stories wherever you get since twenty thirteen we launched this podcast the goal of the podcast was to share wealth of information and i feel that we've successfully done so as a natural product listeners like you would reach out and ask could i coach them could i train their team could i come and speak in an sk could i consult for them and that is how we gain the majority of our business and still to this stay so in twenty nineteen one of our clients saw what we did and ask could we do that for them we experimented with it and we started a podcast production agency now we create podcast for some of the biggest brands in the world and it's amazing i would love to show you and your team how we can create podcast for you and use it as an entertaining source but also educational and a lead generation if you're interested go to blue mango studios dot com again blue mango studios dot com and our team could show you exactly what we did it's amazing well let's go dive deeper into that though let's say that we are doing emails more and i want to be more effective at this with an organization what should be my motion because here are some of the the things that i come across i mean i agree a hundred percent the buyers are more they're being more protective of their information and again no big deal out against that from the consumer and but then when you look at it from the sales motion again a little bit more challenging and i am seeing issues with emails as well because my emails are not getting through what can i do as an organization with a good go to market strategy for let's say email outreach founder led sales translating over to you know in a trying organization there well first is a sort of motivating data point we surveyed about two hundred business decision makers in the us sorry business decision makers worldwide let this year and we found that sixty one percent preferred cold email as an outreach versus cold calling which was less than ten and if you look at the us market maybe you know you're instinctively thinking all calls will be better actually it's worse seventy one percent prefer cold email so if you actually talk the the decision makers the email recipients or the people who are on the other end of the call they vastly prefer digital outreach through cold email linkedin is actually number two but it's only twenty nine percent so there's a huge delta between their preference for channels being email first and then sort of everything else down the line so first off like there's some data that suggest this but as you're going to to go into email there's a couple things you wanna know the first is that there's a lot of in of there look there's a lot of valuable content about your tech stack about like what products to buy how to set up how to configure your domains most of that is a solved problem today just follow the rules follow all the guidelines that you find people post on their blogs and you'll be fine you know there's yes there's some technical stuff don't avoid it just do it but the real meat and potatoes comes into how you build and segment your lists and how you end up writing your content and really at the end of the day your success or failure in cold outreach is gonna come down to those two things what we see is a huge drop off on a list in terms of list performance if that list is above a hundred people like the performance almost drops to half it's pretty remarkable and what that's saying is when people try to do email they tend to make the outreach too bigger than audience and what ends up happening is the number one and number two problems are about like relevance and personalization and so this is really about as the sales or or marketing professional am i talking to the right people with the right message and if i can keep my list small enough roughly a hundred people i can pretty well tailor whatever my message is going to be whether you use ai or not it doesn't matter you still have to get the core concepts right and so starting with a really good targeted list and keeping that list small enough to keep the message relevant that's number one the second is really about the message itself there are some good rules but i think number one and this is a thing we trip over all the time i think anybody does right you either you try to say too little so you're not overt talking or you try to say too much so that they have everything they need to make the decision people forget the cold email is really about engaging in a conversation you're not trying to close the whole deal in the first email you try try to do some basic things give me an example of what that might look like if i'm gonna do a like a really you you guys do you know see a whole bunch of data come through but what might that sound like if i'm working for you at hunter sending out an email to someone so first off it depends entirely on the recipient let's start with that but you want to establish a few things right up front you first you want to establish credibility use a reasonable domain like you probably like ours is hunter dot i io o right that's our primary domain but when we do cold outreach we use get hunter dot io we use something where we do use email hunter sometimes so it depends but usually are sub our email domains if someone looks at that they totally understand who it's related to oh hunter yeah i've i've heard a hunter right the other thing is that we do either content on those domains or we redirect those domains to the primary domain because what a lot of email tools do now is they make it really easy for you to click on the url of the sender to see what their domain is like so if you click that link and it just sits there spinning you're gonna bail out you're gonna delete that email and you're gonna move on so you gotta remember you're trying to do enough things in an initial email to establish credibility and a lot of that starts with some really basic things around what domain are you using what email what subject line and are you creating enough of a brand impression that somebody who looks at it would recognize your brand and would think yeah i should keep reading you get about two to three seconds to establish enough credibility for them to read the whole email and even even then you're only gonna get like ten seconds yeah alright it is tough so so one of the things so several components i'm putting notes down here for make sure to email is list to short make sure it's highly relevant to that list make sure you personalize it to some degree because the way we look at this and the way we teach our teams and our clients is personalize it to the role of the individual and then obviously the more relevant you are then you know black cats and milwaukee like that's that's pretty relevant opposed to just general black cats right in summertime but then the other part your domain make sure you have a a set domain that is not the main one so you can't burn that per s right and then subject line talk to me about subject line what are you guys seeing when it comes to subject line of trends that makes makes it more effective i've actually seen a lot of variance in subject lines that could be successful but typically there's something in the subject line that speaks to the problem that the buyer has and that way you know so sometimes people get a little too playful i think in email subject lines and they're like oh just get him with a gotcha line and then they open the email and then i've got their attention right well yeah it's like yes so you could walk into the room with a purple suit on and get everybody's attention but did that establish your credibility or did you become the guy with the purple suit you know you've gotta think of the subject line the same way am i speaking to a problem you care about in a way that gets you to read it so that when you come into the email and i double down on that problem i'm in the re you know you know i as a reader him in the right place it's a lot like what you're trying to do with like a web page or a landing page you optimize for a particular keyword or in this case a problem and you wanna make sure right there in the subject line that you've confirmed there in the right place and then right there in the first sentence or two sentences you wanna support that because i think ultimately the end of the day you'll never get timing right you kinda just have to hope on timing you have to think about this like a brain impression almost think about it a little bit like radio advertising we've all somebody old enough well some of us old enough to remember radio advertising being like a primary channel and the thing about that was you had to sort of be running it all the time because it wasn't like even if there was a big promotion going on it wasn't like if you just ran it for that week you'd get this all this information but what it was was that when they heard it that week that it mattered to them they already had a bunch of brand impressions kinda creating a sort of warm environment in their brains when they finally had the problem where they were thinking about the problem when they saw your brand connected their problem it was like oh instant recall and i think that's a problem that's really well managed by cold email that people don't ever think they're so busy trying to go for the clothes in the first email they forget it's still a brand impression there's value that builds over time with these things and so establish the problem create a like a a trust brand impression touch point out of the email make sure you explain in what way you're gonna help solve that problem how are you gonna remove that pain for them it's just a pitch it's like an elevator pitch but you're trying to get it as concise as possible around like usually one single problem and then if there's interest would they like to continue hook them with an easy call to action let them see something let them click a link if you're afraid of links in that first do it have a simple reply and don't go so fast to the takeaway you know a lot of times what they'll do with the they'll send the first email maybe they'll do a bump and then they immediately be like okay i guess this is not for you it's like dude this is all one week i'm still thinking about the first email you know like so you gotta like pace this a little bit better in think about it a little bit more holistically and i think generally then it tends to perform better are you struggling to close deals b to b selling is tougher than ever before and that why i will tell you about linkedin sales navigator listen up linkedin sales navigator is a sales intelligent platform that helps sales professional effectively prospect and engage high valued customers drive higher revenue and increase sales performance sales navigator helps target the right buyers surface key signals such as job changes or which account you should prioritize and shows you hidden an ally so you can find those buyers that are most likely convert fueled by linkedin one billion members platform yes one billion sales navigator gives you the most up to date first party data enabling you to unlock conversations with the people that matter right now you can try linkedin sales navigator get a sixty day free trial at linkedin dot com slash t s e that is linkedin dot com slash t s e for a sixty day free trial try it for yourself linkedin dot com slash t s e when this get started i want you to emphasize one thing you you shared was to establish one problem i found that to be when i talked to and and you'd mentioned the idea of conversation as well one of the things that we teach in our program because i find sometimes we are speaking to the prospect as opposed to trying to have an engaging conversation and pretending just realizing go back to what you said with rectangle device in our hands we're so used to and i probably say maybe half of my email you know checks are coming from that like i'm checking the email from the phone so the idea of making a conversational speaking to one problem because when you start giving me two three problems and then you have four call to action just makes it so convoluted that i can't process it that doesn't make it easy for me to push yes send more information or yeah open to learning more and i think that's a important factor one of my favorite cold email experiences was actually somebody who cold emailed me and it was one of those where they did everything right although it seemed like the easiest most basic email it was like i think it was less than forty words might have been closer to like thirty but it was very direct it was very to the point the subject line kind of indicated what the problem was and it said something i'll get it a little bit wrong i should have a memorized but they were something like are you tired of trying to do forecasts in google spreadsheets now you're like yes if you're a ceo or a cfo or a founder the answer a hundred percent yes so yeah exactly so easy click right easy open and then the pitch is easy it was like most founders we talk to are really tired of trying to do forecast for their vcs or their board in google sheets or spreadsheets and this is what our product does and it was like really straightforward would you like a demo heck yeah like dead now they might have even emailed me three times previous to that it's i didn't notice i don't know for sure but i know on that email that was a problem that i absolutely know i have i know if somebody can offer me a solution to that problem i will take advantage of that whenever i see it and it's always going to be there so even if i don't do anything the problem is the same and so i'm still gonna wanna know about that thirty days from now so even if i'm not quite ready to activate on that email as a buyer i still get the brand pressure i'm still like yeah this is a problem maybe i'll even set a reminder for myself on this maybe i'll even go to the website and bookmark you know takes some additional action and the reason why they made the problem super clear they didn't try to tell me too much it was like if this sucks for you we can help you here's a demo like that's it and that's really everything right if you're trying to do more than that you can pretty that up you can have some fun with it but if you're trying to do more than that you're probably trying to do too much i think that's probably the critical part there you know don't overcook the grits yeah and like and it doesn't have to be too complicated i maybe we start off this episode and i did it you know in in a joking way like you know what is that exact formula i don't think there's a perfect formula i think there's some elements like you're saying that just you should follow but don't over complicate it talk to the person but it's a more preferable way for me to get in touch with you with majority of our executives because that's how they're gonna go about doing it do to linkedin side of course and i for the love of everything that's holding for me i'm still gonna have a cold call emotion in there but well the majority i'm probably gonna leave i lead with linkedin and then we do a email personalized email relevant email and then i use phone for those who are engaging opening it up and and just doing some outreach with that as well but i i think that's a great program i think that's that's a really good way to go about it multi touch is better i think anytime you can get more impressions in front of people just psychologically we know that that works hundred percent there's a sales leader listening to this and he's thinking about it from his perspective he wants to get his team going and he just feels stuck right now they're sending emails they're not seeing the success that they want initially what advice would you give him in the last piece of this episode well the first thing i would do is i would take a step back and i would evaluate whether or not the message is formatted in a way that makes sense for the recipient i know that sounds basic but let me explain if you're gonna talk to a ceo or a cfo that coli email that worked on me is brilliant it's straightforward it's to the point there's no fluff it came directly from somebody like it was obvious so this was like a real pitch for a real product if you were sending a message to my cmo you might wanna have a little more fun with it you might wanna have some personality in there especially you know given that that's something that that audience like not maybe not a cmo at an enterprise company but if you're talking about a marketer at a small to medium sized business yeah are they're constantly challenging themselves and their own team to have some fun and make things more clever so if you don't think about that when you're reaching out to a cmo or or a head of marketing in a midsize company or something you're totally missing the boat on the message they don't want direct simple to the point like a ceo or a cfo would right and so i think like one of the things that i often find when i do like you know tear downs with customers and i take a look at their emails and i try to figure out what's not working one of the first things i noticed is just the message doesn't quite work for the audience and i think that's like the number one thing there's lots of tools out there figure out how you can you can use those make sure that message is more tailored and in cold email sometimes what that does is then somebody will send me an email that'll in the first message they'll jammed a bunch of personalization variables and in the first message will say something like you know as ceo of of a company i'm like i don't need you to tell me my title to like make me think that this is personal that's not gonna work telling me that you understand the problems i'm facing is how you're gonna get through to communicating in a way that makes sense for somebody who's as busy as i am that's how you're gonna get through to me and i think people miss that they think let me just do what the tool can do not how do i use the tool to get the right message across to the buyer and i think it's that little switch if you can flip that switch that makes a huge difference on your cold outreach a hundred percent i couldn't agree with you more if folks wanna learn a little bit more about you matt and about what a hunter can do for them and how they could take advantage of it wanna give a quick elevator pitch and then also how they can get in touch with you absolutely so first off the best place to find anything is hunter dot io and you can go to our website it's very content rich you can go to hunter dot i o forward slash blog if you wanna kinda read a little bit more in depth than get into some more testimonial case studies use cases etcetera so go there i'm also on linkedin i tend to not be a frequent poster i tend to only post things that i think are really interesting and important to read but i'm also always open to connecting with people who wanna reach out on linkedin and have a question and wanna a chat so either of those please look us up and look if you're in this business hunter has some part of our platform that will help you whether that's the cold email campaigning component or whether that's just better data that's what we specialize in i think at the at the beginning of our brand journey we were really focused on the data and so we have just continued to double down on making sure we have the highest quality data that we can possibly offer anybody in the world and i feel like we do a really good job at that like our email verification product probably one of the best ones out there and i would highly recommend use it for segmentation list management verification make sure the people you're reaching out to are the right people can i give a quick testimonial real quick so absolutely not i didn't plan this i didn't plan to this see he's like of course tom i'm gonna like sent me raw recording too i'll use this so when our podcast back in twenty fifteen twenty sixteen we started twenty sixteen we probably started doing more sponsorship outreach we had landed one with pre and we thought we were hot stuff and we feel like people wanted to that was inbound people wanted to you know explore it so my wife has nothing to do with sales she doesn't have a sales bone her body the only ds of dna she has is what i rub off on her so she started doing she's like let's try to pitch some people so i we she even found a email at that point and i i doctor it up and then we started pitching people we built a list on i just went to conferences to people that were sponsoring conferences and then we used that email and then i taught her how to use hunter docs i of it she sent emails out one of the companies are no longer on prospect dot i they became came directly from that we also had another one with another crm company that came directly from that but several deals closed directly from her usage of hunter dot io i went on about the you know closed but she booked the appointment got people in a shoot so i'm telling you hunter doesn't play and we use we recommended to all of our clients to as one of the options out there so there's several more market but i recommend hunter as well so guys that's my pitch for hunter thanks tom look we work look i'm really proud of our team the team works really hard to make sure we're delivering valuable things and not just cool shiny objects that you know might get people's attention for the next week and yeah we just keep making the product stronger and better so yeah check it out we'll keep recommended it matt thank you so much for coming on the show we'll put all your information down in a show notes appreciate man appreciate you along that was matt thor go ahead and connect with him you have his information in the show notes down below tell him you heard him here on the sales z evangelist podcast connect with him on linkedin he shares amazing stuff and hunter dot io o to have a lot of dope episodes i'm not getting any kickback it's just an amazing platform awesome tool and i would tell you if you're starting your cold outreach if you're using cold outreach or if you're you're you're trying to do stuff use it highly highly highly recommend you take advantage of it if you wanna find out how you can test it out you can go ahead and watch some of their videos and so their content on their site or you can go ahead and hit me up and i'll be more a willing tell you how we've utilized it hit me up on linkedin donald c calais as always i want you to thrive i want you to succeed i want you to raise a level of thinking but most importantly i want you to go out and do big things see you on the next one the sales evangelist podcast is created by the sales of angela sales training organization it is produced by ts studios our a podcast production manager is nancy paul our audio engineer is j ob our video engineer is das ko guest management is done by jill vid and christy vi our content writer is carl gal our graphic designers y sa and i'm your host and executive producer donald c kelly pod sales podcast network

31 Minutes listen 7/7/25

If you’re struggling to make it as a seller, you may be unknowingly doing things that a top performer would never do. To help you figure out what you may be doing wrong, I’m going back to episode 1831 with my chat with Andrew Barbuto, a seasoned sales professional and author. He shares five th... If you’re struggling to make it as a seller, you may be unknowingly doing things that a top performer would never do. To help you figure out what you may be doing wrong, I’m going back to episode 1831 with my chat with Andrew Barbuto, a seasoned sales professional and author. He shares five things that top-performing sellers always do to help them succeed in finding clients and closing deals. Andrew Barbuto’s BackgroundAndrew Barbuto is an accomplished sales professional and author with a deep understanding of the intricacies of top-performing sales strategies. He shares his sales methodologies in his insightful book, “Top Sales Producer: How To Crush Your Sales Quota.” Andrew’s commitment to excellence in sales makes him a valuable resource for anyone aspiring to elevate their sales performance and effectively manage their client interactions.Key Practices of Top PerformersAndrew shares the five things that top performers do differently than average performers. 1. Time Management: Top performers allocate their time to maximize revenue-generating activities. Start early on your work tasks and focus only on the ones that bring in money. Also, don’t forget to put the phone down to help avoid distractions.2. Research: You may find researching on a specific client to be long and boring, but it’s one of the most important tasks top performers do. Andrew explains that rather than adopting a broad approach, successful sellers conduct targeted research to identify and connect with the right prospects. 3. Meeting Preparation: You can avoid generic questions and tailor conversations to address specific needs by coming to a meeting prepared. This is why it’s important to research a prospect before contacting them. 4. Prospecting Activities: Andrew recommends employing a multi-channel approach with at least seven touch points, including phone calls, emails, and LinkedIn messages. This persistence helps in turning cold prospects into warm leads.5. Leveraging CRM: Creating detailed notes will allow you to maintain contact with prospects and provide personalized value to each one of them. You can do this by using a CRM system to help strengthen your client relationships. “Top producers typically will try to allocate as much time as they possibly can to revenue-generating activities.” – Andrew Barbuto.Resources Learn more sales tips from Andrew from his book,“Top Sales Producer: How To Crush Your Sales Quota.”Follow Andrew on LinkedIn and YouTube. Download Andrew’s cold outreach strategy to book more clients. If you like more guidance with improving your sales skills, join my Sales Mastermind Class.Thinking about starting a podcast yourself? Learn more about Blue Mango Studios. Sponsorship OffersThis episode is brought to you in part by Hubspot.With HubSpot sales hubs, your data tools and teams join a single platform to close deals and turn prospects into pipelines. Try it for yourself at