Sales Management Podcast
Cory Bray, 8x author and co-founder of CoachCRM, digs into hot sales management topics.
Sales Management Podcast
95. Revolutionizing Inbound Sales Development + Initial Demos with Troy Munson
It's silly how many companies manage their inbound leads, and Troy is on a mission to change that. Click a "request a demo" button. Talk to someone who was in college 7 months ago who asks you scripted questions. Meet again with someone who re-asks these questions. Then in meeting #3, see what you initially wanted based on the button click.
We dig into the future of initial demos for inbound leads. Check it out!
Welcome to the Sales Management Podcast, your source for actionable sales management strategies and tactics. I'm your host, coach, crm co-founder, corey Gray. No long intros, no long ads, let's go. I'm so excited. I just told him I was so excited for this session. This is going to be an amazing episode of the Sales Management Podcast. I've got Troy Munson, who is the founder of DIMMO, d-i-m-m-o. We'll get you some insight on how to get to his site if y'all stick around long enough, and he's doing something that I think is really disruptive. Hey, troy, how are you?
Speaker 2:I'm good man.
Speaker 1:How are you? I'm doing awesome. All right, I'm going to give my 15 seconds on why I think this is really going to change things and then I want to dig into what the heck are you actually doing? So I think that he is going to completely change the game for inbound sales development. Inbound sales development being those folks that work at companies and they talk to leads that come inbound to the company and say, hey, I'd like to learn more, I'd like to request a demo, what's going on? I downloaded white paper. I said I oh, what's going on? I download a white paper, I sign up for a trial. They do lots of things specifically with the company that signify some level of curiosity or intent to work with them, and a lot of times in the technology world, the button they click on the website is request a demo, and the process they go through is painful. We'll talk about that a little bit more, but I think this whole game is going to change based on what Troy's building.
Speaker 2:So, troy, what the heck are you building man? Hey, yeah, I love the way that you just described it and yeah, that's kind of what we're building right. So the idea of demo is how do we get people to evaluate? Right now it's watch software demos. Of course, this is V1. We launched two months ago, we launched May 15th and if you're listening to this, it's 2024 um, and so we launched about two or three months ago and some change um, and so right now we're essentially like software for or, uh, like youtube for software. You can go, you can watch software demos and they're actually platform walkthroughs and a lot of them are specific use cases and things like that. Um, so you don't need to go through that form fill, so so you don't need to go through that.
Speaker 2:Like you said, inbound SDR call, where really what they're doing is just making sure that you're qualified to even talk to a sales rep and then you can get exactly what you want. So that's what we are today, but what we're building is how do you create a place and how do you create a centralized place that allows you to not only explore and find out about new technology but evaluate it as well? So all those questions that you're going to get asked from an inbound SDR even on that first sales call, which is a discovery question about pain, challenges and things like that. How do you avoid that and how do you immediately find out about the technology and if they solve for those pains and challenges that you have before you go inbound? So my whole goal is hey, can we build a marketplace? I hate saying the word marketplace is. You know, a lot of people just hate that term. But how do we build a place?
Speaker 1:I like it. It's a marketplace. Let's go. Let's roll with it. Let's roll with it. Let's roll with it. Shake off the haters.
Speaker 2:I know, honestly, it's really just investors that hate the name marketplace, but that's all right. That's why a lot of them lost out on Airbnb. So all that to say is, yes, we are building what, in my mind, will be the place we want to be the household name where, if you are evaluating technology for a company, or your company has challenges and you need something to help solve for it, how do you build that one place that you go to and not only explore new technology, but know that this specific technology integrates with your tech stack, it solves your challenges and this is what you can expect from it. Post-implementation, and then you can go and talk to a sales rep and speed up that sales cycle, reduce your customer acquisition costs on the company side, because you're not spending as much on inbound SDRs, paid ads, all that stuff.
Speaker 1:So, yeah, I love it because if I'm buying stuff, especially if we're talking about marketing technology, let's talk about marketing technology software. Do you know what the number is? How many folks are on that marketing technology landscape? It's like 6,500, or is it more than that now?
Speaker 2:Oh, I think the last one that came out was 9,000 plus.
Speaker 1:Wow, okay. So what we? There's this diagram. If you Google marketing technology landscape, you'll be able to see an image in Google 9,000 companies are solving for something in the marketing space. Well, how in the heck are you going to evaluate 9,000 companies? Well, you're not. So you're going to go in there and you're going to say, well, I've got this specific problem, I've got something around content marketing, cool. Well, 800 companies and if I'm reading this right, troy, what you're telling me is that, instead of going to some subset of those 800 companies websites and clicking request a demo, learn more, talk to sales, whatever they're able to in minutes, go to your site and see what do they do, what problems they solve, what use cases are applicable and do evaluations super quick as a sorting function and do evaluations super quick as a sorting function.
Speaker 2:That is exactly right, and very, very soon. You'll just be able to type in your challenge and then we'll show you the exact companies that solve for that challenge. So, like you said, content marketing there's also dozens of different content marketing challenges and dozens of different of content marketing technologies that do different things for different types of content. Is it SEO, is it paid social? This and that it's more so like, how do you ask a question? Hey, here's my tech stack, here's my challenges and why it's a challenge. What technology should I be looking at?
Speaker 2:Well, we'll only show you the technologies that you should be looking at based on your company, and what I mean by that is Zoom Info is a great tool for enterprises, things like that. I think it's the leader in the B2B contact space, whether you hate them, whether you love them, it just is. But ZoomInfo is not good for a 15-person company. So how do we know exactly who that person is? That's asking the question what company they work at, how big that company is, and then, that way, we can only show you technologies filtered to their ICP, filtered to their challenges, and be like hey, these are the six technologies that you should be looking at in the content marketing space, and then you can even get more granular after that over time. But absolutely we want to make sure that hey type like you would to your boss hey, here's our challenges, here's what we need to solve for, and then we'll tell you exactly what you should be looking at.
Speaker 1:That's great and I think you're probably going to have better insight into differentiation between solutions, because a lot of times solution A and solution B, even if they do really good competitive Intel and they're honest they're still not going to be able to keep up with what the other person's doing. And in a lot of spaces folks see somebody else being successful with a feature or a product or a geography or whatever and then just copy it, because that's what you do to keep up in a lot of spaces.
Speaker 2:Yeah, oh, absolutely. We see it all the time. You see it with Apollo, you see it the same thing B2B context space. I feel like that's what goes on there all the time. Well, they came out with that, but we'll come out with it too.
Speaker 1:Yeah, and if I'm a salesperson and I say, look, they don't have that and the wrong, I just saw it, then me as a salesperson, I lose credibility with that buyer because they're sitting there thinking that I'm lying to them and I might, I might be, or I might not be lying to them. I might be telling them what I believe to be the truth, because I read the product marketing brief last quarter and guess what? That's not accurate anymore.
Speaker 2:Yeah, yeah, exactly, you get it, man.
Speaker 1:You understand it Well I think that most people that have seen a lot of things understand it. That's the trick. Oh yeah, you're going to get people. So here's, here's the world without you. So let's paint a picture of what the world without you looks like. World without you looks like. Well, we've got all these leads that come in and some of them are good and some of them aren't. So let's put a filter between the salespeople and these leads and let's try to understand who's good and who's not. All right. So then you got all these leads.
Speaker 1:Let's say a company has a hundred leads coming in and they come in through different ways. They click, request a demo, talk to sales, they download a white paper, sign up for trial, whatever. Some of those have a higher probability to convert to an actual held sales meeting. So if somebody comes and says, talk to sales, they're probably going to want to talk to sales. If somebody just downloads some random white paper, maybe they read it, maybe they didn't. Maybe they liked it, maybe they didn't. So it takes a little bit of work from the team to follow up with that person and get a meeting booked on the calendar. Well, here's the problem. The person that's booking that meeting on a salesperson's calendar is getting paid per meeting booked. And oh boy, do they love those ones that say talk to sales or request a demo because that's low hanging fruit and it's easy. Well, a lot of people can hit their goal, their quota, whatever it is, based off of those.
Speaker 1:So then the effort put into trying to convert the harder, to convert folks that did the lower intent activities, if you will white paper, that did the lower intent activities, if you will white paper, data sheet, whatever it was Well, that's hard. So a lot of people just don't do it or they don't do it well, and then you just end up with this layer of semi-bureaucracy that it's like the guy in office space, tom Smikowski, you know I take these things from the engineers or the customers because I don't have to, you don't need that, you don't. You don't need a lot of it, maybe you need a little bit of it. So maybe if somebody's in some wild market segment and you want to say I've got three or four follow-up questions before I flip you over to Troy, cool, but there's a function for that. So I'm not saying completely get rid of the function, but you definitely don't need to pay somebody $100,000 a year to shepherd someone from requested demo to a calendar invite for another person. That's just dumb.
Speaker 2:That is the very first reason why I decided to start demo and go big here. And it is that issue right. It's like okay, if they're wanting to talk to sales, why are you giving them to somebody that's not sales? Well, I guess, whatever you can call them sales, it doesn't really matter. Inbound SDR.
Speaker 1:Inbound SDRs are not salespeople.
Speaker 2:Yeah, yeah, maybe it's because they talk to an account executive instead. But yeah, man, and then you have that conversation and they're like you're not a good fit or your timing's not right. But that whole inbound SDR is essentially like a BANT methodology and they just kind of use it because they need to. And then you go and talk to sales and a lot of times that sales rep doesn't really even trust that inbound SDR and the conversation they had. So they then redo that entire conversation, making sure that all right well, let's make sure that you're a really, really good fit versus a good fit based on my inbound SDR and how does that make the prospect feel? Like shit. They're just ready to see the demo. Like like, all right, like, look, I know my problem and I get it. Like you, your job as a sales rep is to, you know, expand and illuminate pain that I that I might have, that I'm not aware of. I totally understand that.
Speaker 2:But at the end of the day, it's like people want to see the product before they get inundated with these sales calls and these sales tactics and be shoved through a sales funnel.
Speaker 2:And that's why when I think of demo or even G2, g2 is great for exploration and really understanding what people are saying about the technology, whether it's flawed or not, based on payments and stuff like that.
Speaker 2:That's beyond me, but it's great to at least go out there and see what people are saying.
Speaker 2:In my opinion, it's like how do you go find out about new technology and, like I mentioned, see it and just be like, oh yeah, like this is something, because a lot of people I actually lost a deal once because they said your UI sucked and I worked at a company it was a very dinosaur company in the cybersecurity space but it was one of the best out there but they were just like dude, I need something fresher. Like this is like a Windows 2000 computer, like I just need something, I just need something new, um, something fresh and easier to use. And like, sadly, like sometimes UI can be and UX can be a competitive advantage these days. But anywho, yeah, the entire thing is like you're having that inbound SDR conversation and I would say the majority of the time your sales rep and or they probably don't even talk about it one or two. If they do talk about it, the sales rep doesn't trust that they did a good enough job and they had that same exact conversation before giving the prospect what they want.
Speaker 1:Well, and I think this is where it gets tricky, because the the perception is that the prospect just wants to see the demo.
Speaker 1:Which, if, if they're junior, if the prospects, if the prospects like, oh, I'm going to go evaluate a bunch of things and see what I like, or if they're mid-level and they're terrified to ask for more budget, then sure, maybe. But if someone's really trying to solve the problem that they have the authority to solve and they need it fixed, then the process is typically I'm willing to give you what you need, to show me what I need, and then we can figure out if we need to move forward. Well, in that case, if I had a five to 10 minute call with person A and then person B re-asks those questions for five to 10 minutes, you've lost so much rapport with me to the point where I say, okay, show me the product now. So when people say, show me the product now, they're not doing it because they wanted to see the product. They're doing it because you just took both of your shots that you had to do good discovery and you you use them on qualification.
Speaker 2:Yeah, oh yeah, oh yeah. That is a. That's a very frustrating experience and now that I'm actually like running something behind the wheels and I am evaluating tech for specific areas, it's obnoxious and I'm like this is why I built demos because of this exact, because of this exact reason. But also it's funny because on the flip side of that, I also see, like one, what I should be building like, okay, this sales rep actually did a great job and I don't know how we're going to, how we're going to emulate that in with using tech and using. I think a lot of stuff could be, but that's one and then two I don't think that human interaction will ever be gone in sales, ever.
Speaker 2:I just don't. I don't believe that, especially like higher ticket sales, right, like you're selling whatever you want to call higher ticket 500 K, a million, whatever it is. I don't think that I could have done my. I don't think tech could have done my old role, where it was large enterprise accounts and you're literally just selling, like to a group of 30 different people in five different functions at a company. So I never think that I'm replacing the human aspect of sales, but I do think that, like, there's a way to streamline and reduce sales cycles by, like, just eliminating all of that BS in the front, where you don't get what you are asking for on the first, second or even third call.
Speaker 1:Yeah Well, humans are evolving. We used to have vacuum cleaner salesmen go door to door and now you can buy a thousand dollar vacuum cleaner at Costco off the shelf and you don't even think to ask somebody a question. Yeah, oh yeah, it's moving that direction. It's not super fast, but it's it's definitely moving that direction.
Speaker 2:Yeah, and maybe honestly, I do like one of our goals is at some point. Is there a way to you know transact technology on the site? Yes, but do I see like an IBM doing transactions through demo? I don't know if I'm thinking really big, maybe, but I think of, like, maybe, small businesses taking advantage of that, like hey, I don't need to go spend 180 K O T E on a sales rep, I could just go take a few percentage off my my sales and make more.
Speaker 1:So well, especially if it's a point solution, it's easy to understand and the buyer has sole authority to do it. So if one person says I want to buy this, you know so. For example, I've been using Salesforcecom since like 2011. I don't need a sales rep to buy Salesforcecom. To me it's a known thing and it just it's worse. It's like I need a new Weber grill. I don't. I do not need to talk to a human about a Weber grill, because I've burned through five of them in my life.
Speaker 2:Yeah, yeah, yeah. And if you've used it before and you've already bought it, especially in like several past lives at other companies, yeah, you're like yo, I'm a champion for this product, I already know it, I just want to buy it, even that product. Even that's frustrating, right, when you're a champion for a product and then you go to buy it. Even that process is usually crappy.
Speaker 1:You're like dude, I know I want this, I used it Like I know it, just come on, let me buy it. Well, and this is what's happening, because you've got a massive explosion in the number of folks that both sell and buy B2B software specifically. So if you think back in the day, the CIO bought most things. There weren't a lot of department heads and there certainly weren't teams that were buying their own stuff, because stuff was expensive, stuff was hosted on premise, stuff had security risk, stuff didn't exist.
Speaker 1:Well, now that stuff exists, it's in the cloud. You can rip a credit card and pay for it. It makes things much more transactional and you're not going out and educating an entire populace on what it is and how it works and to get comfortable with new stuff, because a lot of things that exist today it's not really that new. It's just the third iteration of the fourth generation of something that's been around for a long time and maybe, instead of being manual or spreadsheets, now it's some technology or maybe even local. Now it's in the cloud. So eventually you get to the point where everything kind of becomes a weber grill yeah, yeah it does.
Speaker 2:there are so many technologies that are really just well. Two things One that are just like a chat GPT wrapper and they just claim that they are an AI native technology and it's like you're just pinging chat GPT's API. I know exactly what you're doing. Companies doing this Like I'm not hating on it at all. But the ones that are like okay, spreadsheets suck, but they work and they do the job, to be honest. So let's just make it a prettier spreadsheet and then, you know, maybe they'll buy it. And people do like I know a lot of successful companies that are literally just trying to replace their spreadsheet functionality and that's all it is. But hey, it's nicer, it's easier to use, but at the end of the day, it's just to use. But at the end of the day, it's just a spreadsheet.
Speaker 1:But yeah, so now we're getting into the finance world. So let's talk about that for a second, since I think people that have stuck with us this far are probably interested in technology, in the future and evolution, things like that. Well, back in the day, you would go raise venture capital because you need it for things like hardware and infrastructure back in the day, day, okay. And then people started raising venture capital for things like product development, innovation, buying a bunch of employees to come come do things, and then one of the most interesting innovations that I've seen is with I think it was general catalyst decoupled risk investment from scale investment. So they said we're going to price from scale investment. So they said we're going to price investment in product development and R&D at one level. We're going to price scaling sales and marketing at a different level. We're going to take less equity and it's going to act more like another type of financial instrument that's not as punitive to the company's cap table.
Speaker 1:Well, that becomes really interesting, because now we're saying wait a second, why would someone take super expensive money to?
Speaker 1:Can't get a bank a lot of times, because you know bank of america and wells fargo to understand, they're still. You know they still got a stagecoach is their logo, so they're. They're back in the stagecoach days for for a lot of us. But I just, I just think the fact that there are so many more people are so much more comfortable with what exists today and the entry cost to build something is so much lower than it used to be, and you're starting to get on the investment side people to realize that wait a second, there might be different risk profiles for different types of capital needs. So innovation on the finance market and Stripe's doing a great job with some of their financial products for working capital loans, man, all this stuff comes together and we start seeing technology companies look less like winner take all markets where one person's going to take over the world, and more like restaurants and gas stations where you can build something awesome that can create family multi-generational wealth without having to be Bill Gates or Steve jobs.
Speaker 2:Yeah, yeah, you can. And it's funny Cause we just actually went through a. We just went through like this whole round of just talking to VCs and stuff like that. It's true, there are so many, like you just mentioned the gas stations, restaurants kind of thing. Obviously you're meaning that in the sense of software as well. There are just so many softwares that can be that gas station, that can be that restaurant when it's just hey, you want to be done running this, give it to your son when he turns 18, when he gets out of school, and maybe he doesn't need to go to college, who knows, it's generating $12 million in revenue a year with like an 85% profit margin. Like just go run it. And so, um, yeah, it's what I've noticed.
Speaker 2:So I've built three things. This one's definitely like by far the one that I the other two things that I've built is more like a layer of like hey, it's really just a feature that I'm selling, and this one is more of like a disruptor, like how can I disrupt the way things are done today? Riskier has a higher chance to fail, but also it could have a higher reward. So it's funny because what I've noticed from all of them is yeah, you can build something for pretty inexpensive and if you can actually find an engineer to kind of go in with you, you might even be able to build it for free. Or just like AWS costs not a lot, s3 costs not a lot. It's very cheap to host and build your technology. So, yeah, and I think that's another reason why we were talking about it before we jumped on this podcast about just the W2 workers and things like that I just think that it's so fascinating for many people and so entertaining to go see, like, what they can do on the side, to the point where because it's happened to me to the point where it's almost dragging you away from your W2 job because you know that there's like a different life out there that could be lived and that you could create.
Speaker 2:But like, yeah, do I make the jump, do I not? I got a family, I dump, do I not? I got a family, I got a kid, I gotta feed them. But then, at the same time, like I know that I have this idea, I just want to go try to build it. Um, and I think that it's becoming a problem. That's why, like, quiet quitters were there for a little bit. They're just like ah, whatever.
Speaker 2:But I don't know, man, it's. It is crazy how easily accessible things are nowadays and it's only going to get easier and easier. Uh, the only thing that'll be tougher is probably just just standing. It's the same way. I think about outbound sales is like if you're going to go spin up 45 different domains and a thousand different fake users, they all route to one domain and one email inbox, like that's a. It's a weird world that we put ourselves in, but it's kind of like you have to do it to scale anything. But yeah, man, I don't know, I have a lot of thoughts just about like how easy and how fun it is to build things and how just I think a lot of people want to. They just don't know where to start.
Speaker 1:but yeah, Well, one of the questions is do you have to stand out?
Speaker 2:I don't, you know. It's funny because at first I thought you did, but then I know, ever since I started demo and I started becoming closer friends with many different founders that have companies that are doing five, 10 million in revenue, and I'm like dude, I don't know anybody that talks about your business. I don't literally know a single soul that knows what you do. But you generate a good amount of revenue and you're profitable, or, and you generate, or, and you um, ended up getting all this funding. Funding is a whole different story. It's not a messy conversation that can be had but, um, whether it's good, it's good for good and for bad, it doesn't matter.
Speaker 2:But yeah, I don't know, because at first I was like, yeah, you got to have a brand that stands out Like you got to be like the gongs, the chili pipers of the world, because they were able to create something where people just like to talk about it without you making them talk about it. But there's a lot of businesses out there that just do really well and they're justbound, closing deals and people like your product. I think product's more important than marketing. I was thinking about this last night but, yeah, you found the answer yeah, yeah, cause you can market a. You can market all you want. You can spend a lot of money in marketing, but if your product sucks, people will just turn, and now your business goes down.
Speaker 1:So exactly, and if your product's good, you'll get word of mouth.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I literally was thinking about it last night, I don't know why Nobody even asked me. I was just like I don't know. I was just like we should build a really damn good, easy to use marketplace product, because then it will market itself.
Speaker 1:But yeah, yeah, and maybe it markets itself or maybe it makes it easier to market, because the math is you want your virality coefficient to be above one and it markets itself. Well, I don't think people in B2B are going to have a virality coefficient above one. That's not going to happen.
Speaker 1:It happens in B2C sometimes, but at least if it exists. So if people will bring on new customers, I think that if the virality coefficient is above one, that means for every customer you bring on, they bring on more than one customer, and it might be like 1.02 customers. Sure, well, that's a great thing. But in B2B, like what? If every customer you brought on brings on 0.2 customers? So one in five brings on a new customer? Well, that's awesome. That's just free growth. Yeah, cheaper growth, reduced cost growth. Yeah, cheaper growth, reduced cost growth.
Speaker 2:Yeah, maybe that's why a lot of these PLG companies are are doing influencer marketing, because if they can bring on you know 20 more. I don't know if you've fooled around with influencer marketing I haven't but it's something I'm planning to tinker in. But yeah, man, it's.
Speaker 1:I think the people that want to be influencers aren't influential. That's my take.
Speaker 2:I, I agree almost a hundred percent. There are some, there are some that I like and I'm like dude, you're actually out here, like you're in, you're actually doing it. And then there's someone I'm like man, you were an AE for a year and now you're posting about 13 different tools that you use, and we know for damn sure you don't use those tools, because no one's ever been a scenario where you can go work at a company and just use 13 different tools of your own and just like I don't know. Yeah, I, I agree. I think nowadays, the influencer marketing space, especially on linkedin, is just like how much money can I milk off you now that I have 10 000 followers? But yeah, um, yeah I think it's.
Speaker 1:I don't think it works. I wouldn't put a dime in it myself yeah, yeah, because the people that you want to be influential. I mean you can be. I don't know in what I'm, is what I'm doing right now in the market? This guy, I've never met you before, right yeah, have you ever given me a dime? Nope, I just think what you're doing is cool.
Speaker 1:And that's it's just I think it's going to put a big splash in an area that I think is a waste, and so we we we talked a little bit about my perspective on inbound sales development from what the sales development reps do. Now let's flip over and talk about the sales enablement world that has just ballooned over the last six or seven years. So when Hillman and I wrote the sales enablement playbook back in 2017, we were sitting there and everybody's saying it's this, it's that, it's the other. So you've got these consultants that are out there trying to build their practice and it's hilarious. You go find a one person consultant. They can nuclear bomb the entire landscape and, as long as they can get a little bit of fruit out of it, they're fed and they're good right. So there's that whole direction. Then you got the software companies that go out and raise. Some of them have raised hundreds of millions now. Well, they want to redefine terms and sales enablement's about content management cool, show me somebody that closed the deal with content yeah, sales in a it's that.
Speaker 2:It's an interesting world that that, now that I have demo, I have access to so many different technologies that do so many different things, and sales enablement is one of the subcategories there. Yeah, and yeah, it's, it's. I. I do feel like a lot of it is tapping into, like the CMS, content management you know the content management system, space and um, and it's less about hey, let's make you a better seller, let's focus on developing you, like I actually tell everybody this, my biggest regret ever in my sales career was leaving MongoDB, because they actually focused on developing yourself as a sales rep and they were so good, like their sales process was so tight knit. And on developing yourself as a sales rep, and they were so good, like their sales process was so tight knit.
Speaker 2:And when I was there I'm sure it's even more now when I was there, it was like 18 quarters in a row where 75% of reps hit quota and they hit 100% of quota or higher every single quarter. Dude, it was nuts and everybody and they were. Your OTE was always lower than any other company and they would always just say we don't overpay you because we know you'll hit your number. Like that's kind of like their whole thing. Um, but they focus so much like so much on actually making you a better sales rep and but I was stubborn, I was already. You know, I came from closing sales for a few years and I went there and I was like, yeah, I have my own way, I like to sell, and I was just being a stubborn ass.
Speaker 2:But, um, but yeah, nowadays it's like sales enablement is hey, go look at like this content, you know this content that marketing created and and go learn it. And then now you can go talk more comfortably on on sales calls. So yeah, there are these weird. It's so weird because then there's other directions where I think some ai tools are kind of getting cool, like, hey, let's train you live on a call. I think they have a long way to go to really make it like worthwhile and fruitful. But but still, yeah, the sale, the sales enablement, space it. It went in so many different directions. Now nobody really knows. I guess it's probably dependent on the, on the company that you're at, but nobody really knows what it means today, if it means becoming a better seller or just getting more resourceful as a seller with content. I don't know.
Speaker 1:And they spend. It ends up spending a lot of time with this inbound sales development.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:And that's because people drift towards their comfort zone, and what better place to have some quick wins and some success than working with the folks that just entered the company in a junior role and they need ramped up on stuff.
Speaker 1:And so you get this situation where almost every company I've ever worked with I've worked with I don't know four, 450, 500 companies over the last 10 years they end up in this world where sales enablement's not working with the second line managers, they're rarely working with the frontline managers, they're almost never working with the senior enterprise salespeople, because they're good, end up working with internal promotions from SDR to AE, inbound SDRs, outbound SDRs, and there's so much value to be extracted from the more senior people, from the hiring process, from the implementation and continuous improvement of the tech stack, but these companies let the enablement resources drift towards comfort zones of sales development reps, first-time internal promotions and the evaluation of new technology. And I feel like you're hitting two of those things right out of the gate, which is the evaluation of new technology and then reducing the reliance on the inbound sales development reps long-term.
Speaker 2:Yeah, yeah, yeah, you know it's funny, I never. When I started demo, I never looked at it as a sales enablement company. And then I talked to a few different VCs, a few different founders and just things like that. They're like yeah, I mean we are investing in sales enablement tools right now and I'm like am I a sales enablement tool? I didn't think I was, Because when I think of sales enablement, honestly and maybe this is just because it's the world I grew up in and I started selling about eight years ago, so it's not like I'm old to the game by any means or I have a lot of wisdom in it but when I think of sales or sales enablement, for some reason my mind automatically and I think it's because it was my first job goes to mind tickle and it goes to like these, like high spots and these companies like that's what I think of as sales enablement is those content tools that you're talking about that are just like hey, he's fresh out of college or whatever, like let's go ahead and and make him watch these videos of how to sell the product and what the brain was yeah, yeah it's, it's not as yeah it is, and I think it's a, I think it's a time waste and I think that that's why a lot of companies, like spec it's trying to do like the enablement on the go, like wherever you, you know, live and are in the sales cycle, um, but, and I don't even know that, I haven't used that tool, but I just know, like, what they do because the demo, so yeah, Because you know what they do Well in giving people content.
Speaker 1:I mean, that's the other funny thing is that when, when you think about salespeople, these aren't folks that made their way through school reading hours and hours and hours a day. I mean, how many sales folks do you know that went to law school? I know like two, maybe.
Speaker 1:Yeah, yeah, and I don't know any, or that have engineering degrees, or that are doctors or that. So folks that really like to read a lot and that retain tons of knowledge, that's what they go do with their lives, because that's how they get cherry picked out of the educational system that's grown up. People that are personable and can talk to other humans, they end up as salespeople. And so then you say, oh hey, hey, person who didn't find success in life reading stuff, here's a bunch of stuff to read.
Speaker 2:How dumb is that? Yeah, yeah, and I never thought of it that way. And that's literally exactly how it happens. It's like, hey, I got this, like for me, I got a supply chain degree and I don't want to do supply chain, I don't know what else to do, like, how am I going to be successful? And then I ended up in sales. So, yeah, yeah.
Speaker 1:Yeah, go ahead and send your general counsel a document and say, hey, read this and learn more about our approach to legal. I are approached illegal. I'm yeah, do it. I'm sure they'll crush. But hey, here's 10 salespeople. Go tell them to read stuff. Yeah, and are you gonna make sure the retention is there? If anybody out there's concerned about knowledge retention for things, be a product, be it sales skills, etc. Hit me up. Free stuff at coach the armcom. Free stuff, coach the armcom, I gotta get for it. See, I said no long ads. I didn't say no ads.
Speaker 2:I love that that was short and sweet. You doubled it up to make sure that it engraved.
Speaker 1:Yeah, and they can't skip it on Spotify because it's too fast. I love it. I love it, yeah. So what's the harder part of the marketplace? Getting companies on there or getting people to come on and watch the demos?
Speaker 2:Companies is easy. I think companies is easy um you know I think companies is easy.
Speaker 1:They're desperate. They want, like we need, more leads. Let's see if this works yeah, yeah.
Speaker 2:so it's funny, we the day that we launched it actually I I wanted to grow demo into a side gig ended up going way more. It ended up blowing up faster than I expected, but all that to say is we've had to to date, the last three months, we've had maybe 800 or more companies request to be on the site because, at the end of the day, it is free traffic for them. That's completely free to sign up, and then if you want to really gather any insights of what's going on on your page, you got to pay, of course, like that's just the way economics works, and so companies is easy. But it's also easy because a lot of companies are starting to make everything publicly accessible, which is great, what buyers have wanted for the last 10 years. But the thing is now, if you're going to go look at like sales engagement platforms, do you want to go to 10 different websites and watch 10 different demos or try to get information from 10 different companies? Probably not.
Speaker 1:And so it was really nice little explainer videos. Here's Charlie Charlie's on his way to work.
Speaker 2:I hate those that are just like the 60 second heavy music. It's like boom, boom yeah.
Speaker 1:Right, yeah, they said our content licensing budget for music is $4. What?
Speaker 2:can we get? Literally, they're like, well, this is free, so let's just go with that, but anyways, now that a lot of stuff is publicly accessible and there's things like perplexity and chat, gpt, it's actually what is becoming even easier is us finding ways to create company pages without them even consenting to it. Just because everything is publicly accessible, it's not like we're using it and it's not out there, right, like I wouldn't go and sign up for a gated demo and then download that gated demo and add it to demo, like I wouldn't do that.
Speaker 1:Your dog in the background will get mad at you cause that's unethical.
Speaker 2:Yeah, He'll, he'd be pissed, Um and so, and so that's that part. But the thing about the user part because the co-founder and I we have around like 115,000 followers on LinkedIn, it's been kind of easy to drive people to the site, but we see that that is definitely like becoming the bottleneck is okay, People are excited about the site, but it's looked the same for the last three months. We got to change the look, we got to add more ways to evaluate and find new technologies without having like poke around, because it was a perfect site when we launched for 45 technologies. We have over 180 now, and so, like, finding tech is now hard because there's so many at the scroll through. So that's all stuff that we're improving on right now.
Speaker 2:And so, yeah, man, I'd say the demand of driving the users is now the hardest part. Um, and that's why we're actually hiring this like head of content, head of you know, community kind of thing, Cause we have we're very bullish on a specific play, but, um, but yeah, man, I think that I think driving the users is the more difficult part, but it hasn't been the biggest challenge yet. We're just starting to see it slow down because we can only use our audience for so much.
Speaker 1:Yeah, how do you get an executive to care about this? Let me paint the picture. So I'm a senior executive at a company that is one of these cool work from home companies, imagine and I just got off, eight Zoom calls and my kids are screaming in the other room and my dog wants to go for a walk. I come back at night I've got some time, but I got a nice bottle of scotch up on there and I've got this movie that I haven't seen yet and I kind of want some sleep. That's the picture. That's the person. How do you get that person to watch videos on your website?
Speaker 2:You know it's funny, that person I mean. Our pitch is pretty simple and it's exactly what we do. Like, hey, do you want to go watch software demos without a sales cycle? But a lot of them are like, yeah, I don't, I'm sick of jumping into sales cycles, so that's nice.
Speaker 2:But I have a caveat here, and that is that what I'm realizing and what we are realizing is we'll see a CMO of a company watch a demo and then we'll see four other lower-level people at that company watch a demo and at the end of the day, if you are a CEO or let's just say you're at Gong the CMO is not evaluating software right, they just don't have the time to. But the VP or the director or the manager are, and so we're noticing that a lot of the people that are watching demos aren't those senior executives that are, you know, vps or C-levels. They're typically director and senior managers. Like that's what we're realizing, but it's just as simple as that pitch. Like, hey, just want to let you know like your team can go and watch sales demos without jumping into sales cycles here, but it's on the flip side of that, they want their company on it. The pitch is very similar.
Speaker 1:Like hey, do you want? That pitch seems like it would resonate with the most senior folks, because if I'm a chief marketing officer of a big company, I don't want my team just running around talking to vendors and pretending like you're doing work all day.
Speaker 2:Yeah, you can just literally hey, your team's wasting a lot of time on sales cycles. They can go watch demos here. They can go evaluate Hopefully here shortly. They can go evaluate software here yeah, Interesting, and then that person would still probably watch that movie and drink that scotch. But at the end of the day, they know where the team can go. Yeah, our messaging has purposely has team can go. Yeah, our, our messaging is purposely has always tried to be very short and succinct, like that's this go evaluate software without a sales cycle.
Speaker 2:That's all we want to do so well, you know a lot of people I have, like product marketers that are reaching out. They're like consultants. Hey, I don't understand what your company does by the messaging. I'm like there's no other like easier way to tell you what it does. Like right now it's literally watch software demos without sales wait, someone said that proactively. Yeah, several people. Yeah, I'm like all right, well, you're silly I bet they're divorced like multiple.
Speaker 1:I got over I got over one and a half divorces for these people. Not that you're a bad person, you got divorced. That's what I'm saying, yeah but it's, but it's. It's always the uh, yeah, not that you're a bad person. You got divorced, that's what I'm saying. Yeah, but it's but it's.
Speaker 2:It's always the uh yeah, not that you're a bad person, but it's always the hey. I'm not really understanding what your messaging is doing like, I kind of get it, but I had some ideas. Let me know if you want to chat. I guess just their prospecting method and I get it.
Speaker 1:Oh, they're trying to get you to hire them for something.
Speaker 2:Yeah, yeah, they're trying to get it's product marketers that are trying to get me to like hire them, to like improve my messaging and positioning in the market, and I'm like I mean, until we do more from a from a feature perspective, like we can't change our messaging because it's exactly what we do.
Speaker 1:So well, I wouldn't hire a product marketer until you were very large. Anyways, yeah, yeah, yeah, exactly, plus. I mean talk about jobs, w2 versus not. So yeah, product marketing is a great spot in bigger companies, companies that are pumping out lots of products, companies that are doing roll-ups. So if you've got a platform company that's doing add-ons, buying a bunch of different organizations rolling them into one, you need really good product marketing. 100% A big company, lots of SKUs. You're shipping hardware, you're doing a hardware-software combo Boom product marketing. You're going international and you're trying to figure out different use cases or different packaging models for different geos based on purchasing price parity boom product marketing.
Speaker 2:Yeah, you guys are tiny, like why would someone? I know, I know, I know, yeah, yeah, not to underestimate product marketers because, like you just mentioned, those use cases, they are great. But you got to be at the right company, the right size, but yeah yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah yeah.
Speaker 1:No need down here Messaging. Did the, did the prospect understand what we do and did they buy from us? Cool, yeah, hey prospect. Yeah, we're getting you set up today. Quick question before we get started Why'd you buy? Yeah, whatever they say, that's your messaging Exactly.
Speaker 2:It's literally that simple, but nobody really does that anymore. You know, it's really just like okay, here's our customer success manager and then bye, see you later. And it's never like why did you buy? It's like, okay, great. So what I'm reading now is these notes, and this is what it looks like we're setting up today. Whatever I mean now, at this point we're going off on a tangent, but yeah we're not going off the tangent, we're going down.
Speaker 1:Okay, so we're going to bring this back because we're going to talk about the future of the world, and the future of the world also includes fewer employees and flatter orgs. Jensen from Nvidia said the other day that I think he reports it's a lot, it's a lot. And somebody else said, well, best practice is eight. And he goes well, best practice for me is not eight, 60. And you need really high performing people If that's going to be the case. You can't have 60 drama people on your team.
Speaker 1:Yeah, no, you cannot smart, autonomous I know what I'm doing Strong leadership skills Boom, let's, let's go. But I think the on the flip side, you've had a world where, especially sales teams like three, four, five people on a team and a manager Managing three or four people is not a full-time job, it's purely not. And so then, when we flip over to how are we evaluating and implementing software? Well, I think we can probably cut a good number of hours out of required workforce time if we're able to think about well, let's put all of our effort, let's still spend the same amount of time. So let's not cut jobs, let's shift. Because I don't want to talk about cutting jobs, because that's not my job here. I do think lots of jobs are going away. I think most jobs are going away. That is a tangent.
Speaker 1:Yeah, that's a tangent that we'll save. But I think that the let's say that there's 100 hours allocated to our tech stack this year. Now, 100 is a dumb number. Let's say 1,000. 1,000 hours allocated to tech stack. I think that way too many companies spend way too much time on the procurement and evaluation side of that scale, as opposed to the implementation, ongoing success side. So let's not fire people because of what Troy's building. Let's go out and say, hey, we've got a thousand hours, why are we spending 700 of them evaluating stuff? Let's spend 200 of them evaluating stuff and take that 500 and put it towards three months, six months, nine months check-ins around how our team is engaging to solve that specific problem that we started.
Speaker 1:Because, hey, people that buy software out there, y'all always want to talk about ROI. None of you ever measure it. I have not ever seen one of you show me an ROI measurement document that you created one year after buying technology. Ain't never seen it. I know somebody probably does it. Not something on my radar. How about you? What did you say at the end? How about you? Have you seen that?
Speaker 2:No, no no, no, you've seen someone put together a post-mortem.
Speaker 1:Here's what their ROI was expected to be. Here's what it was, here's the variance analysis and here's what we're doing about it. Nobody does that. So why the heck do they talk about it on the front of the process? Because they think they're supposed to yeah, no, nobody does it.
Speaker 2:But they will pay a damn good amount to try to get some forester report saying that they, they on average, give you 500, you know 80 x roi, but yes, there's never. It's funny because when I and that's what like a mongo db for, for example, like they, they were one of them where it was like it was just so well set up. There's, like you're one of those where, like you have to make sure that they're generating an ROI or they're going to turn and you already know, like the too much turn, the business goes down. But um, but yeah nobody is saying this is your exact ROI.
Speaker 2:Um, and the end of the goal of ROI is making sure that you're getting more than what you're spending. Like that's really it. That's the basic.
Speaker 1:If somebody uses it, no matter what it is, it can be anything. If somebody uses it, there's not a thing in the world that produces a negative ROI.
Speaker 2:Yeah, yeah, that's, that's actually with now that you talked about like physical hardware. You're like we're forced to use physical hardware, but that's the challenge with software companies is getting people to use it. So if you're a sales tool or anything like that, it's like yeah, they, you know we sold a thousand licenses but only a hundred of our sales reps are actually using it. Pretty well, and then you know 90 of them aren't using it that well, 10 of them are power users. So like that's, that's the big challenge. I say, and I've even thought like hey, is there?
Speaker 1:a way to come out it If I have an employee. So if I have an employee that leaves and their Slack doesn't get used, I get a refund. They give me the money back. Companies should just bake that in, well, okay, so let's talk about this usage-based pricing. So Frank Slootman, the guy that was the I don't know if he still is, maybe he is a CEO of Snowflake he said that everything's going to usage-based pricing and that this whole per user per month paid in advance is a scheme that's. Basically. Salesforce did it when they started, so everybody started copying it because it was easy to sell stuff. People like to buy how they like to buy, and if they knew that that's the model that works through finance and procurement, then cool, I'll pay per user per month. But you just said people buy a bunch of users they don't use. So do you have any opinions on usage-based pricing in the future?
Speaker 2:I like it. I like it, but it's just so hard to predict it, which is why I think a lot of people don't want to do it if they know your user account. So the way it's, I feel like I've brought them up 50 times. Mongodb had a usage-based pricing where it was a database where you build applications on top of it. Their whole thing was like we're going to give you three months to see how much you use it after the contract and then, once that happens, we'll then multiply that by four and assume that that's what you're going to use for the year.
Speaker 2:But of course, a lot of times when you're building applications and you get users on it and you build traffic for that application, it goes, you know it increases and you usually make a little bit more. But that's how you would predict how much you made in ARR is. You give it three months and, and so I think that it makes for the buyer, for the company, if you want to like reduce churn. I think that that makes so much more sense. Like dude, only 70% of my Salesforce is actually using this tool and I'm over here wasting so much money. There's so much wasted money in tech.
Speaker 1:Yeah, so it doesn't make sense for the investors for venture capital specifically.
Speaker 2:No, it doesn't.
Speaker 1:It doesn't make sense. For Private equity guys are fine because they're not trying to triple, triple, double, double, double. But when you think about locked and recurring revenue, I mean what is recurring revenue? A really good product that has no contract, that pays monthly on a usage basis, is more likely recurring revenue than a bad product that has a one-year contract.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I agree with that, it's recurring for a year?
Speaker 1:sure, yeah, but there's going to be churn. So this goes back to your insight, which I a hundred percent agree with. And I think this is the most important thing is, you got to build a great product. And if you build a great product and people actually use it, then it's going to produce a good return on investment. And if the pricing packaging is pricing and packaging are fair, then you can end up in a spot where everybody wins.
Speaker 2:Yeah, yeah, and I think that's a. It's such a tough thing to measure because you can say pricing and packaging is fair, right, but then every company is so different. I was at a company where the churn was so high, but it's because the price was very low. But we were just bringing on customers left and right. We were Series B. We were like let's go get a ton of customers, it doesn't matter what they look like, 70% of them all churned. And so it's so tough because to one company that might seem fair, into the next company it's like, oh, this is really high, but I don't know. In my opinion, when it comes to sales, it's like the price is not high If the problem is big enough. So that's like a whole, whole, another can of worms.
Speaker 1:You can go. You can go high if, if there's a ton of pain to be solved, you can go really high until the next company shows up and can do exactly what you did for one third of the price.
Speaker 2:Yeah, exactly yep, that's another thing. The other thing vc's talking about a lot is what's your moat? And I just feel like moats very funny and overused these days. Um, because, like gong, yeah, they're a great tool, but there's so many tools out there now that are like people are realizing maybe I don't need all these bells and whistles and I can just use a, you know, one of these recall recording tools that are $100 a month versus $1,000, $1,200 a month per user. But yeah, exactly, you're exactly right with that.
Speaker 1:Yeah, and as a result, other companies can come in with lower employee count, lower capital needs, come in with lower employee count, lower capital needs. So the owners of the business retain more equity, so they can have more control and they can make decisions that they want to make, instead of having to be by committee of somebody that has some kind of interest financial only interest, not as much emotional interest in the business. And you don't have to do things in two-year sprints, otherwise you die. I think that's one of the big changes that's on the horizon and it's happening in a lot of places is that if you get in the venture capital route, you have to, you basically have to raise money at least every three years, otherwise you go away. Well, you used to need to raise venture capital if you're starting a software business. That is not the case anymore. You do not.
Speaker 2:It's not. And I'm even seeing a shift where, because venture capital wants to just place a lot of bets, they know 99% of them are going to fail, but they just hope for that one unicorn, because I think the statistic is it pays off for like 100 losses or something like that if they get one unicorn. I can't remember the exact thing I read, but I'm also seeing a lot of people just raising like that pre-seed kind of round and then you know whatever 500, 1 million, and then they're like all right, cool I'm. You know, I'm not going to raise a kid, because I know that with this I can go hire the right team, the right small team, to then scale it to profitability. And why do I need to go raise more if I'm profitable? So that's another route.
Speaker 1:That that's another thing that a lot of people are doing these days, and so yeah, yeah, especially if you're not really I'm not going to say not tech, but not hard tech.
Speaker 2:Yeah, oh yeah, deep tech, deep tech and hard tech might need a little bit more, but yeah yeah, you need tons of money.
Speaker 1:Yeah, if you're doing hardware or if you're doing something that's really hard like an actual AI company, putting in prompts into chat, gpt and doing fine tuning on models is not AI.
Speaker 2:No, no, no, it's just no. It's AI enhanced, but it's not an AI product. Yeah, and a lot of times I'm noticing, really the only good use case for that is like search and then summarization maybe, but like, I guess, customer success a little bit. But even then, I still get annoyed with these ai chat bots that are for customer service and I still want to speak to a human about it. But, um, but yeah, it's not a, it's not a real ai technology. If you're just tapping into I think we talked about that in the beginning tapping into chat gpt's api yeah, it's a good feature, though no, it is.
Speaker 1:You build lots of cool features so you can do lots of things that just take a shortcut. Take a shortcut there, add an enhancement here or there. Lots of stuff going on over there. All right, troy, anything that you want to plug. How can people get in touch with you and learn more about all these demos that are out there that they don't have to talk to salespeople for anymore?
Speaker 2:Yeah, yeah. So I guess two things. One, just Troy Munson on LinkedIn I don't know my URL, to be honest, but Troy Munson on LinkedIn. And then, if you want to go watch software demos without the sales cycle, demoai D-I-M-M-Oai.
Speaker 1:D-I-M-M-Oai. Yeah, I mean you should make your get that custom LinkedIn profile. My LinkedIn profile is linkedincom. Slash whatever slash. Buy dash triangle selling, because everybody should buy triangle selling.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I love that. I think mine is like whatever dash, troy D Munson or Troy Munson, I can't remember it is my name. I did make a custom but I don't know what it is. But hopefully, like I've done enough for the LinkedIn community where if you search my name you'd find it, but if not, then I'm doing something wrong.
Speaker 1:Yeah, maybe you should hire an influencer to advise you. I will All right, Troy, thanks so much for chatting Everybody else. Thank you so much for stopping by this episode of the sales management podcast. We'll see you next time.