Podcasts about sales development reps

OpenAI DevDay is almost here! Per tradition, we are hosting a DevDay pregame event for everyone coming to town! Join us with demos and gossip!Also sign up for related events across San Francisco: the AI DevTools Night, the xAI open house, the Replicate art show, the DevDay Watch Party (for non-attendees), Hack Night with OpenAI at Cloudflare. For everyone else, join the Latent Space Discord for our online watch party and find fellow AI Engineers in your city.OpenAI's recent o1 release (and Reflection 70b debacle) has reignited broad interest in agentic general reasoning and tree search methods.While we have covered some of the self-taught reasoning literature on the Latent Space Paper Club, it is notable that the Eric Zelikman ended up at xAI, whereas OpenAI's hiring of Noam Brown and now Shunyu suggests more interest in tool-using chain of thought/tree of thought/generator-verifier architectures for Level 3 Agents.We were more than delighted to learn that Shunyu is a fellow Latent Space enjoyer, and invited him back (after his first appearance on our NeurIPS 2023 pod) for a look through his academic career with Harrison Chase (one year after his first LS show).ReAct: Synergizing Reasoning and Acting in Language Modelspaper linkFollowing seminal Chain of Thought papers from Wei et al and Kojima et al, and reflecting on lessons from building the WebShop human ecommerce trajectory benchmark, Shunyu's first big hit, the ReAct paper showed that using LLMs to “generate both reasoning traces and task-specific actions in an interleaved manner” achieved remarkably greater performance (less hallucination/error propagation, higher ALFWorld/WebShop benchmark success) than CoT alone. In even better news, ReAct scales fabulously with finetuning:As a member of the elite Princeton NLP group, Shunyu was also a coauthor of the Reflexion paper, which we discuss in this pod.Tree of Thoughtspaper link hereShunyu's next major improvement on the CoT literature was Tree of Thoughts:Language models are increasingly being deployed for general problem solving across a wide range of tasks, but are still confined to token-level, left-to-right decision-making processes during inference. This means they can fall short in tasks that require exploration, strategic lookahead, or where initial decisions play a pivotal role…ToT allows LMs to perform deliberate decision making by considering multiple different reasoning paths and self-evaluating choices to decide the next course of action, as well as looking ahead or backtracking when necessary to make global choices.The beauty of ToT is it doesnt require pretraining with exotic methods like backspace tokens or other MCTS architectures. You can listen to Shunyu explain ToT in his own words on our NeurIPS pod, but also the ineffable Yannic Kilcher:Other WorkWe don't have the space to summarize the rest of Shunyu's work, you can listen to our pod with him now, and recommend the CoALA paper and his initial hit webinar with Harrison, today's guest cohost:as well as Shunyu's PhD Defense Lecture:as well as Shunyu's latest lecture covering a Brief History of LLM Agents:As usual, we are live on YouTube! Show Notes* Harrison Chase* LangChain, LangSmith, LangGraph* Shunyu Yao* Alec Radford* ReAct Paper* Hotpot QA* Tau Bench* WebShop* SWE-Agent* SWE-Bench* Trees of Thought* CoALA Paper* Related Episodes* Our Thomas Scialom (Meta) episode* Shunyu on our NeurIPS 2023 Best Papers episode* Harrison on our LangChain episode* Mentions* Sierra* Voyager* Jason Wei* Tavily* SERP API* ExaTimestamps* [00:00:00] Opening Song by Suno* [00:03:00] Introductions* [00:06:16] The ReAct paper* [00:12:09] Early applications of ReAct in LangChain* [00:17:15] Discussion of the Reflection paper* [00:22:35] Tree of Thoughts paper and search algorithms in language models* [00:27:21] SWE-Agent and SWE-Bench for coding benchmarks* [00:39:21] CoALA: Cognitive Architectures for Language Agents* [00:45:24] Agent-Computer Interfaces (ACI) and tool design for agents* [00:49:24] Designing frameworks for agents vs humans* [00:53:52] UX design for AI applications and agents* [00:59:53] Data and model improvements for agent capabilities* [01:19:10] TauBench* [01:23:09] Promising areas for AITranscriptAlessio [00:00:01]: Hey, everyone, welcome to the Latent Space podcast. This is Alessio, partner and CTO of Residence at Decibel Partners, and I'm joined by my co-host Swyx, founder of Small AI.Swyx [00:00:12]: Hey, and today we have a super special episode. I actually always wanted to take like a selfie and go like, you know, POV, you're about to revolutionize the world of agents because we have two of the most awesome hiring agents in the house. So first, we're going to welcome back Harrison Chase. Welcome. Excited to be here. What's new with you recently in sort of like the 10, 20 second recap?Harrison [00:00:34]: Linkchain, Linksmith, Lingraph, pushing on all of them. Lots of cool stuff related to a lot of the stuff that we're going to talk about today, probably.Swyx [00:00:42]: Yeah.Alessio [00:00:43]: We'll mention it in there. And the Celtics won the title.Swyx [00:00:45]: And the Celtics won the title. You got that going on for you. I don't know. Is that like floorball? Handball? Baseball? Basketball.Alessio [00:00:52]: Basketball, basketball.Harrison [00:00:53]: Patriots aren't looking good though, so that's...Swyx [00:00:56]: And then Xun Yu, you've also been on the pod, but only in like a sort of oral paper presentation capacity. But welcome officially to the LinkedSpace pod.Shunyu [00:01:03]: Yeah, I've been a huge fan. So thanks for the invitation. Thanks.Swyx [00:01:07]: Well, it's an honor to have you on. You're one of like, you're maybe the first PhD thesis defense I've ever watched in like this AI world, because most people just publish single papers, but every paper of yours is a banger. So congrats.Shunyu [00:01:22]: Thanks.Swyx [00:01:24]: Yeah, maybe we'll just kick it off with, you know, what was your journey into using language models for agents? I like that your thesis advisor, I didn't catch his name, but he was like, you know... Karthik. Yeah. It's like, this guy just wanted to use language models and it was such a controversial pick at the time. Right.Shunyu [00:01:39]: The full story is that in undergrad, I did some computer vision research and that's how I got into AI. But at the time, I feel like, you know, you're just composing all the GAN or 3D perception or whatever together and it's not exciting anymore. And one day I just see this transformer paper and that's really cool. But I really got into language model only when I entered my PhD and met my advisor Karthik. So he was actually the second author of GPT-1 when he was like a visiting scientist at OpenAI. With Alec Redford?Swyx [00:02:10]: Yes.Shunyu [00:02:11]: Wow. That's what he told me. It's like back in OpenAI, they did this GPT-1 together and Ilya just said, Karthik, you should stay because we just solved the language. But apparently Karthik is not fully convinced. So he went to Princeton, started his professorship and I'm really grateful. So he accepted me as a student, even though I have no prior knowledge in NLP. And you know, we just met for the first time and he's like, you know, what do you want to do? And I'm like, you know, you have done those test game scenes. That's really cool. I wonder if we can just redo them with language models. And that's how the whole journey began. Awesome.Alessio [00:02:46]: So GPT-2 was out at the time? Yes, that was 2019.Shunyu [00:02:48]: Yeah.Alessio [00:02:49]: Way too dangerous to release. And then I guess the first work of yours that I came across was React, which was a big part of your defense. But also Harrison, when you came on The Pockets last year, you said that was one of the first papers that you saw when you were getting inspired for BlankChain. So maybe give a recap of why you thought it was cool, because you were already working in AI and machine learning. And then, yeah, you can kind of like intro the paper formally. What was that interesting to you specifically?Harrison [00:03:16]: Yeah, I mean, I think the interesting part was using these language models to interact with the outside world in some form. And I think in the paper, you mostly deal with Wikipedia. And I think there's some other data sets as well. But the outside world is the outside world. And so interacting with things that weren't present in the LLM and APIs and calling into them and thinking about the React reasoning and acting and kind of like combining those together and getting better results. I'd been playing around with LLMs, been talking with people who were playing around with LLMs. People were trying to get LLMs to call into APIs, do things, and it was always, how can they do it more reliably and better? And so this paper was basically a step in that direction. And I think really interesting and also really general as well. Like I think that's part of the appeal is just how general and simple in a good way, I think the idea was. So that it was really appealing for all those reasons.Shunyu [00:04:07]: Simple is always good. Yeah.Alessio [00:04:09]: Do you have a favorite part? Because I have one favorite part from your PhD defense, which I didn't understand when I read the paper, but you said something along the lines, React doesn't change the outside or the environment, but it does change the insight through the context, putting more things in the context. You're not actually changing any of the tools around you to work for you, but you're changing how the model thinks. And I think that was like a very profound thing when I, not that I've been using these tools for like 18 months. I'm like, I understand what you meant, but like to say that at the time you did the PhD defense was not trivial. Yeah.Shunyu [00:04:41]: Another way to put it is like thinking can be an extra tool that's useful.Alessio [00:04:47]: Makes sense. Checks out.Swyx [00:04:49]: Who would have thought? I think it's also more controversial within his world because everyone was trying to use RL for agents. And this is like the first kind of zero gradient type approach. Yeah.Shunyu [00:05:01]: I think the bigger kind of historical context is that we have this two big branches of AI. So if you think about RL, right, that's pretty much the equivalent of agent at a time. And it's like agent is equivalent to reinforcement learning and reinforcement learning is equivalent to whatever game environment they're using, right? Atari game or go or whatever. So you have like a pretty much, you know, you have a biased kind of like set of methodologies in terms of reinforcement learning and represents agents. On the other hand, I think NLP is like a historical kind of subject. It's not really into agents, right? It's more about reasoning. It's more about solving those concrete tasks. And if you look at SEL, right, like each task has its own track, right? Summarization has a track, question answering has a track. So I think really it's about rethinking agents in terms of what could be the new environments that we came to have is not just Atari games or whatever video games, but also those text games or language games. And also thinking about, could there be like a more general kind of methodology beyond just designing specific pipelines for each NLP task? That's like the bigger kind of context, I would say.Alessio [00:06:14]: Is there an inspiration spark moment that you remember or how did you come to this? We had Trida on the podcast and he mentioned he was really inspired working with like systems people to think about Flash Attention. What was your inspiration journey?Shunyu [00:06:27]: So actually before React, I spent the first two years of my PhD focusing on text-based games, or in other words, text adventure games. It's a very kind of small kind of research area and quite ad hoc, I would say. And there are like, I don't know, like 10 people working on that at the time. And have you guys heard of Zork 1, for example? So basically the idea is you have this game and you have text observations, like you see a monster, you see a dragon.Swyx [00:06:57]: You're eaten by a grue.Shunyu [00:06:58]: Yeah, you're eaten by a grue. And you have actions like kill the grue with a sword or whatever. And that's like a very typical setup of a text game. So I think one day after I've seen all the GPT-3 stuff, I just think about, you know, how can I solve the game? Like why those AI, you know, machine learning methods are pretty stupid, but we are pretty good at solving the game relatively, right? So for the context, the predominant method to solve this text game is obviously reinforcement learning. And the idea is you just try out an arrow in those games for like millions of steps and you kind of just overfit to the game. But there's no language understanding at all. And I'm like, why can't I solve the game better? And it's kind of like, because we think about the game, right? Like when we see this very complex text observation, like you see a grue and you might see a sword, you know, in the right of the room and you have to go through the wooden door to go to that room. You will think, you know, oh, I have to kill the monster and to kill that monster, I have to get the sword, I have to get the sword, I have to go, right? And this kind of thinking actually helps us kind of throw shots off the game. And it's like, why don't we also enable the text agents to think? And that's kind of the prototype of React. And I think that's actually very interesting because the prototype, I think, was around November of 2021. So that's even before like chain of thought or whatever came up. So we did a bunch of experiments in the text game, but it was not really working that well. Like those text games are just too hard. I think today it's still very hard. Like if you use GPD 4 to solve it, it's still very hard. So the change came when I started the internship in Google. And apparently Google care less about text game, they care more about what's more practical. So pretty much I just reapplied the idea, but to more practical kind of environments like Wikipedia or simpler text games like Alphard, and it just worked. It's kind of like you first have the idea and then you try to find the domains and the problems to demonstrate the idea, which is, I would say, different from most of the AI research, but it kind of worked out for me in that case.Swyx [00:09:09]: For Harrison, when you were implementing React, what were people applying React to in the early days?Harrison [00:09:14]: I think the first demo we did probably had like a calculator tool and a search tool. So like general things, we tried to make it pretty easy to write your own tools and plug in your own things. And so this is one of the things that we've seen in LangChain is people who build their own applications generally write their own tools. Like there are a few common ones. I'd say like the three common ones might be like a browser, a search tool, and a code interpreter. But then other than that-Swyx [00:09:37]: The LMS. Yep.Harrison [00:09:39]: Yeah, exactly. It matches up very nice with that. And we actually just redid like our integrations docs page, and if you go to the tool section, they like highlight those three, and then there's a bunch of like other ones. And there's such a long tail of other ones. But in practice, like when people go to production, they generally have their own tools or maybe one of those three, maybe some other ones, but like very, very few other ones. So yeah, I think the first demos was a search and a calculator one. And there's- What's the data set?Shunyu [00:10:04]: Hotpot QA.Harrison [00:10:05]: Yeah. Oh, so there's that one. And then there's like the celebrity one by the same author, I think.Swyx [00:10:09]: Olivier Wilde's boyfriend squared. Yeah. 0.23. Yeah. Right, right, right.Harrison [00:10:16]: I'm forgetting the name of the author, but there's-Swyx [00:10:17]: I was like, we're going to over-optimize for Olivier Wilde's boyfriend, and it's going to change next year or something.Harrison [00:10:21]: There's a few data sets kind of like in that vein that require multi-step kind of like reasoning and thinking. So one of the questions I actually had for you in this vein, like the React paper, there's a few things in there, or at least when I think of that, there's a few things that I think of. There's kind of like the specific prompting strategy. Then there's like this general idea of kind of like thinking and then taking an action. And then there's just even more general idea of just like taking actions in a loop. Today, like obviously language models have changed a lot. We have tool calling. The specific prompting strategy probably isn't used super heavily anymore. Would you say that like the concept of React is still used though? Or like do you think that tool calling and running tool calling in a loop, is that ReactSwyx [00:11:02]: in your mind?Shunyu [00:11:03]: I would say like it's like more implicitly used than explicitly used. To be fair, I think the contribution of React is actually twofold. So first is this idea of, you know, we should be able to use calls in a very general way. Like there should be a single kind of general method to handle interaction with various environments. I think React is the first paper to demonstrate the idea. But then I think later there are two form or whatever, and this becomes like a trivial idea. But I think at the time, that's like a pretty non-trivial thing. And I think the second contribution is this idea of what people call like inner monologue or thinking or reasoning or whatever, to be paired with tool use. I think that's still non-trivial because if you look at the default function calling or whatever, like there's no inner monologue. And in practice, that actually is important, especially if the tool that you use is pretty different from the training distribution of the language model. I think those are the two main things that are kind of inherited.Harrison [00:12:10]: On that note, I think OpenAI even recommended when you're doing tool calling, it's sometimes helpful to put a thought field in the tool, along with all the actual acquired arguments,Swyx [00:12:19]: and then have that one first.Harrison [00:12:20]: So it fills out that first, and they've shown that that's yielded better results. The reason I ask is just like this same concept is still alive, and I don't know whether to call it a React agent or not. I don't know what to call it. I think of it as React, like it's the same ideas that were in the paper, but it's obviously a very different implementation at this point in time. And so I just don't know what to call it.Shunyu [00:12:40]: I feel like people will sometimes think more in terms of different tools, right? Because if you think about a web agent versus, you know, like a function calling agent, calling a Python API, you would think of them as very different. But in some sense, the methodology is the same. It depends on how you view them, right? I think people will tend to think more in terms of the environment and the tools rather than the methodology. Or, in other words, I think the methodology is kind of trivial and simple, so people will try to focus more on the different tools. But I think it's good to have a single underlying principle of those things.Alessio [00:13:17]: How do you see the surface of React getting molded into the model? So a function calling is a good example of like, now the model does it. What about the thinking? Now most models that you use kind of do chain of thought on their own, they kind of produce steps. Do you think that more and more of this logic will be in the model? Or do you think the context window will still be the main driver of reasoning and thinking?Shunyu [00:13:39]: I think it's already default, right? You do some chain of thought and you do some tool call, the cost of adding the chain of thought is kind of relatively low compared to other things. So it's not hurting to do that. And I think it's already kind of common practice, I would say.Swyx [00:13:56]: This is a good place to bring in either Tree of Thought or Reflection, your pick.Shunyu [00:14:01]: Maybe Reflection, to respect the time order, I would say.Swyx [00:14:05]: Any backstory as well, like the people involved with NOAA and the Princeton group. We talked about this offline, but people don't understand how these research pieces come together and this ideation.Shunyu [00:14:15]: I think Reflection is mostly NOAA's work, I'm more like advising kind of role. The story is, I don't remember the time, but one day we just see this pre-print that's like Reflection and Autonomous Agent with memory or whatever. And it's kind of like an extension to React, which uses this self-reflection. I'm like, oh, somehow you've become very popular. And NOAA reached out to me, it's like, do you want to collaborate on this and make this from an archive pre-print to something more solid, like a conference submission? I'm like, sure. We started collaborating and we remain good friends today. And I think another interesting backstory is NOAA was contacted by OpenAI at the time. It's like, this is pretty cool, do you want to just work at OpenAI? And I think Sierra also reached out at the same time. It's like, this is pretty cool, do you want to work at Sierra? And I think NOAA chose Sierra, but it's pretty cool because he was still like a second year undergrad and he's a very smart kid.Swyx [00:15:16]: Based on one paper. Oh my god.Shunyu [00:15:19]: He's done some other research based on programming language or chemistry or whatever, but I think that's the paper that got the attention of OpenAI and Sierra.Swyx [00:15:28]: For those who haven't gone too deep on it, the way that you present the inside of React, can you do that also for reflection? Yeah.Shunyu [00:15:35]: I think one way to think of reflection is that the traditional idea of reinforcement learning is you have a scalar reward and then you somehow back-propagate the signal of the scalar reward to the rest of your neural network through whatever algorithm, like policy grading or A2C or whatever. And if you think about the real life, most of the reward signal is not scalar. It's like your boss told you, you should have done a better job in this, but you could jump on that or whatever. It's not like a scalar reward, like 29 or something. I think in general, humans deal more with long scalar reward, or you can say language feedback. And the way that they deal with language feedback also has this back-propagation process, right? Because you start from this, you did a good job on job B, and then you reflect what could have been done differently to change to make it better. And you kind of change your prompt, right? Basically, you change your prompt on how to do job A and how to do job B, and then you do the whole thing again. So it's really like a pipeline of language where in self-graded descent, you have something like text reasoning to replace those gradient descent algorithms. I think that's one way to think of reflection.Harrison [00:16:47]: One question I have about reflection is how general do you think the algorithm there is? And so for context, I think at LangChain and at other places as well, we found it pretty easy to implement React in a standard way. You plug in any tools and it kind of works off the shelf, can get it up and running. I don't think we have an off-the-shelf kind of implementation of reflection and kind of the general sense. I think the concepts, absolutely, we see used in different kind of specific cognitive architectures, but I don't think we have one that comes off the shelf. I don't think any of the other frameworks have one that comes off the shelf. And I'm curious whether that's because it's not general enough or it's complex as well, because it also requires running it more times.Swyx [00:17:28]: Maybe that's not feasible.Harrison [00:17:30]: I'm curious how you think about the generality, complexity. Should we have one that comes off the shelf?Shunyu [00:17:36]: I think the algorithm is general in the sense that it's just as general as other algorithms, if you think about policy grading or whatever, but it's not applicable to all tasks, just like other algorithms. So you can argue PPO is also general, but it works better for those set of tasks, but not on those set of tasks. I think it's the same situation for reflection. And I think a key bottleneck is the evaluator, right? Basically, you need to have a good sense of the signal. So for example, if you are trying to do a very hard reasoning task, say mathematics, for example, and you don't have any tools, you're operating in this chain of thought setup, then reflection will be pretty hard because in order to reflect upon your thoughts, you have to have a very good evaluator to judge whether your thought is good or not. But that might be as hard as solving the problem itself or even harder. The principle of self-reflection is probably more applicable if you have a good evaluator, for example, in the case of coding. If you have those arrows, then you can just reflect on that and how to solve the bug andSwyx [00:18:37]: stuff.Shunyu [00:18:38]: So I think another criteria is that it depends on the application, right? If you have this latency or whatever need for an actual application with an end-user, the end-user wouldn't let you do two hours of tree-of-thought or reflection, right? You need something as soon as possible. So in that case, maybe this is better to be used as a training time technique, right? You do those reflection or tree-of-thought or whatever, you get a lot of data, and then you try to use the data to train your model better. And then in test time, you still use something as simple as React, but that's already improved.Alessio [00:19:11]: And if you think of the Voyager paper as a way to store skills and then reuse them, how would you compare this reflective memory and at what point it's just ragging on the memory versus you want to start to fine-tune some of them or what's the next step once you get a very long reflective corpus? Yeah.Shunyu [00:19:30]: So I think there are two questions here. The first question is, what type of information or memory are you considering, right? Is it like semantic memory that stores knowledge about the word, or is it the episodic memory that stores trajectories or behaviors, or is it more of a procedural memory like in Voyager's case, like skills or code snippets that you can use to do actions, right?Swyx [00:19:54]: That's one dimension.Shunyu [00:19:55]: And the second dimension is obviously how you use the memory, either retrieving from it, using it in the context, or fine-tuning it. I think the Cognitive Architecture for Language Agents paper has a good categorization of all the different combinations. And of course, which way you use depends on the concrete application and the concrete need and the concrete task. But I think in general, it's good to think of those systematic dimensions and all the possible options there.Swyx [00:20:25]: Harrison also has in LangMEM, I think you did a presentation in my meetup, and I think you've done it at a couple other venues as well. User state, semantic memory, and append-only state, I think kind of maps to what you just said.Shunyu [00:20:38]: What is LangMEM? Can I give it like a quick...Harrison [00:20:40]: One of the modules of LangChain for a long time has been something around memory. And I think we're still obviously figuring out what that means, as is everyone kind of in the space. But one of the experiments that we did, and one of the proof of concepts that we did was, technically what it was is you would basically create threads, you'd push messages to those threads in the background, we process the data in a few ways. One, we put it into some semantic store, that's the semantic memory. And then two, we do some extraction and reasoning over the memories to extract. And we let the user define this, but extract key facts or anything that's of interest to the user. Those aren't exactly trajectories, they're maybe more closer to the procedural memory. Is that how you'd think about it or classify it?Shunyu [00:21:22]: Is it like about knowledge about the word, or is it more like how to do something?Swyx [00:21:27]: It's reflections, basically.Harrison [00:21:28]: So in generative worlds.Shunyu [00:21:30]: Generative agents.Swyx [00:21:31]: The Smallville. Yeah, the Smallville one.Harrison [00:21:33]: So the way that they had their memory there was they had the sequence of events, and that's kind of like the raw events that happened. But then every N events, they'd run some synthesis over those events for the LLM to insert its own memory, basically. It's that type of memory.Swyx [00:21:49]: I don't know how that would be classified.Shunyu [00:21:50]: I think of that as more of the semantic memory, but to be fair, I think it's just one way to think of that. But whether it's semantic memory or procedural memory or whatever memory, that's like an abstraction layer. But in terms of implementation, you can choose whatever implementation for whatever memory. So they're totally kind of orthogonal. I think it's more of a good way to think of the things, because from the history of cognitive science and cognitive architecture and how people study even neuroscience, that's the way people think of how the human brain organizes memory. And I think it's more useful as a way to think of things. But it's not like for semantic memory, you have to do this kind of way to retrieve or fine-tune, and for procedural memory, you have to do that. I think those are totally orthogonal kind of dimensions.Harrison [00:22:34]: How much background do you have in cognitive sciences, and how much do you model some of your thoughts on?Shunyu [00:22:40]: That's a great question, actually. I think one of the undergrad influences for my follow-up research is I was doing an internship at MIT's Computational Cognitive Science Lab with Josh Tannenbaum, and he's a very famous cognitive scientist. And I think a lot of his ideas still influence me today, like thinking of things in computational terms and getting interested in language and a lot of stuff, or even developing psychology kind of stuff. So I think it still influences me today.Swyx [00:23:14]: As a developer that tried out LangMEM, the way I view it is just it's a materialized view of a stream of logs. And if anything, that's just useful for context compression. I don't have to use the full context to run it over everything. But also it's kind of debuggable. If it's wrong, I can show it to the user, the user can manually fix it, and I can carry on. That's a really good analogy. I like that. I'm going to steal that. Sure. Please, please. You know I'm bullish on memory databases. I guess, Tree of Thoughts? Yeah, Tree of Thoughts.Shunyu [00:23:39]: I feel like I'm relieving the defense in like a podcast format. Yeah, no.Alessio [00:23:45]: I mean, you had a banger. Well, this is the one where you're already successful and we just highlight the glory. It was really good. You mentioned that since thinking is kind of like taking an action, you can use action searching algorithms to think of thinking. So just like you will use Tree Search to find the next thing. And the idea behind Tree of Thought is that you generate all these possible outcomes and then find the best tree to get to the end. Maybe back to the latency question, you can't really do that if you have to respond in real time. So what are maybe some of the most helpful use cases for things like this? Where have you seen people adopt it where the high latency is actually worth the wait?Shunyu [00:24:21]: For things that you don't care about latency, obviously. For example, if you're trying to do math, if you're just trying to come up with a proof. But I feel like one type of task is more about searching for a solution. You can try a hundred times, but if you find one solution, that's good. For example, if you're finding a math proof or if you're finding a good code to solve a problem or whatever, I think another type of task is more like reacting. For example, if you're doing customer service, you're like a web agent booking a ticket for an end user. Those are more reactive kind of tasks, or more real-time tasks. You have to do things fast. They might be easy, but you have to do it reliably. And you care more about can you solve 99% of the time out of a hundred. But for the type of search type of tasks, then you care more about can I find one solution out of a hundred. So it's kind of symmetric and different.Alessio [00:25:11]: Do you have any data or intuition from your user base? What's the split of these type of use cases? How many people are doing more reactive things and how many people are experimenting with deep, long search?Harrison [00:25:23]: I would say React's probably the most popular. I think there's aspects of reflection that get used. Tree of thought, probably the least so. There's a great tweet from Jason Wei, I think you're now a colleague, and he was talking about prompting strategies and how he thinks about them. And I think the four things that he had was, one, how easy is it to implement? How much compute does it take? How many tasks does it solve? And how much does it improve on those tasks? And I'd add a fifth, which is how likely is it to be relevant when the next generation of models come out? And I think if you look at those axes and then you look at React, reflection, tree of thought, it tracks that the ones that score better are used more. React is pretty easy to implement. Tree of thought's pretty hard to implement. The amount of compute, yeah, a lot more for tree of thought. The tasks and how much it improves, I don't have amazing visibility there. But I think if we're comparing React versus tree of thought, React just dominates the first two axes so much that my question around that was going to be like, how do you think about these prompting strategies, cognitive architectures, whatever you want to call them? When you're thinking of them, what are the axes that you're judging them on in your head when you're thinking whether it's a good one or a less good one?Swyx [00:26:38]: Right.Shunyu [00:26:39]: Right. I think there is a difference between a prompting method versus research, in the sense that for research, you don't really even care about does it actually work on practical tasks or does it help? Whatever. I think it's more about the idea or the principle, right? What is the direction that you're unblocking and whatever. And I think for an actual prompting method to solve a concrete problem, I would say simplicity is very important because the simpler it is, the less decision you have to make about it. And it's easier to design. It's easier to propagate. And it's easier to do stuff. So always try to be as simple as possible. And I think latency obviously is important. If you can do things fast and you don't want to do things slow. And I think in terms of the actual prompting method to use for a particular problem, I think we should all be in the minimalist kind of camp, right? You should try the minimum thing and see if it works. And if it doesn't work and there's absolute reason to add something, then you add something, right? If there's absolute reason that you need some tool, then you should add the tool thing. If there's absolute reason to add reflection or whatever, you should add that. Otherwise, if a chain of thought can already solve something, then you don't even need to use any of that.Harrison [00:27:57]: Yeah. Or if it's just better prompting can solve it. Like, you know, you could add a reflection step or you could make your instructions a little bit clearer.Swyx [00:28:03]: And it's a lot easier to do that.Shunyu [00:28:04]: I think another interesting thing is like, I personally have never done those kind of like weird tricks. I think all the prompts that I write are kind of like just talking to a human, right? It's like, I don't know. I never say something like, your grandma is dying and you have to solve it. I mean, those are cool, but I feel like we should all try to solve things in a very intuitive way. Just like talking to your co-worker. That should work 99% of the time. That's my personal take.Swyx [00:28:29]: The problem with how language models, at least in the GPC 3 era, was that they over-optimized to some sets of tokens in sequence. So like reading the Kojima et al. paper that was listing step-by-step, like he tried a bunch of them and they had wildly different results. It should not be the case, but it is the case. And hopefully we're getting better there.Shunyu [00:28:51]: Yeah. I think it's also like a timing thing in the sense that if you think about this whole line of language model, right? Like at the time it was just like a text generator. We don't have any idea how it's going to be used, right? And obviously at the time you will find all kinds of weird issues because it's not trained to do any of that, right? But then I think we have this loop where once we realize chain of thought is important or agent is important or tool using is important, what we see is today's language models are heavily optimized towards those things. So I think in some sense they become more reliable and robust over those use cases. And you don't need to do as much prompt engineering tricks anymore to solve those things. I feel like in some sense, I feel like prompt engineering even is like a slightly negative word at the time because it refers to all those kind of weird tricks that you have to apply. But I think we don't have to do that anymore. Like given today's progress, you should just be able to talk to like a coworker. And if you're clear and concrete and being reasonable, then it should do reasonable things for you.Swyx [00:29:51]: Yeah. The way I put this is you should not be a prompt engineer because it is the goal of the big labs to put you out of a job.Shunyu [00:29:58]: You should just be a good communicator. Like if you're a good communicator to humans, you should be a good communicator to languageSwyx [00:30:02]: models.Harrison [00:30:03]: That's the key though, because oftentimes people aren't good communicators to these language models and that is a very important skill and that's still messing around with the prompt. And so it depends what you're talking about when you're saying prompt engineer.Shunyu [00:30:14]: But do you think it's like very correlated with like, are they like a good communicator to humans? You know, it's like.Harrison [00:30:20]: It may be, but I also think I would say on average, people are probably worse at communicating with language models than to humans right now, at least, because I think we're still figuring out how to do it. You kind of expect it to be magical and there's probably some correlation, but I'd say there's also just like, people are worse at it right now than talking to humans.Shunyu [00:30:36]: We should make it like a, you know, like an elementary school class or whatever, how toSwyx [00:30:41]: talk to language models. Yeah. I don't know. Very pro that. Yeah. Before we leave the topic of trees and searching, not specific about QSTAR, but there's a lot of questions about MCTS and this combination of tree search and language models. And I just had to get in a question there about how seriously should people take this?Shunyu [00:30:59]: Again, I think it depends on the tasks, right? So MCTS was magical for Go, but it's probably not as magical for robotics, right? So I think right now the problem is not even that we don't have good methodologies, it's more about we don't have good tasks. It's also very interesting, right? Because if you look at my citation, it's like, obviously the most cited are React, Refraction and Tree of Thought. Those are methodologies. But I think like equally important, if not more important line of my work is like benchmarks and environments, right? Like WebShop or SuiteVenture or whatever. And I think in general, what people do in academia that I think is not good is they choose a very simple task, like Alford, and then they apply overly complex methods to show they improve 2%. I think you should probably match the level of complexity of your task and your method. I feel like where tasks are kind of far behind the method in some sense, right? Because we have some good test-time approaches, like whatever, React or Refraction or Tree of Thought, or like there are many, many more complicated test-time methods afterwards. But on the benchmark side, we have made a lot of good progress this year, last year. But I think we still need more progress towards that, like better coding benchmark, better web agent benchmark, better agent benchmark, not even for web or code. I think in general, we need to catch up with tasks.Harrison [00:32:27]: What are the biggest reasons in your mind why it lags behind?Shunyu [00:32:31]: I think incentive is one big reason. Like if you see, you know, all the master paper are cited like a hundred times more than the task paper. And also making a good benchmark is actually quite hard. It's almost like a different set of skills in some sense, right? I feel like if you want to build a good benchmark, you need to be like a good kind of product manager kind of mindset, right? You need to think about why people should use your benchmark, why it's challenging, why it's useful. If you think about like a PhD going into like a school, right? The prior skill that expected to have is more about, you know, can they code this method and can they just run experiments and can solve that? I think building a benchmark is not the typical prior skill that we have, but I think things are getting better. I think more and more people are starting to build benchmarks and people are saying that it's like a way to get more impact in some sense, right? Because like if you have a really good benchmark, a lot of people are going to use it. But if you have a super complicated test time method, like it's very hard for people to use it.Harrison [00:33:35]: Are evaluation metrics also part of the reason? Like for some of these tasks that we might want to ask these agents or language models to do, is it hard to evaluate them? And so it's hard to get an automated benchmark. Obviously with SweetBench you can, and with coding, it's easier, but.Shunyu [00:33:50]: I think that's part of the skillset thing that I mentioned, because I feel like it's like a product manager because there are many dimensions and you need to strike a balance and it's really hard, right? If you want to make sense, very easy to autogradable, like automatically gradable, like either to grade or either to evaluate, then you might lose some of the realness or practicality. Or like it might be practical, but it might not be as scalable, right? For example, if you think about text game, human have pre-annotated all the rewards and all the language are real. So it's pretty good on autogradable dimension and the practical dimension. If you think about, you know, practical, like actual English being practical, but it's not scalable, right? It takes like a year for experts to build that game. So it's not really that scalable. And I think part of the reason that SweetBench is so popular now is it kind of hits the balance between these three dimensions, right? Easy to evaluate and being actually practical and being scalable. Like if I were to criticize upon some of my prior work, I think webshop, like it's my initial attempt to get into benchmark world and I'm trying to do a good job striking the balance. But obviously we make it all gradable and it's really scalable, but then I think the practicality is not as high as actually just using GitHub issues, right? Because you're just creating those like synthetic tasks.Harrison [00:35:13]: Are there other areas besides coding that jump to mind as being really good for being autogradable?Shunyu [00:35:20]: Maybe mathematics.Swyx [00:35:21]: Classic. Yeah. Do you have thoughts on alpha proof, the new DeepMind paper? I think it's pretty cool.Shunyu [00:35:29]: I think it's more of a, you know, it's more of like a confidence boost or like sometimes, you know, the work is not even about, you know, the technical details or the methodology that it chooses or the concrete results. I think it's more about a signal, right?Swyx [00:35:47]: Yeah. Existence proof. Yeah.Shunyu [00:35:50]: Yeah. It can be done. This direction is exciting. It kind of encourages people to work more towards that direction. I think it's more like a boost of confidence, I would say.Swyx [00:35:59]: Yeah. So we're going to focus more on agents now and, you know, all of us have a special interest in coding agents. I would consider Devin to be the sort of biggest launch of the year as far as AI startups go. And you guys in the Princeton group worked on Suiagents alongside of Suibench. Tell us the story about Suiagent. Sure.Shunyu [00:36:21]: I think it's kind of like a triology, it's actually a series of three works now. So actually the first work is called Intercode, but it's not as famous, I know. And the second work is called Suibench and the third work is called Suiagent. And I'm just really confused why nobody is working on coding. You know, it's like a year ago, but I mean, not everybody's working on coding, obviously, but a year ago, like literally nobody was working on coding. I was really confused. And the people that were working on coding are, you know, trying to solve human evil in like a sick-to-sick way. There's no agent, there's no chain of thought, there's no anything, they're just, you know, fine tuning the model and improve some points and whatever, like, I was really confused because obviously coding is the best application for agents because it's autogradable, it's super important, you can make everything like API or code action, right? So I was confused and I collaborated with some of the students in Princeton and we have this work called Intercode and the idea is, first, if you care about coding, then you should solve coding in an interactive way, meaning more like a Jupyter Notebook kind of way than just writing a program and seeing if it fails or succeeds and stop, right? You should solve it in an interactive way because that's exactly how humans solve it, right? You don't have to, you know, write a program like next token, next token, next token and stop and never do any edits and you cannot really use any terminal or whatever tool. It doesn't make sense, right? And that's the way people are solving coding at the time, basically like sampling a program from a language model without chain of thought, without tool call, without refactoring, without anything. So the first point is we should solve coding in a very interactive way and that's a very general principle that applies for various coding benchmarks. And also, I think you can make a lot of the agent task kind of like interactive coding. If you have Python and you can call any package, then you can literally also browse internet or do whatever you want, like control a robot or whatever. So that seems to be a very general paradigm. But obviously I think a bottleneck is at the time we're still doing, you know, very simple tasks like human eval or whatever coding benchmark people proposed. They were super hard in 2021, like 20%, but they're like 95% already in 2023. So obviously the next step is we need a better benchmark. And Carlos and John, which are the first authors of Swaybench, I think they come up with this great idea that we should just script GitHub and solve whatever human engineers are solving. And I think it's actually pretty easy to come up with the idea. And I think in the first week, they already made a lot of progress. They script the GitHub and they make all the same, but then there's a lot of painful info work and whatever, you know. I think the idea is super easy, but the engineering is super hard. And I feel like that's a very typical signal of a good work in the AI era now.Swyx [00:39:17]: I think also, I think the filtering was challenging, because if you look at open source PRs, a lot of them are just like, you know, fixing typos. I think it's challenging.Shunyu [00:39:27]: And to be honest, we didn't do a perfect job at the time. So if you look at the recent blog post with OpenAI, we improved the filtering so that it's more solvable.Swyx [00:39:36]: I think OpenAI was just like, look, this is a thing now. We have to fix this. These students just rushed it.Shunyu [00:39:45]: It's a good convergence of interests for me.Alessio [00:39:48]: Was that tied to you joining OpenAI? Or was that just unrelated?Shunyu [00:39:52]: It's a coincidence for me, but it's a good coincidence.Swyx [00:39:55]: There is a history of anytime a big lab adopts a benchmark, they fix it. Otherwise, it's a broken benchmark.Shunyu [00:40:03]: So naturally, once we propose swimmage, the next step is to solve it. But I think the typical way you solve something now is you collect some training samples, or you design some complicated agent method, and then you try to solve it. Either super complicated prompt, or you build a better model with more training data. But I think at the time, we realized that even before those things, there's a fundamental problem with the interface or the tool that you're supposed to use. Because that's like an ignored problem in some sense. What your tool is, or how that matters for your task. So what we found concretely is that if you just use the text terminal off the shelf as a tool for those agents, there's a lot of problems. For example, if you edit something, there's no feedback. So you don't know whether your edit is good or not. That makes the agent very confused and makes a lot of mistakes. There are a lot of small problems, you would say. Well, you can try to do prompt engineering and improve that, but it turns out to be actually very hard. We realized that the interface design is actually a very omitted part of agent design. So we did this switch agent work. And the key idea is just, even before you talk about what the agent is, you should talk about what the environment is. You should make sure that the environment is actually friendly to whatever agent you're trying to apply. That's the same idea for humans. Text terminal is good for some tasks, like git, pool, or whatever. But it's not good if you want to look at browser and whatever. Also, browser is a good tool for some tasks, but it's not a good tool for other tasks. We need to talk about how design interface, in some sense, where we should treat agents as our customers. It's like when we treat humans as a customer, we design human computer interfaces. We design those beautiful desktops or browsers or whatever, so that it's very intuitive and easy for humans to use. And this whole great subject of HCI is all about that. I think now the research idea of switch agent is just, we should treat agents as our customers. And we should do like, you know… AICI.Swyx [00:42:16]: AICI, exactly.Harrison [00:42:18]: So what are the tools that a suite agent should have, or a coding agent in general should have?Shunyu [00:42:24]: For suite agent, it's like a modified text terminal, which kind of adapts to a lot of the patterns of language models to make it easier for language models to use. For example, now for edit, instead of having no feedback, it will actually have a feedback of, you know, actually here you introduced like a syntax error, and you should probably want to fix that, and there's an ended error there. And that makes it super easy for the model to actually do that. And there's other small things, like how exactly you write arguments, right? Like, do you want to write like a multi-line edit, or do you want to write a single line edit? I think it's more interesting to think about the way of the development process of an ACI rather than the actual ACI for like a concrete application. Because I think the general paradigm is very similar to HCI and psychology, right? Basically, for how people develop HCIs, they do behavior experiments on humans, right? I do every test, right? Like, which interface is actually better? And I do those behavior experiments, kind of like psychology experiments to humans, and I change things. And I think what's really interesting for me, for this three-agent paper, is we can probably do the same thing for agents, right? We can do every test for those agents and do behavior tests. And through the process, we not only invent better interfaces for those agents, that's the practical value, but we also better understand agents. Just like when we do those A-B tests, we do those HCI, we better understand humans. Doing those ACI experiments, we actually better understand agents. And that's pretty cool.Harrison [00:43:51]: Besides that A-B testing, what are other processes that people can use to think about this in a good way?Swyx [00:43:57]: That's a great question.Shunyu [00:43:58]: And I think three-agent is an initial work. And what we do is the kind of the naive approach, right? You just try some interface, and you see what's going wrong, and then you try to fix that. We do this kind of iterative fixing. But I think what's really interesting is there'll be a lot of future directions that's very promising if we can apply some of the HCI principles more systematically into the interface design. I think that would be a very cool interdisciplinary research opportunity.Harrison [00:44:26]: You talked a lot about agent-computer interfaces and interactions. What about human-to-agent UX patterns? Curious for any thoughts there that you might have.Swyx [00:44:38]: That's a great question.Shunyu [00:44:39]: And in some sense, I feel like prompt engineering is about human-to-agent interface. But I think there can be a lot of interesting research done about... So prompting is about how humans can better communicate with the agent. But I think there could be interesting research on how agents can better communicate with humans, right? When to ask questions, how to ask questions, what's the frequency of asking questions. And I think those kinds of stuff could be very cool research.Harrison [00:45:07]: Yeah, I think some of the most interesting stuff that I saw here was also related to coding with Devin from Cognition. And they had the three or four different panels where you had the chat, the browser, the terminal, and I guess the code editor as well.Swyx [00:45:19]: There's more now.Harrison [00:45:19]: There's more. Okay, I'm not up to date. Yeah, I think they also did a good job on ACI.Swyx [00:45:25]: I think that's the main learning I have from Devin. They cracked that. Actually, there was no foundational planning breakthrough. The planner is actually pretty simple, but ACI that they broke through on.Shunyu [00:45:35]: I think making the tool good and reliable is probably like 90% of the whole agent. Once the tool is actually good, then the agent design can be much, much simpler. On the other hand, if the tool is bad, then no matter how much you put into the agent design, planning or search or whatever, it's still going to be trash.Harrison [00:45:53]: Yeah, I'd argue the same. Same with like context and instructions. Like, yeah, go hand in hand.Alessio [00:46:00]: On the tool, how do you think about the tension of like, for both of you, I mean, you're building a library, so even more for you. The tension between making now a language or a library that is like easy for the agent to grasp and write versus one that is easy for like the human to grasp and write. Because, you know, the trend is like more and more code gets written by the agent. So why wouldn't you optimize the framework to be as easy as possible for the model versus for the person?Swyx [00:46:24]: I think it's possible to design an interfaceShunyu [00:46:25]: that's both friendly to humans and agents. But what do you think?Harrison [00:46:29]: We haven't thought about that from the perspective, like we're not trying to design LangChain or LangGraph to be friendly. But I mean, I think to be friendly for agents to write.Swyx [00:46:42]: But I mean, I think we see this with like,Harrison [00:46:43]: I saw some paper that used TypeScript notation instead of JSON notation for tool calling and it got a lot better performance. So it's definitely a thing. I haven't really heard of anyone designing like a syntax or a language explicitly for agents, but there's clearly syntaxes that are better.Shunyu [00:46:59]: I think function calling is a good example where it's like a good interface for both human programmers and for agents, right? Like for developers, it's actually a very friendly interface because it's very concrete and you don't have to do prompt engineering anymore. You can be very systematic. And for models, it's also pretty good, right? Like it can use all the existing coding content. So I think we need more of those kinds of designs.Swyx [00:47:21]: I will mostly agree and I'll slightly disagree in terms of this, which is like, whether designing for humans also overlaps with designing for AI. So Malte Ubo, who's the CTO of Vercel, who is creating basically JavaScript's competitor to LangChain, they're observing that basically, like if the API is easy to understand for humans, it's actually much easier to understand for LLMs, for example, because they're not overloaded functions. They don't behave differently under different contexts. They do one thing and they always work the same way. It's easy for humans, it's easy for LLMs. And like that makes a lot of sense. And obviously adding types is another one. Like type annotations only help give extra context, which is really great. So that's the agreement. And then a disagreement is that when I use structured output to do my chain of thought, I have found that I change my field names to hint to the LLM of what the field is supposed to do. So instead of saying topics, I'll say candidate topics. And that gives me a better result because the LLM was like, ah, this is just a draft thing I can use for chain of thought. And instead of like summaries, I'll say topic summaries to link the previous field to the current field. So like little stuff like that, I find myself optimizing for the LLM where I, as a human, would never do that. Interesting.Shunyu [00:48:32]: It's kind of like the way you optimize the prompt, it might be different for humans and for machines. You can have a common ground that's both clear for humans and agents, but to improve the human performance versus improving the agent performance, they might move to different directions.Swyx [00:48:48]: Might move different directions. There's a lot more use of metadata as well, like descriptions, comments, code comments, annotations and stuff like that. Yeah.Harrison [00:48:56]: I would argue that's just you communicatingSwyx [00:48:58]: to the agent what it should do.Harrison [00:49:00]: And maybe you need to communicate a little bit more than to humans because models aren't quite good enough yet.Swyx [00:49:06]: But like, I don't think that's crazy.Harrison [00:49:07]: I don't think that's like- It's not crazy.Swyx [00:49:09]: I will bring this in because it just happened to me yesterday. I was at the cursor office. They held their first user meetup and I was telling them about the LLM OS concept and why basically every interface, every tool was being redesigned for AIs to use rather than humans. And they're like, why? Like, can we just use Bing and Google for LLM search? Why must I use Exa? Or what's the other one that you guys work with?Harrison [00:49:32]: Tavilli.Swyx [00:49:33]: Tavilli. Web Search API dedicated for LLMs. What's the difference?Shunyu [00:49:36]: Exactly. To Bing API.Swyx [00:49:38]: Exactly.Harrison [00:49:38]: There weren't great APIs for search. Like the best one, like the one that we used initially in LangChain was SERP API, which is like maybe illegal. I'm not sure.Swyx [00:49:49]: And like, you know,Harrison [00:49:52]: and now there are like venture-backed companies.Swyx [00:49:53]: Shout out to DuckDuckGo, which is free.Harrison [00:49:55]: Yes, yes.Swyx [00:49:56]: Yeah.Harrison [00:49:56]: I do think there are some differences though. I think you want, like, I think generally these APIs try to return small amounts of text information, clear legible field. It's not a massive JSON blob. And I think that matters. I think like when you talk about designing tools, it's not only the, it's the interface in the entirety, not only the inputs, but also the outputs that really matter. And so I think they try to make the outputs.Shunyu [00:50:18]: They're doing ACI.Swyx [00:50:19]: Yeah, yeah, absolutely.Harrison [00:50:20]: Really?Swyx [00:50:21]: Like there's a whole set of industries that are just being redone for ACI. It's weird. And so my simple answer to them was like the error messages. When you give error messages, they should be basically prompts for the LLM to take and then self-correct. Then your error messages get more verbose, actually, than you normally would with a human. Stuff like that. Like a little, honestly, it's not that big. Again, like, is this worth a venture-backed industry? Unless you can tell us. But like, I think Code Interpreter, I think is a new thing. I hope so.Alessio [00:50:52]: We invested in it to be so.Shunyu [00:50:53]: I think that's a very interesting point. You're trying to optimize to the extreme, then obviously they're going to be different. For example, the error—Swyx [00:51:00]: Because we take it very seriously. Right.Shunyu [00:51:01]: The error for like language model, the longer the better. But for humans, that will make them very nervous and very tired, right? But I guess the point is more like, maybe we should try to find a co-optimized common ground as much as possible. And then if we have divergence, then we should try to diverge. But it's more philosophical now.Alessio [00:51:19]: But I think like part of it is like how you use it. So Google invented the PageRank because ideally you only click on one link, you know, like the top three should have the answer. But with models, it's like, well, you can get 20. So those searches are more like semantic grouping in a way. It's like for this query, I'll return you like 20, 30 things that are kind of good, you know? So it's less about ranking and it's more about grouping.Shunyu [00:51:42]: Another fundamental thing about HCI is the difference between human and machine's kind of memory limit, right? So I think what's really interesting about this concept HCI versus HCI is interfaces that's optimized for them. You can kind of understand some of the fundamental characteristics, differences of humans and machines, right? Why, you know, if you look at find or whatever terminal command, you know, you can only look at one thing at a time or that's because we have a very small working memory. You can only deal with one thing at a time. You can only look at one paragraph of text at the same time. So the interface for us is by design, you know, a small piece of information, but more temporal steps. But for machines, that should be the opposite, right? You should just give them a hundred different results and they should just decide in context what's the most relevant stuff and trade off the context for temporal steps. That's actually also better for language models because like the cost is smaller or whatever. So it's interesting to connect those interfaces to the fundamental kind of differences of those.Harrison [00:52:43]: When you said earlier, you know, we should try to design these to maybe be similar as possible and diverge if we need to.Swyx [00:52:49]: I actually don't have a problem with them diverging nowHarrison [00:52:51]: and seeing venture-backed startups emerging now because we are different from machines code AI. And it's just so early on, like they may still look kind of similar and they may still be small differences, but it's still just so early. And I think we'll only discover more ways that they differ. And so I'm totally fine with them kind of like diverging earlySwyx [00:53:10]: and optimizing for the...Harrison [00:53:11]: I agree. I think it's more like, you know,Shunyu [00:53:14]: we should obviously try to optimize human interface just for humans. We're already doing that for 50 years. We should optimize agent interface just for agents, but we might also try to co-optimize both and see how far we can get. There's enough people to try all three directions. Yeah.Swyx [00:53:31]: There's a thesis I sometimes push, which is the sour lesson as opposed to the bitter lesson, which we're always inspired by human development, but actually AI develops its own path.Shunyu [00:53:40]: Right. We need to understand better, you know, what are the fundamental differences between those creatures.Swyx [00:53:45]: It's funny when really early on this pod, you were like, how much grounding do you have in cognitive development and human brain stuff? And I'm like

Sales is the lifeblood of any business, but it is fascinating to see the number of organisations that focus so much of their attention on their own products and services without learning the structural fundamentals as to what problem those products and services solve in the marketplace. The end result? Low conversion rates, and ultimately unrealised sales & revenue potential. In today's episode, I speak with Gabe Lullo, the CEO of Alleyoop, a sales development as a service business which offers organisations the ultimate sales assist. Gabe has hired, trained and managed over 8,000 Sales Development Reps for companies such as Zoominfo, AWS and Adobe, to name a few, and offers incredible value in this conversation around sales development and improving conversion rates. I hope you enjoy the conversation as much as I did. To connect with Gabe and to learn more about Alleyoop, please go to: LinkedIn - https://www.linkedin.com/in/lullo/ Website - https://alleyoop.io/

Marketers play a crucial role in generating leads, raising brand awareness, and ultimately fueling the sales engine. One often overlooked resource that marketers can leverage to maximise their pipeline is the use of sales development representatives (SDRs). And in today's podcast, we will explore what SDRs are and how marketers can effectively utilise them to drive pipeline growth.And there's no better person to talk to about this than Catarina Hoch, VP of Global Marketing at Operatix. Not only has Catarina been an SDR previously, but Operatix provide outsourced SDR teams for B2B Tech companies, so she has a wealth of knowledge about what works and what doesn't.We cover:What does a Sales Development Representative (SDR) do?How do they fit into a typical sales team?How marketers can best work with SDR's to increase pipeline.The best metrics to track.Outsource or hire the SDR function?What are the best tools for SDR's to use?And so much more.Market Mentors is brought to you by Matt Dodgson, Co-Founder of Market Recruitment. Market Recruitment is a recruitment agency that connects B2B Tech & SaaS businesses with top class marketers to help them grow.If you'd like to be a future guest on the Market Mentors podcast you can apply here.

Last week, I had the privilege of being a guest on Chris Bussing's podcast, and it was a huge success. Now, I'm excited to have Chris join my show as we discuss his journey in account management, including his experience at Google. During our conversation, we touch on valuable insights for salespeople, such as separating self-worth from performance, dealing with layoffs, and how sales can foster personal growth. We also explore the advantages and disadvantages of being an extrovert or introvert in sales, the importance of caring for others, and the impact of my father's influence on my career. Moreover, we share tips on becoming an SDR, the foundational role of coachability, and handling objections effectively. Tune in to learn more and discover some great book recommendations related to sales.   https://wethesalesengineers.com/show277

Ask Austin Anything! In this episode Austin answers questions from listeners just like you. Get your question answered on a future Ask Austin Anything episode by submitting it to the link below.Time Stamped Show Notes:[0:30] - #AAA for March 2023[1:09] - Adam - How do you fight imposter syndrome, and do you see it having a direct relationship with self confidence?[9:26] - Richie - Reaching out to companies, finding roles, and figuring out creative ways to build relationships is mentally exhausting. What advice can you give that will help the job search burnout?[15:40] - René - How do you make your LinkedIn carousel posts?[18:33] - Jordan - When you first started offering your coaching or side business(es) in general, how did you know what was fair in terms of pricing and when did you know it was time to increase it?[21:49] - Lisa - How do I quantify the achievements of a Hospice CNA, 10+ years Daycare Owner, & Airbnb Owner by using key words when customizing my resume for Sales Development Rep and Sales Engineer?Ask Austin Anything (And Have Him Answer Live On The Podcast!)Click here to submit your question.Want To Level Up Your Job Search?Click here to learn more about 1:1 career coaching to help you land your dream job without applying online.Check out Austin's courses and, as a thank you for listening to the show, use the code PODCAST to get 5% off any digital course:The Interview Preparation System - Austin's proven, all-in-one process for turning your next job interview into a job offer.Value Validation Project Starter Kit - Everything you need to create a job-winning VVP that will blow hiring managers away and set you apart from the competition.No Experience, No Problem - Austin's proven framework for building the skills and experience you need to break into a new industry (even if you have *zero* experience right now).Try Austin's Job Search ToolsResyBuild.io - Build a beautiful, job-winning resume in minutes.ResyMatch.io - Score your resume vs. your target job description and get feedback.ResyBullet.io - Learn how to write attention grabbing resume bullets.Mailscoop.io - Find anyone's professional email in seconds.Connect with Austin for daily job search content:Cultivated CultureLinkedInTwitterThanks for listening!

How Maria Bross of revenue.io is modernizing the way we look at SDR training, onboarding, and support. There's a common myth that some of us are natural-born salespeople - and without that innate ability or predisposition, you won't see success as an SDR. Well, consider this podcast an episode of MythBusters because we reject that reality and substitute our own. And so does our guest, Maria Bross of Revenue.io. She is a self-proclaimed “not naturally good at saleser,” and yet she's built out an impressive career as both an IC and as a manager+. Her secret? Training, coaching, and support. And those themes stayed constant throughout her full circle journey - from Sales Development Rep to Sales Enablement Manager and back to Sales Development, this time in a leadership position. Her love of adult learning and fascination with pipeline generation propelled Maria forward - not some “innate ability.” We talk about the impact of a well-structured training program, what happens when management offers minimal support, and whether or not the SDR model is still viable in today's modern environment. ===

WHAT IS SALES DEVELOPMENT WITHOUT A FULL-TIME SDR?With its definition as a Sales Development Rep, many people in the sales space are used to having full-time SDRs as the major channel for sales development. However, Kevin Warner believes otherwise. In this episode, Kevin discusses the reasons why the future of sales development does not really require a full-time SDR, as what we really need to measure is ROI and revenue, instead of just SDR activity. Find out more in this latest episode of Sales Transformation.Want to book more meetings and close more deals? Start selling the way your buyers want to buy with Humantic AI! TRANSFORMING MOMENTSKEVIN: THE FUTURE OF SALES DEVELOPMENT“We say the future of sales development is not having a full-time SDR, because companies, the way you evaluate an SDR is activity-driven, not ROI driven. Marketing campaigns at their core, if you run an ad on Facebook, on Instagram on Google AdWords, it is revenue driven from every analytic point.”KEVIN: SCALE BY KNOWING THE MARKET“In my mind, the sales development spaces leading to marketing, you should have campaign managers, you shouldn't be structuring these with very unique campaigns, you should be segmenting your market as much as possible and running unique campaigns that you can then measure. And we should be valuing the strategy and the management of those and not just an SDR team.”Connect with KevinKevin Warner | Leadium | Leadium.comConnect with Collin LinkedIn | YouTube | Newsletter | Twitter | IG | TikTok

When Sales Development Representative, Greyson Wooten, wanted to make a career change, he did a full 180. Or did he? This week, Faith chats with him about moving from teaching to startups, being passionate about sports, and how if you can handle the wrath of an 8th grader, you'll excel in sales. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

☎️The Ultimate 5 Step Cold Calling Strategy & Script for B2B Sales: https://softwaresalesguide.com/software-sales-guide/p/the-ultimate-cold-calling-strategy-script-for-b2b-sales Clear target for the quarter , What number do you need to hit your quota, what number do you need to promote, what is your personal target & how will you get there SNEs on open ops, Scheduled Next Event, account executives out there clean up your pipeline, you need at least 4 pipeline coverage Make list of all the meetings you have in Jan, Sales Development Reps should be cold calling al of the set meetings to welcome customers to the new year & confirm the meeting time Customer renewals in the next 90 days, low handing fruit pipeline opportunity Lost ops, cold call all lost opportunities Run a live conversations report, start the convo with “how have you been”, visit softwareslaesguide.com for my cold calling guide. 0:00 With Down Your Sales Targets Daily 1:24 Improve Show Rate For January Meetings 2:35 Pipeline Hygiene 3:32 Prospect Customer Renewals 4:20 Prospect Lost Opportunities 5:14 Cold Calling sales activities, new year success, rep success tips, starting the year off strong, sales strategies, goal setting, productivity, time management, sales techniques, new year's resolutions, cold calling

When your first sales job was hustling your classmates over Yu-Gi-Oh cards at six years old, you're bound to be one of the best in the biz by the time you're a full-grown adult. Such is the case with Donovan Suggs, one of Gun.io's Sales Development Reps. And when he's not working for us? He's working on laying tracks as a talented musician. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Future-proof your skillset to thrive in the modern workforce: https://softwaresalesguide.com/ YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/c/trentdressel LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/trentdressel/ Leave a review if you enjoyed :)

Podcast de ventas y marketing B2B .- Estás trabajando como Sales Development Rep y día tras día estrujas tu cerebro: ¿Cómo puedo triunfar como SDR? Es posible que te motive ganar más dinero o quizás lo que buscas es un ascenso rápido en tu empresa. En cualquier caso, aquí podrás encontrar varios caminos para catapultarte hacia el éxito en tu profesión. .- Recursos gratuitos sobre #modernprospecting en: https://outbounders.es/

Podcast de Ventas B2B y #modernprospecting .- Charlamos con Cristina Ferreres de Outbound People sobre las oportunidades y e autentico BOOM que atraviesa hoy el mercado laboral para los especialistas en ventas B2B Outbound. Muy especialmente es el perfil del Sales Development Reps el más demandado. Hablamos sobre los Skills que se buscan, salarios medios y oportunidades en este sector. .- Perfil de Cristina en LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/cristina-f-6b140478/ .- https://www.outboundpeople.com/ .- Recursos gratuitos en #modernprospecting en https://outbounders.es/

Morgan Buchanan is a Sales Development Rep at Spekit. Prior to that, she spent 10+ years as a professional ballet dancer. In this episode, we discuss: Her professional dancing career and correlation to sales Why and how she transitioned into tech How Morgan's booking meetings right now And much more.. If you enjoy the podcast, would you please consider leaving a short review on Apple Podcasts? It takes less than 60 seconds, and it really makes a difference in helping to grow this show and find the best guests possible for you. Follow The Podcast: Apple/Spotify: Millennial Sales Twitter: TommyTahoe Instagram: TommyTahoe YouTube: TommyTahoe Website: Millennialmomentum.net

Morgan Buchanan is a Sales Development Rep at Spekit. Prior to that, she spent 10+ years as a professional ballet dancer. In this episode, we discuss: Her professional dancing career and correlation to sales Why and how she transitioned into tech How Morgan's booking meetings right now And much more.. If you enjoy the podcast, would you please consider leaving a short review on Apple Podcasts? It takes less than 60 seconds, and it really makes a difference in helping to grow this show and find the best guests possible for you. Follow The Podcast: Apple/Spotify: Millennial Sales Twitter: TommyTahoe Instagram: TommyTahoe YouTube: TommyTahoe Website: Millennialmomentum.net

Hello and welcome to another episode of the Investor Mel – Women of Action show! In this episode, I am speaking with Naomi Bandara. She started her real estate investing journey with the Action Family Mentoring Program in October 2021 and now owns 14 units (4 properties)!Naomi was born in Sri Lanka and migrated to Canada 16 years ago. She currently works as a Sr. Sales Development Rep for a US based car wash manufacturing company in Nova Scotia with her husband Sangeve who's a contractor. They also have three dogs.  Her goal is to build passive income to be able to quit her 9-5 job and have financial and time freedom to do do what loves the most... travel around the world!  Within seven months of joining my Action Family mentoring program, she purchased a 5-Plex, a Duplex, and a 6-Plex! In this episode, she shares how she was able to purchase 14 units in such a short period of time. She also shares how by doing her due diligence, she decided to walk away from certain deals and talks about how her family and people around her felt about her real estate investing journey: "They are very skeptical, and not just them… most people when you say you're into rental properties. They go: Oh my God, why do you want that headache? They only heard the bad stories, not the good stories. They have this bad mindset when you say tenants. But I always say:  hey, it's not as bad as you think.”I love seeing how she overcame the skepticism and focused on her goals! And if you're just starting in real estate, here's her advice:"Numbers don't lie. When your numbers work, then you're good to go. If you can step out of that comfort zone, that would be one of the greatest steps you can take." What's next for Naomi? She wants to keep growing her portfolio so she can quit her full-time job and start packing her bags!

Marci DiGaetano, Head of Global Sales Development at Cyberpion, has a unique and special way she onboards, coaches, and develops her SDR teams. Listen to the holistic approach she takes to onboarding reps, how she builds confidence in her teams, the practical approach every SDR should take if they want to get promoted, and how leading and coaching isn't just a job, but an obligation for her. 

Have you ever asked yourself how much your marketing content is worth?   The eBooks you create. The infographics you design. The webinars you host.  How much are they worth?  How do you value your marketing content? You need to know, because contrary to your beliefs, they have value and your ability to apply the appropriate value matters. The value of your marketing content isn't measured in terms of money, but rather by how much information your prospects are willing to give up.  Value, marketing content based on its usefulness, currency and unique information it is offering. The information you request for a download is the price.  Understanding how to price your content is the key to maximising your content strategy. To simplify this a bit more, if your submission forms are asking for lots of information*, names, phone numbers, company size, title, roles, etc. then that's a high price for the content. It may be worth it but know that it is expensive. On the flip side, if you're only asking for an email, that's cheap. YOUR CONTENT IS NOT FREE – let's be clear,  If you're asking for any information as a condition of access to your content, your content is not free. The price is the information. The only time content is free, is when prospects can click a button and get it without inputting any information. Now that we understand our content is not free. Rule #1; Don't price your content too high. Like the pricing of anything, value is key. Make sure that you know what you're asking for is worth what you're offering.  If you're offering an infographic on general trends in the industry, asking for a lot of identifying personal and corporate information, may be too expensive and impede the volume of downloads Too often companies overcharge for their content, requesting lots of information for content that's not worth it. Rule #2; Don't Price too low Like over charging for content, you can under-charge for content.  Undercharging for content happens when you don't ask for enough information for something that is highly valuable. Maybe you've completed a robust assessment of the state of a market that can help your prospects plan for their upcoming year.  Only asking for an email is pricing it too low.  You don't want to give away such a valuable piece of content. Pricing killer content too low can overwhelm your Sales Development Rep's, marketing and more with unqualified, unidentified submissions that have little to no lead or opportunity value. The key is to price right. Understanding the value of your marketing content and pricing accordingly is key.  It's not enough to just create content and just put it out there for everyone at a one price fits all strategy. Consider offering content with varying price points.   Create some free content, referring to more expensive content tucked inside. Create inexpensive content that requires little more than an email address.  Create higher value content that requires identifying information like size of an organisation, role, budget, etc.  Finally, create expensive content.  Expensive content is rich in data, insight, and value. Charge a lot for this content, require insights, identifying information, and even agreements to meet or a scheduled appointment. When we evaluate content through the lens of value and price, it changes the game.   It requires price to be included into the conversation.  If we're not getting the downloads or form submissions we want, is it the content or the price?  We can no longer simply assume it was bad content, thus poor submissions or valuable content because of tons of form submissions. Price plays a role in conversions and getting the price right matters. The Strategy: Create content for all prices points, (free, cheap, moderate, expensive) Be sure the value of the content is consistent with the price Don't overcharge or undercharge Use varying priced content to drive interest to more expensive content Continually evaluate your content to make sure the price is still fair Old, out of date content may need to go on sale and only require an email.

AJ Alonzo is the Director of Marketing at demandDrive. He's responsible for marketing communication efforts growing their social media presence and is a co-host of The UNSUBSCRIBE Podcast.  It's a podcast designed to help Sales Development Reps better prospect, manage their teams, and prepare them for the world of Sales Development. During this episode, we discussed tenacity, grit, resilience, and how the industry of sales development has developed since we started a while back.These were my top ten takeaways from our conversation. 1. Why they started their own podcast2. The advantages of seeing it through vs always leaving for the next best thing. 3. How the SDR mentality can help you in many aspects of life. 4. Work smarter not harder.5. The evolution of sales and how consumers can research everything before speaking with your company. 6. How successful organizations really understand taking care of their SDRs. 7. How prospecting and building those strong SDR skills can help you excel as a top AE. 8. How personalization has changed because of all of the information we have out there on the internet. 9. How the pandemic has changed prospecting. 10. Authenticity gets you meetings. If you want to connect with AJ, you can connect with him below. https://linktr.ee/aj_alonzohttps://www.linkedin.com/in/ajalonzo/

AJ Alonzo is the Director of Marketing at demandDrive. He's responsible for marketing communication efforts growing their social media presence and is a co-host of The UNSUBSCRIBE Podcast.  It's a podcast designed to help Sales Development Reps better prospect, manage their teams, and prepare them for the world of Sales Development. During this episode, we discussed tenacity, grit, resilience, and how the industry of sales development has developed since we started a while back.These were my top ten takeaways from our conversation. 1. Why they started their own podcast2. The advantages of seeing it through vs always leaving for the next best thing. 3. How the SDR mentality can help you in many aspects of life. 4. Work smarter not harder.5. The evolution of sales and how consumers can research everything before speaking with your company. 6. How successful organizations really understand taking care of their SDRs. 7. How prospecting and building those strong SDR skills can help you excel as a top AE. 8. How personalization has changed because of all of the information we have out there on the internet. 9. How the pandemic has changed prospecting. 10. Authenticity gets you meetings. If you want to connect with AJ, you can connect with him below. https://linktr.ee/aj_alonzohttps://www.linkedin.com/in/ajalonzo/

About AshleighAshleigh Early is a passionate advocate for sales people and through her consulting, coaching, and The Other Side of Sales, she is devoted to making B2B sales culture more inclusive so anyone can thrive. Over the past ten years Ashleigh has led, built, re-built, and consulted for 2 unicorns, 3 acquisitions, 1 abject failure and every step in between.  She is also the Head of Sales at the Duckbill Group! You can find Ashleigh on Twitter @AshleighatWork and more about the Other Side of Sales at Othersideofsales.comLinks: Twitter: https://twitter.com/ashleighatwork LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/ashleighearly TranscriptAnnouncer: Hello, and welcome to Screaming in the Cloud with your host, Chief Cloud Economist at The Duckbill Group, Corey Quinn. This weekly show features conversations with people doing interesting work in the world of cloud, thoughtful commentary on the state of the technical world, and ridiculous titles for which Corey refuses to apologize. This is Screaming in the Cloud.Corey: Couchbase Capella Database-as-a-Service is flexible, full-featured and fully managed with built in access via key-value, SQL, and full-text search. Flexible JSON documents aligned to your applications and workloads. Build faster with blazing fast in-memory performance and automated replication and scaling while reducing cost. Capella has the best price performance of any fully managed document database. Visit couchbase.com/screaminginthecloud to try Capella today for free and be up and running in three minutes with no credit card required. Couchbase Capella: make your data sing.Corey: Today's episode is brought to you in part by our friends at MinIO the high-performance Kubernetes native object store that's built for the multi-cloud, creating a consistent data storage layer for your public cloud instances, your private cloud instances, and even your edge instances, depending upon what the heck you're defining those as, which depends probably on where you work. It's getting that unified is one of the greatest challenges facing developers and architects today. It requires S3 compatibility, enterprise-grade security and resiliency, the speed to run any workload, and the footprint to run anywhere, and that's exactly what MinIO offers. With superb read speeds in excess of 360 gigs and 100 megabyte binary that doesn't eat all the data you've gotten on the system, it's exactly what you've been looking for. Check it out today at min.io/download, and see for yourself. That's min.io/download, and be sure to tell them that I sent you.Corey: Welcome to Screaming in the Cloud. I'm Corey Quinn. My guest today does something that I, sort of, dabbled around the fringes of once upon a time, but then realized I wasn't particularly good at it and got the hell out of it and went screaming into clouds instead. Ashleigh Early is the Head of Sales here at The Duckbill Group. Ashleigh, thank you for joining me.Ashleigh: Thanks for coming on and running, screaming from my chosen profession [laugh]. You're definitely not the only one.Corey: Well, let's be clear here; there are two ways that can go because sure, I used to dabble around in sales when I was, basically, trying to figure how to not starve to death. But I also used to run things; it's basically a smart team. I was managing people and realized I was bad at that, too. So, really, that's, sort of, an open-ended direction. We can go either side and…But, let's go with sales. That seems like a more interesting way for this to play out. So, you've been here for—what is it now—it feels like ages, but my awareness for the passing of time in the middle of a global panini is relatively not great.Ashleigh: Yeah. I think we're at day—what is it—1,053 of March 2020? So, time is irrelevant; it's a construct; I don't know. But, technically, by the Gregorian Calendar, I think I'm at six months.Corey: It's very odd to me, at least the way that I contextualized doing this. Back when I started what became The Duckbill Group, I was an independent consultant. It was, more or less, working people I knew through my network who had a very specific, very expensive problem: The AWS bill is too high. And I figured, this is genius. It is the easiest possible sale in the world and one of the only scenarios where I can provably demonstrate ROI to a point where, “Bring me in; you will inherently save money.”And all of that is true, but one of things I learned very quickly was that, even with the easiest sale of, “Hi. I'd like to sell you this bag of money,” there is no such thing as an easy enterprise sale. There is nuance to it. There is a lot of difficulty to it. And I was left with the, I guess, driving question—after my first few months of playing this game—of, “How on earth does anyone make money in this space?”The reason I persisted was, basically, a bunch of people did favors for me, but they didn't owe me at all. It was, “Oh, great. I'll give them the price quote.” And they're, like, “Oh, yeah.” So cool, they turned around and quoted that to their boss at triple the rate because, “Don't slit your own throat on this.” They were right. And not for nothing, it turns out when you're selling advice, charging more for it makes it likelier to succeed as a project.But, I had no idea what I was doing. And, like most engineers on Twitter, I look at something I don't understand deeply myself, and figure, “Oh. Well, it's not engineering, therefore, it's easy.” Yeah, it turns out that running a business is humbling across a whole bunch of different axes.Ashleigh: I wouldn't even say, it's not running a business; it's working with humans. Working with humans is humbling. If you're working with a machine or even something as simple as, like, you know, you're making a product. It's follow a recipe; it's okay. Follow the instructions. I do A, then B, then C, then D, unless you don't enjoy using the instructions because you don't enjoy using instructions. But you still follow a set general process; you build a thing that comes out correctly.The moment that process is, talk to this person, and then Person A, then Person B, then Person C, then Person D, then Back to Person A, then Person D, and then finally to Person E, everything goes to heck in a handbasket. That's what really makes it interesting. And for those of us who are of a certain disposition, we find that fascinating and enthralling. If you're of another disposition, that's hell on earth [laugh]. So, it's a very—yeah, it's a very interesting thing.Corey: Back when I was independent, and people tried to sell me things—and yeah, sometimes it worked. It was always interesting going through various intake funnels and the rest. And, like, “Well, what role do you hold in the organization? Do you influence the decision? Do you make the decision? How many people need to be involved in the rest?”And I was looking around going, “How many people do you think fit in my home office here? Let's be serious.” I mean, there are times I escalated to the Chihuahua because she's unpleasant and annoying and basically, sometimes so are people. But that's a separate topic for later. But it became a very different story back as the organizational distance between the people that needed to sign off on a sale increased.Ashleigh: Mm-hm. Absolutely. And you might have felt me squirm when you described those questions because one of my biggest pet peeves is when people take sales terminology and directly use that with clients. Just like if you're an engineer and you're describing what you do, you're not going to go home and explain to your dad in technical jargon what exactly; you're going to tell him broad strokes. And if they're interested, go deeper and deeper; technical, more technical.I hate when salespeople use sales jargon, like, “What's your role in the organization? Are you the decision-maker?” Don't—mmm. There are better ways to deal with that. So, that's just a sign of poor training. It's not the sales rep's fault; it's his company's fault—their company's fault. But that's a different thing.It's fascinating to me, kind of, watching this—what you said spoke of two things there. One is poor training, and two, of a lack of awareness of the situation and a lack of just doing a little bit of pre-work. Like, you do five seconds of research on Corey Quinn, you can realize that the company is ten to 15 people tops. So, it makes sense to ask a question around, “Hey, do you need anyone else to sign off before we can move forward with this project?”That tells me if I need to get someone for technical, for budget, for whatever, but asking if you're a decision-maker, or if you're influencing, or if you're doing initial research, like, that's using sales terminology, not actually getting to the root of the problem and immediately making it very clear, you didn't do any actual research in advance, which is not—in modern selling—not okay.Corey: My business partner, Mike, has a CEO job title, and he'll get a whole bunch of cold outreach constantly all day, every day. I conducted a two-week experiment where in front of my Chief Cloud Economist job title, I put ‘CTO/' just to see what would happen, and sure enough, I started getting outreach left, right, up, down, and sideways. Not just for things that a CTO figure might theoretically wind up needing to buy, but also, job opportunities for a skill set that I haven't dusted off in a decade.So, okay. Once people can have something that hits their filters when you're searching for very specific titles, then you wind up getting a lot more outreach. But if you create a job title that no one sensible would ever pick for themselves, suddenly a lot of that tends to go by the wayside. It shined a light on how frustratingly dreary a lot of the sales prospecting work really can be from—Ashleigh: Oh, yeah.Corey: —just from the side of someone who gets it. Now, I'm not exaggerating when I say that I did work in sales once upon a time. Not great at it, but one of the first white-collar-style jobs that I had was telemarketing, of all things. And I was spectacular at it because I was fortunate enough to be working on a co-branded affinity credit card that was great, and I had the opportunity to position it as a benefit of an existing membership or something else people already had. I was consistently top-ten out of 400 people on a shift, and it was great.But it was also something that was very time-limited, and if you're having an off day, everything winds up crumbling. And, eventually, I drifted off and started doing different things. But I've never forgotten those days. And that's why it just grinds my gears both to see crappy sales stuff happening, and two, watching people on Twitter—particularly—taking various sales-prospect outreach for a drag. And it's—Ashleigh: Oh, God. Yeah.Corey: —you know, not everyone is swimming in the ocean of privilege that some of the rest of us are. And understand that you're just making yourself look like a jerk when you're talking to someone who is relatively early-career and didn't happen to google you deeply enough before sending you an email that you find insulting. That bugs me a fair bit.Ashleigh: And I think part of that is just a lack of humanity and understanding. Like, there's—I mean, I get it; I'm the first person to be jumping on Twitter and [unintelligible 00:08:41] when something goes down, or something's not working, and saying, you know—I'm the first one to get angry and start complaining. Don't get me wrong. However, what I think a lot of people—it's really easy to dehumanize something you don't see very often, or you're not involved in directly. And I find it real interesting you mentioned you worked in, you know, doing telemarketing.I lasted literally two weeks in telemarketing. I full-on rage-quit. It was a college job. I worked in my college donations center. I lasted two weeks, and I fully walked out on a shift. I was, like, “Screw this; I'm never doing anything like that ever again. I hate this.”But what I hated about it was I hated the lack of connection. I was, like, I'm not just going to read some scripts and get yelled at for having too much banter. Like, I'm getting money; what do you care? I'm getting more money than other people. Maybe they're not making as many calls, but I'm getting just as much, so why do you care how I do this?But what really gets me is you have to remember—and I think a lot of people don't understand how, kind of, most large, modern sales organizations work. And just really quickly giving you a very, very generic explanation, the way a lot of organizations work is they employ something called SDRs or Sales Development Reps. That title can be permeated in a million different ways. There's ADRs, MDRs, BDRs, whatever. But basically, it's their job to do nothing but scour the internet using, sometimes, actual, like, scripts.Sometimes they use LinkedIn; sometimes they have—they purchase databases. So, for example, like, you might change your title on LinkedIn, but it's not changing in the database. Just trust me Corey, they have you flagged as a CTO. Sorry. What [crosstalk 00:10:16].Corey: My personal favorite is when I get cold outreach asking me on the phone call about whether we have any needs for whatever it is they happen to be selling at—and then they name a company that I left in 2012. I don't know how often that database has been sold and resold and sold onwards, yet again. And it's just, I work in tech. What do you think the odds are that I'm still in the same job I was ten years ago? And I get that it happens, but at some point, it just becomes almost laughable.Ashleigh: Yeah. If you work in a company—that when in doubt—I tell every sales, kind of, every company team that I work with—do not use those vendors. Ninety percent of them are not very good; they're using old databases; they don't update. You're better off paying for a database that is subscription-based because then, literally, you've got an SLA on data quality, and you can flag and get things fixed. The number one sales-data provider, I happen to know for a fact, I actually earned, I think, almost $10,000 in donations to a charity in—what was this—this was 2015 because I went through and did a scrub of are RCRM versus I think, LinkedIn or something else, and I flagged everything that wasn't accurate and sent it back to them.And they happened to have a promotion where for every—where you could do a flag that wasn't accurate because they were no longer at the company. They would donate a buck to charity, and I think I sent them, like, 10,000 or something. [unintelligible 00:11:36] I was like, “None of these are accurate.” And they're, like, you know? And they sent me this great email, like, “Thank you for telling us; we really appreciate it.”I didn't even know they were doing this promotion. They thought I'd be saving up for it. And I was, like, “No, I just happened to run this analysis and thought you'd want to know.” So, subscriptions—Corey: You know, it turns out computers are really fast at things.Ashleigh: Yeah, and I was very proud I figured out how to run a script. I was, like, “Yay. Look at me; I wrote a macro.” This was very exciting for—the first—God, the first five or so years of my sales career, I've consistently called myself a dumb salesperson because I was working in really super-technical products. I worked for Arista Networks, FireEye, Bromium, you know, PernixData. I was working in some pretty reasonably hard tech, and I'd always, kind of, introduced myself, I definitely talked about my technical aptitude because I have a degree in political science and opera. These are not technical fields, and yet here I am every day, talking about, you know, tech [crosstalk 00:12:25].Corey: Well, if the election doesn't pan out the way you want, why don't you sing about it? Why not? You can tie all these things together.Ashleigh: You can. And, honestly, there have several points—I've done a whole other shows on, like, how those two, seemingly, completely disparate things have actually been some of the greatest gifts to my career. And most notably, I think, is the fact that I have my degree in political science as a Bachelor of Science, which means I have a BS in BS, which is incredibly relevant to my career in a lot of different ways.Corey: This episode is sponsored by our friends at Oracle Cloud. 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Visit snark.cloud/oci-free that's snark.cloud/oci-free.Ashleigh: Yeah, so wrapping up, kind of, how modern-skills organizations work, most companies' employees can be called BDRs, and they're typically people who have less than five years of sales experience. They, rightly or wrongly, tend to be people in their early-20s who have very little training. Most people get SDRs on phones within a week, which means—Corey: These are the people that are doing the cold outreach?Ashleigh: —they've gotten maybe five or six hours of product training. Hmm? Sorry.Corey: These are the people who are doing the cold outreach?Ashleigh: These are the people who are doing the cold outreach. So, their whole job is just to get appointments for account execs. Account execs make it—again; tons of different names, but these are the closers. They'll run you through the sales cycle. They typically have between five and thirty years of experience.But they're the ones depending on how big your company is. [unintelligible 00:13:35] the bigger your company, typically the more experience your sales rep's going to have in terms of managing most separate deal cycles. But what ends up happening is you end up with this SDR organization—this is where I've spent most of my career is helping people build healthy sales-development organizations. In terms of this churn-and-burn culture where you've got people coming in and basically flaming out because they go on Twitter or—heaven forbid—Reddit and get sales advice from these loud-mouthed, terrible people, who are telling them to do things that didn't work ten years ago, but they then go try it; they send it out, and then their prospects suddenly blasting them on Twitter.It's not that rep's fault that they got no training in the first place, they got no support, they just had to figure it out because that's the culture. It's the company's fault. And a lot of times, people don't—there was a big push against this last year, I think, within the sales community against other sales leaders doing it, but now, it's starting to spread out. Like, I have no problem dragging someone for a really terrible email. Anonymize the company; anonymize the email. And, if you want to give feedback, give it to them directly. And you can also say, “I'm going to post this, but it's not coming back to you.” And tell them, like—Corey: Whenever I get outreach from—Ashleigh: “Get out of that terrible company.”Corey: Yeah. Whenever I get outreach from AWS for a sales motion or for recruiting or whatnot. I always anonymize the heck out of the rep. It's funny to me because it's, “Don't you know who I am?” It is humorous, on some level. And it's clear that is a numbers game, and they're trying to do a bunch of different things, but a cursory google of my name would show it. It's just amusing.I want to be clear that whenever I do that, I don't think the rep has done anything wrong. They're doing exactly what they should. I just find it very funny that, “Wait, me? Work at an AWS? The bookstore?” It seems like it would be a—yeah. Yeah, the juxtaposition is just hilarious to me. They've done nothing wrong, and that's okay. It's a hard racket.I remember—at least they have the benefit over my first enterprise sales job where I was selling tape drives into the AS/400 market, competing against IBM on price. That was in the days of “No one ever gets fired for buying IBMs.” So, yeah. The place you want to save money on is definitely the backup system that's going to save all of your systems. I made one sale in my time there—and apparently set a company record because it wasn't specifically aimed at the AS/400—and I did the math on that and realized, “Huh, I'd have to do two of these a month in order to beat the draw against commission structure that they had.”So, I said, “To hell with this,” and I quit. The CEO was very much a sales pro, and, “Well, you need to figure out whether you're a salesperson or not.” Even back then, I had an attitude problem, but it was, “Yeah, I think that—oh, I know that I am. It's just a question is am I going to be a salesperson here?” And the answer is, “No.” It [laugh]—Ashleigh: Yeah.Corey: It's a two-way street.Ashleigh: It is. And I say this all the time to people who—I work with a lot of salespeople now who are, like, “I don't think sales is for me. I don't know, I need [unintelligible 00:16:24]. The past three companies didn't work.” The answer isn't, “Is sales for you?”The answer is, “Are you selling the right thing at the right place?” And one of the things we've learned from the ‘Great Recession' and the ‘Great Reshuffling' in everything is there's no reason to stay at a terrible company, and there's no reason to stay at a company where you're not really passionate and understand what you're selling. I joked about, you know, I talked down about myself for the first bit of my career. Doesn't mean I didn't—like, I might not understand exactly how heuristics work, but I understand what heuristics are. Just don't ask me to design any of them.You know, like, you have to understand and you have to be really excited about it. And that's what modern sales is. And so, yes, you're going to get a ton of the outreach because that's how people—it still works. That's why we all still get Nigerian prince emails. Somebody, somewhere, still clicks those things, sadly. And that gets me really angry.Corey: It's a pure numbers game.Ashleigh: Exactly. Ninety percent if enterprise B2B sales is not that anymore. Even the companies that are using BDRs—which is most of them—are now moving to what's called ‘account-based selling'. We're using hyper-personalized messaging. You're probably noticing videos are popping up more.I'm a huge fan of video. I think it's a great way to force personalization. It's, like, “Hi. Corey, I see you. I'm talking to you. I've done my research. I know what you're doing at The Duckbill Group and here's how I think we can help. If that's not the case, no worries. Let me know; I'll leave you alone.” That's what selling should be.Corey: I have yet to receive one of those, but I'm sure it'll happen now that I've mentioned that and put that out into the universe.Ashleigh: Probably.Corey: What always drove me nuts—and maybe this is unfair—but when I'm trying to use a product, probably something SaaS-based—and I see this a lot—where, first, if you aren't letting me self-serve and get off with the free tier and just start testing something, well, that's already a ding against you because usually I'm figuring this out at 2 o'clock in the morning when I can't sleep, and I want to work on something. I don't want to wait for a sales cycle, and I have to slow things down. Cool. But at some point, for sophisticated customers, you absolutely need to have a sales conversation. But, okay, great. Usually, I encounter this more with lead magnets or other things designed to get my contact info.But what drives me up a wall, when they start demanding information that is very clearly trying to classify me in their sales funnel, on some level. I'll give you my name, my company, and my work email address—although I would think that from my work email address, you could probably figure out where I work and the rest—but then there are other questions. How big is your company? What is your functional role within the company? And where are you geographically?Well, that's an interesting question. Why does that matter in 2022? Well, very often leads get circulated out to people based upon geography. And I get it, but it also frustrates me, just because I don't want to have to deal with classifying and sorting myself out for what is going to be a very brief conversation [laugh] with a salesperson. Because if the product works, great, I'm going to buy. If it doesn't work, I'm going to get frustrated and not want to hear from you forever.Which gets to my big question for you—and please don't take the question as anything other than the joking spirit in which it's intended—but why are so many salespeople profoundly annoying?Ashleigh: I would—uh, hmm.Corey: Sales processes is probably the better way to frame it because—Ashleigh: I was going to say, “Yeah, it's not the people; it's the process.” So—Corey: —it's not the individual's fault, as we've talked about it.Ashleigh: —yeah, I was going to say, I was, like, “Okay, I think it's less the people; more of the processes.” And processes that will make [crosstalk 00:19:37]—Corey: Yeah. It expresses itself as the same person showing up again and again. But that is not—Ashleigh: Totally.Corey: —their fault. That is the process by which they are being measured at as a part of their job. And it's unfair to blame them for that. But the expression is, “This person's annoying the hell out of me, what gives?”Ashleigh: “Oh, my gosh. Why does she keep [unintelligible 00:19:51] my inbox? Leave me alone. Just let me freaking test it.” I said, “I needed two weeks. Just let me have the two weeks to freaking test the thing. I will get back to you.” [unintelligible 00:19:58] yeah, no, I know.And even since moving into leadership several years ago, same thing. I'm like, “Okay, no.” I've gotten to the point where I've had several conversations with salespeople. I'm like, “I know the game. I know what you're trying to do. I respect it. Leave me alone. I promise I will get back to you, just lea”—I have literally said this to people. And the weird thing is most salespeople respect that. We really respect the transparency on that.Now, the trick is what you're talking about with lead capture and stuff like this, again, it comes down to company's design and it comes down to companies who value the buyer experience and customer journey, and companies who don't. And this, I think, is actually more driven by—in my humble opinion—our slightly over-reliance on venture capital, which is all about for a gathering of as much data as possible, figuring out how to monetize it, and move from there. In their mind, personal experience and emotion doesn't really factor into that equation very much, so you end up with these buyer journeys that are less about the buyer and more about getting them from click to purchase as efficiently as possible in terms of company resources, which includes salespeople time. So, as to why you have to fill out all those things, that just to me reeks of a company that maybe doesn't really understand the client experience and probably is going to have a pretty, mmm, support program as well, which means the product had better be really freaking good for me to buy it.Corey: To be clear, at The Duckbill Group, we do not have a two-in-the-morning click here and get you onboarded. Turns out that we have yet to really see the value in building a shopping cart system, where you can buy, “One consulting please,” and call it good. We're not quite at the level of productizing our offering yet and having conversations is a necessary part of what we do. But that also aligns with our customer expectation where there is not a general expectation in this industry that you can buy a full-on bespoke consulting engagement without talking to a human being. That, honestly, if someone trying to sell someone such a thing, I would be terrified.Ashleigh: Yeah, run screaming. Good Lord. No, exactly. And that's one of the reasons I love working with this team and I love this problem is because this isn't a quick, you know, download, install, and save, you know, save ten percent on your AWS bill by installing Duckbill Group. It ain't that simple. If it were that simple, like, AWS wouldn't have the market cap it does.So, that's one of the things I love. I love really meaty problems that don't have clean answers, and specifically have answers that look slightly different for everybody. I love those sort of problems. I've done the highly prioritized stuff: Click here, buy, get it on the free tier, and then it's all about up-sale, cross-sale as needed. Been there, done that; that's fun, and that's a whole different bucket of challenges, but what we're dealing with every single day on the consulting's of The Duckbill Group is far more nuanced and far more exciting because we're also seeing some truly incredible architecture designs. Like, companies who are really on the bleeding edge of what they're doing. And it's just really fun—Corey: Cost and architecture are the same thing in the Cloud.Ashleigh: —[crosstalk 00:22:59] that little—Corey: It's a blast to see it.Ashleigh: It's so much fun. It's, it's, it's… the world's best jigsaw puzzle because it covers, like, every single continent and all these different nuances, and you got to think about a ‘ephemerality,' which is my new favorite word. So…Corey: It's fun because you are building a sales team here, which opens up a few interesting avenues for me. For one, I don't have to manage and yell at individual salespeople in the same way. For example, we talk about it being a process and not a person thing. We're launching some outbound sales work and basically, having the person to talk to about that process—namely you—means that I don't need to be hovering over people's shoulders the way I felt that I once did, as far as what are we sending people? These passive-aggressive drip campaigns of, “Clearly, you don't mind lighting money on fire. If that changes, please let me know.”It's email eight in a sequence. It's no. This stuff has an implicit ‘Love, Mike and Corey' at the bottom of everything that comes out of this company, and it represents us on some respect. And let's be clear, we have a savvy, sophisticated, and more-attractive-than-the-average audience listening to all of these shows. And they'll eat me alive if we start doing stuff like that—Ashleigh: Oh, yeah.Corey: —not to mention that I find it not particularly respectful of their time and who they are. It doesn't work, so we have to be very conscious of that. The fact that I never had to explain that concept in any depth to you made bringing you in one of the easiest decisions we've ever made.Ashleigh: Well, I think it helped—I think in one of my interviews I went off on the ‘alligator email,' which is this infamous email we've all gotten, which is basically, like, you know, “Hi. I haven't heard from you yet, so I want to know which one of these three scenarios has happened to you. One, you're not interested in my product but didn't have the balls to email me and say that you're not interested. Two, you're no longer in this position, in which case, you're not going to read this email anyway. Or three, you're being chased by an alligator, and I should call animal control because you need help.” This email was—Corey: He, he, he, hilarious.Ashleigh: Ugh. And there's variations of it. And I've seen variations of it that are very well done and are on brand and work with the company. I've seen variations that could be legitimately, I think, great humor. And that's great.Humor in emails and humor in sales is fantastic. I have to shout out my friend, Jon Selig up in Canada, who actually, literally, does workshops on how sales teams can integrate humor into their prospecting. It's freaking brilliant. But—Corey: Near and dear to my heart.Ashleigh: —if you're not actually trained in that stuff, don't do it. Don't do the alligator email. But I think I went off on that during one of our interviews just because I was just sick of seeing these things. And what kills me, again, it comes back to the beginning, is people who have no training, no experience coming in—I mean, it really kills me, too, because there's a real concerted effort in the sales community to get more diverse people into sales to, kind of, kill the sales bro just by washing them out, basically. And so, we're recruiting hard with veterans, with black and other racial minority groups, LGBTQ communities, all sorts of things, and indigenous peoples.And so, we're bringing people that also are maybe a little bit more mature, a little bit older, have families they're supporting, and we're throwing them in a role with no support and very little training. And then they wash out, and we wonder why. It's, like, well, maybe because you didn't—it's, like, when I explain this to other people who aren't in sales, like, “Really, imagine coming in to being hired for a coding job, being told you're going to be trained on, you know, Ruby on Rails or C# or whatever it is we're currently using”—my reference is probably super outdated—but then, being given a book, and that's it. And told, “Learn it. And by the way, your first project is due in a month.” That's what we're doing in sales—Corey: For a lot of folks, that's how we learned in the engineering spaces, but let's be clear, the people who do well in that, generally have tailwinds of privilege at their back. They don't have headwinds of, “You suck at this.” It was, you're-born-on-third-you-didn't-hit-a-triple school-of-thought. It's—Ashleigh: Yeah.Corey: —the idea of building an onboarding pipeline, of making this stuff more accessible to people earlier on is incredibly important. One of my, I guess, awakening moments as we were building this company was it turns out that if you manage salespeople as if they were engineers, it doesn't go super well. Whereas, if you manage engineers like they're salespeople, they quit—rage quit—cry, and call you out as being an abusive manager.One of the best descriptions I ever heard from an advisor was that salespeople are sharks. But that's not intended to be unkind. It is simply a facet of their nature. They enjoy the hunt; they enjoy chasing things down, and they like playing games. Whereas, as soon as you start playing games with your engineers on how much money they're going to make this week, that turns out to be a very negative thing. It's a different mindset. It's about motivating people as whatever befits what it is that they want to be doing.Ashleigh: It is. And the other thing is it's a cultural conditioning. So, it's really interesting to say, you know, “People,” you know, “Playing games.” We do enjoy—there's definitely some enjoyment of the competition; there's the thrill of the hunt, absolutely, but at the same time, you want your salespeople to quit? Screw with their money.You screw with their money; we will bail so fast it'll make your head spin. So, it's like, people think, “Oh, we love this.” No, it's really more—think of it as we are gamblers.Corey: Yeah. To be clear when I say, “Playing games with money,” I'm talking about the idea of, “Sell to a company in this profile this quarter, and we'll throw a $5,000 bonus your way,” or something like that. It is if the business wants to see something, great, make it worth the sales team's while to pursue it, or don't be surprised when no one really cares that much about those things—Ashleigh: Exactly.Corey: It's all upside. It is not about, “He, he. And if you don't sell to this weird thing that I can't really describe effectively to you, we're going to cut your bet—” Yeah, that goes over like a lead balloon. As it should. My belief is that compensation should always go up, not down.Ashleigh: Yeah. No, it should. Aside from that, here's a fun stat—I believe this came out of Forrester, it might've been out of [Topel 00:28:54]; I apologize, I don't remember exactly who said this, but a recent study found that less than 68 percent of sales reps make their quota every month. So, imagine that where if you're—we have this thing called OTE, which is On Target Earnings. So, if you have this number you're supposed to take home every month, only 68 percent of sales reps actually do that every month.So, that means we live with this number as our target, but we're living and budgeting anywhere from 30 to 50 percent below that. And then hoping and doing the work that goes in there. That's what we've been conditioned to accept, and that's why you end up with sales reps that use terms like ‘shark' and are aggressive and are in your face and can get—[unintelligible 00:29:30]—Corey: I didn't realize it was pejorative.Ashleigh: I know. No. But here's the thing too, but somebody called it ‘commission breath,' which I love. It's, like, you can smell commission breath coming off us when we're desperate. You totally can. It's because of this antiquated way of building commissions.And this is something that I—this was really obvious to me, and apparently, I was a little bit ahead of the curve. When I started designing comp plans, everyone told me, “You want to design a comp plan? Tie it to what you want them to do very specifically.” So, if you want them to move a pen, design a comp plan that they get a buck when they put the pen from the heel of your hand to the tips of your fingers. Then they get a buck. And then they can do that repeatedly. That's literally how I was taught design comp plans.In my head, that meant that I need to design it in such a way that it's doable for my team because I don't want my team worrying about how they're going to put food on the table while they're talking to a client because they're going get commission breath and it'll piss off the client. That's not a good client experience; that's not going to lead to good performance. Apparently—Corey: Yeah. My concern as a business owner has nothing to do with salespeople making too much money. In fact, I am never happier than I am than paying out commissions. The concern, then, therefore has to become the, “Okay, great. How do I keep the salespeople from being inadvertently incentivized to sell something for $10 that costs me $12 to fulfill?”It's a question of what behaviors do you incentivize that align what they're motivated by with what the company needs. And very often getting that wrong—which happens from time to time—is not viewed as a learning experience that it should be. But instead, “They're just out to screw us.” And I've seen so many company owners get so annoyed whenever their salespeople outperform. But what did you expect? That is the positive outcome. As opposed to what? The underperforming sales rep that can't close a deal? Please.Ashleigh: Well, no. And let's think about this too, especially if it's tied to commission and you're paying out commission. It's, like, okay, commission is always some, sort of, percentage—depending on a lot of things—but some sort of percent of what they're bringing in. If you design a comp plan that has you paying out more in commission than the sales that were earned to bring it in, that's on you; you screwed up. And you need to either be honest and say, “I screwed up; I can't pay this,” and know that you're going to lose some sales reps, but you won't lose as many as if you just refuse to pay it.But, honestly, and I'm not even kidding, I know people. I've worked at a company that I happen to know did this. That literally fired people because they didn't have the money to pay out the commission. And because they fired them before the commission was due to be paid out, then that person no longer had a legal claim to it. That's common. So, the commission goes both ways.Corey: To be clear, we've never done that, but I also would say that if we had, that's a screaming red flag for our consultancy, given the nature of what it is that we do here. It turns out that when we're building out comp plans, we model out various scenarios. Like, what is the worst way that this could wind up unfolding? And, okay, some of our early drafts it's, yeah, it turns out that we would not be able to pay salaries because we wound up giving all of that in commission to people with uncapped upside. Okay, great.But we're also not going to cap people's commissions because that winds up being a freaking problem, so how do we wind up motivating in a way that continues to grow and continues to incentivize the behaviors we want? And it turns out it's super complicated which why we brought you in. It's easier.Ashleigh: Yeah, it's a pain. But the other side of this too, I think, is there is another force at play here, which is finance. A lot of traditional finance modeling is built around that 50 to 70 percent of people hit commission. So, if all of the sudden, you design a comp plan such of a way that a hundred percent of the team is hitting commission, finance loses their shit. So, you have to make sure that when you're designing these things, one of the things I learned, I learned the hard way—this is how I learned that not everyone does it this way—I built my first comp plan; my team's hitting it.My team's overperforming, not a ton, but we're doing really well. All of the sudden, I'm getting called to Finance and getting raked over the coals. And they're like, “What did you do?” I'm like, “What do you mean what did I do? I designed a comp plan; we're hitting goal. Why are you mad?” “Well, we only had this much budgeted for commission.”And I was, like, “That's not my fault.” “Well, that's what historic performance was.” “Okay, well that's not what we're going to do going forward. We're going to do this.” And they're like, “Oh, well, you need to notify us if you're going to change it like that.” And I was, like, “Wait a minute. You modeled so that my team would not hit OTE?” “Yes.” “That's how you've always done this?” “Yes.” “Okay. Well, that's not what we're going to do going forward, and if that's a problem, I'll go find a door.” Because, no.Especially when we're talking about people who are living in extremely expensive areas. I spent most of my career living and working in San Francisco, managing teams of people who made less than six figures. And that's rough when you're paying two grand in rent every month. And 60 percent of your pay is commission. Like, no. You need to know that money's coming.So, I talk about modern sales a lot because that's what I'm trying to use because there's Glengarry Glen Ross, kind of, Wolf of Wall Street school, which is not how anyone behaves anymore, and if you're in an environment that's like that or treats your salespeople like that? Please leave. And then you've got modern sales, which is all about, “Okay, let's figure out how we can set up our salespeople to be the best people they can be to give our clients the best experience they can.” That's where you get top performance out of, and that's where you never run into the terrible emails with the alligators, and the, “Clearly you like lighting piles of money on fire.” That's where you don't get emails to Corey Quinn asking him if he's interested in coming to work for AWS, the book company.It's by incentivizing the people and creating good humans where they can really thrive as salespeople and as people in general. The rest comes with time. But, it's this whole, new way of looking at things. And it's big, and it's scary, and it costs more upfront, but you get more on the back end every single time.Corey: Not that you care about this an awful lot, but you have your own podcast that talks about this, The Other Side of Sales. What inspired you to decide, not just to build sales teams through a different lens, but also to, “You know what? I'm going to go out and talk into microphones through the internet from time to time.” Which, let's be clear, it takes a little bit of a certain warped perspective. I say this myself, having done this far too often.Ashleigh: Yeah. No, it's a fun little origin story. So, I'm a huge Star Trek geek; obsessive. And I was listening to a Star Trek podcast run by a couple of guys who are a little bit embarrassed to run a Star Trek podcast, called The Greatest Generation. Definitely not safe for work, but a really good podcast if you're into Star Trek at all.And they always do, kind of, letters at the end of the shows. And one of the letters at the end of the show one day was, “Hey, I was really inspired by you guys and I started my own podcast on this random thing that I am super excited about.” And I'm literally driving in the car with my husband, and I'm, like, “Huh. I don't know why I'm not listening to sales podcasts. I listen to enough of these other random ones.” Jumped online, pulled up a list of sales podcasts, and I think I went through three or four articles of, like, every sales podcast that was big. And this was, like, January of 2019.Corey: “By Broseph McBrowerson, but Everyone Calls Him ‘Browie.'” Yeah.Ashleigh: Literally, there was, Conversations with Women in Sales with the late, great—with the amazing Lori Richardson, who's now with it, but she took over for a mentor of mine who passed in 2020, sadly. But there was that, and then there was one other that was hosted by a husband-and-wife team. And that was it out of, like, 30 podcasts. And [laugh] so it was this moment of, like, epiphany of, like, “I can start my own podcast,” and, “Oh, I probably need to,” because, literally, no one looks or sounds like someone who I would actually want to hang out with ever, or do business with, in a lot of cases. And that's really changed. I'm so grateful.But really, what it came down to was I didn't feel there was a podcast for me. There wasn't a podcast I could listen to about sales that could help me, that I felt like I identified with. So, I was, like, “All right, fine. I'll start my own.” I called up a friend, and she was, literally, going through the same thing at the same time, so we said, “Screw it. We'll do our own.”We went full Bender from Futurama. We're like, “Just screw it; we'll have our own podcast… with liquor… and heels… and honest conversations that happens to us every day,” and random stuff. It's a lot of fun. And we've gone through a few iterations and it's been a long journey. We're about to hit our hundredth episode, which is really exciting.But yeah, we're—The Other Side of Sales is on a mission to make B2B sales culture truly inclusive so everyone can thrive, so, our conversations are all interviews with amazing sales pros who are trying to do amazing things and who are 90—I think are over 90 percent—are from a minority background, which is really exciting to, kind of, try and shift that conversation from Broseph McBrowerson. Our original tagline was the ‘anti-sales bro' podcast, but we thought that was a little too antagonistic. So…Corey: Yeah, being a little too antagonistic is, generally, my failure mode, so I hear you on that. I really want to thank you for taking so much time out of your day to speak with me. Because—well, not that I should thank you. It's one of those, I should really turn around and say, “Wait a minute. Why aren't you selling things? Why are you still talking to me?” But no—Ashleigh: No, I'm waiting for you to say, “Back to work.”Corey: Do appreciate your—exactly. I think that's a different podcast. Thank you so much for your time. If people want to learn more, where's the best place to find you?Ashleigh: Well, definitely please go check out duckbillgroup.com. We would love to talk to with you about anything to do with your AWS bill. Got a ton of resources on there around how to get that managed and sorted.If you're interested in connecting with me you can always hit me up at—I'm on Twitter @ashleighatwork, which is another deep-cut Star Trek reference, or you can hit me up at LinkedIn. Just search Ashleigh Early. My name is spelled a little weird because I'm a little weird. It's A-S-H-L-E-I-G-H, and then Early, like ‘early in the morning.'Corey: And links to all of that will wind up in the [show notes 00:39:11]. Thanks so much for your time. It's appreciated.Ashleigh: This has been fun; we'll do it again soon.AndIf your AWS bill keeps rising and your blood pressure is doing the same, then you need The Duckbill Group. We help companies fix their AWS bill by making it smaller and less horrifying. The Duckbill Group works for you, not AWS. We tailor recommendations to your business and we get to the point. Visit duckbillgroup.com to get started.Announcer: This has been a HumblePod production. Stay humble.

Exciting news: Storyboard is hiring! We're looking for a Sales Development Representative to help our team facilitate a great first experience for prospective Storyboard customers.Join Forest Spiegel, our Head of Sales, and Mariya Harris, our Product Marketing Lead, as they share more details on this role and what it's like to work at Storyboard.Apply here: https://joinstoryboard.notion.site/Sales-Development-Representative-1b09359a2d654ddd8eb946f09f30d746---POPP (The Podcast on Private Podcasts) is presented by Storyboard (http://www.trystoryboard.com) and will provide an overview for anyone who wants to launch a private, internal podcast for their organization or company. In this series, we'll interview innovators and leaders who have adopted podcasting to transform their internal communications.Subscribe on Apple: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/podcast-on-private-podcasts/id1499419154Subscribe on Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/0zcB9s2GiFrr2DQWa9lvPsSearch for Us: "Podcast on Private Podcasts" in your favorite player

The world of sales has changed over the years, especially during the pandemic. The existence of SDRs has increased more out of necessity than the desire to sell. Charlie Locke joins me to explore the importance of developing effective teams. Charlie Locke is a sales leadership expert who, in 2020, teamed up with community building expert Michael Gagliano to build the only dedicated community for Sales Development Reps in the world - SDR Nation. After 20 years in software sales, both knew that something had to be done to bridge the huge enablement gap that exists in sales. Now Managers and sales leaders will learn how to nurture the talent within their teams. Whether you're a seasoned designer or a total novice, with Visme, you can create engaging, dynamic branded content that makes people ask, “How did you do that?!” Visit https://tinyurl.com/seizevisme to explore. If you are a small business owner or salesperson who struggles with getting the sales results you are looking for, get your copy of Succeed Without Selling today. If you haven't seen all Audible.com has to offer, you don't know what you're missing. Sign up for a free trial at audibletrial.com/businessgrowth. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In this episode we talk to Charlie Locke, sales leadership expert and Co-Founder of the SDR community, SDR Nation. We explore the key skills that SDRs need to succeed. When founders should hire SDRs, and how they can incentivize them to retain their top sales talent, and the ways in which the industry is changing. Charlie also breaks down the eight phases of cold calling and how SDR professionals can identify their weaknesses and put theory to practice to boost their conversions. Listen in.  Get $10,000 free credits to use Freshworks products (including the brand new Freshworks CRM packed with AI-based lead scoring, phone, email, and activity capture) by joining the Freshworks for Startups program. Click here to check eligibility.About the GuestsCharlie Locke is a sales leadership expert with experience in various companies such as Salesforce, Adobe, and Shutterstock. In 2020, Charlie teamed up with community building expert Michael Gagliano to build the only dedicated community for Sales Development Reps in the world - SDR NationSign up for regular updates from The Orbit Shift Podcast.The Orbit Shift Podcast is powered by Freshworks Inc, a global SaaS company headquartered in San Mateo, California. If you enjoyed listening to this podcast, consider giving us a five-star rating on Apple Podcasts. Host and Producer - Jayadevan PKAssistant Producer - Shashwath JAudio Engineer - Rajesh Subramanian  

Are you involved, responsible for, or dependant on Sales Development and pipeline growth for a B2B SaaS or Cloud company?If you answer yes to any of the above, this is an excellent conversation to gain new insights and hear innovative approaches to maximize pipeline development.Kyle Coleman is the Vice President, Revenue Growth and Enablement at Clari. This role includes sales development, sales enablement, and demand generation at Clari. This integrated approach to pipeline development is unique in the B2B SaaS industry.Kyle highlighted that having enablement as part of the same function ensures the messaging and campaigns that demand generation invests in developing make it to the target audience across every channel.Integrating sales development and demand generation as part of the same organization with common goals and measurements is unique. When asked, Kyle believes this is more due to transition and logic, and one of those legacy thoughts is that "quantity" of leads versus "quality" of outcomes such as pipeline dollar growth and new ARR.Though Kyle mentioned that it is still important to measure more traditional metrics like website visitor conversion rates, leads, paid media performance, etc. - the ultimate measurements for Sales Development and Demand Generation are PIPELINE and REVENUE.Where does the combined function of Sales Development and Demand Generation report? Kyle reports directly to the Chief Revenue Officer, while also having a dotted line reporting relationship to the Chief Marketing Officer. Kyle highlighted that his function is the core functional "connective tissue" to align marketing and sales.The Chief Revenue Officer (CRO) does not have responsibility for all marketing. However, in Clari, since demand generation is part of their responsibility, it frees marketing up to increase their focus on brand, content marketing, product marketing, and corporate communications. Account Management and Customer Success reports into the CRO, which provides a well-integrated approach to the entire customer lifecycle, including acquisition, retention, and expansion.Kyle is also blazing the trail by having dedicated Sales Development Reps focused on existing customer expansion in partnership with Account Managers. This is a new approach within Clari, and the process continues to evolve. Today, the Account Management team focuses more on existing customer renewals. The existing customer Sales Development Rep is responsible for sourcing, educating, and qualifying up-sell and cross-sell opportunities. The existing customer sales development resource is called an Account Development Manager. The Account Development Manager is compensated against qualified opportunity pipeline and has a management by objectives focused on expanding business within key target, strategic accounts.Kyle continued to refer to quality as a major topic, so we asked "how do you define quality" for sales development at Clari? Clari does NOT incent on booking meetings, it is more focused on outcomes, specifically qualified pipeline. SDRs create a Stage "0" opportunity, and then the Account Executive determines if the opportunity is qualified, and that is the first incentive component for SDRs.  Clari does not use "BANT" but uses more nuanced criteria, including seniority, readiness, and next steps defined versus budget and timing. This approach is primarily due to the "Revenue Operations" Technology space still evolving and often not a budgeted line technology.If you are evaluating new and better ways to accelerate pipeline growth, Kyle is a great follow and listen!

Today we have Surya Vadaddi who is a Team Leader at Chargebee. He started in Sales about 2 years ago with no experience. He brings immense energy, curiosity, and willingness to help. He's full of ideas and you can't feel bored in his company. Connect with me on Linkedin Follow Sales Spin on Linkedin Follow us on Instagram for a daily dose of Sales Memes --- Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/salesspin/message

Hey, a big hello, Portland, Oregon. Welcome to another episode of B2B Marketing & More. Yay! I have a very special guest today. Tyler. I actually love his name. Tyler Lindley. Tyler is senior sales instructor and SDR coach at Vendition. Let's find out what SDR is. Okay? Vendition is a sales training company. Tyler also has his own podcast “Sales Lift” with more than 40 episodes. So you should check that out. So let's get started. Welcome Tyler.   Tyler Lindley: Thank you, Pam. I'm going to bring you on my podcast and have you do that intro every single episode. (Pam laughs) That might just be my new episode forever.   Pam Didner: More than happy to do you intro and outro but I think I am going to scare people away.   Tyler Lindley: I loved it. I love it. Thank you. Thanks for having me on.   Pam Didner: Oh my pleasure. So, SDR. I heard about SDR. Can you explain what that is? And also, you know, people talking about inside sales and outside sales. Can you also explain that as well so we on the same page before we move forward?   Tyler Lindley: Yeah, certainly, certainly. So yeah, SDR for those that don't know is basically a sales development rep. Um, so if we think about what a sales development rep is, a sales development rep is someone that is qualifying, uh, prospects. They're doing a lot of prospecting, a lot of top of the funnel activity, basically sitting in between marketing and sales. So if we've got full cycle sales--   Pam Didner: Oh, that's a very tough, tough spot to be in. (laughs)   Tyler Lindley: [00:01:44] Yeah. It's a tough role to fill. It is it is an interesting place to be. Um, just, because obviously marketing and sales and the alignment there is really important. And the SDR is actually a physical group of people that are signing up to be in between those two groups. So, uh, um, so very brave group of, of folks that do a lot of cold calling and prospecting and it's, uh, definitely a fun adventure being an SDR, for sure. Pam Didner:  So, how is that different than inside sales and outside sales? Can you be a little bit clear about that one too? I have my own definition, but love, love, love to hear yours.   Tyler Lindley: So yeah. Inside sales and outside sales, um, I guess the main difference is inside is typically done indoors. Uh, but it is, it is sales.   Pam Didner: We don't go out.   Tyler Lindley: They don't go out! Yeah, really a lot of sales is now inside sales, where, you know, used to, when you think of outside sales, that was a lot of field sales where you had higher value accounts, you needed to develop relationships. So you were investing a lot more time and energy to go meet with clients in person. Uh, with inside sales, it's kind of the new model that get popularized by tech and software companies, where a lot of sales is happening just on the phone, on the computer. There's very, very little travel if any, happening at all. So everything is done remotely. And as we know, with the big changes with COVID last year, you know, a lot of teams that were outside were forced to move inside. Uh, so now inside sales has become almost the default. Um, although as things continue to loosen, I'm sure, you know, some of those folks that were doing outside before will go back to that model, but I think you'll also see a lot more folks, you know, maybe that moved inside to inside sales model will likely stay there in the future just because it makes maybe more logistical sense for them. And maybe they saw good results.   Pam Didner: So, is it fair to say that the role of SDR is kind of like a subcategory of inside sales to some extent?   Tyler Lindley: To some extent, yeah. If we think about SDR, the reason the SDR role was created was because we decided to separate the prospecting and the top of the funnel activities. From the kind of moving people through the full sales cycle and closing, we decided to bifurcate those roles. Um, and the reason being is that it's two different skill sets really. It's a different skillset to do prospecting. It's high volume. The messaging really matters a lot. You don't have to have a ton of product knowledge because you're not having very in-depth conversations. Whereas when you move to an AE role, a closing role, you really need to have a lot more product knowledge. You need to learn how to manage a lot of different stakeholders. You've got to learn how to drive to the close, overcoming objections, getting through purchasing negotiations. I mean, it's a very different skillset. So the roles were bifurcated because it kind of just makes sense to do them separately. And then what happens is a lot of SDRs will graduate into an AE role, assuming they're successful.   Pam Didner: So you mentioned that SDR is sitting between sales and marketing in that very, very cushy chair, which is between you and all the sales and the marketing department. Then the next question I would like to ask you is should SDR be part of sales or marketing? What is your thought on that?   Tyler Lindley: It's a good question. I think it really depends. It depends on the structure of the organization, depends on what's the value of a customer? I mean, and, and how many leads are we talking to? A lot of folks have moved to an account-based model and account based marketing model. And in that kind of a model, you know, it might make sense for the SDRs to live under marketing because they're doing a lot of the nurturing, a lot of the qualification that is really just an extension of your marketing efforts. So we've seen some folks pull SDRs over to the marketing function,   Pam Didner: Especially on demand gen side of things,   Tyler Lindley: Yeah. Especially. Yeah. And if you're doing it, yeah. A lot of inbound. If you have a lot of inbound leads, you want to make sure that that speed, the lead, the speed of the SDR getting on the phone is very, very important. So sometimes it can make sense for that to live in marketing and more of a campaign-based environment versus in sales. Now the flip side of that is that this is actually a sales role. This requires you to get on the phone. This requires conversations, soft skills, things that are probably better nurtured under a sales leader. Um, that's what I think the best model is to actually have an SDR leader that is specific to the SDRs and that leader, I think, can work on the alignment between marketing, the marketing leader, the sales leader, and, and bridge that gap, I think a lot easier. So for me, it depends. It can go in either marketing live under marketing, live in or sales, but yeah. At the end of the day, the SD R team needs their own leader. Um, because it is such a unique role that's sitting in between those two groups.   Pam Didner: Yeah. And the based on what I have seen so far, and you can comment on that as well. Majority of SDR tend to be part of sales organization. Would you agree?   Tyler Lindley: I would agree. Yeah, I would agree. And it also makes sense more SDRs, I think become full cycle sales reps—AEs--than they do marketers. It doesn't mean that you can't become a marketer as starting as an SDR, but it's a more common path to stay in sales than to move to other parts of an organization. So it definitely, I think more likely than not is, is housed under sales, but you could make an argument for it to be housing or marketing depending on the circumstances.   Pam Didner: Got it. So now we talk about, you know, the roles and responsibility. And the next question I would like to ask is the process. So, um, now obviously, uh, SDR can be part of the marketing organization or sales. In terms of the setting up the structure and process for outbound prospecting and also campaigns, what do you think is ideal process that put a marketing and SDR together and working together in terms of nurturing and also following up?   Tyler Lindley: Yeah, I think that the SDRs the, the, the messaging that marketers are using to, to generate interest, to attract good fit potential prospects should be the same exact messaging that the SDRs are using as well. I think there needs to be alignment in that messaging and it needs to be cohesive to where you couldn't really tell if a message is coming from a marketer or from an SDR.   Pam Didner: There's that seamless digital experience, right? So your customer experience, it doesn't matter what content you are using, what email you're using. It should be very seamless.   Tyler Lindley: Very seamless. The only difference is the SDR can potentially add a little bit more context, a little bit more of a human-centric element because it's an actual individual. So they should be taking the messaging from marketing that might be a more of one-to-many message and contextualizing it for that specific client. However, it should be the same message. We should be speaking the same language across marketing, all the way to the SDR all the way to account executives, customer success, across all of your revenue-facing parts of the organization should see be the same.   And the SDR plays a pivotal role because they're, they're the first person that's, that's really contextualizing that first specific account. I'm taking this maybe more broad messaging that marketing created, and I'm making it specific to this person at this account. Why is this relevant for them? or what is relevant for them? We have all of these different things that we can talk. What is Susie, who is the VP of Marketing going to care about? versus Jack who's the VP of sales? You know, what is he going to care about? How can I contextualize my message to make it relevant to that individual in that company?   Pam Didner: Got it. So messaging should be consistent and seamless. And obviously there's a training element of that to make sure that the marketing and the sales--including SDR--are trained in terms of messagings and have that consistent talking point along the way. And who should take the lead? If you actually have inbound leads that's coming and, uh, who should kind of take over? Do you think the marketing team should do some sort of pre-qualification first? or should that be directly just passed to SDR and the SDR can take it and run it?   Tyler Lindley: It depends on how fast that SDR can respond. Because as we know, inbound leads, the rate of drop-off and those converting, when it takes longer and longer to respond, it just continues to drop off. If the SDRs can't respond in real time--if you don't have a dedicated resource to be able to respond in real time,--then marketing should likely they should likely take a lead in terms of just doing some initial qualification. Now, do they need to do full qualification? No, but they should at least be moving the process forward immediately and maybe scheduling a call for that SDR. Now if the SDR can be a dedicated resource that can respond in real time, that's great. In my opinion, it's hard for that person to always be available, 24-7. Likely it's something you should maybe automate to some extent and then have the SDR manage the actual initial conversation, um, that should potentially be automated in terms of scheduling.   Pam Didner: You know, you brought a very good point, too, you know, in terms of who should take what? And I think having a huddle meeting between say the demand generation team and SDR on regular basis probably doesn't hurt. They probably should get together like a Monday at 10 o'clock. Day 11, whatever, right early week, and kind of review the leads that came through the week before and kind of review that, maybe divide and conquer. “Hey, you know why these are the four leads you should take over and start looking into it. There's a five things. Five leads. I probably can just do a prequalification or making a call.” But I do agree with you in addition to all that, the communication, a weekly huddle meeting that having automation, uh, set up life, for example, there's auto responders, but make that, um, the, the email itself a whole lot more personal, uh, will be great. And having a certain kind of automation set up, I think is very important that will help both teams, but having a huddle meeting on a regular basis from my perspective is also truly beneficial, especially when I was in the client, on the corporate world, having that kind of meeting, just talking things through and before we move forward to a next week. And I think that was that that's actually efficient. What is your thought on that?   Tyler Lindley: Yeah, I agree. And I think that huddle meeting should start with more of a service level agreement about the definitions of an SQL and an MQL.   Pam Didner: I totally agree.   Tyler Lindley: I think it should, it should start with what is our, you know, requirements, the business, how quickly are we going to respond to leads? If it's going to be a human driven resource, like how quickly are we going to do that? Just to make sure that everything is being followed up on. Every lead or prospect is getting the same experience regardless of when and how they're coming into the funnel. So I just think there needs to be alignment for a foundation set for that meeting to happen. And then I do agree that that always needs to be updated. We need to always be communicating about what are we seeing, right? What are we understanding? Like these SDRs are actually talking to customers. Listened to the gongs, listened to the conversation, relay the feedback. I mean, we have so much information. We're drowning in information right now, but, but are we actioning on it? Are we actually using that information to make positive change? And the SDRs could do that in two directions. They can do it backwards to the marketing team to talk about the demand gen or they can do it forwards to the AEs, closing the deals. And that part of the process, they really are bridging that gap, truly bridging the gap. They are the bridge. Um, so if you have an SDR team, treat them as such and, and meet with them regularly instead of just complaining and, “oh, man, this is not going well. They're not qualifying right. These leads are terrible, yada yada yada,”   Pam Didner: What?!? I love complaining. Complaining is so much easier than doing the real work. Come on! (both laugh)   Tyler Lindley: I mean, complaining is fine. It's going to happen naturally, but at least complained together, complain with each other--like SDRs complain with the marketing team, complain with the AEs because then you'll at least hopefully learn something that can affect change. Um, so that would be my 2 cents.   Pam Didner: Do you think SDRs do any kind of cross-selling and, uh, and up-sale with existing customers or purely just focused on new logo?   Tyler Lindley: I think SDRs should only. Prospect into existing logos if you know that if that logo, if it's maybe a dormant,   Pam Didner: Really big company is a very big company. They have a totally different division that, you know, product division, not doing totally different things, ok.   Tyler Lindley: Initially. Yeah. Potentially. Or if the, you know, the account has gone dormant and we're trying to reignite that account. I think that that should be owned, honestly, at that point by either the AE or even the customer success team because of that relationship; because we need the SDR focused on the top of the funnel and we need them focused on net new accounts. So I would lean for them, not that we can't teach the AEs and the CSMs how to prospect back into those existing accounts, but I think the SCR should kind of stay in their lane and focus on net new.   Pam Didner: Got it. So with that being said, obviously the marketing and SDRs on the front lines and they actually have a lot of information in terms of what customer feel about the products sometimes. So what do you think the process should set up? Should SDR provide the feedback, the product feedback directly to the product team? Do you think there's a value to that? Or that's something that needs to be done say you do a survey, you kind of follow up with, uh, the outside sales team that actually have a more in-depth knowledge or AE to provide that information.   Tyler Lindley: Yeah. I think you need to be learning it from both groups, because if you think about SDRs, they are both qualifying and disqualifying. So they are both learning the reasons for and the reasons people against people, you know, exploring your, your product or your solution further. So I think that there's a ton of value there in helping to go back and define your ICP to go back and define your target buyer, your different personas. Like, yeah, maybe we've got the perfect product, but we're just going after the wrong person in the organization, you know, wherever you're talking to the sales team, but we need to be talking to enablement or marketing. All of that information is contextual and it should be shared back across the organization--should be shared back to marketing should be shared back to product. Because all these things are related. I mean, your product, the messaging, and then all of the messaging that you're, you're marketing your enablement, your sales development team, your AEs, your customer success, like these are all related messages. So in my mind, the most effective revenue organizations are ones that are sharing across that spectrum. Anything that they're learning because they might learn.   Pam Didner: You can share that back to the product team.   Tyler Lindley: Yeah, you might learn something after someone's been a customer for five years from the customer success team that would impact, you know, product. But it might be something after a five minute conversation from someone who's not even a customer, they're just a potential prospect. So I think regardless of where you sit, all of that should be shared back to the product team and the ones closest to the actual prospects should be relaying that message.   Pam Didner: Understood. Well said. When SDR is working through the potential prospects and the conversion rate tend to be pretty small and they got a lot of disqualified leads or even loss opportunities. So what do you think that marketing should do with some of those disqualified leads or loss opportunities? Do you think it's their job to actually kind of really try to revive the opportunities or this is something that the SDR should kind of take a second look?   Tyler Lindley: So I think it's a shared responsibility. I think that the nurturing can happen from the marketing team or the SDR team. I think it depends on the value of the accounts, the amount of like, what is your total addressable market? You know, how many people are actually in your pipeline at a given time? If you have a very small addressable market, then a really valuable exercise for both marketing and for the SDR team to be trying to reignite those accounts, because there's not an unlimited number. Now, if you have a different product, maybe a lower, lower value product where you have a large total addressable market, I would then put that in marketing shoes to try to reignite, um, those type of accounts, um, making it more of a low touch, automated, automated, reignite fashion there. Uh, so I think it really depends on how big is your total addressable market? What's the value of a customer? And can we justify that being done by the SDR, that person, which is a lot harder to scale than having marketing do it in a potential automation. Yeah. Yeah, exactly. So it really does depend.   Pam Didner: So you bought a good point. I actually have additional insight I'd like to add to that specific question. There's another angle from my perspective, which is I talked to my client in terms of how to address disqualified leads or loss opportunities is determined by the causes of the loss opportunities or disqualify. Is it because of lack of budget? Is it because the timing is not right? Or is it because the feature doesn't, it doesn't work at this time. So because of different causes, and, uh, depending on the causes, you can also create different kind of nurturing while you can determine if you want to nurture or not. Does that make sense? Yeah, so I think the product part of it is really important, but the other one is the causes of disqualification.   Tyler Lindley: I totally agree. And you've got to set up the, the engine to be able to put those causes, identify the causes. Let's make it a dropdown select option, make it very easy for the SDR to display.   Pam Didner: I agree. Totally agree. (laughs)   Tyler Lindley: “Because of this reason…” Do not make it a fill in the blank cause you'll get a bunch of garbage,   Pam Didner: You'll get like a million choices. That's it!   Tyler Lindley: Or you can't do it. Yeah. Give them five choices, the drop down select and then, yeah, based on what they answer, you could then determine maybe this bucket. We want to reignite with the SDR team, these we're going to do with marketing. But make it simple and easy to know what you're going to do with each group.   Pam Didner: 100% agree. I think the biggest takeaway from today's episode, they are couple number one is the, uh, the close collaboration between sales and marketing, especially SDR and, uh, demand gen. And the second thing is have a process in place and keep that communication going. And I, 100% agree with you. Service level agreement is key, especially in enterprises. Another one is basically looking to if what any kind of disqualified leads and also lost opportunities and have a conversation with the SDRs and determine what the causes are. And also the products itself and then a set of a processing trends of if you want to nurture them or not. So those are great, great key takeaway, Tyler. You are fantastic! I'm going to ask you one more question. It's a silly question and I have two of them and you can choose one to answer. Number one. What is the most useless talent that you possess? Or you can choose to answer the next one. Did you have a ridiculous go in your life?   Tyler Lindley: Um, Those are great questions. Uh, let's see the most useless, useless talent. I would say the most useless talent I possess is, um, the ability to buy a lot of technology things, kind of like we discussed the other day, Pam. Buy a lot of technology may not need it all, but, uh, but just buy it. And try to figure out the use case for it sometimes after the fact. So some have some buyer's remorse, uh, from time to time because. I like shiny new things in terms of technology. And, uh, and sometimes I, I either look at the return policy or try to figure out what am I going to actually do with this after the fact. So I guess that's a very useless skill and a very expensive one at that. (both laugh)   Pam Didner: Well, you and I are the same thing. You and I will talk in about, um, just Tyler and I have a prep call and we will talk in about. How should I say it nicely? How much shit we have. (both laugh)   Tyler Lindley: Way too much.   Pam Didner: The, the A/V, you know, equipment, like I have three different microphones really. And I also have a lavalier microphone And then I have audio interface. Oh my God. And then I have webcams that we will talking about like the different, uh, equipment or the, the stuff that we buy, just, uh, just to set things up, especially for virtual communication is insane.   Tyler Lindley: Exactly. And we tend to buy more than one. Yeah, you need to know what that other mic sounds like.   Pam Didner: Tyler it's wonderful, wonderful to have you on my show. It's fantastic. And, uh, I love all the insights that you share. I hope that you will come back again!   Tyler Lindley: Yeah, definitely. Yeah. If folks want to find out more about me online, check out the sales lift.com or Tyler lindley.com. I'm also active on LinkedIn. So just search me, Tyler Lindley, and I'd love to come back someday and chat, chat, more sales and marketing with you, Pam. Thanks so much for having me on.   Pam Didner: Sounds good!

Five different french audio startups explain what their companies' missions are as they're interviewed at the Vivatech 2021 mega-conference in Paris, France.One french company that stood out was Cogneed, which focuses on the power of AI specifically when it comes to Inside Sales, Customer Care & Sales Development Reps, assisting them with dynamic display of relevant information, triggered by audio detection.Then comes Storyfox, a video interview tool that companies can use to create structured interviews using templates. This could especially be beneficial for companies that are looking to hire new employees as it makes the process much quicker.Next, we interview Playplay, an online video editing tool that allows anyone to create videos easily, as videos are the main form of content that users consume. It also has a new feature that can be used to create videos for podcasts including automated motion design and automatic subtitles.Afterwards, we learn all about Sonup, a startup that's based in Montpellier. It's an innovative and reliable solution for healthcare professionals wishing to offer their patients a hearing assessment service. They explain why their solution is important for people with hearing problems.Last but not least, we get to know Odiho, a company that provides sound to soundless advertising, such as video billboards. People can scan the QR code on the ad to watch the video with sound on their cellphones.Listen to the full episode to get the answers to all of your burning questions!HighlightsAvailable at http://bit.ly/voicetechpodcast-ep086Sponsor LinksManning books

Welcome to the Careers Wiki! A new initiative by EntryLevel to bring more transparency to the workforce. How can you know what role you want to do without exploring it first? Here's a way to explore dozens of careers through the eyes of someone who has been there and done it. Here are some of the questions we cover: What does a day/week in your job look like? What are the units of work? What do you actually need to do as part of your role? What are the best parts of the job? What are the worst parts of the job? What kind of traits do successful people in this role have? Are qualifications necessary? Any advice for people looking to get into this role? Let us know what you think! If you want to learn more about what we do at EntryLevel and how we can help land your next job, visit our website: https://entrylevel.net

Ali McCallay is one of Point of Rental's new Sales Development Reps, coming to Point of Rental from the worlds of bridal retail and tacos. We guess she'll be pretty used to working with people passionate about what she's offering.

Gabrielle “GB” Blackwell is the Sales Development Manager of Gong who serves in virtue of Empowerment, Advocacy, and Enlightenment with the way she cultivates expertise in Sales Leadership, Sales Training, Sales Management, Change Management, Sales Coaching, Personal Coaching, Sales Enablement, and Cold Calling. Being heavily involved in the tech space for most of the duration of her sales career, Gabrielle started as an Enterprise Sales Development Representative with Cloudwords, Inc. Even though it was her first job, she realized that she had the capacity to make it in the field when she made her mark as a member of the pioneering cast of Sales Development Reps within the company’s first satellite office. After working her way to the top and loving everything that she’s doing, she’s now recognized as a reputable sales mentor being a Career Coach at SDR Nation. Gabrielle hosts the show - #SDRHotline presented by Sales Hacker on LinkedIn and co-Hosts the show Women in Sales Club.Find out more and reach out to Gabrielle Blackwell through the following links:LinkedIn - https://www.linkedin.com/in/gabrielleblackwell/Women in Sales Club - https://www.linkedin.com/company/women-in-sales-club/Join the Sales Hustle Community! Text “Hustle” to 424-401-9300!If you’re listening to the Sales Hustle podcast, please subscribe, share, and we’re listening for your feedback. If you are a sales professional looking to take your sales career to the next level, please visit us at https://salescast.co/ and set a time with Collin and co-founder Chris.Please make sure to rate and review the show on Apple.

Sally Duby, the Chief Sales Officer at The Bridge Group and a co-founder of the Silicon Valley VP Sales Forum has seen the evolution of inside sales and business development for 25+ years.In this episode of Selling the Cloud, we discuss the evolution of Inside Sales in the SaaS/Cloud industry, and specifically how Inside Sales is being used in the pursuit of enterprise-class customers.Sally first learned the craft of Inside Sales at Oracle, which was the first traditional enterprise software company to prove that inside sales is applicable for enterprise software sales.Leap forward to 2021 and the path to become an Inside Sales professional often starts in the Sales Development Representative (SDR) role.  This role is about learning the outbound lead generation and opportunity qualification process and is the traditional stepping stone to an inside sales role.Traditionally, Inside Sales ran the full lifecycle of lead to close for SMB or mid-market target buyers, and/or total contract values less than $25K...that dynamic is changing.  COVID has accelerated the evolution of the Inside Sales function to more effectively focus on and close enterprise-class deals up to and above $100K ACV.   SaaS companies define "Enterprise" target markets by employee size (such as > 10,000 employees) or revenue (such as > $1B).Chief Revenue Officers are not investing enough time in understanding, valuing, and promoting the Sales Development function as a great starting point for future leaders of the company.  In fact, with marketing and sales becoming more integrated, and responsibilities blurred, the skills an SDR develops in gaining buyer engagement and interest before transitioning to sales bodes well for understanding the tactics required for marketing and sales.Sally highlights why serving in multiple roles across sales and operations is a critical investment that early-career sales professionals can make to pave their road to the Chief Revenue Officer role.  Sales Development Rep, sales operations manager, inside sales - commercial, inside sales - enterprise, and even revenue operations or growth marketing are all great roles to build the next generation path to become CRO!See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Learn to Run Your I.T. Business Hosted by Jeff Halash from TechNutPC.com Paco Lebron from ProdigyTeks John Fazio from JohnFaziojr.com   MSP Unplugged Video   Live Show and Chat every Friday at Noon EST Email: Jeff@MSPUnplugged.com   Support This Show Patreon.com/MSPUnplugged BuyMeACoffee.com/MSPUnplugged PayPal.Me/MSPUnplugged   TechCon Unplugged - BE THERE! BRINGING THE I.T. COMMUNITY TOGETHER Join like-minded business owners for a weekend packed with resources to help your IT business thrive! Hear from the experts and get one-on-one time with peers facing the same challenges. Walk away with concrete action items to take your business to the next level.   Main Topic: 1) When is a good time to bring on a Sales rep 2) What kind of sales rep should I bring on? (i.e. Sales Development Rep, Inbound Sales, Outsourced sales) 3) How should they be compensated? Links: MSP Unplugged Docs   DISCLAIMER: This description contains affiliate links, which means that if you click on one of the product links, we’ll receive a small commission.   Music By Jim Holley

In our second episode, recorded late 2020, we sit down with Lainie Noonan a Sales Development Rep at Bolt. Lainie is one of our first 50 members and is an incredibly intelligent and brave SDR tackling the front lines.

On this episode of SmartBug on Tap, Jen Spencer shares four tips for empowering sales development reps in the digital age.  Jen discusses: 1. Building the right team 2. The importance of persona battle cards 3. How to create data-driven strategies 4. The importance of providing the right sales enablement assets

Shawn Finder, Founder at Autoklose appeared on the Launch Legends Podcast and shared how he used sales development reps to grow company to $1m in ARR.

Ryan had a dream of becoming a rapper. He spent a lot of his time in high school and his early adulthood focusing on music. After some years in the industry, he realized the lifestyle wasn't for him.   He tried to stay in the music industry but ultimately ended up in sales. His music skills didn't go to waste though. Listen in as he tells Jonaed how music is still incorporated in his sales career.  Want to get in touch and/or support Ryan? LinkedInWant to get in touch with NoDegree Inc?  Listen to more podcast episodes hereFollow and/or connect with Jonaed Iqbal on LinkedInFollow NoDegree on LinkedIn,  Facebook and Instagram Remember, no degree? No problem!  Resources Mentioned in this Podcast: Never Split The Difference by Chris Voss

Becc Holland is a woman on a mission to help Sales Development Reps - and anyone at the front of the sales process to better communicate with and help buyers buy. She has an exhaustive library of plays for those newer to sales to try in order to reach buyers and have more positive conversations to ultimately move deals forward. Her Flip the Script program offering is free for others to learn, and paid for by sponsors. We talk about how her helping others internationally when young, along with her love of music and selling helped bring her to where she is today. 

Ep 23: Compensating and Motivating Sales Development Reps (SDRs) feat Graham Collins

Have you ever asked yourself how much your marketing content is worth? The ebooks you create, the infographics you design and the webinars you host. How much are they worth? Podcast Transcript Have you ever asked yourself how much your marketing content is worth? The ebooks you create, the infographics you design and the webinars you host. How much are they worth? You need to know, because contrary to your beliefs, they have value and your ability to apply the appropriate value matters. The value of your marketing content isn't measured in terms of money, but rather by how much information your prospects are willing to give up. The information you request for a download is the price. Understanding how to price your content is the key to maximizing your content strategy. To simplify this a bit more, if your submission forms are asking for lots of required information, names phone numbers, company size, title, roles, etc. then that's a high price for the content. It may be worth it, but know that's expensive. On the flip side, if you're only asking for an email, that's cheap. YOUR CONTENT IS NOT FREE – let's be clear, if you're asking for any information as a condition of access to your content, your content is not free. The price is the information. The only time content is free, is when prospects can quickly click a button and get without inputting any information. Don't Price too High Now that we understand our content is not free, rule #1 is; Don't price your content too high. Like the pricing of anything else, value is key. Make sure that know what you're asking for is worth what your offering. If you're offering an infographic on general trends in the industry, asking for a lot of identifying personal and corporate information, may be too expensive and impede the volume of downloads Too often companies over charge for their content, requesting lots of information for content that's not worth it. Don't over charge for your content. Don't Price too low Like over charging for content, you can under-charge for content. Undercharging for content happens when you don't ask for enough information for something that is highly valuable. Maybe you've completed robust state of the market assessment that can help your prospects plan for their upcoming year. Only asking for an email is pricing it too low. You don't want to give away such a valuable piece of content. Pricing killer content too low can overwhelm your Sales Development Rep's, marketing and more with unqualified, unidentified submissions that have little to no lead or opportunity value. The key is to price right. Understanding the value of your marketing content and pricing accordingly is key. It's not enough to just create content and just throw it out there for everyone at one price fits all. Consider offering content with varying price points. Create some truly free content, referring to more expensive content tucked inside. Create inexpensive content that requires little more than a first name and an email address. Create higher value content that requires identifying information like size of an organization, role, budget, etc. Finally, create expensive content. Expensive content is rich in data, insight, and value. Charge a lot for this content, require insights, identifying information, and even agreements to meet or scheduled appointment. When we evaluate content through the lens of value and price, it changes the game. It requires we include price into the conversation. If we're not getting the downloads or form submissions we want, is it the content or the price? We can no longer simply assume it was bad content, thus poor submissions or valuable content because of tons of form submissions. Price plays a role in conversions and getting the price right matters. The Strategy: Create content for all prices points, (free, cheap, moderate, expensive) Be sure the value of the content is consistent with the price Don't over charge or under charge Use varying priced content to drive interest in more expensive content Continually evaluate your content to make sure the price is still fair Old out of date content may need to go on sale and only require an email.

Adam Beaton is a Sales Development Rep at LeadIQ. He's in his first few months at the role and has no previous sales experience. In this episode, we talk about how to nail your first 90 days on the job as a new rep. We dig into how to learn about the industries and people you prospect to, coaching yourself, and cold call openers. Connect with Adam on LinkedIn and check out LeadIQ here. Resources mentioned in the episode: Think Outside the Script Summer Virtual Tour Show Notes Page Reply Method Guide Become a Think Outside the Script Member

Lewis Chawko is a Sales Development Rep at Tessian. In this episode, we talk about how he prospects into security, compliance, and IT professionals. He shares his process for learning about your prospect's day-to-day, sequencing strategies, and using LinkedIn videos to land meetings Connect with Lewis on LinkedIn here and check out Tessian here. Resources mentioned in the episode: Think Outside the Script Summer Virtual Tour Show Notes Page Reply Method Guide Become a Think Outside the Script Member

Defending Sales Development Reps with Nikki Ivey #322 Hello Sales Babblers this is Pat Helmers hoping you had a great Memorial Day weekend. I'm still on vacation so I'm going to makes this brief. Our guest is Nikki Ivey, and she's a member of SDR Defenders an advocate for sales development reps. Today she shares strategies and tactics for business development, old habits we need to stop and new areas where we should focus our energy. In this episode it's all about respecting prospecting and the people that do it. 

SUMMARY SHORT VERSIONThe SDR Chronicles Podcast host Morgan J. Ingram started as a Sales Development Rep (SDR). He was promoted to SDR Manager and is now working with John Barrows of JBarrows Sales Training and is crushing it when it comes to the top of the funnel prospecting. Morgan delves into how he defines success, tips on how to be referable, and finding a group of influence. Get dialed in to find out more about cold calling, tracking fulfillment and asking how to get referrals. KEY POINTSMorgan’s top 3 best practices and tips on prospectingLinkedIn Voice Messages Video and LinkedIn Video best practicesAsking for referrals Morgan tips on how to be referableHow Morgan stays inspiredThe Anti-WhyHow Morgan defines successWhy you can’t be money motivatedAdvice on how to get on track to fulfillment What Morgan is most excited about right now? Advice on finding your group of influenceRELEVANT LINKS All Things TelesalesWebsite: https://allthingstelesales.comLinkedIn: http://www.linkedin.com/company/64255888/ Facebook: http://www.linkedin.com/allthingstelesales/YouTube: http://www.youtube.com/channel/UCRQ98JUE1Mm3K9ez2DOxVhw/ Follow Jake LynnLinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jakelynndotcom/ Follow Morgan J. IngramThe SDR Chronicles: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC5mIKms3bZLtuXapHBVp2tALinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/morganjingram Website: https://jbarrows.com RECOMMENDED READS AND VIDEOS:Inside Bill’s Brain: Decoding Bill Gates on NetflixTraining and Development for DummiesSupport the show (http://www.allthingstelesales.com)

Read the complete transcript on the Sales Game Changers Podcast website. MARC'S FINAL TIP TO EMERGING SALES LEADERS: "Some of this might be trite but you must always be continuously improving as a selling professional. Knowing about the technology is key but it's not nearly as crucial as paying attention to your sales PERFORMANCE. You have to treat your selling profession as a true craft and keep working to get better at it. If you're not doing that, you're going to lose." Marc Gonyea is the cofounder at memoryBlue. He's an expert on inside sales having managed nearly a thousand young SDRs (sales development reps). We're talked about how to optimize phone sales and how young sales professionals can optimize their careers. Marc can be found on LinkedIn here.

Lessons from a Ryan Johnson discusses mindset, his work ethic, humility and tips on how to be successful in life. If you would like to connect with him, please reach out below and let him know you found him via my podcast. https://www.linkedin.com/in/ryan-johnson-rj9/

For this meetup, we had 3 guests lined up for a panel that talked about their own experiences in leadership and also took questions from the audience. https://youngleaders.tech/meetup-5/ ORLA MORANTHOUSANDEYES https://www.linkedin.com/in/orlamoran/ Orla has worked for over 15 years for American Multinational SaaS companies. She has been part of 3 start ups in her career to date, one of which was acquired by the multi billion $ company; Citrix. She founded the EMEA office in Dublin for New Relic back in 2013 and saw it IPO for $1B market cap in 2014. She is currently heading up the EMEA sales function for another start up company, called ThousandEyes. ThousandEyes is a network intelligence company that gives organisations visibility into the internet, the cloud and the networks they rely on. ThousandEyes is VC backed by sequoia, google ventures and salesforce ventures. She volunteers for a charity called “ Dress for Success”, which help women get back into the workforce. Orla has helped 100’s of women regain their confidence so as to soar at work and in life. She is passionate about eradicating plastic and is a podcast aficionado. Orla was also the runner up in the Image magazine business woman of the year awards 2015. TYLER WELSHMASTERCARD https://www.linkedin.com/in/tylercwelsh/ Tyler Welsh is a Release Train Engineer for Mastercard’s Fraud Technology where he focuses on relentless improvement of Mastercard’s development processes. Prior to this role, Tyler has worked as a program manager and product manager in Mastercard’s Digital and Prepaid teams. He recently relocated from New York City as part of his career aspirations to become a global technology leader. Dublin isn’t the first big move as Tyler has previously worked in South Africa, Zambia, India, Los Angeles and Argentina. Outside of work Tyler is a Caribbean dancehall dancer, fish taco expert, beach camper and avid reader of geopolitics. REBECCA KILKELLYCARGURUS https://www.linkedin.com/in/rebecca-kilkelly-cargurus Rebecca Kilkelly is the Manager of the European SDR Team at CarGurus where she currently leads a team Sales Development Reps across three regions. Founded in 2006 by Langley Steinert (co-founder of TripAdvisor), CarGurus is now the largest online automotive marketplace in the US. Rebecca started her career in Tech as a Sales Development Rep in Google. She then joined the SDR team at AdRoll Dublin, before moving into Account Management. Later came an opportunity to gain experience working abroad, growing AdRoll’s strategic account base in Australia while also developing an employee onboarding program for the growing AdRoll APAC team. Rebecca returned to Dublin two years later as an Account Executive for Microsoft, before joining CarGurus in October of last year. In her free time Rebecca loves to travel, hike and spend time with family in the wild west of Mayo.

Sales Development Reps and Account Executives are two entirely different roles. How you manage those two roles should also be entirely different. Meg Hewitt, Regional Manager of Retail & Consumer Goods at Salesforce shares how to navigate through both styles of leadership and provides actionable advice on hiring, authenticity, and running one-on-one meetings. Make sure to jot down Meg’s tips on how to stand out as an SDR for that next promotion. 

Interview with Joe Walmsley, Sales Development Rep at Matillion. We discuss university, how it does/doesn't prepare you for the real world of work and what it's like to work for a fast growing tech startup!  Check out Joe and Matillion here:  https://www.linkedin.com/in/joe-walmsley-/ https://www.matillion.com/ 

Sales Development is an important role in many companies but many teams still struggle to figure out how to coach and train reps to be successful. In this episode we discuss the importance of sales development and the top three skills needed to be successful. Conversation starter Lead Management Qualified lead/opp transfer to sales

James Buckley, Business Development Manager & Brand Ambassador at RingLead, is addicted to the hunt. He knows what it takes to be successful as a Sales Development Rep. He's discovered that the more he humanizes the prospecting process, the more success he enjoys. According to James, "Lots of people will talk to buyers, but very few will connect with them." All sales professionals will benefit from the ideas in this conversation! 

James Buckley, Business Development Manager & Brand Ambassador at RingLead, is addicted to the hunt. He knows what it takes to be successful as a Sales Development Rep. He's discovered that the more he humanizes the prospecting process, the more success he enjoys. According to James, "Lots of people will talk to buyers, but very few will connect with them." All sales professionals will benefit from the ideas in this conversation!

James Buckley, Business Development Manager & Brand Ambassador at RingLead, is addicted to the hunt. He knows what it takes to be successful as a Sales Development Rep. He's discovered that the more he humanizes the prospecting process, the more success he enjoys. According to James, "Lots of people will talk to buyers, but very few will connect with them." All sales professionals will benefit from the ideas in this conversation!

@Richard Smith with @refract.ai is obsessed with Coaching. In fact, Refract specializes in helping SDRs and Sales Rep pinpoint what it takes to be successful with their coaching platform. It’s like watching game tape in sports. Listen in as we discuss why companies don’t coach SDRs, what individual SDRs can do to upgrade their skills, and what to do if you truly want to excel in Sales. Great episode! The Sales Development Conference 2019 is coming up August 23rd in San Francisco. EARLY BIRD SOLD OUT, grab remaining tickets while available!https://tenbound.com/conference/ Big thanks to @Darryl Praill of @VanillaSoft for making this podcast possible. Check out their new Sales Engagement solutions here... https://www.vanillasoft.com/solutions/business-function/sales-engagement-platform/#SDR #BDR #salesdevelopmentrep #salesdevelopment #prospecting #coldcalling #salesloft #outreach #sales #tenbound #salesforce #salesappointment #revenue #salesops #salesdev19#marketingops #salesforce #tech #salestech #marketingtech #salestraining #brighttalk#salesenablement #discoverorg #leadgeneration #accountbasedmarketing #abm

Whether you call the them Business Development Reps, Sales Development Reps, Inside Sales Reps, etc... Should the team responsible for outbound demand gen live in the marketing or the sales organization?  --- Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/miketrap/message

Show highlights: 03:00 - Intro, Jeremy got interest in Sales and Marketing wanting to start in sports broadcasting, got internship, which turned into helping the sales team at the radio station. He gets success by being unique in his SDR persona, and in honor of his sports background he wears throwback sports jerseys. This has become part of his personal brand to be memorable to his prospects today. 06:30 - Jeremy regrets not focusing on business classes because the business acumen for sales is so important. Jeremy suggests knowing the basics of the industry, job titles, enterprise software, and what these things does for businesses as you are selling or marketing. 10:00 - Sales Development Representative world (SDR) and personalization in outreach. Not just for rapport but personalize to the persona and the job function. For example, build a list of your top 30 best customers, and then look at each of their top 3 competitors (that's 90 companies total. Now, you can tell a story about their specific landscape in the competitive space. Another example is that you can look at who YOUR target company sells to in order to go deeper. 15:00 - Tactically, we discuss how to manage volume and personalization. 5 minutes or less, get as much information as you can, but record them in your tools (Salesforce and sales engagement softwares). Example techniques, pointing two tactics at each other in the same account, or referencing job postings but then later using relevant marketing content. 24:00 - How to structure a Sales Development Representative team. Why we should think about inbound and outbound SDR reps. 25:00 - Why invest the time to go deeper and personalize up front to get prospect's attention? Because the data says it works better than blanket, blast email sends and unprepared cold calls. More blanket approach gets unsubscribes than replies, and the replies want to be taken off the list. 27:00 - LeadIQ's SDR and Marketing relationship is strong. LeadIQ has better social media presence than companies 10x their size, but it's the power of LinkedIn to build brand as part of strategy. LinkedIn as a lead generation tool and place to talk about the industry. Converting LinkedIn engagement from likes, profile views to meetings is NOT done in a sales-y way. It's not, "hey thanks for liking my post, now here's my product." It's content that's valuable and insightful for target buyers. It creates a natural, not-forced, organic transition. The LinkedIn content warms up the cold call to schedule the demo because the prospect has seen it. 33:00 - How video fits in the sales development rep process (for example, Wistia or Vidyard), using our advertising brain we can use "video views" the same way by seeing percentage of the video viewed. 43:00 - Data validates and shapes our tactics for prospecting content. Including, having fun on video to send to prospects. It CAN work for any industry, because we are all humans. We just have to humanize the process with the tools we have available. 51:00 - how Jeremy suggests getting onto LinkedIn, both for personal branding and helping your company. Crawl, walk, run social selling framework. Crawl: month 1 and 2, observe what is happening on LinkedIn in terms of the right content in your feed. Do this by connecting and following co-workers, partners, customers of your company, and industry thought leaders. If you sell to Chief Information Security officers (CIOs) follow them! Don't just connect, but connect and watch. When to connect? Wait until there is some type of two-way engagement. In the meantime, just follow them, which is different and less intrusive than connecting. Do you like a post? Actually click the like button! 55:00 - Walk: month 3 and 4, post industry content on LinkedIn. In the sales space, post Sales Hacker articles or HubSpot blog posts. If you sell to IT people, focus on CXO Talk or similar publications. Watch what your marketing team is doing for sharing content, and then put your own spin on it. Is your prospect and author of his or her own article? Share their post and TAG them. Your effort to build a coalition with your prospect will get rewarded sometimes. 58:00 - Run: months 5 and 6, start posting your own original content because you've been watching. You see what's been working. Now you're ready to formulate your own insights and opinions. When you share, be sure to say "I found this valuable for me because..." in any share or comment. 01:04:00 - Closing remarks, as you're prospecting in Sales Development Rep role, or in marketing and advertising, don't abuse the cell phone calls or the power of advertising to send something worth the prospect's time. A good rule of thumb: the meeting, email, InMail message, or and other interaction should provide so much insight that will help their jobs that the prospect might even pay for that information.

Kyle Vamvouris has created a niche for himself as not only a top performing Sales Development Rep, but also as a Manager and Leader. Lucky for us, he has written down his knowledge in a book, now available on Amazon:Cold to Committed: Find leads, engage prospects, and book more meetingshttps://www.amazon.com/Cold-Committed-Engage-Prospects-Meetings/dp/1540899896/ref=tmm_pap_swatch_0?_encoding=UTF8&qid=1535052599&sr=1-1Listen in to this wide ranging conversation on how to move prospects from cold to committed! Thinking about attending The Sales Development Conference next week, August 30th in San Francisco? Check out this quick video explainer --> https://youtu.be/lnkHJavTFjYStill haven’t picked up your tickets yet? This Conference will sell out so grab them today. Early Bird SOLD OUT but leave a comment and we’ll try to get you in at that rate. https://tenbound.com/conference #salesdev18#SDR #BDR #salesdevelopmentrep #salesdevelopment #prospecting #coldcalling #salesloft #outreach #sales #tenbound #salesforce #salesappointment #revenue #salesops #marketingops #salesforce #tech #salestech #marketingtech #salestraining#salesenablement #discoverorg #leadgeneration #accountbasedmarketing #abm

Although it can be a grind, the Sales Development Rep position can be also be a great learning experience and springboard to a successful career in Sales, Marketing, Customer Success and other parts of the company. But how do you stay motivated?James Bawden came to realize the opportunity after trying a few different roles before getting in to Sales Development, and has now figured out how to truly take advantage of this awesome opportunity. Listen in on this weeks pod to figure out you can to, and how you can motivate your team to get excited about being an SDR! Thinking about attending The Sales Development Conference on August 30th in San Francisco? Check out this quick video explainer --> https://youtu.be/lnkHJavTFjYStill haven’t picked up your tickets yet? This Conference will sell out so grab them today. Early Bird SOLD OUT but leave a comment and we’ll try to get you in at that rate. https://tenbound.com/conference #salesdev18#SDR #BDR #salesdevelopmentrep #salesdevelopment #prospecting #coldcalling #salesloft #outreach #sales #tenbound #salesforce #salesappointment #revenue #salesops #marketingops #salesforce #tech #salestech #marketingtech #salestraining#salesenablement #discoverorg #leadgeneration #accountbasedmarketing #abm

      Sales is a profession with a steep learning curve, and a short timeline to produce results. If you’re a new sales development rep (SDR), what can you do to succeed, and what mistakes should you avoid? Host, Darryl Praill interviews Lori Richardson on this topic.    About our guest, Lori Richardson Lori Richardson is the founder of sales consultancy Score More Sales, where she helps company leaders fix sales team issues to grow more revenues. She is the voice for "more women in sales” and is the President of Women Sales Pros, chartered to get more women into B2B sales and sales leadership roles in companies with male majority sales teams. In Lori's technology and financial services sales career she worked for 23 different sales managers and she has helped onboard over 1,000 SDRs, BDRs, and AEs in a 3 year period. Her new book, "She Sells, She Leads" will be available in September.  

Ralph Barsi is the Global Sales Development Leader for ServiceNow. He leads a team of Sales Development Reps that fuels the growth of what Forbes Magazine has recently decided is the Most Innovative Company in the World. In the nearly 3 years Ralph has led the global SDR team ServiceNow has seen 380% growth. He’s added 14 offices around the globe, increased headcount over 100% and creates the pipeline that fueled last year’s revenues of over $1.93 Billion. He shares how he creates the next generation of “Jedi-level salespeople.” He has 2 missions: Develop pipeline and Develop people. In this episode Ralph shares a 5-step approach to creating Jedis that includes lighting the Bat Signal and finding the Boysenberries. Don’t miss this one.

Compensation matters across all of sales but it really matters for sales development reps. SDRs need more guidence when managers can't be around and bad comp plans can lead to bad results. Most people don't have an answer for compensation but experience can teach you a lot. In this episode, Alex Hudzik, from Nasuni, talks about his experience and lessons learned about building an optimal SDR comp plan. Links and Resources Mentioned in This Episode: Alex's LinkedIn Profile State of Sales Development Infographic Subscribe to Gabe's Content In This Episode You'll Learn: An SDR compensation plan is incredibly important. It should provide the guideposts and direction for the 90% of the day when the manager is not directly working with the team. Too often organizations mess this up by: Preferring simplicity over KPIs that really matter to the business Not weighting things in a way that eliminates luck and levels the playing field for all, creating unfair wealth distribution amongst the team Coaching on best practices, but not incentivizing reps to actually perform them through compensation Paying SDRs in a way where they don't have enough control over achieving it or not - i.e. reliant upon their field rep, or marketing leads Incentivizing SDRs to achieve objectives that don't align with your business objectives (i.e. paying on meetings scheduled - without other requirements).

Richard Harris is on a mission to address a serious problem in the Sales Development world: why don’t we train our Sales Development Reps?Sure, we give them a few weeks of product training and show them how to use Salesforce, but where does it go from there? Hope they produce high quality Sales appointments by trial and error, and smile and dial? Hope is not a strategy. Forget it. To achieve high performance, SDR’s must be continuously training. And Richard has cracked the code on Sales Training through his methodology at Harris Consulting. He also innovated with his own Conference with Scott Leese, surfandsales.com And he’s be sharing some of his secrets at The Sales Development Conference in August! Still haven’t picked up your Sales Development Conference Tickets yet? Early Bird SOLD OUT but hit me in the comments if you’d like a hook up. This Conference will sell out. https://tenbound.com/conference #salesdev18#SDR #salesdevelopmentrep #salesdevelopment #salesdev18 #prospecting #coldcalling #salesloft #outreach #sales #tenbound #salesforce #salesappointment #revenue #salesops #marketingops #salesforce #tech #salestech #marketingtech #salestraining#salesenablement #discoverorg #leadgeneration #accountbasedmarketing #abm

Trish Bertuzzi is the President and Chief Strategist at the Bridge Group, Inc. She is also the author of The Sales Development Playbook: Build Repeatable Pipeline and Accelerate Growth with Inside Sales.  Over the last two decades, Trish has promoted inside sales as a community, profession, and engine for revenue growth.  Trish and her team’s research and ideas have been featured on Inc.com, in Forbes, by associations like SLMA and AA-ISP, and across more than 68 sites in the sales and marketing world. Trish has received many awards and recognitions including:  Top 25 Sales Influencer by OpenView Labs (3X) Top 25 Most Influential in Inside Sales by AA-ISP (3X) Top 50 Most Influential People in Sales Lead Management by SLMA (3X) Special Recognition Lifetime Contribution to Inside Sales from AA-ISP Topics Discussed: Hunters and Closers…what are they? What are some of the biggest hurdles that sales development is facing today? What are some of the best ways for sales development to get their prospects interested in them? How can sales development build a relationship of trust with their prospective audience? How AE’s and SDR’s should be working together. What is the difference between sales process and sales ownership/creativity? PTO and Sales Many tech companies are offering unlimited PTO, but sales people are not unplugging. What has the Bridge Group found in their research about the correlation between these policies and sales burnout? Software solutions discussed: Outreach SalesLoft Share This:

Debunking Sales Myths with Mike Schultz #216 Selling has changed tremendously in the last 10 years. But prospecting has changed even more. Previous  research suggests that 57 percent of the purchase decision is complete before a customer calls a supplier.  This gives sellers the false impression that buyers don’t want or need to talk to them early in the buying process. They do! Mike Schultz visits Sales Babble for clarifying and debunking these sales myths with advice based on hard research. Some Common Sales Myths Rain Group is a sales research institute just completed a study on prospecting. They talked to 488 buyers, asking them what  is the process they have used for past purchases. They study found it’s a sales myth that buyers don’t want to talk to sellers, eg. 67% sale done digitally. But this should slow sellers down.  71%  of buyers said they want to talk to sellers at the early part of their research. They want context. With too many choices it becomes to difficult for buyers to choose “Its the ‘paradox of choice” according to Barry Schwartz. Myth cold calling is dead. Greater than 50%  of buyers prefer to be contacted by the telephone. It is second only to email. Of the buyers researched,  57% have had the seller reach out to them on the phone. 82% of buyers take meetings with people they don’t know but have talked to on the phone. Buyers need inspiration, start with your existing clients. What Winners Do It’s a myth that buyers don’t want to hear about capabilities and only benefits. The #1 content buyers want is features and capabilities. It’s buyers primary research on their industry. They want descriptions of the capabilities in context. They desire content customized 100% to their business  Not mass mail merges. Great Sellers WAVE Winners Mindset – The Mindset of a winner is strategic,  not tactics only. Attraction Campaign – multistep and modal approach to reach out and connect to buyers. The number of attempts to reach a prospect should be 8 (not 3). Value – Get prospects to say wow that could be worthwhile (to have a call, meet, agree to demonstration or buy). Execution -Winners do all the tactical parts. They take action to turn around objections. They exercise executive functions to stay focused in a noisy world.  They have the ability to concentrate and focus for prospecting (which is the hardest thing to do).   Cold meetings that have a value approach will turn deals into wins. When sellers focus on value, 96% said it was influential. They want to be educated and collaborative >90%.  Yet the meetings must be interesting and add value. Most sales meetings are not valuable to most buyers. If they are impressive they will buy  things. Take Action Plan To get good at prospecting you have to make it 100% of your focus.   Attack it like you’re going to make it work. Build an  attraction campaign. How To Find Mike Schultz Website: https://www.raingroup.com Mike Twitter: https://twitter.com/mike_schultz RAIN Group Twitter: https://twitter.com/rainselling RAIN Group Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/RAINGroup/ Mike LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/mikeschultz50/ RAIN Group LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/rain-group_2/ Mike mentioned that we was happy to share a copy of the report with the audience:  5-sales-prospecting-myths-debunked How to Prospect and Generate Leads Here are past episodes that talk about the mindset for lead generation. What’s Not Working In Sales Today with Brandon Bruce #204 How To Generate Leads without Sales and Marketing with John Tripolsky #191 Repeatable Success for Sales Development Reps with Brendan Barrett #188 7 LinkedIn Strategies for Generating Qualified Leads with Janis Pettit #176 Why Qualifying Prospects is Like Selling To Zebras with Jeff Koser #171 7 Healthy Phone Habits to Get First Meetings with Marylou Tyler #150 Myths on Social Selling with Mark Hunter #142 How to Power Prospect with LinkedIn Groups with Liam Austin #135 How to Sell Big Clients and Win Tremendous Deals with Melinda Chen #114 How To Be An Awesome Sales Professional with Thomas Ellis #102 The post Debunking Sales Myths with Mike Schultz #216 appeared first on Sales Babble Sales Podcast | Sales Training | Sales Consulting |Sales Coaching.

The Top SDR at DiscoverOrg - Josh Sutton - Grit & Doing What Others Aren’t Willing To Do Full show notes complete with shareable clips and links to items mentioned in the show available at: http://top1.fm/41 After a rough first 90 days as an SDR at DiscoverOrg, Josh Sutton found his footing and became the top Sales Development Rep in the company. In 1 year he generated over 300 completed meetings that resulted in nearly $2M in closed business. He even set a company record by scheduling 10 meetings in a single day. In this episode of the Sales Success Stories Podcast you’ll hear how he did it.

This week on the podcast I interview a rising star in the Sales Development Mastermind community, Hope O. Baker with Apptus! Hope is a top-performing BDR who's in the trenches every day getting it done. Listen to how she brings positivity, energy and curiosity to her role and focuses on positive outcomes for her prospects and co-workers in order to achieve success. If you're managing a Sales Development program or are a Rep yourself, this is a must listen episode packed with practical tips to set more appointments and gain more pipeline. Hope is a powerhouse! Episode brought to you by our good friends at @discoverorg - check them out here https://discoverorg.com/sdr Have you gotten your Sales Development Conference Tickets yet? Grab the remaining Early Bird here https://tenbound.com/conference#SDR #salesdevelopmentrep #salesdevelopment #salesdev18 #prospecting #coldcalling #salesloft #outreach #sales #tenbound #salesforce #salesappointment #revenue #salesops #marketingops #salesforce #tech #salestech #marketingtech #salestraining#salesenablement #discoverorg #leadgeneration #accountbasedmarketing #abm

How to Generate Referrals Without Asking with Stacey Brown Randall #206 Leveraging business referrals is a powerful way to grow your business. Unfortunately the process is poorly understood and followed. The majority of the people are uncomfortable asking clients to do something that would help their business. They’ve been told to just get over their shyness and ask for a referral or reference. Since there are few alternatives, most  people just skip it all together. In this episode Stacey Brown Randall preaches against outright asking for a referral.  She shows an alternative process on how to generate referrals without asking. Build a Referral Network Stay Top of Mind If you have a business reflect on your loyal and happy clients. Place them in your referral network. If you’re working for a startup, it will require old school networking. Work with people you know from you past. Ask them to keep you top of mind. Adhere to a process (see below) and overtime, referrals will happen. Five Step Referral Process In the interview Stacey walked us through the five step process on how to generate referrals without asking. This will will be covered in her new book: Know whose referring you and your referral sources. Build a list (24-36 sources) Warm lead, introduction, word of mouth buzz, referrals ( 4 different types of prospects) Have a follow up / thank you process once you receive a referral Outreach with touch points to your referral network. Go deeper when interacting with them. Use language that will cause them to think of you and generate referrals. Beyond keeping in touch. Know something about them e.g. Fathers day, something personal. Maybe a host a network lunch, bring two people in your network together. This is the Secret Sauce.  Build out a year long plan. Automate the year long plan with process by building a calendar, on a cycle. Work on it each week. Track the plan and tweak as you learn what’s working and what’s not. Take Action Plan Focus on step 1 and build your list of referral sources (who should and have sent business to you).  In your CRM, make sure to include with your list of clients,  who referred them. This way you have a means of thanking and honoring your network. How To Find Stacey Brown Randall Stacey’s new book is Generating Business Referrals Without Asking   It’s coming out Fall of 2018  Preorders will start in March.  The book delves deep in the 5 steps and provides supplemental material. Website – www.growthbyreferrals.com/salesbabble Click on the link to get the four reasons you don’t get referrals and next how to generate referrals without asking. Join Stacey’s free Facebook group – Referrals Without Asking and learn more:  https://www.facebook.com/groups/referralswithoutasking/ You can find Stacey in Social media Twitter – @staceybrandall Facebook – www.facebook.com/StaceyBrownRandall LinkedIn – www.linkedin.com/in/StaceyBRandall   Business Development and Lead Generation Strategies Here are past episodes to continue this week’s conversation. Enjoy! Repeatable Success for Sales Development Reps with Brendan Barrett #188 Startup Story Where Software Goes to Seed with Charlie Wiltgen #179 Myths on Social Selling with Mark Hunter #142 Understanding the Value of Testimonials #126 6 Simple Steps for Generating New Leads With Chris Helmers What Startups Need to Know about Business Development with Tim Allen #119 How to Find Sales Leads with Twitter with Madalyn Sklar #199 How To Generate Leads without Sales and Marketing with John Tripolsky #191 6 Ways To Generate Leads With Fatima Zaidi #180 7 LinkedIn Strategies for Generating Qualified Leads with Janis Pettit #176 How To Schedule Sales Appointments with Automated Emails with Neil Kristianson #157 Take Command of the New LinkedIn User Interface with Brynne Tillman #151 Referrals – The Master Key To Winning Sales with John Spence #127 Looking for Leads with Social Media, an interview with Brian Basilico #34 SB029- How To Generate Leads on LinkedIn, an Interview with Patrick McFadden. Crossing the Chasm an Interview with author Geoffrey Moore The post How to Generate Referrals Without Asking with Stacey Brown Randall #206 appeared first on Sales Babble Sales Podcast | Sales Training | Sales Consulting |Sales Coaching.

On this edition of The Predictable Revenue Podcast, host Collin Stewart welcomes James Buckley, an Account Executive with Cirrus Insight, a sales workflow tool increasing sales efficiency and acumen by integrating your inbox with your CRM. Although James is currently in an Account Executive role, he's done it all at Cirrus Insight. During his tenure, James has grown from a Client Engagement Specialist, to both a Manager and Director of Business Development. His excellent onboarding manual, written for new Sales Development Reps at Cirrus Insight, was eventually published as a book titled: Tip of The Spear: Blood Sweat and Sales. The man has insight. Throughout the pod, Collin and James discuss, and attempt to improve, a critical piece of the sales cycle - the handoff from SDR to Account Executive. Highlights include: James' book: Tip of The Spear: Blood Sweat and Sales (3:28), the transition point of a discovery call (4:21), roleplaying calls (11:32), the hand off (21:34), and being nimble as an SDR (34:01).

On this edition of The Predictable Revenue Podcast, host Collin Stewart welcomes James Buckley, an Account Executive with Cirrus Insight, a sales workflow tool increasing sales efficiency and acumen by integrating your inbox with your CRM. Although James is currently in an Account Executive role, he's done it all at Cirrus Insight. During his tenure, James has grown from a Client Engagement Specialist, to both a Manager and Director of Business Development. His excellent onboarding manual, written for new Sales Development Reps at Cirrus Insight, was eventually published as a book titled: Tip of The Spear: Blood Sweat and Sales. The man has insight. Throughout the pod, Collin and James discuss, and attempt to improve, a critical piece of the sales cycle - the handoff from SDR to Account Executive. Highlights include: James' book: Tip of The Spear: Blood Sweat and Sales (3:28), the transition point of a discovery call (4:21), roleplaying calls (11:32), the hand off (21:34), and being nimble as an SDR (34:01).

What’s Not Working In Sales Today with Brandon Bruce #204 Brandon Bruce grew up in a tiny California town of 800 people where he only had one classmate at a school with outhouses as their bathroom. He went from these humble beginnings to now Cofounding and growing Cirrus Insight to $12 million in revenue and #41 on the Inc. 500 list (after a six-year rollercoaster of sales success and setbacks). Today Brandon and I discuss what’s not working in sales today. Times Have Changed for Sales Cold emailing and cold calling still work, but not as well as in the past. The internet is changing consumers behavior.  They are spending more time alone shopping and comparing before calling the sales line. It used to be that growing a big email lists was the path to success. But it doesn’t work as well as it did in the past. People can smell a pitch a mile away. A small list of targeted prospects is better. Sales Solutions That May Work Be eminently reachable – post your calendar online and let people find a spot that works for them. Use email prudently asking for advice and help if you’re a startup: Hi I’m a founder like you,  I’ve created a new application, it does THIS, I’d really appreciate it if you would download, and give it a try then give us some feedback on it and  tells us what we did right and not right We’re very open for feedback. In this example you’re not selling but asking for advice. Kill them with flattery, by not selling, but getting them engaged. Be vulnerable and admit  you may not have the answer, but you’re open for feedback. This is authentic. Pushy sales is what’s not working in sales today. How to Find Brandon Bruce Brandon on LinkedIn https://www.linkedin.com/in/brandonbruce/ Website https://www.cirrusinsight.com/ Twitter @cirrusinsight Babble me to enter the drswing for Brandon’s swag! Business Development Listen to past episodes to find ways to grow business quickly. Repeatable Success for Sales Development Reps with Brendan Barrett #188 Startup Story Where Software Goes to Seed with Charlie Wiltgen #179 Myths on Social Selling with Mark Hunter #142 Understanding the Value of Testimonials #126 6 Simple Steps for Generating New Leads With Chris Helmers What Startups Need to Know about Business Development with Tim Allen #119 The post What’s Not Working In Sales Today with Brandon Bruce #204 appeared first on Sales Babble Sales Podcast | Sales Training | Sales Consulting |Sales Coaching.

Southern Californian-native, Ian Harriman is a rockstar salesperson. He started as a sales development representative until he rose up to the ranks of being a mid-market account executive at Checkr, a background check community that utilizes software (instead of people) to complete a majority of the parts to the process. Ian also talks about his leadership role in the Bounce Back to Work Program at Checkr, where they help both applicants and companies through their background screening process. We talk about how most companies fail, his experience at a failing company, and how he actually bounced back to where he is now.

Sahil Mansuri is a force of nature. Many years ago, Sahil and I shared a double-wide cubicle in the infant days of Glassdoor. I was struck by how intelligent and driven he was. He’s not one to follow the generally accepted dogma. He’s someone who gets things done with flare, massive creativity and hard work. Listen in as Sahil talks about how Sales Development Reps can improve their performance, what he’s building to support this at Bravado, and his thoughts on the future of Sales. Can’t miss! #SDR #Salesdevelopment #bravado

From US Army Ranger to Founder/CEO of a highly successful software company, Kyle Morris has seen it all. On this week's episode, hear about making that transition and being successful by relying on your own wits and strength. Kyle and I go deep in our discussion what makes a great Sales Development Rep and Manager, and how you can upgrade your standards to achieve excellence. It's time to change things up. Learn from the best in this week's episode!

How To Learn The Secret Lingo of Your Customer with Jeffrey Shaw #192 Author Jeffrey Shaw visits Sales Babble to talk about his book Lingo – Discover Your ideal Customers’s Secret Language and Make Your Business Irresistible.   Jeffrey believes that far too often people sell the wrong thing to the wrong people. Unfortunately too few people understand for whom they are for. Your ideal client has a secret lingo that mirrors your traits and values.  Once you learn their lingo, you can quickly discern and serve this market. Five Step Process In his book Jeffery outlines a five step process for discovering your prospects secret lingo. Understand your ideal clients perspective Create familiarity and comfort Style – build one that matches your target Pricing – Use whole numbers for high-end customers Words – use language they speak How To Connect with Jeffrey Shaw To find Jeffrey Shaw, his book,  and the free secret lingo giveaways go here: Lingo mediate kit Inforgraphic Free Chapter of his book Audio version of the first chapter of the book The full book on Amazon LinkedIn Twitter @jeffreyshaw1 Go to Jeffreyshaw.com/sales  How to Learn About Your Ideal Client Here are past episodes that speak to the importance of knowing your ideal client. How To Generate Leads without Sales and Marketing with John Tripolsky #191 Repeatable Success for Sales Development Reps with Brendan Barrett #188 7 LinkedIn Strategies for Generating Qualified Leads with Janis Pettit #176 Why Qualifying Prospects is Like Selling To Zebras with Jeff Koser #171 7 Healthy Phone Habits to Get First Meetings with Marylou Tyler #150 Myths on Social Selling with Mark Hunter #142 How to Power Prospect with LinkedIn Groups with Liam Austin #135 How to Sell Big Clients and Win Tremendous Deals with Melinda Chen #114 How To Be An Awesome Sales Professional with Thomas Ellis #102 Sales For Start-ups with Mano Behera The post How To Learn The Secret Lingo of Your Customer with Jeffrey Shaw #192 appeared first on Sales Babble Sales Podcast | Sales Training | Sales Consulting |Sales Coaching.

Takeaways Attitude is Everything: A trend that I see becoming more and more prevalent every day is new grads thinking they should be able to jump from Sales Development Rep to Chief Revenue Officer. I’ll admit, I too thought I knew everything at 22, and 25, and 30, but the more I learned the more I realized there was to learn. Carrying a learning attitude combined with a personal “why” will help you climb the rungs quickly. Build Your Own Tools: It’s easy to look to your manager or even the company as a whole to provide all the tools you need. Instead, look to them for guidance or a framework and build your own. This forces you to be both adaptable and personally accountable. Knowing something is one thing, but the next step is making it your own. You Create Your Audience: This whole show is about the behaviors, attitudes, and techniques of sales success, and I think Richard summed it up nicely by saying it’s the combination of all three of those things that creates the audience you sell to. The way you ask questions, your ability to read your prospect and put them at ease, whether or not you keep your word, think hard about whether or not you would buy from yourself. Full Notes https://www.salestuners.com/richard-vis/ Book Recommendation The Challenger Sale by Matthew Dixon Sponsors What if every sales rep inherited the habits of your best rep? With Costello, they do. The pipeline-centric system is strategically built on a proven selling methodology that keeps teams focused on the only thing they can control in sales – actions that push deals to close.  

How To Generate Leads without Sales and Marketing with John Tripolsky #191 In this episode we meet John Tripolsky, CEO of JTE Marketing. John shares his process to generate leads through a referral process. When starting John had neither  marketing nor a sales staff. Instead he leveraged his existing network to find qualified prospects and generate leads. It worked and this is how to generate leads without sales and marketing! Hire a Team Without Hiring The JTE Marketing earned its first two clients from friends and family. They repeated the process by working networking meetings. John kept attending and connected with five people. From those five they built their portfolio. Building personal relationships is what matters. John is a strong advocate for LinkedIn. He has 7K connections. Almost all have gotten a personal message welcoming them to connect.   Not everyone is a qualified prospect. Yet all know people who ARE qualified. Referrals come from both existing and non clients Lead Generation Referral Process Use the three letter word “ask”    Sit down and casually start… “let’s talk about XYZ …..” He then asks…. “Do you know anyone I could talk too? “ Next he asks … “Would you introduce me? Would you send an introduction email?” Share “I would love to talk to them and pick their brain about …. “ Once you get the lead follow up … “John Smith recommended I give you a call…” Lastly asks if they would be open to personally set down and chat for 10 minutes. In person This is how you learn about a market and it’s nomenclature. It’s also solid advice on how to generate leads without sales and marketing. This process is great news for startups! A Watershed Deal After a terrific presentation he was asked for a proposal. He had no idea what to do but eventually created an order form. It was not pretty. Since he’s a marketing company, he believed this poorly represented the company. He made it beautiful with graphics and brand worthy style. Make your invoices and quotes BEAUTIFUL! He recommends Pandadoc  Having a great proposal maintains the positive feeling that happened at the time of the presentation. Take Action Advice Ask……  Make it second nature to make requests of clients and prospects. Get over the hump of shyness. If you never ask you’re never going to get anything from it. Keep forward momentum, embrace lifelong learning and ASK. Where To Find John Tripolsky This is the link to the JTE Marketing Group You can also find John on LinkedIn How to Prospect and Generate Leads Repeatable Success for Sales Development Reps with Brendan Barrett #188 7 LinkedIn Strategies for Generating Qualified Leads with Janis Pettit #176 Why Qualifying Prospects is Like Selling To Zebras with Jeff Koser #171 7 Healthy Phone Habits to Get First Meetings with Marylou Tyler #150 Myths on Social Selling with Mark Hunter #142 How to Power Prospect with LinkedIn Groups with Liam Austin #135 How to Sell Big Clients and Win Tremendous Deals with Melinda Chen #114 How To Be An Awesome Sales Professional with Thomas Ellis #102 Sales For Start-ups with Mano Behera How to Assume Rapport when Prospecting with Ken Dunn #90 The post How To Generate Leads without Sales and Marketing with John Tripolsky #191 appeared first on Sales Babble Sales Podcast | Sales Training | Sales Consulting |Sales Coaching.

Our guest this week is Morgan Ingram, host of The SDR Chronicles, a Youtube show all about the joys and challenge of being a Sales Development Rep. He walks us through what an SDR is and what it isn't. The challenges that most SDRs face daily and his tips for battling them. PLUS! It's our Halloween special. Jen and Jeffrey reveal the absolute scariest thing you can hear on a sales call and discuss sales-themed costume ideas. Subscribe to The SDR Chronicles: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC5mIKms3bZLtuXapHBVp2tA Follow Morgan on twitter: https://twitter.com/morganjingram   On today's show… 4:00 - The scariest thing you can hear on a sales call 14:40 - What exactly IS an SDR? 25:00 - Morgan reveals the biggest challenges for SDRs and his advice on overcoming them. 27:30 - Where does Morgan get his mental toughness? 33:00 - Motivation vs. Inspiration: nuance or semantics?   *** Follow Jeffrey on twitter and instagram @gitomer Follow Jennifer on twitter and instagram @jeninanyminute   *** Need more sales help? Jeffrey's website: https://gitomer.com Jennifer's website: https://salesinanyminute.com Gitomer Gold Webinar Series: https://go.gitomer.com/gitomer-gold

Repeatable Success for Sales Development Reps with Brendan Barrett #188   There is a growing trend for companies to separate business development from deal closing. We’re talking about two different people: One person setting up appointments the Sales Development Reps (SDR) and the other is the  closer. In this episode our guest Brendan Barrett and I walk through the SDR process with it’s pros and cons. We do some roleplaying in order to show practical advice for anyone prospecting and trying to set up an appointment.   What and Why an SDR? SDR stands for Sales Development Reps – appointment setters, prospectors and cold callers.  Brendon calls the the Roller to the Closer .  This is different than the traditional inside sales (an order taker).   This is all outbound sales and Business Development.  They are sometimes called Business Development Reps or BDR. More efficient for closers, who can be closing deals daily vs spending time in the office setting up their own meetings. Downside of SDRs. Details get dropped Having a process imperative Communication What Makes For SDR Success? Entry level position Hungry, coachable, naturally curious SDR Process In this section we walked through the SDR process and gave practical examples for the Listeners. Create a relationship Use LinkedIn to prospect Reach out to sescretary Take 2-5 touches to get a meeting Create a dialogue (conversation) “I’m looking for people who set up your brown bag discussions “I saw your post on LinkedIn and I’m curious about it ….. Could be set up on Facebook, Messenger, LinkedIn or email Always wish somebody a good day, that opens up people Qualify Prospecting is market research Some deals take years, hand off slow deals to marketing to keep them warm Laws of attraction applies by showing interest. Create curiosity, get them to ask you about you Be skeptical, don’t assume they are qualified Ideally you want them to see the value and self qualify Win permission to sell Make a phone call about them “How was the weekend, what do you have going on this week If you met at a conference, start there, “what’s your next conference on your calendar Introduction to Closer Sounds like we could work with you well but I’m not the right person Take Action Advice Nice guys win and smarter guys win more! Be helpful! How To Find Brendan Barrett Go to the Start In Phoenix website  www.startinphx.com Business of Family and Selling Podcast  startinphx.com/family From there you can download the Double my Revenue 7 day Sales Challenge @StartInPhx on Instagram StartInPhx on Facebook @StartInPhx on Twitter Support our Sponsor Bluehost Sales babble is brought to you by Bluehost. Take your idea and start your business online. Sales Babblers can start for only $3.95/month FREE Domain Free Site Builders 1-Click WordPress Install 24×7 support Special intro offer and 30-day money-back guarantee Powering over 2 million websites worldwide   How to Prospect and Generate Leads Other great episodes on business development. Listen today! 7 LinkedIn Strategies for Generating Qualified Leads with Janis Pettit #176 Why Qualifying Prospects is Like Selling To Zebras with Jeff Koser #171 7 Healthy Phone Habits to Get First Meetings with Marylou Tyler #150 Myths on Social Selling with Mark Hunter #142 How to Power Prospect with LinkedIn Groups with Liam Austin #135 How to Sell Big Clients and Win Tremendous Deals with Melinda Chen #114 How To Be An Awesome Sales Professional with Thomas Ellis #102 Sales For Start-ups with Mano Behera How to Assume Rapport when Prospecting with Ken Dunn #90 How To Generate Sales Leads Using LinkedIn, Facebook and Twitter     The post Repeatable Success for Sales Development Reps with Brendan Barrett #188 appeared first on Sales Babble Sales Podcast | Sales Training | Sales Consulting |Sales Coaching.

Back in February, Ryan O'Hara from LeadIQ interviewed Morgan Ingram, who is a Manager of Sales Development at Terminus and talked about how he's been successful as a first time Sales Development Rep, and how he's figured out the wild world of prospecting. Since then, Morgan's been promoted at Terminus, and also hosts The SDR Chronicles, one fo the most popular YouTube channels on Sales Development: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC5mIKms3bZLtuXapHBVp2tA If you want to try out LeadIQ, and see how it helps with your workflow, please visit: http://leadiq.com and try 50 free leads.

As technology becomes a bigger and more necessary tool for doing business, Sales Development Reps who are still in the beginning stages of their career can find it difficult to truly connect with a prospect when using any form of communication other than email. The “human touch” component of sales is absolutely crucial to closing the deal with a client, but can it be taught to a new generation of SDRs? Our guest today is Andy Paul, Founder of Zero Time Selling and host of the sales strategy podcast Accelerate!. We discuss how buyers form perceptions of SDRs, the importance of first impressions, and Andy’s process for engaging clients and connecting on a more human level. Episode Highlights: Blending sales technology with a human touch When does a prospect first form an opinion about you? Creating a good first impression even with non-verbal communications Lock your cell phone in your desk drawer: Why multi-tasking won’t help you get more done Doing prep work for your first verbal conversation with a prospect Asking the right questions Making yourself different from the competition Breaking away from talking about the pain points of the client Speaking to the CEO like he’s your peer More from Andy Paul Resources:   Thinking Fast and Slow by Daniel Kahneman The Science of Selling by David Hoffeld Resonate by Nancy Duarte The Coaching Habit by Michael Bungay Stanier Selling Fearlessly by Robert Terson   Want more from Andy Paul? Give him a call at (619) 980-4002, send him an email at andy@zerotimeselling.com, or connect with him on Linkedin or Twitter @zerotimeselling Check out Andy’s podcast, Accelerate!

Today, I'm going to share with you FIVE things to help you become a better sales development rep (SDR) or help you work better with your SDR. First off, let's briefly define the role of Sales Development Rep. SDRs are also referred to as your inside sales team. They help to qualify or bring in […] The post TSE 542: How Can I Become A GREAT Sales Development Rep (SDR)? appeared first on The Sales Evangelist.

On this podcast, Gabriel will be interviewing one of the founders of developing inside sales systems, Marylou Tyler. They will be discussing the following key topics: Sales Process, Specialization and Sales Development Reps, Cold Emailing, and Technology. Tune in to the podcast to find out more! You can expect weekly podcast sessions that dive into specific topics to help you scale your business faster.  As well as expert interviews with industry leaders.   For show notes, downloadable resources, or to speak with one of our experts visit www.revenueaccelerator.io  

On this podcast, Gabriel will be interviewing one of the founders of developing inside sales systems, Marylou Tyler. They will be discussing the following key topics: Sales Process, Specialization and Sales Development Reps, Cold Emailing, and Technology. Tune in to the podcast to find out more! You can expect weekly podcast sessions that dive into specific topics to help you scale your business faster.  As well as expert interviews with industry leaders.   For show notes, downloadable resources, or to speak with one of our experts visit www.revenueaccelerator.io  

On this episode, I’m interviewed by my longtime friend and colleague Gabriel Padva. Gabriel is the founder and principal consultant at 30,000 FT Strategies, a company that focuses on helping companies communicate with their prospects. He is also a CRO at Revenue Accelerator Inc. We go in-depth into the role of the sales development rep, including how to hire them, train them, and promote them into upper management positions. We also discuss the do’s and don’ts of cold emailing, my must-have tools, and the best sales advice I’ve ever gotten. Episode Highlights: Marylou’s process for identifying new prospects and driving sales Why is sales team specialization important? The evolution of the SDR Client metrics Understanding the ideal account profile Building your list Is the phone still relevant for the SDR? How to work the internal referral system Hiring the best SDR: References, interviews, and skill tests Critical KPI’s The do’s and don’ts of crafting cold messaging Must-have technology tools of 2016 The best sales advice Marylou’s ever gotten   Resources: Gabriel’s question checklist for checking references of potential SDRs Tool Recommendations: Outreach.io Tout Sales Loft Marketo Predictable Prospecting: How to Radically Increase Your B2B Sales Pipeline by Marylou Tyler   Quotes/Tweets: “Always be testing, measuring, and pulling out data. Tell the truth.” - Gabriel “Using the phone in combination with email and social selling is a great way to ‘warm up the chill’ of cold calling” - Marylou “You are as equally important as the person that you’re trying to convince to try your product or service” - Marylou

On this episode of Predictable Prospecting, Marylou Tyler herself is interviewed by Andy Paul, host of the sales podcast Accelerate.   If you’ve ever wondered about the process of writing Predictable Revenue and Predictable Prospecting, Marylou’s thoughts on the true role of Sales Development Reps, and her top tips for identifying your ideal customer, then this is an episode you don’t want to miss! Episode Highlights: Introducing MaryLou Tyler Writing Predictable Revenue with Aaron Ross Is Predictable Revenue still relevant? Intraday calling and fearing the phone The inspiration behind Predictable Prospecting Sales Development Reps: usage, burnout, and hand-off points Targeting companies with the fastest velocity and highest lifetime value Ideal prospect personas within the pipeline The five levels of awareness Varying methods of outreach How Marylou would fix stalled sales fast Marylou Tyler’s top attributes Must-read books and favorite music Resources: Predictable Prospecting by Marylou Tyler Send Marylou proof of purchase to get access to her presentation of a completed prospect persona Lead Generation for the Complex Sale by Bryan Carroll Mark Hunter SPIN Selling by Neil Rackham Getting to ‘Closed’ by Stephen Schiffman Visit Marylou Tyler on her website, download a free chapter of her new book at Predictable Prospecting, or connect with her on Linkedin. You can also Tweet her @maryloutyler

When you're recruiting sales development reps, if you only emphasize quantity, your lead quality suffers. Instead, you want SDRs who are intelligent and passionate about your industry. Listen in as Sahil Mansuri, Vice President at SalesPredict, shares exactly how to go about hiring the perfect SDRs for your business.

My regular guest on Front Line Friday is Bridget Gleason, VP of Corporate Sales for SumoLogic. In this episode, Bridget and I have a conversation about setting up SDRs for failure and how companies can propel forward by using the quality over quantity method of selling. Included among the questions we discuss are: Are companies reaching out to only the qualified leads? Why are companies putting too much pressure on SDRs to make contact? Why is there a lack of preparation when it comes to sales calls? Why it’s better to measure an SDR on results, rather than on activity. Are the expectations of success too low for SDRs? Learn more about what’s in the future for sales. Be sure to join us for this information packed episode!

My regular guest on Front Line Friday is Bridget Gleason, VP of Corporate Sales for SumoLogic. In this episode, Bridget discusses how she, as a sales leader at a high growth tech company, views the importance of the SDR role and how it will continue to evolve over the coming year. Included among the topics we discuss in this conversation are: How SDR roles will change over the next year. The situations where further specialization of SDRs responsibilities makes sense What you need to do if your AEs are doing too much prospecting How to fill the gap between the leads marketing provides and what sales needs. Why the data in your dashboard is probably inaccurate. And how to fix it, now. If you’re a sales leader or sales manager, then be sure to join us for this episode!