· iii Foreword This book, ScaleX.ai, Multi-Channel Sales Acceleration, Powered by Artificial Intelligence, is the result of attempting to tape together email marketing, social selling,

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Organic growth has become an essential element of business strategy. In "Multi-Channel Sales Acceleration, Chad Burmeister shows us a practical path to turn a strategic vision into concrete sales results by combining the power of personalization, AI, and the magic of the human voice at dominant speed and scale. What's in it for you? Sales results that you will love, while your competitors scratch their heads and try to play catch up.

– Chris Beall, CEO, ConnectAndSell

They say, “Remote selling is the future and the future is now.” Creating, qualifying, and closing remote opportunities requires sales teams that are internally directed through discipline, externally driven through process, and who are maniacal in determining successful and repeatable sales plays that optimize and inform their success. Chad Burmeister is one of the top ten sales leaders who execute this with precision.

– Michael Critchfield, CSMO SilverVue

Chad has done a phenomenal job pulling together world-class thought leaders in sales to create the first book available on AI for sales. Chad worked for me in the early 2000’s and I’ve seen his career launch into another atmosphere where SDRs and BDRs deliver 10X more meetings and more quality pipeline than ever, which makes predictable revenue possible using artificial intelligence.”

– Stephen D’Angelo, President, Worldwide Field Operations, Aviso

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Other books by Chad Burmeister

Sales Hack: With contributions from over 25 of the world's greatest sales professionals of our time

Sales Hack, The Original 25 Sales Hacks (Volume 2)

Copyright © 2018 by Chad Burmeister.

All rights reserved.

No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted by any means without the written permission of the authors.

Cover design by Chad Burmeister

First edition 1/1/2018

Printed by CreateSpace

Printed in the United States of America

ISBN-13: 978-1979062169

ISBN-10: 1979062161

Contents Acknowledgments .......................................................................................................... i

Dedication ...................................................................................................................... ii

Foreword ....................................................................................................................... iii

Multi-Channel Sales Acceleration: A Strategic Weapon .....................................................1

Multi-Channel Sales Acceleration: Where to Start? ............................................................4

Case Study: HR SaaS Company Embraces Multi-Channel Sales Acceleration ..................9

Multi-Channel Sales Acceleration: Develop the Playbooks ..............................................11

Multi-Channel Sales Acceleration: Deploy the Playbook .................................................14

Multi-Channel Sales Acceleration: Optimize the Playbooks .............................................17

Sales Hack #1: Bring Quality to the Top of the Funnel .....................................................19

Sales Hack #2: The Thirty-Two-Seconds Hack .................................................................20

Sales Hack #3: The Shocking Value Statement .................................................................21

Sales Hack #4: Get Inside the Conversation ......................................................................22

Sales Hack #5: The Video Whiteboard or the Vidyard Video ...........................................24

Sales Hack #6: Recycling Unqualified Nos .......................................................................26

Sales Hack #7: The Instant Response Hack .......................................................................28

Sales Hack #8: The Dormant Leads Hack .........................................................................31

Multi-Channel Sales Acceleration: Scale ..........................................................................34

Multi-Channel Sales Acceleration: Powered by Artificial Intelligence (Just add AI) .......37

Multi-Channel Sales Acceleration: The Challenge of Real Personalization .....................46

Multi-Channel Sales Acceleration: The Next Chapters .....................................................51

scaleX.ai Bonus Sales Hack #1: The Math of Personalization at Scale, Powered by Artificial Intelligence ....................................................................................................57

scaleX.ai Bonus Sales Hack #2: Invaluable Career Lessons from Washing Dishes, Driving a Forklift, and Basement Waterproofing .........................................................62

scaleX.ai Bonus Sales Hack #3: The Power of Your Mindset ..........................................66

scaleX.ai Bonus Sales Hack #4: Life on the Sales Development On-Ramp .....................69

scaleX.ai Bonus Sales Hack #5: Silver Platter Syndrome – A New Disease That’s Plaguing Your Sales Process ........................................................................................74

scaleX.ai Bonus Sales Hack #6: Sales Training of the Future ...........................................80

scaleX.ai Bonus Sales Hack #7: AI For Sales Forecasting, How to Be the Billy Beane of Sales ..............................................................................................................88

scaleX.ai Bonus Sales Hack #8: The 15 Best Bots for People Who Work in Sales ..........91

scaleX.ai Bonus Sales Hack #9: When a New Technology Emerges, There’s an Initial Trigger ................................................................................................................94

Multi-Channel Sales Acceleration: Step-By-Step Instructions to Dominate Your Market .........................................................................................................................105

About the Author .............................................................................................................106

i

Acknowledgments

This book is dedicated to three sales leaders who impacted me the most in my sales career: Stephen D’Angelo, Mitch Tarica, and Mary Jane (MJ) Shutte.

Stephen D’Angelo taught me the enterprise sales hacks—like “the Divine Whisper” and the importance of understanding the pro-spect’s pain.

Mitch Tarica taught me the importance of networking inside your organization and to get things done as quickly as they come at you. So many sales leaders tell you to slow down because “Our com-pany is too big for the speed you bring,” but not Mitch Tarica.

Mary Jane (MJ) Shutte taught me the importance of your people. As a leader, your job is to get to a point where your people would walk through fire for you. The balance between this principle and the metrics needed to deliver Multi-Channel Sales Acceleration is a fine line.

ii

Dedication

This book is dedicated to the fine people of ConnectAndSell: Chris Beall, Shawn McLaren, James Townsend, Jon Campbell, Janie Wall, Matt Forbes, and the entire team at ConnectAndSell. This team never gave up. When digital marketing became the buzzword of the day, then account based marketing, and now artificial intel-ligence (or AI), ConnectAndSell understood that selling is a science and an art, and that where real sales are done is inside the conversation.

iii

Foreword

This book, ScaleX.ai, Multi-Channel Sales Acceleration, Powered by Artificial Intelligence, is the result of attempting to tape together email marketing, social selling, and sales acceleration over the past decade, with good results, only to find that when really connecting them together, truly great things can happen.

At WebEx, using “mail merge,” Sales Genius, and a required 30 dials/day, we grew to a $3.2B company and were acquired by Cisco.

At ON24, using InsideSales.com, we increased dials from 30/day to 100/day, integrated email and social, and insured that marketing leads were given priority in the queue, leading to an increase in conversion rates.

At RingCentral, we deployed SalesLoft plus ConnectAndSell (as standalone technologies) to ensure that marketing leads were called within seconds of the time they hit the website, and, on average, attempted at least 10 – 20 times. According to a board member, this process led to “world class” sales developments like he had never seen before.

At talentReef, we deployed Outreach.io plus ConnectAndSell (standalone at first, then integrated as the very first alpha customer) and, with a 30% smaller sales team, delivered 500% more sales activities per month, a 200% bigger pipeline, and a 50% increase in bookings. The sales team now averages 250 sales activities per day, where most sales teams in the US average just 50.

What’s new in 2018? The recurring question for sellers is which leads should be called first. What multi-channel sequence should be used for which prospect? How much personalization is required? Once they finish a sequence, then what do they do? Is there a sequence or playbook I should use for in-funnel opportunities? What about cross-sell and up-sell? For the first time ever, true sales acceleration can be integrated into a multi-channel sales process, powered by artificial intelligence, to answer these questions and more.

* * *

What Is Multi-Channel Prospecting?

According to a blog posted by Craig Rosenberg, the co-founder of TOPO, multi-channel prospecting campaigns are not new, and they have been driving real results for the fastest growing companies in the world. There are five key factors (and 2 bonus channels) in the multi-channel prospecting campaign:

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1. Prospecting is a campaign.

2. Email is the core channel for outreach.

3. The phone isn’t dead, but it is used differently.

4. A social touch (LinkedIn) increases overall conversion.

5. Campaigns should be delivered over time.

Bonus channels that bring additional lift:

6. Hand written notes.

7. Video.

The full post: http://blog.topohq.com/age-multi-channel-prospecting-despite-hype-nothing-dead/

Contributed by: Craig Rosenberg, Co-Founder of Topo.

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Multi-Channel Sales Acceleration: A Strategic Weapon

The Multi-Channel Sales Acceleration Powered by Artificial Intelligence book provides the step-by-step playbook for your company to implement the lowest cost, highest yielding sales and sales development machine in the history of sales. As Rick Brennan, former navy captain, commanding officer, and director of Battlespace Networking shared with me once at a dinner, in business, as in war, the company that can fight at the lowest cost will always win.

An excerpt from Craig Rosenberg’s blog post:

The phone isn’t dead, but it is used differently.

• Another tactic is to mix dialing automation into the touch pattern.

• Organizations will still organize a campaign with 3 – 4 email touches over the course of 3 – 4 weeks.

• As part of that campaign, they will carve out time to “war-dial.”

• In a “war-dialing” session, reps will allot 1 – 2 hours/day to make cold dials without leaving voicemails, and aiming for connects.

• The email cadence can help the effectiveness of these connects, as the prospects are aware of the rep and their organization before the call.

ScaleX.ai, Multi-Channel Sales Acceleration

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Frank Swain, chief revenue officer at Instana and former SVP of Worldwide Sales at AppDynamics, eloquently said at a Sales 2.0 conference in San Francisco, “It’s not that the sales reps are right or wrong that emails coupled with sales acceleration will generate more meetings. If the air cover (email) gives them the confidence to have a better sales conversation, then it’s worth it.”

What changes when combining sales enablement technology with sales acceleration (otherwise known as conversation acceleration)?

1. Sales Reps are extremely happy with the ease to get a prospect on the phone within their sequence. They will no longer skip tasks in their sales enablement solution—and they will have sales conversations, a lot of sales conversations. I know, because, as the VP of sales at talentReef, in the first quarter, I wanted to show the team the value of sales engagement technology, and when the call tasks added up, it was easy to click “next” or “skip” the task. The dashboard looks good, but conversion to meetings plummets. At RingCentral, when I put in ConnectAndSell, BDRs averaged 250 dials/day, and around 10 conversa-tions/day. After bringing in sales engagement technology, conversations plum-meted, and you could hear a pin drop on the sales floor.

2. Sales leaders and CEOs can dominate their markets by increasing the number of leads or contacts put into the sequence or cadence. When compa-nies use the Topo recommendations for multi-touch outreach, call tasks stack up in a few weeks. As a result, the recommended number of leads a rep should put into their sequence or cadence is around 25 to 35 per day.

However, when sales acceleration is added to the multi-channel playbook, a sales rep can load up to 3 – 5 times more leads or contacts into their sequence (from 25 per day to 75, 100, or even 125 per day). But there is still a constraint that should not be overlooked: email must be managed correctly to avoid being tagged as a spammer. Make sure you collaborate with your sales enablement vendor and IT department to avoid this disastrous outcome. I know, because I once caused a company’s email to go into SPAM by the thousands by using sales engagement technology to do what a marketing automation solution should do—email blasts to drive butts in seats to an event!

3. The sales person gains back the most precious commodity they have in their sales career—TIME! What used to take 3 – 5 hours to complete 40 – 50 dials, navigate phone trees, and leave messages that were rarely returned, now takes 20 – 30 minutes. Or, even better, instead of 50 dials, the seasoned solution sales professional could now achieve 125, 150, or even 250 dials in the time it used to


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take them to drive just 50. And, worse, the pain of manually dialing 50 prospects makes a seller want to leave your company.

4. You can hire sellers instead of sales development reps. Now that a highly trained seller (compared to a phone-tree navigator) has Multi-Channel Sales Acceleration at their fingertips, sales development or business development representatives are needed less often. There is a high cost to hire a team of BDRs who align to sales on a 1:2 or 1:3 basis. By coupling sales engagement technol-ogy with sales acceleration technology (ConnectAndSell), the value of the SDR goes down precipitously.

Do you remember Rick Brennan, a true expert on the art of war said, “The company who has the lowest cost to wage war will win the war.”

To conclude this chapter, it’s worth giving credit to some of the pioneering technologies that helped get us to the point where sales technology can truly support market dominance: companies like Sales Genius, driven by the vision of David Thompson; Yesware and Toutapp, who made personalized email market possible; and current two market leaders Outreach.io and SalesLoft, who take that vision to the next level of personalized multi-channel engagement..

What’s different now? Only ConnectAndSell. ConnectAndSell has the practical, patented solution for getting prospects on the phone quickly enough, and at low enough cost, to let live conversations scale just like email and social media. United States Patent 8,649,500 protects dynamic allocation of agents for outbound calling in an automated communication link establishment and management system. The resulting math says it all: when it takes less time and effort to get a live, targeted conversation than it does to compose and send a personalized email, true multi-channel sales acceleration becomes a reality.

Like to read patents? Check it out here: http://www.freepatentsonline.com/8649500.html.

In the next five years, I predict that the company to win the sales engagement space is the company who partners with ConnectAndSell for conversation acceleration. At the end of the day, sales is about getting to a conversation, and there is only one technology that I’m aware of that automates this at scale—and that’s ConnectAndSell.

In this book, you will learn about D2O/T (develop, deploy, and optimize over time).

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Multi-Channel Sales Acceleration: Where to Start?

I’m the CEO, CRO, and VP of sales of a company, and I’ve heard about other companies deploying sales enablement technology. So, where do I start?

ANSWER: “Do not try this at home!” Imagine strapping a jet engine to a golf cart, then inviting your top sales rep to “take a seat,” lighting the fuse, and then off they go ... right into a ditch! This is what you’re basically doing if you leave Multi-Channel Sales Acceleration in the hands of an SDR leader, or a sales rep, or even a highly paid (and highly trained) sales ops person who doesn’t have experience bringing velocity to selling. Whether they have a Harvard degree (or not), if they don’t know the ins and outs of Multi-Channel Sales Acceleration, they will not be successful.

There is currently only one solution provider who has taken the lead in Multi-Channel Sales Acceleration and that is Outreach.io. When Craig Rosenberg, co-founder of Topo, had the vision to introduce Manny Medina, CEO of Outreach, to Chris Beall, CEO of ConnectAndSell, they decided to co-sponsor a Dreamforce event in 2015. This event was the most attended after-hours event on the first day of Dreamforce that year. ConnectAndSell sponsored the cigar hand-roller and 108 silver cigar cases that were handed out that night, and the rest is history.

Gerhard Gschwandtner, the CEO of Selling Power, was there. Kraig Kleeman, the self-proclaimed world’s greatest cold caller, was there. Alice and Liz Heiman were there helping hand out the schwag. And Manny Medina and Chris Beall began their business relationship that would lead to the most powerful sales solution of all time. It reminds me of a quote from Back to the Future. For the millennials reading this book, that’s a movie


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starring Michael J. Fox, when Dr. Emmet Brown, played by Christopher Lloyd, said, “If my calculations are correct, when this baby hits 88 miles per hour ... you're gonna see some serious shit.”

Well, I’m here to tell you, “This baby hit 88 miles per hour.” Multi-Channel Sales Acceleration is some serious shit too.

Understanding what it means to go from having one conversation with someone on your list in one day to having eight to twelve conversations with people on your list is some serious poo poo (Trish Bertuzzi, I’m using that one for you, because you made me laugh the entire time I read the Sales Development Playbook). Put another way, due to capacity constraints, most sales professionals make 1 or 2 dial attempts into a lead or contact, send a few emails, and then move on. With Multi-Channel Sales Acceleration, the sequence can not only be configured to require 8, 10, or even 20 dial attempts into a lead or contact, but also actually executed, because ConnectAndSell eliminates the biggest challenge in the system—capacity.

The Math

Consider a market with 1M potential contacts across 100,000 companies.

Before Multi-Channel Sales Acceleration

• 40 sales professionals averaging 50 sales activities/day (20 dials, 20 emails, and 10 social connections) will achieve ~500,000 sales activities in a year. Which means < 1 attempt on the 1M potential prospects, or a few attempts on a subset of the 1M potential contacts.

After Multi-Channel Sales Acceleration

• 20 sales professionals averaging 250 sales activities/day (150 dials, 100 personalized email/social touches, and some video/personal hand-written letters) will achieve 1.25M sales activities/year.

• 20 sales professionals (up-market reps) averaging 100 sales activities/day (50 activities/day plus two weekly call blitzes) will achieve 500,000 sales activi-ties/year.

1.75M sales activities against 1M contacts is still not the recommended approach. The most optimized approach is to collaborate with a company like EverString, ZenIQ, or LeadSpace to help you bifurcate your market into the A accounts, B accounts, C accounts, and D accounts. As a CEO or sales leader, with the same size sales team, you


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now have 1.75M sales activities to point at the market, instead of just 500,000 (a 350% increase in productivity).

Additional side effects of increased sales conversations (from ~10,000/year to ~50,000/year)

1. Your sales professionals will become more effective at their jobs – by enabling more sales conversations with integrated call recording capable of being listened to by sales leaders, managers, or a call coach (and scored) by computer or cellular phone, reps will finally get the coaching that they have been asking for.

2. Your sales professionals will stay longer – because you invest in them and their career, they will typically stick around a lot longer than with a company who doesn’t provide the latest tech stack.

3. Your competition will be outflanked, and you will “be in all the deals” – at Riverbed Technology in 2007, the SVP of sales hired me to insure “we were in all the deals,” because we won 92% of the time when we competed. At talentReef, we face a similar situation—a 92% win rate against our biggest competitor, and you always lose the deals you aren’t in. By optimizing 1.7M dials and 50,000 sales conversations against the top of the market, we see more demos, more pipeline, and, ultimately, a lot more bookings.

* * *

So, Chad, Where Do I Start?

Step 1 Hire a professional. The Bridge Group, led by Trish Bertuzzi, has inside sales experts who know how to optimize the tech stack—and much more. Factor 8, led by Lauren Bailey (“LB”), has a team of sales trainers who have deep domain expertise in ConnectAndSell and the importance of a SWIIFT Intro (So What’s In It For Me).

And then there are sales leaders like myself who have lived and breathed Sales Genius, ToutApp, InsideSales.com, Mail Merge, SalesLoft, and Outreach. And, in a few rare cases (yes, me), they have even led the sales and marketing team at ConnectAndSell, the only patented technology on the market today that will add Sales Acceleration to your Multi-Channel Sales playbook. Hint: look for people who are like-minded, and who believe that having more sales conversations leads to building more pipeline. In today’s selling environment, there are a lot of sales


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people (and leaders) who believe that the only way to drive a conversation is to email blast a list of prospects—which is simply not true.

Step 2 Communicate to your sales team that this professional knows what they are doing. If you hire someone without credentials, and they can’t run a call them-selves or use the technology to levels of mastery, then you hired the wrong person. The CEO should communicate in exec meetings and to the sales team on a regular basis (preferably in person, email not recommended), that they have put their faith in the process, and that they are optimistic about the results.

When sales people begin to “drift” and say “How can I be expected to make 250 dials in a day,” or “I don’t have time to do my other sales tasks like proposals,” remind them that 2 hours using conversation automation or sales acceleration replaces a full 8 hours of manually dialing the phone.

Changing a managers approach isn’t easy (they are either a weasel, or they are not a weasel). Changing a manager is easy, simply fire the person if they won’t get on board with company strategy. It starts at the top, and the CEO must hold their ground there, or Multi-Channel Sales Acceleration will likely not work. “But, Chad, I’m a soft CEO. I like to manage by serving suggestion.” “We empower our people to be social sales professionals.” “I’m not so sure cold calling works anymore.” ANSWER: hire a chief operating officer, someone who is comfortable with calling out the social sales weenies. (I say this with tongue in cheek. Jamie Shanks is truly one of my best friends in the business, and he is NOT a social sales weenie. Jamie is a Multi-Channel Sales Acceleration expert, and he just happens to be outstanding at the social part of the multi-channels!)

Step 3 Establish a weekly cadence with the sales engagement expert to insure rapid and near immediate progress. The phrase “inspect what you expect” comes to mind. The dashboard should be straightforward and show trend lines over time before Multi-Channel Sales Acceleration is deployed, and after. Establish a baseline and then a target for sales activities, demos booked, demos held, pipeline (units and dollars), and bookings.

Try not to make too many sudden movements throughout the quarter, or you’re results will be inaccurate. Reps, other leaders in the company, and even your managers may say things like “Our demos seem to be down” and “I can’t take the time to personalize when I am talking to so many prospects.” Call BS! With Multi-Channel Sales Acceleration done right, the research is done at the front end of the outreach sequence, and follows the lead or contact all the way through the


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sequence steps. “Research once, outreach many,” a quote I coined while deploy-ing this in Q4, 2017.

Step 4 It’s all about the bookings! At the end of the day, sales activity for sales activity’s sake is a wasted effort and, when executed poorly, it can become the main focus for certain sales professionals who miss their quota. They could point to the activity and say, “But look, I’m #1 in sales activity.”

The key to this exercise is not to just track the bookings of the sales team using Multi-Channel Sales Acceleration (i.e., the inside sales team), but to also track the benefits of freeing up advanced sellers to focus on more strategic markets for the business (see the HR company case study in the previous chapter). By freeing up 8 sales reps to focus on named/major accounts, my team opened up $3M in pipeline and drove ~$1M in bookings within 3 months from the time the team was launched.

The strategic question to ask is, “Is it better to have a team of 28 reps drive $1.2M in bookings/quarter, or bifurcate the team to where 21 reps drive $1.2M and 7 reps drive $1M for a total of $2.2M/quarter?”

Step 5 Ongoing care and feeding of the model and a hand-off to a manager who can keep the teams effectiveness and efficiency at levels you read about! Once the rocket has launched with Multi-Channel Sales Acceleration, a few important steps should occur.

Step (1): Hire a sales leader who believes in the process. Ideally, this is someone who has been groomed from the inside, someone who uses the process on a day-to-day basis and can take the baton and scale the process to the next level of optimization.

Step (2): If you don’t have a sales ops person, this is the time to hire them. The consultant you hired has both sales and sales operations skills; the internally promoted sales manager you promote, does not. Before handing off the organi-zation to the new leader(s), make sure that all of the processes are documented, an on-boarding plan has been created and deployed, and clearly monitor the trends. Remember that sales reps (and sales leaders) can and will naturally drift from the process that has been established. Without clearly defined governance and accountability, they will drift even faster and your KPIs will suffer as a result.

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Case Study: HR SaaS Company Embraces Multi-Channel Sales Acceleration

From January to June, 2017, an inside sales team of business development managers (or BDMs) consisted of 28 sales professionals, averaging 60,000 sales activities per quarter. From July to September, 2017, the inside sales team of BDMs consisted of 21 sales professionals, averaging ~60,000 sales activities per month (180,000 sales activities per quarter, a 300% increase). In Q4, the inside sales team increased to 300,000 sales activities/quarter. By coupling personalization (through Outreach.io) with speed (through ConnectAndSell), sellers were more comfortable. Prospects were more comfortable too, because it was “no longer a cold call.” And the CEO and board were happy because they saw 5X the improvement in sales productivity.

So what?

1. Cost savings - A team of 21 sales professionals costs a lot less to run than a team of 28 sales professionals (~$500,000 annual cost savings).

2. Strategic sales execution - By redeploying a team of 8 to a list of target accounts, the team generated $3M in pipeline and, with a 33% close rate, will drive $1M in bookings, which will provide 2X more in bookings than the entire BDM team produces in a quarter.

3. Multi-Channel Sales Acceleration – By adding sales acceleration to multi-channel prospecting, the inside sales team will also deliver record bookings month in and month out.

As Chris Beall, CEO of ConnectAndSell and I like to say, “The math is the math.”


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Here’s the data:

Sales Activities Demos Pipeline Bookings

July 16,486 87 $814,174 $200,403

August 35,055 118 $847,998 $176,626

September 63,927 129 $1,252,027 $270,102

October 100,108 136 $1,477,457 $331,522

The lessons learned

• Personalization at scale is easier said than done - Although the idea of adding personalization to the sales process has shown to increase conversion rates, the practice of adding personalization to the sales process is rarely followed through. What I’ve seen happen time and time again is that the sales team complains to their manager that they think they could drive more demos with less activity, then the activity goes down, and the demos go down.

• Let the reps be the reps, and the leaders be the leaders - If you have sales reps who can create your company strategy, promote them to the C-suite! Until then, they should follow what their executive sales leadership asks them to execute. By nature, people will drop to the lowest level of output that is required by their leaders. In October, when 5,000 sales activities/month per person were required, the team had the most demos all year, and the most bookings. When the leaders let the “inmates run the asylum” (I know, not an elegant phrase, but stick with me here), results plummet.

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Multi-Channel Sales Acceleration: Develop the Playbooks

The first step in D2O/T (develop, deploy and optimize, over time) is to create a master template for your playbooks. This template should start from something that you know works, such as the template below—the 30-day Multi-Channel Sales Acceleration playbook.

Your sales engagement provider should provide a library of sample playbooks that have shown highly optimized outcomes. For example, the minimum benchmarks for a “good” playbook, according to my amazing former customer success manager, Lauren, should

DAY ACTION CONTENT

Day 1 Triple Touch: Voicemail#1,Email#1,

ConnectonLinkedIn.

Capture something about the prospect that is extremely relevant. Record a < 60 second Vidyard video link to their website vs. what it “could be” w/your solution (lead with insight). Send a physical letter introducing yourself (ideally automated through PFL or another).

Day 2 ConnectAndSellDials(X2) Refertothevideo yousenttothem(andtheirCEO)

Day 4 DoubleTouch:Voicemail#2,Email#2 Value-addInvite towebinar

Day 7 ConnectAndSellDials(X2) Refertowebinarinvite

Day 11 Single Touch:Email#3 Value-add contentbymarketing

Day 11 ConnectAndSellDials(X2) Refertocontent sent

Day 21 SingleTouch:Email#4 Topof yourinbox

Day 21 ConnectAndSellDials(X2) Refertofactthatyou’veattempted for3weeks

Day 30 DoubleTouch:Voicemail#3,Email#5 Finaltouch(HailMary)

Day 30 ConnectAndSellDials(X2) VPSalesCallafter exhaustiveOutreachbyBDM

Timeinvestment:2-3hour/day(250salesactivities)• 30personalizedemails/day,~60minutes

• ~200ConnectAndSellDials/day

PersonalizationTouches:• 14personal(80%)- Video,Voicemail,LinkedIn,Email,Conversation

• 4“auto”(20%)– Autoforwardofpersonalizedmessage

Mutli-Channel OutreachPhone, Social, Email, Physical Letter, w/Vidyard customized video


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deliver a 30% minimum open rate, and >3% reply rate. When conversation acceleration is added, you should see the “reply rate” move from <3% to upwards of 50 – 75%. This is because instead of waiting for the prospect to read an email and reply, the sales rep will proactively speak with the prospect (I know this is a novel idea in sales, but keep reading).

This is where it is important to put a definition around something that is critical when hiring personnel to run these accelerated playbooks.

Conversation Weasel – Someone who will do anything possible to avoid talking to a prospect. This person can be anyone—a CEO, an SDR, even a seasoned sales leader. The most successful sales professionals are not conversation weasels - they are conversation pigs (see below). The conversation weasel should typically end up in one of two places—the marketing department, or on your competition’s payroll as a “sales person” for them, because if they stay in sales for your company, you will be sub-optimized in the new world order of Multi-Channel Sales Acceleration.

Conversation Pig – The conversation pig is someone who gets their energy by having sales conversations. They don’t care if it’s a cold call, a warm call, or a social sales call. Once they are engaged in talking with someone, they make things happen. A conversation pig does not have to be “born” a conversation pig. My own success in sales started with failure. If you read my first book, Sales Hack, I share the story of being fired from Olsten Staffing Services (no, it’s not even listed on my LinkedIn, because I was devastated by this failure). What I discovered about myself was that I couldn’t just “wing it.” I had to know the material (and sales process) inside and out before I was ready to have sales conversations. So, I studied and studied, read dozens of books, and turned my weakness into my strength. I became a conversation pig.

What playbooks should I create?

The first playbook that should be developed is a pretty generic playbook. Its purpose is to gain buy-in and adoption of the sales engagement solution from the sales team and sales leaders. I recommend having 4 – 5 call steps, 4 – 5 email steps, and a few additional steps, such as a social media connection request, and perhaps a short Vidyard intro video.

THIS IS A CRITICAL SECTION OF THIS BOOK! THIS HAS BEEN THE BIGGEST CHALLENGE OF SALES ENGAGEMENT TECHNOLOGIES IN THE PAST FIVE YEARS, AND IT IS THE REASON YOU CAN HEAR A PIN DROP WHEN YOU WALK AROUND A TYPICAL SALES FLOOR!

What you’ll find in deploying a simple playbook is that sales reps will ask for persona-based messaging or vertical messaging, and they will also see their call sequence steps


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build up as backlog in short order. Email is easy; point, click, 50 emails go out, which means 50 “sales activities.” As the backlog builds up, this is when you, as a sales leader, should be creating the playbooks that follow—persona based, vertical based, inbound playbooks, and the like. When your reps ask for these playbooks, empower them to build and tune them for the rest of the sales team. Their curiosity and capability earns them the right to build their own and influence the organization in a positive way. But monitor what is built. In most cases, it’s not a good idea to have more than 4 – 5 emails in a sequence, yet you should have 12 – 20 phone attempts. Many reps intuitively flip this relationship of email to phone – don’t let them!

Depending on your sales alignment strategy and coverage model, your second playbook should be pointed towards marketing leads. Whether that is to drive “butts-in-seats” to a webinar, traffic to a booth at a trade show, or better yet, dormant / unqualified leads, progressing quickly to bringing Multi-Channel Sales Acceleration to marketing leads is important. Marketing automation has used sequences / playbooks for a decade or more. For sales, this is a new concept. By collaborating with the marketing department, everyone wins.

After the first and second playbooks are developed, then it’s time to deploy them. In the optimize chapter, you’ll learn about more advanced playbooks including the voice nurture playbook, the VP check-in step, and much more.

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Multi-Channel Sales Acceleration: Deploy the Playbook

Once your first and second playbooks are designed (using the template from the last chapter), and the emails and sequence steps are created within your sales engagement technology, it’s time to deploy the playbooks to your sales teams.

When creating the messaging as to why your sales team should care about this, make sure that you deliver a lot of WIIFM (or “What’s in it for me”) because sales people typically care about one thing—their quota attainment. If you show them how a Multi-Channel Sales Acceleration process, powered by AI, will deliver more meetings, more pipeline, and, most importantly, more bookings, they’ll listen.

Make sure to follow these steps when deploying Multi-Channel Sales Acceleration to your sales team:

Education Gamification Inspectification


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Education – Whether you leverage MindTickle, SalesHood, or another provider, short, frequent, mobile optimized and on-demand training is a must in today’s millennial-heavy workforce. Think “snap-chat” for sales training. Why does this matter? Ever tried it without? How about a 1.5 hour lunch and learn? I’ve seen 0 – 2% adoption rates when using traditional sales training. That’s why I developed The Multi-Channel Sales Acceleration Playbook in MindTickle to give sales professionals the ability to learn on demand, and practice, and receive individualized coaching through the online experience.

Gamification – Now that the team is fully trained on how to do Multi-Channel Sales Acceleration, you’ll see some early adopters, some early majority, and a lot of late majority or even laggards who have a tough time adopting the “new world order.” The way to drive continuous improvement is to gamify the behavior, not the outcomes. The behaviors you can drive—how many leads or contacts are loaded, how many emails are sent, how many customized Vidyard videos are created, how many social touches are sent, and how many conversations are had. Companies like Hoopla have done a great job publically displaying these results via TV monitors. This can also be achieved through dashboards in Salesforce.com, and what I like to do is automate the daily sending of those dashboards to the team. Which leads to the next most important thing when rolling out Multi-Channel Sales Acceleration.

Inspectification – Okay, so inspectification isn’t a word, but it doesn’t mean that it’s not important. You’ve heard the term “if it’s not in SalesForce, it doesn’t exist.” Inspectification means that if you don’t inspect frequently and thoroughly, it won’t happen.

Two examples of inspectification:

1. Daily - Once the dashboard has been rolled out to the sales team, create a recurring calendar invite for yourself and your managers to inspect the sales team’s progress. This must be done daily, but you may be able to move it to weekly over time. Every time I’ve tried to move to weekly, I have experienced “drift” where the managers and reps get focused on other things, and sales activity has a way of being pulled back down to what it started at—which is completely unacceptable. The key is to be crystal clear in the expectations—how many leads or contacts are loaded and how many emails, dials, and social connections are made. If you want a recipe for disaster, don’t be clear.

2. SalesForce dashboards with trend lines – When you track a stock over time, you want to see if it’s going up, going down, or if it’s flat. It’s the same thing with sales activity, pipeline, bookings, and the like. For each of your core key performance indicators (KPIs), track the trend lines over time. It’s hard to refute


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the data. When some reps, managers, or other executives at your company say things like “It seems like demos are going down over time,” or “The pipeline doesn’t seem to be trending in the right direction,” or “I think I can deliver more demos if I don’t have to do so many calls,” you simply print out the trend lines and show the results.

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Multi-Channel Sales Acceleration: Optimize the Playbooks

Deploying an effective playbook can only be done if the “production line” has regular and ongoing inspections and when you benchmark your process versus other companies doing similar things. My mother worked on a manufacturing line in the Midwest when she was young. She would inspect a random sampling of the parts going through the line, and, if she ran into a problem, she pressed a buzzer and stopped the production line. Sales teams need to adopt this strategy, or else they will put out “finished goods” that are of low quality, and, as a result, pipeline will suffer and, ultimately, sales will suffer.

op·ti·mi·za·tion ˌäptəməˈzāSHən,ˌäptəˌmīˈzāSHən/ noun

3. the action of making the best or most effective use of a situation or resource. "companies interested in the optimization of the business"

It’s unlikely that the most optimal playbook will be deployed on day one. Leveraging templates and best practices provided by your sales engagement provider, or a company like ScaleX.ai, are a good idea, but remember that every market is different, every persona is unique, and every situation changes over time. What might get a 5% reply rate today might turn out to be an under-performing playbook for you three years from now, because things change.


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The following Sales Hacks will provide some ideas of things to think about when optimizing your playbooks.

Sales Hack #1: Bring Quality to the Top of the Funnel

Sales Hack #2: The Thirty-Two-Seconds Hack

Sales Hack #3: The Shocking Value Statement

Sales Hack #4: Get Inside the Conversation

Sales Hack #5: The Video Whiteboard or the Vidyard Video

Sales Hack #6: Recycling Unqualified “Nos”

Sales Hack #7: The Instant Response Hack

Sales Hack #8: The Dormant Leads Hack

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Sales Hack #1: Bring Quality to the Top of the Funnel

The manufacturing industry learned decades ago that the best way to impact quality was to bring quality to the front of the process. Errors upstream lead to defects downstream.

So, why in the world has sales not learned from this? Sales leaders all over the world hire entry-level college graduates to have initial conversations with prospects, and then they have another salesperson with a few years of experience talk to the prospect about their business needs.

How do you bring quality to the top of the funnel?

Step 1 Train the sales team to do only very light qualifications up front. Example: Does your company have a sales team? Do you talk to businesses on the phone? How large is your prospect database?

Step 2 When the sales rep books the appointment, have them add a senior leader on every call. Eliminate their bad habits on call one.

Step 3 Enjoy the results of bringing quality to the top of the funnel!

Expected results: the ConnectAndSell sales team made this change and, in June 2015, brought the CEO on 108 sales calls, and signed 47 deals!

Reps who can’t see that quality at the top of the funnel doesn’t help them make more money may not stick around very long. They’re welcome to go spread their lack of quality at your competitor’s business!

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Sales Hack #2: The Thirty-Two-Seconds Hack

In October 2013, ConnectAndSell opened an office in Denver, Colorado, with ten sales reps who used ConnectAndSell to deliver 18,344 dials and 898 conversations in 3.5 business days.

Everyone on the team dialed the same list, had the same phones, and the same manager (me!). And their results were all over the board.

The best sales rep set 14 meetings, then it went to 12, 8, and down from there to where one rep had none!

What we learned is straightforward. Reps who didn’t know how to open a conversation had no chance of booking a meeting!

The opening line we settled on that drove the most conversations was … “I realize I’m an interruption. Do you have thirty-two seconds so I can tell you why I called?” This earned the right to continue in the conversation 94 times out of 100.

Pro-Tip: This opening gambit does not work in all industries and with all personas. For example, in HR, I use, “Hi, this is Chad Burmeister with talentReef, did I catch you at an okay time?” (Some sales coaches recommend, “Did I catch you at a bad time?” If you like it, try it.)

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Sales Hack #3: The Shocking Value Statement

Once your sales rep gains the attention and the right to share why they called, do they have a two-sentence pitch that clearly articulates why they should talk to you?

Try these on for size, and then think about what you should say about your company in the first thirty-two seconds.

“[Name], what ConnectAndSell does is takes the problem of getting business people on the phone and makes it go away. Your rep simply picks a list of prospects, dials into a phone bridge, clicks GO, and talks to a prospect on your list in a few minutes.”

OR

“I’m calling to introduce you to a way that your SDRs can have fifty conversations per day—instead of making fifty dials per day—using the same technology that I just used to get you on the phone.”

What is your shocking value statement? If it’s feature based or non-compelling, then why would a prospect take a call? Keep it simple. Write two sentences for your sales team and then make sure they use it … over and over again.

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Sales Hack #4: Get Inside the Conversation

Here is the tale of a sales team calling on the SAME pool of leads.

Ten reps, 3.5 business days, 18,344 dial attempts, 898 conversations, 64 meetings booked before getting “inside the conversation.”

The outcomes realized by the team

#1 Rep – 14 meetings booked



After that, the meeting count tapered off from 5, 4, 4, 3, 3, 1, to 0.

After listening to the recordings, it was determined that the rep who got 0 just wasn’t going to make it. Time to cut bait.

The rest of the team was given two options: learn pitch number one by rep #1, or learn pitch number two by rep #2. Within a few days, a rep resigned and said, “I don’t want to be a robot.” This was the rep who booked just one meeting in 78 conversations!

After getting inside the conversation, the result was that we shed two under-performers, and the rest of the team went from converting 4% of their conversations into meetings to converting 12%!


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If there are any doubts, just check the Outbound Index report by the Bridge Group. You’ll find that the average company scored 42 in September of 2013. ConnectAndSell focused on a list of 983 funded companies in one quarter, called three contacts per company 22 times, and created 342 opportunities for a score of 383! It was an 814% better result than the industry average.

So, you can keep doing things the way you have and get the same average results, or you can use this Sales Hack, multiply your quantity times quality and drive more opportunities than you could ever dream of.

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Sales Hack #5: The Video Whiteboard or the Vidyard Video

Webinars take time and money to execute and quite often generate a wide audience with some influencers and a few decision makers.

This can easily be seen in the webinar statistics showing that only 42% of those who sign up actually show up to the webinars. As a former WebEx and then ON24 sales leader, I’ve participated in hundreds of webinars and, truth be told, I multi-task. In most cases, they are simply too long, not compelling and they lack quality!

Introducing Inside Sales Hack #5, the Video Whiteboard

What you can do with these video whiteboards in sixty seconds can provide more value (and more leads) than a webinar! I’m a VP of Sales. When I see these videos and “get it,” I schedule a meeting. I rarely attend webinars anymore.

Why do they work?

1. They are short and pack a punch with a compelling value proposition (when done right).

2. Google AdWords video ads can follow your prospects around to different sites and persistently show up.

3. They appeal to the midbrain due to the constant movement in the video whiteboard – the same reason we all get hooked on video.


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4. The primary purpose of the video is to get someone to click it! The content is secondary. Once clicked, your sales professionals are notified and they call the prospect – immediately, while they are still engaged.

Check out www.sparkol.com and www.rawshorts.com.

Since discovering this sales hack a few years ago, I’ve become a huge fan of the Vidyard Chrome Extension. This simple technology enables a sales professional to record their screen with their webcam image in the lower left corner. In 60 – 90 seconds, a sales professional can share their screen, record an insight (or two) about the prospect, and then share what could be improved by checking out their product or solution.

By including these at the beginning of a playbook, I find that the sales rep can research once, re-use the same research until a conversation is had with the prospect, and follow up on conversations with a quick, hyper-personalized video that will be opened, watched and clicked.

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Sales Hack #6: Recycling Unqualified Nos

Contributed by: Kyle Weiger

“Hey, Bob. Kyle from ConnectAndSell here. I realize I’m an interruption. Do you have twenty-seven seconds, so I can tell you why I called?”

Click.

Did that guy seriously just hang up on me? Doesn’t he know how important I am? Doesn’t he know that he’s my perfect prospect?

Here’s the deal: YOUR PROSPECTS ARE NOT SITTING AROUND WAITING FOR YOUR CALL.

When you get hung up on, you have come to a fork in the road and you should choose wisely. You can mark them as “not interested – disqualified,” but that is not a very skillful position to take.

Think about it. The prospect never heard your value prop. They don’t know what you do or how you can help them. Their hang-up is more of a “not right now,” rather than a straight up “no.”

I can tell you first-hand that I have booked meetings that led to closed business dealings from the following sales hack.

When someone hangs up on me before I get the value prop out, I schedule a call back for a week later (let them forget about you) and, when they inevitably pick up the phone


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again, I say, “Hey, Bob. Kyle at ConnectAndSell here. I caught you at an awkward time back on the fourteenth. Is now an okay time to chat, so I can tell you why I’m trying to get hold of you?”

Oh, shoot. I don’t remember this guy, and he’s calling me again because of something I said … okay, I’ll give him a minute.

Think about any time you’ve hung up on someone. Do you remember their name? Do you remember the company they’re with? No. 100%, positively, unequivocally, NO.

They’re an afterthought, at best.

So, as a salesperson, play to this short-term memory loss.

Again, I’m not telling you this as theory, as my own hypothesis, or as a cute idea. This is my practice that I put into place every day on the phones, and it works.

If they’re the right title, at the right kind of company, don’t let them off the hook simply because they were brash enough to hang up on you. If anything, the hang up means they are busy enough to be important, so CALL THEM BACK.

Sell well friends.

Contributed by: Kyle Weiger – Owner/Founder of Reflexion Yoga, and former Senior Account Executive at ConnectAndSell

Kyle Weiger’s entrepreneurial and mindset of abundance make him a great sales hack. (https://reflexionyoga.com)

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Sales Hack #7: The Instant Response Hack

Imagine that you are a “mid-market” or “enterprise” company, with forty sales development reps who are responsible for generating leads for sales. On average, the SDR team generates between twenty to thirty meetings per month. Peeling back the data, you discover that over 70% of the meetings come from INBOUND marketing leads and a mere 30% of the meetings come from outbound. This is where things got exciting in 2015 with the advent of ConnectAndSell’s “InstantResponse” capability, which can be implemented as a managed service, or in-house, achieving the same or better results with a much smaller sales development rep team.

Check it out ….

In-house sales development rep team (40 reps @ 50 dials/day)

40 in-house sales development representatives @ $60,000/year = $2,400,000/year

4 managers @ $140,000/year = $560,000/year

1 director @ $200,000/year = $200,000/year

Other misc. costs (technology, HR, benefits, office space) = $1,264,000/year

Total: $4,424,000

* * *


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In-house sales development rep team (2 reps @ 1,000 dials/day, powered by ConnectAndSell w/Instant Response)

This model assumes in-house lead gen reps using ConnectAndSell Lightning

2 in-house sales development representatives @ $60,000/year = $120,000/year

0 managers @ $140,000/year = $0 (ConnectAndSell provides remote management)

0 directors @ $200,000/year = $0/year

Other misc. costs (technology, HR, benefits, office space) = $48,000/year

Cost of ConnectAndSell for 2,000 dials/day = $375,000/year

Total: $543,000/year ($3,881,000 savings/year)

* * *

In-house sales development rep team (0 in-house SDRs, 100% powered by ConnectAndSell OutboundOnDemand w/Instant Response)

This model assumes ConnectAndSell OutboundOnDemand lead gen reps using ConnectAndSell Lightning

0 in-house sales development representatives @ $60,000/year = $0/year

0 managers @ $140,000/year = $0 (ConnectAndSell provides remote management)

0 directors @ $200,000/year = $0/year

Other misc. costs (technology, HR, benefits, office space) = $0/year

Cost of ConnectAndSell for 2,000 dials/day = $625,000/year

Total: $625,000

* * *

Benefits of ConnectAndSell Instant Response

• Majority of leads called in < 5 minutes (after-hours leads get queued up, and they are called first thing in the morning)


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• Leads get called multiple times with automated persistence

• 40 headcount no longer required to drive 2,000 dials/day

• Full transparency to all activities through integration with CRM

• Remote management/monitoring of the entire process insuring the best possible outcomes

Having deployed nearly fifty customers over two quarters, the trend is for companies to either convert their in-house sales development reps to SDRs powered by ConnectAndSell Lightning (with InstantResponse) OR to leverage ConnectAndSell OutboundOnDemand (with InstantResponse), and upgrade their SDR program to quota-carrying inside sales representatives.

Building and maintaining an SDR team took a lot of time and money. And building the team to the highest levels of efficiency was nearly impossible.

Until now …. ConnectAndSell OutboundOnDemand guarantees the highest level of efficiency on the market today, and ConnectAndSell Lightning, with InstantResponse, gives companies the tools to build the highest level of efficiency in-house. Check out the ConnectAndSell Top 100 Report comparing the Top 100 Power Users of ConnectAndSell to the ConnectAndSell OutboundOnDemand Team.

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Sales Hack #8: The Dormant Leads Hack

Of all the sales hacks posted to date, this is perhaps the biggest of them all, especially for companies that have generated hundreds or thousands of leads, passed them on to sales, and then seen sales send them back to marketing.

This hack, otherwise known as the “unmatched socks” hack, is credited to Chris Beall, CEO of ConnectAndSell. After launching a ConnectAndSell OutboundOnDemand campaign with RingCentral, Chris noticed that the number of meetings generated was better than any other campaign launched so far, for any customer. In fact, in just one day, in 987 dials, Josh Parnes, an OutboundOnDemand ISR, generated 33 meetings by calling these “dormant leads” on behalf of RingCentral.

The discovery – Marketing manufactures leads, marketing passes leads to sales, sales attempts to call the leads using manual phone dialing, e-mails, and sometimes social media. Prospects respond to the sales attempts less than 9% of the time (or less than 23%, depending on whom you ask).

This leaves a “pile of unmatched socks” that marketing manufactured and sales hasn’t talked to. The great thing about these leads is that they are usually intrinsically qualified to be a buyer of your solution, and the second good piece of news is that they quite often don’t buy due to “no decision,” which means, this pile of unmatched socks is one of the best sources of leads that you can call into.


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Here’s the sales hack:

1. Identify these dormant leads or unmatched socks—usually, these are inbound pricing requests, or “request a sales call,” and can even be “whitepaper down-loads,” depending on the size of the list you’re after, and the conversion metrics you’re after. Don’t be afraid to go back in time to include leads from the past couple of years (yes, years!).

2. Accelerate your ability to reach out to these leads. Whether you bring an advanced sales acceleration technology like ConnectAndSell in-house, or you use ConnectAndSell through ConnectAndSell OutboundOnDemand Managed Service, sales has proven that they can only reach 9 – 23% of the marketing-qualified leads (MQLs) using manual techniques. By enabling sales with advanced sales acceleration OR having a managed service company call these leads, incredible results can be achieved. For example, a high-growth CRM / marketing automation vendor in Arizona saw 59 meetings scheduled, and 4 closed/won deals, as a result of using ConnectAndSell OutboundOnDemand to call 2,000 of these leads. The stats: 10,000 dials, 555 conversations, 59 meetings, 4 closed deals.

3. Repeat, repeat, repeat – Once you know that your company’s marketing lead program is generating these dormant leads, determine where all of them are currently. Then go back 90 days, 180 days, even 2 years and use advanced sales acceleration technology to call them all – several times. Depending on the value of a customer, clients will make 5 attempts, 10 attempts, even 50 attempts to every single dormant lead (a partner like ScaleX.ai can help you determine how many attempts based on your own metrics).

4. Re-build – The final questions to answer, once you know the conversion metrics for these dormant leads, is “How did this happen in the first place?” and “What if we called our leads back in less than five minutes, and had a 65% or greater conversation coverage against all marketing leads?” ANSWER: It varies. In the book, Zero Time Selling, by Andy Paul, he talks about the strategy of getting as close to zero minutes response time as possible.

The dormant leads hack has been around for a long time. Several years ago, I personally used ConnectAndSell at ON24 to call 1,398 dormant leads. The good news—many of them had been qualified properly by the sales team (kudos to me, right?). The bad news—I uncovered and closed four opportunities in the last week of the quarter, simply by reaching out to these dormant leads again.


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Whether your company generates 500 dormant leads/year, 5,000, or 500,000, give the dormant lead sales hack a try.

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Multi-Channel Sales Acceleration: Scale

By now, you’ve completed D2O/T + S (develop, deploy, and optimize over time). What’s next? Now it’s time to scale. Consider the HR SaaS company case study: what did we learn from their deployment of Multi-Channel Sales Acceleration?

Sales Activities Demos Pipeline Bookings

July 16,486 87 $814,174 $200,403

August 35,055 118 $847,998 $176,626

September 63,927 129 $1,252,027 $270,102

October 100,108 136 $1,477,457 $331,522

November* 53,535 97 $925,058 $221,779

Answer: By adding another column to the worksheet, we learn that at 4,767 sales activities per sales person in October, it took 736 sales activities to book a demo, and there were 136 demos booked, the most all year. The next month, when the team said they could schedule more demos with less activities, the ratio of activities to demo


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improved, but the demos decreased by 28.6%, which led to a decrease in bookings of 33%. The age-old phrase “it’s a numbers game” still holds true today.

Sales Activities Demos Sales Activity to

Demo Ratio

July 16,486 87 189

August 35,055 118 297

September 63,927 129 495

October 100,108 136 736

November 53,535 97 551

Total 215,576 470 458

Sales Activities

Sales Reps

Sales Activities

per Rep/month

Bookings

July 16,486 21 785/month $200,403

August 35,055 21 1,669/month $176,626

September 63,927 21 3,044/month $270,102

October 100,108 21 4,767/month $331,522

November 53,535 20 2,676/month $221,779

The purpose of this analysis is to determine the maximum number of sales activities per month per rep is optimal. In this case, after October was completed, several reps and the sales leaders said that 350 sales activities/day was taking away from their ability to personalize their messaging, and they felt it could lead to a negative impact on demos set


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and bookings. This is when we made an adjustment to do more personalization on the first step of contact loaded into a playbook, to allow for more time to personalize.

However, the team, and the managers of the team, took personalization too far and delivered just 53% of the targeted activities for the month.

Sales strategy according to Faiza Hughell (VP of Sales at RingCentral): When I shared these results with Faiza, she said, why not A/B test one team with the activity and one team without?

Great input Faiza! Take note, Faiza has been A/B testing her way to a nearly $4B valuation at RingCentral, and knows a thing or two about high-velocity inside sales teams.

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Multi-Channel Sales Acceleration: Powered by Artificial Intelligence (Just add AI)

Everything up to this page in the playbook can be done using a combination of Outreach, ConnectAndSell, and data. This chapter introduces one of the most controversial topics in sales today—artificial intelligence, or AI.

Blogs have been written by sales thought leaders suggesting that bots should be taxed as if they were human beings, and others say there is no way that a bot can execute a complex sale. That is not the argument and, in fact, there is no such argument.

What you are about to read is how I used the most basic form of artificial intelligence to increase sales outcomes 3X by my sales team.

The following are actual quotes from sales professionals who have worked for me over the past few years:

• “I’m not good at cold calling, I need to do research before I am comfortable talking to someone on the phone.”

• “ConnectAndSell helps me put activity on the board, but I rarely book a meeting that way.”

• “Sales Engagement technology is great for personalization, but I book most of my meetings through emails sent directly from Outlook.”

* * *


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The following are quotes from sales professionals after artificial intelligence:

“I just booked a meeting with a McDonald’s franchise. First meeting I booked through Outreach plus ConnectAndSell.”

“I regularly have 100 sales calls due on a daily basis, and I used to skip them all to progress the lead to the next stage of the sequence. With ConnectAndSell/Outreach integration, now I don’t have to.”

When I asked a sales professional what was different about the combined solution, he said

“The Director of Operations is not someone I would normally reach out to. I sent an email to 50 companies in Atlanta sharing how a recent customer saw 1,000 candidates from talentReef. Then I called all the contacts. That’s how I booked a meeting using Outreach plus ConnectAndSell.”

Pro-Tip: What was different about Outreach + ConnectAndSell?

1) Personalization at scale - The sequence that the rep used was “contextual” or “mono-thematic.” When this rep created a sequence telling his prospects how a recent customer saw success in the solution, he was excited to talk to people about it.

2) Organization – By their very nature, sales reps aren’t as organized as a project manager or an IT professional. They have a lot of things going on upstairs when they’re thinking on their feet! By starting with a sequence in Outreach, when they make calls into that sequence they know the purpose of the call, eliminating a problem that plagued many sales teams when they used ConnectAndSell standalone.

“This morning, I had roughly $9,000 fall out of my pipeline for this month, and I felt worried about how my month would ultimately turn out as a result. I spent the day from here working on what I would consider "warm leads" from conventions and such to backfill this amount. Toward the end of my day, I figured I had better get the ConnectAndSell + Outreach integration working so I could use it tomorrow. As I had some time, I decided to start my task list. After about one minute of calling, on call number 7, Sam R picked up. We proceeded to talk for 15 minutes about the solution and the need for his business. By the end of the call, we had set a demonstration up for 8:00 a.m. the next day! The value of this business was roughly $8,000 of the $9,000 I had lost! From here on out, I’m a true believer. This works!”


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The benefits of bringing AI to the Multi-Channel Sales Acceleration playbook

1. Now you can hire sales professionals, not email marketers - Sales professionals should be hired to be sales professionals, not data gathers, or researchers, or email marketers, yet that’s what many “sales teams” have become. Bringing AI to the playbook allows sales leaders to hire sellers. (Pro tip: you shouldn’t settle for second-rate marketers once you move to AI selling. When you add acceleration plus AI, if you hire bad sellers, you accelerate suck.)

2. Match the right message with the right persona, vertical, product fit – Let’s face it, even a seasoned vice president of sales has a hard time mapping the right message with the right buyer. Now imagine being a millennial with no business experience and being asked to map the right message to the right buyer. Forget it! Artificial intelligence helps with matching the right message with the right prospect.

Bruce Lewolt, co-founder of JoyIsJoy, spoke at Sales 3.0 in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, with Chris Beall, CEO of ConnectAndSell on December 4, 2017, and showed the sales leaders at the conference the value of matching sellers with a given sales personality to buyers with a similar personality/profile. The results were staggering – 500% increase in conversion from conversation to meeting. Bruce said, “It’s like having a conversation with myself all day.”

* * *

Lessons learned from a CEO who became an SDR for two months (think “under-cover boss” but not under-cover)

Adam Schoenfeld set out on a mission to become SDR and posted his findings from November to December 2017.

The post can be found here: https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/from-ceo-sdr-adam-schoenfeld/


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I decided to get a little weird in hopes of learning.

Siftrock has a good model for demand gen and inbound, but we wanted a new channel for 2018.

My gut: Outbound could work for us.

But, I really didn't know much about the details, so I was hesitant to hire an SDR and start investing heavily. I was part of building and growing an SDR (prospecting) and ADR (qualifying) team in my last CEO job, but I'll admit that I wasn't in the weeds enough. I didn't totally understand the process. And, the world has changed a ton in the last 5 years.

So for Q4, I'm playing the role of SDR. I'll put aside 1/2 my CEO duties and be the sole SDR at Siftrock. I'm a novice on outbound and I want to learn the process deeply.


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Along the way I'm sharing my learnings in this post. Check back here if you want to see my experience and take-aways.

7 Days Before: The Idea Before I started, I floated this idea on LinkedIn.

It turns out this wasn't totally novel. Manny Medina was the first SDR at Outreach while CEO. Tons of people left nice comments to encourage this idea. Also some people thought I was a total fool and the idea was crap. Good sign: Nobody was luke warm :)

Day 7: How I Botched My First Appointment

Here's the play-by-play on how I botched the very first positive reply.

7 days into actual prospecting, this was an "oh crap" moment. Take away: Figure out the hand-off before you start prospecting! There are so many little gotchas I'm learning as an interim SDR.

Day 11: I Couldn't Avoid INDEX/MATCH - Ops & Enablement Wanted

What I learned about ops and enablement in outbound.

Part of me thought I could just hire an SDR, give them some tools, and then magic would "happen." That now seems like a terrible idea. The marketing/sales ops requirements to


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enable outbound is no joke. I spent nearly 2 weeks mired in data prep and process definition. There is no lack of great tools. The hard part for me was getting everything together and presenting it in my action system (Outreach.io). And, the stakes just feel higher. If I'm interrupting someone, I want to be confident that I have accurate and complete data. Personalization is only good if it's the right information.

Day 14: Personalization vs. Automation

Either real personalization is key, or I suck at automation.

My early experience has me betting that real personalization is the right approach for my business. Here are the VERY EARLY metrics on two approaches.

1. Real personalization. Hands on the keyboard to research and send cold email.

• 59 prospects. 80% opened —> 34% clicked —> 29% replied

2. Tailored automation. Automated sequences with tokens and segmentation.


One important piece of context to this conclusion: I have a very focused TAM. I have some limit on volume that is possible. Therefore, I'm valuing higher engagement rates in my outbound investment. For companies that have giant TAMs, the conclusion could be very different.

Day 20: Why I Can't Open with Harry Potter or College Football

How can I personalize without being phony?

I don't ask this question rhetorically. I'm very interested to learn how people do this effectively. I've often got stuck on this question while running through my prospecting tasks as interim SDR. What I know so far: It takes a ton of patience to find something that can be both relevant for the prospect and delivered authentically. And, it seems to matter a lot.

It’s easy to sit on the sidelines and tell SDRs that they should be able to write great personalization for every prospect AND generate tons of activity. You can find everyone’s Twitter and Facebook... the internet will tell you what they like... You have


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Google and LinkedIn! But, even when that information about the prospect is obvious, it doesn't mean it can be used effectively by the SDR.

Some of the comments are exceptional

Dan Morris Hey Adam, this was a really great read. As a consultant to companies building out sales teams I get to address this regularly. I think you described it perfectly with "Interrupting someone + bad info = brand destruction." Also you're not alone with the thought you had about just adding people, giving them tools and expecting magic, I see it all the time!. I'm looking forward to reading your next update. Good luck!

Manny Medina This is priceless! I wish more CEO's and sales leaders would come to this realization. You guys should exchange notes with Ben Salzman they are personalizing outreach at very large scale.

Ryan Schertzer Chad Burmeister and I were just discussing some of this the other day (combining Outreach and ConnectAndSell). The mix of tech solutions seemingly knows no end. Combining these tools with data solutions like DiscoverOrg/RainKing and Sales Navigator only introduces new problems like getting that data into Salesforce consistently and comprehensively. Ultimately, I look for tools that eliminate time wasters and get us doing more of the things that will build pipeline. It's a simple litmus test, but critical. A good toolset should empower a rep in the same way that a good comp plan incentivizes one - it drives the right behavior.


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What can one take away from this under-cover boss turned sales development representative (SDR) experience?

Personalization matters. Not cheesy “wanna-be” personalization but real personalization, as Adam calls it. The difference in real personalization versus “tailored” automation is 4X (414% higher response to real personalization over tailored automation).

1. Real personalization. Hands on the keyboard to research and send cold email.



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2. Tailored automation. Automated sequences with tokens and segmentation.


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Multi-Channel Sales Acceleration: The Challenge of Real Personalization

The challenge of real personalization is that it traditionally takes considerable time to get a 29% response rate to 59 prospects, until artificial intelligence is injected into the process.

In Q4, 2017, I set out to gather as much information as possible about “AI for sales” by sending a connection request through LinkedIn to CEOs, founders, and VPs of sales of software companies. Through LinkedIn I approached nearly 750 people with this message:

[Name], looking to connect with you around your membership in a LinkedIn Group focused on artificial intelligence. I'm intrigued by this space, and I would appreciate connecting if you have any insights into how to use AI for sales professionals. Thanks, Chad

The responses were amazing. There was a mix of “You have the wrong person” to “My company does exactly what you need” and more. Here are some of the replies:

• Chad, looks like we have a lot of people in common. Happy to help in any way I can. Bob

• Chad. Happy to connect and chat. I'm flexible most of next week, so let me know what works for you. Cheers!

• Hi Chad, I'm happy to connect. It's an amazing new field opening up that should change most aspects of sales. I'm happy to catch up any time.


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• Chad, take a look at Nimeyo.com - I am an advisor for Nimeyo. We have several leading tech companies as customers. Nimeyo provides precise enterprise insights using AI/NLP technologies in the context of the existing tools like email and SFDC, etc.

• Hi Chad, thanks for connecting. Would be glad to set up a time to chat about what our customers are doing. Please drop me a note at [e-mail address] with your availability for next week. Have a great Thanksgiving.

• Have a look at Conversica: https://youtu.be/i_Y1JD_VJvs

• And their competitors: https://datafox.com/competitors/ava-ai

• Hello Chad, Thanks for reaching out. With the natural language recognition, the entire sales process can be automated. There are also many other ways to use AI to evaluate sales metrics, trends, and so forth. It is mostly in a research phase but, pretty soon, we will see some commercial use of these applications.

Berk Cagatay, Co-Founder and CEO of WhatTuDu & Pikorua Technologies

• Hello Chad, Thanks for your interest in connecting with me! To be honest, I can't say that AI on sales is a big thing now; there are a lot of misunderstandings about AI. I know some platforms or chatbots that can help to automatize processes, but again there is no AI inside, maybe some kind of NLP. Let me know if you are interested and I can send you interesting links. Best, Dave.

• Hi Chad, How are you these days? I'm doing some unique account targeting campaigns for my clients and would love to share with you and see if you need help getting face time with prospects or customers. So far, we are at a closed sale rate of 42% - not bad in my eyes :-) Do you have time to talk?

• Hi Chad - happy to connect! Our strength is analysis of sequences of events and we have a solution that predicts which sales opportunities are won/lost really early in the sales process (over 90% accuracy within 30 – 40% of the progress of the opportunity). It is also connected to prescriptive actions for how to improve close rate when things are going downhill. There are a bunch of other applica-tions too. Happy to discuss if this seems to be of interest. Best, Peter

• We are a group of data scientists – about 250 data scientists and data engineers. We are helping our clients to build Real-Time Intelligent Big Data based prod-ucts and solutions. Data Monsters has a solid track record of 100 projects,


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honored to work with Fortune-500 companies such as Cisco, LeapFrog, Intel. Our team had invested 250 man-years in mastering Scala, Spark, Hadoop, Mesos, and other technologies. Would you be interested to meet with us and discuss your ideas? Our website is www.datamonsters.com.

• Hi Chad, happy to help. We do have customers using A.I. for sales prospecting. Happy to set up a time to chat in more detail: email me at [e-mail address]. Greg

• I like this article from HubSpot: https://blog.hubspot.com/sales/targeted-sales-prospecting-guide

• You're welcome to join our upcoming AI session at Google event, check it here: OneTraction.vc / Venture Summit Thanks Chad

• Hi Chad! I'd be happy to discuss with you AI strategies for targeting and/or optimization. Interestingly, it seems that you do sales in an industry that is extremely similar to mine, so I look forward to discussing the market with you. Full disclosure, I do not claim to be a marketing expert, but I have written several custom algorithms for marketing and/or sales problems. How would you like to proceed? Have a great day.

• Sounds like you may be looking into automating lead generation

You could pull in all data from multiple sources (social networks, news articles, data exchanges, funnel events), normalize the data, create and train an ML model that would predict a single rank (e.g. days to close), then rank leads based on that single number

The reason why I sent the article is that it outlines steps in the process, and each step could potentially be automated.

I think before you apply any AI, you may want to think about tracking metrics and identifying bottlenecks. If it turns out that you can't fill your funnel fast enough, then lead generation is probably your priority. If you have many leads, but not as many sales, then maybe you want to focus on quality of leads. AI is many things (classification, prediction, recognition, etc.), so you need to apply it selectively.

Dmitri Bouianov, Augmented, Virtual and Mixed Reality Development

expert and self-proclaimed “Rocket Alien”


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• Hi, Chad I am just learning about sales. So, think about the tasks in sales. How do "you" make decisions when faced with these tasks, which data sources do you use, which tasks do you do most often, which tasks are boring/repetitive, for which tasks it is easiest to collect data, for which tasks it makes a huge difference to decide/act faster or better. If you can answer these, then I could give some insights. Thanks. Zehra

* * *

Pro-Tip! This is exactly what occurred in the early 2000s with the move to business process outsourcing (or BPO). Zehra is exactly right about AI to “focus on those tasks that are boring/repetitive,” and “which tasks it is easiest to collect data,” and “which tasks it makes a huge difference to decide/act faster or better.” Perhaps this new space should be called business process AI?

As Dmitri Bouianov, self-proclaimed “Rocket Alien,” pointed out, let’s examine the bottlenecks of an outbound sales process:

1. Company research – this takes reps 5 – 10 minutes before each outreach, and it is done over and over again due to a failure to capture the research in a meaningful way.

2. Tech stack research – until now, it was virtually impossible to know which technology companies were using. It took weeks, months, or even years to figure this out by asking the prospect.

3. Personalization takes time – once the data is collected, formulating it in a way that encourages opens, clicks, and replies in email (and creates a positive conver-sation by phone), is often reserved for the best of the best. You are either a great emailer and “don’t like to cold call” or your grammar is poor and you prefer talking to people. Either way, bottlenecks occur.

4. Navigating gatekeepers and phone trees take an average sales professional one hour to navigate 10 gatekeepers, and the likelihood of talking to even one prospect is low. That’s because it now takes 20 – 50 dial attempts to talk to a prospect on a list.


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Consider the following tasks that are boring/repetitive, easy to collect data, and make a huge difference to decide/act faster or better:

• Company Research o Finding out if a company is using a competitor

o Mapping the appropriate “talk track” or email sequence to that specific competitor

• Tech Stack Research o Solutions like DiscoverOrg and HG Data make information about the

technology that your prospects have deployed simple. By mapping this information to your targeted accounts (or a list of leads), you enable the sales professional to act on the information, and they don’t have to invest countless hours doing mind-numbing research.

• Automated Personalization o If the company research can be automated and the tech stack research can be

automated, the next step is automating the creation of the first personalized outreach in a sequence leveraging that information.

• Navigating gate keepers and phone trees o Solutions like ConnectAndSell eliminate 94% of the wasted time by sellers

who navigate switchboards and talk to gatekeepers. It’s an incredible waste of time that can be taken back to allow sales to do what sales should do – talk to prospects.

By coupling the tasks that are boring/repetitive, easy to collect data, and make a huge difference to decide/act faster or better, one can finally get to personalization at scale.

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Multi-Channel Sales Acceleration: The Next Chapters

The future of artificial intelligence in sales will be completely disruptive. As this reply to my LinkedIn connection request clearly articulates here … “the entire sales process can be automated.”

Hello Chad, Thanks for reaching out. With the natural language recognition, the entire sales process can be automated. There are also many other ways to use AI to evaluate sales metrics, trends, and so forth. It is mostly in a research phase but, pretty soon, we will see some commercial uses of these applications.

Is this an overstatement of what’s really going to happen? ANSWER: NO! There are so many software solutions that can be purchased online where there is no need to talk to a salesperson if you don’t want to.

Consider Drift or Intercom.io, chat solutions for your website. No dialogue with a salesperson required, yet they sell a lot of software!

If you were born in the 70s or 80s, you’ve seen Terminator 3, the Rise of the Machines. It’s coming soon to a sales team near you. The new sales professionals may not look like Arnold Schwarzenegger on the outside (or like the robots on the cover of this book), but make no mistake, this type of sales process automation is here, and it’s going to cause companies to up-level their sales people to sales professionals. The men and women of sales who can function in this new world will move 10X faster, 10X smarter, and sell more than they ever have before.


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Consider how this starts and where it ends. In the mid-2000s, inside sales became a popular role for companies. Rather than pay a field sales person $250,000 plus a solutions engineer $150,000 ($400,000 all-in), why not staff an inside sales team of five people for the same cost to drive more sales activity, more pipeline, more demos, and more bookings?

The traditional “line in the sand” for a quota-carrying inside sales team was an ARR that would account for 10 – 20% of the sales, but 70 – 80% of the total transactions. The value proposition was sell more deals, for less money, while freeing up the field sales team to focus on bigger deals and grow revenues.

The next chapters of professional selling

1. The inside sales team will shrink by 30 – 50% while delivering the same amount of bookings.

2. The sales development representative (SDR) and business development representative (BDR) jobs will be decimated, in favor of a quota carrying inside sales professional who can do more with less, powered by technology.

3. The true sales professionals, leveraging by Multi-Channel Sales Acceleration and powered by artificial intelligence, win big.

The inside sales team will shrink by 30 – 50% while delivering the same amount of bookings.

This happened in the mid-2000s with the introduction of business process outsourcing (BPO) to sales. By introducing offshore chat and tele-sales in countries like the Philippines and India, companies hired highly educated AEs, SDRs, and BDRs (many with MBAs) for $8,000 – $12,000 per year, compared to their U.S.-based peers who fetched between $45,000 – $120,000 per year.

Example – just read the ConnectAndSell case study on how they use their own technology to empower each of their sales professionals to do the work of 3 – 5 sales professionals—or the case study in this book, where a team increased sales activity by 5X and bookings by 2X with a team one-third smaller.

The sales development representative (SDR) and business development representative (BDR) jobs will be decimated, in favor of a quota carrying inside sales professional who can do more with less, powered by technology.

In the next chapter of sales development, even the BPO providers can’t keep up with artificial intelligence.


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Example – when I ran worldwide sales development for a well-known public voice-over IP company, we had a team of 10 – 12 chat reps in Manilla. With 30 – 50% annual turnover, the manager of the team was constantly training new SDRs how best to use chat to convert website visitors to meetings, and ultimately bookings. Whenever staff would turnover, the level of misspellings and typos from the chat templates was incredible. However, companies like Intercom.io, Omniquo and [24]7 (www.247.ai) take this problem and make it go away, which will lead to the best possible conversions from visitor to opportunity ever.

* * *

The true sales professionals, leveraging by Multi-Channel Sales Acceleration and powered by artificial intelligence, win big.

This is how they will stay relevant …

Townsend Wardlaw, speaker, consultant, and demand creation architect, made a shocking prediction in one of his LinkedIn posts in Q4/2017:

This week I have been sharing that 2/3 of B2B salespeople will be need to find another career within five years.

I am doing this because this dystopian future scares the hell out of me.

For 30+ years, sales has been both my career and my passion.

More importantly, sales represents a career where someone of average education and intelligence can earn an above average income.

While no official statistics exist, it is estimated 8 million (or so) people derive their income from B2B sales This means FIVE MILLION salespeople could be displaced.

Where will they go?

Arguing about whether 2/3 is the right number or wrong number only wastes time you could be using to answer two important questions:

1. What will increase your chances of having a chair when the music stops? and ...

2. What should you be preparing to do next if you don't? To be honest, I don’t have a good answer for #2 but I CAN share what I believe you need to be doing now to give you the best shot.


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Tomorrow I will share the ONE skill you need to master if you want that chair.

What is the ONE skill you need?

Over the past weeks, I've shared why 2/3 of B2B salespeople will be need to find another career within five years.

The question is: What will it take to be part of remaining 1/3? Look up ‘fungible’ and you’ll find it means “easily replaced or interchangeable.”

Most aspects of the salesperson role are fungible in that they can be automated or provided by cheaper (and outsourced) labor as well as automated or AI enabled.

In his groundbreaking 1996 article ‘What is Strategy’ Michael Porter introduced the concept of a Sustainable Competitive Advantage.

This refers to the interconnected set of activities which allow companies (or people) to command a premium over time for their goods & services in the face of competition.

As I’ve alluded, survival comes down to identifying where salespeople add significant and ‘sustainable’ value.

Porter would suggest we identify ACTIVITIES salespeople master to avoid replacement. Unfortunately, isolating sales ACTIVITIES that deliver sustainable value is difficult (maybe impossible.)

As such, we must look to an ATTRIBUTE that can never be outsourced or automated. This ATTRIBUTE is empathy.

(Defined as the ability to understand and share the feelings of another.)

Tomorrow, I'll share why empathy is the key to YOUR future in sales.

Why is empathy the most powerful source of sustainable competitive advantage?

In my last post I shared how empathy was the attribute that will determine whether or not you will have a career in sales five years from now.

EVERYTHING ELSE salespeople do today can be being outsourced or automated or commoditized.

Prospects share themselves with those they trust and see as credible.

All others might get the opportunity to bid against ‘requirements.’


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Credibility comes from knowledge about what THEY care about NOT from knowledge about our products or services.

Trust is earned through consistently demonstrating care for THEM and a commitment to placing THEIR interests ahead of our own.

Credibility and trust cannot be maintained without empathy. Empathy is not an action or behavior itself but represents the actions and behaviors which allow us to ‘see the world through their eyes.’

Empathy can’t be faked (sustainably) and is impossible to automate... it can only be performed by a human.

As such, it represents a powerful source of sustainable competitive differentiation.

Multi-Channel Sales Acceleration:

BONUS Sales Hacks

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scaleX.ai Bonus Sales Hack #1: The Math of Personalization at Scale,

Powered by Artificial Intelligence

Contributed by: Evan Jay Kesner

As a mathematical-minded business development professional, I’ve always been enamored with the impact of simple math in business growth. In this short chapter, you’ll learn how to drive costs down from $7 – $12 per sales activity to $1 – $2 per personalized sales activity.

Why should you care about driving personalization at scale?

Before ScaleX, a team of 11 sales reps created 44 opportunities in September and 50 in October. Enter ScaleX. In November, ScaleX delivered 12,567 sales activities and our one BDR resource created 44 opportunities. Our client’s best BDR “Luke” upped his game and started using some of the same techniques and tech stack. Luke just had his first child. Luke was thrilled that he had his best month with 33 opportunities created. His previous record of was 18 shattered and nearly doubled.


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2.34X Business Meetings in ScaleX.ai Month One (Started October 26th)!

OWNER AT FIRST MEETING

SEP 2017 OCT 2017 NOV 2017

Totals 44 50 110

Rep 1 6 1 —

Evan J. Kesner — 3 44

Rep 2 — 2 4

Rep 3 — 1 —

Rep 4 (moved on) 11 8 —

Rep 5 “Luke” 13 18 33

Rep 6 5 9 9

Rep 7 — — 1

Rep 8 1 2 4

Rep 9 5 2 3

Rep 10 — 1 —

Rep 11 — 1 —

Why does the chief revenue officer of this AI company that has taken three businesses from $0 to $30 million in revenue, including one with a $550 million valuation trust ScaleX to drive 6 and 7 figure deals for his sales team?

The biggest challenge in business development today is that it is nearly impossible to hire, train, and retain qualified sales development reps that are experienced, knowledgeable, and willing and able to stay in business development (BD). There are some “unicorns” out there, but when the average sales rep makes an average of $17,000/yr more than a business develop rep (BDR), it’s NOT attractive for a top performing BDR to stay in business development. Plus, business development is arguably harder and filled with rejection. (Sourced from an OutboundWorks article.)


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The math is actually pretty simple.

Sales Rep/Agent Cost 50/day 500/day Notes

Agent Cost/year (Philippines, Belize, Offshore) $ 16,000.00 $ 16,000.00 High volume, low personalization

Agent Cost/year (Denver, Austin, Charlotte) $ 60,000.00 $ 60,000.00 High volume, high personalization

Agent Cost/year (Major Metro) $ 100,000.00 $ 100,000.00 Low volume, low personalization

Sales Activities

Sales Activities/day 50 500

Sales Activities/year 12500 125000 Sales activities / 5 = Leads required

Sales Rep/Agent Cost/Sales Activity

Cost/Activity (Offshore: Philippines, Belize) $ 1.28 $ 0.13

Cost/Activity (Tier 2 City: Denver, Austin, Charlotte) $ 4.80 $ 0.48

Cost/Activity (Major Metro City: San Fran, NYC) $ 8.00 $ 0.80

Tech Stack Costs (Data, Personalization, Email, Dials) Cost/Activity

Data Cost/activity ($0.25/record), 10 activities/1 record $ 0.048 $ 0.048 Estimated cost $0.25 per lead

Personalization Cost/activity $ 0.29 $ 0.12

Persona based = free, tech based = $0.5/record

Outreach Annual Cost = $1,440 per Rep $ 0.058 $ 0.006 More seats = lower cost per seat

ConnectAndSell Cost/dial $ 1.00 $ 0.65 More up-front commitment = lower cost/dial

Coaching as a Service (quality control) $840/year/rep $ 0.067 $ 0.007 Reps stay longer, conversion goes

up. 2 hours coaching / month

Total Cost (Tech Stack) / Activity $ 1.396 $ 0.824

Total Cost Per Sales Activity

Cost/Activity (Philippines, Belize, Offshore) $ 2.68 $ 0.95 High volume, medium quality

Cost/Activity (Denver, Austin, Charlotte) $ 6.20 $ 1.30 High volume, high quality

Cost/Activity (Major Metro) $ 9.40 $ 1.62 High volume, high turnover

Cost/Activity (ScaleX.ai) NA $ 1.25 No manager overhead required, no software, OpEx vs. CapEx


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The average business development rep will make a combination of about 50 calls, emails and social touches per day; that’s about 1,000 per month or 12,500 per year. In major metro areas like San Francisco and NYC, you can easily pay $47,000 – 60,000 base salary, $15,000 - $25,000 commission, $12,000 – $18,000 healthcare, plus tech stack, plus desk cost, plus management oversight. You get it—plus, plus, plus. It adds up fast, doesn’t it?

That’s how many businesses end up paying $100,000 annually for a fairly inexperienced business development rep to make 12,500 sales activities at the rate of $7 – $10 per sales activity. Plus, it takes the average BDR about 3.3 months to ramp up, and that’s more than one-fifth of the time they are typically in the role!

The difference: “I’m amazed with how fast you’ve been able to ramp up! You’ve given us as many leads in your first four weeks as our previous provider did in the last year!”

• Satisfied ScaleX Client

ScaleX.ai BDRs will make a combination of about 500 sales activities (calls, emails, and social touches) per day for your business. That’s about 10,000 a month or 120,000 a year. That’s 10X!! By leveraging tools like Outreach + ConnectAndSell + our proprietary tech stack, you can personalize your outbound. No one wants spam. Our reps drive personalization at scale for $1 – $2 per sales activity.

How is that possible? ScaleX has a stable of experienced business development reps that are experts at using sales technology optimally. On the open market, companies typically pay $200,000 per year for our prospecting ninjas (that typically don’t live in major metro areas). That all sounds great, but how does that work in real life?

ScaleX: Leveraging the Power of ConnectAndSell Follow Ups

A couple of weeks ago, while using CAS, I reached the decision maker at the Bank of NY Mellon. Let's call him Skip. It was a really, really bad time for Skip. Skip was in bereavement. Skip was displaying all of the emotions you'd expect. You could feel his sadness, but he was appreciative of the call and asked for a call back.

Move forward nine days, using CAS follow-up I reach Skip. Skip's in a much better mood.

"Thank you for calling," says Skip.

"Glad to hear that you sound a lot better."


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The tone is set; we're immediately business colleagues rather than strangers. Soon, Skip agrees to organize his team for a group demo. Three days later, Skip and his seven direct-reports show up to the group demo. Skip and his team love it.

The power of follow-ups works. Why book 8 meetings when you can book one that's worth 8?

I bet our client closed them for $150,000+.

Contributed by: Evan Jay Kesner, Co-Founder, ScaleX, LLC

Named the number one business development rep on the planet by numerous people including Chad Burmeister, author of the Sales Hack books, and Ryan Reisert, author of Outbound Sales No Fluff, Evan Kesner has had a history of business development excellence ranging from out-producing full teams at companies including ON24, XpertHR, and training reps with successful careers at Oracle and SalesForce.

His mathematical roots are strong. The Hopf mathematicians on his mother’s side of the family wrote formula with Einstein. He earned a Master of Science in Management of Technology from NYU Stern and the Tandon School of Engineering while working full-time.

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scaleX.ai Bonus Sales Hack #2: Invaluable Career Lessons from Washing Dishes, Driving a Forklift, and Basement Waterproofing

Contributed by: Ryan Shertzer

I had quite the career before my career ever started. You know, all that stuff you did before the stuff you put on your resume. I learned early on the time value of money. When I'd ask for a new thing as a kid, my dad would simply reply, "Well, I guess you'd better get a job." So I did.

I started early with my own paper route. And it was a long route. We lived in the country, so I got up early, rolled the papers, and put rubber bands on them. I had to put them in bags if it was raining. Then I loaded them up on my bike and set out on my route. There was nothing strategic about it. But it required discipline and effort—especially if I wanted to get done in time to watch cartoons.

Then one day, they announced a contest for the paperboy that could sign up the most new subscribers. My very first sales contest! Being hyper-competitive by nature, I was enthralled at the prospect of winning my own 14" color TV. When the results were announced a few weeks later, I had successfully vanquished dozens of other entrepreneurial 10 – 12 year olds and won that TV. It was my first taste of sales, but not my last. I began to realize that there could be great excitement, accomplishment, and satisfaction in work.

By the time I matriculated to high school, I had moved on to the world of food service, but not the flashy front of the restaurant. No, I was in the back washing dishes. I cannot


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begin to express to you just how much I hated washing dishes. And you cannot even begin to imagine what people sent back on their plates. The day a dirty diaper came back on a plate mixed with syrup and over easy eggs nearly did me in.

Despite my disgust, I pressed on. Every night as I washed dishes well past midnight, I sulked and wished for any assignment other than what I was doing. What I failed to realize was that I hadn't done the one thing I'd been given to do well enough to warrant anything else. It took an intervention for this realization to occur.

At the restaurant where I worked, everyone clocked out at the same time. So, if I wasn't done washing dishes, no one else could leave. One particularly long night, several others were just standing around waiting for me to finish so they could go home, and I wasn’t even close to finishing. Eventually, one of my chain-smoking, educationally-impaired co-workers walked over and said, "Okay, I'm going to show you this one time. Move." Over the course of the next fifteen minutes, that middle-aged man, who lacked even a GED, washed every dish and cleaned the entire workspace afterward. Fifteen minutes flat! It would have taken me two hours.

That man had no idea the lessons I learned that night in both humility and determination. He just wanted to go home. I wanted to crawl into a hole. From that night forward, I attacked every dish-washing session as though my life depended on it. Within just a few weeks, I became a bus boy and eventually became a cook.

After graduating and prior to heading off to college, I worked in a factory for a few months. For an eighteen-year-old, getting up every day at five in the morning is akin to mandatory beatings. Yet there I was dragging myself out of bed at 5 a.m. for a 45-minute commute to work in one of the most bizarre environments I'd ever been in.

There are literally thousands of people that walk into the building at exactly the same minute every day. They walk to their work station and do exactly the same thing over and over and over again for eight hours, and then they walk out of the building at exactly the same minute every single day. They do all this knowing that they are going to do EXACTLY the same thing tomorrow and the day after and the day after for the next forty years.

That scenario is my own personal nightmare. And yet that's what I did for three months. I learned to throw cardboard boxes into a massive trash compactor. Yes, I said learned. When you're messing with a machine that can kill you, there's instruction involved. Then I learned to drive a forklift. And then I got to know the other people working there. Nearly every conversation ended with them telling me to stay in college.


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There's nothing wrong with working in a factory. I met lots of folks who loved it. It just wasn't for me. However, it was a fantastic motivator, because I knew from the first day that I wanted something different. There was no place for that ultra-competitive paperboy in the land of assembly lines. I was ready for my next adventure.

So, I became a sandwich artist! During my freshman year of college, I worked for Subway and got my first real taste of customer service. I never saw that job as preparing food—I was an artist, after all. I saw it as a chance to interact with the people on the other side of the glass. I got to understand what they wanted and create it right in front of them and make it an enjoyable experience for them. I also figured out that mayo on a meatball sub is the stuff of dreams.

Evidently, I did well, because they asked me to be the manager. I said no. I don't know if you realize this but most college kids are lazy and often hung over. Managing that place offered no upside, only misery. To this day, that's the only promotion I ever turned down.

And then I embarked on maybe the most life altering career change yet—I went into the basement waterproofing business! Specifically, I became a telemarketer. If you ever wondered who was calling at dinnertime trying to get you to sign up for a basement inspection, it was me. Now, most people would rather try to infiltrate North Korea than work as a telemarketer. In this regard, I'm not most people. Every night I'd put that headset on, turn on my auto-dialer and get beamed into people's kitchens and living rooms for four hours.

I had people scream and cuss at me on a regular basis. I had a guy tell me that he needed the water in his basement for his pet alligator. I had a kid tell me his parents couldn't come to the phone, because he'd killed them. (Yes, really! And yes, I called the police. And yes, the police rolled up into the front yard in a bucolic neighborhood in Toledo, Ohio, guns drawn. Yes, the homeowner was extremely angry and came looking for me the next day at our office.)

Despite all that, I had people say yes! They said they needed help with their leaky basement. And we sent people to see them. And they spent thousands of dollars to fix their problems. I learned very quickly that I was going to have to wade through vast marshlands of rejection to get one single reward, but that reward was definitely worth it.

And thus endeth the career before my career. I'm very specifically calling it my career because every single paying job I've ever had contributed to me being the sales person I am today. I don't believe that there are jobs and careers. I may be splitting hairs here, but don't miss the opportunity to learn from what you're doing. Don't miss the chance to be great at every task set before you. Don't miss out on learning from those around you.


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Don't take rejection personally. It's all fodder for the future. And what you do with that is up to you!

Contributed by: Ryan Shertzer, Weaponizer of Inside Sales and Business Development Teams across the globe and Director of Inside Sales at SealSoftware

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scaleX.ai Bonus Sales Hack #3: The Power of Your Mindset

Contributed by: Mark Chambers

The power of your mindset

As salespeople, we all have many skills in our toolbelt that we use on a daily basis to be successful. Some rely on their strong communication skills over the phone and others find that face-to-face discussions are best. For me, and how I coach my teams, I bring it back to the basics of one’s mindset. I specifically focus on this task with three little words that have changed not only my sales/personal life, but others that I’ve coached as well … “How NOT Why.”


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Imagine a sales rep who came to a brand-new company without any knowledge or experience in the tech space, let alone selling a product dealing with VOIP. This can be intimidating itself, and it would be tough to learn all the new terminology at the same time. Now, add in the fact that this person moved roles three times in six months on top of everything else. You would probably think this rep is saying in their head, “WHY the hell do I keep getting moved around every two months after I’m just starting to find my groove in this position? WHY do I have to change my process? WHY does my quota keep going all over the place?” Well, that person was me, and it was exactly the thoughts going through my head.

Although I found myself hitting quota each month and doing well, it took me a minute to realize that I was the guinea pig for the new roles we were creating. SDR to hotline rep, hotline rep to hybrid SDR/BDR, hybrid to first outbound BDR. After my third role change, “How NOT Why” was born for me.

As I sat in my cube one day, I told myself, “It’s time to approach everything with a positive mindset and figure out HOW to be the best sales rep possible! Enough with the negativity and questioning WHY every little move or decision gets made around here.” So, I did just that. While other reps were busy complaining about a higher quota, new tools, or new processes, I was embracing all these changes and figuring out HOW I could succeed.

My quota got raised 15%. No problem! How many more calls and emails do I need to make to get to my new quota? Use this new tool. Great. HOW do I implement this tool into my daily process and make sure I’m hitting my quota and KPI’s. HOW, HOW, HOW! No matter what was thrown my way, I was going to succeed. This approach led me to smash my quarterly quotas at 150% or better, big commission checks, winner of multiple contests, and even a trip to Hawaii for attaining the president’s club. Life was good, but I felt like I was sitting on a gold mine that needed to be shared with others, so I did.

As I got into SDR/BDR leadership roles, this was my story that I preached. Approach each day with these three words in mind (“How NOT Why”) and watch greatness unfold. I’m not saying you can’t question certain directives that people hand down, because we all know this can be beneficial in certain scenarios. I’m saying that when a boss, loved one, friend, colleague, or whomever it may be has a task, comment, or suggestion for you, approach it with positive thinking and a can-do attitude—especially inside of the sales world, this is key!

When you think, HOW, you are being proactive, forward-thinking and doing what is necessary to succeed. When you think, WHY, this is setting yourself back and


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approaching certain situations in a more negative light in my opinion. For most, this type of thinking is not going to happen overnight, and it may be hard to re-wire our brain this way. We are all human at the end of the day and, when faced with something we don’t like or want to do, our brains tend to go to WHY before they go to HOW.

I can tell you with 100% confidence that the more you think, preach, and practice this mindset, the more success you will have. My greatest satisfaction from these three words is not the personal success I have seen, but rather the positive impact it has had from those I’ve coached/mentored along the way. When a rep comes to you and says, “Thank you for teaching me about, How NOT Why,” because it helped them close a deal, settle a personal argument, or even helped them get promoted, those are the most satisfying results I could ever hope for!

At the end of the day, we all look at life differently through our own lens and have our own mindset beliefs. Mine just happens to be the one of sheer positivity each day. I don’t question WHY I’m here on this earth, I say, “HOW can I make each day given to me memorable and impact others positively along the way!” My challenge to you all reading this is when you wake up tomorrow morning, approach your day with a, “How NOT Why” mindset! Greatness awaits you.

Pro-Tip! Mark Chambers is dead on. Things change. Rather than ask the question “Why?” ask the question “How?” How can I leverage AI in my sales process? How can I leverage the latest sales engagement technology to 5X my sales productivity and 2X my bookings?

Contributed by: Mark Chambers, Business Development Manager, Venminder.

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scaleX.ai Bonus Sales Hack #4: Life on the Sales Development On-Ramp

Contributed by: Chris Beall

I get asked this question a lot at conferences, usually by a sales development manager in the next seat, as we listen to a tips and tricks presentation, “How long should it take to onboard an SDR?”

My answer, usually given before I have the good sense to stop myself, is “Five days.” Then I am obliged to list the assumptions behind this answer, often as the innocent questioner is edging his or her way toward the closest door.

Assumption #1: Your brand new SDR sounds okay during a phone call.

Assumption #2: You provide the SDR with prospecting lists.

Assumption #3: You provide the SDR with a system that lets them have 30+ conversations per day.

Assumption #4: Your goal is to set meetings, not to sell your product in one go.

Assumption #5: You are willing and able to do a month’s worth of coaching in those five days.


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Here’s the program:

Day 1 Morning • You teach your new SDR the one thing about your product or service that any

sensible person would sincerely think is both different and important—its “breakthrough” quality.

• You demonstrate through 10 live conversations how to set meetings that offer the opportunity to learn more about this breakthrough.

Afternoon • Your new SDR has 10 live conversations, with coaching after each conversation on

the one moment where he went off the tracks.

Night • Your new SDR sleeps, dreams, and integrates the learnings of Day 1 into their

worldview.


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Day 2 Morning • You demonstrate 5 live conversations. • Your new SDR has 10 live conversations, each one coached.

Afternoon • Your SDR has 10 live conversations, each one coached.

Night • More sleeping and dreaming.

Day 3 Morning • Your new SDR has 10 live conversations, each one coached.

Afternoon • Your new SDR has 10 live conversations, with the coaching done with call

recordings at the end of the day.

Night • You guessed it—more sleeping and dreaming. The butterfly begins to stir.

Day 4 Morning • Your new SDR has 10 live conversations, followed by a one-hour coaching session

using call recordings.

Afternoon • Your new SDR has 10 live conversations, followed by a one-hour self-coaching

session guided by the coach.

Night • The self-coaching sessions become the thing of dreams.


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Day 5 Morning and Afternoon • Your new SDR is now 70 coached conversations into the program. This is the

equivalent of one month or so of the usual on-the-job trial-and-error approach. You let the SDR run all day, with a one-hour review of their 20 – 40 conversations at the end of the day. The SDR runs the review and breaks down their own calls. The coach guides the process and provides feedback.

Your new SDR has done it—with lots of help from you! They have negotiated the on-ramp and are now on the freeway. At the end of each week, or when they ask for it, you let them take you on a tour through 5 conversations where they did great or want help.

It’s really pretty simple. Having conversations is like driving for miles when you’re learning to be safe and sure behind the wheel. More practice early, with more responsibility for taking the wheel—kept in good shape with a weekly tune-up—lets you cut months off the process and avoid nasty wrecks.

And the best part is, in 5 short days you get a brand new SDR who is happy, productive, and very low maintenance.


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Contributed by: Chris Beall, CEO, ConnectAndSell

For the past thirty years, Chris Beall has participated in software start-ups as a founder or at a very early stage in a company’s development. His belief is that the most powerful part of any software system is the human being that we inappropriately call a “user,” and that the value key in software is to let the computer do what it does well—go fast without getting bored—in order to free up

human potential. Toward that end, Chris has been involved with Requisite Technology, GXS, Epiance, Qlip Media, Aptara, Cadis, Sun Microsystems, and Unisyn.

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scaleX.ai Bonus Sales Hack #5: Silver Platter Syndrome –

A New Disease That’s Plaguing Your Sales Process

Contributed by: Lauren Bailey

Leads are screwing up our sales process (but not why you might think).

It’s not because we don’t have enough leads, or the quality of our leads aren’t good.

It’s not because our sales process has been turned upside down to get leads even faster (although all true, yes?).


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It’s not even because our death-match staring contests with marketing over lead quality and follow up are escalating.

Seriously, when did you learn to sell marketing? (And be honest sales leaders, how much credit do your reps really give the lead score?)

Leads are screwing up selling in that salespeople have now actually forgotten how to sell.

Too Many Leads Have Made Your Reps WORSE at Selling

We’re giving reps so many leads that it’s faster, easier, and, hell, probably actually smarter to ditch the hard ones to make time for the next cherry.

And we’ve just brought in a whole new generation of reps who don’t know life before twenty fresh inbound leads per day.

Unfortunately, they probably never will know how to sell.

(Hint: these are the kids spamming you on LinkedIn.)

Before you quit reading and decide that I’m a no-good marketing sympathizer who’s handing marketing a huge compliment by saying we’ve become too dependent, read this story and see if you

1. Might agree with me, and …

2. Might even spot some of these tendencies on your floor.

A small online technical training company in Florida gives their BDR (this is Lead Gen, SDR, Biz Dev to some friends) team lists of companies to outbound call, uncover


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opportunity, and pass to an inside/outside ISE. Because their industry is industrial, they will often break in through an industrial or tech role like maintenance engineer, shift manager, etc.

Their new rep (let’s call him Ben) shows me his lead list (there are hundreds you guys, he’s scrolling and scrolling here) and explains that these seventeen that he’s highlighted are the ones that he is working. Why? Because Ben used to be a production engineer and he has good luck breaking into the leads with that title listed.

Okay my trusty team of readers, what did he do right? Total props for finding his “In,” yes?

And what is going to happen to those OTHER 300 leads without that title listed?

Bingo.

Let’s be clear on two things:

1. Every one of those leads HAS a production engineer in the company; it’s just not listed on the lead (and may have a different title).

2. If the Ben on your team hasn’t targeted a lead for some reason, it will likely get the three-voicemail throw away, and you’ll be giving him 300 more on Monday.

And what COULD we be doing with this list? I’ll tell you what Ben’s boss hired us to teach him:

1. Find out what the account is potentially worth before even trying to find the right DM. We call it sales qualification—using any live body to score revenue potential (not lead buying potential).

2. Prioritize Ben’s list with the big potential on top (not the rep’s favorite title or home state) and call “A” potential leads 15 times and “C” potential leads 3 times.

3. How to go and get the production engineer’s name, title, and direct dial number.

Guys, Ben set his lead list on FIRE. There’s a strategy in place, he’s excited about uncovering A’s, and he’s lighting up the phone finding contacts and working the list instead of going through the voicemail motions just to get his next list to cherry-pick.

And yes, the results spiked. By the end of the month, the team nearly doubled the number of qualified leads passed and accepted. I can’t wait to see what happened to lead spend.

You’re going to love this next example. Give your guys inbound leads?


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I spent a few days on the floor of a massive internet tech company with their inbound team. These guys get so many good calls a day that the top guys have basically just learned how to not pee for a workday. I wish I was kidding.

If they’re three minutes into a call that is slightly annoying, what have they learned to do? You got it. They ditch the caller and get the next one.

It’s like watching the old ladies in Vegas who spin the reels again and again and don’t even watch the slot machine to see the result.

They’re addicted to the pull, the HOPE that the next caller will be triple 7’s.

And, naturally, they’re randomly rewarded (the strongest form of behavior modification) so the addiction is set.

As leaders, we’ve been so concerned with getting them the good leads that we forgot to teach them what to do with them!

Once again, we fall into the trap of buying our sales teams stuff that would have made us superhero reps when we were reps.

But the hard truth is that we don’t have a lot of superhero potential on our teams anymore.

The war for sales talent is too great and these guys have never really had to learn sales.

It’s like what they say about pretty people not having to try hard in bed. We’ve made reps lazy and entitled by surrounding them with leads they can cherry-pick to quota.

I call it the …

“Silver Platter Syndrome”


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So, why is this a syndrome and not a celebration? Because quota attainment is going down folks.

Check out CSO Insights numbers:

Ability to attain quota: 63% in 2012. 57% in 2016 (CSO Insights)

Forecasted deals won: 47%

The number of C-level execs that say the rep added value to the process: under 20%.

We’re not meeting goals, we can’t predict what will close, and our customers would rather do it without us.

As an industry, we are LOSING you guys!

And I see a direct correlation in the decline of sales ability with the increase in lead spend and marketing-driven (and customer-driven) sales.

Too Many Leads Wasted? Here’s How to Diagnose (and Treat) Silver Platter Syndrome with Swift Action!

Maybe we all see it, and I’m just the only one who’s saying it.

Maybe we all don’t want to see it. So don’t take my word for it.

Here’s how to diagnose Silver Platter Syndrome on your sales floor:

What percent of opps in stage one began as leads? Are there ANY that reps self-generated?

How do reps determine who to call first on their list?

How many touches do leads get before they are trashed / recycled? How is this managed?

When you listen to a call, does the rep ask at least five sales questions? Do they try to close?

What are you spending to generate these leads and what’s your current ROI or % closed (or however you measure it). Has it gone down?

So, copy and paste this next part into your calendar for a week from now, okay? Because once you go out and investigate this, you’re going to have a serious OMG! moment that I hope sounds a lot like, “Holy hell! LB was right! I have to take ACTION! Silver Platter Syndrome will NOT stand on my floor!”


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5 Specific Steps to Cure Silver Platter Syndrome

1. Reduce lead flow. Don’t cut it all at once; the poor babies will starve.

• If there are only 30 inbound calls, I might not hang up on this one until I’ve really tried …

2. Hire more heads if you can’t slow down the engine.

• You’ll lose a few reps who don’t like to share their leads—good riddance.

3. Implement lead management rules + inspection.

• No, Ben, you can’t have more leads until you finish working the ones you have!

4. Install sales qualification.

• It’s different than a lead score and your rep scores it himself so he’ll actually believe it.

5. Get them some sales training (why yes, I’d LOVE to help you with this. Thanks for asking).

• Sales qualification, capturing new contacts, asking questions, closing … they need it all!

Contributed by: Lauren (L.B.) Bailey

L.B. Bailey is a twenty-year sales veteran and a five-time recipient of the “Most Influential” designation for inside sales. As the President of an award-winning training and consulting company, Factor 8, L.B. and her team are best known for getting immediate revenue results by putting reps live on the phones during training.

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scaleX.ai Bonus Sales Hack #6: Sales Training of the Future

Contributed by: Dan Smaida

Traditional Sales Training Is About to Go Extinct … As It Should

Executive Summary

Technology already exists that uses artificial intelligence, data mining, and good old-fashioned psychology to optimize both sales efficiency and effectiveness. As sales organizations realize the economic value of harnessing these technologies, the sales trainer—and traditional, classroom-based sales training itself—will become extinct, replaced by higher-level learning engineers orchestrating a process of systematic seller development.

This chapter discusses the forces transforming how we think about developing sales talent, what this means for traditional sales training, and the skills, strategies, and technologies necessary to build your own, tailor-made sales development system.

* * *

Over the last several years, we have had entirely too many conversations with buyers of sales training in which we hear the complaint, “Sales training failed to stick again. The traditional approach is not working.”


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When the buyers of any product or service say, “This ____ isn’t working,” sellers need to pay attention. Think of sellers in the PC industry in the early 2000s who failed to recognize that buyers wanted a different buying experience. They wanted to buy from Dell, or they wanted to buy from other suppliers who did business like Dell. The PC sales industry took too long to listen and react, despite e-commerce and supply-chain efficiency tools and processes being readily available. PC giants Compaq, HP, and IBM were forced to consolidate, merge, or sell assets simply to avoid going out of business. Multi-billion dollar PC resellers went out of business literally overnight.

It all happened because suppliers didn’t listen and react quickly enough, despite all signs pointing to a need for transformation. The sales training industry may be headed for a similar fall. We are already seeing vendor consolidation, which is perhaps an early sign of capitulation by traditional vendors of sales training.

The sales training industry is way overdue for transformation.

Why?

Traditional sales training is incredibly inefficient. The one-size-fits-all approach to developing sales training content (write once, sell many) may be efficient for those who create sales training content, but NOT for the buyers and implementers who are left to figure out how to make one-size actually fit all. Plus, companies often lack the resources to integrate, coach, and reinforce a foreign methodology or practice.

Commercially available sales training content is just guesses. No matter the research base, if sales training content isn’t based on empirical data from your sellers, it’s just guessing at what will work for your company now. Therefore, rented sales training (meaning borrowed from someone else’s research base for a fee), even when customized, has a very low adoption rate and a very high turnover rate.

Off-the-shelf training lacks validity. Have you ever wondered why sales people roll their eyes when they hear about sales training? Is it because they hate learning and possibly getting better at what they do? No! They roll their eyes, because deep down, they know that content based on research from outside is probably not going to reflect their reality to a significant enough extent. They will grin and bear the sales training, but the lack of relevance and direct applicability of the models being delivered to them in sales training means the experience will deliver little to no long-term value to them personally.

Traditional sales training isn’t enough. Classroom time serves a unique purpose: to provide a safe environment for people to practice, fail, get feedback, and learn. But it’s just the start of the process of converting learning into on-the-job behavior. Traditional


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sales training providers tend to limit the practice, observation, and feedback opportunity to a single or perhaps just a few interventions over an extended period of time. By providing only a little practice or allowing large gaps of time between practice sessions, traditional sales training solutions lack the most important driver of sales skills improvement: feedback!

As ludicrous as it might sound, this is exactly how traditional sales training environments work (or don’t) even today. Without homegrown, organic models, validity is low. Without sufficient observation and feedback, skills do not improve. Without watching their own game tape, sellers don’t get to see where they can improve, and the team doesn’t fully commit to changing. Nothing changes. Unfortunately, this is precisely the answer we hear from buyers of traditional sales training when we ask them about their results from traditional approaches: “Nothing changed.”

Will the Sales Training Industry Adapt and Evolve?

We don’t need to stare into a crystal ball or read tea leaves to see what the future holds for the sales training industry. We are talking about right now. The technology that will transform sales training already exists. Spirited discussions about the sales technology stack on LinkedIn and other social media channels have been ongoing for roughly two years.

Examples

• Do you need to do a better job of on-boarding and staying continually engaged with new hires? Plenty of learning management systems (LMSs) can do that.

• Do you want to create individualized, just-in-time learning paths for sellers of different knowledge levels? Area9 Group’s adaptive learning technology puts the means in your hands.

• Do you need to get sellers to practice and their managers to observe and give immediate feedback remotely? Tools like Allego and Rehearsal (and a host of others) make that all possible on a mobile device.

• Do you want to capture how a seller executes a prospecting call or conduct some quick diagnoses of how a particular salesperson is handling critical customer calls? Refract, Gong, Chorus, or ExecVision have the technology for that.

The point of this short litany of sales technology stack examples is to demonstrate how much technology intersects with planning, execution, coaching, and follow through by


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salespeople and their managers. Technology is solving the (until-now) intractable problem of scaling personalization, feedback, and coaching.

And yet, the traditional sales training industry is wont to adapt despite the obvious advantages available to organizations that seek better and faster sales results. Adaptive approaches are required to meet individual development needs, and the traditional, license-driven sales training industry is neither interested nor equipped to deliver adaptive approaches. The tools to build your own sales development system exist now and threaten the very existence of traditional sales training vendors, so, of course, they’re not interested in developing it.

But, traditional sales training vendors cannot fight the tide. The sales technology stack of 2018 creates the conditions—learning faster and more cheaply—for sales training transformation. It is time!

Rented Sales Training Programs Will Be Replaced by DIY Sales Development Systems

Clearly, we see traditional, rented sales training as a failed model, and we think the time is ripe for transformation. Indeed, forward-thinking sales organizations have already made, or started, the move toward modern solutions.

The transformation at hand has three parts:

1. Rented à DIY – As you can see from the sheer number and similarity of sales training programs on the market today, training itself is a commodity. In fact, there’s an incredible amount of free sales training available online today, all of it based on the same basic principles. Think of it in terms of automobiles: tradi-tional sales training is like renting a car you must customize—you’ve paid a premium for something people don’t take care of. DIY sales development is like building a kit car tailor-made to your specifications. All you need is a mechanic, and you will own something in which you’re fully invested.

2. Sales Training à Sales Development – To train salespeople is to teach specific knowledge or skills. One level up from training is development: to develop salespeople is to help them evolve, grow, mature, and progress. So, any training you do is part of a more strategic focus on developing sales effectiveness over time. The great news is, when you own your own sales methodology and train-ing, you can focus on the broader issue of developing talent. You’re not required to put everyone through the latest program you just “bought” from someone else.


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3. Programs à Systems – A program is a planned series of events according to a schedule, but programs live inside a system, which has interdependent, interre-lated parts that are more than the sum of its parts. In the case of sales develop-ment, a functioning system relies on systems, people, and processes working toward the same end—to make sellers more productive. The problem with traditional, rented sales training is your reliance on vendor systems (e-learning, customization process, delivery, assessment). Building and owning your own content and delivery allows you to leverage your own system (marketing, product management, CRM, ERP, LMS, etc.) and get exponentially better results.

Each element of the transformation will happen differently and is already happening at different rates. For example, the number of companies building their own DIY sales training has skyrocketed in the last ten years. However, the number of companies operating a sales development system is far, far fewer.

Sales Trainers Will Be Replaced by Learning Engineers

It’s time to say goodbye to the sales trainer. We should bid farewell to both species of sales trainer: the external consultant (and the method they’re peddling) and the internal sales trainer.

They never really worked the way we thought they would anyway, each for their own reasons:

• External consultants lack the tribal knowledge to prioritize learning and create truly custom learning experiences. They’re limited to the box of content they know and the song they’ve sung a hundred times.

• Internal sales trainers are good at the “trainer” part but don’t have the “sales” part. They don’t carry a quota, and they are dismissed by all but the newest salespeople as not entirely credible.

How do we replace these dinosaurs? We find learning engineers who are paid to solve the systemic problems of traditional sales training, while spending less money and reducing the impact on selling time.

What’s a Learning Engineer?

Meet the learning engineer, a strategic partner to sales leadership paid to build, operate, and optimize a sales development system that includes, people, processes, and technology. In the most forward-thinking organizations, the learning engineer will be


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partly compensated on sales performance and viewed as a revenue driver, not a cost center.

Learning Engineers exist today, they’re just not known by that name. We believe this term is the most apt, though, because it succinctly describes the two skillsets required from the modern sales developer—the ability to foster learning and the ability to operate a system of sales development.

What Competencies Will the Learning Engineer Need to Succeed?

Engineering and operating a learning development system requires a diverse set of skills, both traditional and non-traditional, such as the following:

Sales skills – At the heart of it all, learning engineers are challenged with making a difficult sale. They have to sell salespeople on the need to practice, self-reflect, and surrender to coaching. Even more importantly, learning engineers need to sell sales managers on using a systematic approach to providing performance feedback and coaching.

Systems Thinking – A system is an entity with interdependent, interrelated parts that is more than the sum of its parts. To grow and adapt, an active system like sales development requires alignment and cohesion among structures and components like marketing, IT, CRM, LMS, and ERP. Learning engineers must be adept at understanding and managing this level of complexity.

Process Engineering – Sales developers must apply manufacturing, development, and engineering principles as time-in-field and productivity expectations go up and budgets go down. Learning engineers must become expert in things like value stream mapping and continuous improvement to meet these rising expectations.

Coaching Coaches – The front-line sales manager remains the pivotal role in whether any sales development effort pays off in results. The amount and quality of effective feedback based on real performance data (game tape) is the single biggest determinant of whether sales training gets used. Therefore, learning engineers must become master coaches, able to help their partners in sales management to navigate processes and technical complexity.

Communication – More than ever, the ability to translate complex concepts into simple pictures and easy-to-understand infographics lubricates the process of change management that will be required to succeed in this transformation. Moreover, learning engineers will need to communicate effectively in all directions—up to executives, across functional lines, and out to technology partners.


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Intelligence Management –The big breakthrough in sales development today is the ability to harness big data and artificial intelligence to build personalized, adaptive learning systems. To harness this exceptional new set of capabilities, learning engineers will function as information scientists and data analysts to help companies find the signal amongst all the noise.

Is this a serious set of high-level skills? You bet it is! But these skills are important now, and they will be even more important as the stakes grow and expectations for results from sales training continue to rise.

Start the Transformation Now!

Although today’s sales trainers (and sales training companies) are going extinct, nobody’s going to die—only the roles will die, along with companies that don’t embrace the revolution in sales development technology.

For now, SALES LEADERSHIP is the catalyst for the move from traditional sales training to tailor-made sales development systems. Your opportunity is to adopt and apply the skills of the learning engineer now, and pull the sales team along with you as you go.

Here are several ways to get on, or even ahead of, the curve as a learning engineer:

• Get smart on AI and personalized learning. These two technologies will have the most impact on how we develop salespeople going forward. You don’t have to be an expert, just educated on what is available and how these technologies are already being leveraged in the field.

• Get conversant in systems thinking, agile development, and lean manufacturing. You will be amazed at the value these disciplines bring to the sales development professional. You are essentially in the process of maximizing throughput (skill gain) while minimizing inventory and operating expense.

• Foster pockets of innovation. Encourage your bleeding-edge salespeople and sales managers to incorporate new tools. Sponsor skunkworks projects, and encourage communities of practice. Get your most progressive minds ideating on what is possible in this new world.

• Hire a good mechanic. There is no substitute for an experienced practitioner when it comes to avoiding re-creating the wheel. Having expert guidance as you incorporate new processes, discipline, and technology is an important shortcut to a successful system.


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• Pilot and Iterate. You need to build your own sales development system, including tailor-made content and models that reflect your actual sales. It will look like small-batch, artisanal brewing, repeatedly and quickly refined and adjusted. That is exactly what sales training should look like.

The good news is, these “do now” ideas can help you drive actual sales results without massive costs. At the core of these efforts, though, is sales leadership and organizational development thinking—and acting—like learning engineers.

Summary

Sales Training is Dead! Long Live Sales Development!

The technology to build and operate your own sales development system already exists. The processes and diagnostics necessary to tailor-make an effective system already exist. Your sellers’ appetite for more credible, relevant, personalized, effective sales training certainly exists. The learning engineer, whether in the guise of sales leadership or learning and development, will drive the transformation from traditional, rented sales training to the modern sales development system.

Contributed by: Dan Smaida, Managing Director, Specialized Sales Systems, and author of Love and Selling.

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scaleX.ai Bonus Sales Hack #7: AI For Sales Forecasting,

How to Be the Billy Beane of Sales

Contributed by: Stephen D'Angelo

Major league baseball and sales organizations have something very much in common. Sure, the competitiveness of sales professionals can rival that of professional athletes, but what I’m referring to is the need for data.

In 2003, Michael Lewis wrote the bestselling book, Moneyball. Some of you may have read the book; others may have seen the movie starring Brad Pitt as Billy Beane. Both tell the fascinating story of how major league baseball evolved from an old-fashioned, stodgy kind of business, to one driven by data and statistics.

Up until the mid-1990s baseball was run by scouts, field managers, and general managers who were old-time baseball people—mostly ex-players from the minor and major leagues. This self-admitted “crusty” crew drafted players and made game execution decisions based on gut, intuition, experience, and personal bias. None of the decisions were based on metrics like on-base percentage, total walks, slugging percentage, etc.

Fast forward to today. The most successful teams use guidance from saber-metrics, big data, and AI to complement human judgment. Analytics now drive draft picks, trades, lineups, and any other major decisions. For the latest evidence of this approach, look no further than the 2017 World Series winning Houston Astros. They successfully transformed their team (business) blending the latest in data analytics with great talent.


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Just about every major league team has a GM that is a maven at data analytics supported by computer modeling. Today, pitchers are drafted by analyzing factors that include maximum external rotation, arm position at foot contact, and knee bend at ball release, because they have a direct correlation to injury probability and performance.

What does this have to do with running a high-performance sales organization?

When it comes to key deal management processes, the majority of sales organizations operate like the old stodgy scouts and GMs of baseball’s yesterday. Most rely on the art of the sell, using gut feel and intuition.

There’s very little data that takes into account historical performance or seasonality being used to guide forecast management, pipeline reviews, or deal reviews.

Preparing for each of these meetings can be time consuming, and with gut feelings driving decisions, leadership isn’t able to get an accurate picture of the business.

Sure, data from CRM systems is useful, but most sales organizations have yet to adopt advanced, cloud-based technology or machine learning to assist their teams. Instead, managers ask questions of their reps, assess their truthfulness, integrate involvement with the deals, come up with a swag or confidence level of a forecast number, and predict which deals will close, for how much, and when.

I suggest that, like major league baseball, it’s time for us to transition to leverage the power of big data, machine learning, and AI to drive decision making for forecast management, deal reviews, and weekly pipeline calls. I have been leading organizations and sales teams for over thirty years, and I too am one of those leaders that had to come to this realization and adjust.

We’ve entered into a new era of the AI-driven sales organization. Like financial planning, supply chain management, and so many other business processes, shouldn’t sales organizations leverage machine learning and AI to create more accurate forecasts? Don’t our CEOs, CFOs, and shareholders deserve a more accurate forward-looking assessment of the business by leveraging predictions based on several quarters of data pulled from your CRM and other sales systems?

It is time for sales organizations to enter the “Moneyball” era and stop using bulky, error-prone spreadsheets as a forecasting tool, or as a tool to run pipeline reviews. Aviso can help you do this. Unlike CRM analytics, spreadsheets, or simple forecasting tools, our platform connects to CRM systems, snapshots data every fifteen minutes, and stores it in the independent data store. We see through millions of data points, to make sense of predictive signals and provide a series of accurate predictions on day one of the quarter.


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We recognize that sales data is generated within several technologies that are resident in the sales stack, and we also leverage this data within our AI algorithms, to provide deal views and forecasting information you haven’t had before.

Another thing you can do with AI is understand that if you’re closing deals fast enough to hit quota—known as pacing—you’ll also be able to determine if your current pipeline will produce enough revenue to meet quota this quarter, and whether the pipeline is being built and progressed at the proper pace to support next quarter’s number.

Finally, through the power of machine learning, you can get an accurate sense of your run rate business, or the amount of revenue you can expect from deals that both open and close in-quarter.

Wouldn’t it be helpful to know if a rep, product line, or business segment is forecasted to miss the number, by how much, and what to do about it, all while driving smart pipeline management and deal reviews? With AI for deal management, you can do that.

Similar to professional sports, you have great talent on your team. You have sales pros that are proficient at selling and negotiating. Now, you can use AI to guide your talent to better assess the likelihood deals will close and forecast more accurately. You can also stay laser focused on deals that need immediate attention during pipeline reviews, and eliminate any prep required for deal reviews.

It’s time to be a fully data-driven organization. If you want to talk baseball, or you’re ready to be the Billy Beane of your team, feel free to reach out to me at [email protected].

Contributed by: Stephen D’Angelo, President, Worldwide Field Operations, Aviso

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scaleX.ai Bonus Sales Hack #8: The 15 Best Bots for People Who Work in Sales

Contributed by: Hubspot

1. Chorus - Chorus.ai records, transcribes, and summarizes your sales calls, so you can instantly see key moments, action items, and KPIs like your talk-to-listen ratio and question count.

2. Attentive - You need to know when your prospect’s situation has changed right away—not next week, next month, or next quarter. After all, the deal often goes to the first salesperson to reach out.

3. Invoiced - I don’t know about your sales team, but it’s always a celebration when the customer sends the signed contract. Most reps try to avoid counting a deal as “won” before this moment—they’ve been burned too many times.

4. Leadsync - Do you use Facebook Lead ads? Connect the Leadsync bot to your Facebook ads account, pick which channel you’d like to receive the updates in, then watch your leads roll in. You can call or email them without skipping a beat.

5. Donewell - Donewell is an easy-to-use tool that layers over your CRM to help you set sales goals, choose the right metrics, and measure progress. The bot lets you create customized reports, goals, and challenges within Slack using your CRM data. You can also schedule notifications for any channel or user; for example, you could request a weekly “meetings booked” report for a rep who’s struggling to hit their meetings quota or a monthly “new business” report for your entire team.


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6. TechCrunch - TechCrunch’s Messenger bot helps you stay informed on your industry, improving your conversations with prospects and ensuring you never miss an important development.

7. Growthbot - Growthbot, a bot created by HubSpot cofounder Dharmesh Shah, is like a sidekick for marketers and salespeople. It connects to HubSpot, Google Analytics, and other databases to give you instant answers.

8. Hipmunk - Whether you’re traveling to client meetings, conferences, or simply trying to get a break from the go-go-go of sales, Hipmunk’s travel bot will be a big help. Describe the type of flight you’re looking for—including non-stop, which airlines you prefer, how cost-sensitive you are, and where you’d like to arrive and depart from—and Hipmunk will find you the best options.

9. To-do bot - If you have a hard time staying on top of your tasks—or you spend valuable minutes every day creating, editing, or updating your to-do list—this bot will be a lifesaver.

10. Google Calendar - Simply looking for a bot that’ll help you stay on top of your schedule? This Google Calendar bot for Slack does the trick.

11. Uber - Sales professionals who use Uber once per week or more should take full advantage of this bot. It does everything the Uber app on your phone does, but with greater efficiency and speed.

12. Lyft - Lyft users can also experience the productivity benefits of hailing their ride from an app. With Lyft’s Slack bot, simply type "/Lyft [pick up address] to [drop off address]" to request a ride.

13. Poncho - Poncho’s bot sends you weather updates every morning and evening, so you’re always prepared and wearing the right outfit. You’ll also receive alerts for severe weather and rain.

14. Mosaic - Mosaic is like a personal assistant making your day a little more seamless. Send your requests via Facebook Messenger or Slack, and the bot will use AI to process your commands and follow through. You can tell Mosaic you want to know your schedule for the day, and it will check your Google Calendar and let you know what you have planned. Or you can write “good morning” to turn on your Phillips Hue or Lifx lights, increase the temperature of your home using your Nest thermostat, and get the day’s weather forecast and traffic conditions. Right now, Mosaic is most useful if you have multiple smart devices. But the creators are


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continually rolling out new features, so in the future, it’ll be handy for the average person.

15. M - M is Facebook’s AI assistant available in both English and Spanish. If you use Messenger, you already have access to M—the bot’s suggestions show up when you’re having a conversation and it finds an opportunity to help.

Contributed by: Hubspot

https://blog.hubspot.com/sales/best-bots

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scaleX.ai Bonus Sales Hack #9: When a New Technology Emerges,

There’s an Initial Trigger

Contributed by: Kostya Gorskiy, Intercom.io

The masses react and become disillusioned, and then the trend slowly builds through a state of enlightenment and, finally, productivity. This is known as the Gartner Hype Cycle.


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If we view bots—the biggest trend in software today—through that lens, they would fit squarely in the trough of disillusionment.

Early attempts at chatbots have fallen flat in their execution, mostly because they rely too much on natural language processing or A.I. capabilities that simply don’t yet exist. Despite this, we’re bullish on bots, but only those that are built to solve a very specific problem.

No matter what we’re building, we always start from first principles (https://blog.intercom.com/peeling-back-to-first-principles/). That means we do deep exploration into the roots of the problem to try to understand what the problem is and why we are going to solve it. When debating whether or not a bot was for us, we


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discovered there are some simple tasks that don’t make sense for humans to do—and bots could be helpful in these cases.

Let’s say you’re going to chat to a business, but it’s the middle of the night. No one is there to actually reply to you. In a situation like this, most messengers would display their own version of a closed sign. Something like, “Sorry, we’re not here yet. Get back to us in the morning and someone will reply to you.” What if a bot stepped in to set expectations for the user while the team was away and collected their contact information. Down the line, a bot could suggest help articles using machine learning or ask users to rate a conversation when it comes to an end.

It took us a year and a half to build our own bot, Operator (https://www.intercom.com/operator-bot), and, in doing so, we learned five important lessons, all of which you’ll want to consider if you plan to do the same.

1. Some people just don’t want to talk to bots

In our earliest days of bot building, a person would start a conversation in our messenger, and we’d have the bot respond with a simple reply, “Hi, I’m Interbot, Intercom’s digital assistant. The team will reply here as soon as they can.”

When the bot introduces itself, people start to form expectations.

We didn’t want to pretend that this was a human. We wanted to be extremely clear and polite, and let the bot introduce itself. What could go wrong?

When we tested the concept, users hated it. It turns out that when the bot introduces itself, people start to form expectations. Some people believe it’s a fully-fledged chatbot, one that will work instead of real human support, and some people just don’t want to talk to robots.

We tried multiple versions of this introduction, but what actually worked best was no greeting at all. In this case, when the person starts a conversation, the bot gets straight to the point and says something like, “The team usually responds in under two hours this time of day. Check back here later or enter your email below.” No introduction is required, and nothing is said that isn’t related to the human’s task.


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2. Your bot probably doesn’t need character

As our exploration continued, we began to ask questions around the bot’s character. Does it need a personality? Should it be male or female?

In some cases, when the product is a bot itself, it’s fine to have some character. But if people are really expecting to have a live chat with humans, any kind of personality is a distraction. For example, look at the Quartz News App below. It delivers your news in a conversational UI, and it doesn’t have any personality. You’re just reading news in conversation.


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You can react with emojis, and you can see GIFs. It looks like a chat, but there is no avatar, no character behind it, and it has a straightforward tone of voice. You’re just reading news.

The job for our bot is quite similar. It should be an assistant to the conversation, one that’s as simple and as invisible as possible, rather than a participant. That means it should be gender neutral and essentially introverted. It’s never the subject of a message and doesn’t draw attention to itself. It doesn’t refer to itself as “I” and never refers to itself in any single message. There is no character necessary.

3. Words actually matter

In the world of conversational UI, it should come as no surprise but words really can change a user’s assumptions and expectations. Below is one of the first messages we tested. It’s very simple. Can you spot anything wrong with it?

What’s wrong is the word soon. People have very different expectations of what soon means. In a live chat scenario, some people think that soon means right now, immediately. Others believe that soon is closer to never.

Striving for clarity, we changed the phrasing and tried, “Brian will reply as soon as he can.” But, using the words he or she caused another problem. Gender isn’t stored in the system, so gendered pronouns would not be appropriate.

To become gender neutral, we tried using the word they, but this started to become impersonal. It’s not how a business talks. The successful phrasing we landed on was straight to the point and spoke directly to the end user’s action: “Don’t miss Brian’s reply. Get notified by email.”


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4. Avoid the “bot jail”

Bot jail is the conversational UI equivalent to voice jail. Imagine the last time you called the bank over the phone. You likely experienced something like this:

“For balances, statements, payments, and day-to-day banking queries, press 1. To talk about new accounts, or services, press 2. To set up, or activate telephone banking, press 3.”

By the time the message is complete, do you remember what option 2 was? If you click 1, then there are another set of choices, and it’s easy to get lost. You’re just trying to navigate this labyrinth, escape this voice jail, and, finally, talk to a human.

Bots are often no better. They present you with some options, in this case with buttons instead of voice commands, and you can’t seem to get to a human, much less resolve your problem. In most cases, you’re only presented with very simple reply options, like “Thanks,” “Okay,” or “Got it.” You’re simply reading text and occasionally typing something to imitate a conversation.

Another example of this is Google Assistant. Take a look below to see what happens when you try to get restaurant recommendations.


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We try to avoid those types of UI as much as possible. We still use short replies like the example below, but it’s only for one question.

We always give users the option to write a reply too. This is like an escape hatch. If you don’t want to navigate these choices you can just write a reply, and if we don’t understand it, we’ll just fall back to human support. It gets you out of jail.

5. Bots should have manners

We found that it wasn’t just the content of our bot that created negative user feelings, but the behavior as well. As we know from Isaac Asimov’s “three laws of robotics” (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Three_Laws_of_Robotics), “A robot may not injure a human being or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm.”

We reframed that concept through the lens of our bot and created a set of principles that we call manners. They are:

• Never interrupt when a human is typing.

• If the user doesn’t engage with the initial interaction, stop the conversation. Don’t try to re-engage them with other messages.

• If the bot wants to perform multiple tasks, they need to be integrated into a coherent experience.

To make this work, we built a special manners engine to make sure the bot is always on its best behavior.


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* * *

So, after a year and a half of trial and error, where did we land after all of this? Our new bot is Operator (https://www.intercom.com/operator-bot), and it excels in those afore-mentioned simple interactions—like collecting contact information from users …


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Asking users to rate a conversation once it’s finished …

And suggesting contextually relevant help content …


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So, should your business build a bot? Whatever your product, make sure that you understand the problem you are trying to solve, and why you’re solving it. That means building the exact solution to the problem at hand. So, in that sense, the answer is no, don’t build a bot. Build what makes sense for your product.

Contributed by: Kostya Gorskiy, Design Lead, Intercom.io

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Multi-Channel Sales Acceleration: Step-By-Step Instructions to Dominate Your Market

At this point, you’re likely thinking to yourself “This all sounds right to me. Where do I go from here?”

Visit www.scaleX.ai and sign up for the weekly newsletter and blog, where you will receive weekly information sharing how best to leverage AI for Sales. Once you’ve signed up, consider a ScaleX pilot program and experience what happens when more than two years of sales activities are delivered in ninety days.

From there, you can decide if you want to bring Multi-Channel Sales Acceleration in-house where ScaleX will deliver for your company:

1. The Playbooks

2. The Tech Stack

3. The Training Program for your own reps

Why pay for a consultant to help you build a playbook, when you can work with a company who can not only build the playbook, but also deliver and execute the playbook, optimize it, then give it back to your company for your sales people to leverage?

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About the Author

Chad Burmeister, Twitter handles: @SalesHack, @ScaleXAI

Chad is passionate about inside sales. Chad has received dozens of awards over the years including Top 25 Most Influential Inside Sales Professional by the American Association of Inside Sales Professionals seven years in a row, Top 100 Sales Coaches You Should Know (2017), and Top 50 Sales Development Leaders You Should Know (2016).

Chad is a regular speaker at conferences including SalesForce.com’s Dreamforce, The American Association of Inside Sales Professionals, Sales 3.0, Sales Hacker, SalesLoft RainMaker, LeadsCon, Frost & Sullivan STAR conference, and he has had articles published in Fortune Magazine, Inc. Magazine, Selling Power Magazine, Entrepreneur Magazine, and more. Chad is an avid blogger at www.ScaleX.ai/blog.

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In Memory of Verna & George Burmeister

George Herman Burmeister – 1919 to September 21, 1966

Verna Jane Burmeister – July 21, 1921 to February 7, 2016

Grandma Burmeister was the great matriarch of the Burmeister family. Her simple approach to life was to “focus on the good, and forget the bad” as she shared with me in her Wisconsin accent, just a few months before she went to heaven. Thanks to Grandma Burmeister, I love to eat chunky peanut butter, and I love God. Before my visits to Milwaukee, I was a smooth peanut butter guy, and I’ll never forget those times in Grandma’s kitchen—and her dogs Pride and Mindy.

I never met Grandpa George Burmeister, and from what I’ve heard of him through my Dad, he went through some pretty tough times in life. After being let go from one of his jobs, the Burmeister family lived on powdered milk and bread for a year—this is probably where I get my “grit” from. Thank you Grandpa Burmeister. George passed away from a brain tumor when my Dad was just 21 years old.

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In Memory of Blaze Bernstein

Blaze went to heaven at age 19

April 27, 1998… taken too soon

Blaze Bernstein grew up in Lake Forest, California, across the street from our family in the early 2000s. Our children got to know the Bernstein children and were devastated to hear the news of his passing. In memory of Blaze Bernstein, ScaleX named the first sales bot Blaze, the Sales Bot, so that Blaze’s impact on the world will continue.

In a statement by Blaze’s parents Gideon and Jeanne:

Blaze was brilliant, colorful, and charismatic. He shined light on all of the lives of the people and communities he touched.

Visit www.blazebernstein.com to learn more.

Documents

· iii Foreword This book, ScaleX.ai, Multi-Channel Sales Acceleration, Powered by Artificial Intelligence, is the result of attempting to tape together email marketing, social selling,