Door Knocking, Grit & B2B Sales Mastery | Jason Bay on Coaching Top Teams – Ep. 20

[00:00:00] Jason Bay: my my first sales job was uh 18 years old going door-to-door selling house painting services actually. So, the company I worked with, I honestly didn't know that a door-to-door was a part of that job. So, when springtime rolled around, they're like, okay, cool, you're going to drive home over the weekend, you're going to go door-to-door selling house painting services. And I was like, oh shit, okay, I thought we were going to get leads or I don't I didn't even know what a lead was actually back then.

[00:00:22] Jason Bay: I really fucking love sales. I love the outcome-based aspect of selling. So, the way that I got it more into inside sales was, you know, fast forward four years, I was a sales manager with that company. And then one of the first things they tasked me with was starting a call center. So I'm a 22-year-old kid, uh, didn't know anything about working in corporate America, didn't know anything about dialers and software and like all of this other kind of stuff.

[00:00:47] Jason Bay: like show up and that first impression, it's just like on the phone, your first impression, the first 10 seconds of smiling, being confident, you know, addressing the person, your tonality, all of that stuff is like 10 times more important in person.

[00:01:00] Chris Lingenfelter: It's like trial by fire experience.

[00:01:03] Jason Bay: Oh, dude, yeah. And now I'm like cold calling, like, dude, the worst thing someone can do is hang up the phone on you, like, come on.

[00:01:09] Jason Bay: There are entire sales teams that are scared to call cell phones. Like that's a way to increase your pickup, right? There are so many ways to do that, but just bringing the humanity back into sales with all the AI stuff going on. And I'm a huge fan of AI, don't get me wrong, you have to be using it. But the people that I see struggling at cold calling are not good at it.

[00:01:27] John Karsant: What we're finding is cold calling is is the number one channel right now and it's it's it's what's uh, you know, bringing the most meetings for all our clients.

[00:01:35] Jason Bay: It's literally like 100 to one emails to to calls. It's it's insane.

[00:01:39] Chris Lingenfelter: You have to talk to people. It's inevitable.

[00:01:41] Jason Bay: You know, it's little stuff like as a sales leadership team, you're blasting out all of the, hey, who's here's who's closed the biggest deal and here's who's at the top of the leaderboard right now. But what about sharing out customer stories when the product gets a great result for a customer? People have been talking about forever just around like the business acumen and understanding of the personas and the people that you sell to. It's easier than ever to get that information.

[00:02:05] Chris Lingenfelter: Where else are you going to get that? You don't get that from email because they're not going to respond to you. Don't get that from LinkedIn if they don't connect with you and respond to your LinkedIn request.

[00:02:12] Jason Bay: The idea that just because someone is really senior that if they do decide to pick up the phone, that they're not going to be responsive to that. I mean, that's like these people are actually more responsive. These are the people like you guys, these are these are people that built the company. Like they've respect the hustle.

[00:02:27] Jason Bay: It's uh, you know, it's the Godfather. It's the offer you can't refuse, dude. It's like, I would feel stupid saying no to that.

[00:02:34] Chris Lingenfelter: Yeah.

[00:02:35] Jason Bay: So, I really think the future is the offer. It's like what are you going to give people that is different and it's I think the big elephant in the room is the marketing engine is the ceiling of your outbound engine. Like you can only be as good at outbound as you are at marketing.

[00:02:51] John Karsant: Welcome back to another episode of Prospecting Pros. Today on our show, we have Jason Bay. Thanks for coming on and spending some time with us.

[00:03:00] Jason Bay: What's up, fellas? Good to be here.

[00:03:02] Chris Lingenfelter: Glad to have you, man.

[00:03:03] John Karsant: Also have Chris Lingenfelter. Uh, thanks for joining, my co-host. Um, so, the way I like to start every show is get a little bit of background on on you, Jason, like how you got to where you are today. I was taking a look at your your LinkedIn profile and some of your history, but like, you know, you're you've you've got a big following, you're you see the ins and outs of a lot of different companies. How'd you get to this point?

[00:03:25] Jason Bay: Yeah, I first got into sales, my my first sales job was uh 18 years old going door-to-door selling house painting services actually. So, the company I worked with, I honestly didn't know that a door-to-door was a part of that job. So, when springtime rolled around, they're like, okay, cool, you're going to drive home over the weekend, you're going to go door-to-door selling house painting services. And I was like, oh shit, okay, I thought we were going to get leads or I don't I didn't even know what a lead was actually back then. Um, but what I figured out through that process was like, I really fucking love sales. I love the outcome-based aspect of selling. It was a full commission job. I didn't really find the door-to-door to be that bad. It was tough like the first time I did it for sure, like getting the nerve to do it. But I was like, wow, you can make things happen really fast when you're like out there making things happen versus all of the businesses I heard about at that time, because this was 2008 when the economy was like crashing. Everyone was going out of business during that time and we were having our best year ever as a company. So, the way that I got it more into inside sales was, you know, fast forward four years, I was a sales manager with that company. And then one of the first things they tasked me with was starting a call center. So I'm a 22-year-old kid, uh, didn't know anything about working in corporate America, didn't know anything about dialers and software and like all of this other kind of stuff and they were like, we're going to build out a call center. So we ended up having, you know, at peak capacity, I think 25 or 30 agents, uh, you know, like a call center manager, all that kind of stuff. And that was how I learned like the inside sales game, because that was mostly outbound cold calling. And then that brings us to around 2013, I left that company and then since then I've been doing consulting on my own and since 2016, really, really honed in on SAS. So, SAS was at that time just exploding and everyone was, you know, hiring SDRs and doing all that other kind of stuff and we started out doing something very similar to what you guys are doing. Uh, we just got really exhausted running that business.

[00:05:16] John Karsant: I don't know how you guys do it.

[00:05:17] Jason Bay: Yeah, just know that we're getting gray hairs. Hey, you still got your hair, man, you know? Um, so it's an exhausting business to run and I was like, you know what? What I love doing, my dream job at 19 was to be become a sales trainer. You know, as soon as I got to train other reps and I saw Jeffrey Gitomer, who was really big back in the day, Little Red Book of Selling was the first sales book I read. I saw him do a seminar or two and I was like, I want to do that, you know, I want to get paid for that. So we shifted around COVID, right before COVID, into just doing exclusively training. So it's like, let's take all the things that we're doing now and let's look for companies that have product market fit, like they have reps that are willing to put in the the energy, they have enablement teams or whatever it might be. Um, they're just missing the soft skills with their reps. Um, they don't have good playbooks and process. They don't know what the best practices are right now that are working. Their leaders don't have a good system for reinforcing uh what they're teaching. Their AEs aren't self-sourcing pipeline. All of those things. And since then we've worked with, you know, companies like Shopify and Zoom and and Gong, and also your startup that's like building out their first sales team and everywhere in between. So, long-winded answer to your question, but that's how I how I got to the place that we are now.

[00:06:27] John Karsant: I love it. Question for you, how did you like did did you feel that all this started to come natural to you or like when you were doing the door-to-door sales, did you have a really good manager that was investing time with you and coaching you up? Like where did you really start to develop those skills?

[00:06:40] Jason Bay: I would say the first time that I went door-to-door, I remember, because it was a two and a half drive hour drive for me to come home to like my territory. So that was kind of the idea, you drive home to the place where you're going to be living over the summer. So my manager, who was my best friend at the time, he came out and I remember sitting in my car waiting for him to come and I was so nervous. I'm introverted, dude. Um, and I used to be very, very introverted that. So the thought of knocking on people's doors and people knowing people in my small town of 5,000, you know, uh, that was really nerve-wracking. And I was like, shit, what am I doing, you know? And then he showed me, honestly, through people saying not interested to him and like, not slamming doors on us, but being like really rude to us for me to and seeing how it just like didn't affect him at all. I was like, oh, this is not that big of a deal. That was actually the thing that got me. Now I'm like, okay, it's not that big of a deal for someone to reject you. You don't have to take it personally. Really what you want to do is show up and that first impression, it's just like on the phone, your first impression, the first 10 seconds of smiling, being confident, you know, addressing the person, your tonality, all of that stuff is like 10 times more important in person. Just looking the person in the eye, smiling, you know, all of that kind of stuff. Once I kind of figured out the tricks, so to speak, um, that's what really sold me. So it was more seeing that it wasn't that big of a deal for someone to say no to you that really helped with my confidence at that time.

[00:08:03] John Karsant: Yeah, that's really good experience. Uh, the door-to-door sales. I think that really builds your

[00:08:06] Chris Lingenfelter: It's like trial by fire experience.

[00:08:08] Jason Bay: Oh, dude, yeah. And now I'm like cold calling, like, dude, the worst thing someone can do is hang up the phone on you, like, come on.

[00:08:15] Chris Lingenfelter: It's not a big deal. You're not interrupting people's dinners and you know, walking 50 feet up to their door and they can see you through the window walking. You know what I mean? Like you're not doing that kind of stuff.

[00:08:27] John Karsant: Yeah. It says no soliciting. Yeah.

[00:08:30] Jason Bay: The no soliciting. I always pretend to I always ignore the no soliciting, dude.

[00:08:35] John Karsant: That's funny. My my first uh like job that involved a computer was selling uh lead generation to in the solar industry. And what's popular in solar is door-to-door uh knocking. And so like a lot of the people we would sell to, they either like, oh, we we have a door-to-door knocking team or we're like doing a combination. So I got to like it it's an industry where it's very commonly used. Uh probably also when you, you know, because it involves homes, you got to go visit, you can point things out to them. But tech sales, you're just behind your computer. All you got to do is, you know, in some cases turn on your video. It's not that hard.

[00:09:12] Jason Bay: In a lot of ways I miss the door-to-door. The part that I miss about it is you can visually see if there's a need. Like you can literally go through census data and see where the, you know, neighborhoods are where people have money and you can see if a house needs painted or not. B2B tech sales is very hard. Like I know people are like intent data is all the rage, but I mean, do you guys actually see that big of a bump in results using intent data? It's not really that like effective, you know what I mean? So it's like, um, I mean, I won't mention any specific company names, but there are a lot of businesses that are like losing customers right now because it's like they just can't prove the ROI of intent data.

[00:09:47] Chris Lingenfelter: Because there really isn't any. And we've tried them all. And vast extents.

[00:09:53] Jason Bay: Yeah, it's it's crazy. So, yeah, I mean, where I'm seeing things go right now is just back to the basics and the fundamentals. It's been kind of a theme in the last year or two is like, okay, cool, people don't pick up the phone as much as they used to. There are ways around that. There are entire sales teams. This is sort of kind of outside of SAS. There are entire sales teams that are scared to call cell phones. Like that's a way to increase your pickup, right? There are solutions out there that help you identify cell phone numbers that are more likely to pick up. I've seen 25, 30 plus percent connection rates with that. There are techniques around leaving a voicemail and pointing that voicemail to the email and using that to increase your reply rates by 2 or 3X on email. There are so many ways to do that, but just bringing the humanity back into sales with all the AI stuff going on. And I'm a huge fan of AI, don't get me wrong, you have to be using it. But the people that I see struggling at cold calling are not good at it. They're just not good at it. It's, hey John, it's Jason with Outbound Squad. Yeah, so we do sales training for companies like Gong. It's hang up. It's like there's nothing like you're just pitching, you're doing all of the wrong stuff and then complaining that it doesn't work.

[00:10:59] John Karsant: So, how do we fix it?

[00:11:01] Jason Bay: Yeah.

[00:11:02] John Karsant: Well, no, um, I mean, I I think cold calling right now for us, like we have roughly 70 plus clients going at a time. There is not a single one that isn't on cold calling because it's working. So what we've found is that it's it's while challenging, while intimidating, uh, to many, it's it's the one channel that can't be automated by AI right now. And it's the one channel where you can go out and actually talk to people. And when we talk to customers, it's like, look, not everything needs to lead to a meeting. How about understanding why they went with the competitor? How about understanding how much longer are they in contract? Like, how about you learn a little bit and what's the best way to do that? Is a conversation. Email they're just going to ignore it. Now, yeah, there's ways to use those channels too to your advantage, but what we're finding is cold calling is is the number one channel right now and it's it's it's what's uh, you know, bringing the most meetings for all our clients.

[00:11:58] Jason Bay: It's the least crowded channel by far. I mean, ask any executive that you know, ask them how many phone calls they get, especially voicemails that they get compared to emails. It's literally like 100 to one emails to to calls. It's it's insane.

[00:12:10] Chris Lingenfelter: What do you think is the biggest difference, you know, I would say like cold calling in its heyday like pre-COVID to to now is what do you think is like the biggest difference between just like outside of, you know, people less likely to pick up, the biggest change that you've seen with SDR teams?

[00:12:24] Jason Bay: I think the biggest change that I'm seeing is the traditional SDR hire is someone that is a first or second job out of college. That's the traditional SDR hire. And what I see is more and more and more inversion to picking up the phone and talking to people. I don't know if that's a generational thing or not, but I see lots of people that are extremely reluctant to pick up the phone.

[00:12:47] Chris Lingenfelter: Yep. I think it's just it's intimidating for some people. They, you know, especially first out of college, if you've never done this before, you've never been exposed to sales or even door-to-door sales, right? Is they have the stigma that if you you call somebody on their cell phone or if you call somebody just out of the blue to pitch them something, it is bad. You should not do it. But these are how businesses are built. You have to talk to people. It's inevitable.

[00:13:11] Jason Bay: 100%. I think that one of the best things you can do and what our best clients do is especially if you're not like a Shopify, let's say, and you're like a category leading company that everyone knows about, which I think that that's very underlooked, by the way. I think that a lot of companies don't take into consideration that, hey, when you say I'm so and so calling with, you know, Zoom or something like that, it's like, yeah, people are going to listen to you compared to the startup that they that they haven't heard of. Like you you have to acknowledge that. But just getting your reps to drink the company Kool-Aid. It's it's little stuff like as a sales leadership team, you're blasting out all of the, hey, who's here's who's closed the biggest deal and here's who's at the top of the leaderboard right now. But what about sharing out customer stories when the product gets a great result for a customer? Having a whole just big database of customer stories and success stories and like, oh, we believe this, you know, we uh, we just onboarded two new sales trainers at Outbound Squad. They drink the company Kool-Aid. They're two previous clients. They see the case studies, the results, like they feel like they're part of something that's really badass when they come on board. Your reps should be really, really confident. So if nothing else, they could get on the phone and that conviction is going to come through. And I just don't see that. Like there's the drinking the company Kool-Aid and the conviction and then there's the other part that people have been talking about forever just around like the business acumen and understanding of the personas and the people that you sell to. It's easier than ever to get that information. All of this lives right inside whatever you're using for a conversational intelligence tool that for whatever reason, these multiple billion dollar valuation companies cannot figure out how to take what's in a transcript and spoon feed you, Chris, and say, hey, did you know that the VPs of sales you sell to, they've all been sharing these three common problems in the last 90 days, like inject that in, like why isn't that a part of these, I don't know, why that's not a part of these tools. But the transcripts are there for you to just take, drop into chat GPT and say, what are what are our buyers talking about right now? That's your enablement material. Like it's just right there. It's sitting right there the knowledge.

[00:15:09] Chris Lingenfelter: It's incredibly powerful and then we use this for our sales team and we're actually we roll it out for our clients um also because we record the transcripts of when we're on the calls. And you'll be be surprised, well, you're probably not surprised, just the amount of companies that don't even think about this is like, okay, we have transcripts. We can actually learn why they don't care, why they do care, where can we improve as an organization? And that's what also makes cold calling so valuable is you're getting in the moment market feedback from your buyers. Where else are you going to get that? You don't get that from email because they're not going to respond to you. Don't get that from LinkedIn if they don't connect with you and respond to your LinkedIn request. And you're so limited in, you know, in the LinkedIn channel as well. And so the only other place you can go is conferences to get direct feedback. But the calling is just it kind of it it has that wall up to where you get more on brutal honesty over the phone than a face-to-face meeting, you know, typically.

[00:15:57] Jason Bay: Yeah. You know what I was just thinking of too that would be the ultimate tool is an open source conversational intelligence tool. It's just got the recorder. And then you can use your own prompts and stuff to have it do whatever you want with the data. It's like that's there's just no excuse for that. I feel like if you have an L&D team, Yeah. I don't know if I want to get into software. But it's like if you have an L&D team or an enablement team, I mean, it's never been easier to create like really, really fine-tuned personas by industry, by role. I mean, like it's never been easier to do that stuff to give the rep the information that they need to have a like a pretty intelligent conversation.

[00:16:33] John Karsant: We use our our dialer. Essentially what it was doing is it was giving us like it was doing AI transcripts at one call at a time, but wouldn't give us a summary across the day. And so what ended up happening is you rely on the SDR for their feedback. Well, what happens when you have a large SDR org is you're going to get wildly drastic feedback across every SDR and reporting that back to clients creates inconsistencies. So what we did is we had to build out our own uh like take all the transcripts, then we started summarizing them on our own. And now we can now release that to our clients and give them, hey, like rather than getting the the SDR's feedback, here's the actual feedback. And this is summarized based off the calls for the day. And yet I'm we're not even a software company.

[00:17:14] Jason Bay: I love that. Yeah. Well, this is the future of AI, I feel like, is having, you know, people like you guys or whoever did that on your team, like someone that has like the knowledge and ability to be able to do a little bit of customization like that or use APIs to pull in some of this stuff and in a kind of a DIY a bit. Like the future of AI, I think is like it's it's all org driven stuff. It's not like teaching reps to use chat GPT to do account research. Like, don't get me wrong, like that that's part of what we teach to like enterprise reps and that's a valuable skill to have, but that should just be surfaced on the back end and dropped right into a Salesforce field. You know what I mean? Like that's just should be automatically done for every single account and contact in there. Like, we're not we're in an age where that's not too far away. I mean, Clay is already starting to use some of this type of stuff. Although I do think it's kind of shitty for a lot of it, but it's like, we have a client that sells a podcast solution very similar to the one that we're on right now. And it's like, they just use Clay because they sell SMB, it needs to be high volume. They use Clay and it just automatically pulls like, do they have a podcast? Yes or no. What's the name of it? Do they have a YouTube channel? Yes or no. What's the name of it? Do they have uh video case studies on their website? Uh, yes or no. You know, it's like basic stuff where you wouldn't even have to do any research to have a really intelligent conversation. Like that to me is like to answer your question, Chris, about the difference in cold calling, it's like because it takes more effort to get people on the phone, you have to reduce effort somewhere else in order to make up for that. I don't think that there's this magical world where we take admin time off of a rep's plate and they just replace that with sales time. I don't I don't think that actually happens. I think you just need to make it easier to do the the task that we're trying to ask them to do.

[00:18:52] Chris Lingenfelter: You mentioned enterprise reps, it kind of leads me to a question because I'm in a lot of sales calls every day and I talk to people, actually one of our recent clients, I won't mention their name though, but they did not believe you could call enterprise level organizations, SVP and up and cold call them. They just did not believe it. I told them, I was like, well, orgs are doing this every day. I was like, isn't it out of Oracle's doing this right now. So it works. And uh, but yeah, that happens more than you think.

[00:19:13] Jason Bay: It's crazy. I think that one of the big things that's so important at these larger companies is the the most well-run companies I see the senior leadership is like they're not out of touch with what it's like to be a rep. Yeah, that's important. It's so important. It's so, so important. That doesn't mean that you're a CRO and you have an org with a thousand plus and you need to be hammering the phones like on a weekly basis, but like, dude, spend some time talking to reps, listen, spot check a cold caller or two. It's like there's little stuff like this that I can't remember if it was Tim Cook or Steve Jobs. It was probably Tim Cook, because Steve Jobs, I don't think people would like hang out with him at lunchtime. Tim Cook says like, you know, famous for like actually being in the cafeteria when people were doing more in person. I don't know if they're still doing that at Apple, but like just eating with like the employees there, you know, and staying grounded with what that's like. And I think it's really easy to have this kind of ivory tower thing going where you're just up and you're doing all the strategy and like you can't get in front of your reps and motivate them and like your reps should want you to be participating in like deals with them, you know? And I just see too many instances where where a lot of reps are like, I I don't want my senior leader on a deal with me like I'm going to probably my my odds of winning the deal are higher without them. So that that is so, so important at these larger companies.

[00:20:22] John Karsant: I'm going to switch topics just a little bit here. Um, I'm curious, what has your experience been with AI SDRs? Is it positive, negative? Like, have you tried it out yourself?

[00:20:38] Jason Bay: I haven't tried it. I've seen a lot of clients uh put AI SDRs into practice and I see it working at the SMB level where it's just, you know, you're firing off fairly templated emails to people that, you know, if you're trying to get someone in the C-suite to give you time at a Fortune 500, like that person's inbox and like the sophistication of that buyer is very different from the person that owns the T-shirt shop down the street, you know? So, um, I've actually seen clients implement AI SDRs very effectively at the SMB level with like email campaigns. I haven't seen anything and and I really cringe inside when I see a lot of the stuff that it's sending, but it's like it's it's working in the sense that there's an ROI off of off of that. Like what it produces is significantly higher than what it costs. I'd be curious your guys's take if you've done a lot of this stuff, but I'm kind of I'm not very helpful for the AI SDR.

[00:21:32] Chris Lingenfelter: For the clientele we serve, it just doesn't fit, you know, into into who we operate with. Now, if we were like going to work with like a big insurance company that's doing like a like a, you know, like a to consumer play, probably you could squeeze something out with something like that because you're selling health insurance, right? Um, or property and casualty, but it's just there's no way that we could spin up an AI SDR and it actually be effective for who we're trying. You get one shot with a lot of these guys and you send the wrong AI email on autopilot, you know, you can lose accounts that way. It's just, yeah. Maybe one day it'll get there, who knows.

[00:22:05] John Karsant: I'm trying to keep an open mind. I haven't seen I see a lot of talk about it online, but I just haven't really seen any of the the results or people raving about it. So, I'm just trying to yeah, keep an open mind and I did see one of them just released a a an integration with Air Call. I forget the name, but it's like, so there's a calling function, human-based, not AI-based on top of the AI SDR. So, it's innovating, but yeah, we'll see where it goes.

[00:22:50] Jason Bay: Well, what are you guys's thoughts on the AI coaching? Like, I I won't mention specific names, but like, I one of these tools, I tried cold calling like the sales leader persona and I couldn't land a meeting with it. I'm like, I'm I'm pretty good at cold calling, you guys. You know? Um, that was like tough.

[00:23:00] Chris Lingenfelter: Yeah, I think with the the training, it's more to like get your reps in and like, you know, practice your objection handling, practice like getting you kind of your elevator pitch down for new reps. But if someone like you going in, it's probably not going to be as effective because you don't need that just like fundamental training, right? And but if it's like for high level, it's really going to like teach me how to cold call and like be effective. It's not really for that. It's more just like learning the content material, learning how to, you know, handle those objections as they come up because you can randomize it too. But yeah, they're difficult, you know, we we use a we've used a couple and we use one right now. And that's not something that's you can easily set a set a meeting up for even though if you probably got on the phone right now, you can probably book a meeting pretty easily.

[00:23:31] Jason Bay: I've found chat GPT like chatting back and forth with that to be pretty helpful once you've kind of feed it the right prompts and stuff. I think that that technology is going to get get pretty good though. And again, I'm really surprised that a lot of these sales engagement tools don't like, why wouldn't that be built into the sales engagement platform?

[00:23:46] Chris Lingenfelter: Well, it should be. And the good thing about like working with an LLM, it's it's all the longer you work with like one LLM, the more it learns about you, the more context it has and like who you are and how you sell, that it becomes more effective over time, the more that you use it. And that can be extremely helpful for sales and marketing team, especially it has that kind of like contextual brain, you know, part of it as well.

[00:24:09] John Karsant: There's actually a few different use cases that uh one uh a company we're talked with the founder often at Trellis. They built in something where you can actually have practice bot as part of the uh interview process. So they have to like go into the tool and then they have to like talk to the bot. So that was I found cool. We don't have that up and running yet, but I thought that was a cool feature and probably some of the other dialers will have that soon. It is for in our space because we're working with a lot of different clients. One, we use it for onboarding internally, but then when we when they we put them on a client, it's also part of our onboarding process. Like, hey, you have to go and practice the script on this bot before you can go start calling live. So like it we found it very useful in that that sense. And then also, it will raise some questions that they can then bring back to the client. Like, hey, I ran into this road blocker. How has this been dealt with? And we can do all that and get the errors out of our system before we actually start live.

[00:25:05] Jason Bay: That's cool. Yeah, that technology I feel like is really, really close to where it needs to be.

[00:25:12] Chris Lingenfelter: Well, because I I look at stuff on RepVue because I always get, you know, clients asking because they're they're taking it into like a procurement team and they're saying trying to equate hiring versus using an agency. So I'll often times I'll break down the math and I take a lot of information from RepVue just because it's typically they have the best information. I don't know how valid it is, but it they have pretty decent information. And when you're going into teams, because you work with so many different teams, how do you feel quota attainment is there for like these, you know, sales development reps and account executives? Do you feel like they're trending upwards now, just, you know, as a whole of like hitting quota attainment or do you feel like it's starting to trend down and what are you kind of gathering from that?

[00:25:52] Jason Bay: I feel like I have a really bad sample size for of data for that because like a lot of the clients, like these are people that have extra budget to spend on this stuff and like they are investing in their reps and there's maybe a bit of bias in the data. I've seen a trend of it going up with SDR teams and the reason for that is they're aligning more of the SDR org around the end outcome. It's like they're being mostly comped on opportunities created and pipeline created. And the meetings being sourced is a very small part of their compensation. And what I would saw at first a couple years ago is like there was kind of a dip. And 2022, like Q1 of 2022, I feel like was really big with software companies where a lot of these PE and VC firms were like, we're not going to give you any more money. And that was like a correction that happened on these SDR teams where, hey, we have whole SDR departments that don't generate a positive ROI for us. Like we need to cut and figure that out. So I've seen higher attainment because people are paying more attention to it now.

[00:27:00] Chris Lingenfelter: Well, I would say your your sample size is according to RepVue, your sample size would be correct then. Oh, really? Because that's what that's what they're saying is like 22, 2 like beginning of 23, it was actually dipped down to like 40% attainment and now it's like into 2024, 2025, it's like trending up towards 50%.

[00:27:27] Jason Bay: Holy shit, it's like I looked at that data or something. Yeah, that's that's like anecdotal. Yeah. Yeah. That was that was my question just because working with so many reps, it'd be interesting to just see what you see on the inside.

[00:27:47] John Karsant: Jason, what about what about moving forward? You know, everyone's always asking, okay, how do you see the next few years or what's changing? Like, I know it's kind of a silly question, but like for you and for us, we're we get the privilege of seeing a lot of different companies. They they open up the curtains for us and we can see a little bit on maybe their sales process, what's working, what's not working. But for you, like where do you kind of see and we can we can specify with cold calling if you want, but like where do you kind of see the market going over the next year or two?

[00:28:20] Jason Bay: I'm honestly very worried about the future of cold calling and I have been for a really long time. The connect rate issue. You know, like there's tools that we talked about before that will help you identify the numbers that are more likely to pick up. Well, what happens when that company really blows up and they have all of these reps calling all of these people that, you know what I'm saying? What happens after that? It feels like a short-term fix. And now there's the iPhone gatekeepers and, you know, Google Voice has had this for the longest time. Android, it's like we keep finding these things to kind of shortcut and chew through data faster or find the pockets of data that are willing to pick up. But it's like, you know, we're even like in B2B now, it's like highly subject to the do not call list. You know what I mean? Like all of these data providers are like they want you to scrub through the do not call list. That's like over 75% of America, dude, is on the do not call list. So, I really think the future is the offer. It's like what are you going to give people that is different and it's I think the big elephant in the room is the marketing engine is the ceiling of your outbound engine. Like you can only be as good at outbound as you are at marketing. So the future really is like, how do I pump out content and thought leadership and all of this other stuff to generate interest in what we are doing so that my outbound is on people that are already brand aware. And then how do I punch through and give them something really valuable, whether that's these exec dinners, uh, events, the audits, the whatever it is, like that's that's really the future in the sense that like it's not that people haven't already been doing that. It's like, I think that's just kind of what you're going to need to do to even make it work. So I think the future for cold calling is very bleak, if I'm being honest.

[00:30:27] John Karsant: I like hearing that.

[00:30:28] Jason Bay: I don't like I don't like it either, dude. This is what we make our living off of. Like, dude, tell me if you feel differently, but the connect rate, it's just going to continue going down, man. And you can only like cherry pick the numbers that are willing to call and you can only dial so fast and like there's there's an end to that that working.

[00:30:50] John Karsant: I I mean, it's tough to disagree. The only positive note I could say is uh from last year to this year, we bumped up our dial to connect by 2% as an organization. Now, that's across a lot of different companies. We've tried adding in different data sources and waterfalls. So like there could be a few different factors there. But on a positive note, if you're listening that, you know, we did see a bump there, but yeah, it's it's tough, especially if we keep saying cold calling is the number one channel, eventually everyone's going to keep, you know,

[00:31:44] Jason Bay: Yeah. We just go back to email. Yeah. And good Lord, email is like even harder like the gatekeepers in email, the super the supermans or whatever that tool is called. There's all kind. Superhuman. There's just so much friction into getting into someone's inbox. And then LinkedIn has a, you know, people talk about LinkedIn, but I'm like LinkedIn doesn't really work that well for most for most buyers. There's few personas here and there where it works pretty well. And then what do you have left? It's like you got the old school like the in-person stuff. You got the, you know, direct mail. Like there's there's all kinds of stuff and I'm not saying cold calling is going to die. It's just it's just becoming so inefficient to do most of this stuff. Um, like the way that you guys, this is why I think there's such a big future for like agencies like your guys where you're someone can outsource it because you're you're getting a very specialized service offering where it's like you're doing what companies, I don't want to say they can't. I think they're unwilling to figure out how to do themselves. It's like, hey, on your ops team, you should have people finding phone numbers and emails for the reps so they don't have to fucking go on LinkedIn sales navigator and figure out which of the four cell phone numbers is John's number. You know what I mean? Like you can do that at your firm. Um, you can have the technology to layer in all of this AI stuff. You can use the the phone technology like most of these companies don't do that stuff. These really large companies that have hundreds of millions of dollars to throw out the problem aren't doing the things from a workflow and technology standpoint that you would think that they would be doing. It just doesn't work unless you do that stuff.

[00:34:50] Chris Lingenfelter: That's something that I see when like orgs come to us and they already have an SDR team kind of set up like, you know, like 50% is some of these SDRs are just like glorified secretaries. They're doing everything from ops to, you know, like actual admin work and then maybe 20% of the time actually selling, you know, and prospecting.

[00:35:06] Jason Bay: I think some of it is like the justification for some reason with the execs. It's so much more straightforward to buy Zoom info and say, hey, we're paying X amount of dollars per year per seat than to add head count of people that are going to like do some of this stuff and offload. Like imagine if you had one master account for all of your data and you had a team of people using those accounts or just accounts for the ops people that are using it and they're doing all of the list building instead of paying per rep. You know, like that's how it should be done. It's like, I think if we knew what a lot of reps that work from home full-time were actually doing, you would be horrified at what they're doing throughout the day. Yeah. All right, we can wrap this up. Jason, thank you so much for spending some time with us. I really appreciate it. Uh, where can the audience find you if they want to get in touch or check out some of your content?

[00:36:00] John Karsant: Yeah.

[00:36:00] Jason Bay: Yeah, thanks for having me, guys. Um, outboundsquad.com is probably the best place to go. Um, we got a ton of free content there. Uh, we only work exclusively with companies. So if you're like, hey, we're not necessarily wanting to outsource this or maybe we want to do a little bit of both. We have reps that we want to train. That's sort of our specialty. So we train reps, train the managers, build the playbooks, all of that kind of stuff. Uh, and then LinkedIn would be the other place. I post basically every weekday, uh, content. So there's a bunch of stuff on there. We focus exclusively on top of funnel pipeline creation. So everything related to outbound. You can check out there. So outboundsquad.com or follow uh Jason Bay on LinkedIn.

[00:36:59] John Karsant: All right, thanks, Jason. Thanks, Chris.

[00:37:02] Chris Lingenfelter: Yeah. Thanks, guys.

[00:37:03] John Karsant: Thanks, guys.

[00:37:04] John Karsant: Prospecting Pros: B2B Sales and Growth Strategies. Sponsored by Level Up Leads.