← Positioning with April Dunford
Positioning with April Dunford
Rethinking Sales Strategies for Modern Markets with Loren Padelford
00:42:45
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- [00:01]
A
Welcome to the Positioning show, where we discuss topics related to the practical application of positioning for marketing, sales, and product teams. I'm April Dunford, a consultant, author, and the world's leading expert on positioning for B2B technology companies. Welcome, everybody, to another edition of the Positioning show with April Dunford. Today, I'm really excited because I have a special guest. I know when I started this season, I wanted to get a handful of different experts to come in and talk about different aspects of things related to positioning. Today, I'm really excited to have Lauren Paddleford. Where I got to know Lauren is where he was vice president of revenue at Shopify. He was also general manager of Shopify. Plus, over his seven years at Shopify, Lauren managed a team of over 1500. He's essentially the only person I know that's grown a sales organization from essentially zero to something very, very big, very, very successful in an extraordinarily short period of time. So I thought it would be really fun to get Lauren on the show and get his take on sales and how that works and how maybe sales is going to interact with marketing. And let me tell you, he's got a few spicy takes, and I really love it because his experience is so practical. And I think that it comes from a place of knowing what actually works on the ground as opposed to just talking about what should work and what shouldn't work in theory. I think you folks are really going to love this conversation. I know I did. I feel so lucky to be able to get him on this show. So let's get right into it. Hey, Lauren. So great to have you on the show.
- [01:35]
B
Hi, April. It's great to be here.
- [01:37]
A
I'm excited because we had a couple conversations before this podcast, and I was like, man, this is going to be good. In particular, last week, you and I had a short conversation. We were talking about, specifically, we were talking about the predictable revenue playbook and why potentially that doesn't work anymore. And so I would love to get your take on that. Like, you know, why did the model, the predictable revenue model, and maybe you could give the people, you know, listening, if they don't know anything about predictable revenue, what that is, Maybe give them the cliffsnose version on it. But why did that work in the past? And why do you think is changing that? Maybe it doesn't work today the way it used to work in the glory days?
- [02:21]
B
Yeah, that's a good question. So just as a historical snapshot, and I think I've become a sales historian as I got older Because I think history matters a lot. So Aaron Ross wrote a brilliant book called predictable revenue in 2011. That's an important fact. 2011.
- [02:42]
A
Yeah.
- [02:43]
B
Right. So like let's remember what the Internet was in 2011. You know, this is pre a lot of the social media platforms. This is pre a lot of the, like just a lot of stuff we have now. Right. So wrote this book. And Aaron Ross was the head of inside sales demand generation at Salesforce in the early 2000s. Like think early Salesforce time. And so he wrote this brilliant book about what they did and what they tried. And it was very innovative, it was very new as an idea. And the newness was there was a lot in there. So I encourage everyone to read it. It's a really good book.
- [03:22]
A
Yeah.
- [03:23]
B
But the substantive component was Salesforce broke the sales process into multiple sales roles. So normally you break a sales process into multiple steps. Salesforce broke it into discrete jobs. And you can summarize it by they had the prospecting job, the BDRs or the SDRs, you can call them kind of whatever you want. And you had the closer job. Right. I close deals. They did this at a very unique time in software. So if we recall, Salesforce was the original SaaS platform. Right. This was the start of the cloud. There had been nothing like it before software before that was all on prem. You had to buy, if everyone remembers, disks, right. And install them and like everything was heavy and expensive and you know, took.
- [04:16]
A
A mountain of professional services to get it stood up and you had to have an IT team to look after it. It, blah, blah, blah.
- [04:22]
B
Exactly. So in introduce Salesforce a completely different way of thinking about how software gets delivered and therefore a unique time to think about how you sell was cheaper. Right. So instead of selling enterprise wide licenses at hundreds of thousands or millions of dollars, they were selling seat licenses at $50, $70.
- [04:47]
A
It was so cheap at the beginning too. Like people forget how cheap Salesforce was when it first came out, because selling at the low end of the market. Cheap, cheap, cheap.
- [04:55]
B
Right. Well, but interestingly enough, that cheap at the low end of the market in 2006-2010 was anywhere between 50 and $200 a seat. That would not be considered cheap today. No, today cheap is free. Right. $5, $10, like.
- [05:15]
A
Well, the competition was Seabel that was selling at $1,600 a seat.
- [05:19]
B
That's right.
- [05:20]
A
That's right. Everybody forgets that.
- [05:22]
B
So I. But I think this is important context for those in today's world who read this book and think I should do this is. Wait, wait, wait. You got to understand the world they were building that model in and why it was going to work and why it may not work today in certain environments. So they built this model, right? And it was like, hey, you're going to have a bunch of bds who are going to qualify deals. So now I'm going to have to layer another component on. So what also was happening at the same time was the rise of the ad networks. Google, right? This kind of stuff. You could buy digital ads and you could then get to a large number of potential customers much faster than you could have in any way. Before that, right? Before that, everyone was buying yellow page lists, Dun and Bradstreet lists, you know, whatever. It was like, this is the good old days. Like, you know, I was selling in this time. So I remember these days, it's like, it was terrible. It was hard. But like, as a sales rep, you had to find deals and prospect them and close them. You had to do it all. There was no way. There was no model pre predictable revenue. Like, I think about this sometimes. Imagine if you would have gone to your boss and been like, hey, I'd like someone to make cold calls for me. They would have literally laughed you out of the room. They would have been like, get out of here. Like sales reps, make cold calls. Go make your cold calls. Predictable revenue comes along, you can buy ads. Ads dump a lot of unknown leads into the system. Someone had to churn through the leads so they could find the deals they enter. Aaron introduces these BDR roles to churn through leads. This makes total sense at the moment in history that they invented it, right? So we have this book. He makes it, of course, Salesforce becomes Salesforce, right? If you're in sales or marketing, we all have this weird affinity to Salesforce at some level, whether we love them or hate them. Now, nostalgia is that Salesforce was the first kind of company that really highlighted this new generation of selling and software and was focused on the sales and marketing process. And it was really great. So we all fall in love with this idea. Aaron publishes this book that says, look at how great this model is. Well, that was right at the start of the next generation of tech, right? All the new software companies, SaaS boomed at that point. Everyone was trying a SaaS model. And so this worked. Salesforce became huge. And so everyone took it and just applied it and was like, well, this must be the way.
- [07:53]
A
Yeah, works for them, must work for everybody.
- [07:56]
B
And at this point, predictable revenue is the bible like, at this point in history, it is the. The operating manual for SaaS software. Everyone just takes it and blindly applies it to their company.
- [08:11]
A
Like, I know people that are doing it, and they've never even read the book, right? Like, it's just. That's how accepted it is, Right. Like, you talk about it and they're like, what? That's just how we. That's how everybody sells. What do you think?
- [08:22]
B
It's religion, right? Like, this is now religion, right? It's like, this is a religious model. It's like, okay, cool. The challenge is that as you fast forward and as SaaS comes online and the whole world changes and all kinds of new software companies come out, you have to remember that his LTV to CAC was very strong. The cost of ads was cheap and their return was high. Like, really high, because no one was doing it yet. No one had figured out how to do ads on the Internet. So it was cheap and everyone hit it because you and I were just getting used to the Internet and ads didn't bother us yet. Fast forward 20 years. Ads are a nightmare. Like, the ROAS of ads is zero at this point. Like, it's just impossible to spend money and get anything on them. The number of places you can spend money is infinite on the Internet now, whereas it was very concentrated in the early 2000s. And so, so true. His economics of being able to have two salespeople in one sales process made sense. Right. You could do it. It was cost effective at $50 a seat. Your LTV to CAC in 2006 made total sense to do it this way. Fast forward 20 years, it makes a heck of a lot less sense now. If you sell a $20 per seat license and you have two sales reps, even if one of them's cheap. 50,000, 60,000 annual. Right. How do you. How's that profitable? Like, how is that efficient anymore? Because the sheer amount of money you spend on ads to pull the leads in, the number of leads you'd have to go through to get to the qualification that makes it. Like, it's just that model is based on exceptional efficiency and, like, an obsessive focus on process improvement and just, like, grinding every little step down to its perfection. And very few do that. Everyone thought, oh, I'll just hire.
- [10:25]
A
We have this limitless number of leads coming in, like, just this giant wave of leads. We couldn't possibly pass them all through to somebody because there's such volume of it.
- [10:36]
B
Yep.
- [10:37]
A
And most of the companies I know just don't have that volume, they don't have that.
- [10:40]
B
They don't have that. And so I think history matters because the context with which any system was deployed is important because there is no playbook. I think it's a lie to believe there's a playbook for success. There isn't one. You cannot copy. What?
- [11:00]
A
Anyways, we wouldn't be having this conversation. We would be. Everyone would do it out of a coconut.
- [11:08]
B
If predictable revenue was a Perfect playbook, no SaaS company would ever go bankrupt.
- [11:15]
A
Right.
- [11:16]
B
By definition, but it's not. It was the perfect playbook for Salesforce at that moment in history. And so I think that how does it change then?
- [11:24]
A
So, so now we've got this thing where, you know, we don't have this limitless, you know, bottomless bucket of leads coming in. The price on our software is getting driven down. Cost for salespeople are going up, are the same. So.
- [11:41]
B
And remember the big one, customers are fatigued. They get 500 million emails a day from all of the technology we have built to support this model. So we built massive marcom platforms to support the predictable revenue model. Email outreach programs, drip campaigns, all this kind of stuff that drives into the BDRs, that moves it through. We built an entire infrastructure to support this idea and it saturated the market. It did what it was supposed to do, but it has a declining curve. Like it peaked and then it's been in decline. Right. And, and so now you're getting negative return values. It's not. You can't run it this way. Your CAC is. Your LTV to CAC is negative. The, the, you don't have the leads to feed the organization. It's. And then the other thing, I think now, especially as you have, you have very fatigued customer bases and declining open rates and declining return rates on ads and email campaigns and that kind of stuff. The other unintended consequence of that model was it broke the customer experience in two. It used to be as sales, you would go engage, you would open the door and close the door. One person, one interaction, one conversation, one relationship. This model created two. I have to get qualified by a bdr, then set up with an ae. Now for the. When you had unlimited leads and it was all perfect, this was made sense. It was efficient. I get it. But now if you're the customer, do you like being handed off? No one likes a handoff. If you're the customer, but no one.
- [13:24]
A
Likes that qualifying call. Well, nobody that wants to buy likes to qualify and call like the bad leads are happy about the qualifying call because they get qualified out and then they don't have to waste their time. But for good lead, qualifying call feels like an unnecessary step. It's like, dude, just take my money. Like why are we having this conversation?
- [13:43]
B
And it is. And so that you have a fatigued customer who's being put through a process that is only good for the software company and not good for its customer.
- [13:51]
A
Yeah.
- [13:52]
B
And this is a compounded problem. The other thing is, if you just look at the math, this process elongated the sales cycles. It not maybe like early days for all the good reasons. Now maybe not so good, but the handoff itself added time to the sales process. And so you made your own. The companies are making their own sales processes longer and the customers don't love it. And it's not necessary. Right? It was necessary. It's not necessary. Now we have a whole secondary religious cult that suggests that, well, you can't get into sales and go right to a AE role. I'm sorry. For 500 years that's exactly how sales work. Right. There was no entry level. Like the entry level sales job was a sales job. It was everything. Now this idea that like you can't take kids out of college, you can't take early career salespeople and put them in a roles exists. I hear it all the time. It's like that. It's total nonsense. Right. I got out of college and was given a full blown sales role on day one. Right. Why do we believe this isn't true anymore? And so we believe we have to have SDRs.
- [15:03]
A
Do we just take SDRS and get rid of that idea or only use them in certain circumstances? Like what?
- [15:09]
B
Like what do you think we do? So I think this is, this is the right question. The right question. Nothing is black and white. This is not a light switch that you turn on or off.
- [15:20]
A
Oh, if it was, man. Like everybody wants there to be the magic thing, right? That works in all circumstances.
- [15:27]
B
Yeah, I want one too. Would be great. If they existed.
- [15:30]
A
It would be great.
- [15:33]
B
And so I think this model makes sense. If you can justify two component pieces, do you have the lead flow to feel it, to feed it and do you have the LTV to CAC to support it?
- [15:46]
A
Yeah.
- [15:47]
B
Now the third part I ask companies, especially now, right, with the fatigue level of customers, is do your customers tolerate it? Because it's not necessary. You can have single rep sales processes. Anything less than about $75,000 in ARPU per year can be done by a single rep who has less than a year. Worth of experience. This is not enterprise grade selling. You don't need experience in like managing corporate executives and all this kind of. You don't need this. This is transactional level selling. And so you don't need these double steps. You can just do them, you can do them fast. Right. The average, across all software, the average time to close a deal under $75,000 in ARPU is 41 days. These are not that long. Like this is not some big expensive sales process. You have to figure out you can.
- [16:44]
A
Do this efficiently in the quarter. It's all.
- [16:46]
B
Yeah. So I think the answer is this totally makes sense for some companies, but it makes sense for a lot less than it used to. And so if I'm starting a company today, while I have tremendous respect for Aaron Ross and predictable revenue and a lot of the companies who deployed it because it went well, this is not my default position. My default position is what am I selling, what's my arpu, what is the complexity process, who's the buyer and what's the best experience I can create for that buyer? And I'll define that model for that. Now, it may end up being that I'll run it with a BDR AE model, but that's not a guarantee anymore. And I don't, and I think this is my advice to most founders and sales execs and stuff is don't default into what the industry says is the truth. Look at your own business and design the system that's going to work for your customer and your product. Because there is no playbook. And if you believe there is, it's your first step towards failure.
- [17:54]
A
Can you talk a little bit about how this worked at Shopify? Just so that, you know, people listening can understand. Because you and I talked about this a little bit last week. But, you know, one of the, one of the things like that I think is really interesting about Shopify is that, you know, they, the management team there, at least from the way I understand it, has a bit of a contrarian view. You know, just because everybody else is doing it that way doesn't mean we're going to do it that way way. And so a lot of the operational stuff inside looks very innovative because people are sort of given that freedom to innovate on stuff. They don't have to do it the accepted way.
- [18:29]
B
Yeah. So just for background, so I joined Shopify in 2014 just before they went public. And I think what you're describing is right. Toby Harley at that point, Craig, Brittany, you know, Shopify is very young and very countercultural. Right. The ethos was very much, why does everyone do everything like this? Maybe we should do something different. And so it was very entrepreneurial. It was very creative. It was, let's go write new books. Craig, who was Shopify's chief product and chief marketing officer, used to say, stop looking for other people's best practices and write your own. And this is a great mantra. It's like, stop believing the religion and try something. Innovate. What's the worst case scenario? You fail. All right, we try something else. So that was the model that we attempted to deploy in kind of everything. It was like the running joke was ask how the industry does it and then do the total opposite of that. And you know, a lot of, a lot of times it worked. But I mean, in fairness, a lot of times that didn't work. And what the industry was doing was totally right. Right. But you wanted to go through that learning process. So when I joined in 2014, this is, you know, 10 years into their journey. That's what my marching orders were, is like, hey, we want to introduce a sales organization into what was a PLG for the. Right.
- [20:06]
A
There was never a sales organization before you showed up.
- [20:08]
B
No, I mean there was Harley, who was. Is a one man sales organization for sure, but there wasn't an official sales organization. There had been some experiments before with it, but there wasn't like a true, let's go do this. Right. And so my marching orders, my boss was Harley and he had said to me, he's like, do all the things that are in your head that everyone said wouldn't work. Try them all here.
- [20:34]
A
That's so awesome.
- [20:35]
B
Yeah, let's write a new book. And I was like, this is great. So I tried all the things that people said would not work. And at that point, predictable revenue was like a monster. Everyone was reading it. Like, I mean, 2014 was like peak predictable revenue. Everyone was like, this is the greatest thing ever written. And I was like, I don't get it. I come from the old world. I'm old, you know, I'm a sales rep. Why do I need bdrs? So we didn't, we didn't do it. Like, I, we hired kids right out of school with no sales background. I didn't care what their degrees was in, actually. I didn't care whether they went to school or not. It was just like I was looking for personality traits more than I was looking for anything else.
- [21:17]
A
What kind of person just said just like, what kind of personality traits were you looking for like, I'm curious, like, what's an interview? Like, yeah. So job.
- [21:26]
B
So I'll explain it this way. I was looking for things I couldn't teach them. So I couldn't teach them creativity. I couldn't teach them curiosity. I couldn't teach them intelligence. I couldn't teach them work ethic. Right. And then a big one was, you can't teach success. People are either successful people in a variety of things. Right. Or they're not. And they usually come from. Success is usually driven from those other personality traits. So this was not a totally original idea by me either. Marco Bears at HubSpot had written. Had, like, written his own book at this point and had talked a lot about the same thing. Right. Of, like, we all look at the wrong things. So fun fact. There is no statistical correlation between education and success in sales. There's no statistical correlation between a past history of success in sales and a future history of success in sales. It sounds like there should be, but there just isn't. Except that's what everyone interviews for, is, where'd you go to school? What was your last job? And it's like, these are irrelevant. There is a perfect correlation between those personality traits and success. And so I looked for things I couldn't teach you because I could teach you how to sell. I could teach you how to do a cold call. I could teach you how to close a deal. I could teach you how to do a demo. I could teach you how to position something. I can't teach you to get up and go to work.
- [22:49]
A
Oh, I used to have that too, when I was interviewing for marketing people. Like, there's so much marketing stuff I can teach you. And there's just a handful of things like I can't teach you attitude. Right.
- [22:58]
B
And that's what we hired for.
- [23:00]
A
Like, yeah.
- [23:01]
B
And so we just hired kids. I call them kids. It's not fair. Right? But young adults, no experience. Not. We're old.
- [23:07]
A
Everybody's a kid now.
- [23:08]
B
Yeah, that's right. And so we brought them in and we gave them almost no training. I was like, look, build software. Like, here's the. Here's Shopify as a platform. Build stores. That's your training. You're going to learn how the software works and then call people and talk to them about it and see if they want it.
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A
Yeah.
- [23:28]
B
And we will build the training program from those early experiences. We will learn how to do it. We will learn if this model works well. It worked really well. Now, I want to caveat this. I, of course, had unfair advantages. I had a fairly aggressive parent company in Shopify. I didn't have to worry about economics because I had a well funded parent company. I had a lot of benefits here.
- [23:52]
A
Where all the leads coming in, all the leads were coming in product like growth. They're essentially Shopify customers. Were they Shopify customers trying to upgrade or was it new people coming into Shopify and saying, well, I'm not sure if this thing can do what it does. We need like the enterprise Y kind of version. Have I ever told you my Shopify plus story is hilarious? Is. So I was in Waterloo doing something, an event and part of the event was we're going to get tour of the Shopify plus offices. So I go in and there's a tour guide and you know, and he looks like he's a co op student. He's really young and he's so excited. He get us on the tour and he says, so this building is where we do plus. It's the upmarket thing of Shopify. And I said to the kid, just because I'm the positioning lady. So I said, well, how's it different? And he says, that's the beauty of. It's the same thing. We just charge more.
- [24:48]
B
I mean, he wasn't exactly wrong.
- [24:50]
A
I was like, dude, like, even if that's true, maybe Jim say that with your inside voice.
- [24:55]
B
Yeah.
- [24:56]
A
So which I think that's what it was at the beginning. I mean it wasn't like you didn't get nothing. I think there was some support and extra things that you got.
- [25:03]
B
But yeah, so. So a brief history of plus. So Shopify is built for entrepreneurs. It's the entrepreneurship company. And so if you're an entrepreneur, every once in a while an entrepreneur, really good idea. Join Shopify, right? And they start a company on Shopify and it gets bigger. So the, the, the one I like to use to narrate this is Allbirds. So we all know who Allbirds is now, right? Joey starts Allbirds on Shopify. It's a very good idea. At some point, Allbirds get so big that they need other things, support, other features, whatever. Well, this wasn't what Shopify was built for. Built. Shopify is built for 0 to 1, not 1 to X. And so there became this existential question. Do you let the most successful entrepreneurs leave Shopify or do you continue to build with them as they get bigger? The answer became build with them as they get bigger. This became plus plus was Shopify's answer to continuing the journey with its most successful entrepreneurs.
- [26:12]
A
Right.
- [26:12]
B
And so it wasn't shifting to go after the enterprise. It was just staying with your customers as they became the enterprise. So that was the original. So we got all the leads from Shopify. The first six months was all leads from Shopify.
- [26:27]
A
All the leads came from Shopify. They already know Shopify. They know this thing. Like why was there a need for a sales team to get this done? Like sometimes I talk to people, particularly people at the product led growth space and they'll, they kind of, they don't say it out loud all that much, but they kind of have this idea like all sales is friction. In a perfect world, customers never want to talk to a salesperson. And you know, why do we even have them? And if we were doing this in a perfect, perfect world, you know, all the sales thing would just go away because the product would just do the job. But that has never been my personal experience. But I'm more on the enterprise side my whole career. But I'm curious, like, you know, clearly there was a need for sales teams. So where did that come from?
- [27:16]
B
So first, I agree, in a perfect world, you wouldn't talk to anyone. You would just get what you want and move on. But like we're maybe hundreds of years away from a perfect world. Right. And so you have an imperfect system which is human beings are by nature social. Right. And curious and cautious. And so when things are cheap, I will make choices without interaction. When things aren't cheap, I won't. So there is a psychological threshold of which self service breaks down. Totally. Right?
- [27:50]
A
Totally.
- [27:51]
B
Now you're seeing that number get bigger and bigger over time. It's like we will now buy cars online without talking to anybody. That was heretical 20 years ago. No one would have bought a car.
- [28:00]
A
Right, Right.
- [28:01]
B
But like we're getting there. So like the, the threshold in our brains of what I will, what I will purchase without talking to someone is getting higher. So it's slowly self service is eating everything. Right. Because we're, our tolerance for interaction is going down. Right. Our attention spans are less and less.
- [28:21]
A
Right. I also think there's a big difference between buying a thing where I'm the end user, I'm the person, versus buying a thing where, you know, I'm really not buying it. I'm making a recommendation for my boss.
- [28:35]
B
Right.
- [28:35]
A
And there's, and there's a whole bunch of people involved and if I make a poor choice here, this is really bad. And you know, and part of what I'm looking for with a salesperson is, you Know, am I doing the right thing here?
- [28:49]
B
Yeah. I think you can look at this as like the one way door or the two way door.
- [28:53]
A
Right.
- [28:53]
B
We're unwilling to make one way door purchases without safety. We're totally willing to make two way door purchases because like what's the risk? So I spent $50 and it didn't go well. Oh well that's not exactly.
- [29:05]
A
Oh, I love that analogy.
- [29:07]
B
And so I think that like Shopify was a plg. Now a few things about PLG history lesson two I guess, right, is I think you have to remember how plgs started is plgs didn't start with the expensive stuff, they started with the cheap stuff for sure. And a few things have to be true to be a real plg. Right. One, you have to be an obsessed engineering org. You have to be killer product builders because what you're basically doing is letting the product do all the work. Well, it better actually be able to do it. Right. It better be friction free, it better be fast. Right. So that's one thing. Two, it needs to be relatively cost effective because at some threshold the customers just won't convert. They'll hit a ceiling. They stop converting.
- [29:55]
A
Yeah.
- [29:56]
B
And three, PLGs were built in a time where ads were cheap. Right. It's like you could just spend your way to top of the funnel growth. Right. And it was cheap and the Ross was high and so it's great. It was wonderful. It's just like I'll just buy AdWords. I don't need, I don't need sales reps who would be the general top of the funnel creators. I'll just spend it on Google and Facebook and I don't need the reps because if I put it in the top and the product is good at converting because I engineered the crap out of it and was obsessed with friction reduction. I don't need sales reps to close the deal. That was the theory. That actually is totally true. Assuming you have those constraints. Right. You have awesome engineers building wicked product. It's cost effective. Right. And it's friction free and ads are cheap. If all those are true, you can build a plg. If any of those things isn't true. Now you get into the harder questions is what do you do now? And I think kind of like the, the SDR BDR AE model. In the early days PLGs made a lot of sense for a lot of companies. Now ads are expensive.
- [31:05]
A
Yeah.
- [31:06]
B
Most engineering orgs aren't that hardcore. Right. They're not as good as the early ones. Right. Shopify was engineers everywhere and like Toby was obsessed with the product. And so you had all those advantages. Now you don't. But even at Shopify's version, what really drove the desire to have a sales org was just like what I'll call mathematical fact is they tried to avoid it, as they should. They tried to build their way out of needing to do this, but they hit a human psychological barrier. They couldn't get someone to convert over $500 a month. They couldn't. They tried. It just fell off a cliff. No one would say yes. Over $500 a month. And so what's the answer to that? It's like, well, how do you solve for that problem? Well, you try stuff. And so they tried something. They put a person on the phone and suddenly conversion went up and it was like, oh, well, that works. Well, I don't like it because I feel like this is the wrong approach. Like, why can't product solve this? But it is solving this now. So we'll install this idea of putting these people in place and we'll spend the rest of our time trying to build software to remove them, which is fine. Like, that's the right idea.
- [32:32]
A
Yeah.
- [32:32]
B
But that is the iteration of it. It was just you humans caused sales reps at Shopify. Right. And so I used to, like, I.
- [32:45]
A
Want to know what was happening on those conversations. Were they just worried they're making the wrong decision and they just need reassurance. So they just need a smart person to say, look, you know, you got options out there. This is why this is a good opt.
- [32:59]
B
I mean, what is sales safety?
- [33:02]
A
Right? I, I agree with this. Like, like, I think this idea of, you know, people that have to make a bigger purchase decision, it's risky. And I think part of our job is to be the guide that makes them feel like this isn't so risky.
- [33:17]
B
So I, I also, you got to think about this. I, I wrote a blog post a long time ago about this, which is I associated sales reps with tour guides in a city. I said, that's what we are. We're tour guides.
- [33:33]
A
I love this. I love this.
- [33:35]
B
So if you go to a foreign city, you travel to a foreign city, right? There's kind of two ways to learn the city. You can buy the book, right? I'm going to call the book the Internet. I can go on the Internet and I can Google the book. So at Shopify, you can Google e commerce. You can be like, what's the best e commerce software? Well, for the record, at that point, in history, there were 1900 e commerce platforms in the world. So when you Google the best one, what you get is a lot of biased information and a lot of information in a language. Because this is a foreign city, they don't speak your language. If you come from fashion, what do you know about the language of E commerce? So it's overwhelming. But that's. Lots of people read the book and they're like, oh, I'm going to go learn this city.
- [34:22]
A
Yeah.
- [34:23]
B
Or. So you and I, we're from Southern Ontario. So I use this as the best example of this. This won't make any sense to people outside of. Of the gta. What is that building called in Toronto? Right, with the roof that retracts?
- [34:39]
A
It's the Sky Dome.
- [34:40]
B
It's the sky.
- [34:41]
A
Everybody knows that.
- [34:43]
B
Right?
- [34:43]
A
But that's actually not what it's actually called.
- [34:45]
B
It's probably called.
- [34:46]
A
Oh, yeah, that's right.
- [34:48]
B
But you did exact. So the book. The Internet will call it the Roger Center.
- [34:54]
A
Right? But nobody locally will call it that.
- [34:57]
B
If you hired a local tour guide, they would be like, it's not the Rogers Center. This is the skydome. That is the difference. So a sales rep is your local tour guide. Your experience of that new city is so much safer and deeper with a tour guide than the book.
- [35:15]
A
I love this analogy so much.
- [35:17]
B
And so that's what you're getting is safety. You're just like, oh, now I understand. This foreign place I've entered that I had, like, I was very confused by the information. I don't know where the streets go. I don't know what lakeshore means. Right. Like, you know, it's like, now you have this tour guide who just calms it down, and you're like, okay, I was making the right choice. That's what they're for. And that's what they're for at Shopify.
- [35:43]
A
That's just so great. I love everything about that. Hey, we're getting near the end. So one last thing, since, you know, I know I have a lot of marketing people listening to this podcast. How does marketing fit into this? Like what? Like, if you could talk to the marketers in the land and give them a tip or two for working better with sales, what would you tell them to do?
- [36:12]
B
I mean, first, you're on the same team, clearly. Like, I think. Well, I don't think it's clearly.
- [36:19]
A
You know, I shouldn't. I shouldn't say that because it is not clear. Like, it is surprising to me how many marketing teams I see that have in companies that have big sales groups where they have almost no interaction. And I. And I don't understand that, but I don't know.
- [36:34]
B
But I think this is. The point is like, hey, you're on the same team. Because I'll use an analogy. If you're in marketing and I'm in sales, and we're in the same boat, and at the front of the boat where you sit, it's nice and dry, and at the back of the boat where I sit, it's leaking, we both sink.
- [36:56]
A
It's true.
- [36:57]
B
You don't avoid sinking because the front of the boat is dry. Eventually it will also be wet. So we either try and bail the water out of the boat together or we both sink. And so I use that analogy because the thing we both have to do is have to realize we're in the same boat and then have to row in the same direction. Shared goals. Marketing doesn't have goals. Sales doesn't have goals. We have one goal set.
- [37:26]
A
Yeah.
- [37:27]
B
Right. And we agree on the language of the goal set. We agree on the metrics. We're going to watch to determine if we're being successful on the path to the goal set. Right. And we talk as one. This isn't us against you. You against us. This isn't. Oh, sales did this. And marketing. No, no, I'm sorry, we don't talk like that.
- [37:47]
A
Right.
- [37:47]
B
We are together, we win together, we lose together because we're in the same boat. The more especially the exec talks about it like that and forces this to be true. Group meetings. Sorry. You don't get to talk as individual groups. Your leadership meets together and reviews together. Because without that, you will drift. You will drift in language, you will drift in expectation, you will drift in goals, and you will sink. Because now we all know this. It's harder now. It's more expensive. Your dollars don't go as far as they used to. It's less efficient. Right. Because you have a bunch of customer fatigue. A bunch of the tried and true methods are being slowly whittled away. I mean, look at Google's recent clampdown on, like, how the email drip campaign tools can be used. This is getting trickier. Yeah, like, we have to be in lockstep to maintain the efficiency of the systems and ultimately maintain our success. So I think that it's. I can't believe we're still talking about this at this point, but we are. Me too.
- [39:03]
A
We've been talking about this ever since I started marketing. Like. Like I'm always talking about this like the first marketing conference I ever went to, there was some guy stood up and he was talking about marketing and sales alignment. And I was like, yeah, yeah, we want to be aligned for sure. And here we are like 19 million years later if I, I still go marketing conferences and there's always some dude standing up there talking about marketing and sales alignment. I'm like, haven't we fixed this yet?
- [39:26]
B
And so I think my last piece of advice there is. It starts with empathy on both sides. Do you know what success looks like to the other side? How those people get promoted, how they get paid, how they get praised by their bosses? Right. How the company views them? Have you talked to them? Have you asked about that? Because if you don't understand your partners on the other side and like what drives their individual and their own careers and their own success, you won't have any empathy for why they make choices and how they think about the world. And like any group of humans, empathy drives relationship. And so we have to have empathy for each other. Hey, I can't be, I cannot be successful as the head of society sales without my partner in marketing, period. There's no pos. There's no way to do it anymore. There's no way to be independently successful in sales and vice versa in marketing without your other partner. And I'm going to say in software there's a third partner now which I would have all the same opinions. Product has to be in the room for sure. Because we're all combinations for sure. Product led, sales led, marketing led. We're all combinations of this. And so this trifecta has to be locked at the hip forever because you cannot be successful when you remove any of them. That those days are over. The days are over where I as a sales leader could just like load up on sales reps and make it work.
- [40:57]
A
Right.
- [40:58]
B
You can't. Doesn't work.
- [40:59]
A
Right. Or marketing could just stick to their like brand things.
- [41:02]
B
Doesn't work.
- [41:06]
A
This has been awesome. Thank you so much for taking the time. You know, is there places like can people find you on the Internet or follow you? I know you're down on social media like me. We were having this conversation earlier that.
- [41:19]
B
Yeah, I mean I'm, I'm on LinkedIn. I have talked a lot less in the last little while. I've taken kind of mental break from the constancy of social media.
- [41:27]
A
Maybe when this comes out, people can hassle you on LinkedIn and ask you questions. Wouldn't that be great?
- [41:32]
B
Yeah, that's. I'm on LinkedIn. That's probably the best way to find me.
- [41:38]
A
Okay. That's awesome. All right, well, thanks again for taking the time, and this was so great.
- [41:44]
B
Yeah, thanks, April. It's a lot of fun.
- [41:55]
A
Hey, thanks so much for listening. If you're listening to this podcast and you're thinking to yourself, hey, my company could use some help with positioning, maybe we should talk. So, as a consultant, I work with tech companies, but very specifically B2B tech companies that have a sales team. I don't really have a size requirement. I work with very, very large businesses, but I also work with growth stage companies that are as small as 10, 20, 30 million revenue. The work I do with companies is focused on getting a very tight definition of how you win in the market and then taking that and translating it into a really compelling story that clearly answers the question, why pick you over the other guy? If you're interested in learning about how we might work together, you can visit aprildunford.com consulting thanks again for listening.