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Revenue Builders
How to Build a Predictable Pipeline Engine Without Sales Heroics with Greg Casale
01:12:13
In this episode, Greg Casale shares how his background in engineering shaped a system-first approach to sales, applying principles of process control, data capture, and structured training to reduce variability and improve consistency. The conversation explores why outbound phone remains a critical channel despite its difficulty, how over-automation has saturated the market and reduced conversion rates, and where AI fits as a tool to strengthen preparation and execution without replacing human interaction.
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- [00:00]
Greg Casale
Outbound phone. Why is this a muscle that works when selling is hard? Outbound phone is hard. And so I always say when things are cheap and easy, the lazy will gravitate to that. When somebody picks up the phone, you're immediately in a live conversation with a prospect that you were trying to reach. There is no other channel that works like that. Every other channel. If somebody responds to your email or they do a form fill or they click on your paid media, you're still probably three, four or five steps away from ever having a live conversation. Outbound phone, they connect, you have a live conversation. Might not go anywhere. You have a live conversation, you're gonna learn something.
- [00:40]
Podcast Narrator
Welcome to the Revenue Builders Podcast, a weekly show featuring B2B sales leaders and executives. Hosted by five time CRO John McMahon and Force Management co founder John Kaplan, the show takes guests in the barrel behind the scenes with the people who've been there, done that and seen the results. Revenue Builders covers best practices for scaling and growing your business while sharing the pitfalls to avoid. Enjoy today's episode.
- [01:08]
John Kaplan
So, hey Greg, welcome and let's just start by telling the audience a little bit about your background and what Revenir does.
- [01:18]
Greg Casale
Yeah, happy to do that. So sometimes I say, you know, a 15 year overnight success in with this company here, Revenir, but I took a, a different path and kind of getting to not only this company but also sales, you know, and listen to a lot of your podcasts. You guys have like absolute sales legends on, you know who many of them just built a career from the start in sales and have incredible leadership experience and all of that. I started completely differently. I was a chemical engineer by degree. I know that you're, you're an engineer as well by, by degree. John, I don't know how long did you work as an engineer before getting into zero days?
- [02:01]
John Kaplan
I went straight to sales.
- [02:02]
Greg Casale
All right. So I, I knew I wasn't going
- [02:04]
John Kaplan
to be very good.
- [02:06]
Greg Casale
I, I, I, it took me about 10 years to figure out I wasn't going to be very good at it. But I was in, I worked in manufacturing for about 10 years and spent some time in, in and out of Japan on some projects there. And the reason that's relevant to, to this company Revenir, that I started is that I kind of, when I finally got to sales, that I got to through the product path, I was kind of looking at the sales floor and the sales motion and the sales process from this engineering mindset. Not that that was probably the right thing to do, but I Couldn't really shake it. It was just sort of what I was thinking about and when I would think about what I learned in, in doing manufacturing in Japan was at the time was kind of the whole, you know, Deming philosophy about, you know, process is a system and it's 85% the system, 15% the people. And so it's the, it's management's responsibility to make sure the system is working well. And you can't blame the people if the system's not working well. So this is like anchored my thinking around sales. And so as I went through my career and got to see a bunch of sales floor floors, I found a lot of things that just sort of got me thinking, like I think there's a better way to do this. I, I saw less of the, the 85% of the systems part of it and I saw most sales floors were over indexing on the people and making it all about we got to get the right people, we got to train the right people. They've got to be successful quick. If they're not, move them out. It was this very people centric thing. But then you looked under the covers at the systems aspect of it and it was like, boy, this could, this could really be improved before you focus on maybe what's not 100 right with the people. I see a lot of things on the system. So when I had an opportunity to sort of take a clean sheet of paper and say, how would I build the blueprint for again, this going back a little ways for the, the sales floor of today, what type of people would I hire? What would the, what was the tech stack look like? How would I train those people? How do you manage it day to day? Where do KPI's metrics reporting come into it? How do you retain them? Right. That was one of the most important aspects of it. How do you grow and develop them? And so I sort of built this whole framework and I started out doing that for friends who were CEOs. As a consultant, I would go in the company, I call it, take an empty room and 60 days. I would build a completely functioning sales floor from the recruiting and everything, recruiting, training, tech stack, the whole thing. And that evolved into the service today, which has changed quite a bit. It's evolved and now we say it's AI plus data plus human, which is really important outbound. That's where we focus pipeline generation. So it's now a pipeline generation service that we bring to our clients.
- [05:05]
John Kaplan
Right. And like you said, you know, if you go to Engineering school like I did and you did. If there's only one thing that you come out of school with is like everything should be defined as a process. And that's the, that's really what you're saying, is the mentality that you, you at least looked at the sales floor with, so what part of it could be people? What part of it could be art? What part of it should be science?
- [05:28]
Greg Casale
Yeah, it was that, John, and it was also that how to bring a process into control. And we used to always learn about the need for a process to be in control. And if you're in manufacturing or oil and gas or chemicals or, you know, processes in control, people get hurt, right? Not quite the same in sales, but there's a need for the process to be in control. And what I found a lot of times in sales was not only was the process not in control, but a lot of times we celebrated the out of controlness of the sales process. I'll give you an example. I think this will resonate with probably both of you guys in your leadership careers, right? You got a big quarter, you're near the end of the quarter, you're just shy of the number. And so this is when the heroics come out, right? Where the leader gets out on the floor and says, hey, we got this much more to go. It's Friday afternoon. Come on, call those customers, call the pipe. The deals that you have in pipe, let's make deals, let's discount, let's get it over the line. And then it might continue, right? Maybe the quarter ends on Saturday night. So now we're into Saturday. And come on, let's get this done. You drag the team across the line, hit the number, tell your CEO we did it, we hit the number. Isn't this amazing? And everybody goes, right? In the manufacturing world, that would get you fired, right? If you were the plant manager and you had a goal to hit and you did that, that would get you fired. Because that's the sign of a process that's out of control. What it does to people and what it does to systems and what it does to cost are all very negative drags on a company. But this was sort of culturally, you know, what we, what we built up in, in sales and so, and, and my thing is not stop doing that, right? But my thing is that build a, a uniform, repeatable, predictable process to the extent that you can. And most of that is using systems technology data, right? Then layer in the people and the people are going to be the least controllable Part of the whole thing, there's a lot of variability in people. But build a system that can tolerate a certain amount of variability in the people. In other words, take as much as you can control from the people and put it into the system and then try to tolerate the variability in the people. And if you can do that, you're left with something really powerful. You don't have the high turnover of an organization, both voluntary and involuntary, which lowers the total cost of operating the sales organization. Right. Which, which affects your customer acquisition cost and everything, which is, you know, which is a good thing. But you've also built something that's resilient and sustainable for the future. So when I started the company, that's what I wanted to do. I wanted to bring something completely different to service options for pipeline generation where we were a true embedded team. And this is, you know, we can get into some of the aspects of it, but truly embedded in the client's sales organization, in their tech stack, in, in their day to day huddles, everything. But it was completely managed outside of the company and we took on the responsibility for every aspect of it. Measured by how successful can we deliver pipeline to that organization. That's, that's kind of was the evolution of.
- [09:04]
John Kaplan
So talk specific specifically about how Revenir fits into a company today from the pipeline generation or SDR BDR side of the business.
- [09:14]
Greg Casale
Yeah. So there were a couple things that when I started, I knew we wanted to do. I studied a lot of. And probably like you guys, right. I was on the wrong end of some of these outsourcing partnerships or whatever that didn't work that well. In fact, the number one way most of my intro calls and my team starts is somebody saying I had a bad experience with outsourcing. Right. So a lot of times to me that's one that the, the teams that are embedded are not dedicated to that go to market. They're fractionalized. So I said we will.
- [09:45]
John Kaplan
If I, if I hire a firm to do pipeline generation for me, an SDR firm, they're basically outsourced. They're in another building, they may be in another city. And they're, they're probably not just working my business, they're working other people's business also.
- [10:00]
Greg Casale
Exactly. And that, that is, is probably the, one of the least desirable parts of, of that business model. It's very difficult, you guys know, I mean it's very difficult to train an SDR or an ae, let alone try to have them do four or five things at once. Right. And, and One of my, you know, somebody was, was approached by a recruiter here by an agency. We always like to find out what they're doing. And he said, oh well, how many clients will I work for? And they said five or six. Like imagine that, right? You're trying to study the go to market. So we had to be dedicated to if we build a team of outbound SDRs, they only work for that one client, which means I can go really deep on training them on that go to market. And I expect they're going to be with that for years, not months. Right. So I can, I can train them really well. The other piece that was really important was that they be embedded in the client's environment. What I mean by that mostly is they log into the client's CRM. And this is really important. Most agencies don't want, there are people logging into the client's systems because they don't want full transparency of what they're doing. And again that goes to the fractionalization. If you're fractionalizing, you're going to have to make trade offs between activities. So we want to be 100, we are 100% into the client CRM. The team logs in every day just like their own people. And that gives them complete transparency, which is good because if you're doing outbound, you don't want to be calling existing customers, don't want to be calling ops that are in progress, any of that stuff. So we're doing that. But the things that we bring. So now we have a dedicated team that's embedded in the CRM. What we're going to bring is end to end AI and I'll talk about that and how. This I think is a blueprint for how maybe your listeners can think about layering AI onto an SDR or even a sales operation. I'll talk about that. And we're bringing the data too in two ways. We're bringing the input data, which is really good accountant contact data, but we're also bringing exhaust data out of the system and this is missed by most sales organizations. The thing I can't stress enough to sales leaders, sales ops, rev ops. If you're not capturing exhaust data from your, from your sales teams, start doing it immediately and you don't even have to know what you're going to do with it. What is the exhaust data? The exhaust data is what happens with every activity, whether it's successful or successful or not. So in other words, I'll use dials an example and we are phone first outbound always have been. And phone right now is having an absolute heyday. So we can talk about phone, but for, for one dial, we capture 26 different things about that dial and we store it in a warehouse. And those types of things are if, you know, if I'm calling you John, obviously I, I don't want your pii, right. I don't need to know your, not even your name, right? Just your title responsibilities, the company you work for, maybe revenue, employee count, vertical industry, product type, acv, sales cycle. Right. Anything that I capture from that activity I put in a structured data warehouse. Now the new part of that, right, recorded recorded phone calls. Right? So now sales loft, you know, gong whatever you're using can record those calls. You put those into the data warehouse and here's where the magic comes. You put AI on top of this warehouse and again this is a data room closed off from the public Internet. And now your AI has incredible context for what is going on in that sales organization. What I tell sales organizations is you're going to learn as much from the things that don't progress. What you might call the bad calls. In aggregate, you'll learn as much from the bad calls as you do from the new calls. But in most cases they're considered throwaway. In most organizations they're considered throwaway. I want to coach on the good calls, I want to learn from the good calls. But there's actually a ton that can be learned from the, the bad stuff as well. So this called exhaust data and it's missed. So we capture all the exhaust data and then I bring it back to my client in the form of insights. What were we able to learn in this go to market based on what was coming back from this dedicated team.
- [14:18]
John McMahon
What's the ICP for? For your. For Revenir?
- [14:22]
Greg Casale
Yeah. And this is, this has changed a bit, John. When I started I did a lot of early stage VC backed and that was mostly because my relationships were with VCs. They had a problem, right? You just invest in a company, the last thing you want is them sitting around a whiteboard going okay, we just got this capital, how do we go to market? So they felt good about bringing a partner in that could help with go to market. So we had a lot of early stage. Now you can probably guess what the challenges are with that. When you're trying to build uniformity, predictability, repeatability is it just doesn't exist in those organizations. You probably don't know your ICP all that well. You don't have things like Consistency and messaging and things like that. So we did it and we can do it. But I moved up over the years. So then it became sort of a PE backed portfolio growth company that got product market fit figured out. Maybe they're, they're in the two 25 million to 50 million, maybe up to 250 million. That kind of a sort of, you know, real growth company. Now we started to attract the big public companies as well. But what I noticed was the use case was different. The use case was I've got SDRs, more than I can count and I've got them all over the world which is a, is a, is good. But it's also a challenge if I have a new go to market that I want to go execute. Maybe I acquired a company, maybe I want to try a new vertical industry. Maybe there's a new geography we want to go after and we do cover emea.
- [15:54]
John McMahon
Would you call those current use cases that are really hot for you right now? The three. Could you repeat those if that. If that's true?
- [16:01]
Greg Casale
Yeah. So for, for mostly with big enterprise where they have big sales infrastructure, it's new product introduction, sometimes through an acquisition, new vertical market they want to test they we were good in manufacturing. Let's try retail or a new geography. And this is where a lot of our North America customers want to move to EMEA and, and test out markets there and vice versa. And we can support both under one.
- [16:27]
John McMahon
And you have global capabilities?
- [16:29]
Greg Casale
We do. No, no, no Asia Pacific yet.
- [16:34]
John McMahon
And what is the roster? The when I say the roster, I'm saying at the customers in your icp. Is it a roster that already. When I say roster, the what, what the current go to market looks like? They have SDRs, they have AES, they have like in like where do you kill it and how pervasive do you go? Because what I'm trying to get at is the human condition is getting very prickly for handoffs, especially in where we are in technology. So first tell me what the roster looks like and then tell me how you handle handoffs.
- [17:17]
Greg Casale
Yeah. So by Ross you mean the different roles in the.
- [17:20]
John McMahon
Yeah, sorry, roles. Yeah, go to market roles.
- [17:23]
Greg Casale
Well if it's that lower tier of customer, I mean we do have some customers that, that didn't build an SDR operation and so we're the only ones doing that for them. Right. So there are those. But I'd say more, more often than not there are going to be other teams, other SDR teams working in the client's environment. What I always Say to them is, I don't want to be seen as. We don't want to be seen as sort of taking food off the table for any other salespeople. That's not the dynamic. We want a partnership. And it's funny because sometimes you get sales leaders say, hey, I want to pit you against my team and like, see who's better. Why would you do that? That creates a loser. Why do you want a winner and a loser? Let's all win, right? So, so I say is give us something that no one else is going after. Because I'm going to measure success and pipeline and bookings, not meetings. So I need to be able to show this partnership is going to generate accretive revenue. So give me, give us something that, that you don't have. So they might say, okay, I've got SDRs doing this. Why don't you guys go after this, go to market. It could be a tech refresh, it could be upsell, cross, sell. It could be, again, the things we talked about, new products. So we're going to go do that now. We are going to be partnered with AES. And so, you know, it might be around Robin or it might be one to one where we're partnered with the ae. And this is where your handoff comes in. What I don't want to do, of course you never want to do, is just sort of throw it over the wall. And this is one of the problems with agencies sometimes is it's the meeting shows up on the AES calendar. It doesn't really know where it came from. He gets on a call with some customer and he's starting from zero. Not a good experience for them, not a good experience for the ae. This is why we're embedded. And what I mean by that is we can see all the AES calendars. We're sharing them in real time. So if One of the SDRs, our SDR, is on the call, they book a meeting, they can see right there, they're going to put it right on the calendar for the ae. They're going to show up for that call when it happens, introduce the prospect to the ae, do a warm handoff and stay on the call. And this is really important. So you get the idea then that this SDR is not someone who's just throwing meetings over. They're a participant in the meeting. Why do you want to do that? And I tell this again, one of those things I tell companies is if your SDRs are not attending the calls they schedule, start doing that right way, right away, because you're missing a huge opportunity. It's an incredible training opportunity because they get to hear an experienced AE going through the product and the value and all of that. Right. So you want them in those meetings. Preferably there's a prep call before if the AE is willing to do it. And now with a, with AI, the SDR can generate a call prep sheet, send it to the ae, say this is what we talked about. You know, we can either do it that way, we can have a live call, but you want some kind of prep, you get on the call and then there should be a call after to say, how do we do to this qualify? Did it become qualified? And another topic here, and we can decide if you guys want to go here or not, is, I'm talking about outbound because we like to do 100% outbound. If somebody wants inbound response, great, we can do it, but we want to do outbound. A lot of times AES don't appreciate the nuance between a prospect that was brought to their meeting via an outbound call and a prospect that came inbound. And they'll, they'll treat them the same and start the call the same way. For example, I might start that call like, hey John, what, you know, what got you interested in revenue? Terrible question to ask somebody who came via an outbound.
- [20:54]
John Kaplan
Right.
- [20:54]
Greg Casale
So we want to, I like to do a little training there for AES, if possible, to say, let's just talk about outbound, inbound. You know, outbound probably came from a two and a half minute call because that's, you know, you're talking two and a half to maybe, you know, five minutes on an outbound call. I can qualify for some things. I can identify needs and pain, but I'm probably not qualifying for budget. So let's, let's change the expectation a little bit for what that experience is going to be like.
- [21:22]
John Kaplan
So you, what you're saying is I can qualify for a lot more on an inbound call than I can on an outbound call. Yeah, both of them in the same, same way. Which, which, which makes, makes sense. That's reasonable.
- [21:34]
Greg Casale
Well, I, you know, I don't want to diminish the qualification of, of outbound, but remember what we're doing in outbound. I'm interrupting someone in the middle of their busy day. I, I got about 15 seconds to get a two minute or more conversation. We measure, we call a conversation two minutes or longer. So we set the software to say if it goes above two Minutes, it's, it's called a conversation. A statistical reason for that. If you get beyond two minutes, the, the, the probability of a meeting goes up dramatically lower than two minutes, not so much. And then there's also a curve on the other side. If you go too long that it diminishes. So beyond five minutes the likelihood of meeting goes down. So you have this bell curve sweet spot. So if you get someone for two minutes you can kind of do some discovery. We don't typically ask about budget but I'll talk about how we train. We're training against a defined list of needs and pain. So it's kind of like you talk
- [22:31]
John Kaplan
about indicators of interest is what you, what you get your team.
- [22:36]
Greg Casale
Yeah, indicators of interest, but they're predetermined. It's, I'm not telling a rep, go find a need for the product. I'm giving him the needs that, that indicate when we sell the product, these are the reasons why we typically sell it.
- [22:51]
John McMahon
And I'm training and how do you get that information?
- [22:54]
Greg Casale
Yeah, so our process is similar to almost like a consulting engagement. What I'm going to ask my client is at the, at the end and it's not me. There's a whole team of people that do this is give me four or five stakeholders that represent sort of a 360 view here. I mean we like to talk about founders if we can, someone really, really technical. I'm going to talk to a CRO for sure. I might talk to an STR and an ae. I'll probably talk to a marketing lead, somebody in marketing, maybe a product person. I do about an hour, we do about an hour with each one and we're just having free flowing conversation almost like this. Tell me about who buys your product. Tell me about, you know, when you're successful, why they bought your product, what need or pain did it cover for them. And we just have this back and forth. We record all those and we AI analyze all of it and then we distill it down into a mind map format. So we use a mind map to create a visual representation of the go to market and it's broken out by the sourcing strategy. It ultimately says how we're going to open our calls. The objection, handling strategy, needs and pain, Discover, offer and close. It's a bunch of trees that kind of branch out and it creates a really nice visual. And when that's done, that becomes the template for the training program. You know, that I can talk about but you'd be amazed by doing this sort of 360 view an hour. With each, you start to just free flowing conversation about why do customers like you, why do they buy you? And out of that, you, you not only get what you need to train, you get a vocabulary and a language about how this company speaks about their product and the market. Because, you know, we'll talk about this when we get into training. What I'm really teaching SDRs is the language of that business and that product. They're learning vocabulary, phraseology, then they're learning how to put it together in a conversation. And this is the magic of training in sdr. One of the number one things I hear and you know, objections to outsourcing is our product's too complicated. You'll never be able to train an SDR to have conversations, certainly not in two weeks, which is we train. It's a two week training program, 80 hours intensive, but 80 hours, they'll say, no, no, you can't do that. I can do it. I can do it 100 of the time for the most complex technologies on the, on the planet. And it's a little bit of black magic how we're doing it, what we're really training to. I would say like you might have a meal that you could make from scratch that would be like as good as a five star restaurant. You know how to buy the right stuff, you know exactly how to season it, you know how to cook it. When it comes out, someone's like, oh man, you're like a chef. It's like, no, I can do this one thing really, really well. And I can do it over and over, over again. I know it like the back of my hand, but if you told me to go make this other thing, I couldn't do anything right. That's what we're doing with an SDR. We're training them for this conversation that starts out 15 seconds to be two to five minutes. And I can train them to have a very valuable, relevant conversation with someone who might know 10, 20 years worth of this stuff. But if you took them outside of that, they would not be able to do that. Right. And that's part of the magic. Most companies over train on product, under train on how to create a conversation and close for a call to action.
- [26:27]
John McMahon
And what capacity do you have for like now your roster? So how many clients can you do? How do they rotate in and out? What's an average engagement look like for you? Do you go and hire? When you, when you engage with a customer, do you go with a client? Do you Go and then start to hire candidates to be in the program. Like what's the, what's the way you do it? How do you do it?
- [26:55]
Greg Casale
Yeah, I mean, you know, when I built this business I wanted to build for long engagements. You know, just like it's a recurring revenue business, my customers pay me monthly. I want those engagements to be long. But in order to do that you've got to prove, we've got to prove that we're building pipeline, that that pipeline is converting. The contracts are surprisingly short. I never wanted someone to be handcuffed to us and say for business reasons we don't want to do this anymore. Which is very common. Right. The company might get acquired, they might change some strategy or something and have to change. But I didn't want them to be handcuffed to the business. So I said, okay, you got to do six months because we're going to build, we're going to put everything we have, we're going to hire people just for you. We're going to build the tech stack playbook training program, instrument the data, all this stuff. So you got to do it at least six months. After that you can terminate with a 60 day notice. But we want to measure engagements in years preferably. Right? We have, you know, I have one on the floor right now that's going on six plus years and I've had the same leader managing that team and that's not uncommon. But sometimes the answer is, hey, what we really need is for you to build out this, go to market, get us ramp scalable, give us the blueprint so we can bring it in house and replicate it. And if you want to do that, I can help you with it or you can take it, I'll give you the keys and you can, you can go do it. We are always hiring new for our engagements unless we have veteran talent that's kind of coming off a project and then we can certainly staff them. But thankfully, you know, we grow 25 to 30% a year. We have constantly bring in new projects and we had to have the ability of, you know, we're recruiting 365 to find people. We're constantly vetting them through a series of sort of things they have to go through to be qualified to come on. And then when we sign a project, we bring them on, we go right into training within two weeks of signing a contract and then they're in training and then they're live. And our time to first meeting is about three days right now. So from the, the time they come out of training to when they schedule their first meeting right now as well. That's a key metric for us. About three days.
- [28:59]
John Kaplan
Yeah, we talked about it a little bit or we touched on it. And a lot of people listening to this are probably thinking because it's like this huge influx of AI tools directed at replacing SDRs and I'm sure you hear this all the time. So what is some of your thoughts of what the AI, AI tools, current AI tools are going to do or future AI tools are going to do with respect to the SDR role and pipeline generation?
- [29:25]
Greg Casale
Yeah, and, and obviously this is a topic that I'm really interested in. Right?
- [29:29]
John Kaplan
Sure.
- [29:30]
Greg Casale
If something came it was like, hey, this is going to replace the sdr. Like, you know, I want to, I want to know about that. Here's the way I think about it. The first thing I think is I think blanket statements and sales don't make any sense. A go to market for a company is a fingerprint. It's a unique fingerprint for that company. There's so many parameters to a go to market. When you get into the size of company, they're going after the unique profile of the Personas that they're trying to bring to the table, the value proposition, the product itself. So many things are different. So to make a statement that hey, AI, you know, an SDR is, is going to be replaced with an AI is sort of dismisses all that. What I would say is if an sdr. Let's just take a simple example. If an SDR is in, is managing inbound leads in a B2C model, I would say yeah, probably that doesn't need to be done. Right. Highly automated call centers, you have interested people who want to get some information. I would say AI all day long. You could probably take the human element out of that. But that's very, that's not related to what we're all talking about here. When you get into, let's call it tech sales and you're talking about mid market commercial enterprise, the activities that an SDR is doing on a day to day basis, there is a. Probably a good chunk of that that absolutely can be automated. And it is being automated. Right. I mean if you think about in, in that and there's a huge negative repercussion of this, but automation has, is, is probably what's caused more of the elimination of conversion than anything else. But you have SDRs and many companies that are just emailing right, because they've been told we don't care how you get the meetings, just get the meetings and here's the number you have to get. So if you give, if that's what you're telling your team, then they're going to use tools that will automate and scale what they do up and up and up and up. Those tools are readily available to SDRs. And they'll go ask their manager for that. They'll ask a manager, hey, there's an AI tool that can write an email for me. There's an AI tool that can, instead of sending a hundred, can send a thousand. All of these automations. And so this is what's happened is automation has caused this 10 x 100 x thousand x in signals and as a result more and more signals going into the same TAM causes conversion to go down. It's simple math. If everybody's 10x100x a thousand the signals into the finite tan and we can. Let's talk about TAM, right? For any company on average, 9 to 14 of the TAM is in market, that's it. At any given time, the rest of them are on the sidelines. They're happy with what they have. They're, they're not, they're not looking. So you've got nine to 14 of your TAM in market. The companies that you compete with are 10x, 100x, a thousandx their signals over the last only three years. And what happens, big denominator, small numerator, conversion goes to zero. This is what's happening with email. And now the filters and everything come to play, right? Spam filters get ratcheted up, you get screening. Your, your phone says telemarketer and now you put filters in to filter these things out. So now let's come back to the, to the AISDR thing.
- [32:59]
John Kaplan
Well, hold on, let's stay right on that, that last thing that you said. So you know, basically the spam goes up from the, from the sales side. The customer has AI optimized filters for email and for phone. And so what's, what does the future look like? How do I, as a, as a sales rep, an ae, an sdr, whatever role I'm in, how do I get through those call filters in order to get to the Persona that I want to get to? I think I know the answer, but I want to hear from you.
- [33:30]
Greg Casale
Well, so let's talk about phone. And this is really, you know, I can't. Okay, phone outbound. Any company out there, you need a phone outbound. Muscle, you 100% need it when selling is hard, but you can't develop it. When selling is hard. It's. It's a hard thing to develop when the market's against you. And we're in a period right now where for most SaaS products, selling is harder. I mean, if you're AI native, you could say, okay, you're gonna have a little easier time, but you. Somebody's still gonna validate that for you. So, right. We're in a period where selling is hard. We were in a period with the pandemic where selling was hard for a lot of companies because people dispersed and weren't accessible. Okay, so selling is hard. Outbound phone. Why is this a muscle that works when selling is hard? One of the first things is outbound phone is hard. And so I always say, when things are cheap and easy, the lazy will gravitate to that. And hey, let's say, let's face it, right? Many in sales organizations are lazy. I always say it's a, it's a diamond, right? You have 25% of your sales organization are top performers. 50% are kind of in the middle, and you always have 20% that are struggling. I'm not saying 20% that are lazy, but you have 25% that are struggling. And it could be for very good reasons, but that's kind of what you get. If you give tools that are cheap and easy, then people that don't want to do the hard stuff are going to gravitate to those. And hence we have this 10x100x, a thousand x phone is not cheap and phone is not easy. Why is it not cheap and easy? Because if you don't train an SCR on how to do outbound phone, it's not going to work. You don't have enough time for that person to get there through repetition. Because we know what connect rates are, right? A good, you know, connect rate can be 2% to 12%. Average might be 4 to 6. You can't get enough reps to get good at phone without really good training. Okay? So you have to train. You have to hire people who want to do phone. You cannot hire someone with the expectation that they're going to do inbound response, they're going to do email, and then when they get there, say, hey, by the way, things are kind of tough right now. I need you to make 50 dials a day. It will not happen, right? That person will quit. So it's hard. You have to train for it. You need special technology. You cannot do this with a cell phone. I took a call from a guy that I know and he said, I don't think we can use it yet. Right now I'm using a kid that I hired out of college and I'm going to have him make some calls, see how it works. I said, how's that going? He's like, he's not getting any connects. Like, the connect rates like zero. I said, well, what's he doing? What software is he using? He's not. He's using his cell phone. Well, forget it, right? The telcos got smart a long time ago. They're watching the profile of dialing of everybody's cell phones. And if the profile is call, hang up, call, hang up, call, hang up, call, hang up, then that number gets flagged as telemarketing. And that's how you, that's why those things happen. So you need software. You need software that rotates the numbers that it originates from. And you also, you can't be robo spam calling, right? You have to. When you get a connect, you have a conversation, you don't say, do you want a meeting? And then hang up. So there's a whole bunch of things to learn about the deliverability of dials, we call it, which is making sure your dials get to the end point. And if so, you can have valuable conversations with prospects. And here's the reason why, as the hidden, the hidden value of outbound. When somebody picks up the phone, you're immediately in a live conversation with a prospect that you are trying to reach. There is no other channel that works like that, every other channel. If somebody responds to your email or they do a form fill, or they click on your paid media, you're still probably three, four or five steps away from ever having a live conversation. Outbound phone, they connect, you have a live conversation, might not go anywhere. You have a live conversation, you're going to learn something. So you've got to hire the right people, give them the right tools, give them the right training. It's hard. If you do all those things, you tap into a channel that cannot be hyperscaled. Remember, AI cannot make outbound B2B calls. The FCC ruled on this in 2024. Can't happen without big fines. So that channel will not go through this. 10x100x1000x. So if you learn to make that channel work for you, it will perform. But it's not easy. It's a journey and you got to commit to it. And if you do it when times are easy, you'll have it when times are tough. But there's never a bad Time to start.
- [38:08]
John McMahon
Help me with the, the phone companies come up with that because the consumers are screaming for it. Like, you know, get your name on a non call list. Like, we've all done it. All three of us have put our names and numbers or whatever we can do on those lists. So you have, and then you can get dialers, you can get an almost like trick somebody to think that it's a call from Charlotte, it's a 704 number, but it's still, you know, it's not flagged or what have you. So at the end of the day, you have this, you have this buyer, potential buyer or prospect that is leery of calls from people he, he or she does not know. Like, how do you deal with that mindset? Just when you know you're getting like, tell me how you hire your people. And you know, what you described is you gotta be good at that. And you got like, that's a special person that we've all been through it because that's how we all started of getting on the phone, dialing for dollars and all that stuff. Talk to me about the mindset that you have to get because it's still relevant today. Not tricking a customer.
- [39:26]
John Kaplan
Train these people. You have to train the hell out of them.
- [39:28]
Greg Casale
Yeah, there's, there's. And I want to say there's. This is not about tricking. This is not. And I get what you're saying about the area codes. That was sort of way back when it started, it was kind of this idea of I'll be local to your area code. And it's really not that at all. All it is is you have to rotate the numbers so they have to have different area codes. But it's not so much the mirroring of your area code. That's not. And most people don't. Oh, it's my area code must be important. Like that doesn't exist anymore. However, what you're saying is, is important.
- [39:57]
John McMahon
Oh, I get 30 of those a day, brother.
- [40:00]
Greg Casale
No, you get. Yeah, you're getting calls.
- [40:02]
John McMahon
Yeah, we all do. So, okay, but. So you're dealing with a consumer that doesn't want to pick up the phone. So how do you like, what's your secret sauce? To get people to connect quickly.
- [40:12]
Greg Casale
So the data, the data would, would say it a little differently than, than you did, John. You're not wrong. But the data would say. And you can pull the telco. This telco data, it's, it's about 50%, 48% to 52%. The people that will pick up a phone when they don't recognize the number. And the people, they will always pick up the phone when they don't recognize the number is about 48%. And the people that will never pick up the phone when they don't recognize the number is about 52%. And they don't cross. So it's like when you're in one camp or the other and you say, well, why would that be? We forget there are a lot of people that deal with a lot of people in their businesses and they don't, they're not putting all these people in the phone in their phone, but their phone is very key device for them to do business. And I'll give you one surprising one. Like we, we did a project, we were calling physicians. You know, we're selling emergency room equipment. And people like, you'll never get a physician on his phone. Get them on their phone all day long, right? They're, they're, they give their number to patients, call me with, you know, they're, they're talking to people. So then you say, okay, now I'm going to call you for the first time, John. And, and by the way, one is never enough. So we're going to call three or four times a week for at least four or five weeks before we give up on the phone. So, because you may, you may be someone who picks up when they don't recognize the number, but I just, you're at a bad time, right? So I got to call many times. And then I'm going to know, are you the person that picks up when you don't recognize or are you not? And I'm going to put you in this camp. Now, if I, if you do pick up, nobody wants the sales call, right? So let's just say you're 100% right on that. You might have needed it for your business, but you don't want the sales call. However, if you train someone in how to have this conversation, someone who picked up the phone not wanting a sales call and not intending to engage in a sales call will end up in a meeting. It happens all the time, right? This whole room of people behind me, it's happening all the time. I, I did not intend to be in the call. I raised an objection. And by the way, there's seven objections that everyone uses to get off the phone in the first 15 seconds. There's only seven. That's it. And we can, we can train someone on all seven. How to turn it into a conversation. Is it going to work 100 of the time. Absolutely not. But we're arming them to do this. So now I took someone who, they did pick up the phone. They did not want a sales call. I was able to engage them in 15, 20 seconds and I ended up with a two to three minute conversation. And at the end of that, something about their needs and pain compelled them to a meeting. Because the one thing we know about humans is they are just a walking mass of wanting to get rid of pain and have needs solved. That's all we do. Right? It's one big Maslow's hierarchy. You walk around going, all right, I got this need, I got this pain. And if someone in two and a half minutes can let you think that 30 minutes of time with someone else will help you check something off that's either a need or a pain, you may just say yes to that. And that's what we're doing now. The people that don't pick up when they don't recognize the number, I have to work other channels. I'm never saying just phone, right? What I'm saying is phone first and phone heavy to separate people into these two buckets. And I'm going to put that right in my CRM. Once I know they pick up the phone, I always go to phone. And by the way, I'm going to ask you for permission to text. So if I get you and I have this conversation for the meeting, what I'm going to say is, John, I love to confirm that meeting with. If you're like me, your mailbox is a mess. All right if I just shoot you a text to, you know, remind you of the meeting? Yeah, sure. Now we have a text channel open and people protect their text channel. And that's going to be really important later on for selling.
- [44:08]
John McMahon
So was it only in that. In that environment? Very interesting. The thank you for highlighting this. Is it only the sense that you want to talk to a live person? Do you. Is there, is there a channel or an avenue to be able to leave a high quality message? What's your thought on that? Well, that connects to some type of interaction.
- [44:36]
Greg Casale
Yeah, this won't be popular, but I've been doing this from day one. We never leave voice messages and as part of an outbound call. Now, if I talked to you before and we had a conversation, I might do it. And here's where time has caught up to this as well and proved it right. Which is. And you know, I'm quite older than both, both of you guys, but generations, you know, the younger people are not listening to or leaving voicemail mails. Right. They're barely responding to texts at this point. So the voicemail is kind of done. If you leave a voicemail, the, the chances that someone's going to go listen to it are just not very good. Now, something new happened which in iOS 26 that I'm sure you're getting on your phone now, which is the. The call screener.
- [45:20]
John McMahon
Yep.
- [45:20]
Greg Casale
The call screener will ask the person, why are you calling John? And they have an opportunity to say something live. And it will transcribe it to the phone, not hang up on, not a voicemail, but they have an opportunity to do this. When this first came out, I'm like, oh, oh boy. Like, what is this going to do to outbound phone? Here's the fascinating part about it. You know the bucket of people that never pick up when they don't recognize the phone, they don't recognize the number.
- [45:47]
John McMahon
Right.
- [45:47]
Greg Casale
We have the people that always pick up, so they're going to pick up regardless. You take the people that never pick up when they don't recognize the number. Those people, when they see the scrolling transcription, sometimes will opt to pick up that call. So that pie now actually took a piece of it, which was people that will engage the call screener. What we did as a company was we added a module to our training program. We calculated how many characters you get on the screen from the call screener. And for every Go to Market project, we carefully craft what they're going to say when the screener comes up. And you have to be sparse. I mean, like no fluff, nothing. You got to be really sparse. And we make them practice that. So as soon as the call screener comes up, they know what to do and they, and they leave it. And people are booking meetings off the call screener now. So that was not the end of, of cold calling. And by the way, I just don't, I'm not convinced. I know that consumers don't want robocalls. Right. And robocalls are not really a business thing. That's a consumer thing. The telcos and the device makers don't want to shut phones off for business. I don't believe they want devices to be business to business devices. It's good for them, it's good for the device, it's good for revenue, it's good for all those things. So I don't think anybody wants to make it so you can no longer use it in sales calls. And in fact, B2B calls are perfectly okay. On mobile phones there's no, you know, do not call or anything for, for B2B. But you know, I think these tools that are coming out are ways to. I like it because it makes it, it raises the bar on being prepared to do this. And the people that aren't willing to go with the bar and change their game and learn are relegated to the sidelines. And I like that. And as people in go to market, we should like that. I always say the harder it gets. Good. Right. That's good for us because that means that the masses are going to do what's easy and that's not going to work. And back to the AISDR right now, I think it's just another. This is something that's cheap and easy and, and so why would you have an expensive human in the mix when you could do this thing that's very inexpensive?
- [48:03]
John Kaplan
That is typically the reaction because I remember now, I mean to myself, but when the Internet came out and every. And I was looking for new opportunities. So I go to all the venture capitalists and they look at me and they go, John, you're an enterprise sales rep and enterprise sales is dead. It's all going to be sold over the Internet 26 years later.
- [48:26]
Greg Casale
Yeah.
- [48:26]
John Kaplan
Price sales is gigantic.
- [48:29]
Greg Casale
Yeah.
- [48:29]
John Kaplan
So that's going to happen. But talk a little bit about what you think. If you had to guess in two years, whether it's, you know, within revenue or outside of revenue, what does AI do to help a BBR or help a sales rep, what you think it looks like?
- [48:49]
Greg Casale
Well, what I think, you know, we talk about high value conversations and you know, kind of give you like a, a silly example. Right. Let's say we're in enterprise sales and we're trying to, we're, we're contacting a C level or VP level person at one of these enterprises. The way I would, I would, you know, in my organization is we're going to use AI all the way up to the last inch, which is the live, getting the live conversation. And now I can use AI to improve the probability that I can get a live conversation with that person. How can I do that? I use my AI to do a lot of research that I used to have to do myself. I use AI to surface signals around propensity. What's happening in that organization, what's happening with this person. I start to use that not just once, but I use that in a carefully crafted series of communications with that person to let them know I'm a real person. I know you I know your company. I have an idea of how we can help. And I'm trying to get a conversation. This is what I'm getting across. Now think about, I'm using all this AI. I'm not letting the AI have the conversation because to me, I always want the human in the middle. Now that AI should get more and more powerful at being able to do things to give that SDR more probability to have a live conversation. But imagine how silly it would be for that person on the other end to have a conversation with an AI at that point. Imagine I could outbound call that person. And I've been doing research. This is on my account list. This is a company. I need to talk to it. Does it make sense that I would ever relegate that conversation to a, a bot, however good that bot could be, right? That now you can't pretend it's a human. It can sound like a human, but you got always got to tell them it's, it's not a human. What does that feel like? Is that a trust? Does that feel like a trusted conversation on the part of that C level executive? And why would I start a relationship that way? It's almost like, you know, if you're at a cocktail party and there's business people networking and you end up meeting someone and you think they'd be great on the podcast and you have a conversation, it's like, hey, I'm gonna, let's talk on Monday, right? And I send my, I, I have my AI write an email to you saying, you know, we met at the cocktail parties. You know, what about my podcast? As good as that might be, there are important conversations that want to be human, human to human. This now you people could say, well, that's pie in the sky. That's not where the world is going. Let me give you a different reason. And I don't hear anyone talking about this one. The reason AI is so, causes us to just sort of our heads explode is because it can take what a human does and quickly learn it and do it more efficiently, better, faster, all of these things. And we're amazed. We say, wow, that took me three hours to do and it did it in 30 seconds. That's amazing. It learned what a human did and it was able to replicate it better. What happens when you take that human out and that human's now replaced by an agent? Okay, so now the agent is doing the activities that the human was doing, and now other agents, instead of learning from the human behaviors and replicating the human behaviors the agents are now learning from other agents. So now we end up with the training data instead of being human generated like that exhaust data I talked about, right? That exhaust data coming from humans off the floor, it was so rich and valuable, is now exhaust data coming from other agents. So now agents are now being trained by other agents. There's not, not forget a human in the loop. There's not even a human in the training data. And so now if every company has that capability, what differentiates you from your competitors? If you're, if you're a cyber security company and you're all go aisdr and then I have an AIAE and then they're going to learn from other AI agents. And now the web says they'll train my agent. So I, now I get a fully trained agent. What is your company now and what makes it different from someone else if you don't have some human element of what makes it different? So I, I, maybe I, I'm, I'm kidding myself and I, and, and I'm, I'm blind, I'm in blinders. But I believe that the human element will always want to be there. We as humans are going to want it to be there. And so we are going to define where the line stops in sales and where we want that to. Not because the AI can't do it. I mean you, you'll probably be able to send an Optimus on a field sales call, right? It's not that the cape, the technology and capability won't be there. It's because we're not going to want it to be there.
- [53:57]
John McMahon
And we're going to, here's, that's my hypothesis. As long as we're talking about an agent to a human, all of these things are relevant the minute we move from an agent to an agent. Because for me in my business it's been, I call it Egypt old. The human wants to know that you understand their business, period. How do you get me on the phone? How do you get me to stay on the phone? You got to be relevant to me. You got to understand me. And they also want you to listen. So that's the biggest challenge of any seller. And that's Egypt old. Now that's very relevant in a world of humans, humans to humans, it's incredibly relevant. Agent to humans still. Very relevant people managing age. I just saw, you know, this podcast that's going through the roof with our friend Halligan. Did you see this one, Johnny, where the, the CEO, the former CEO of Twitter is saying like he's gonna, he wants to be a CEO and have thousands of people or thousands of agents reporting to him. He must be a real introvert. But anyways, they're the, the thinking on this is like it's, it feels like it's getting out of control that you have to go back to the basics. And I want you to give our listeners like if we just listen to this incredible experience that you shared with us, help us with just some of the Egypt old stuff like you get somebody on the phone or you're trying to get somebody on the phone. I call it making it warm. I don't believe in cold calls. I think that with today's technology there's no, there should be no discussion about cold. So do you have some tips for our listeners? With all of your experience, with all of the data you're looking at, can you leave our people with because everybody's still using the phone. What are some of the greatest things that we could prepare ourselves with to make these warmer? Is that a fair question?
- [56:10]
Greg Casale
Yeah. Well, so there's the warming of it and then there's the actual action. Yeah, yeah. In the call, right? When you're in the call.
- [56:18]
John McMahon
Yeah.
- [56:19]
Greg Casale
You know, and by the way, I, I don't want to come across that. I, I love AI. Right. I just, I just, I want to been on a two year journey to infiltrate every part of our platform with AI. So I think it's, it's incredible. And the area, one of the areas is really incredible is being able to surface things about your ICP and your Persona that you cannot get from normal regular sourcing tools. Right. It can go out to the public Internet, pull these things in and, and find things that are not. So there's that. So now you, and what we do is the, the answer is not to give the, the SDR a sourcing tool that has an AI component that can do that. This is the mistake a lot of companies make is to put the tool in the hands of the SDR or sales rep and say, hey, go, go use this to make better calls. No, when, when AI can automate something and make it better, bigger, then that tells you to pull it to the back. I'll call it the back office, right? Pull it into the rev ops and centralize it so that it's no longer part of the, that you don't need. Because remember what I talked about back to putting getting a process under control. You need uniformity, which I define as people doing the same thing the same way at the same time. So instead of Arming each rep with an AI based sourcing tool so they can get really smart about who they're calling. That's not, that's not. The value is pull all that back, do it on a massive scale by their icp, all the customers and the, all the accounts in the tam. All the accounts, contacts, phone numbers, email addresses, propensity signals, all that send what's relevant directly to the sdr, right? We do this through Sales Loft. So now take away the whole sourcing part. Because the sourcing part is human error, right? Oh, I, I thought the ICP was this company. So right person, wrong company. Right company, wrong person. So take all the human error out, do it in the back office, let the AI do its thing. Send, we call it Perfect fit. Send perfect data to the sdr. Now they have the warm information they need at their fingertips when they're ready to make the call. And that used to be hours a day in research that then they're putting in the CRM and now it's all there. All right? So now that's all there. Now we get on the call. Now sometimes in marketing, we want to create scripts for calling, right? Because they need to control the message, which I get. They, they might take these, this warmness of a call and want to get all that into the call and say, here's a script. It's important, right, that you take all this stuff that you learned. You get it in the call because they don't want a cold call and they don't want you wasting their time. So let them know that it's warm. What I would say is when you're making the call, a little goes a long way, right? It's like, you know, salt in your food a little bit goes a long way. You may know all these things. This is not the time. Remember what's happening. You saw a number come up on your phone, you didn't recognize it. In the back of your mind, you're like, oh, God, it's probably a sales call. But I got to take it because it could also be a customer. So you take the call. The SDR does a warm opening, you know, says something about you and the business you're in and maybe tease you with a little something they learned on. Oh, I saw you just finished that ACP SAP implementation, letting you know that it's not a cold call, it's not scripted. But you're still fight or flight, right? Your heart rate's going up, you're starting to sweat. All this happens too. And it's Been measured. So you're, you're in, you're like, I have to get out of this life or death situation. I have to get off this call. And by the way, it happens with VPs of sales too. They got to get off the call. And so like objection. I got to raise you. They, you did not hear much of anything that, that in that opening. And people have to understand this which is why crafting this like worded message doesn't make any sense. Your brain is not paying attention. Your brain is in fight or flight. Get me off the call. The first thing you're going to do is raise an objection. It's going to be one of these seven objections. I'm not the right person. I don't have time. Send me a bad time.
- [60:40]
John McMahon
You already have caught me at a bad time.
- [60:43]
Greg Casale
I'm at a bad time. Okay? Now if I can take that and do a little jujitsu with it and use it to get another 15 seconds of conversation, I'm going to do something else that's really important. The untrained SDR or AE calling anybody. They're now, they're anxious too now because they can sense that you want to get off the call. So they're going to speed up. They're going to start to want to share some of the warmness from their research and try to pull you into the call. It's not going to work because now you're amped up and they're amped up and there's no way to have a conversation because you have two excited people. So what the SDR has to do is use their voice to get everybody to calm down. And there's a section we do in training. I've never really seen anybody else do this. And it's how to use your voice in order to get people to relax on the phone very quickly. And it's counterintuitive to what you would think. Hey, John wants to hang up. I can hear it in his voice. He told me so I have to quickly get this out. I'm actually do the opposite. I'm going to slow down, I'm going to pause. I might even just create some dead air while I think. And then I'm going to come in with the how I'm going to handle my objection and an open ended question. Once you feel that go down and you find out that Greg's not really, he's not one of those scripted cold callers. He doesn't really sound like a bad guy. Seems to know something by this that's happening in your brain very quickly. Seems to be okay, no real threat here. All right, I'm gonna, I'll chat with him for a little bit. And that's how we get into. That's why the two minutes of conversation has the highest probability to lead into a meeting. Because now you're predisposed to it going too far as answering too many questions. So what I, I guess in answering your question, what I'm saying is we have all this rich research. Here's where the human comes in. They have to look at that and say, okay, I've done this a bunch of times. I know how cold call works. I'm going to decide what I'm going to use in this chess match and this strategy. But it's not a call that is, I'm just doing for you. I'm teaching a choreography, a pattern to these calls and I can teach a rep the pattern and the choreography of how these calls work. I said there's an opening. There's always the response. Fight or flight. There's always an objection. Then if we get past that, we get into need, some pain, discovery. We have a thing we do called embrace informing question. Right. If you answer the question, I'm going to embrace what you say, Inform a little bit about my product. Ask another open ended question. This creates a cycle. I'm going to keep slowing down, using pauses, getting everyone to relax, embrace, inform and question. When I uncover a need through that process. And by the way, I have the needs right in front of me. There's six or eight needs for every company. Anytime I've ever gone through that playbook, that always comes out six or eight needs that customers have when they buy the product. Now I'm probing on those with John, I think I have one. I make my call to action. Hey, you know, it sounds like you know a little bit about this. 30 minutes, I can hook you up with somebody who can talk about it. There's another set of objections called closing objections. Hey, you know what, that sounds good. I am interested, but I'm not ready to go to a meeting. Send me some information. I have to go through that next cycle of handling that objection before I can get you to go to the meeting. So long winded answer of saying this is where the human in the loop is. I call it is really important. Now the beginning, that person's going to fumble all over the place. But we're going to learn with real people, the more they do it. This is pattern recognition. It's muscle memory. They start to get really good at it. And then the one thing I'll add in there is AI training bots which are incredible. I'll plug the one we use called Hyperbound. These are amazing. So for each engagement we built about a half dozen of these custom training bots. You put in all the profile information, right? What kind of person is it? What's their role responsibilities? What do they care about? You get on a call with them, you don't know. It's not a human. It's about as real as could be. You know, you can make it as mean as you want. You move the sliding bar and you can sort of make it meaner and hang up on me and make it.
- [64:57]
John McMahon
There's a Kaplan button on there, Johnny,
- [64:59]
John Kaplan
but it's a Joe Pesci one on there. Yeah, but, but Greg, what's, what's the name of that company?
- [65:07]
John McMahon
Hyperbound.
- [65:07]
Greg Casale
Hyperbound.
- [65:08]
John Kaplan
Hyperbound, yeah.
- [65:10]
Greg Casale
Great. You know, great product because I, it was really hard to find something that simulates that. I mean you can role play but let's face it, you don't, you don't get that, you know, you don't get that feeling in the, in the chest. This gives you that, right? Because it's, hey, I, I hit the button, I dial my headset on, somebody answers, what do you want? I don't have time for this. And now I'm in it. And that's good for, you know, you do these repetitions. We even have reps will do it as a warm up, right. They're, they're going out in the floor for the morning.
- [65:37]
John McMahon
Great idea.
- [65:38]
Greg Casale
Because you don't get enough conversations a lot.
- [65:40]
John McMahon
You don't get as, you don't get enough Reps, you know, 2 to 4%
- [65:44]
John Kaplan
connect range, you're not going to get
- [65:46]
Greg Casale
enough reps. Yeah, hopefully not two to two to four, but. And you can also, by the way, just while we're on that topic, you can boost connect rate. We used to say it's the one thing you can't influence making somebody pick up the phone. But you can buy data that are people known to pick up and you know, I'll plug another one there. Titan X is one of those data providers so that's another way you can get a little edge. But this is sort of the sophistication of, of the game now, which is why it's not just grab a, grab a kid, give him a phone and say call. Right. That's not going to work. But if you make this a muscle in your company and you buy the right tech and you train the right people, you have an edge. I know everybody says, oh, I get so many cold calls. The number of organizations that are doing this consistently is, you know, is very low. Everybody says they do. When I get on the call, you know, if I talk to a CRO and they'll say, you doing outbound inbound? Oh, yeah, you know, we're doing, we're doing up. Up on phone. Oh, yeah, yeah, we're calling, you know, and then you look at reports and like, not so much.
- [66:48]
John Kaplan
It's the first place that a lot of these guys want to cut. I mean, when, when people are looking to cut costs and the CFO is having a conversation with the CRO and the CEO, the CFO is going to say, you need to cut costs because you keep. As we scale, you keep adding sales reps, and we're not in. The cost of customer acquisition is going up, not down. Your productivity of the overall sales reps is flat to decreasing. Your ramping reps used to get ramped in six months. Now they're getting ramped more in nine or 12 months. Your attrition is still at 20, 25% every year.
- [67:24]
Greg Casale
Well, this is where.
- [67:26]
John Kaplan
And the CFO says, here's what I think you need to do. You need to either cut the comp plan, you need to cut the SDRs, where you need to cut the manager to rep ratio. And where does the CRO go? He'll go, okay, I'll cut some, I'll cut some SDRs. And that might be a really good thing for you and Revenir, because when they look back, they're going to say, maybe it made a big mistake.
- [67:45]
Greg Casale
It converts to OPEX too, instead of headcount. A lot of companies aren't hiring freezes. But this is where I think the AISDR conversation kind of missed the boat. If you came out and said, hey, an SDR is going to make. An AI is going to make your SDR 50% more effective or they're going to double their, their effectiveness, you go, okay, I believe that's going to happen. Right? And so now you say, well, well, great, I can get rid of half of my SDRs. Well, it's like, wait a minute, we want to grow, right? You, if each SDR, if you could do 50 or 100 more outcomes, say more qualified pipeline, wouldn't you keep that the same or do more, Right? I always used to say, and this is why in the pandemic, when I said it's not a good idea to cut SDRs is when selling is hard, cut everything else, but not because the only way you get out of it is to sell right little products and sell them, find another way to cut. But it would always surprise me when like the first thing we're going to do is we're going to cut SDRs and then maybe say, well, the AES will make up for it. Whoever decided that could work.
- [68:55]
John McMahon
It's the same people that said you didn't need AES because you had product led growth and then you're going to try to sell those that product led growth in an enterprise fashion with, with credit cards. And it just so that big swing that I've seen over the last, you know, decade or so has a lot to do with that. Hire a bunch of SDRs because they can do the job of, you know, especially when you say, you know, your metrics around pipeline and bookings, which is amazing, why wouldn't I? And then, you know, and then when they get customer feedback that says, you know, I need to see somebody in person when I'm going to pay a million bucks for something, then, you know, then it just kind of goes cyclical. So I think there, I think you've done a great job of helping us understand now. How do we, how do we get ahold of you? Like, where do they find Revenir? How do they get a hold of you?
- [69:51]
Greg Casale
Website's an easy place to start and you know, somebody can grab you there. I'm on LinkedIn, of course, and would love to talk to anyone and, and what I tell people too is that you can tell I love talking about this stuff and, and a lot of the conversations I have aren't about trying to sign a client. I just like to talk about this because it's fascinating how much it's changed and how much it's continuing to change. And even when, you know, like people say, hey, there's a world coming where customers have all the information they need to make a buying decision, they never need to talk to a sales rep. I always say, well, well, what if their decision is not you? Right? That's why you need outbound, because you need to interrupt that process because if it's not you, they're not coming in to you.
- [70:35]
John Kaplan
What if it's a brand new product they've never seen before?
- [70:37]
Greg Casale
What if you're not the incumbent?
- [70:38]
John McMahon
I give you guys a great example. I need to talk to somebody in my business. I need to talk to a human. I spent 20 minutes trying to get a human on a big brand company for my business, for technology by and couldn't do it.
- [70:56]
John Kaplan
Yeah.
- [70:57]
John McMahon
So I stopped.
- [70:58]
John Kaplan
Well, very few people do it like you do it, Greg, and the way you do it at Revenir, because even on just the enterprise sales side, we know, Johnny and I know that very few people look at things like a process, know how to measure things, look at each and every stage and step of the sales process, figure out what the skills are, what's the knowledge you need. Very few people approach it. So the way in which you're doing it with Revenir, you know, hats off to you and thanks a lot for doing this episode on the Revenue Builders podcast. Appreciate it.
- [71:30]
Greg Casale
My pleasure. Thanks for having me on.
- [71:31]
John McMahon
Well done, Greg.
- [71:32]
Greg Casale
Conversation, guys.
- [71:34]
John Kaplan
Yeah, thanks. Greg Casale from Revenier. We're going to put your information in the show notes. Thanks, John Kaplan. And thanks to everyone for listening to another episode of the Revenue Builders podcast.
- [71:48]
Podcast Narrator
Thanks for listening to today's episode. If you enjoy the content, please subscribe, rate and review the show to help us reach more people. This show is brought to you by Force Management, where we help companies improve sales performance, executing the growth strategy at the point of sale. Check out Force Management management.com for more information.