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Practical Go-to-Market guidance specifically for B2B software and service companies between $5MM-$50MM in revenue.
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#26: Sales Mastery Unleashed: A Dominant B2B Outbound Engine with Tito Bohrt
Unlock the secrets of a high-octane B2B sales engine with our latest GTM Pro Podcast guest, Tito. With 13 years under his belt, this outbound sales maestro takes us through the blueprint of targeting and securing those big-ticket accounts that can transform your revenue stream. Tito doesn't just talk tactics; he presents an entire strategic framework for engaging the movers and shakers in any organization, ensuring your initial prospecting efforts lead to lucrative closings.
You'll gain an insider's look into the buyer's journey—a map often neglected yet vital for setting the winning criteria for your product. We tackle the common blunders that sales teams stumble upon, such as treating every lead with a one-size-fits-all mentality, and the disconnect that arises when outreach efforts fail to resonate with the customer's purchase intent. Furthermore, we unpack the potential of a well-crafted SDR strategy, showing you how to mold your team into a revenue-generating powerhouse.
Wrapping up, we dive into the psyche of the enterprise buyer, exploring the nuanced mindsets from those actively seeking to detractors resisting change. Through compelling storytelling and a deep understanding of sales psychology, we reveal how to convert prospects into customers.
Tito Bohrt - Sales Mad Scientist
tito@altisales.com
gtmPRO
Now, what I find fascinating is if you analyze your decision-making process for buying a car and you analyze your decision-making process for buying a house and you analyze your decision-making process for even like what university to go attend, those processes are quite similar. What you do to decide and to commit is very predictable and therefore B2B sales can be very predictable if you know where the prospect is in the journey and how to take him one step closer to the decision-making point and to the purchasing point, to the decision-making point and to the purchasing point.
Gary:Welcome to the GTM Pro Podcast, your essential audio resource for mastering go-to-market discussions in the boardroom. Here we share insights for revenue leaders at B2B software and services companies, especially those with less than $50 million in revenue. Why? Because the challenges faced by companies of this size are unique. They are too big to be small and too small to be big. This dynamic pushes revenue leaders into executive leadership without a lot of help or support. We are here to provide that support.
Gary:Your journey to boardroom excellence starts now. Okay, we are super excited to have Tito with us here today. So May is the month of Outbound and we are taking a lot of different perspectives here, and just already in the pre-show before recording, we had to pause ourselves to get going here because we were on such a good rip. So I'm very excited to have Tito here on the GTM Pro Podcast. Tito, I am not going to do it justice. I think it would be really helpful I'm always fond of this is just provide us kind of the overall arc of your career. A lot of those contextual experiences over time lead you to where you are today and then, you know, maybe wrap up with a little overview of AltaSales.
Tito:Cool, yeah, thanks for having me. I don't want to bore people with background. The only thing you need to know is I am obsessed with outbound sales and how to create predictable revenue. I'm cracking that code and I've been at it for 13 years. I've done it for several customers. But how do we now make it consistent and reliable for everybody to crack the code of outbound sales? And the reason I'm so obsessed with it is I believe in the B2B world there's only one channel where you have full control of the revenue faucet from beginning to end, which is the only way that you can win is if you control the conversation, from the moment somebody is unaware they have a problem, all the way to the moment that they give you money, and outbound is the way. Every other channel relies on the prospect having taken some action first. So if you want to win in B2B, you need to learn the full journey, and if you want to do that, it all starts with outbound meeting generation.
Gary:All right, there's a lot to unpack there. So let's put this into context GTM Pro CEOs revenue leaders of lower middle market companies $5 to $50 million in revenue, typically PE backed or self-funded, most often 10 to 30 million in revenue. So what does that mean? Lean teams, trying to do a lot with a little prioritization and orchestration is so, so important, and so that's a key aspect here. But as you think about what you just described and you're building this as we speak or have well on your way to building it, and you're building this as we speak or have well on your way to building it what are the core capabilities that are required in order to do outbound? Well, I know you've talked about data and we can unpack that. If you talked about, obviously, the people and training and what they're doing, and just think about it from that perspective, if you think about it as building blocks, what would those look like?
Tito:Yeah, before we go there, I think it's important for the people listening here to understand who is this for, who is this not for. So you should not build outbound sales development motions unless your average deal size is $30,000 or more. If you have an SMB function, I guess potentially you can build it, but you would build it in a very different way from what I'm going to be talking about.
Tiana:So if your average deal is, under 30K.
Tito:Listen to this, but discard the 90% and figure out what is useful, what is not. If your average deal is over 30K annual recurring revenue, this is very targeted at you on how you do it. So what are we trying to achieve? What we're trying to achieve is, every month, have an employee or a set of employees dedicated to the following motion. We're gonna grab 100 target accounts which have been defined as our ideal customer profile due to certain characteristics of them. Those can be firmographic or technographic, if you want me to go deeper into that. That means they have a certain number of employees in industry, certain technologies they use. We've defined who they are. Now we put a list of 100 accounts and we assign that to an employee who we might call a sales development representative, and their goal is to grab those 100 accounts and do calls, emails, linkedin, direct mail, whatever they can, to get 10 meetings with the right person of that account. And the right person is somebody who is above the line, meaning they have power to start an initiative and create internal change of the company. Usually that means director level or above.
Tito:In the area where your product makes an impact. You sell to sales leaders. Cool, you need a CRO or a head of sales or whatever else. Cool, that's step number one. 100 accounts into 10 meetings. Step number two we need a process that turns those 10 meetings with the right people, the right account, into five and a half to seven opportunities. That means we meet with this prospect who has agreed to meet with us. They're not necessarily interested, but they're at least curious and we grab that curious prospect and in a 30-minute meeting we turn them from yeah, you know I'm open to learn some stuff to holy cow, I get to start working on this ASAP. Now we have five and a half in pipeline or up to 7, if you're doing an incredible job and our final step is to turn those 5 and 1 half in pipeline into 1.6 customers. So 30% conversion from pipeline to customer. If you can do that, you have just created an outbound revenue machine that will take your company on IPO. And I am not joking. If you figure out this machine, this is worth hundreds of millions of dollars and there's no question about it because let's run the math If each SDR can get 10 meetings and your average deal size is at least 30K, they can turn those into five and a half in pipeline.
Tito:They can close a deal and a half every month. Your SDR is sourcing deals that will eventually close for at least 45K a month. Running this SDR maybe their OT is 100K. Add taxes, benefits, insurance, you're at 130. Add management tools, data, whatever, support teams, onboarding, hiring costs, whatever Cool, you're at 20k, maybe 23, no more than that, and they're producing 45. So your cac payback period is under six months and I'm just going down a little bit of a rabbit hole here. But what I wanted to understand is if you build this machine, it's scalable, because if you had one str on 100 accounts on a 30 000 average deal size, if your average deal size isK, you definitely must have thousands of accounts that you can go after. Add another and another and another SDR. If you keep doing that now, you can produce revenue in perpetuity. So I think the whole focus of a CRO that is trying to build efficiency into a company between 10 million and 30 million in revenue is to figure out their outbound revenue machine.
Gary:And what I love about that, Tito, is you started with. What are we trying to accomplish and what are the economics behind that? Does this even work? Does the math even work Versus? Well, I read in a blog post that we need to have this. So let's go build that function and let's get better at it. And you know we're supposed to have X number of meetings and what have you. So let's back up on the process. So that's the math model to get us to where we need to be to create value.
Gary:Let's break down what's required there. So the first is you mentioned ICP, so we have to have great data. We can get account information, Presumably. We can get contact information. That's getting a little bit harder, so talk a little bit about that aspect. And then I think the other aspect of data that we're seeing more and more important is what can we know about that person or company that shows the recipient that we've done research and we understand you, versus just a generic outreach so that we can crack through the noise in order to do that. So maybe data comprehensively from those two angles.
Tito:Yeah, I'm actually going to break the pattern here. I'm going to recommend we do the opposite. Let's start with the end in mind. Let's reverse engineer the process. So the last thing people do is purchase. Before they purchase, they do paperwork. They only will go do paperwork if they've decided they want to buy your solution. They will only decide that they buy your solution if they have explored enough options that you feel like you're the best option. So for that, they're going to go request a bunch of demos or explore a bunch of different options. Before they do that they're exploring options, they need to set what criteria are they looking for in their preferred solution.
Tito:Right Now, let's go back to what I was saying a little bit earlier, before we started the podcast. If you analyze your decision-making process for buying a house, buying a car or even selecting what college to go, to all these life-altering decisions right, the process is very similar. Right? Let me run you through it. You bought a car. What did you do before that? Well, you signed the paperwork and you got the loan. Okay. What did you do before that? You made the decision that you were going gonna buy the Ferrari Roma that you've always wanted. Cool, what do you do before that? Well, you went to Ferrari, but he also went to Lamborghini and he also went to Mercedes Benz and you explored a few cars. Cool, what did you do before that? You said the type of car I want needs to make me look incredible and show that I'm successful, or I need to have the best to safety my kids, or you're setting criteria. What do you do before you set criteria? You say I want to buy a car. If you haven't decided I want to buy a car, why would you set criteria for the car you want to buy? It makes no sense. Once you set the criteria, you explore your options. What do you do before you say I want to buy a car? That's the problem. Most salespeople are talking to everybody as if they have already decided they will buy a car. And in the B2C world, and if you're a car salesman, if somebody walks into the car dealership and they're like hi, you're like hi, are you here to buy a car? I mean, how many times have we, as consumers, walked into a car dealership and they're like hi, you're like hi, are you here to buy a car? I mean, how many times have we, as consumers, walked into a car dealership not wanting to buy a car? Never, why would you do that? So the leads are pre-qualified.
Tito:In the b2b world, we're doing something crazy, which is we are deciding who should buy our product and and we're going outbound. Imagine a guy who works at a car dealership going to the shopping mall and be like Gary, come here, what type of car do you wanna buy? You'd be like, what are you talking about? I don't even wanna buy a car. And you're like, yeah, but don't you care about the seat belts and the safety of the car? You'd be so creeped out. But on B2B, this actually works, but only if you understand the full journey. So what are we going to do before somebody prioritizes the project?
Tito:What we got to understand is consumers buy things because they make our lives better. Right, I have an iPhone because it's better than a Nokia phone, but I'm never running RO rois. The purpose of my life is to enjoy life. It's different. The purpose of a company is to make money. So you can actually convince somebody that doesn't want to buy a software solution that they must buy it because it will make them money.
Tito:Ah, now we're interesting. Now we're no longer selling cars to random consumers. Now the mindset is a little bit different. Imagine you're selling car parts to Ferrari. Well, ferrari is not buying car parts for their regular cars. They're buying car parts for the F1 team Because the F1 team, if they win the F1 races, they make hundreds of millions of dollars. So now the motivation to buy a car part is very different for Ferrari for their F1 Formula team, versus how a consumer buys a car themselves. That completely changes the game. And having said that, now we can go deeper into different areas here. Gary, we can talk about like okay, most sales teams, for example, are really good at turning interested prospects who have a prioritized project, aka a demo request to a sale.
Tito:The biggest mistake they make is they say, oh, we're closing 40% of opportunities into revenue, we just need more opportunities. How do we do that? And they're like let's outbound cold call. And now they treat every meeting that's coming to their calendar the same way that they treated the person that requested a demo.
Tito:And what they understood is that might both be intro calls. We might be naive enough to call both those discovery calls. I don't think they should even call the same. But the problem is we're asking them in the first meeting. So, gary, why do you want to buy these car parts? And they're like I don't want to buy any car parts. You called me and there's a disconnect and that's where everything breaks apart and falls into pieces.
Gary:Yeah, that's a. The analogy really helps make that clear. Um, so, tito, from you know, let's. Let's go back to you know, the lower middle market company we described earlier. Let's say and we've seen this happen over and over had had an SDR team. Before it was kind of doing the load up the spam can and send out messages, phone calls, what have you. And then error of efficiency comes in. They're told to cut costs. They do that. They eliminate the entire SDR team. Now they're in a situation where they're realizing to your point I actually don't have any control, I can't reach my customers, I have to do something from an outbound perspective.
Gary:If they were starting from scratch and starting to want to build this capability with a relatively small team, what are the pieces that you would say, all right, well, you're going to need to do this well. And then you're going to need to do this well. You talked a little bit about content and people and structure and how many. What's the minimum price of admission required to actually do this? Well, because I think one of the things that we run into at this size company is the concept makes sense, but when you actually start to do the math like you just laid out, and the human realities of training and sales enablement and things like that that they suddenly realize, oh my gosh, this is a team of five, six, seven people and this is a much bigger investment than we thought before. And, just as an example, so yeah.
Tito:But keep your eyes on the price right. If you keep your eyes on the price, go back to the beginning of this podcast and listen to it again. 100 accounts, 10 meetings, 5.5 in pipeline, 1.6 sales, average deal size call it, it's 50K. You can make $75,000 per SDR per month in a fully scalable system. Grow that 10X. You'll be spending 250K a month. You'll be making 750K in sales every month. Holy cow, I am now worth hundreds of millions, if not billions, because of the system.
Tito:So go back to the Ferrari analogy and the F1. You can't try to build an SDR team and think about it like going to race in the formula one and do the following oh, I'm just gonna like test it with um, I'm just gonna buy a volkswagen beetle and I'm gonna sign up to race f1. You're dead. Guess who you're competing against? You're competing not only against your direct competitors as a software solution. You're competing against anybody and everybody who sells anything important to your same buyer persona at your same target accounts. You sell marketing solutions to Fortune 500 companies. You want to get in touch with a CMO at Coca-Cola. Guess how many people are trying to get in touch with a CMO at Coca-Cola? You're competing against all of them. They all have their own machines.
Tito:If you think you can spray and pray and make it work, it's not going to work. That CMO at Coca-Cola already has thousands of people sending them emails. You're not going to. You're not going to stand out. To stand out, you need to go deep, you need to understand them. Well, you need to do phone, linkedin, email, voicemail, direct mail. You're going to go to trade shows. You got to do everything to try to get your attention, their attention. Yeah, and and and. Yes, it does take, I think, a company that is thinking they should build outbound. If they're budgeting under half a million dollars for their initial test, they're doing it wrong.
Gary:It's not going to work. Yeah, what would that look like in terms of people resources if they were going to go do that?
Tito:I've been building these teams for a while. So, first things first, don't hire an STR right out of college. Right? It's like, if you're building a system, think about it like building the manufacturing company that will create the Formula One cars. Right, the first people who work at that factory aren't the employees assembling the cars. The first people are the people who design the machines, that assemble the parts that create the car. So the first people you got to hire are people who are incredibly smart and experienced in creating processes. You need three types of processes the one that turns 100 accounts into 10 meetings, the one that turns 10 meetings into five and a half in pipeline. And the one that turns five and a half in pipeline to 1.6 customers. If you've been selling inbound and you already have a couple million in revenue, your pipeline into revenue might already exist and be really good. You might already have those A's. You know what are your differentiators objection handling, contract negotiation terms, discounting, procurement, security. All that Great. Now you need the other two pieces.
Tito:What I would do in the early days when I build SDR teams for a lot of companies both early stage companies that never have built it and they're doing their first iteration companies like relics, styra, hummingbirds, on and so forth, but I've also done it for IBM, 8, 8x8, docebo, publicly traded companies and a bunch of people in between. First things I would do incredibly experienced senior SDR. This is a guy that is really good at opening doors. I would not have him do it all by himself. There's a lot of work here that needs to be done. Like if I was that SDR, I would select my accounts. I want to go after Coca-Cola, pepsi, starbucks, procter Gamble, unilever. I don't want to be the one going on LinkedIn, finding their names, their phone numbers, putting them on Excel sheet. So, second person, I would hire full-time a data researcher right Data researcher, potentially in a low cost country. You can hire somebody in Philippines, in India, whatever else. You're gonna teach them the process of how to research your target personas within that account and, ideally, if they're doing this right, they're gonna upload those into your sales engagement tool.
Tito:I would not run a email only strategy. The email inbox is crowded. You need phone email, linkedin, you need everything. So I would buy one of the top sales engagement tools. I'm a big fan of Outreach. I think they're much better than everybody else. But if you already bought Sales Loft or something like that. So be it, you're fine. I would not go with the spray inbox rotation, not for $30,000 and above deal sizes. If your deal size is 3K, do whatever you want, but if it's 30, 50, 100k, you're competing for attention. Um so, senior str data researcher good processes and just focus on 100 accounts at a time and see if that person can create those 10 meetings and then start building processes around it yeah right, and your step two is going to be how do we turn those 10 meetings into five and a half in pipeline?
Gary:Yep, and what about from a content perspective? So the SDR, the creative SDR as you talked about, is a door opener. Is there any additional resources or content that they need to help pry that wedge, like case studies, use cases, cases videos, things like that?
Tiana:yeah and like. Sorry, but to add to gary's question, I just wanted to ask, like, how do you put the sdr in a context where they know where the buyer is at, like what the what stage of the buyer journey they're at? Because, as you have established before, it's too important for them not to know where they are to them so that they become really good, as they are actually door openers. So how do you train them for them to be able to realize or dissect in which stage of the buyer journey they are?
Tito:Excellent question. So here's the way you should be thinking about this. Let's first analyze the average company and the average buyer in their journey. If you look at how people buy, this could be an HR solution, database management, cybersecurity, whatever enterprise solution we're looking at right Again, $30,000 plus. Companies.
Tito:Usually, when they buy something, unless it's absolutely broken, they try to stick around with it for two, three years at a minimum. After three years they're gonna be open to evaluating something new and if they are really not stoked, super happy, they will actually start taking demos and looking at alternative solutions. Only if they are like incredibly happy will they not go do that purposefully. But I think people are in one of four mindsets. At any given point, people are either in market, which is I'm I'm looking forward to taking demos. Let me do some quick math for you. People do that approximately every three years from the moment they say I want to go look at demos to the moment they schedule those demos, start taking the demos and select their preferred vendor, which is quite quick. I think it's about a month. I go to demo request, take a bunch of demos and pick my favorite. That takes a month. A month every 36. What does that mean one out of every 36 people, or one hour every 36 companies really is in the market 3%.
Tito:There's a lot of other people that are what I call open to change. They're a little frustrated with their solution. They kind of know that their renewal is going to come up eventually. They haven't really prioritized a project to change it. But if you tell them that you've got something new, better, easier, faster, more user-friendly, whatever it might be, they'll be like yes, I'll take a look at that. I'm using Sales Loft. You're reaching out to me from outreach. Outreach is better, easier, faster, better data, more Sure. How many people are there? I think about 10% of the market are frustrated with their current solution, to the point where you say do you want to look at an alternative to your current solution? And they'll be like yes, well, we only have 13% of the market. Where's everybody else?
Tito:I think about 40 or 50% of the market is open to learn, and this is the key. This is who you really need to learn to sell to. These are the people who I use sales loft and I'm like, yeah, it's good, whatever. And I say, hey, do you want to look at a better product? And they're like not really.
Tito:But if you change the way that you sell and you sell the problem, not the product, and you say, hey, we're talking to SDR leaders about how to increase efficiency for their SDR teams and how to get them to produce 10 meetings a month, would you like to learn some secrets? This SDR leader is going to be like yes, I want to learn to be better. I'm open to learning. I'm not interested in buying product, don't even talk to me about outreach. But if you can sell me a better process, a better system, a better idea conceptually, I want to hear about it. And if you can convince me that that's much better, and then you can convince me that my current tool is not good enough, I'll be open to change. I'll move from open to'll be open to change. I'll move from open to learn to open to change.
Tito:So now we have 3% in market, 10% open to change, about 40 or 50% open to learn. The rest they're detractors. You can tell them anything you want. They'll be like I don't want to talk to you, I'm not buying. I don't talk to vendors unless I'm buying. And I can see that inside companies you have some employees. They're always trying to get better, always trying to learn more, always trying to succeed. They're what Kim Scott calls them superstars, right. And then you have all those people that just do the minimum possible. They're not champions, they're just like yeah, we have a contract for three years, I don't want to learn anything right now, but you still don't want to talk to them as an outbound seller. So you sell the problem, not the solution, and you sell the best practices, not the product. And if you can do that, you might potentially be able to capture the 63% of the market that is willing to meet with you.
Tito:Now here's the hardest challenge. If they are in market, the intro call is really easy. Hi, tiana, I sent you an email talking about sales versus outreach and why outreach is better. You said you were about to look at it next month. I'm glad we can schedule a demo about outreach. Great, that's easy. Then you have the open to change, right? The people who you said hey, we told you how outreach is better than sales loft. You said you're with sales loft. I'm kind of happy, but open to learning about new products, love to show you what we do and hear more about.
Tito:What are the frustrating parts about sales law? What is making you open to change and you'll say, like, great, I'll join that call. Here's the problem. They're open to learn people. We just said it. They don't want to talk about product. How are you going to open that introductory call?
Tito:You can start the call with like hi, gary, yeah, tell me about your challenges. You're going to tell me what do you mean. Tell me about your challenges. You told me, tito, that you would tell me about the best practices on how to be the best SDR leader in the world. I'm not going to tell you about any of my challenges. You tell me what. Show me what world-class looks like. If we can learn to sell that, then we can build an outbound revenue machine.
Tito:And there's a, there's a system to do it. How do you convince somebody who doesn't wanna change that they need to change and it's for their own good that they need to change, and it's for their own good? You might be inspired by all sorts of research and books and things, but it's a lot of storytelling. There's organizations worldwide that dedicate their lives to doing this. If you look at AA, what they do is they convince people who don't think that they have a problem that they gotta change for their own good. It is not magic. It is predictable, but you need to learn how to do this with your sales team, and the people who are really good at doing that are not always. More importantly, they're likely very different from the people who are very good closers, because the people who are really good closers are good at putting pressure and moving things forward and negotiating hard, while the people who are good at opening your mind to change are thoughtful. They're storytellers. Yeah, they're thought leaders. It's a very different profile.
Tiana:Yeah, People are actually just naturally risk. They have naturally risk aversion. So or a change version like, people don't like when things change. We are comfortable in our comfort zone where everything is at as it should be every day, and just breaking through that and it's very interesting that you pointed it out because it's you're talking about attacking directly the pain point, but not from a solution point of view, but from like this is your problem. I know your problem. I've been there, I've done that. I know how to make it better and that is what generally like, makes a reaction. And I was like I just got thinking about like the car analogy that you said. Like if my car is working, it's not bad, I can still drive it. Then I might be interested if you show me some solutions, but it's not like I'm going to go looking for another one because I'm comfortable, it's my car, I don't want to change it right now. If it stops working, it's different. So just learning to speak to people from that angle very interesting.
Tito:Let me give you also a good story and a good solution. I think I can tell you a quick story that will get people to understand how do we actually do this? On this part of the book I'm writing, it's going to be called the Outbound Revenue Machine. It's going to be out probably in August or September this year.
Gary:Mark your calendars, everybody.
Tito:One of the people that I met actually is a guy whose name is Glenn Boghossian and he has this fascinating story. I'm going to make it really short for the podcast, but he used to have a mouse pad company. He used to have the little mouse pads that we used to use, right, if you're over 35 years old, you probably remember them, and this is back in the 90s, right, where desktop computers were, the were the thing. In the early 2000s, a big problem happens laptops start coming out and the new, like um computer mice with laser uh, come out. So you no longer needed the mouse pad for the little ball at the bottom of the mouse, uh, to roll your computer master roll. So his market is tanking.
Tito:His? Um wife's birthday is coming up and she just just started doing hot yoga. So one random day he starts. He goes online, starts trying to look for hot yoga, um yoga maps as a birthday present and he couldn't find necessarily anything great. A few days later he's playing playing tennis Saturday afternoon with his friend and he realizes that even though he's really sweaty and his hands are sweaty, the racket grip isn't slippery, it's actually holding his hand really, really well. Comes up with a genius idea, this epiphany moment where he says here's what I'm going to do. I'm going to grab my mouse pads, my computer's tanking, I'm going to increase the'm gonna making human size. I'm gonna making yoga mat size. On top of that, I'm gonna grab the coating from my tennis racket grip. I'm gonna figure out how that's built, I'm gonna coat the yoga mat with it and this will be yoga mats specifically for hot yoga. I'm gonna try to see if I can sell it.
Tito:Spends a couple of weeks, makes some prototypes and he used to sell those mouse pads at Best Buy. Right, he was a wholesaler to Best Buy. He never sold retail. This is early 2000. E-commerce wasn't even a thing. So the guy built them and he says I need to find somebody who will carry these, but Best Buy is not my team to carry the product. That's where I have relationships starts trying to build relationships. Nike, adidas, dick's sporting goods, target walmart. Lululemon calls everybody, emails everybody, this tiny little company. Lululemon responds to him and they said oh, we have a buying committee. We love taking meetings with vendors who are willing to offer their products. See, if we want to make him a Lululemon product, you can come over to the headquarters and present to us. You have 10 minutes to present. You're invited. Here's the address. Guy shows up. Shows up with two yoga mats, one on each arm on a water spray bottle. Remember the people who he's about to talk to. What is their mindset? Are they in market for yoga mats?
Tito:no not necessarily what is wrong about your yoga mats. They would tell you nothing's wrong with our yoga.
Tito:I mean, we love our yoga mats. Don't you love our yoga mats? Right? Are they're open? Listen, are they open to change? No, but they're open to learn. Right, so he gets there. There's another five sales reps. They're all going to present Most of the sales reps. Here's their presentation.
Tito:Hi everybody, my name is Gary and I am the Northwest Regional Sales Director for XYZ Company. I am here to present you an incredible product that will revolutionize the way that you guys do shoes. This product has been not only tested by the best people. I know what everybody's doing in the room. Come on, shut up and show me the product. Have we not heard that a million times? Show me, the demo already Happens all the time. That's because they're trying to hype it up. Have we not heard that a million times? Show me, the demo already Happens all the time. Right, that's because they're trying to hype it up.
Tito:Glenn had a completely different strategy. He was a genius at selling to the people who are open to learn, because he gets into the room and he says hi everybody, I'm Glenn. Nice to meet you. I'm not going to bore you with a little background here, but I just wanted you to know that I'm a yoga mat nerd and I found some insights and how the market is changing. But I'd like to share with you and give your opinion, because you guys do yoga mats.
Tito:So before I get started, may I ask you guys two questions? And they're like yeah, he's like, awesome thanks. Um, they're like yeah, he's like awesome thanks. They're simple but not very common. So if you don't know the answers, it's no big deal. But do you guys know what your yoga mat rollability coefficient is? And the team kind of like looks at each other. They're like rollability coefficient no idea, dude. He's like okay, okay, cool, no big deal. Um. Second question, a little bit easier on this case um, do you guys measure your wet traction coefficient? And they're like white traction coefficient. I mean we do the traction coefficient, which is how well does the grip of the yoga mat hold when we try to move. But wet traction do you mean that we do that when the product is wet? He's like yeah, let me explain. Look at this.
Tito:He grabs both yoga mats, puts them on the table, rolls them out, tries to roll them out flat, and guess what happens? One of the yoga mats is a Lululemon yoga mat're gonna bend over awkwardly upwards. The other one is one that he brought. It's almost perfectly flat, he says you might have not thought about this before, but the experience of rolling out your yoga mat every morning when you're about to do yoga is different depending on your rollability coefficient. You either need to put your feet in every corner and try to spread it out, or you need to flip it around and it gets bumpy and it's an annoying experience. There are lots of complaints on different websites online telling us that this is a big problem. The other thing that's very interesting is that you guys have done an incredible job at the following Puts both hands, one on each. Each yoga mat tries to move him. You hold traction really well with lululemon yoga mat. But here's the problem some water on the yoga mats. Look at this whoo butter.
Tito:You have not yet thought about what's happening in the market. What's happening in the market is people are buying yoga mats not only to do yoga at home. People go running. They come back, they have a yoga mat to do some stretching. They're sweaty. Hot yoga is taking off. People are doing workouts at home jumping jacks, push-ups. They're sweating and if they use Lululemon yoga mats, it's slippery. It is not a good experience.
Tito:So I've analyzed the market. Right now, the market for yoga mats nationwide is 532 million dollars. You guys, according to my estimations, have about seven percent of that market. What I foresee is that if you guys improve your rollability coefficient and your attraction coefficient over the next three years, you can go from seven to eighteen percent of the yoga mat market. It is a very fragmented market. The yoga mat market is also growing 8% per year. It's going from 500 million to about 1.2 billion in the next 10 years. So here's what I'm thinking If you guys start being more forward thinking about your yoga mats and you start making some modifications, you guys can add hundreds of millions of dollars to your bottom line. Um, my time is up. I would love to tell you all about how to build these, but I don't have it today. Here's my business card. If you guys would be open to hearing about that, please call me.
Tito:So what did he do? Here's the process of taking from somebody who's open to learn to somebody being in market. First thing you do is you help them imagine future state. You paint this visual in their mind of what life would be like if it was different. He used the water spray and the rollability coefficient to help them understand that there's a better way. The second thing is to actually have it very, very concrete in their mind. They can see themselves using it. They can see themselves putting their feet on the corner. They can see themselves slipping. They can see themselves doing the exercises and getting sweaty. Now it's concrete.
Tito:Step number three is run some back of the envelope math. It doesn't need to be perfect. We're not talking about the every penny and every dollar and every cent, but we're helping them understand the approximate impact of change. Now I've convinced the Lululemon people to go from yeah, I'd love to learn about yoga mats to, at the end of the meeting, being like holy bananas. If I change the rollability coefficient, the wet traction coefficient two terms that they didn't even know before the meeting I can make $100 million. If I have to work on anything in my life right now, it's those two things.
Tito:Guess what happened? The head of product at Lululemon called Glenn the day after the meeting and said I have to meet with you because, as a company, we have now prioritized improving our yoga mats. It is the most important company initiative. We've decided as a committee yesterday that that's what we got to do. We'd love to get your insights on how we might be able to do that. He ended up signing a 10-year contract for $20 million a year worth of Lululemon yoga mats to be sent to them, and he retired the week after All the yoga mats were being built in China Factory that did all the same things they had sent directly to Lululemon. He has a 10 year agreement. You know 70% margin. He's making $14 million a year. Done One deal and you're done it's amazing.
Andy:How do we so in our companies? I think we wish we all had a Glenn right Like and that's not, I'm guessing, your typical SDR. That's not, I mean, it's hard to go find a Glenn. How do you? How do you? Often, I'm sure you work with all manner of companies that have a Glenn capability or not, right and we talked about it before the show where, like, some people just have no clue about that, let alone have someone who can do that or a function within the company that can replicate what Glenn did there. How, in your spectrum of working with companies, the ones that best replicate what Glenn did, what is their composition? How do they go about figuring out that competency?
Tito:So this is the key right to it all. Let's go back to the three pieces of the machine. 100 accounts into 10 meetings. For that you need strategic S strs and know how to get people to go from nah I don't think I have a problem, but I'm open to learn.
Tito:So I'm curious. I'll take a meeting. You can build that. For that you need strs. A lot of people know how to do that machine.
Tito:Number three is turning pipeline into customers. We've talked about the aes. We know that. Wait a second, we're missing something between the str and the ae. We need glens. That's what I also do for a living, but the past few years I've been training companies on how to turn some of their aes into glens. And the way we do so is we have an outbound ae assessment. Every time we start working with a company we give them a survey. For how do you think about outbound? Answer all these questions in the context of outbound. How? What are the questions you would ask? Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. We score them. On top of that, we start building the meeting machine with SDRs. We start sending the meetings. We throw about 20 meetings across 5 to 10 AEs. Everybody takes two to three meetings.
Tito:What we do is we have a scorecard on how to run what we call illumination calls. We have the illumination scorecard. What is the purpose of the illumination? Take somebody from. I don't think I need anything to aha. A light bulb just go, went off. In my head I have a genius idea. That's what we need to make him feel. So we score all the aes on how well are they illuminating?
Tito:Once we have those two, we build a program for every customer. We custom design a program where we will pick the two best fit AEs to become our glints and we run a three-month bootcamp. We call it the Outbound Sales Bootcamp and we meet with them every week, review all their calls align with the Illumination Scorecard and help them move the needle every week so they get better. And we will not stop the boot camp, even though it's three months at the beginning, up until the moment that we have 55 of all the intro calls ending with I gotta go do this. I gotta go talk to my boss, can you send me some materials? When at the beginning of the call they were like yeah, your sdr kind of harassed me and got me in here. I don't necessarily know why I'm here. I don't have any problems and that's the key building your glance.
Gary:I love that's a great question, andy, you know. And but one thing I really love the way you laid this out you mentioned earlier, which is such a valuable point about acv. Like the unit economics for this have to work, but what you just described in terms of the open to learn, moving to open to change and what it takes to do that, there are now things and concepts that you can see. How could we value engineer this to take that same approach with a smaller ACV customer, whether it's from much more intelligent marketing or moderated, more automated outbound or what have you, whatever that looks like, but the same principles apply. So you now have a framework from which to be able to value engineer, based on where your ACV is.
Tito:Yeah, and again, when you think about consumer products, I'm a big fan of Celsius. I drink Celsius every day and I'm potentially now even consider recurring revenue celsius I drink celsius every day, right, uh, and I'm potentially now even consider recurring revenue for celsius because I drink it every day. But but the way I bought that it was very different. I was like I don't drink coffee. I need something healthy in the morning that gives me energy. Uh, sometimes I was drinking tea, I took caffeine pills. At some point I learned this. I looked at the label. I, holy cow, the content's actually quite healthy. I'll give it a try.
Tito:But the buying process is different, because giving this a try was three bucks and it worked. And then I bought a case of 12 and it was like 25 bucks or 30 bucks or whatever. I can try it for 30 bucks and it's not going to kill me. But if you're selling cybersecurity, nobody can try it for 30 bucks. So you need to convince them of the value.
Tito:And then there's other elements that we're not going to be able to get into too deep today, but all these decision-making processes happen where subconsciously, the prospect is doing some value engineering, as you said, gary, right, what is the amount of time, effort and the money it is going to take me to change, right?
Tito:Because it's not only the money, it's the time and effort. Staying the same costs zero time, zero effort and zero money. Changing takes time, effort and money. So you can't just do if you invest 100K, you will get 300K, yeah, but it's 100K plus a lot of time and effort, and if I fail I'm going to get fired for investing 100K and if I produce 300K, it's not good enough. So sometimes you need like a 10X return, right. So we need to engineer the value, create the process and know where to go de-risk it. Create the process and know where to go de-risk it. If you read the book the Jolt Effect, they teach you how the reason why most buying decisions end up being no decision is because it was too risky to change. It is easier to just not do anything but also not be blamed for change Right.
Gary:Yep, yeah, and I know you've been very generous with your time and we're there so, and I also know that we could go on another hour with questions. For sure, we may need a follow up because there's there's so much to that as you think about the human element inside an organization, incentive structures, how they work with other departments, all of those kinds of things. So, and also like, should you be even doing this yourself or should you consider somebody like AltaSales as the resource?
Andy:So we kind of feed that- Make versus buy, make versus buy.
Gary:Yeah, exactly, but-.
Tito:So much to talk about. Thank you so much for having me. You know, it's kind of funny because, like, we are known to be the experts at meeting generation and sales development and building SDR teams, and today we've actually ended up talking about the second part of the machine rather than the first one. But yeah, next time we can also talk about how do we build SDR teams that are highly effective and efficient. And at the end of the day, though, the math that people do, gary, is always about how many dollars I'm gonna put, always about how many dollars am I going to put in and how many dollars am I going to get out right. And sometimes also when buyers are not knowledgeable and they don't understand that there's a process of turning the open to learn people and to open to change, and so on and so forth. Sometimes it hurts buyers because they just think that if I just go get some meetings, I'm going to turn them into revenue. It never happens yeah go buy cheap meetings.
Tito:Oh, I want to pay for performance. Can I pay 500 bucks a meeting? 300 bucks a meeting, a thousand bucks a meeting, doesn't matter. They go buy lots of meetings and guess what? They haven't built their outbound boot camp to turn and then it all goes to zero. So we've all done it. I built software for cheap failed. Builds up her cheap again failed. Finally, I hired a great CTO. Calls me a million dollars, but now I have the software they.
Gary:I want it you know, yeah, yeah. So, tito, how can people find you? What's the best way to reach out? Or read more this is LinkedIn.
Tito:Okay, tito Bort, I put myself there as the sales mad scientist. Everything I do is data-driven and like, as you can see, very, very thoughtful, very thoroughly considered, analyzed and tweaked around, improved, creating the perfect recipe and the perfect formula. So, um, that's it. Link. You can email me to taltisalescom if you want to go find me there, but uh, but my inbox is crowded with everybody who's doing spray and breath.
Gary:yeah, we saw that post recently. Yes, um. Well, that's awesome, tito, stick around for a second. But we're really very thankful to have you here with a wealth of information we're going to dive into that. We'll be putting this out shortly and have a GTM short to go with it. Really appreciate it. Thank you for your time Until next week. Bye, bye, dot co, and continue your path to becoming board ready with us. Share this journey, subscribe, engage and elevate your go-to-market skills. Until next time, go, be a pro.