[00:00:00] Luigi Prestinenzi: Welcome. This is the sales IQ podcast. My name is Luigi Prestinenzi, and I'm on a mission to help salespeople be the best sales professionals they can be each week. We'll bring you a different message from thought leaders from around the globe so we can help you master the art of selling today. We're going to killer episode all about.

Yeah, what the hell he's dimension, but we've got, I'm really, really excited because I listened to this, um, to Chris's name is he's a podcast and I follow him quite intensely. I've been following him for a wall around, you know, demand generation and what it means and what you should be doing from a marketing perspective.

And you're probably thinking Luigi, I'm a sales pro. Why should I be thinking about marketing? This is the, this is the, the shift that's happened in the world of selling. You've heard me say this time and time again, that the world of selling from my perspective, hasn't changed the fundamentals of selling hasn't changed just the way in which we engage with their buyers has definitely, definitely changed, but ultimately sellers are now markets.

And if you want to be successful as a marketer, you gotta be successful at selling. That's what Chris talks about. Chris talks about how do we create brand? How do we create content? How do we. Information that enables our buyers to connect with us earlier in the sales process. Now I'm all for prospecting, you know, my mantra and this, you know, my philosophy around selling it's about, you've got to make it rain.

You've got to create your own net new opportunities, and this is how you do it. We are living in a world right now where you have more and more opportunity to engage with your ideal customers, to engage with the buyers that you want to. This one, love this episode, because he's going to talk a little bit about some of the strategies that you can employ to take your content to another level.

And if you're not doing it, if you're not creating content, start to think about the content and even repurposing other people's content and driving that activity in the marketplace. To engage with your prospects earlier in the sales process. Now, also today, I had this opportunity to have Cole Coleman run this incredible masterclass on running cold email.

And that was awesome. So if you have the opportunity, jump onto our website sales IQ, global.com and jump in there, put your details in and grab the masterclass because there was incredible tactics that Cole shared with us and things that'll just help you with your prospecting efforts. But we can talk about that another day, because this episode is all about demand gen and our guests this week.

Chris Walker is an incredible guest because he helps businesses scale up through the demand generation, tactics and campaigns. And he's going to give us some techniques that we can employ to meet. As sales professionals to drive more opportunities into our pipeline. This episode is brought to you by video video, the online video tool for sales professionals video makes it easy for sales teams to turn text-based emails, interpersonal video messages, and will help you engage with your.

And create an incredible buying experience for them, which will ultimately help you reach your pipeline and revenue goals. So do yourself a favor, get to bgr.com, sign up and start using video in your sales process.

So buckle up, enjoy let's get into it.

Well, welcome to the show, Chris,

[00:03:47] Chris Walker: what we do really happy to be here, man. How are you? The I'm

[00:03:49] Luigi Prestinenzi: going well, man, I'm going well. I'm actually, I'm pretty excited. I watch many videos of yours with that mind and that background at night, the

[00:03:57] Chris Walker: background looks insane again.

[00:04:01] Luigi Prestinenzi: So thanks for coming on the show, mate,

[00:04:04] Chris Walker: I'm on blast.

Uh, really excited to be here and really excited to understand what we're going to be talking about today.

[00:04:10] Luigi Prestinenzi: Well, mate, before we get into talking a bit about, you know, why sales people or sales professionals should be better marketers and vice versa. Um, I'd love to learn a bit, a little bit more about you, mate, how you started in the world of sales and marketing.

[00:04:26] Chris Walker: Yeah. So let's, uh, let's get through this pretty quickly, but I'll try and cover, especially on the other point you just raised. And so, um, started my career in engineering and then moved to product management. The thing that, the key thing about product management that people should know is that in order to build the right products, I wouldn't talk to customers.

And so that's a huge piece of things that a common SAS marketer doesn't do. And so talking to customers gave me insights. And then when I moved into a demand generation role, I did the same thing. I wouldn't talk to customers. And then my demand gen got way better because I knew what content to create. I knew what resonated.

I knew what objections they had. I knew what they thought about the competitive landscape. I understood them. I knew where they were for information. And so by, I think one of the take-home points that I'm trying to make for market has been trying to do this for 18 months. Don't see it enough. So I'm going to keep talking about it is that you need to be in.

The community to be a part of their community, and people can talk about that and say that, but there is a huge benefit to actually doing it to, for them to see you as a peer. Yeah. Which I've been in both situations. I've been, I've been 24 years, 24 year old marketing manager. And I know that the customers did not view me as a peer.

They viewed me as a vendor and I right now, And I have D for other buyer percenters, the marketing been in a community where medical directors would buy me shots because they saw me as a peer, not a vendor because I didn't treat, you know what I mean? And so there's, there's, there's a level there and it makes all of your marketing better when you can get to that level with people.

And so that's one take home. And then, and then when I started getting into the, into the downstream demand role inside of the venture funded. I went out with the sales reps and I spent time with the SDR team and I actually did some SDR function work in order to assess my own lead quality. And so through that big, that was the beginning process of me really understanding that marketing.

That a marketer that understands sales is a better marketer. Yeah. And so I started following up with leads. I stopped, I followed up with ebook downloads and I called them and I understood how they responded to me and whether or not they even answered the phone or how they answered the emails. And I was like, I don't want to send this to my account executive that's for sure.

And then, and then I would go and I would talk to demo requests and I'd be like, oh, This person really wants, wants a demo. And I send it to the AE and they, they closed their 50 K ARR deal in 15 days. I guess we should keep doing more of this. Right. And now after starting my company and executing all the marketing and sales right now, and we have a team that's working on it, but I have very clear insights.

I continue to have more and more recent. For how distinctly different these two functions are. A lot of companies make the mistake of trying to do them as one. They are distinctly different functions, but in order to be good at either one, you need to respect. I see a couple of things in the market right now.

I see, I see marketers that have no under no understanding of respect for sales. And that's why they send 3000 MQL. Is that our ebook downloads just down the chute to SDRs that do absolutely nothing. It's complete junk. And that's one side of the equation. And the other side of the equation is we have marketers running ABM programs that are actually only doing sales.

Like I, I have. Sales conversations with companies that come to me and they're like, we want to run ABM. And I'm like, the term ABM is so nebulous. Can you tell me more about what you mean? And they're like, we want email sequences. We want to, you know, figure out what score so we can go out, do outbound cold calling and I'm like, that's sales.

Let's do some marketing please. Right? And so in the ABM and ABM realm, we have, we have marketers that are actually doing sales and their comp their companies are doing no actual marketing. And that's an issue too.

[00:08:01] Luigi Prestinenzi: Dude, you go meet. Incredibly right now, man. I mean, you just hear so many, I had to get my pen out because I'm like, fuck, there's so many talk tracks.

Yeah. Um, but I, I want to actually go back and sit, because what you said is really interesting and something that I, I advocate quite strongly with all the sales pros that I, that I coach and, and businesses that I work with, um, actually go and listen to the customer. Right. Um, what you did was go back and, you know, You went and spoke to the ebook downloads, you know, you went and you went and followed up with prospects, um, and actually went on the front line and heard what they were saying.

Um, how, like, from your perspective, how important was. In helping you develop your mindset that you have right now about, so it was

[00:08:49] Chris Walker: absolutely imperative. Yeah. It's absolutely imperative. It's one. I wouldn't say it's one of the top five things that set me apart as a marketer today is that I respect that function.

And when I talk to people, I listen and I not only listened directly, but I asked I probe and I ask questions. You should see, you should see some of the comments that I make on LinkedIn. You see some of the posts that I make. I say some of those things, so I can. So I can hear what people, how people respond.

I can say things to people in a one-on-one conversation. They say something back, or I could feel their response based on how they move the tone of their voice. Like does those are insights that other people don't look for? Um, which then helps me. Adjust my messaging consistently refine, um, messaging consistently figure out what channels to go to consistently figure out what's what's resonating and what's not.

Um, and so those are, I think some of the key things, I think marketers, um, learning that, that, that is a deep skill. Yeah. And, and marketers inside of most companies are not incentivized to do those things because it's hard. Yeah.

[00:09:54] Luigi Prestinenzi: But I think what you're talking about, he's not just like, cause I find, I find it really interesting, you know, you talk about IBM and, um, uh, found it really interesting that, you know, marketers need to talk to up to, to their customers.

I find it, that salespeople are calling on these customers all the time. And a lot of them actually don't listen to what the customer is saying. They don't actually understand the reality of their customers. You know, I work with them and said, let's do an ICP and it comes back and there's just a lot of stuff missing, you know, and

[00:10:29] Chris Walker: this is why marketing should do this process.

[00:10:32] Luigi Prestinenzi: Right?

[00:10:33] Chris Walker: Sales can't sales is invested in the outcome. And so they don't hear the real. Yeah, and this is by design should not be invested in the outcome. I remember doing this market research and in 2013 and I didn't do it well because I was invested in the outcome. Even though I was a marketer, I still wanted that person to buy something three years later, I go into those meetings.

I don't care whether or not that person tells me that the product is the worst thing ever. What they, if they tell me the truth, Because then I have that, then I have the knowledge and I can go and execute against it. And so by separating from the outcome and making people feel comfortable telling you the truth and being able to ask the right questions in a way that doesn't lead them to the answer that you want to hear are, are all key things.

[00:11:15] Luigi Prestinenzi: Yes. You know, one thing that I love Chris about the world of selling right now, and this is my, my, my opinion on the topic, I don't believe. The philosophy of sales has changed, right? Since the day people traded before currency, they traded product for product value for value, um, to the augment Dino's even to today is to the modern day sales authors for me sells, has it changed, right?

There needs to be a value exchange. If people see value though, invest in the product, um, and there's relationships, et cetera, around that. What I absolutely love about what's changed though, is how. How I, as a sales professional can take marketing and make it as part of my remit. I can, I can demand, I can create demand, managing processes, create sequences, creating your own.

Absolutely. I don't even require marketing self. Remember, you know, 15, 20 years ago, um, inbound leads were like unheard of for some companies that had the budget to do a lot of above the line activity. And so this is what I want to ask you. Like, from your perspective, how important is it? If he, for a sales, probably listening to this podcast right now, going, you know what, I'm loving what I'm hearing from Chris, but how important is it that they need to see marketing and demand gen as a fundamental skill that they need to build over the next couple of years to be.

[00:12:46] Chris Walker: It's absolutely imperative. It's already happening, right? Like the, the best account executives recognize that they don't need SDRs to source pipeline. Cause they can get better pipeline on their own that they don't need marketing to anything that marketing inserts, if it's good. Cause a lot of marketing pipeline is not, especially at these types of companies.

That if they're not going to wait for SDRs to book the meetings and they're not going to wait for marketing to send them ebook downloads, they're going to go out and source that pipeline on their own. And they recognize that cold calling and sending bam spam bulk email through outreach might not be the way.

And so there's, there's different ways, but account executives that take control of their own destiny that recognize that this is a clear opportunity. This is the path to becoming the number one account executive to being the best in your organization at sourcing your own pipe. Is how it was, how you do it.

Um, and the, and the, the interesting thing is. The best account executives are migrating to using traditionally marketing tactics, because it is the quickest way to business development today. Yeah,

[00:13:50] Luigi Prestinenzi: that's awesome. That's awesome, man. This is such, such a great response and that's something it's one of the philosophies that.

That we definitely push. Um, it's about, you know, being in control of your own destiny and you can't wait for somebody else to create your own pipeline. And if you haven't got the ability to do that, then you could be facing, you know, we're changing career cause you might become redundant. Right. So, uh, um, that's awesome.

And, and, and so from your perspective, if you haven't adopted some of these marketing principles and you feel like you're a bit behind in that development side of things, where can one start to build their, to build their skills around this sort of stuff?

[00:14:26] Chris Walker: From an AI perspective from an IAA.

[00:14:29] Luigi Prestinenzi: If you're an SDI, if you, somebody in sounds good.

My man, I'm loving Chris's spot on the point, but we do want

to stop. I'm overwhelmed.

[00:14:36] Chris Walker: Let's say you're a new AAE. You're working at some like legacy hardware brand and they just got a nice tech job at a SAS company selling to CFOs. Okay. Let's just say that's the situation right now. You don't know much about CSS CFOs.

You don't know that much about tech SAS. You just like had sold a couple of copiers before. And you did pretty well at it. And so here you are one of the first things that you should probably do aside from the internal relationship building. If we're talking to external focused in your job, one of the first things you should probably do is you should try and talk to 10 CFOs in a non-sales conversation.

And then the key is in a non sales conversation, understand them, like, think about it as a coffee. And so, and then how do you learn, um, as, how do you extract as much information as you can while not being like, kind of annoying and how many questions that you ask and you have a personal conversation with those people and are able to deliver whatever value you can back and those types of things, a really great way to do that is by starting your own podcast.

Yeah. It doesn't even have to go on apple or Spotify, but just, Hey, Hey, we're here. We have the top CFO in. MarTech, um, podcasts would love to have you on the show and invite the top 10 CFOs from MarTech companies on it. And 80% of them will say, yes, cause I give this advice in 80% of people say yes to go on this podcast with them.

And then they get to talk to them and they get to. And they also get to network and they also, at the end can ask, Hey, by the way, do you know any other people that would want to be on this podcast? Um, you also get to create content that you can push out on LinkedIn. So you get this kind of content creation, muscle building.

And I think that is one of the best ways to get started is to, is to what I, since going back to what I said at the beginning, be part of the community before you are selling to the commercial. Yeah.

[00:16:24] Luigi Prestinenzi: You know what you said there? That community? I, uh, it's one of the bigger houses I got when I interviewed Seth Goden.

Um, yeah, I was asked, uh, flew up is actually a very many scene. Cause my phone comes up with photos like a year ago and last, this time, last year I was in, in Chicago. Nice cold Chicago. And uh, and then I went in and spent some time in set in New York. And one of the things that resonated the most for me man was, was the fact that he talks about the minimum minimal.

Audience, and don't worry about selling to the masses. Just get your community in play, but find that community, find that true. And just laid them right. And spoiled them and lead them

and absolutely love it. The thing on this one is that in order to get to that point, companies love to use company firmographics.

We sell to B2B financial services companies of greater than a thousand employees. And that's their ICP to get to your minimum viable audience. You need to start looking at psychographics. Yeah. And those are things that are hard and those are, those are things that require making choices. Because in order to resonate with that audience, you're going to have to alienate alienated, potentially another audience.

And most companies will not make those choices, especially conservative B2B tech companies. Right? You can start, you can start to see them in San Francisco. People taking stands that are, that are important. That turns some people off.

I'm

actually saying that. But those are, those are important decisions that B to C companies make and have wild success with and B2B companies, because of the way that they're run.

Typically don't do those things. But in order to get to your minimum viable audience, you do, I would be lying if I told you that people don't get pissed off when they read my, some of my content. But guess what? They're not my audience. You might see the content, but I'm not trying to get to them because I know psychographically they're going to go for their 10,000 MQL and run them through marketing automation.

And that's not what I'm doing. So, um, making those types of choices, as I've continued to progress on this journey, I've actually narrowed in not expanded. Yeah, which is a huge insight for people. The content gets better. We have way more ICP customers coming through. Our customers are more successful.

They're staying for longer. They're happier. They're telling other people all by just being more narrow in who you serve.

This is, and for all of our listeners, you've heard me say this before, right? Not everybody's your customer. And by going through that, the technographic fits the psychographic fits and all the things that Chris is talking about enables you to create much better dialogue.

I've like I said, I'm getting really excited, man, because this is the sort of stuff that I continue to push out there is don't worry about the messages, um, is a key of customers out there that we want to really late. And so. So, this is pretty cool, man. So what about from a marketer's perspective? So, you know, you're, you're again, you're, you're listening to this going, holy crap.

I'm spending 2, 3, 400 K a month on, on lead gen and a very low conversion. Um,

[00:19:24] Chris Walker: mark and I usually don't even know what the conversion is. That's the problem. They're not incentivized to look at the conversion. They're just incentivized on 30,000 leads and how much they, those leads cost. They don't spend any time in Salesforce and understanding what happens after they become a lead.

And that is the root of the issue. This is where I figured it all out. Um, because when I was running this demand function that I eventually built up to five people in a multimillion dollar budget. But, uh, at the beginning I built this by myself. I was doing everything, community management, uh, social media ads, paid search ads, content development crew, managing a creative agency, creative freelancers, um, integrating HubSpot with Salesforce, email automation.

I did all of it. So. Big breadth of knowledge. And so when you are going from $0 in budget to trying to get to 2 million in a team of five people, guess what you need to do. You got to frame up, you have to actually have results. You actually have to have results that matter to the CEO. And so when I built this, it was really interesting to be like, Hey, um, You know, we spent, we spent $500 in that test.

We got four leads. They all converted to an opportunity and we won 25% of them and we spent $500. We, and we got 50 K ARR back. I think we should probably try and do more of that. Because we're over here with 40 salespeople and it, we can't get that done. Um, and then you start building on top of that and you're like, okay, actually the sales cycles are actually shorter too.

The win rates are high of three X higher than our outbound STR meetings that are going to our customer acquisition cost is way lower. Like we shouldn't be, we shouldn't be expanding our sales team again. We shouldn't be expanding our STR team again. We need to be putting more money back into this. And when you.

In order to even get to the level where I could have that conversation, I needed to have the intuition to say, oh, I need to frame this up in pipeline and revenue and how this business grows this way. And how it's, if the vision of how it scales you don't, you don't need to scale by sales headcount anymore.

Or you can scale by marketing efficiency. Yeah. And so that was sort of the, how I figured this out. And then when I went, I got very deep into things that are happening from the lead to the two revenue. And the interesting things that I found, not all MQs are created equal the conversion rate on a demo request versus the content download versus your bullshit MQL MQL score.

Versus this are all going to be different, not only from MQL to, to opportunity, but from opportunity to. Yeah. And when you start to look at those and respect them, I'm going to go after the ones that are called demo requests are going to close at seven to 12% from lead raw lead to revenue. If you do it well, and ebook downloads are 0.1%.

Contents indications 0.1%. Webinar attendees are 0.2 per. Virtual events or 0.5%. Like you want to go in and generate hundreds of leads and maybe when one of them, or you want to focus on winning 10% of them. And so as a marketer, if you can actually acknowledge that insight, you have tons of power because you can get off the MQL hamster wheel because you need way less leads to hit your revenue target.

If you focus on ones that have high intent, um, The, to get back to your question, marketers, don't look at those metrics because they're not incentivized to, and until the marketers take a look at those metrics, they will never change. But

[00:22:40] Luigi Prestinenzi: this is interesting, right? So they're not incentivized, but should they, regardless of what they're getting paid for, should they care about the next step in the sales process?

Like yeah. Some might be incentivized by how many MQL. But in order for me to be the best, your best marketer, I can be sure. I want to go deeper in the funnel and see where these are going and follow the bouncing

[00:23:06] Chris Walker: ball. Absolutely. But I have a deep amount of empathy for the, to be, to be direct the amount of times that I've almost gotten fired for doing stuff like that.

Like I know, I know how it works. Yeah, I know how it works in big machines and, and especially sales led sales focused companies don't need their marketers stepping into that stuff. And so, um, so I have a lot of empathy for it, actually. Um, yes. Should you do it? Yes. Do you, if you need your job, are you going to do it?

Probably not because it's going to put you in a position where you're vulnerable, where you're, cause you basically have to blow the whistle that the metrics that are set at the highest executive board level. Are wrong. That's what you have to do. That's what I did. That's what I, that's what I did. Yeah.

That's what I do. That's what I do every time. And I just happened to have CMOs that, that trusted me now five years ago. I didn't no one, no one believed in me. So those are, that's really the difference.

[00:24:04] Luigi Prestinenzi: I've lost clients as a result of it. So, you know, talking about, you know, speaking to them saying, you know, you got, you've got all these incubators coming in.

You're getting somebody to download a book. And you're not putting any indication on that, on that lead capture form that you're going to call them. And then you call them 10 minutes later. I wonder why they don't answer. And you're your measure. You've got to order a 35% penetration rate on, on lead to contact, and then you're not lead scoring.

Um, and then these leads who actually want to be spoken to, you're not calling them for say six hours because you can't get to them because you've got congestion of all these leads coming through. I'll have those clients because I've advocated to make some changes.

[00:24:41] Chris Walker: You really think about this model here's what's happening.

Companies are building content that sucks and, and paying to have people download it that don't even realize. And then 10 minutes later, pestering them and annoying them when they didn't ask for it. And if you have a small total addressable market, it will not take you long to annoy everyone. Imagine you have 15,000 accounts and you're able to collect a thousand leads a month.

It will take you a year to burn through everyone that's in. That is not a good prop. That's not a good proposition.

[00:25:15] Luigi Prestinenzi: Absolutely. Now for thought so. Okay. So we're going to, we're just going to flip back a moment back into the sales process. So you've inspired the people listening to this to say, you know what, man, um, you've inspired me.

I'm going to go talk to 10 of my buyer personas my key buyer personas, not with my sales hat on more with a learning hat, just to get a better understanding of what's going on in their world. And I'm going to then start to create some. Just like you did for me, man. You, you, I had a podcast and you said, mate, you're lazy.

If you're not repurposing that into blog posts and this, and I'm actually putting everyone upon podcast, man, because of your posts, I'm turning it into blog posts. Right. Because you actually made me think I'm missing out on all the other opportunities. Right. But you're a sales pro. You've been inspired by this and you are, I can't wait for marketing.

I'm going to go out there and create my own demand. Um, I interview some, some, some, uh, Some of my prospects, some of my buyer personas, and I've got a bit more. Where to next is it. Podcast is a blog. I saw that post, she did put it at 500 million books or can remember,

[00:26:17] Chris Walker: and then it was 500, 500 million blogs, 500,000 active podcasts.

[00:26:22] Luigi Prestinenzi: There's a podcast, uh, you know, get right. Um, so what, what's the best thing that I should do? Should I post more content on LinkedIn? You know, should they create a little podcast? What do you think is the biggest opportunity for growth

[00:26:36] Chris Walker: here? Before we jump into tactics, let's talk strategy on this one.

Cause you have to, you have two choices as your account executive. You've just done those things. You understand your buyers a little bit. You need to make a decision about whether you're the host of the party or the keynote speaker. Let's look at those two different ways, right? So if you're the, and the key is looking inside and say, and both of them can work, but looking inside and saying, which 1:00 AM I a better fit?

Am I a better fit to go out and pick all of the experts and interview them and put together the information of the market and be the person that delivers it. Because a lot of people, you know, you could be the host of, you know, America, whatever, the good morning America, where you just interview people like that can be one way.

That definitely works. It works especially. Well, if you were in. The expert in the topic. So if you're selling to medical directors and you aren't one, that could be a good strategy. The second one is to be more on the, the keynote speaker, which can either be, I have authoritative thoughts are I'm going to talk through the things that I'm learning.

Or some combination of both. So, you know, last week I talked to seven CFOs, the thing that they are all dealing with, it felt like as 20, 21 planning, they're all doing it this way. It seems to be a struggle with this. They were going to try X, Y, and Z. What I, what I heard is that Z is probably the best option.

What do you think. Reporting on the things that you find, is it also an interesting way to look at it as a day in the life? Once you can? And honestly, probably some mix of the two. Like I believe that I probably mixed both of them without even really acknowledging it because I'm talking to people all at once and I'm doing it and you know, it kind of happens together once you're in it.

So anyway, you can pick on pick one of the other ones. From a strategy perspective. Now let's get into tactics. The podcast, I believe to be the most, the easiest to execute and the highest upside podcast to LinkedIn distribution to would be the, the two in a B2B company. Um, the podcast, because. W what are the opportunities to have an hour long conversation with your target market?

When it's not in a sales conversation, this is how you get it done. The fact that it's recorded and then can be broken down. You can relisten, you can watch someone gets to know you at a personal level, and then you can push anything smart that they said, or you said, or anything, chop that up and throw that on LinkedIn.

You've had, we've had the conversation. Yeah, I've said 10 things to you. And now you can say, you know, talk to Chris last week, he was talking about this one thing. Actually, I thought it wasn't very smart. So I actually disagree. And this is what I think just by having the conversation, it sparks insights.

Um, and so those are some of the strategies that I would recommend, um, to get started. That's

[00:29:25] Luigi Prestinenzi: awesome. So think about the strategy in guy Dan and detect teak and just to

[00:29:29] Chris Walker: execute. And then you just got to get the ball rolling, right? Like I'm sure people, if they want to go back on YouTube, they can look at some of the I D it's funny.

Cause I give the advice that I took. And, um, August of last year I invited CMOs and VPs of marketing at companies that I never thought that would want to work with me onto my podcast. And it wasn't even, it wasn't even a podcast. We just had a zoom and I recorded it and I put it up on YouTube and it probably has a hundred views, but guess what?

I got to talk to that VP of marketing for an hour, and I got to learn a lot and a couple of them have come back and down and we've opened opportunities with them a year later. I, uh, I did those things and then not only until six or eight months later, did I actually watch a, a actual podcast on Spotify?

It's

really

[00:30:19] Luigi Prestinenzi: interesting, man. Cause that's one of the reasons it took me, you know, you talk about just do it. It took me about probably a year and a half to get the confidence to get started. It was always a concept of, I want to do this. I want to do this. And you're right. I think if somebody had said, well, what are you?

Are you the host or the keynote? Um, I think that would have been a really great conversation for me to have, it would have sped up my, my process to get started. Those awesome advice. By second, I'm a big, I've been a big book reader of sales ever since. Kind of 17 because I struggled at school and I'm pretty fortunate that I fell into sales man.

Otherwise I'd be really struggling right now. Right. But, um, but uh, I learned through books, um, and it was one of the best things that I got from my podcast was interviewing the people that I had read for so many years. Right. And then actually you're right. Getting that out with them, picking their brain and go, man, because the content that you can get has been awesome.

It's also what it also allowed me to do was see through. Some of the experts and after reading their book and then talking to them about their content, not seeing alignment and actually going, you know what, there are some people out there that are thought were experts that aren't actually the people they say that now.

So it was a really enlightening process for me to learn a little bit about the gap in the marketplace.

[00:31:36] Chris Walker: Yeah. And then when you think, if you are the account executive listening to this. How you cannot quantify how important it is after if you go into a sales conversation next week. And the person's the person that you're talking to is saying, you know, blah, blah, blah.

And you can say, actually I talked to John, the CFO of blah, blah, blah company last week. And he's trying, he tried that and it didn't work. Here's what he said. He learned. To be able to say that, or actually I talked to 10 CFOs last week. They've all tried that and it didn't work or they're going in this direction, the insights that you get from other people in the market that you can then bring into actual sales conversations is huge.

Yeah,

[00:32:13] Luigi Prestinenzi: absolutely. You know, one of the best performing emails that I use to nurture some of my active. You know, prospects, um, was a no call to action just to complete insight email, which shared some data to say,

[00:32:26] Chris Walker: Hey, yeah, this is what's been happening.

[00:32:29] Luigi Prestinenzi: Um, these are some of the touch points. I know you're on this journey of transformation from a sales perspective.

I think you might find this valuable no call to action. No. Hey, do you want to meet next week or how does 2:00 PM or anything like that? It was purely just here's something. Um, they receive for me the best and you know what? I did it. If you look at everybody's tactics of 1 25 emails, all there's three subjects.

I did it against, it was a long email. It was, it was a, there was a bullet points in there. I kind of went against the grain of what all, what everybody says is best practice total. And it was the best performing

[00:33:06] Chris Walker: email that I had. I'll shove millions of emails into something, and then optimize for 0.1% open rate.

As opposed to an actual outcome that matters. Yeah. Um, and that's the that's the problem is because there's so many specialized roles. That's why you have 30,000 MQs that don't convert to even SIL because of the specialized role in this assembly line with no actual coordination of the, how the whole thing runs.

Yeah. Um, I've been thinking about. If you think about it like a manufacturing facility, I think this one is very, very simple for people. Okay. So you are a manual, you're a manufacturing company. You are, you have parts coming in from a different supplier, parts being leads before you actually process them in your facility and then you go to sell them.

And so when they get there, this big truck come. And 99.9% of the parts are junk and you have to throw them out and then you take the 1% and you move the 0.1% and you move them through the sales process. Even those you think are faulting. You lose some at the end of the assemble of wine. And that's what companies are doing with their MQL is right now

[00:34:11] Luigi Prestinenzi: to seek an LNG man under the throttle down.

But he's actually a

[00:34:14] Chris Walker: really good and really simple stuff's coming in and you're doing stuff to it. And certain amount of customers are coming. And if you just think about it in pure logic, you're like, okay, the first thing that I need to do is the first thing I'm going to do is I'm going to fire that supplier and I'm going to go find a new one that has better quality parts,

[00:34:31] Luigi Prestinenzi: because you're right.

If you, and I've worked, you know, a lot in the lean manufacturing space and you need to worry about that, right? If you actually had a waste metric of that high 98% or 95% of waste, you'd be sad. It would be not a, you know, I used to measure, they measure waste, they measure, they measure and all that sort of stuff.

If they actually had that happening. Um, I mean, imagine you bloody Boeing building.

[00:35:05] Chris Walker: Yes. So you're, you're Boeing and the, the waist in this example is having 50 SDRs on the assemble line, picking out junk that doesn't fit. That's not going to work. That's not going to create a real. And that's easy. There's just hidden cost.

But since SAS companies have it in a fixed demand waterfall model, they don't see it that way, but that that's having 50 people on your assembly line that don't belong there because your suppliers delivering new junk and you're gonna get a new supplier. Do you know the thing that started.

[00:35:32] Luigi Prestinenzi: That's good.

That's really good.

[00:35:34] Chris Walker: Thanks the way that I've started to look at it. It's the first thing that you're going to do is you're going to eliminate the garbage from the system, and then you're going to figure out how to get more of the good stuff in, and that's all I've done for the past five years. And it's weird because, um, I've been reading this book mastery by Robert Green.

I don't know if you know. Yeah. Um, and so it's like all these different pieces, the product management and talking to customers, I literally was working inside of lean manufacturing and waste and cost of goods sold and looking at this different stuff. And you start to put all these different knowledge pieces together into what you were actually meant to do, which is what I'm doing right now.

Or maybe there's something higher that I haven't discovered yet, but all those different components have gotten me to a place where I just like, see that. Specific thing in a very different way than others do I, this

[00:36:19] Luigi Prestinenzi: is really good, but I don't know. I'm having a lot of fun cause it's just helping me really consider things and get good.

It's good. And why I've sort of creative mindset really flow, man. So I appreciate that. And look on, I'm mindful that we can talk about this stuff hours, because I'm a bit of a nerd with this sort of stuff, man. But, um, but maybe before we get, sort of get wrap up, I want to ask you a question. I think this will be, yeah.

I, I try to ask this as many times as I can, otherwise I forget, but in your eyes is sales an art or a science would be really interesting to hear your response on this.

[00:36:49] Chris Walker: It's the same thing as marketing. It's both. Yeah, it's both. Um, we have an ops. I'll answer it from the marketing perspective, just because I think I understand it better.

I think that my answer can translate to sales. There, there are plenty of people that are, that are in tech land. San Francisco that think that all they have to do is build some wild funnel with percentages and their business is going to become a unicorn. That's not the way that it works. 100% math marketing would already be figured out.

We wouldn't be here talking about marketing, if that was the way to do marketing. And then we have other people on the other hand where they, um, I work with a lot of these people and we actually help. A lot that are only focused on art that only care about what the word say that only look at how, what color is in the picture.

The key is in putting them together. The key is about respecting both and combine that with human psychology, art, science, psychology, put it together. Um, and so though that is the way that I look at it. There's, uh, I don't think that a black and white answer on sales is appropriate. Either everything, everyone listening to this would agree that the answer is.

Yeah,

[00:37:56] Luigi Prestinenzi: that's awesome, man. I actually liked it cause I think you're right. I think the technology sector, the tech sector, the effective growth maths growth burn rate has kind of really impacted the silos. Engagement process, right? Because you go, well, I'm going to grow. I know that I've got some funding let's

[00:38:17] Chris Walker: series by volume, rising, well efficiency low-quality is all that it's about, I can keep burning

[00:38:22] Luigi Prestinenzi: through cash and I'm not making a profit because these companies have a different type of valuation.

So the customer experience, isn't kind of at the forefront of our focus. So it's kind of, they're using that. Cool. Cool. Um,

[00:38:36] Chris Walker: footprints intimate, but it's great to hear. It's great for people to think about that because a lot of it's true. Like I interact with these companies that are not focused on this at all, which gives you, if you recognize it, an amazing opportunity to stand out just by doing something different, like the, and focusing more on the experience.

What happens when, if you made the shift from low volume? There are sorry, high volume, low efficiency, low quality. What does that, what does that actually materialize into? It means you need a lot of sales reps and when you have a lot of sales reps, you have to pay them less. And when you pay them less and you give them low quality work, they turn over flat fast.

That's what's happening in the SAS community. Right now. If you switch that to high efficiency, low volume, high quality, you have less routes. You can pay them better. They're doing good work. They stay longer. You need to have a lower customer acquisition costs. It seems so obvious to me. Yeah,

[00:39:30] Luigi Prestinenzi: there was one particular client I'm going to send this to straight after this episode, our listeners that want to connect with you now, you've got them pumped and in for everyone out there, Chris shares incredible content and it's actually, it's really thoughtful and it's very deliberate and you'll take a lot of value.

Where can they engage in connection?

[00:39:49] Chris Walker: Yeah. So we've been getting incredible feedback on the podcast. Actually, if you search an apple or Spotify, it's called state of demand. Gen. We publish two to three episodes a week getting great feedback from people. Hey, I just got this new job. I was listening to the podcast for two weeks and I just got this new job or, you know, got promoted or had tried this and it worked or some salespeople that are w have literally moved to demand functions just by listening to the podcast.

And what they said because their company wasn't focused on marketing. So a sales person that becomes like head of demand gen in a certain period of time, just by following the formula. And so podcast is the one I would encourage people the most and then LinkedIn, Chris Walker, common name, but you'll be able to find me.

CEO of refund labs is where I publish content every day, which is like micro formats of the podcast. The last thing for people were saying is like, you can look at the way that the content, uh, waterfalls down from podcast into social, and you can use that as a model for yourself. Yeah.

[00:40:39] Luigi Prestinenzi: Awesome. Chris, no matter what you want to say, look, thanks for coming on the podcast.

Um, your contribution has been quite, I've had a, to better, big impact, especially to me I'm mean I've, we've just hired a demand gen manager and a big part of that was the sitting to your content and really thinking more and thinking deeper about what demand gen is all about. So. Um, this journey for me is really exciting.

It's going to evolve and what's going to be the difference between, you know, success in marketing and just everything else, all the noise. And it's a pretty noisy marketplace out there, mate. So thanks for the contribution you make to our community, man. And thanks for coming to the podcast.

[00:41:15] Chris Walker: Thank you very much for having me really happy to hear that it's helpful for you.

And, um, we'll catch up again soon.

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This episode was transcribed digitally, some errors may be present.