A 10x Playbook for Business w/ Ampliz B2B Summit #scottsthoughts

Welcome back to success story the most useful podcast in the world. I'm your host Scott and today you're going to hear me at the Ampliz B2B summit speaking about a 10x growth playbook. This was an event that was put on during COVID so there's a lot of great lessons learned. I hope you enjoy it let's get right into it thank you so much I appreciate I appreciate the opportunity. I'll give you a little bit of background so you mentioned it properly like I run a sales and marketing organization for a software unit within a large organization so my 9 to 5 I'm responsible for sales and marketing activities basically all commercial activities bringing new software products to market for Grass Valley for audience engagement and that's a lot of fun for me my background has always been starting off in sales as a direct contributor and sort of moving my way up to to more you know larger markets and then eventually managing sales teams I've gone on to do my own consulting for a little bit working with a variety of different organizations just very disruptive organizations I enjoyed that and now I'm sort of working again for someone in a capacity that I really enjoyed just sort of as a digital you know like going helping an organization through their own digital transformation and so I've done a lot of different types of things throughout my career and I wanted to you know when I got this topic the 10x the 10x playbook at first glance it's a little bit like okay yeah like what are you going to talk about 10x like 10x by definition is to increase your business by a factor of 10 increase your revenue by a factor of 10 whatever that PPI is and obviously not a lot of companies can do that easily and the playbook for that definitely depends on the context of the company the industry the environment what you're selling to your customers are but I just want to speak over a concept that will I think basically work in in any industry and the concept stems from how you sell to customers so when you want to 10x your business so you want to increase your business by a factor of 10 every business will have a sales strategy every business will have a marketing strategy there's you know all these different types of branded sales strategies you know you have a challenge or you have a spin there's the list is endless of sales strategies and that's really like your sales playbook you know you understand your customers you understand your pain points you solve your customers pain points with the ever solution you're selling and that's that's sort of how sales works now that's not new that's not going to like 10 extra business so what what do we have to do more than just a regular sales strategy well if you think about how we solve customers pain points when we when we deliver our sales campaign to a customer we focus on our marketing our branding our narrative our messaging our inbound our outbound our operations our tech stack our our sales enablement help our sales are spend more time selling and whatnot and when you realize how many things are involved in selling to a customer it's much more than just one conversation you have to understand that these are these are the all these all these behaviors all these different parts of a commercial business unit are what you have to focus on and what you have to align your messaging across so what I mean by that is a great sales leader a great marketing leader a great revenue leader they're going to build out an end-to-end process that leaves basically no point of interaction with the customer up to the imagination traditionally when you look at a sales organization and a marketing organization in in a lot of circumstances those business units are traditionally siloed so let's walk through the traditional sales process a customer hears about your product perhaps they go to a landing page they submit their email address on a form that becomes a marketing qualified lead that gets passed over to sales an SDR BDR calls out to that customer and and then you know they book a demo an AE follows up and account executive follows up and that's sort of like the traditional linear sales process and if you realize if you take that mindset as to how you sell to a customer after they become a marketing qualified lead in MQL they almost get passed over to sales and it's almost like you're after marketing some with them now it's the onuses on sales to close that deal and that's how a lot of businesses work but I think to understand the current customer environment to again 10 extra business you have to understand that customers don't buy that way so why are you selling to them like that and what I mean by that when I say customers don't buy that way is there's you know a variety of research out there that shows that between 50 to 70% of the research is done 50 to 70% of the customer journey is completed in terms of them finding the information they need to buy a product before they even speak to somebody from your organization because they're going to your website they're going to your social they're going to you know any sort of like peer review website and they're getting all of these stats and statistics and they're speaking to you know their peers and they're looking at references and whatnot all before they engage with you and then they finally you know they go to your website they they put in a request for a sales demo and now your sales rep speaks to them but even as your sales rep is speaking to them they're still looking at different parts of your website at your social media for more information on the product so you have to understand that the customer journey is no longer linear and if for some reason the messaging that the marketing is putting out there that your social media is putting out there the copy on your website isn't in line with what your SDRs are saying on the phone which features are speaking about which pain points are trying to solve now you have an issue of trust because the customer has already done a kind of research and if the research that they've done and the content that your company's put out there does not align with what your sales reps are speaking to them over the phone now there's it's a disjointed communication process between your marketing and your sales and from the customer's point of view all they feel is as if your organization is not aligned so the you know if we speak about why people buy people always buy with emotion and then they justify with logic so you have to have that trust component and to build that trust component you have to tailor your commercial organization your marketing and your sales to be in line with how customers buy which means that you have to understand as an organization that all the content you put out all the the scripts that your you know your SDRs are using every conversation that you have on social through your sales reps all that that all has to be aligned because your customer is hitting all of your revenue channels repeatedly with or without your sales reps guidance at multiple points throughout the actual buying process the buying process is extremely complex it's no longer linear and that's the true takeaway that I wanted to give over if there's one thing to connect your business it's to make sure that your marketing and your sales business units are completely aligned and understand how your customer buys and if you can align the messaging and the way that you interact with the customer so that their experience across your entire organization however they consume your brand is synonymous and and to sync and align and congruent that is how you will build trust and that is how you will eventually close your deal close your customer what not so just understand how complex the buying process is because the customer has access to all this information and then align your commercial organization so when I say commercial organization your sales and your marketing to sell to that kind of customer your smart customer your knowledgeable customer that knows more than they ever known in history so that that's really the 10x playbook it's just to really sell the way your customer wants to buy that's all I got okay so we'll actually jump up with the questions then okay so the first question that we have is how to align sales and marketing to get 10x through yeah so the first question so I spoke a little bit about this but it comes down to the messaging so literally when you write the copy and you speak about the pain points that you're solving for your customer make sure that when an SDR a sales development rep is on the phone with the customer make sure that they're speaking and reinforcing the things that the customer has already read on your website so things like that it seems so simple but a lot of organizations don't do that and how many times have you had a sales development rep that just goes off about a certain feature or function of a product that your company really doesn't even focus on that much on their website just because they feel that's the best possible solution for the customer they do that as a knee jerk reaction because they feel that the company hasn't provided enough marketing support material so they know the customer well which is fine but true alignment is to get the feedback from the customer as to why they bought get the feedback from the sales development rep as a so marketing is speaking to sales you know the VP marketing speaking to the VP sales VP sales is literally getting the conversations that the sales development rep is having and they're using the verbiage the words that are using those conversations as part of their marketing material you're having interviews with customers after they buy and you're asking the customer why did you buy my product and the customer is giving you a list of reasons and you're using those reasons as part of your marketing material so that's really how you get that alignment it's just communication across the organization. So the next question that we have is for product the trust level takes time so does it apply to 10X growth? Say that one more time that the which takes time? So for product like building the trust level for a new product takes time so does it apply for like the 10X growth? I think I think there's two ways to look at 10X growth so there's a quite literal way which is truly getting achieving 10X what your business is today or there's like the I guess fantasized I guess romanticized 10X which is really just doing quite well right so I think when a lot of people say 10X growth they don't actually mean I need to in one year take my business by a factor of 10 and grow it because that's an extremely large amount of growth in you know one year maybe in a five year plan but not many businesses grow 10X year over year except if you're looking at some extremely high growth startups so I think that if you have like a mindset of growth remove the 10X from it and just focus on the core components that enable growth now if one of your KPIs and you're trying to sell to your shareholders that you're going to grow by 10X and you've modeled it out and that's a true growth goal that's fine but like 2X 3X 5X is still better than like 95% of companies right so I think just focus on the core principles make sure that your goals are realistic so you can hit them and that's a really a lesson for KPIs like never set KPIs you can set KPIs that you want to aspire to but don't set things for your business that are going to demotivate you demotivate your shareholders demotivate your employees if you don't hit it so just make sure that whatever goals are 10X or 5X or 2X just have the fundamentals in place so that you can reach that target whatever it is in the 1, 2, 5, 10 year plan. We have the next question from Chandan he asked if we send cold emails to customers what resource should be added apart from normal Phich Tech? So the resource is traditional resources in cold email would be like a customer references white papers case studies these are the traditional resources that you would generally use to reach out to a customer get them excited I shy away from those I don't like including any collateral in a cold email because if I just think about again it's changing your mindset to what the consumer wants and if you think about getting an email from someone you've never heard about and they're not only asking for your time you know think about first okay let me stop there because it's a really good point first of all you have to get them to open the email then you have to get them to read the email and then if you're lucky you know they'll actually reply to the email so I think that sending them a PDF that's three pages long in the email is just ludicrous you're never going to get that you're never going to get them to read that are a very few or small percentage of people that you send that email to are actually going to read that so I would suggest you don't send any collateral in a cold email I say you focus on your copy you focus on getting a response I say you use a lot of video I really like using video in cold email because it humanizes you but if you're not comfortable on video with cold email and he's like bid yard what is another one there's a few of them that you can use limbless is another one if you want to use some of these like cold email video outreach relating it's a great tool but I would not I would not use too much collateral I don't even like using collateral if the customer is already somebody who I know because it's just it's just too much text so I would say video and copy in a cold email with the only intent of getting them on the phone if you just overwhelm them with PDFs very few customers are going to care about that because I don't think you as a customer would care about that if somebody sent you a five page PDF that's my opinion at least they probably want to speak to somebody from Brooklyn we have a question he asked are you aware of any tools that allows you to take lead leads from sales and plug them into paid marketing channels that is starting with SQL then retagetic and things yeah so if you have so if you have a list of emails you can it's Facebook or you know Google ads or whatnot you can import that and create a look-alike audience I think that's what you're asking for so then your paid ads are hyper targeted towards customer profiles that fit your existing customers so it's usually just like uploading a CSV file into Facebook or Google you don't need a special tool for that most most paid ad platforms allow that as a like a direct excel upload and that's a great that's a great tactic that is the the tactic of using local like audiences for your for your for your paid another question that we have from a conch is can you take a talk about your first 10 sales before we move on to 10x my first 10 sales yeah so my first 10 well so way back I guess my first my first sales job was was door-to-door lawneration so it was like I've sold more than 10 things there but I'll just tell you about the the overall process it was basically walking down the street for about you know 12 hours a day hauling this big machine and going door-to-door asking people they wanted the lawn-erated it's when you know you get those little those little things that looked like small little like like dog who's like all over your lawn because they pull out the cores that was my first that was my first sales job it was horrible then I moved into into telco and I was doing small business in retail so that was and then I moved into a call center and then I moved into more larger mid and enterprise so you know and each of those jobs I've sold more than than 10 things per se but the experience has always been the same I think that's probably the best lesson right it's about being authentic with the customer building trust with the customer being you with the customer if you if you feel like you can't stand behind the product you're selling like quit in all seriousness quit that job because it's gonna be such a drain on you to sell something you don't believe in so you know I spoke my first sales job as lawn-eration like I quit that job I think it was like after two or three weeks that I just couldn't stand it because first of all it was physically difficult but I also you know it wasn't something that I really cared about or stood behind it wasn't my thing so anything that I've ever enjoyed selling and anything that I've ever been successful in selling I genuinely believe that that product can solve for a customer's problem and I would honestly say if you don't feel that if you don't have that passion into helping people and and solving problems I would honestly say quit your job because that's not it's going to be excruciatingly difficult on your psychological well-being to sell something that you don't believe into customers because you will eventually build relationships with them. So I think we have time for just one last question in starting phase of food and beverage industry how can how can we increase sales and what are the channels? So that's a loaded question but I would say in any industry what you should do is first of all again build out your brand so if you're going to be in food and beverage so you you're going to build out I don't know I don't know what you have so far but I would say build out your brand build out across all your social make sure that the problem that you're solving for customers is that is that theme that like permeates and infiltrates all your sales and marketing collateral so whenever you know you have a conversation with your customer you know what problem you're solving for them and then I would say start exploring new social channels I'm a big fan of social selling social media selling by video these are all things that I think are going to put you ahead of all your other competitors because yes we can speak about like you know how to how to target across traditional industries we can talk about inbound strategy we can talk about outbound strategy there's the sales and marketing gamut of activities is enormous but I think that the edge lies in things that a lot of your competitors aren't exploring yet so selling with videos important selling on social like social selling but also taking to new social media channels like these things that not every competitor is doing properly or effectively or even willing to do yet that's where I think you can gain huge market share if your product is very much similar to everything else in the market if you have a really disruptive product intruding beverage that's amazing so I would say that you probably a little bit of an edge and you want to and you want a hyper target you know the audience that you're going after but if your product is very very generic then I'd say just using channels that your your competitors are okay great so thank you for all the discussions and your insights and thank you for answering the questions if you have any other questions you can shoot it out to me I'll move it on to a spot and we can probably answer those questions and get back to us thank you for thanks for joining my pleasure thanks hey hope you like the recording do check us out at Amplest beauty page for 11 more killer content also try out Amplest sales ready if you want to think that next customer is taking care