To tie this back to to I think the challenge you guys have, which is, um, finding that right level of persistence, let's say the good news is like the way that we're doing outbound isn't forcing somebody into a decision saying, hey, do you want to buy right now? It's really just about de-risking that first call for most, you know, services that are sold remotely, uh, knowledge work, let's say, uh, ad agencies is kind of our core competency. People might not be an expert, but they kind of get what's going on, right? They understand the problems that you solve. And really at that point, the scarce resource is, is trust, right? So then the question becomes like, what's the best way to build that trust? And our whole experience has been it's not so much about the product or bells and features and benefits. It's more about the trust that comes from, from relationships, from being part of the same tribe and that kind of thing.
Welcome back to Digital Marketing From The Coalface. I did it, I did, I quite often say digital marketing from the podcast. So this time I got it right. Uh, this week, delighted. We've got Dan Englander from Sales schema come to talk to us. And I think Alex and I are both excited about this because most of the work that we do, in fact, pretty much all the work we do is done with inbound. And today, um, speaking to Dan, we're going to be talking more about outbound, how you can be more proactive with helping to grow your business. So, um, really looking forward to it. I think before we get any further, Dave and Alex here from, from red evolution and across the pond, we've got Dan, Dan, tell us about you and your business and give us a potted history, if you don't mind.
Yeah, I'll do that. But first I just want to say I know that we're just recording audio, but I think you guys should consider video in the future because you guys have the the most idyllic Scottish man cave background, right?
It's the dartboard, isn't it?
For those that can't see this, there's there's this, like a dartboard. Where are you guys? In a in a basement or.
Well, actually.
We are just downstairs in, in our in our building. It's not a basement though. There's, there's, uh, there's streets right there to my left. Okay. But this is where we have meetings and chill out. We've got the dartboard and stuff. Yeah, absolutely. Yeah.
No, that's that's that's great. You got the Dyson vacuum. I see. I was just playing I spy now. Um, but but anyway. Sorry sorry.
That's okay.
That's good gentlemen. Um, so so yeah. So again, Dan, I appreciate you guys having me on. My background originally was, is in the agency space. You know, I kind of fell into that when I moved to New York in twenty ten. And I was an accounts grunt, you know, I was kind of like answering a community manager kind of role. And that was back when I always say like, you could just say we do social media and we're cool, and companies would just kind of give you all their money. Yeah. Um, so I did that for a little while. Then I sort of fell into, uh, you know, basically a startup creative services house focusing on animation. And I was in that split sales and client service role. And, you know, a lot of our business was coming from inbound marketing. Um, and I never initially took ownership over being in sales and then finally had to learned a lot about that. Um, and then eventually kind of like quit and did the whole Tim Ferriss thing for a while and self-published a business book and then started sales schema in like twenty fourteen, um, pivoted pretty early to becoming, uh, what we are now, which is basically a lead generation company. Um, excuse me, focusing on outbound. So we're helping our clients get meetings, uh, usually selling into mid to large companies. Our core specialisation is in the agency space, but we work with lots of B2B service companies that are usually going after like larger organisations and we help them get meetings. So that's a little on, on my background.
Yeah. And I would really, really recommend people go to sales schema dot com and read, uh, Dan's full story, which is, uh, fascinating. Alex and I really enjoyed it. It goes into the, into the weeds, into the nuts and bolts of the whole thing. That was a great, uh, potted version of it done, but it was a I. It was a fantastic read, so I definitely go and look at that. One of the things that that jumped out at me was a short passage from it which, which which was in reality. You said in reality I was a glorified order taker. And unless a prospect had already decided to buy from us, most deals evaporated. And you were in this kind of feast and famine cycle, um, of not really landing the, the, the work that you were hoping to land.
Yeah. Yeah, exactly. And that was, that was some time ago. So I'm trying to remember what, what it felt like back then. Um, but yeah, I think initially, and this is, this is something that we still see a lot with, with our clients and with people we talk to. And I think some industries it's more pronounced than others. But you know, there's this aversion to sales. There's this sort of if they're, if they're not ready to buy right now, there's nothing that I can do to change that, that fact. And of course, there's, there's a fine line, right? Like, I think the sort of people that preach, oh, I'm going to hypnotise people into investing one hundred thousand dollars when they're not ready. Uh, you're wasting your time. You might as well select for the people that are further along. But at the same time, if you just sort of give up on anyone that's not ready to go right then, or sort of give up the idea that you can inspire action, then you're also selling yourself short. So I think, I think a lot of what I went through, like in the early days, and even, you know, now, like every day kind of learning, I still still have a sales coach and everything is about figuring out where that line lives and, you know, figuring out how to, how to move, move things forward and close deals and all that good stuff.
Yeah, yeah. I mean, I think where, you know, your strength lies where certainly I'm, I'm weak. And I don't know if Alex would agree that he's maybe the same as me that like, we're very much inbound guys. So we want people to come to us because they've recognised they've got a problem and they're actively looking for a solution. And we did the work. So they found us and we have a conversation. And even when we get to that point, we've got them engaged. If they're there then sort of go slightly cold on us, then that's it. I don't hassle them. I don't go back to them. I just, I just kind of walk away. Hey, you know, they know where we are and this kind of passive approach, it's it's fine. It works well for us. But I guess in your world, you'd look at that and say, well, you're missing a trick, guys.
Yeah. You know, I, I think again, back to the fine line thing, I think to talk about, you know, a little, a little how we're thinking about it. So we're focusing on outbound, we're focusing on getting meetings. Um, and usually it's, it's getting those meetings in a place where people don't take meetings lightly, right? They're, um, getting pitched constantly, you know, it's often for services that are perceived as commoditised and that doesn't mean they actually are. So I think that what we've seen happen is there's been sort of this idea that's been pitched a lot that, hey, people want to read a bunch of articles first before they have the call and they want to like, know exactly what they want before they get on the phone with people. But I think what's happened is there's just so much information that that process isn't really fun or enjoyable for a decision maker, you know, whether whether it's a C level person, whoever it might be. So the it's not like the barrier to getting the call is that massive. But what we've found is that, you know, the scarce resources is trust. It's no longer information. It's no longer like this idea that you're going to be vetted by putting people through a bunch of, of, um, a bunch of sales collateral or content always. So our whole thinking is that, you know, if you're selling something that's specialised, it's not for mass consumption, you might as well find the best way to de-risk that, that call, um, sooner rather than later and build that relationship before people have the need, not during or after. Because if you're relying on that, it's kind of just a crapshoot. So, so to tie this back to, to, I think the challenge you guys have, you know, which is, um, finding that right level of persistence, let's say the good news is like the way that we're doing outbound isn't forcing somebody into a decision saying, hey, do you want to buy right now? It's really just about de-risking that first call. And I think like a little bit either, you know, either intuitively or counterintuitively, it's not so much about the business case at the top of the funnel. It's really more about like de-risking. Yeah, de-risking that relationship. So for example, um, a lot of the times that means personal commonalities, right? A lot of the campaigns we do might be to the effect of, hey, we both know this same person or it might be, hey, we're both in your backyard in Aberdeen. It might be, hey, we both went to the same college. Um, it's a lot of those sort of connections that will really, you know, cause somebody to say, yeah, I'll take this call. Like this is somebody that's sort of in my tribe. Um, and that's, that's the plug, you know, my book a little bit where I'm about to come out with a book called Relationship Sales at Scale. That's all about that, that idea basically, I should have mentioned earlier.
one of the phrases that one of the phrases, what we'll do is we will put, um, we'll put links to your website in the book and everything into the show notes as well so that people can get access to that would be good. Um, one of the phrases that you use is that you tastefully open doors, and that seems to be, was that hornet your end or our end?
Yeah, it's.
It's.
On my end was.
The territory I'm in. I'm in Manhattan.
So it's just there's nothing to be done about it. Yeah, yeah.
So this idea of like tastefully opening doors, does that feed into what you just told us about looking for existing relationships, leveraging that kind of thing?
Exactly. Yeah. Yeah. And this, this can, this is where I tend to overthink it and get really academic about it. But I think, uh, there's this book that I love called Breakthrough Advertising, and it was written in the sixties by this, this classic, like, you know, ad man, they named Eugene Schwartz and he talks about the stages of market sophistication. Um, so there's, there's essentially like five stages according to Jean. And I like try to paraphrase each one and the first one's like, you know, Facebook when it was invented or whatever, it's like nobody knows what they. It's the classic. Like if people asked what they wanted, they would have said a faster horse when the car came out kind of thing. And then, you know, it progresses from there. Stage two is there's some competition and it's the advertising gets longer because you have to differentiate. It kind of increases. Stage three is about in depth process. Stage four is kind of like the all out, you know, battle between providers. And that's where you might have a lot of disruptors and that sort of thing. And then stage five is the most sophisticated and most skeptical. And for, for most, um, you know, services that are sold remotely, uh, knowledge work, let's say, uh, ad agencies is kind of our core competency engineers, architects, etc. people might not be an expert, but they kind of get what's going on, right? They understand the problems that you solve. And really at that point, the scarce resource is, is trust, right? So then the question becomes like, what's the best way to build that, that trust and our whole experience has been. It's not so much about the product or bells and features and benefits. It's more about, um, the trust that comes from, from relationships, from being part of the same tribe and that kind of thing. So that's a lot of what we're going for with our outreach. And I might have completely lost your question.
But no.
No, not at all. And the idea of tribes obviously thinking about Seth Godin and find your tribe, it's that kind of this, this is this is, this is, uh, thinking that's going right through, you know, marketing, you know, across the piece and, and something you said there was again, pick picking out something that I read on, on your site about it's hard selling skeptical prospects in a low trust environment. So it's, you kind of clearly understanding, you know, it's not like you're calling people and saying, I don't understand it. Like you just slammed the phone down on me. We get that people are fed up with it. We get that people are skeptical and we get that there's a lack of trust. So your scientific approach is to is to get past that. It's it's not just to keep banging up against it like the fly against the windscreen.
Yeah, exactly. And I think that, um, one thing I talk about in the book is the idea of, of automation gang versus love letter gang, right. So automation gang is like, it happens probably on the marketing front, on the sales front, but it's basically this sort of thing where it's like everything has to be automated. Um, and I'm not saying automation is bad, but it's like the extreme, the extreme end of the numbers game, right? Like where it's like, we're just gonna put out a bunch of drip sequences and that's in the sales world. And I'm sure there's a version of that in the marketing world. And it's sort of like, we're just going to keep a B testing on, on this mass of people and so on from there. And I think that that works. If you have a mass market product or service like Facebook ads are great. Like there's all sorts of stuff you can do. There's pros and cons to ads, but, you know, but if you have a specialised service, right, a big ticket, specialised thing, and your service isn't for mass consumption, trying to play that, that over automation game to the ninth tenth degree is going to have diminishing returns because you're going to piss people off. It's not going to work so well. You're not going to get a good number of meetings. So that's on one end of town. On the other end of town is Love Letter Gang, and they're the people that are scared to do outreach, that are scared of offending anyone.
That's us. Maybe. Yeah, yeah, yeah, you just described us. It's okay, it's okay, I get it. Everybody, you know, starts.
Starts there at some point. Um, but and then what they do is they'll be like, we're going to hyper personalise everything. We're going to write custom love letters, we're going to send direct mail, we're going to make this beautiful list of like twenty people that we might contact in a month and go from there. And the problem with that is that that might not work either because for one, maybe just whatever, it doesn't get through. You get somebody at a bad time and then all that resource is wasted. And also it's just not sustainable. You're going to get busy and you're not going to be able to maintain that process. So the answer is what I call in the book, you know, jokingly is Goldilocks gang, right? Where you're in the middle of these of these two extremes. And at that point, then you can you can be automated, you can be contacting enough people to get enough meetings without doing it, you know, way too much and pissing people off. So in our world, in our sort of like B2B space, for context, we might be contacting anywhere from like twenty five up to two hundred people per business day. And that means that those people can, we can customise a good amount of that, personalised a lot of it, and really draw on the personal orbits that people have. And these sort of things that I talked about earlier that work really well.
One of the things selling, you know, selling complex B2B business solutions, products, etc. I guess one of the, one of the things I can't get my head around, and we've had this in the past when we've had sales guys working for red evolution in the dim and distant past is the chances of hitting somebody just at the right time when they when they really needed to make this complex purchase.
Seems they're considered purchases as well. They are the kind of things that you think people are going to kind of like, rush into or do on a whim. You'd have to actually be kind of actively looking already, surely. But yeah, I mean.
It's a very, a very simple way would be like, you know, hey, can I speak to you about your website? Does it generate leads? And the guy's like, wait, what? Sorry. I'm just, I know you're smart. I can.
See you smiling because.
We're being like, beyond naive with these questions, I realise.
No, I don't.
Think that's.
Naive at all.
No, keep going though.
No, no, I mean, the question is, you know, selling complex B2B services and products seems to be like the idea that you could just contact someone and they go, hey, you know what? That's just amazing because that's what like lead forensics and that are trying to sell us, isn't it? You know, it's amazing that you guys have called right now because that's exactly what I need. And that's the bit where I just think, how does that work?
Yeah. So it's a good question. So I think, um, if you, you know, if you're playing enough hands, then that will happen, right? And if you're getting out there enough times, you will get lucky. Um, the issue is, is that relying on that alone just isn't, isn't really sustainable. Right. So usually what's happening is, you know, people are, they already kind of know who they want to work with by the time they, they get there. Um, and it's about building that relationship before they have the need, right? And then, and then staying ahead of staying, nurturing people, staying ahead of them, etc. and like to dig into that a little bit. Um, when you say there's all these buzzwords, or if you say them, it can mean a million different things. People just nod their heads, but it doesn't really mean anything specific. So like, what does nurturing mean? Um, well, it can mean what, what you're focusing on, right? It can mean like just having somebody on a newsletter and being honest and saying, this is a newsletter for one. To many, it's for everyone. All that stuff is great. Um, I think though that where people go wrong is they try to over automate on the sales front, right? When they already have a relationship with somebody, and then they're like, I'm going to send this person through a sequence and they're going to think that it's me, but it's actually a robot. And like, I don't think that works super well. I think what works better is like, if you've got a limited number of people that have like the propensity to invest, you know, five, six, seven figures with you, what works better is just really simplifying it. And maybe that's just like a filter that says, okay, here are the people that I haven't talked to in thirty or ninety days. Can I re-engage them? Do I have new stuff to talk about? And so on from there? And then the question is really more a matter of like, not so much the tactics, but the who's doing what, who has the time and energy to actually do that. Right. And that's situational. And there's a lot to talk about there.
Yeah, yeah. So here's a, here's a thing. I recently had a call from somebody who said, um, I was at a talk you gave a couple of years ago. I really like what you said. Um, and is it, you know, can we have a conversation about a project now? It seems to me that to a certain extent, what you're doing is raising the profile of your customers in the eyes of lots of people, just almost in the same way that my profile was raised in the eyes of that potential customer. When we gave a talk, it's we did something that was beneficial for them. They didn't buy anything off us, but two years later, they still remembered it and they came to us. But because they were now aware of us and a lot of people are not aware of us because we're not doing much of that. Whereas with your approach, more people would be aware of red evolution. Therefore, when they get to a point where they've got a particular challenge, they might go, oh yeah, those guys. Because yeah, they reached out recently and I just said, yeah, nice to meet you. But there was nothing doing. But actually, I don't know. I mean, is any of that along the right lines?
Yeah.
I mean, I think all the awareness elements are all useful and like really, really it does matter. But our whole thinking is like, okay, you know, if you have unlimited resources, you really can do everything. You can do ad campaigns, you can do all these things. But if you've got a small team and maybe you have even a partner that's split between, you know, selling and serving clients, or even just one new business person that has, you know, eight hours a day to do this stuff. Um, that's still not a ton of time and resources. So our whole thinking is like, if you. Okay, so there's that. And then you have a total addressable market of like, let's say several thousand companies. It's not however many it is. It's not like an infinite mass market sort of situation. Oral thinking is like, you really can get to know almost everybody in your market over the course of, you know, a couple years maybe. Yeah. So why not do that sooner rather than later? So it's more than just the awareness element. It's like you can actually go build those relationships. Um, if you just do do this the right way. So that's kind of our thinking on it anyway.
So it's quite interesting because like, if I'm understanding correctly, a lot of what you're saying is kind of geared towards getting that kind of first initial meeting, if you like. It sounds like there's an awful lot riding on, on that meeting, right? So like you've gone to all this effort to win it. And then you've got to go in and I guess, are you are you coaching the kind of people that you work with to go in and try and land the sale there and then, or is it?
No, I think that's a really good question. Um, so no, I actually don't think there's a lot, a whole lot riding on the meeting. There's something riding on it. I guess you could theoretically screw it up really badly or do something terribly. But, you know, I think a lot of the times people ask us that and they're like, oh, if this doesn't go well, did I burn this prospect forever? And like, and I'm not saying I don't mean this negatively because I have the same thought too. I don't mean this combatively, but I think there's like a lot of narcissism built up in that, in that thought because you're like, wow, they must really, they're really going to remember.
Me and like, they care. Yeah, but but.
But they're not. But they will remember that they, that they met you and they will remember your name and then, you know, you'll jog their memory. So no, I think it actually can be kind of low stakes on that first call and, and, and so on. And a lot of the times, um, the goal might not, might not even be to close anybody. Ideally, you have a situation that has that in the cards that progresses things forward. But even like getting into an account that you want to do business with and getting referred to somebody and so on, and to kind of like, um, elaborate on that. I think this comes up when our clients are selling into bigger companies. There's a lot of like hand-wringing on who decides, right? Like sometimes it's this person, sometimes it's that person who do we sell to? And I think the fact is, you don't really know. You can take guesses, you can take educated guesses. But until you talk to somebody in the company, you're not going to really know. Um, so our whole thinking is you might as well talk to somebody senior enough within that account, like sooner rather than later. And it doesn't have to be high stakes. It can be pretty low stakes.
At least they're going to point you in the right direction, I guess. Yeah, no, that makes sense. It's interesting because those are a lot of the kind of challenges we have as well, certainly with like B2B in marketing, right? It's like you spend a lot of time and effort and energy creating stuff that kind of persuades people that you're authoritative and that you know what you're talking about. And then you hope that the right person from the right company is going to land on your website and read it. But I guess it's the same kind of thinking, isn't it? It's just get in front of somebody and trying.
Yeah. And our whole thinking is not against inbound doing that too. But it's, it's sort of like, yeah, if you have limited time and energy, you know, where do you put it sort of thing. Um, it's ideally both. I mean, I think for, for us, like, I'm doing your podcast now we have our own podcast, um, that, that, that's great. And you have like, ideally you have this, like whether it's a podcast or a blog, ideally you have like one big inbound project, right? That you're always, that's sort of like building steam with a grain of salt. And then an oral thinking is if these boxes are checked, limited total addressable market, big enough deal size, you know, you might as well emphasise outbound and doing it that right. Yeah.
That's right.
So we're biased.
Well yeah. But but you're biased because you're getting results because it works. I mean you obviously, you know, you're in a market where the perception is that it's and again, I'm taking some of your words. It's cheap. it's cheap and easy to reach out. So because it's cheap and easy, it's mostly done really badly. You know, let's face it, we're all getting pestered every single day by, you know, greetings of the day. Can we sell you shit? You know? I mean, and it's it's just depressing, isn't it? So to actually to actually have gone into that arena and thought there's a better way of doing this. I mean, that's the really interesting aspect of what you're doing, I think.
Yeah. And it's not like it just kind of came to us overnight like it was we did the cold outreach thing for so for so long and had so many pissed off clients because like, nothing would happen. Um, and, and so on. And it was, you know, it was a gradual process to kind of get to this, this relationship sales at scale, uh, hashtag, uh, approach and, and yeah, and I think at the risk of like, you know, getting, getting overly academic or lofty again, I think, um, I think it's bigger than just our little niche of the sales space. I think that, you know, we're kind of leaving this information age and going towards something else where it's not really about raw data or information anymore. It's about, you know, the I'm not sure how to define it, but it's something about the actionability of it, you know, about like, what can you what can you do with it? Like the idea that you're just going to buy a list and then this is going to work for you is not realistic. I think if you look at any other area that seems to be playing out as well, you know, I think that like just the, the problem if you talk to people that are like, and I'm not one of them, but if you talk to people that are real specialists on big data or whatever, they're like the number of people that can actually process this stuff and do something useful with it is like precious few, right? So we're kind of leaving that phase, I think.
Yeah. That's right. And, and obviously you, you came at this as well. Something, something that you said was that, you know, losing sleep over results for clients. So you were doing outbound. You were maybe just part of the noise. But like all of us, you know, we're on the inbound side of things, we lose sleep. You know, we lose sleep on our inbound. I mean, I don't think clients often realise how much, you know, we care as agencies because we've got to get this stuff right in order to get the gigs and pay our way in this world. And I guess you were you were in that exact same place from the outbound side of things, which, which drove you towards digging deeper to find out, you know, what, what, what a better process would be.
Yeah. Yeah, exactly. And I think like in the, in the early years of the business, we were, we were just kind of doing a variation on what I think most people are still doing, which is cold outreach, right? Which is just basically like, okay, you want to contact CMOs of e-commerce businesses in the US and Canada, we're going to build a list, and then we're going to put them through this funnel. And it involves these channels. And I think that there was a point at which that used to work. But then my whole, you know, experience or hypothesis has been the market got more sophisticated and that that approach doesn't work anymore. You know, you need to, to be more, more personalised and so on. Um, but the other thing is like, I think the other reason it stopped working is like across the board, not just in our little niche is that markets are moving through these phases faster, right? So they're becoming more skeptical faster because of the internet, because of information and everything like that, where years ago, like it might take a, you know, it might take months or years, uh, for, for people to understand generally how something works. But it's, it's, it's moving faster now. Um, so, so yeah, I might have, might have lost your question, but that's.
No, no, that's exactly what I was, what I was aiming for. Um, something again that you said, and I'm using a lot of the, you guys said because this is an area where I, I just don't have the expertise. And that's one of the reasons I was so excited about chatting to you. You know, the idea of that you stop, stop, stop looking like we're trying too hard. You know, you're, it's, it's part of that relationship building approach, I guess, where you just, you know, it's just like, hey, how are you going? You know, you fancy a coffee sometime? That'd be great. And that's rather than how you're doing. Uh, hey, I've got this great, great thing I'd like to talk to you about, you know, which, which is suddenly a completely different conversation.
Yeah, yeah. And I think that, like, when we get to the copywriting element, um, I really think that, you know, Rory Sutherland talks a lot about this, who I've had on the show, but, you know, the, the opposite of a good idea can be another good idea. Like, I don't think there's one way to write copy for these emails that works. Um, I will say just like tactically, and this is kind of like giving people our lucky lottery numbers and may or may not work, but what we've seen is that a lot of the messaging that works is actually kind of old school. It's longer. Um, it looks, it's essentially a pattern interrupt, you know, we want, we want the effect and we get this effect a lot when we're doing things well of there's something different about you. We literally get this response. There's something different about your message. I'm not sure why I responded, but yeah, and, and so on. And it. We'll also hear a lot of. And this is we've seen this, you know, from the biggest companies on earth, like this chief brand officer of, of a top five pharma company last week was like, there's a, I never, ever respond to unsolicited outreach. There's something different about your message. But and I'm responding, I'm not sure what it was. Um, and that's, that's what we're going for. So without, without people, how do you do that? But yeah.
Without, without actually spilling the beans because this is, these are the crown jewels. This is a trade secret. But do you know why he responded.
I have no, I don't I don't know what was going on in his brain. That's the profession I love, you know, educated hypothesis. Yeah. Well, first off, it's that level of personalisation. So usually we're coming in through a mutual relationship or some other commonality, and we're basing a campaign around that. So that does help a lot. But I think a lot of it is it just looks different than an email that most people are getting, you know, so it looks it just looks different. And I think that to be hopefully more useful to people, one way you can do this is, um, go into your is write the email. And then when you're editing it, go to your spam box and just make it an always different than that, you know? Yeah. Um, another thing that I think, uh, Marcel Petitpas, who's an agency has an agency focused tech business in the accounting space, came up with this idea, so I'm stealing it from him. But if you're making that, that email template, make it like as detailed as you could, as if you were going to write like a fully custom love letter to somebody. And then all of those custom areas, the blanks that you have to fill in, then figure out how to get those blanks filled in. So work backwards instead of just like looking at the publicly available information you could grab, think about the most persuasive email you could write and then find that information, if that makes sense.
Yeah, absolutely.
Um, so those are a couple ideas.
Okay. I'm quite interested in. Like, so earlier on, you were talking a little bit about oversaturation and the fact that those kind of original cold emailing tactics kind of very quickly became kind of a bit, a bit passé because everybody was doing it and it was a little bit kind of, you know, run of the mill. Is there a worry that in that eventually the same thing will happen to this approach to that? You know, if everybody starts doing it, it's gonna lose effectiveness, right?
It's yeah, it's a really good question. It's something we think about all the time. Um, so the short answer is tactically. Yeah. So like, in terms of how we phrase the copy and the exact tactical campaign that we're doing. Yes. Um, I think though that the idea of like using a mutual relationship to, to build trust, uh, is not going to go, go away. I think if any, if anything, that's becoming stronger as everything else has become weaker, you know, um, like information and sales pitches and case studies and all the, all these things that are really, uh, really, you know, ubiquitous. Um, I think though that like what, what that means, you know, to get to get a little more specific for how we're thinking about it is a lot of our clients have already, like, you know, built up these rolodexes. They're kind of like standing on top of gold. They just haven't really been deliberate about using them to get to the right places. Right. So for example, like one of our more successful campaigns that we often recommend is us just saying, hey, let us know everybody that you'd feel comfortable asking for a referral that you actually know, take out anybody you don't feel comfortable with. Um, and then we're going to map the people that they know within your target accounts, and then you're going to get referred to those people, right? And sometimes people will be like, is that pushy or whatever. But what we found is that like, if you're, if you're very honest and just upfront and specific, and you make it easy on people to help you, it tends to work really well. Um, I don't think that's going anywhere. I don't think that's going out of style anytime soon.
I guess it speaks like a deeper human psychology, doesn't it? You know, we like to be referred to we like, you know, we like to think that people have thought of us and that kind of thing. So yeah.
Yeah, exactly. So I don't yeah. I don't think that's that's going anywhere, if anything, for better or worse. You know, I think that the tribal thing is becoming stronger can have very negative effects or connotations. It can have very positive ones too, you know, uh, but that's, that's kind of where we see things going, I guess.
How do we, how do we steer away from a kind of make sense sincerity? How do we, how do we say looking authentic? Because I, I can't even think of how to phrase the question, but it seems to me and whether or not there's a difference in thinking over here in the UK as opposed to over in the US. But it would it feels like it would be easy to to come across. As you know, when I get a sales call and we get them, you know, actual sales phone calls and the guy's like, hey, mate, how's it going? And what are you up to at the weekend? I'm like, I just, I don't know this guy. And he's asking me what I'm doing at the weekend and he's calling me his mate. And it's a massive, massive turn off. I just can't get off the phone quick enough. So how do we avoid that? I mean, I don't even know if that's a fair question to ask because I wouldn't know.
I think it's a really fair question. I mean, I think the first the first thing is to just be be authentic with, with what you're doing. Like, you know, don't, don't fake anything. Um, and I think that that's ultimately like what all of our, of our messaging is doing. If we find a connection just because it's at, it's at scale or there's more than one person on that list, it doesn't mean it's not, not real. Um, for example, like one of, one of the most successful campaigns is, hey, we went, we went to the same college. I have really fond memories from there. You probably do too. Like none of that stuff's untrue. It's just. Yeah, you might, you know, the fact, the fact that you're reaching out to a few people, uh, makes people feel, you know, like, like they're doing something wrong. When really, I think that's more authentic than all the alternatives, right? Um, like, for example, I love Godin. I think he's great. The one thing and maybe. And to be fair, I haven't reread his The Permission marketing book in a while, so I might be strawmanning his argument. But I think like, there's this whole idea of permission marketing where you have to get permission first and all this stuff. But I think the reality of that is like, for one, how do you get permission? You have to interrupt someone. Yeah, yeah. Whether it's through an ad or through outreach, you've got to interrupt them to get that permission. But also like, I think that things have evolved to such a creepy degree. And this is nothing against inbound writ large, but it's like, you know, the advertising that's like literally listening to you. Yeah. Have a conversation with your family and then serve you ads like that's, you know, if you're comparing that to making a list of one hundred people that you share a commonality with and doing the outreach in the right way, like, come on. Like there's. Yeah. Like if we can't do that, then what are we left with? Yeah.
No, I couldn't agree more about, you know, the creepy side of inbound, which, which I like to think that we avoid. But but yeah, I mean, and people, people don't like it. People hate it. So why do it? You know, some people might argue, well, because it works, I don't know. I mean, I had an interesting one yesterday in terms of like, maybe it's an it's an outbound approach, but I got a WhatsApp message, you know, it's either to our business, WhatsApp or it might have been just to my personal one, you know, it was just like, hey, you know, I found you in my address book. Do we know each other? I don't, I can't remember you. And obviously accompanied by, um, you know, the profile picture as, um, um, a pretty woman sort of thing. So it's a way of trying to get me to go, hey, well, maybe we do know each other and, and then start some sort of conversation. I was just like, oh, delete book. Yeah.
I mean, I think you could take, take either perspective, right? You could take the, the, just the winning the game ends justify the means cynical perspective. Uh, or you could take the, I want to play the game in the right way. And still doing that either way is wrong. And here's, here's like the reason why the real politics cynical way is wrong is that it just doesn't work that well anymore. Like the robots have gotten smarter. They know how to block that stuff off. Mhm. You're gonna offend way more people, you know. You're gonna make more enemies than friends. Eventually, it'll catch up with you. Uh, it takes a lot of energy to manage all this automation because things break. And when you're, like, pissing off that many people at scale, it just doesn't work.
I think pissing off people at scale is my favorite take on automation.
Right, right. So, so then the other side and then then the how you play the game side is, is yeah, you just don't want to be part of that. So, so I think the answer is, you know, yeah, there's still a numbers game dynamic that doesn't go away. Um, but the numbers have just shrunk a bit. And at least for the cases that I'm, that we, that we focus on. Right. Which is limited market size, big ticket sales and that, and I think the same dynamics are there across the board, but, um, it's a little bit different than if you're selling to a mass market or something.
Yeah. I mean, being inbound guys, we're even bad. And I'm wondering if if you ever work with businesses to, to, to resolve this, We're even bad at upselling and cross-selling to our existing customers. I mean, we know we have those conversations where where we'll be talking to a really good customer like, oh, you guys do that as well. I mean, is there anywhere is there any scope for the techniques that you use to actually mine into extremely warm contacts, existing customers? Because we've looked at it and yeah, we're not, we're not the best. We're not the best at doing it, I don't know. Yeah.
Nor are we. And I think that, you know, that that's really like a great place to put your energy. I think the the thing about it is like once you have that relationship with, with a customer, um, that's where the automation really kind of goes out the window, you know? Um, or if, or if you do have automation, you're not lying and saying it's one to one, you're, you're being upfront that it's, you know, one, one to many so that you're not fooling anybody. And I think so, so that, that really just kind of gets into more old school, um, timeless best practices for like sales and account management. And in the book I talk about this, I have a whole chapter that's basically like, hey, once, once you get to the point of an open door and somebody's talking to you, the sales best practices haven't changed a lot over the course of centuries. They've changed a bit because we have more information. There's there's more, you know, the consultative sales process has changed the fact that you're talking on a screen versus like at a boardroom or something changes some things. So it's changed on the margins. But by and large, like, you know, we're still the same humans with the same psychology. Yeah. Um, so that whole chapter that I have is basically just about like, look at the stuff that's worked and has continued to work. Um, one of my favorite books is, you know, uh, um, what's it called? The challenger sale by CB is really good. Yeah. Um, and that's kind of like a spiritual successor to, to this book spin selling, right? Which was Neil Rackham wrote the foreword to it. So that's, that's the kind of thing that, that we, uh, that's my experience anyway, is it's really just kind of about like timeless best practices for that and, you know, being helpful and consultative and so on.
Good stuff. Well, that just leads me on just as we maybe start to wind things up, but you guys effectively provide, I think these are your words, fractional, a fractional new business team. So this is, is that like the ideal gig for you guys to just, just to come in and say, look, we know you don't like doing this stuff. We're really good at it. And you just engage on that on that basis.
Yeah, exactly. And our whole philosophy is that, you know, when you say the word sales, it's a whole bunch of different skill sets. And it takes so much time and energy that it's become like people aren't thinking about it. The full implication of the word sales, right? So what we're replacing is the top of the funnel, which in the US, I'm not sure if you have the same jargon on the other side of the pond, but like a BDR or business development rep, um, junior salesperson, the person who's getting those meetings teed up. And our whole philosophy is that, you know, you're not going to have this automated like, like widget, like there's a lot of these productised lead gen companies that promise the world and it almost never works. That's not going to work. The thing the the alternative is hiring and training that salesperson. But then you're also giving them a lot of strategy and support and lists and copy. So our philosophy is that's better done through through a fractional team. So that's essentially what we're doing. We're never going to replace the bottom of funnel sales. The person that's doing, dealing with the complexity with.
The deep product knowledge, for example.
Exactly. Yeah. That's almost always going to be an in-house role. Um, but the top of the funnel is what we're, we're looking to help with. Yeah.
Okay, great. So before we wind up, Dan, do you just want to share again, um, how people can get in touch your website, uh, the book that's coming out, just give us a bit more information on that and we will put all this in the show notes as well.
Yeah, absolutely. So, um, the book that should be out, you know, recording this on March tenth, twenty twenty two. So within thirty days, knock on wood, everything gets done. It's called relationship sales at scale. Um, there's a whole landing page that has resources from the book. It also has like the first chapter read out loud by me. So if anybody wants to get all that stuff before they decide to drop, the nominal amount of money on the book is just sales schema dot com slash r s r sass. Uh, and, uh, yeah, hopefully that's, that's useful to people.
Excellent. And is there anything that I haven't asked because this is like Alex and I both way out of our comfort zone. It's been fascinating for us. Is there anything that we should have covered that we didn't?
Uh, there's always more to talk about, but no, I think you guys asked really great questions. I hope I was helpful to the audience and everything. Um, yeah, I mean, I don't think you missed anything. I think like where my head goes is just we could probably do a whole other episode on, on hiring, you know, hiring for sales and what makes sense for different levels. I think that's the biggest issue we see is people get too into, um, the tactics or they hire somebody too early or, or they do the opposite. And it's like the, the partner is partners still handling sales, you know, years into the business. Yeah. Um, so that's, that's a whole other episode though. And still me too. So yeah.
Yeah. So once the books out and you and you've got some feedback from the book and then maybe you can come back on and we could maybe talk about that, that whole thing because yeah, it's something that we, we, we have partnerships so we can help people who are struggling with sales, but we don't have that deep knowledge in house. We certainly don't. I mean, we're more kind of, you know, marketing generate the leads and then kind of hope that the guys that were generating the leads for have got the skill set and the capabilities to take them forward.
Yeah, I have no idea what that's like in our business. Yeah. No, that's that's great guys and would love to come back on. I really appreciate.
It. Great stuff. That's excellent. Dan really, really enjoyed this. Um, Digital Marketing From The Coalface. If you want to come on and talk, if you want to guest on, you know how to get in touch with us redevolution.com/digital-marketing-from-the-coalface or redevolution.com Dan, it's been an absolute pleasure. Thank you.
Thanks very much, guys.