[00:00:00] Speaker A: You're listening to b two B revenue acceleration, a podcast dedicated to helping software executives stay on the cutting edge of sales and marketing in their industry. Let's get into the show.
[00:00:11] Speaker B: Hi, welcome to b two B revenue acceleration. My name is Orania Muccier and I'm here today with Mansour Salami, CEO of Front Spin. How are you doing today, Mansour?
[00:00:21] Speaker C: I'm doing well. How are you doing, ohanya?
[00:00:24] Speaker B: I am good. It's getting very cold here in the UK. We had snow and I'm in a room that is not really well isolated. So I've got a little. My little cardigan is coming out to keep me warm.
[00:00:37] Speaker C: But apart from that, hopefully the topics will keep you warm too.
[00:00:40] Speaker B: Oh, yeah. Very interesting one. So today, introducing the topic, we will be talking about Google and Yao's new email policy and how that's impacting people, platforms, all the ecosystem that are basically using email as a way to generate leads and meetings. But before we get into the topic, I think it would be super useful for yourself to give us a quick introduction, Mansour, and also introduce Fran Spain, because I think you are well placed to speak about this topic due to the fact that you're the CEO of frontspin.
[00:01:11] Speaker C: Excellent. Yeah. So my name is Mansour Salome. I am the CEO of Frontspin. We're a sales engagement tool for sales agencies and strategic businesses that value the phone first but also want other mediums like email, SMS, LinkedIn. And sometimes we are actually coming in as the whole sales engagement tool. Other times people use us just for telephony as a dialer and they have an existing sales engagement tool for email and others. So that's basically frontspin in a nutshell.
[00:01:49] Speaker B: That's wonderful. And we are using frontspin. Great solution, guys. So you should definitely check them out. Mansour, could you provide a brief overview of the recent email authentication and spam prevention policies that have come out from Google? And yo, just to give a little bit of context, I'm pretty sure most of the people who are tuning in are tuning in because they understand what's going on. But it'd be good if you could just give it from an a level perspective. What is that changing for the market?
[00:02:14] Speaker C: So actually a lot of these mechanisms were already in place for a long time. So if you take a look at SPF, DKiM, DMARC, we've already been using that for our emails. We've been recommending our customers use it and most likely most people are using it. What those ensure is to ensure if an email is coming to you, you can be pretty confident it's coming from the sender who says who they are. For example, if you get an email from Barclays, you can be pretty sure if it's signed properly that it's coming from Barclays. And the primary goal of those procedures that Google and Yahoo are putting in place initially, and I suspect Microsoft will do the same, are to prevent mostly phishing emails. If you take a look at what's happening or people pretending to be someone they're not. Right? So people sending you an email, a phishing email pretending to be Barclays. So I think that's the first level that's going to go up. A lot of people put spam and marketing into kind of that bucket. I don't think that's the initial intent from everything I've seen. To take away marketing is to take away unsolicited emails, I would say, and phishing emails.
[00:03:26] Speaker B: And how do you see that impacting b two B and b two C businesses? Would there be a difference between both? I mean most of our audience is probably b two B, so maybe with a bit more focus on b two B. But I would expect that we will have to change behaviors and we won't be able to send as many emails as we used to and probably sending as much automation as we were doing before.
[00:03:49] Speaker C: Right. So I think with BTC like you mean, it's not exactly my area of expertise. They tend to do things in very high volume. Apple is Google's largest customer, plus they pay them I think billions of dollars a year in search. So I don't think they'll treat Apple. Google won't treat Apple the same way they treat the rest of us.
But we'll have to wait and see. With regards to b two B, the biggest one is the spam percentage. So if more than 0.3% of the emails are marked as spam, so what does that mean for the b two b? That means you need less emails to be marked as spam to be potentially a danger for the whole domain. So you have to be very careful with every single email that we send. And one thing we can do, we can talk a bit later on. We have a customer that forbid all his team, all his company to send automated emails. So every email has to be handcrafted and hand signed.
Now I don't know if this is an extreme or not. I would say we saw similar enforcement in other medium like for telephony that was stir shaken. That was supposed to prevent people calling you from supposedly a foreign country. Hey, I've got this money. I need $200. Can you please wire it to me and do these things? So I think this will eliminate a lot of that, but I don't know if it'll change significantly as much as people think it will the landscape.
[00:05:16] Speaker B: Okay, so let's talk about that from a best practice perspective. So I'm a big believer big volume email campaigns are not great. Even if you want to send a mailer, I think it's good to have a segmentation of your database and try to adapt, I don't know, based on the job title or based on the type of companies. So you can change things to be a little bit more specific.
It's very easy, I believe, when you are the receiving end of an email to quickly understand if it's an email that is for you, that has been someone who's under research, or if it's an email that's for lots of people. Okay. But from a practical perspective, what is it that we need to adapt for? So what is it that we need to do in order to be blacklisted as a domain? What are the do not do? And then we can speak about probably the best practices.
[00:06:06] Speaker C: So do not send the same email that is not personalized. Hi there. For example, do you want solution XYZ? Please schedule a meeting with me. So this is like a totally unpersonalized email. Send that over. Chances are if you do that at scale, that will not be good for the domain and that's not the company.
[00:06:30] Speaker B: Because technically you could get blacklisted, for example, by emailing lots of people at Google with that message. What you are saying here is that Google as the email servers will recognize your message from different clients and be able to mark you as a spam, which means that you can't email any of their clients.
[00:06:48] Speaker C: Exactly. I mean, you and I will not be able to email even directly from our email clients from our phones. We won't be able to email each other if one of our domains is blocked. That's what we're understanding from Google. We had a client or we had a prospect a while back, they never became a client. They had the whole domain blocked. That was about four or five years ago because they did bad practices in email marketing. That was on the b to c side. So I think what we're seeing a lot of people doing, they're getting domains, derivative domains for reaching out. So for example, instead of operatics.com, you may want to do operaticsales.com and then use that to market in case there's a problem, the general company's email won't be affected, it'll just be a subset of those emails. So we're seeing a lot of people positioning themselves that way. And actually, I don't think it hurts. There is a domain reputation, from what we understand how long the domain has been in existence. So if it's a newer domain, it will have a lower reputation. So it may have a higher tendency even to be marked as spam. But we are seeing a lot of people having multiple domains or having a handful of domains. So in case something goes wrong, they would learn from it and not repeat it. But it won't affect as dramatically the domain of their company.
[00:08:12] Speaker B: And what about doing a mailing? So let's say you want to do a little bit more of, you want to use a mailchimp or whatever it may be. If you're a small organization you want to send a mailing to, you may want to send a mailing to your own customers.
[00:08:28] Speaker C: Like a newsletter, right?
[00:08:29] Speaker B: Yeah, newsletter. Or even it could be sending, I don't know, 30 emails to all my clients in the Bay Area to tell them, hey, guys, just wanted to send you a thing. I'll be in the Bay Area.
I'm going to have sometimes on that day, that day, that day I'd love to meet for a coffee or something like that.
Can you still do that or everything needs to be crafted one by one?
[00:08:54] Speaker C: No, I think that should be fine. If you're sending their existing clients, they know who you are. Chances are they're going to open it up. There's no guarantees because it would be the server that might go ahead and blacklist you. Sometimes genuine emails get blacklisted. Like we've heard horror stories where somebody send an email, a genuine email out, but because it included finance or three times finance in the email, they thought it was a spam and it blocked the whole domain. So this is even before these new rules coming in. So these rules have been in place. I think it'll be just a little bit tighter and it's just one of the many steps, I think, that are going to happen. The very positive thing is I think we're going to have much less fraud and much less phishing emails in our inboxes, which is, I think, the big goal of it. But genuine marketing and genuine business relationships, especially where you have an existing relationship with your customers in the Bay Area, you want to come visit them. I don't think that would be an is there?
[00:10:05] Speaker B: So coming back to the BDR. So I'd like to look at two best practices. So best practice from a BDR, sending probably a lot of email as part of the outreach, but trying to personalize this email. So I'd like to understand your perspective on best practice at the SDR level and your perspective in term of best practice at the campaign level. So now I'm a marketing manager and I would like to reach out to a fair amount of prospect because there is an event and I've got a list of 200 participants and I would like to send them all the same message. So if we start with the BDR, what are you saying? I mean, I'm sure the best practices are what we should do anyway, which is research, but is there anything in specific that you are developing or pushing with frontspin, because your solution can actually help the automation. So is there anything that you are doing from a technical perspective to make sure or to protect your clients? Is there any recommendation that you are giving your clients in term of what they should put in this message, what they should do, what they should not do. What are the recommendations at the BDR level?
[00:11:04] Speaker C: I think at the BDR level, of course, the more segmentation you go, the more relevant the email is going to be. And it's going to be a weighing that. You decide how much time does a BDR or does a rep spend crafting the email and customizing it. There's a lot of great things with intent data now that's coming in with companies like Zoom info and cognizant have intent data. I mean, it'd be interesting to see how good those are and how they improve the open rate and the relevance of those emails going out. We do throttle the number of emails that a rep sends. So we just want to make sure that not everything doesn't send 200 emails in the next five minutes. So things are sent throughout the day. So it looks like much more like a human is sending them. But we do recommend each email be crafted quite differently, beyond just the variables anyway, to see what happens at first. And I think one thing.
[00:12:00] Speaker B: What?
[00:12:00] Speaker C: We'll dive in in a little bit. We're starting to see telephony, a resurgence on telephony. So a lot of our customers are telling us, okay, great, what can we do? So email is going to be a bit more restricted.
LinkedIn is going to fill a little bit of it. But the only other medium we can pivot to is telephony because telephony is the only one that has enough volume that we can make up for it. So we're seeing a lot of customers saying, okay, you know what, let's be conservative on email. Let us maybe reduce the number of emails we send per BDR in a given playbook or cadence, and let us go ahead and focus on making sure that there's more of a human reaching out to another human over the phone.
[00:12:43] Speaker B: Interesting.
Do you have any results around that? Do you have any conversion rate that you see across all your clients?
[00:12:51] Speaker C: I think it's too early. We had one client that was. They couldn't use a tool like ours. They had tried a number of different tools for email that were using us for telephony. So they were using something that would send like 10,000, 20,000 emails a day. And one thing they did see is they saw a lower. The conversions on emails were going down. They were getting about 20% of the appointments by email, and by the end of last year, they were getting closer to ten. So the phone became even more dominant for them.
[00:13:26] Speaker B: Yeah, I think for us, 85% of our connection conversation, meetings, demo booked, and everything that is done from a prospective selling perspective. So I'm not talking about any inbound. Yeah, I'm just talking about pure outbound. 85% of what we get is from phone. And the phone has always been relatively important. And there are some other things you can do. You can use voice notes as well on LinkedIn, but you've got to do it from your mobile phone. So that's the reason why people tend to get less, because if you've got a big call center or enough shock or call center and things like that, people tend to work on the laptop, they don't have their LinkedIn profile and the app on their phone, which means that they won't go on the app, record a message and send it to you, but you can actually send a voice message on LinkedIn. And those voice notes have been relatively successful. But again, I think we've got. It's about having the right spread. I do believe that email has been a bit too much, and we've had reps on our side hiding behind emails. I'm putting a lot of emails, I'm doing a lot of activities, but it's really lazy activity. So just an email to people, particularly if it's the same one. So crafting is very important, and it's interesting to see also the emails that are working. Okay, so I guess, would the rules become a little bit more strict on using tactic like re two points or fw two points in a title? When you send the first email or that sort of thing. So you don't believe that someone is forwarding you something or you don't believe that someone is responding to a thread already existing.
[00:14:59] Speaker C: So you can see different things. I think there's a lot of different tactics with emails. I think you're doing the right thing. I mean, just to come back on the voice message leaving. One thing we did notice is voice messages are being used more, not because you're going to get a call back, right. So leaving a voicemail on a phone, you're not going to get a callback. But two things are happening where people spending more time leaving voice messages. We can automate a lot of the voice message, but first of all, they're now being transcribed on your phone in real time. So if I say, hey, Aurelian, and if you don't pick up, then I click the button, but at least it gives you a time, says, oh, this person knows my name, who's that? And then you may pick up, we have a conversation, but the other thing it does is the branding. So leaving a professional voicemail with a professional value proposition, a lot of times people don't value the voicemail is a branding for the company you're representing. And so that's something that we're seeing. Also, people are spending more time on their voicemail. They've asked to say, how can we automate the voicemail here? And how can we leave enough time for the rep to say the name of the prospect so the prospect can decide to pick up the phone if they want to. Now with the screening, voicemails are happening. And so it's the same thing with email. Obviously you want to send it to somebody, you want to hit a chord and you don't want to be poking exactly with the same email, like, okay, I'm boiling this up, boiling this up. I guess if you poke somebody too much, something bad could happen, something good could happen, but most likely something bad will happen also.
[00:16:36] Speaker B: Yeah. So coming back to the campaign now, do you see any specific elements of email campaign that will become more critical under the new policies?
[00:16:46] Speaker C: I think you pointed it out. I mean, I think you need to segment, even know campaigns insinuates a large number and I think you want to move more closer to one to few as opposed to one to many. So you want to have one to a few people. Like you said, if you're going after people in the Bay Area, there may be things very specific to the Bay Area you want to say about your trip. You may have a restaurant and then you may be going seeing the same Persona in New York the next week. You're going to have a very different message, or a different message enough that resonates with people in New York versus the people in San Francisco. So don't treat those, even though you may be trying to meet CIOs in both companies, in both locations, don't treat them as the same campaign. Try and segment them as much as possible. And tools, I mean, of course our tool helps you break down the segmentation to small segments like this. But I think the more smaller segments you can do, the more value you can add to those customers. For example, if I was in the Bay Area, invite me to a restaurant, I'd love to go meet you there and have a drink and a meal with you.
[00:17:53] Speaker B: Yeah, absolutely. We do that in London all the time. We should do it in the Bay Area now, of course.
So coming back, some of the best practices. So if I'm a marketing manager and I want to send some email, probably prudent to create a subdomain. So if something goes wrong, my main domain doesn't get blocked. So we got that.
Do you have any specific rules in term of volume of emails? Are we talking about Android? 500,000, 10,000?
Is there a specific level at which Google Yow in their policy would say, okay, that's spam because there's too many of them going out.
What would be a batch? If we want to segment, what would you say is the, and I don't know if you've got the answer, but is there a specific size of what that batch should be?
[00:18:39] Speaker C: Right.
I think if you take a look at. So it's hard to tell until February 2. Right.
But I can tell you what we've seen in the past. In the past we recommend that when you start warming up an email, that you start warming it up with the rep at 50 emails a day and minimum 1 minute to 90 seconds between both emails. So if I'm sending a batch of 50, make sure that every email is sent at least 90 seconds between each other and that they're well crafted.
From a campaign perspective, Google is saying 5000. So if you can keep those less than 5000 per day and across all the different campaigns you're doing, that'd be a good start. And then warm up as things going because the minute you send them, you'll see what your spam rate is. So if your spam rate is below the threshold, you can increase it a little bit probably, and go from there. And that probably is a smart thing is to warm up a campaign. I don't think anybody can tell you what the numbers are until Google turns on and Yahoo turns on their system.
[00:19:50] Speaker B: Great. And you mentioned a few times about email being well crafted. So again, I'm going to ask you a little bit of a tough question before February and the timeline, but can you define what you mean by well crafted?
[00:20:03] Speaker C: So well crafted? I think it includes a number of things. So it has a clear identification of the Persona, it has a clear identification of their pain point, and a clear value proposition that you're adding to them. So I would say it includes those three in a non robotic way, in a way that would make it very personal. Very personal for you. So for example, I know you like going skiing in Utsavois. I wouldn't go say, hey, do you want to buy a pair of skis, for example? I would go ahead and say, hey, listen, these are great. Skis are being used in Savois and if you want to, I can get you somebody to go try them out at no additional charge. Do you want to do something so it's actually even more customized to you even though it's the same value proposition? Do you want to try a pair of skis versus you want to try them and they're available next to you? So if you're reaching out to me, and I happen to be in the Bay Area or happen to be in Phoenix, it'd be good for you to talk to me about something that's happening in the Bay Area versus talking to me. Something happening in New York. Not that I don't care about New Yorkers, but it's probably not as relevant to me as the Bay Area.
[00:21:12] Speaker B: The skiing is not great in warm.
[00:21:15] Speaker C: No, but there's some skiing about a couple hours away. But in Utah. So we get to Utah, which is great.
[00:21:22] Speaker B: So that's good. I think at the end of the day, if you think about it, any BDrSDr that is doing their job properly, I'd like to get your thoughts on that because that's my opinion and maybe something that I've seen from stats and that's kind of the opinion that I'm trying to put in the mind of our managers. I think to do a good quality job of prospection. If you do more than 100 and 5200 activities per day, which will include calls, voicemail, emails and stuff like that, you're starting to lose any notion of relevance or personalization. I prefer relevance to personalization because I think personalization with AI is getting a little bit severe, really. Some of the personalization. I think that, yeah, people have found some information about you online, but it doesn't make any sense or has no context with what they're selling you. So it's just like, oh yeah, well, I know that you like skaying and by the way, I'm trying to sell you a hoven. So you're like, okay, why? But the point I'm making is that I think it's important to be able to limit WDISDr to, for emails. I would say if it was me, I would say no more than 100 and 2130 emails. I don't think it's possible to actually have done research and be pertinent and be able to give the why you, why now to a prospect if you send more than even 60, 80 emails a day. Okay. I think the phone calls are slightly different because you can really have your blitz of calls in the morning, blitz of calls in the afternoon, so you can try to catch the people during the golden hours and you can really put a lot of activity in a short period of time. And with the response rate being relatively low, you can really go from one to the other. But for emails, I think it's so important to encraft email. Now there is the second, the third and the fourth email, which are usually the one that are a bit shorter. So if I already send you an email with a value proposition, my next email is likely to behave. And so have you had a chance to catch up on my last email, by the way, we've got this that. So I may have to have a little news. I may want to give you a little nugget or I may say I've got a case today that I would like to share with you, whatever it may be. But that follow up email usually is less tailored. What I find difficult is in a sequence to have every single email tailored. I think the first email, I think it's tailored, is important. But then the follow up, at least in my way of working, are relatively similar. The name will change, but what I'm asking them is, okay, could we try to find some time next week or. I've just left you a voicemail, so I saw we send you another email, send you a note last week. What's the best way to reach out to you, whatever it may be, but similarity in this message, is that an issue, you think for when the second third force message in the sequence are less valuable in term of content because they are piggybacking on the previous one?
[00:24:18] Speaker C: Yeah, I mean, I think they definitely will be more of an issue on the second one. And if somebody's not responding to your emails, it's good to pick up the phone and call them, right?
Or at least try some other mediums.
You probably know these things. And we do see people responding on the third or fourth or fifth email. So we do see that persistence does pay off. Right.
So we have a response rate typically on a campaign for the first email and then we have them as a follow up. So if somebody's generally interested and didn't get to it, they would value this thing. You need to be able to make it without ruining the reputation of the campaign or even worse, the email of the company.
[00:24:58] Speaker B: Yeah, and you exactly made my point, which is with emails and touches, you probably need to go to people three or four times because before you actually get something, it's extremely rare, but it does happen. I'm not saying it's impossible. It's rare that you just send one email and you get a response straight away because usually people with your forward or looted with someone else, but it gets forgotten because they may be in the middle of something when they read your note and it's good to go back to them. Now the shift to phone, that's important.
There will be some limitation in some region about phones and stuff like that. And is there any best practices that you push to your clients in term of usage of the phone voicemail? So I know you mentioned already a couple about, but what's.
Because that's another thing as well. If you receive 20 calls in one day from the same number, it's a little bit much. So do you have any stats about what's actually converting from a phone perspective?
[00:25:54] Speaker C: Yeah, we can come back to that, but I think the first thing is you're very lucky. From what I've seen from your team, your team is very comfortable with the phone. We see a lot of teams that are very scared to call on the phone. They would rather send email. Wait. And literally, if they make 1012 calls a day, that's a busy day on the phone for them because they're doing all this email. How'd you go ahead and transition a team that was traditionally doing a lot of email and you want them to focus more on phone?
And I think this is something that was really impressed when I was actually at memory blues offices, you had a DM that would coach in real time, the rep, so they would sit down for multiple hours in a row. They would block 2 hours, 3 hours, and they would listen to the rep in real time, whisper in the rep's ears. Because one of the things with the phone, contrary to the email, you get a very personal response back. And the feedback you get from a lot of prospects is a no and that's a negative feedback. But you could be doing everything right. And if it's the first time you're hitting the phones, you may not know about it. So having this real time coaching, which something you do which is not something that's easy to do, is critical to get the confidence of the reps that haven't been very phone heavy, to become more phone heavy. So I think that's important. You also do a lot of things, I know, with Michael Hansen in terms of training. So training them on the phone, best practices, how to address objections, because the worst thing is they work really hard. They have a prospect on the phone, the prospect is not converting.
It'd be a shame to waste all that effort to get the prospect on the phone and not do everything possible to try and convert.
[00:27:41] Speaker B: Sorry.
[00:27:42] Speaker C: Oh, no. So this is again, things that inside sales teams that don't have phone training, don't know anything about. They think phone training is, oh, hi, Ray. Do you want a pair of. Goodbye. Oh, do you want a pair of skis? I mean, they think this is selling right? And they think this is prospecting. So having a great training program, which you do, having a great coaching program, and then having also the rep, especially if they haven't done it very much in email and you want to move more on telephony, have them shadow an experienced, successful rep that does very good on the phone. To see how that person behaves is actually very valuable. But this is, I think the biggest problem is the mentality of sales management today in our industry is very telephony driven. Sorry, it's very email driven and they're going to have a hard time, I think, shifting, and this is where I think you guys can differentiate yourselves over the next few years because you already have everything in place. It's not just a technology, you have all these processes in place.
[00:28:52] Speaker B: And it's critical when you think about it. Emails are fantastic, but we still have a lot of customers that sell to two or three different people. It's very difficult in a large organization to know exactly who will be the person who will buy. And in fact, in most cases like that, there will be a consensus of people that will buy a solution. If you are a commodity product, then you will have to find the people that are buying it over and over again every year or every two years or every three years, if you are disruptive, you will have to find the group that will be looking at each other and say, all right, who's paying for it? Who's implementing it? Who's doing this?
What's wonderful about the phone is that you can have a conversation and people say, hey, I may not be the right person for that. That's interesting for me. And you really bounce from one person to the other, and that's really what prospection is all about. We spoke about prospecting. How can you prospect from an email? I think emailing is almost like it's phishing. You just put your email out and you wait for something to buy when you are calling and it's changing. But I remember when I was doing the job, you would also have pas, lots of pas, and they were fantastic because you would get information from them. You would pitch everyone. You'd pitch the switchboard lady, and she would help you to get to some people. But what's wonderful about the phone is the ability to get information relatively quickly. Now, we know that people are scared about the phone because the conversation happened quickly. Okay. And you put yourself at the same level as the prospect that you're engaging with, which means that not only you need to have a knowledge about your product that goes beyond just a script, you need to understand the why of the product. You almost need to be convinced that you want a product yourself. If you are a buyer, you will buy that product yourself.
You need to understand the product. You need to like the product, but you also need to have an understanding of the ecosystem and the context of the prospect. And that's probably the most difficult to train people on. You're going to speak to boeing today or you're going to speak to Alaska today. Alaska Airline. Okay. Well, since they've had a door flying from a plane, the plane in Detroit yesterday, the day before, I don't know if you want to put that in your message or not. But what I'm saying is that you need to adapt to what's happening. If they're going through PI issues or their price share is going down or the kerosene is going up and you're speaking to an airline company, you could speak about cost saving, could say, look, with the price of kerosene going up, I would expect your board to ask you to cut some cost somewhere else. Okay, well, I've got a solution that could help you with that. Now, the problem I've got is I don't know if that would move the needle enough for you to be interested and give me 30 minutes of your time for a meeting and then you can go into the conversation. But having the sort of openers of knowing what's happening in the business, actually watching the news and being, oh, okay. Now I've got some ideas about pitching. That's the declaration that is really difficult to get in people. It's the practicality of understanding the context of business, but you can teach it. And what's amazing is that when you actually do that, well, it's very difficult to craft an email with all that information.
It's much easier to speak to someone about the price of the car, the interactions.
[00:32:02] Speaker C: There's like three or four interactions that happen back and forth, whereas an email, it's just one, and then you wait back another one.
[00:32:09] Speaker B: Exactly.
I think you can be a bit more challenging with your tone of voice and what you are putting in front of a prospective on the phone than you can do in an email. Right. So I think you've got much more tools to be successful on a phone call. But yeah, I think you're right. Lots of people are relying on email, and in fact, it's probably a good thing that they are reducing the volume of email. I was looking at my junk as we were speaking in my mailbox and I never realized because delete, delete, delete, delete. But you are right. They're all the same emails. All the same emails like contact and some title of the emails, some everything. Partnerships, things like that. When you create a partnership, you want to send me something.
[00:32:51] Speaker C: An email could be a good. I mean, don't get me wrong, because I think when you say second or third email, if it's in support of a conversation we've had. Right. Hey, it was great talking to you. You mentioned that XYZ is part of the decision. If there's more than one decision maker, you send it to them. It's relevant. That email will hardly ever be marked as spam. Right. Because you made sure you listened to them, you understood their organization, you understood their decision process, you sent it to them. That already puts you ahead of a number of people. But the challenge we're seeing, Ray and a lot of our customers are asking us, and we've recommended a few people to Mike Hansen, is how do I get my people to pick up the know they are scared of the phone? I don't know if you know Steve Richard, but he posted something where there was a sales floor where it says, please watch your volume, don't speak too loud. Whereas part of the thing of being good on the phone is having a team, having good energy, them supporting you, making sure you can speak without any restrictions. Right. Not feeling like you're walking on eggshells and be yourself and pitch it. And I think that's going to be the biggest challenge is people, sdrs who were email centric before 23 are going to have to invest a lot in themselves and training and also their company have to invest a lot in themselves if they want to be successful with a heavier phone load.
[00:34:15] Speaker B: Yeah, absolutely.
In term of landscape and future and how those policies will evolve over time, do you see any potential innovation in term of technology that could come from those changes? I mean, how does that affect?
[00:34:30] Speaker C: So I think there's a number of exciting things that we're seeing in the technology realm. I don't think you'll be able to out AI Google, so I don't think you'll be able to, no matter how great the vendor is, I don't think they'll be able to find an incredible machine. They'll be able to send emails, they'll never get marked to spend because I mean, Google will always have a bigger budget and better AI. But what we're starting to see things are things to support the rep. So the rep becomes much more supported not only by their, of course their manager can coach them for two, 3 hours every month, maybe twice a month, but they can't be there every day. So there's different tools like AI. You introduced me to Salespath. There's a number of tools like Salespath which give you a lot of the objections. So you're very confident if you got a prospect, you're not fumbling to address this objection, not fumbling to address that objection. All the information is there at your fingertips and some of them, like Salespath and others are adding AI. So in real time you can almost have a coaching manager right there with you. So we're starting to see a lot of those things with emails. We can go ahead. Obviously, Mark, the emails are most likely going to be marked as spam and try and take those out. But I think that's more of a defensive way than a offensive way. I think the offensive is to do more telephony and to have a lot of these AI tools are coming in. And like I said, email, I don't think email will go away. I think there'll be just as much volume of email as before. It just may not be the first touch point or the first five touch points with 10,000 similar emails like you said same subjects and so on. I do think that, for example, some of those tools we're seeing, they can summarize the phone conversation I had with you, and you can take that and put it directly into an email saying, hey, here's the summary of the conversation and I'll follow up with you whenever you're ready next week or whatever we said in the phone call. So linking everything together based on touch points and feedback, interacting with the prospect, the prospect is part of the process. And a lot of times we ignore that. A lot of times we say, okay, we reach out to the prospect, it's time to do email number two. Let me send email number two. Oh, it's time to do phone number five. But sometimes I'm on vacation.
There's no point doing a lot of those things if they're not, as you called, not personal. But what did you call relevant? They got to be relevant to that prospect.
[00:37:07] Speaker B: I agree with you. And there is lots of AI tools that can also give you context to be a little bit more relevant with the account. So even from a data perspective and things like that, so we really have the tools. All in all, I think it's a step through for the prospect. It's going to be better for the prospect. I think the companies who are using the phone will be more successful. Lots of companies using emails are probably extremely concerned about what will happen to them and they probably will move to LinkedIn. LinkedIn is already a bit overcrowded for my liking. I don't even follow my dms anymore because I've got so many people trying to sell me ux development, recruitment and things like that actually don't need, but they just think that I've got a need about it for some reason that it's difficult to find a good message through the bat. So I just don't accept the request of people I don't know anymore. So I think it's good. In a way.
I like your approach about the offensive. I think it's good. And I think the people that can craft better messages, the people that will really spend time in studying the accounts, understanding the challenges and trying to make some hypothesis of pain points to their prospect would probably thrive while the other one won't be able to reach out and they will have their domain block. So it's going to be an interesting few months from February and we should definitely watch out. But in the meantime, I just wanted to thank you so much for your time and for your input.
[00:38:32] Speaker C: Thank you, Rene. I enjoyed it.
[00:38:36] Speaker B: I want to take away from it. And if anyone wants to get in touch with you to discuss about frontspin and what you do as a technology dialer and support companies like operatics memory brew to be successful, what's the best way to get hold of you?
[00:38:49] Speaker C: Mansour so for me, you can go on ww dot frontspin.com and see what we have to offer, and then you can reach out to me directly. I'll give you my email, and let's see how many get marked as spam.
[email protected] so my first
[email protected], feel free to reach me that way. And if you're smart enough to figure out what my cell phone number, I'll pick up the phone. I usually pick up the phone 90% of the time.
[00:39:16] Speaker B: Yeah. Are you in zoom? Are you in cognizant?
[00:39:20] Speaker C: I'll let you guys find out.
[00:39:23] Speaker B: All right. Thank you so much once again for your time.
[00:39:25] Speaker C: Pleasure.
[00:39:28] Speaker A: You've been listening to b two b revenue acceleration. To ensure that you never miss an episode, subscribe to the show in your favor. Favorite podcast player. Thank you so much for listening. Until next time.
