Episode Transcript
[00:00:01] 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 Kathryna Hoch, and I'm here today with Alex Ollie. He's the co founder and CRO at Reachcast. How are you doing today, Alex?
[00:00:22] Speaker C: I am very well, thank you, Kat. It's been a busy week, but I got to see you at an event this week, which was a pleasure. And now we're talking again. Yeah, pretty pleased about that.
[00:00:31] Speaker B: Yeah, sounds fun. And Alex, you were telling me when we met that it was the first time that you were on a podcast. Three, four years ago when you came on the b two b acceleration. And here we go. We introduced you to the world of podcast, and now you are our first guest back to our podcast. So that's really exciting to have you back.
[00:00:49] Speaker C: So I'm the first person you ever brought back on?
[00:00:53] Speaker B: Yeah, exactly.
[00:00:54] Speaker C: Either, Kat, that's because I did something really badly and you want to make up for it, or you think I'm worth having on again. So I hope that it's the latter one. But thank you for coming back. Yeah, I remember doing that episode, and I was terrified. I was like, I've never been on a podcast. How does this work? So, thank you for introducing me to the world of podcasting.
[00:01:13] Speaker B: There we go. And now you're a pro, almost like a digital celebrity, you know?
[00:01:17] Speaker C: Hey, let's see, let's see.
[00:01:20] Speaker B: Nice one. So, Alex, obviously you guys have recently been through a change of strategy, and you move into an all bound motion, which we know it's not that easy to execute. And it sounds great on paper. And lots of people, when we talk about it, they're like, oh, yeah, I don't really know how to do it. And how does it actually work? So, obviously, today we're going to be talking a little bit about the ins and outs of setting up an Obama motion. But before we get started, can you just introduce yourself to our audience and tell us a bit more about reachtest?
[00:01:53] Speaker C: Sure. I've got this funny role where I'm both a CRO and a founder of a business. So I been in sales mainly in SaaS for coming up to about 1415 years. Now is when I got my first sales job. So I run everything, partnership, sales, marketing, account management, all under the umbrella here at Reachdesk. I'm obsessed with go to market. I actually was a lawyer for a short period of time and decided it wasn't for me. But as a business.
I'm british, but we're actually a US headquartered company.
What we do is we help companies connect with hard to reach customers and prospects. We do that by delivering moments that matter at every stage of the buyer journey, using direct mail and gifting. And we actually call it all band engagement. So yeah, that's who we are and that's me.
[00:02:38] Speaker B: Well, good stuff. I love your lawyer background and it does sound like sales is much more exciting, isn't it?
[00:02:46] Speaker C: Oh, different world. It's the world I live for now.
[00:02:49] Speaker B: There we go. Good stuff. Well, before we dive into all bound, maybe let's just talk about definitions. So what is allbound and how does it actually differ from traditional demand and energy?
[00:03:02] Speaker C: That is a very good question. Let's start with allbound is then. So the way I look at it is all bound's really about generating and capturing demand, which is the same as demand Gen. Demand Gen. You generate it. You run campaigns that allow you to capture the demand. I said the distinction for me is there is an intense focus on revenue and not like creating pipeline, it's generating close one revenue. So it's similar to an account based model. So with Orban, you take this holistic approach across the full lifecycle, includes all teams, it's sales, marketing, partnerships with BDRs, you include executives. All is one motion and it's agnostic in terms of the channel source. What this means is it doesn't actually matter who sources an opportunity.
We've fought this battle for many, many years about is it marketing source? Is it sales source? Where did this come from? It's all about how are you focusing on the right customers to acquire them? Not first and foremost, but that's the first job to do, but focusing on the customers that you're going to retain and grow. So it's kind of like ABM on steroids, but for the entire go to market motion. So think of it as like a way where only one team wins. If you hit your revenue goals, know your pipeline goals, your revenue goals, and how do you align all those teams with a channel agnostic approach that has a holistic view on revenue and revenue.
[00:04:25] Speaker B: Gotcha. Does it cause any friction between the teams? Because, you know, there is always that, like, oh, that was an inbound or that was an outbound and who's going to get credit for it? You know, who's going to get paid commission on it? How do you deal with these things? Did you have any friction internally with the team, or was it quite easy to adopt it?
[00:04:45] Speaker C: It removes the friction. That's the beauty of it. The way I think about it, and I'm sure people have their own definitions, the way I think about it is people are compensated on revenue. So if you are generating a revenue, you're winning. So, candidly, our marketing team has the same goal. Revenue goal. Close on revenue goal is our sales team.
Okay, so they don't care about mqls. They do. We care about how many meetings we're booking. Where is it coming from? Qualified pipeline. But those are more like KPI's first. So if the entire team, partnerships, marketing, sales, bdRs, all of them actually share the same goal, and so it removes the friction. So actually what it fosters is collaboration so that you can work together to get your revenue roles so the friction no longer exists.
[00:05:30] Speaker B: Okay, interesting. So does it not create any competition around, like, who should get paid the commission on? I mean, you said everybody does get paid on it, but sales teams, obviously are very used to getting the credit for closing the deals. And do they not feel bad about having to share their commission with the BDR or marketing team? Or is that just a new culture that everybody got used to and it.
[00:05:55] Speaker C: Works well, yeah, it is a new culture. So let me tell you what I was used to ten years ago. Ten years ago, it was really about, what's marketing doing to generate leads? And I remember a time where our marketing team, they were like 120% to their target, so they were all celebrating, saying, we're absolutely crushing it. The sales team were at like 60%. There was a massive imbalance. Hang on, how is that team celebrating that goal? But the end goal, we're running a business here, is totally off. But imagine if both teams were both 100% and they're both celebrating each other's success. Isn't that a better world for everyone? And so I redesigned it so that that could be real. Now, where it causes friction is when neither of you are winning. And that's where you can ask each other questions. Now, the idea is you create a culture where there's no finger pointing. It's not like, oh, this is marketing's fault, this is sales fault. What I do know is if you remove the barriers, the things that we can gamify and go to market, like, how do we get more email addresses, for example? Some of you can gamify. I could go and find lots and lots of leads today for everyone to do in the old format. But when you remove those barriers and you remove the friction for the buyer. The idea is that you're working together to help people buy. And so it becomes this team sport where when marketing and sales are both winning at the same time, everyone's crushing it, everyone's happy to, and it doesn't matter who's getting paid, what percentage of commission. You're all getting paid towards the same number. And so all frictional biases or competition immediately gets removed and just works way better.
[00:07:25] Speaker B: And how did you get to that idea of trying to implement an overall notion? Because obviously you guys probably done it the traditional way. What kind of motivated you to change?
[00:07:36] Speaker C: Oh, that's a very good question. I think the biggest thing that motivated me to want to change this, I think it ties back to how buyers buy. I saw go to market was fundamentally broken, and different teams were doing their own things in silos. And actually, I remember speaking to people, I was like, what was your experience of buying from us? And they were like, yeah, we kind of felt like you were gating all your content. So I didn't read it. So I wasn't aware of those differences or the things that make you unique or the content that you had. So I was like, what would happen if we removed it? We'd be way happier. So the marketing team, they were like, well, then how are we going to hit our goals? So I had to learn. It was a stage process. Everything we had to do, I had to learn. I'd love to say I sat down one night, did a Jerry Maguire, just wrote a thesis, and then turned it all around.
This took years of learnings from the old way to the new way and testing things and iterating on things. And I'm not pretending that we've completed the puzzle by any means, we're still learning. But I think the thing that really motivated me was one like, if you can align your teams that are happy and work together collaboratively, you're probably going to create a much better buyer experience for your buyers. That's the first thing. The second thing is if you can just align teams, you will move way faster and execute. It's far easier, rather than being political about things, trying to point fingers, trying to get credit when it's not due. And so just removing all of that fosters a way better collaboration. And we actually had our commercial kickoff this week, and I didn't even instruct the team to do this. They were all talking about how their all bound approach is going to overlap, how BDRs are working with partners and AE's and marketing and customer success. As one team to be able to drive forward towards their revenue goals. And that's when you know you're on the right track.
[00:09:25] Speaker B: Yeah. Do you still align with the astrology or how is the distribution of leads?
[00:09:31] Speaker C: Yeah, so we create pods and it's different based on enterprise and mid market.
The reason behind podding is you're aligning BDRs and AE's in smaller environments where there's less communication. And I think people get this wrong, I certainly used to. The best part about podding AE's and BDRs together, we have a very account based approach is that you can co prospect. And there's a lot of evidence to show that if you're going after accounts top down, bottom up, typically within our enterprise segment, for example, the AE will prospect senior decision makers within the account, the BDR will go after less senior. So manage eleven and above and you're multi threading from the get go. And so actually your ability to penetrate an account as you book a meeting and then create it into an opportunity is going to be far higher because you're going after a much wider Persona base and decision making unit from the get go. But also you're selecting those accounts together. You're looking into the reasons why you should be going after them. You have that consistent messaging that goes forward with that and you should be going after therefore fewer accounts, rather than just trying to do as many dials as possible with no context. So that's the benefit I see from podding, is that co prospecting motion. Cool.
[00:10:40] Speaker B: Interesting.
And obviously attribution is a big one, right? And I guess you kind of remove a little bit the need for attribution when you go for an outbar motion, especially if you have teams that are very in synergy. Right. But you still kind of promote. And putting myself into my marketing shoes here, I still need to know where the leads are coming from. Right. Or what are the channels or sources that are working best. So do you use channels and sources as a way to just understand what's working rather than calculating ROI on them? Or how do you go about that more? From our perspective?
[00:11:16] Speaker C: We could talk about this for hours.
[00:11:19] Speaker B: Let's go there.
[00:11:21] Speaker C: Let's not do that. The simple answer is, my opinion is attribution should not be about credit. Yeah, I believe this is. I've done a lot of research on this and I've interviewed old people. 90% of go to market teams use attribution models so they can gain credit for their work, so they can say, we did our job and we want credit for that. And I don't believe that's right. I believe attribution should be about understanding what's working and what's not working, so that you can optimize, so you can redistribute your funds and your resources, so that you can double down on what is working and then remove what's not. And that's all attribution should be. So, ideally, and this is the bit that we're really starting to work on even more ideally, you have a multi touch attribution model, which has multiple channel sources, things you can measure, including like digital, but also like self reported attribution. Things that don't exist within systems that you can actually start to enhance now and enrich. That helps you understand what's working, what's not working, so that you can cut the bad stuff out and double down on the good stuff or know what you need to optimize. And that's it. So no one's arguing about, well, we did all this, and therefore we want to be attributed and credited for that, because again, it comes back to revenue. Did we hit our goals? And if we did, what were the pathways that led to us to hit our goals? How do we do more of that? How do we do less of that? Is that a good way to optimize? That's what I think attribution is really about.
[00:12:45] Speaker B: Yeah, I agree. And I guess the fact that you don't need to give people credit, you are working as a team, I think, definitely removes that friction. I'm more thinking along the lines of calculating ROI on an event or on a certain technology that you spend money on, or a new channel that you're trialing. So you kind of need to understand that you're getting ROI from that. But then I guess you can't get fully rid of an attribution model. I think you can. You can maybe soften it and go a bit more, maybe less granular. And obviously, if you think about buyer journeys, they are never linear, right? You often, if you take a last touch attribution model where like the BDR converted that meeting, they're pointed at the video. But then all of the work that marketing did, first of creating content, social media, going to events, getting the brand out there, you know, this obviously counted as well. So I guess attribution is never an easy conversation, isn't it? Because sometimes you just try to find formulas to justify what you're doing. But that formula doesn't always tell you the truth.
[00:13:51] Speaker C: It won't. Exactly, you know, we unpacked a deal. We do this by looking at what were all the touch points that we could see and the ones that we couldn't see and actually manually go through it. And in a typical, like, last touch, 90 day look back attribution model, you would have seen that that came from a BDR. But that's what happened, is we ran an event with a partner and someone saw, let's say, me speaking at the event, but then they saw three of our digital ads and they read these two pieces of content and they saw someone, one of our leaders, post something on LinkedIn. This is why that attribution, honestly, can become this, a bit of a fallacy that we're trying to chase. That's why I don't like the idea of it being about credit, because actually, even if you've got the best systems in the world, you don't know what really led to it. That's why I try and remove that as much as possible. You can't measure the Roi on everything. You just can't. It's literally impossible to measure the Roi on everything. So I don't put too much effort into that. What I try to do instead is I try to align teams and initiatives that we think based on historical data and also a bit of gut feel what we think is going to work and then go after it. And ultimately, if we hit our revenue goals, who cares?
[00:14:59] Speaker B: Yeah, fair point. Yeah, absolutely. Just coming back to the revenue roles and the commissions and stuff. So do you have monthly revenue targets or is it quarterly? Or like, how do people get paid a bonus or a commission or just by going to the nitty gritty here?
[00:15:17] Speaker C: Yeah, it depends on teams. For BDRs, we do a combination of monthly and quarterly. The rest of the team is done on a quarterly basis. Try and keep it simple. With bdRs, it's kind of easier to measure because they are predominantly focusing on booking meetings and those meetings qualifying. So you can measure that quite quickly on a monthly basis. We focus on quarterly.
[00:15:39] Speaker B: Gotcha. Okay, cool. And I mean, obviously, Alex, for you guys, moving to the overall motion probably wasn't relatively straightforward in the sense of you didn't need, like, buy in from the leadership team because you're the leadership team. Right. So you came up with the idea, but do you feel like other companies that are going through that and maybe they need to do a bit more educating upwards to their leaders? What sort of issues do you think people would run into? Or how can they try to get buy in from their leadership team and I guess the broader team as well. Right. Because you need to manage their up and down.
[00:16:13] Speaker C: Yeah, I mean, I'm semi jokingly laughing there because I am not the entire leadership team, obviously.
[00:16:20] Speaker B: Yeah, of course.
[00:16:21] Speaker C: This is something that was something that was top of mind for me and for some of the others in my team already. The truth of it is that I did have to make sure I had the right leaders on the team. I don't think I had this previously. So we had to keep those who believed in this motion. We also had to recruit new people who bought into this first. And just an example, I hired marketers who cared about revenue. I had each had to go and look for the people that wanted that, who wanted a comp plan, who wanted the same number of sales, who said, this makes sense, I'm bought into this. It is quite hard to change some people's mindsets. And some people did want to change. Most of them did. But honestly, you will find people in your organization that want to do it the way they've done it for the past 1015 years. That's really, really difficult to change. And if you're in that situation and you're trying to drive forward this new motion that you believe is going to be better for your business, this isn't for everyone, by the way, but for us, it made a lot of sense. Then you have to have the right people who, who bought into that. So that was painful. It was. I had to find the right people who bought into that. And I think that's the first piece of advice I give, is to get people who buy into that. Naturally, if you can't persuade them, then I did have to get them all working towards the same goal. And there is still that, like, oh, well, what if sales aren't very good? Marketing is looking at going, are they being performance managed? And that's where you have to give them confidence that you have the right leaders, making sure that sales team are getting coached, that they are doing their inputs. Because a lot, look, at this day and age, sales people are required to generate a lot more of their own pipeline. You actually, it has to work both ways. So you have to say, well, here are the things that we're doing in sales to make sure that we are holding people to a high standard. The bar is constantly being raised, they're being coached, but they're also doing what's expected from them. And when you've got that, you have a much healthier balance. If you're not doing those things and you're operating on the old school mindset of like, well, where are all my leads from marketing, which is what I was used to ten years ago, then it doesn't work. So you have to shift that mentality internally. And then when you've done that, that's when you. It's much easier to get people on the same goal, which is revenue. And so that is quite a painful exercise. It has to work both ways. You can't just say everyone's going to be tied to revenue, because that's very easy for sales to say. It puts marketing at disadvantage. You have to show them what sales are doing to make sure they're contributing towards that goal as well. And then you ask about the broader team. They do still need convincing. I'm talking what happened at the leadership level. First, you have to be very clear with the expectations and what's changed, what's different now, and how what they're going to do is going to contribute towards revenue themselves. And this is part of their job. Let's take self generation. So AE is building their own pipeline. I believe between the years of, like, 2020 and 2022, that kind of went out of the way. There's so much pipeline going around that salespeople, I think, perhaps had it too good and had a lot coming towards them. It's a really hard shift saying half of what you need to produce needs to come from you. And all I said was, if you're not willing to do that, go look for another job. You have to be very clear with the expectations and set the bar high. But no one left. They all got it. And you have to be quite ruthless with your approach.
[00:19:25] Speaker B: And to be fair, I guess most of the salespeople would have come from an outbound background. Right? Like, I think the majority of the kind of career path you see is an SDR that becomes naive. So, like, they're used to doing the outbound thing. Obviously, it's easier if you get it all on your lap.
[00:19:43] Speaker C: Oh, look, they're used to it. But here's the thing I've learned, the thing that once their day is done, once they're no longer an SDR, that's then done. They think that I don't have to prospect anymore and it's going to fall into my lab. Those days are gone. AES need to. And anyone who's listening, who is looking to take that path from going outbound to becoming a salesperson, get real. Like, control your own destiny. You've been trained, hopefully really well, to generate pipeline for others. The best AE's the ones that can consistently overachieve on their goals are the ones that control their own destiny. And they continue to prospect, they continue to network, they continue to build that themselves. And their mindset is, hey, look, if I get opportunities from bdrs, from inbounds, that's a bonus. They're the ones that are constantly doing 120% of their goal. And if you can embrace that early on in your career as an AE, you're going to be really well.
[00:20:39] Speaker B: And I guess in a way, building those connections and doing outbound yourself, you are kind of creating your own nurture pot. And we see our top performing east. They do outbound a lot of outbound, but then suddenly people start coming back to them, maybe a contact that they got in touch a year ago, they then come back to them a year later as an inbound to themselves. You know what I mean? So, like, you almost build your own inbound engine when you're doing outbound, because you get your name out there. You go through connections, relationships. So, yeah, that's the beauty of it, isn't it? Interesting, Alex, what did go wrong? Like, or maybe what would you have done different or any advice that you like? Oh, we learned this very quickly, and then it change that. If anybody is kind of on their journey to go over, what are the learnings? What could you share?
[00:21:32] Speaker C: Yeah, I think I mentioned one, which is a critical one, is having the right people who buy into it early on and who have shared the same vision. Without that, it's really hard because you don't know what happens behind the scenes. I'm not saying this necessarily happened here, but I know it's happened to other companies who I've helped try and do this. And they're like, you know, everyone's nodding their head in the room saying, yes, it's here, we're going to do this. And then in the background, they're complaining about how sales isn't doing this, that and the other. And so you have to foster an environment. Well, firstly, get the right people. Foster an environment where people are able to speak freely about what they don't like, what they dislike, what they disagree with, so that you can iterate on that fast. That's the first thing. It's a big change for many people. Having a revenue goal, certainly a revenue goal on an account plan for a marketer is quite a big departure from the old ways. And so you need people to be honest about that and how they feel about it, and you need to get them on side. The attribution piece was something I underestimated big time. We tried to, like, over engineer that and like, build this sort of custom attribution. Actually, we spend less time worrying about attribution now because we were just trying to dig into it in the old way. And actually, I'm writing something at the moment which is going to help businesses to be able to build that in a simple fashion, so that, so that they can create a really simple matrix to be able to measure what's working, what's not working, and how you get towards that revenue goal. That was really difficult. We had, we had twelve months of going, should we do it this way? Should we do it that way? How do we measure this? And we kept changing it, confuse people and really burnt them out. So I think keep that super, super simple and then just really reduce the level of communication that you need. And the way I did that is, I'm sure you're familiar with the winning by design bowtie. Yeah, yeah.
You want to map all the initiatives and everything you're doing to the bowtie from like, start to finish. And so the way I look at it is like target awareness considerations, decision, purchase, then you've got on board, activate adoption growth and retention. That's the way I map it out. And you can create these columns in each and you can essentially model which teams should be doing what, where and when.
The thing I found helpful is you say to someone, you are responsible for this bit. You are the overseer of this part of the buyer journey, but you need to work with these other teams on these things specifically. So when it came to our go to market planning for marketing and sales partnerships, we could plan according to the buyer journey. We could put the initiatives and the teams as to where they should be focused and then the efforts and the resources and expenditure into each bucket. So you've essentially got this bowtie framework, which I didn't have at the beginning. I was like, how am I going to get people to think about the full life cycle? How am I going to get them to know where their resources should be applied, where we should be spending our money and our time? That was really, really helpful just to map out the buyer journey, attach it to like, stages, the teams and the overlap that you can create and then resources and spend. That's how we plan. Now. That was really, really helpful that I got there in the end.
And it's a really good visual tool to be able to say, all right, guys, well, it looks like we're spending way more time trying to generate more what you might deem top of funnel or early stage stuff. But let's not forget about what's going on over here. Let's readjust. We need to be spending more of our time here and it allows you to really navigate things quite easily.
[00:24:41] Speaker B: I love them. It's very easy for sales, marketing and videos just to care about top of funnel. Right. And like we need more time to learn, we need to be more opportunities. And I guess for the company I get, you know, it kind of, I wouldn't say it doesn't matter where the money is coming from, but like you need to look at the clients in a holistic way. You can't just think of two different things, you know, the acquisition and the retention. So I guess that kind of removes a little bit of that sort of culture thinking that marketing is responsible for this and then the bds for this. And again it kind of comes back to those pods and tribes and everybody working towards the same objective. So I guess it also removes that friction of thinking that we are just responsible for this bit, you know? So I guess it brings more sustainability to the business. What did you see in terms of measures, metrics, results? Did you guys see a growing pipeline in sales or did you see your conversion rates going up? Or how did you measure if that shift was effective and where were the inflection points? Like what were the business where influenced the most?
[00:25:48] Speaker C: Yeah. So the thing we've been aiming for is how do we either sustain or lower the level of pipeline that we have on an ongoing basis to increase our revenue and what we saw conversion. Yeah, I think most of it, it's about. It's about conversion, right. So the three things you tend to measure and like go to market is like velocity, volume and conversion velocity. How fast is something moving from one stage to the next? Conversion is obviously one stage to next too. And then volume, like how's that fluctuating over time? What we saw was our pipeline was going down, we were focusing on the right accounts, but conversion was increasing drastically. And in the space of six months from really going hard at this, our win rates just doubled. They literally doubled.
[00:26:31] Speaker B: Amazing, right?
[00:26:32] Speaker C: So three quarters in a row, I think we grew 37% in six months. Like net new revenue, just as an example. 37%, I believe it was in six months with less pipeline and a smaller team and less spend.
[00:26:47] Speaker B: Interesting. And that probably leads me to the next question, which is, I guess you were saying you were a bit more granular and specific around the counts you were going into. So obviously you had less pipeline but more wins. Did you use any sort of technology or how did you go about selecting the accounts you wanted to get into so that you could really optimize that pipeline conversion?
[00:27:10] Speaker C: We did. So we're quite a big 6th sense user, so looking to use 6th sense to help us understand which customers are like good fit, that they have models that we're still tweaking that model. It's an ongoing thing. You don't need a platform like that to really optimize. At the beginning we found it helpful for us who try and do it at a decent scale, but you don't need a lot of technology to make this work. It's like everything. You just need really good process and workloads, that's it. And then you can put the technology on after. And that was a big learning for me as well. To give you an example, I think regardless of what industry you are or what motion you've got, a really simple exercise you can do is you can just look through your existing customer base. Let's say take a twelve month look back, who's adopting your product the most, who's retaining at the highest rate. I look at in segments, so enterprise, mid market commercial for us. And so we look at adoption retention, net dollar retention, so growth. Who's expanding with you? And you're looking for the top 20%. That isn't your manual exercise. I actually built a GPT in chat GPT, where you can put a spreadsheet in it and it tells you the answers quickly.
[00:28:12] Speaker B: There we go.
[00:28:14] Speaker C: But look at your customer's files, because revenue and go to market isn't about acquisition. I used to think it's all about sales and bringing in new business. But if those guys aren't using your product, they're not retaining, they're not growing, they're not healthy, then there's not really much point. And this is quite a difficult thing because I actually said to our team, a lot of our revenue is coming from here, but these are really bad customers for us, so we're going to eliminate them. And they were like, what? That's like, these are bad fit customers for us. So we're going to focus here. Instead. We're going to move more into these verticals, into companies that look like this, and then we're going to apply that to our sales funnel as well. Do those match the ones that move through our sales cycle the fastest, at the optimum close rate and the optimum deal size. And when you cross reference those two, you don't need technology to tell you that you can just say, here's what we're going to go after. It's account based marketing. At the end of the day, you're just using very simple logic to be able to guide you so that you're being efficient and effective with your approach to going after your best fit customers. And that's how you optimize your win rates, your velocity, your deal sizes. It's not by spending more, it's not by adding more headcount. It's actually better to have a smaller, leaner team that believe they can win and going after these best fit customers at all times.
[00:29:25] Speaker B: And I guess you know what? Kind of stood out here for me as well. You said you have less pipeline now, but you have more conversions, like better deals. Sometimes salespeople, when they have the pressure to deliver a certain pipeline number, they often put something in pipeline just to make the number for the week or the month. Right. And maybe it wasn't that qualified or maybe there wasn't that much intent, but they kind of need to get that pipeline in because that's what their target is saying. So I guess also when people just work together towards that same objective and everybody as a team, like working around the revenue target, I guess that removes a bit of the pressure from the sales team to just produce pipeline for the sake of pipeline. You know, they'll probably be more brutal around qualifying clients out or understanding that, yeah, maybe this isn't going to be a sticky client, you know? So I guess you just drive all of the right behaviors there as well, right?
[00:30:21] Speaker C: 100%. It is difficult, right. Because let's take our bdrs, for example. They do have a goal to hit a certain amount of opportunities. But if we're saying, hang on a second, this isn't the right custom for us, they can feel disappointed. But by saying, remember, you're incentivized on revenue, too, that's the ultimate goal. And we need to get to this certain win rate, and we need to get to these customers who are best fit customers, develop that culture over time. It doesn't happen overnight. So, yeah, it can become difficult. It can, particularly when people are under pressure, but you have to stick true to it. You have to. Otherwise you're just going to go backwards consistently. And once you break one rule, the rest of them can be broken very quickly. But that's why they're incentivized on that, too.
[00:30:59] Speaker B: That's cool and very random question, but I saw yesterday that your head of sales development was moved into a marketing director role, which is curious. I'd love to hear if that had anything to do with that Obama motion and you guys becoming more one team.
[00:31:16] Speaker C: Yeah, of course. I mean, look, Ben Smith is the person you're referring to. He's been an absolute superstar. He's been with me for many years, and this is actually always a pathway that he wanted to take. Remember, like six months in saying he started as a BDR and I, he said, I don't want to go down the sales route. Actually. I don't really want to be in a or go down that route. I think I want to be a marketing leader one day. I was like, all right, well, let's get you on that path. And this week it came true for him. But he's been one of those key players that has fostered this all bound mindset, even when it's become difficult. And to your point, about, like, this didn't qualify. And it's his ability to his goal as a business development director and his team. But ultimately, he's fostering that mindset of ball bounden through and through, and he's now taking that leap forward into focusing on marketing and marketing as his priority.
[00:32:07] Speaker B: Cool. I love that. I think a lot of the very good marketers are people that came from sales, because I think the earlier we as marketers understand that we need to work together. We are there to serve sales. We are there to make sales easier, the better it will flow. Right. The better line will be there. So that's a really cool success story. Sorry. Nice. Alex, we are running out of time here. I mean, we could just talk forever.
[00:32:30] Speaker C: Oh, no.
[00:32:33] Speaker B: But I love what you shared. I think it's very tangible and very easy to digest and understand. So I appreciate you really kind of showing us the truth of what's been going on and how you guys build your outbound motion. But if anybody has any questions and wants to connect directly with you, what's the best way to get in touch?
[00:32:51] Speaker C: LinkedIn. I'd say that's where I spend a lot of my time, maybe too much. So just find me on LinkedIn. If you send me a personalized invite note, I'll always accept and you can chat there. But if you want to find out about reachdesk, just go to reachdesk.com, and that's where the business is. But if you want to ask me questions, get me on LinkedIn.
[00:33:09] Speaker B: Nice. Awesome. Well, thank you so much, Alex. Always great to chat to you.
Here we go. Maybe we'll have to have you back again in a few years on our podcast.
[00:33:18] Speaker C: For four year anniversary. Let's make it first. I'll see you in four years on this podcast.
[00:33:25] Speaker B: Awesome. Sounds good. Well, thank you so much for your time once again, thanks for having me.
[00:33:30] 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 favorite podcast player. Thank you so much for listening. Until next time.
