In this episode, we dive deep into the world of signal-based selling and how it’s revolutionizing the sales landscape. Join us as we discuss the evolution of signal-based selling, the top signals you should be tracking, and how AI and automation are transforming the way we approach sales and marketing.
Key Topics Covered:
- The evolution of signal-based selling: From manual tracking to AI and automation.
- The top signals that 80% of people should be measuring but aren’t.
- How companies like Common Room, Pocus, ZoomInfo, and Apollo are leading the way in signal-based platforms.
- The future of sales: Will AI and automation reduce the need for SDRs?- Real-world examples of how companies are using signals to drive sales.
- The importance of creativity and technical skills in modern sales roles.
📢 Stay Connected with Us:
Don't forget to subscribe for more inspiring interviews and startup stories.
- Follow me on X (Formerly Twitter): https://twitter.com/andymewborn
- Follow me on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/amewborn
- Follow me on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/andy.mewborn
📩 Feedback & Contact:
We value your feedback and questions! Leave us a comment below or reach out at: andy@distribute.so
🤝 Production Partner: https://bio.link/ytorbit
🎙️ About the Channel:
Our channel is dedicated to uncovering the stories of entrepreneurs who are changing the game. From tech innovators to wellness pioneers, we bring you the insights and behind-the-scenes looks at the journeys of today's top founders.
Andy:
You go on your phone and within three app, within three click, even one click in one app, like perplexity. I have the world's knowledge in one click, dude. It's wild. Everything that has ever been written in the history of humankind. And now I sound like this crazy dude, but like literally within one search, you could have the knowledge of anything you want that we know about. Can you hear me?
Brendan: Yeah, I can hear you. Can you hear me okay?
Andy: Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, okay, cool. Yeah, man, so let's talk signals today. I see signal this, signal that. I'm seeing signals everywhere, Brendan. And I'm like, dude, if everything's in signal, then is nothing a signal? Like, what's going on here? Because like, what do we measure these days? I see these platforms, I see all this stuff. So I'm like, and you know me, I'm a nerd. I like to get into this stuff. So I'm trying to figure out, And I think what people would want to figure out is like, what are the top things? This is a question I want people to answer today is of all the different signals you could measure. What are the top signals that 80% of people should be measuring that they're not currently measuring? I think that is the question that we want to get to today. Um, and that at the end of this, people will have that answer, right? I think that would be, that would be good. Um, you obviously, so you, you had a background of building like a signal platform previously, right? Where you were taking all these signals. Um, and so you're, you're, you're kind of the guy around this area, which is why I wanted to bring you on, man.
Brendan: According to perplexity, I invented the term signal based selling. So that's my claim to fame.
Andy: You're getting your AI, what are they calling now? AI SEO game down or whatever.
Brendan: Exactly. I do think I came up with that term, but unfortunately I didn't make any money off of it. I wish I had, but like a lot of people talk about it now, which is cool.
Andy: Dude, well, yeah, you need to trademark it or something. I should have. I should have at least bought the domain.
Brendan: I remember when I first talked about it, the domain was available. I don't know who owns it now, but I should have at least bought the domain. I don't know how to, yeah, I don't know if you could trademark it. Anyway, I have a lot of thoughts on this. So can I just jump into my response to it?
Andy: Dude, just jump, let's dive in the deep end.
Brendan: So let me try to frame this in a way that I haven't before. But as you were saying this, I think there's basically three phases to, let's call it signal-based selling. Phase one was like the last five to 10 years. The best sellers were already doing signal-based selling. They were seeing who was engaging with their emails. They were looking up who did the fundraise and they would reach out. Or if a VP of sales went to a new company, they were kind of doing this stuff manually. The best reps are already doing this. So a lot of people push back and they're like, oh, why do we need a new name for this thing? Isn't this like what the best reps have been doing? Yes, first of all, yes, they have. What's different now is we can actually collect this data. There's a lot more of this data that exists on the web, and we can kind of operationalize it with AI and automation. That's where we're at today. Now, so this is phase two. Now there's companies like Common Room, Pocus, and even ZoomInfo and Apollo. Koala, et cetera. There's a bunch of these companies that are like kind of signal-based platforms or whatever you want to call them. They're helping you capture signals and use those signals, operationalize those signals, whether that's an elite score or automated workflows. My prediction is, and I think that's good. I think that's the right way. That's the best way to go to market today. Sales and marketing is to use signals. It's basically just intent signals. It's who should you reach out to that are most likely to have a sales conversation with you this week. And in phase two, I think that all of these signals will quickly become commoditized. They'll be baked into these platforms that like, you know, early adopters are starting to adopt these platforms, but I think it's going to follow like a similar trajectory as outreach and sales loft 10 years ago, where the early adopters had the alpha. There was an advantage now it's table stakes and there's kind of no alpha and using a sequencer. Maybe it's like, I don't know that you want to throw away a sequencer, but there's not as much alpha anymore. Okay. Now. And that's still probably a year or two out. So I think there's still links. You should definitely still be doing kind of signal-based selling if you're not already. I'm going to talk about phase three in a second. I think that's the most interesting place. But the last thing I'll say about where we're at in this current moment is, to your question, what signals should you be tracking? Um, that you're not, that you're not there. So there's 500 signals that you can track or something.
Andy: I see why. Okay. Let me tell you why I'm asking this because I always see you post like images of like track these signals. And I'm like, Brendan. That's a hundred different things, dude. Like you just like, you lost me, bro. You lost me.
Brendan: Yeah. I put out a guide that was a curated guide of five resources of signals to track. I think each of them had, you know, a hundred plus signals. So like literally there's hundreds of signals you can track. Should you track all of those? Definitely not. Definitely not. But I think people should skim through that list. And if you know your business, if you're a founder or if you're a head of marketing or sales or SDR, or a rep for that matter, when you look at a list of, let's say a hundred signals, there's probably going to be some mental model that like in your subconscious, it's going to bubble up and you're going to be like, Ah, that one is something I do today manually. I think I can automate that. Or, ah, that's an interesting signal. Maybe I should be tracking that. And we can talk about those specific signals. Before we go there, because I think this is kind of related, I think this third kind of phase of signal day selling is This is my advice when people ask me, what signals should I track? The best signals, the things that convert the highest are signals that aren't on this list. These are not generalized signals. These are things that are really specific to your business. I'm consulting right now. I can't go into a consulting client and be like, this is the signal you should track. I don't know their business well enough. And I'm decent at B2B, SaaS, go-to-market. I don't know a particular business to the degree that you need to, to be able to build a signal that's really effective. So as an example, because I think examples are super helpful here. By the way, before I give you a couple of quick examples, this took me a while to get actually, and I will be honest. AI, having little agents. I work with a guy named Andreas Wernke, who's amazing. He builds little agents inside of a clay table that are scraping for very specific things for clients. There wasn't a single aha moment for me. It was over a couple of months of these little micro aha moments. But now that I'm on the other side, it's like, I can't unsee this. I can't unsee what you can do with AI to go find really, really specific signals, because this just technically was not possible three years ago.
Andy: Yeah. Or it took a lot of like engineering effort and work to do it. Right. Like to go and do this stuff.
Brendan: Yeah. Yeah, exactly. And it probably, or like, or you would hire, you know, a virtual assistant or something to go manually find some of this data. Um, and a lot of the times it was like not really worth the lift, but now with these tools, you can build these things once and then they just. Every day, every night monitor, they're scanning and they're pulling it back. And it's low frequency events, but high converting events.
Andy: Oh, yeah, low. Interesting. So it's like less is more, almost situation where, or it's like, yeah, low, which is, which is great, actually, right? Because it tells people where to focus versus having
Brendan: And it gets away from this crazy spray and pray warming of domains and spinning mailboxes and like all this chaos. I think it kind of works right now. I don't think that's going to be the game in two years. Like I just don't think that's sustainable. So how do you send 90% fewer emails and get 10 times the results?
Andy: Which is honestly, better. Yeah, it's better for everybody. Yeah, that's, that's amazing. And one thing I noticed, actually, because right now, like, what's the main signal, like, the new hot signal right now is like website visitors and identifying actual people that hit your website, right? Which is great. Don't get me wrong. It works for me. It's amazing. We obviously know people that run companies that do that. A few actually. So that's great. But you're right at the same time. A lot of those people aren't ICP so they can be a distraction too. Right. And sometimes I don't even know how, like I had like a. A police officer come on my site yesterday. Right. And I'm like, how in the hell, like, am I getting arrested? You know, like what's going on here? Why is this guy on my site? Like, what did I pay my taxes last year? Yeah, I did. Okay. Great. You know? Um, so yeah, man, that's the, you know, that, that's, what's interesting where it's like, it could just be a lot of noise too. I would love it to be more distinct.
Brendan: And I think that's where the platforms, by the way, I think the platforms are going to help a lot there where it's like, okay, you've got a website visitor, just have a basic filter that says, are they ICP? Do they have more than 20 for you? Do they have more than 20 salespeople? Are they a B2B SaaS company? Are they headquartered in the US? Have they raised at least a Series A? I don't know, whatever your criteria is, great. That takes away 90% of the noise. Now I've got 10%. So if a hundred people went to my website today, I don't care about 90 of them, but the 10, I really care about. So I think these platforms will do that. Again, I'm not saying you shouldn't be doing kind of signal based selling. You definitely should. I think if there's people on your website, especially on like high intent pages, for sure, you should know about that. You should probably just automate a message to them or have whatever, if it's not super high volume, have a Slack message to you. And then you can kind of manually go reach out, connect with them on LinkedIn, whatever. And that's kind of like the, I would call those like evergreen plays. These are plays that are just always running. Somebody, another example of that is somebody goes to your request demo page and doesn't actually go through and request a demo. You want an automated email to go to them. This is like, you know, if you go to like put a pair of Nike shoes in your cart and they abandoned that cart, you get an email with a 10% code or whatever the next day. You should have the same thing. That's an evergreen play. You know, if, whatever, like job changers. Like, of course you should be reaching out to past champions when they go to your company.
Andy: These are like the table stakes.
Brendan: Evergreen, table stakes.
Andy: Keep going, keep going, because I want to keep hearing these. Yeah. Yeah.
Brendan: So what are some other ones? I think technologies are really interesting. Actually, one of the signals, or I don't even know if I would call it a signal, although sometimes it is, is more like a filter. Um, is using job descriptions for interesting information. This is not good for every company, but certain companies it's really interesting for.
Andy: So like Sumbul does that. Sumbul is amazing. You got me on them.
Brendan: Yeah. Yeah. Sumbul is great. Sumbul is like one of the coolest bit of market tools I've seen in the last couple of years. Um, Top three for sure. Uh, and the size distributed, come on. You just distribute the list.
Andy: Obviously they're number one.
Brendan: Uh, and, uh, yeah, it's all, it's all is amazing. It's free to use. You can just sign up and start playing around. You'll get value in two minutes. Um, You can type in, you know, does somebody use Outreach? Does somebody use Sales Loft? Traditionally, like, BuiltWith doesn't have that data because they're scraping for a pixel. You know, if like, oh, whatever, Google Analytics is really good because they can programmatically get that as a technographic. Yeah. But if they're using Sales Loft, like, that's not going to show up. Every job description says we want proficiency in Salesforce and Salesforce and gone. It's like, okay, cool. That's the tech stack. So that's super helpful. You can also do keywords in the job description. They're starting to do like the guy, the guy that started Anthony founded Kaggle. So they're doing like just really smart machine learning stuff. I have no affiliation with him, by the way. So they're cool. I think that's a really interesting filter slash signal to go after. Another simple example would be hiring. So again, for your business, like you help companies train and ramp reps. So it's like if a company has three or more job recs open, that's probably a good time to go reach out to them. And your message is, saw you're hiring a handful of reps. We help ramp them. We help reduce ramp time by 30% or whatever. Again, let's say you have a list of 5,000 companies you can sell to, series A to series D in the US, B2B, SaaS, whatever. You have a list of 5,000 companies. What my goal is, is how do I find the 50 companies or even 50 people to reach out to this week that are most likely to take a sales conversation with me? I don't want to reach out to 5,000. I don't want to just reach out to a thousand every month for the next five months. I want to be intelligent about it and only reach out to 50 that are most likely to take a sales conversation. So if people are ramping reps and they're currently using Gong and sales loft, that's a really interesting person to go reach out to. And I'm using that list as my message. Um, so I think these, and that's only relevant for you and your business. And again, like. you can come up with more creative and thoughtful ideas than I can, you know your business better. But I think that's where, I think there's like real alpha there and staying power, where it's like the people that are the most creative and thoughtful that are going to run these experiments are the ones that are going to win over the next few years. And AI just superpowers this. It's incredible.
Andy: Now, let me ask you a question that I think everyone's thinking. Like, Two, I have two questions, like, or let's call them, I don't even wanna say objections, but this is what people, most people will think, right? Which is one, does all this just become a distraction? And I think you kind of talked about that, which is like, it can if you don't like drill into it enough, right? Like, so if you're just doing website visitors and then not building on top of that foundation, it could be a distraction, right? So you're kind of needing to automate underneath the signal as well, is what I'm hearing. And then the second thing is, is this only like mostly useful for PLG companies that get a crap ton of users and stuff? No, they have better first. Yeah.
Brendan: They have better first party intent signals because you have signed up data and usage data, which is really strong. This was when I was at zoom video, um, you know, it was like, uh, I was doing operations and enablement for the PDR team specifically. Uh, like basically building out kind of the playbook for the BDR org. There's a hundred BDRs there. And, you know, BDR rep might have like, uh, I don't know, a hundred accounts. Across three, three AEs. So it's like they have 300 accounts. They should figure out at a PLG company like zoom, which are the 15 this week that signed up for zoom and like, let's go reach out to those 15. That's like, obviously the highest intent signal there is. But once they reach out to those 15, they're not just going to twiddle their thumbs. They got to go outbound. And so then now they have a list of 285 companies to go after. They need to prioritize those. And how do you do that? Then you have to start looking at these third party signals, which is traditional outbound and has nothing to do with PLG.
Andy: Interesting. Okay. Interesting. Cause that's what I'm wondering. Cause when I see a lot of these PLG companies like really going ham at this, or when I see a company like I see, you know, or like characteristics of them going ham at it, it's typically like your figmas, your, your canvas, your this, but that's because they're getting like tens of thousands of signups a day. Right. And so I'm like that, you almost have to build something crazy. So I'll tell you, actually I was, I was at an event on last Tuesday or was it Thursday, whatever. with zoom info. And, you know, here in Austin didn't event zoom info. I don't know. Shoot. I should have told you about that event. I don't know if it's all good. Anyway. Yeah. Anyway. Oh, where are you? Yeah, I will. I got the invite. Like literally last second from Ben. So he texted me like the day before I was like, Hey, come this way. But shout out to Ben. But you know, there was an executive from figma there. And I asked him the same question because I was very curious. I'm like, shoot, what? Like, I'm sure they get a million signups. And I'm like, one, I want to know where their signups come from. Right. Insight one insight to how do they determine it was a sales leader. I don't want to say their name for obvious purposes. I don't know if this is, you know, classified or whatever or not. Um, but Um, there were sales leader. And then I asked like, Hey, uh, secondly, how do you like keep your ex folk focus on who to go after? Cause you're probably getting every logo to sign up every single day on the internet, like worldwide. Right. And then, so a couple of things insights that he, he, he gave me, which is actually amazing. First, he said, you want to know what the leading, uh, leading thing is for us to get new signups. And I go, what? He goes, comments, people commenting on like a big mobile and then brings people in. Nice. I'm like, no way. Okay, cool. So yeah, we're building that distribute. I put that up in priority, basically. Nice. Second thing. Yeah, a little good little flywheel, right? Second thing that, um, second thing that was like a big, uh, a big insight that he told me was, dude, they have like a whole data science team that goes and like, not only comes up with all these crazy signals, But like, like what they should be measuring, but then does like triggers that then tells the reps here and they get slack and they do it all through slack notifications, believe it or not to a rep makes sense. Cause that's where they live slack and email. And then they send the push to slack. And then in that slack, apparently they already have a initial email written based on what actions or signal that that was taken. And I was like, no way. And I mean, when he said we have a, like a lot of people involved, it sounded like it was more than like three, it was like 50, a hundred plus kind of thing. Right. Like a whole team just to manage all that. Right. Which is just like crazy, crazy, crazy. So that's my other thing. Like, are these single platforms, you know, how to, How do you integrate them in a way where maybe you don't need these massive teams in order to do these signals, right? And I'm guessing that's what they're trying to do.
Brendan: That's definitely what they're trying to do, right? That's what they're kind of in part when I was going to groundswell, that was, that was definitely the goal. We were starting with product usage as the first signal. And then the goal is always kind of to expand out to other signals over time, but the highest intent signal was PLG. And so we were going after basically 750 logos, 750 logos that have that were PLG companies that also had 10 or more sales reps. Um, And oftentimes, well, not oftentimes, every time I talk to a big company like Figma, like a growth stage company, they already had something in place. They already had a data science team that had built some sort of model that was pushing some sort of lead list to Tableau or Looker or into custom fields or an iframe into Salesforce or into Slack. And it was super custom for them. Uh, that there was some sort of like, you know, whatever regression analysis stuff that's, I'm not smart enough to do, uh, that the data science team had done to figure out like. What is the aha moment, uh, for a user and let's reverse engineer that when they hit that moment, let's push that in front of sailors. So let's give it some sort of score. I think that's right. Um, I think, I think it's hard to. Look, I just think data science doesn't know sales like sales know sales. And so I think that's always been my beef with lead scoring is like, you know, maybe you know how to build the right lead score, but like there's certain things that salespeople know intuitively that Those things are not being baked into a lead score. And there's not a close enough relationship between, from what I've seen data science and sales teams to get a really tight feedback loop. And, and from a product perspective, that's the other thing is like, okay, they get a Slack message to a rep. with a pre-generated email, if I don't send that email, is there a feedback loop to say, hey, that signal that you used, I skipped it because it's not actually relevant. Next time, send me less of those type of leads. There needs to be a productized feedback loop and actual machine learning happening in the background. So I think that's what these companies are kind of like the end state of these companies will be. You know, it basically just show up and you have a list of here are the 20 prospects I want to go after today based off of scanning hundreds of signals and then a prioritized list of people to go after with a pre-generated email. And then I can just crank through that in 20 minutes. You know, yeah, that was good send. Now I can call into them. I can multi-thread. I can touch, you know, go on LinkedIn. I can do like more human stuff, but we've never been good. Like I've never been good and I've managed a lot of SDRs and AEs. People are not great at manually scanning hundreds of things to find a single person out of that. It takes 20 minutes to do. And if you do it for a few weeks, you just realize this is a really brutal existence. You don't want to be doing that. But that's literally the definition of what an LLM is good at. is scanning hundreds of pieces of text and then finding the interesting things in there. However you want to define interesting.
Andy: Yeah. Well, okay. So the question I'm still having is like, it almost sounds like the best of the best are doing their own thing. Right? Like they're, they're building their own thing. So it makes me question this, these like these single platforms, right? Like maybe they're a good starting point and maybe I'm wrong, but that's what it, it makes me, you know, it's almost like the solution should be almost an SDK versus like a portal you sign into. Right. And more of something like an SDK where you can. it builds your own portal, but based on your own product signals, cause everyone has different product signals. So it almost feels like it's that versus something that where you like sign in and do like an OAuth connection to Salesforce or whatever the heck, right? It's almost something that's like putting a script or a tag in certain parts of your code. And we're getting super nerdy right now, but you know, I'm an engineer, so. like a scripted tag and pieces of your product that are interesting, that show a good signal. And then using that to basically create like a custom dashboard. So it's, it's less of like the one-to-many and the one-to-one, but using an SDK. That's what it sounds like the solution long-term could actually be.
Brendan: I think for the product usage side of things. Yeah. I mean, technically, I think that, you know, if you look at like a company like amplitude or, you know, whatever mix panel or, or segment, like, A lot of these companies functionally are doing that for product usage. Um, I think that would still miss out on like, you know, champion tracking the third party signal. So, um, even people like engaging with, uh, a marketing email, that's an interesting first party signal people on your website. Interesting. First party signal close lost deal. That's been nine months. And the reason they didn't move forward was just timing. That's an interesting first party signal. Um, I think again, it's like, You don't want to try to boil the ocean, but you want to think about, look at the list of a hundred signals and be like, okay, what are the five that are probably the highest impact? The other thing I'll say to your question of like, is it better to kind of roll your own in-house? I think probably the easiest distinction is like, if you're a really big company that has the resources like Figma and you can put a team of 10 data science people behind it. Yeah, probably right now. Like if you're a startup, just go use one of these kind of out of the off the shelf solutions. However, I do think that there will probably be a time where, and I think that time is probably coming pretty quickly, where it's like those signal-based platforms will be better than the internal solution.
Andy: Really? Well, it's trade-offs, right? Like it'll be the implementation cost and the management of the solution will outweigh you having to pay your own team, maybe for, you know, a 10% increase or whatever. Well, I guess it comes down to how much your deals are too. Like if, if hiring 10 data scientists and you know, that costs you a million bucks a year, but then they can come up with things that make you 20, right? Like, I guess that's the trade off, but you don't know until you actually get the data scientists and try it. Right. So.
Brendan: And if there's a low volume, by the way, it's not like there's going to be a crazy lift. If you have two people that visit your website a week, you don't need to probably track that and build some automation around it. It's too early. Sorry. But you don't have the right volume of signals where it makes sense. When I was at Groundswell, again, I would talk to people a lot, early stage founders, and we were trying to automate the process of signups, who's signing up, enriching that data on the person level, the company level, and then building automated workflows off the back of that. If a company said, yeah, we get five signups a day, it's like, you don't need to automate anything. Like you should personally be looking at all five of those and trying to have conversations with as many as possible.
Andy: Yeah.
Brendan: It's like this, you need to find product market fit and you need to go figure out how to take that from five a day to 50 a day. All right. Like you don't have a problem. We used to talk about the needle in the haystack problem. It's like, you don't need to figure out what are the best ones, you know, where's the needle in the haystack, the best leads that are signing up today. You just need a bigger haystack. That's your problem today. And so I think that's the same with signals is like, if you're a small company, you don't need to over architect some like crazy signal based kind of motion. You probably just need to like be going and doing more sales and marketing activities that would generate more signals for you. And then you can actually operationalize those.
Andy: Well, let me ask you this then, when do you think is like the, the, um, The best time, like, and there's probably no like magic bullet answer, right? But like, when, when should people start thinking about the signal based selling, let's say they're going zero to one, they're a startup, they're starting to get more traffic, right? Cause it all comes down to traffic besides the product. But also if you don't have a lot of traffic, you probably don't have a lot of people using your product. So it all kind of comes hand in hand. So when do you, when do you see people start to kind of think more about this stuff? Is it when pipelines like super drying up? Is it when, they're trying to get ahead of it. What are typically the characteristics of you, when people do it and when they should do it? And then start to look into this.
Brendan: Yeah, I've never thought about this question. It's a good question. When to do it? I don't know. I think some founder selling motions, Like you can kind of do a little of this manually or even automate some of it. Like you could spend an afternoon and automate a couple of these and it's worth it depending on your business. Like I'll give an example. If you're, I don't know, if you have a database of sales reps and that's what you sell, it's kind of like recruiting. If you're a one-man company, what you really want to know is when does a VP of sales open up a job rec for an AE? I want to know at certain companies. I want to know every time that happens, and I want to reach out and say, hey, I saw you just opened a job rec. We'd love to place somebody for you. We have a database of candidates for you. You could be a one person startup. It's probably worth spending an afternoon figuring out how do you do that? And how do I get a list every day or every week of the 50 VPs of sales that opened up a job rec last week? That's like a pretty high impact thing for you to do.
Andy: Yeah. On the flip side, really digging into the job stuff, which is interesting, but we'll get more. Yeah.
Brendan: Yeah. On the flip side, it's like, um, If you don't have a ton of traffic on your website, do you want to spend an afternoon figuring out some automated motion? Probably not. Put RBB on your website, get a Slack notification, call it good. You don't need to build any crazy, wacky automations, enrichment, filtering. just get some slack notifications that's cool when the volume starts to become overwhelming that you can't handle it then it's like okay i need a process to actually automate some of this cut down some of the noise etc so i think you sort of can feel it um But I don't know, it's pretty case by case. Definitely on the high end, if you have like a low ticket or a PLG product and you want high automation, it makes sense and probably pull forward when you start tracking signals. So it's like a C stage instead of series B. I don't know. Definitely when you start having reps and like you need them to prioritize which companies to go after, that's like another probably trigger point when you want to start doing it. I think it's like the most important question to answer in go-to-market is like, how do you prioritize which companies and people to go after and when? That's our job in go-to-market. And so single base selling is like a way to unlock that in an intelligent way. That's better than like, I'm just going to put a bunch of VPs of sales into a sequence and see what happens. Cause by the way, they're not gonna respond.
Andy: Yeah. And I mean like the North star is like, you have, you have it so dialed that every lead that your sellers reach out to is the right lead. Right? Like that, that's the North star. Then it begs the question. If you think about it like that, then the next question becomes, well, do we need as many salespeople? Right. And so don't get me wrong. I love salespeople. My product runs on salespeople. Yes. Like I'm not trying to get rid of salespeople or something crazy, but what I'm saying is then it kind of, The next problem there is, okay, well, how many salespeople do we need to do that? And then should we put more effort into not doing the initial reach and building pipeline, but now putting more reps against helping things convert, right? But maybe you have less lead flow. So I don't know, we're getting technical here, but that's interesting, right? That's interesting. But naturally, if it was the right lead every time, your win rates would jump significantly, right? Like everything down the funnel would be correct. Um, so it, yeah, it's, it sounds very important.
null: Yeah.
Brendan: I, by the way, I'll say like, I, I explicitly think there will be far fewer SDRs in five years. I think there will be something like 80% far fewer SDRs. Um, I don't, I don't love saying that because of what you're talking about. I think, I think we will get to a place AI and automation and tooling will get us to a place where we are focused on. The right companies and the right people at the right time. And when that happens, we're not going to see a 0.5% reply rate. We're going to see a 5% reply rate, right. And, uh, or, or higher. And so instead of sending a hundred emails a day, you might send five emails a day, but if they're converting at 10 X or 20 X, what they used to. The net of that is actually greater. And so I think that we will see kind of this like 10 X engineer concept actually in sales.
Andy: And, you know, when I was like GTM engineer, right? 10 X GTM engineers.
Brendan: For instance, I think maybe even for eight years, I think there'll be full site sales cycle reps. Uh, I think, um, I think like a rep, uh, we were texting before this. It's like the product that you just launched. I don't know. Can I talk about it?
Andy: Yeah. Oh yeah. I just emailed the whole user. That's why I was like, I'll be a few minutes late. Cause I was, I was lacking on getting that email out.
Brendan: So, so as an example, the product that you just launched is looks super dope. And. Uh, as I understand it, you've got to call recorder. It will just generate the next steps automatically on your behalf. One of the things, when I was an AE every day, I would have a notebook and at the end of the day, I would at eight o'clock at night, I would like, over dinner and a beer, I would like be going through the nine demos that I did and all the chicken scratch that I'd written down and I'd be updating the CRM and I'd be drafting followup emails. And on the days when I was too tired, that didn't happen. Um, and. Uh, if I had had a tool like what you just shipped, I'm pretty sure I could be 30% better. 50%, like significantly better.
Andy: 80%, come on, give us some credit here, Brandon.
Brendan: He's 99% better, double. There is a lot of room to grow for me. And that's like one example. And then it's like, okay, what are the other five things that are out today? And what are the other 10 things that will be out in 12 months? And then when you start stacking these things, it's like, okay, if I'm 30% better across these 12 different little micro AI workflows, that starts to become very significant. And, you know, this is the cliche of like, AI is not going to replace salespeople, but salespeople using AI will replace salespeople. I think that's right. I think it's basically anybody that's not adopting AI, they're just going to be like at a disadvantage. And, you know, I think we're like, I think we're very early with AI and with agents. I think it's like, Um, there's a lot of hype around it and I think it's warranted. I think it's like my bet is like this thing runs for many years. It's not like we're not at the peak of a bubble right now.
Andy: Yeah. Like AGI or whatever people try and push forward.
Brendan: I don't know about AGI, but just like, you know, is there a world where I just wake up and over my coffee, I just like say to, you know, whatever, some device, like tell me about my day and it preps me for my day and. It does some follow-up for me or does some pre-work for me. And like that world is pretty close. Like I, I chat with open AI significant amount of time. Uh, and it's like, are you good?
Andy: Yeah. I mean, it's, it's, um, that's interesting. Cause it's like, that's the question, right? The question that I'm thinking of is. Are sellers going to have to become. Is each one going to have to almost become like their own go to market engineer?
Brendan: Yeah. I think, I think they're going to have to become more technical. Absolutely.
Andy: Yeah. Right. To be, that's what I'm thinking. Right. And not necessarily like an engineer, but like they're gonna, you know, it's, I think there's going to be a lot more creativity that's going to have to be involved. Right. Which is actually like that. That's always been our bet and why we built distribute. Right. Because like, they're having to personalize not only cold emails anymore, but like additional resources. Right. Like that's, that was basically our thesis. Like we helped build the engine to create pipeline. Now let's help build the engine to convert the pipeline. Right. And so that's the problem statement that we're solving now. And, um, you know, with that, you do have to be a little bit more creative. There's no like magic bullet, as you know, for every deal, there's no magic bullet, unless you're doing transactional sales. Then there's more of a process that you can say, we do A, B, C, D. And then if we do those right, we can convert 30% of the time. That's, in transactional sales, that's even getting harder. But like, when you think of anything that's not transactional, you're dealing with humans and getting humans together to make a decision. I don't know about you, but like even your closest people, your wife, your kids, it's hard to get them to make a decision when you're, you know, like that close to them. Right. And so then you, you do that with someone who you don't have a, you know, family relationship with. who's then having to get other people involved to make a decision. Like there is a lot of factors in there with humans that there's never gonna be a full solution for, right? And so that's where you have to get creative. And because the market is getting more competitive in the software lens at least, you know, you have to know how to play that card really, really well. Like, you know, the political card. And we used to say at outreach that like every deal that you run is you're running a political campaign. Right. And you're, you're, you're trying to get the vote for you. Right. Because you're always most likely in a bigger deal. You're not the only one they're looking at. So it's, it typically comes down to two or three vendors. Right. And that's literally what you're doing. You're running a political campaign who can get the most mindshare for them to say when they're like, yeah, we're going to do this and solve this problem. You still have to solve the next problem, which is, well, I hope they pick me to do it. And so that's where the politics become involved. Right. So that's, what's interesting. from the sales perspective. And to do that, what do you have to do? You have to get creative. You have to run different campaigns. You have to run things in a different way. Just like in politics, they're saying different messaging, but they're going for the same thing, to be the governor, president, or whatever. But they're using different tactics. They're using different motions. And the one that resonates the most, it may not always be the best option either, but they had the best messaging that what people wanted to hear, right? There you go. That's I kind of see it in the same exact way. And people are like, don't talk about politics. But you know, whatever. But it is very similar in that sense. Yeah. So look at it.
Brendan: I think especially as you go up market, it really matters. Like the politics really?
Andy: Yes. Yeah, 100% upmarket, a lot different from different from a PLG product PLG. Oh, benefits look great. Let me download. Cool.
Brendan: Like I'll buy now, you know, although I'd say like a PLG, when you're layering in sales, you know, at zoom video, or even at Apollo, if you're doing a six or seven figure deal, like, you're not just letting a bunch of free signups come in, and then somebody swipes a credit card for $500,000. Like, you have to build a use case for the IT department, like you're gathering information from these PLG users and then you're packaging it up and presenting it. And that is very much so like a political game because you don't want to like step on their toes. Hey, I'm going to go present to the VP of RevOps what you've been doing. That's like a scary thing. That's like a very potentially, uh, you know, uh, yeah, political thing to do that might annoy somebody. Um, The other thing I'd say is, I think there's probably just like a pretty clear analogy. You asked like, do reps need to become their own GTM engineer or whatever, more technical? I think yes. And I think like 30 years ago or something, I don't know, 40 years ago, uh, like, you know, door-to-door sales reps had a Rolodex and then they like started putting stuff in a spreadsheet and that was like probably kind of technical for them to do. 20 years ago, they took that spreadsheet and they put it into a CRM and they had to update fields in a CRM and look at reports. And like, that was like kind of a new skill that they had to learn. And like, you could tell, like, I know personally, I got really good at Salesforce and I kind of became a Salesforce admin. I just learned on the nights and weekends, but it was like, because I wanted to make my workflow as an AE better and more efficient. And that helped me. become the best rep on the team that I was at by 30%. And I think that's like the shift that we're seeing now is like this next level up. It's like, you gotta become technical and kind of re-skill yourself. And it's kind of scary and like, it's hard. It's hard to learn all these new tools. It's moving so fast.
Andy: Some of them won't- Dude, I still don't even know how to use Clay. Like Clay's like the hot thing, like shout out to Clay. I still don't know how to use it. I haven't really tried, like, but honestly, it's kind of intimidating. Like I'd rather code up an app on the weekend than like try and figure out clay. Like, uh, you know, it's probably not that hard. I'm just not a spreadsheet guy though. You know, so no, it's tough.
Brendan: I mean, I think they're aware of this. Like I would say clay is as a, as a very steep learning curve. Like, I don't know. Uh, you can't learn it over a weekend. I'll say that, like, I'm definitely not.
Andy: Oh, wow. Okay. Wow.
Brendan: Okay.
Andy: You know, it's like, who's the best teacher at clay.
Brendan: They have clay cohorts. So you can go through, I think it's a free clip cohort where you can go through and you apply and you can like with, through a cohort, you can learn clay, like kind of clay. That's probably like the easiest way. They have a really good, um, uh, whatever education course on their website. That's free. forget what it's called. There's lots and lots of content on YouTube and LinkedIn about how to get good at clay. But I don't know that everybody needs to go learn Clay necessarily, but should you tinker around with LLMs and should you tinker around with other tools that are easier to use? Yeah, I think so. When you see that little AI button pop up in Notion or Slack or Gmail, should you click it and be curious about it? I think it's like, how do you learn these little ways to interact with AI? Again, this is my bet. I'm like, I haven't placed any, like, financial money against this, but I want to. I want to figure out how to, like, financially capitalize on this. But, like, I feel very strongly that, like, this, like, AI wave is, like, the biggest thing since the internet itself. And so, if I was a web today, it's like, I'd be all in on trying to, like, it doesn't mean you have to spend all your time on it, but, like, should you spend a few hours every week on it? I think so.
Andy: Yeah, yeah, I'm with you. I think it's it's one of the biggest things that's happened. I mean, we were my wife and I were in the car the other day. And he actually shout out to my wife. I needed a hat head bedhead. So you know, she, we were talking in the car. And we were like, damn, like, we're like, is AI going to be like AGI status soon? I don't know. But like, is AI one of the craziest things ever? And it's like, yes, You go on your phone and within three app, within three clicks, we even want to click in one app like perplexity. I love perplexity for like, you know, I use all of them for different situations, but for perplexity, I have the world's knowledge in one click dude. Everything that has ever been written in the history of humankind. And now I sound like this crazy dude, but like literally within one search, you could have the knowledge of anything you want that we know about. Like, isn't that crazy? Anything that we understand as humans today that any human has ever understood, you can search and have that at your fingertips. Like that is wild. Like you used to have to go to the library or Google and then go through a million Google files. Like even that was crazy when the internet came out. Right. That's what was like, Oh wow. I can search anything that, you know, any books digital now, whatever. Before that, it was like, you had to go to the library, find a book. Right. And like, maybe someone like wrote about it. Like think how much time that took. And then to find the exact thing you wanted to know from the book, like, dude, that could have taken a whole day. Now I can do it in a second. Like, dude, that is like, when you sit and think about that, like after a couple, do it after a couple of beers. And then like, for me, I'm like, holy shit, this is crazy. That's why it's wild.
Brendan: I think my, my like aha moment was a few months ago as I went on a walk and I was just, I had headphones on and I was just chatting to a chat GPT. And I don't remember what I was talking about, but it was like, you know, tell me about, you were doing like a therapy session, fossil fuels.
Andy: Tell me about signal-based selling and how amazing it is. Talk dirty to me in signal selling.
Brendan: You ask a question and it gives you a 30 second answer. It's like, okay, tell me more about that. It gives you a two minute answer. Okay. Tell me about the other thing you just mentioned. I don't really know about that. Takes you down another two minute rabbit hole. And like, you can just go on and on. And after 45 minutes, I was like, I've just been talking to this thing it's educated me on this entire thing that I had no idea about 45 minutes ago that to your point this would have taken me days to find out all this information before in such a concise way like yeah and like this is the worst it's ever gonna be it's only gonna get better from here
Andy: That is okay. That's the next crazy part is like every day that you wake up, that's the worst. The AI is going to be right. Like, like tomorrow it's going to be better than every day. It's just getting better. And right now it's like insane. So you're, you know, what's funny is my wife and I liked it. We're very curious. So. Anytime we have a question about something like, Oh, I wonder why that is like that. Or when we're listening to a podcast and they bring up something and we're like, Oh, that's interesting about, you know, Russia or something, um, you know, or about this country or like, and they mentioned a revolution and I'll open up chat duty and chat with them and be like, Hey, tell me more about the revolution. Like what caused that? Like, why did it happen? Like, and then you get the backstory in like five minutes and you're like, Oh, okay. And, uh, dude, I have, my son's only two and a half, but like, I speak Spanish to him. You know, I speak Spanish. I'm, you know, my family's from Mexico. So we, you know, um, I want him to know Spanish growing up and, you know, and learn it now when his mind's a sponge. And so I'm like, as soon as he's like in a few months when he gets better and can actually hold a conversation. I'm going to have him like, this is going to sound creepy, but I'm going to have him talk to GPT and tell, Hey, GPT, my, I'm going to give this to my son, talk Spanish to him too. Like when we're in the car or something. So he can just like, you know, it can like teach him words and stuff. And like, that's crazy, dude. The education is going to be amazing.
Brendan: I also have a two year old son and you know, he's getting to the age where he'll like, ask me some questions and like, there's going to be a day where he's like, you know, why are leaves green? And I'm like, I don't actually know like photosynthesis. I don't really know. Let's ask, you know, it's like, he could just have a conversation and like learn this stuff direct. I mean, I think that's amazing. I think that's like the acceleration of learning is really exciting. Like this is a good thing.
Andy: It should. Yeah. It's just, it's crazy, man. It's crazy. It's, And I have a call right now, so that's why I'm looking on the side here. Dude, it's good to catch up. Dude, great to catch up. Hit me up on any go-to-market things you see that are awesome. I'm a nerd. I love this stuff. I'll do the same. And then I'm going to send you a distribute coupon code so you can get it for free or whatever, just so if you want to help me out and get in there. Let me know, dude. I love that. So love it, man. And then keep me posted on your stuff and what you're doing, dude. And we'll get together soon. Maybe we'll do a little wake surf sesh with Adam or something. That'd be great. We're both in Austin. So we'd love to. All right, Andy. Appreciate you having me on. All right. See ya.
