Ep. #1055 - How Do You Automate Sales?

Matt DeCoursey 00:00
And we’re back! Back for another episode of Startup Hustle. Matt DeCoursey here to have another conversation I’m hoping helps your business grow. Speaking of helping your business grow, sales cures ails. And how do you get more of them? One of the best ways to do that is to start automating so many of those processes. That’s exactly what we’re going to talk about. I love this topic, by the way, so stick around because I think you’ll love it too. And before I introduce today’s guest, here is a quick reminder that today’s episode of Startup Hustle is powered by FullScale.io. Because hiring software developers is difficult and Full Scale can help you build a software team quickly and affordably and has the platform to help you manage that team. Go to FullScale.io to learn more. We love talking to Startup Hustle listeners. And I know that one thing that will happen is, at least, in a conversation with us, you’re going to leave with some good advice. And with me today, I’ve got a founder who has been on the show before, but his company is on our Kansas City’s top startups list. And that’s kind of tough to do. We’re pretty picky about that, especially here in our hometown. His name is Nick Smith. He is the CEO and co-founder of Saile.ai. That’s S-a-i-l-e.ai. There’s a link for that in the show notes as well as a link to FullScale.io. Nick, yeah, welcome back, man.

Nick Smith 01:26
Great to be here. And thanks for . . . it’s an honor to be one of your top startups. So I really appreciate it. I’m happy to be here again.

Matt DeCoursey 01:34
Well, you’re all over the local press here. You’ve had fresh funding, fresh accolades, and winning awards. Yeah, man, you’re all over the place. So you just saw just on the show, and what about August?

Nick Smith 01:46
I think so. It’s time. It’s fine. 2023 has started off really strong with a lot of interesting things, of course, in part to some of those accolades and some of that press. But I also think that you know, we just continue to find more and more companies that have a bottleneck in the prospecting process. And we’re finding a lot of success helping them automate it, for sure.

Matt DeCoursey 02:07
Well, you’ve gone ahead and in an unsolicited way. I mean, Full Scale started using Saile. And we’re getting through that process because we’ve got a bottleneck there, too. And, you know, we talked last time about sales and prospecting and automation. And you know, before we hit record, we were both kind of: humans aren’t always the answer. One thing I know about software is if it’s done right, it shows up to work every day.

Nick Smith 02:33
Yeah, well, I think, especially humans that are tasked with doing robot-like things. That’s the main thing. Yeah. Because humans are the answer for us, so much higher, and so many high IQ activities. Yeah. But if you look back at your day, how many tasks did you do that could have been automated? Or it could have happened simultaneously, which we don’t even get to talk about enough. But yeah, absolutely.

Matt DeCoursey 02:56
And that’s the hard part. Because you want to try to have intelligent, thoughtful, motivated people on your team. But one way to kill all that is Okay, now go find 87 blanks and capture the link. And let’s put it in a spreadsheet.

Nick Smith 03:15
Yeah, repetition kills the spontaneous nature of a great sales executive. It kills creativity. You were talking right before. I think that was for a hit record about being clever. And salespeople are some of the most clever people ever. But the way to kill that inspiration is to just pile on so many tasks that are repetitive. Well, let’s be realistic.

Matt DeCoursey 03:37
People, in general, are not consistent. Sure. And they don’t like doing robot-like stuff. Yeah. So if you can take that off of their plate and let people do more valuable things, you’re gonna get a lot more done. Now you also talk about scalability and, like, why did we start using Saile.ai? Once again, there’s a link in the show notes. It’s because I’m trying to, you know, I’ve got this rapidly growing company. I just had my 300th employee start. We’re not even five years old. I’m trying to. I realize there’s so much more that we can do. But I need to scale the process. And that process is very definable. It is very repeatable for so many things. And then there are some other things that aren’t. So I look at it like you get that old 8020 rule, like if you can take 80% exactly of these things and begin to automate it.

Nick Smith 04:32
So when we look at automating sales in general, like what are some of the top things seen, I think of the discovery process, so when we talk about Saile bots, we can usually break it down into three pools. Saile bots for people, meaning, here’s my top salesperson, if they had a bot to prospect, they’d be able to close three times as much, or their Saile bots for products. So a company that’s selling a lot of different things. They can have Saile bots that represent each of those different things. But what you’re reminded of is the third pool which is Saile bots for processes. So Though there’s not just one sales function, there’s the function of discovering net new contacts and companies. There’s the, you know, the research function. How about the nurture function who out there has 100,000 records or a million records in their CRM, and they have no idea what’s what, where they came from, if the person still works there, if it’s a valid email, if the information is right, we can automate, we can automate any of those functions with the Saile bot, I think, the most common and where I think companies still see, I have a story about this, where companies still see the biggest lift today is on that research and discovery side, most companies have figured out how to email everyone at once, and they’re following up manually one at a time, I think there’s still a question of what do we do once they respond? And how do we find the people we’re going to email in the first place? So Saile bots automate all of that, you know, with sort of the news around chat GPT, there’s been a ton of, of just content on LinkedIn, and posts about how chatGPT is helping me. And I was really struck by this post a couple of weeks ago, where someone said, Look, you know, I can, I can ask chatGPT, which my top prospects are, I can ask for more information about prospects, and I can put all of those prospects into a spreadsheet, and then I can automate emails outbound to them. And you know, we look at that and say, you know, hey, that’s great. That’s another half-step toward automating the entire process. A Saile bot would find the people, validate them, validate the data, target them simultaneously, and react intelligently to everything that they were saying back to you. So there’s more and more interest in automating it, but I still think people get really excited about finding prospects for them. And the automation of that piece.

Matt DeCoursey 06:56
I think that’s what I find so interesting and fascinating about what you’re doing at Saile because, like, here’s the reality is like, for the I mean, you’re doing the prospecting process is the key ingredient is let’s find new opportunities, not just manage the ones that we already know, exist. And there’s, you know, great salespeople, I’m a great salesperson, you’re a great salesperson, I’m good at spotting and looking for opportunities and having some kind of reasonable assessment. Maybe at this point, it’s experience and a gut instinct about the value of that opportunity. But what really stinks is when something about, well, okay, so I’m the CEO of a 300-person company, I got a lot of shit going on me on and it’s easy for me too, unfortunately, and I say this because it is unfortunate, and it’s painful is when you miss an opportunity because you weren’t paying attention, or it slid by or whatever. And that’s where automation can fix the problem and also become a scalable solution.

Nick Smith 08:02
Sure, because you’re going to, you’re going to certainly not have the same. Let me say it another way. Anytime you automate something, there’s a piece of it that, because it’s automated, is more rinse and repeat than maybe you would be manual. And maybe with every manual email or approach, you would put a piece of individual flair on that. You might lose a bit of that by automating it. But the sheer volume you’re able to cover and as intelligent as you can make it, and the more intelligent, the better. You should see huge returns on that automation that, like you’re talking about with the 8020 rule, net out too far bigger gains than if you were to go after something manually or with a novel approach. But what we say to people, like here’s an example, when one of our salespeople reaches out manually there, their objection to me is, this person is gonna say, why didn’t you use the Saile bot to reach out to me. And my response is the exact reason you did reach out manually is that you had the time because your Saile bot is automating your baseline prospecting for you. Now you can have more strategic conversations, and you can talk about novel ideas that are taken differently than you typically would because your time has been freed up. Because the one thing you know as a salesperson is, especially if you’re full cycle, you have to prospect all the time, this prospect all the time for you, and you call the shots on who it’s prospecting.

Matt DeCoursey 09:30
Prospecting and selling are two different skills. And not all salespeople possess both because I think a lot of salespeople, like, well, all salespeople, like the actual act of making a Saile and completing, and a ton of them just don’t like prospecting. They’re not good at it. It’s just Yes, it’s work. Yeah, it’s work and so on. And so part of that is, you know, so what would happen in your company if, and I’m speaking to you, the listener, what would happen in your company, if you could automate the process of identifying and finding more opportunities, and the answer should be that you’ll sell more, and your revenue will grow. So why aren’t you identifying more opportunities? And then the real reason for that is because you’re running a business, you’re delivering services or products to buyers, you’ll probably have a life outside that, if you’re lucky, and you’re doing a whole lot of other stuff, so why not get a little help in the background? So you say, Okay, great. So you go, Okay, so I’m gonna hire a new salesperson. And then the thing is, it’s gonna take you a couple of months to figure out if they’re any good. And you’re hoping that they are. And the reality is every salesperson that shows up to an interview is going to tell you what a great freakin salesperson they are, and very few are. And now you get down, and now you’re three months down the road, and that person didn’t work out, or they weren’t any good, or they found a different opportunity, or something occurred. Now you get to start over. Yeah, it’s a start over, and you get to start over, and you get to start over and then, but that’s what appeals to me about automation and bots is that you only need to get that part of it right in that slice that matters. And now you can pile more people around it, you can turn the vote, you turn it up to 11. And do a lot of stuff that is imagine being able to have a repeatable process that you don’t have to train 10 million people into another thing, like what I really in tricked me about Saile is if I have a 1020 person sales team, they can step right into that don’t have to sit around and train people or pay them to do a bunch of manual stuff.

Nick Smith 11:37
Sure it well, you know, we get asked a lot about closing ratio, what can we expect? So sales and lots deliver actionable opportunities. What percentage of those can we expect to close? And we say the same percentage that you would require your human salespeople to close today because A, they’re still going to be the ones closing it be they’re driving on who the ideal company is, they may not have to provide the data, but they’re describing it and see, they’re in control of the content. You know, they’re describing the value proposition. They don’t have to write emails, but they’re describing the value proposition. And so that the full process is controlled, it’s just a matter of serving them more revenue opportunities. But what you said, I think, is smart. Because the reality is, I think companies come to us first, for more revenue opportunities, I think they stay based on the outcomes that were accelerated. And those outcomes can come in many different shapes and sizes, you described hiring a salesperson and waiting three months to find out if they’re going to work out what if they had a Saile bot or some automation on day one, you would find out a lot sooner if they had what it takes to close business. If they did, by the way, they would close business a lot sooner, because they would be served opportunities. What about on the market side, you know, it’s a lot less expensive to deploy a bot to investigate the viability of a market than it is to put a human on it manually. And if it’s not working, or there’s no interest, you’re going to know so much quicker with a Saile bot than you would investigating that manually. And so there’s a savings component there. I mean, we might have talked about this last time, but salespeople don’t tend to get too excited about saving money, they get more excited about generating revenue. But I think there is some important value added that the acceleration offers.

Matt DeCoursey 13:31
So I want to give you an example of the kind of automation built once again, what part of it intrigued me because the missed opportunity is the painful one. You always learn about it later. Yeah, unfortunately, I’ve had conversations with people that I’ve seen, and I’m like, Hey, so what’s going on? Did you know? How’s that development? So they’re like, Oh, well, we hired someone else. And I’m like, why? Well, no one followed up with me. Yeah. And that’s like a component of what you do. So you talk about this like, okay, look, I’m a self admitted salesperson, which and because I’m a good salesperson that probably guarantees that I’m not organized or not in a way that organized people are actually organized. Like, I got a file or a folder. So I know it’s in my laptop somewhere, right or my in or out box. Yeah. And for me, that’s what it’s actually like, good. My so what it’s good enough, but I’ll run into like, Hey, call me back in July. Yeah, our funding round with clothes and I’ll be like, great. And then around August, I’ll remember that I forgot to do that.

Nick Smith 14:37
Well, so we had to move my dad into a home right? Because he has dementia and so part of that came with cleaning out his belongings, and I too am a salesperson and I could share without being too self deprecating. I agree with you on the organization front sometimes. But in cleaning out my dad’s stuff. He had this box and inside of it was this manila envelope. With a big red ink that said, you know, important, and inside this important envelope was a bunch of unopened mail. So he knew it was important. That doesn’t mean he’s going to open it or address it. You’re exactly right. So someone responds and says, follow up with me in 12 months, or follow up with me in July, a Saile bot would read that and do just that. It will follow up in July or a year later, I think the benefit to you is, you’re so busy as a salesperson, it doesn’t hit your desk until it’s really actionable, meaning they need the information now, or they want a meeting on Tuesday, something like that. Quick story, you talked about missed opportunities as a salesperson. So it’s 2011, maybe 2012. And I don’t tell this story a lot. But I was at CBS at the time, and I was managing a group of younger people. I would call them like sales associates, and selling advertising, right? So this company reaches out to those in the rideshare business. And they want to have a meeting about some exciting things we could do for them. And the company is called Uber. And so we sat in the conference room.

Matt DeCoursey 16:10
It’s me and Pete, are you left out a little mysterious? And they’re like, fuck it.

Nick Smith 16:15
Yeah, exactly. So we sat in a conference room and Uber, she was like a marketing director or something. She’s describing this app, and people are gonna be able to request rides. And after the meeting, I tell Pete, this is totally on me. I said, I don’t know, Pete seems like a weird business model. I don’t know. I don’t know what’s there. I’m not gonna kill the cow. So like five years later, I’m gonna completely work for a component or slander.

Matt DeCoursey 16:41
I’m Shannon, Uber. Yeah.

Nick Smith 16:45
Five years later, I’m at a job which I think is Uber to the interviewer and the business manager that Uber wants to advertise with this new media company I work with the business manager comes up to me, he says, Nick, I don’t know if we should approve. I don’t know if we should approve this company for credit. I don’t like their I don’t like their business model. And there’s me, are you crazy? We’re talking about Uber? How could you never approve them for an ad spend or something like that? And I realized in that moment, how dumb I had been talking about the missed opportunity, you know, the one that got away?

Matt DeCoursey 17:19
Well, I think you missed a lot of opportunities, you probably could have been an early stage investor. Oh, man, but like, your Uber, Uber is like, probably the most palatable example of like, widespread disruption that you can come up with. I mean, the other the other. The other one that, okay, so, as Uber was kind of coming out, we were also going through the whole like, like the, the music streaming. Yeah, stuff. And I, you know, I have a history in the music industry. So I remember how disruptive. What do you mean, you wanted to give it away for free, right? And he may not only get a penny a lesson? Yeah. But the idea is that more people will listen. Oh, there’s more opportunities. And yeah, it’s just yeah, for sure. All right. So I asked our friend to chat with GPT, which we mentioned earlier. What are the 10 things that say, what are 10 things that salespeople are bad at? For getting into that list, a quick reminder that today’s episode, Startup Hustle is brought to you by FullScale.io where we can help you find and build a team of software developers, testers and leaders, we do it quickly and affordably go to FullScale.io to learn more. So. Okay, so we asked the AI Yes, we asked the AI what 10 Things that salespeople are bad at? What do you think number one is prospecting. That does not know it’s listening?

Nick Smith 18:45
Oh, listening. Oh, my gosh, yeah.

Matt DeCoursey 18:48
Well, which is a weird thing, because I’ve actually had this conversation because a lot of people think you’re a good talker, that you’re a salesperson, that’s usually not the case, because a good salesperson is listening. Yeah, I become a remarkable listener when I’m trying to sell something interesting, though.

Nick Smith 19:05
Yeah. Because how are you going to create solutions if you’re not hearing what the problem is? Right? What’s number two? Time management time management?

Matt DeCoursey 19:15
And that’s, that’s where that’s kind of that’s where that comes into what you built. Yeah. Because they may struggle to balance customer interactions, administrative tasks and self promotion. Right. So there’s a few things I’ve learned about business and that’s the getting the people that you hired to do the job that you hired them for is sometimes tough be you’re hoping they’re good at it and see, what can you do to clear them up so like, you want your programmers program and you want your testers testing you want your sales people selling you want your accountants adding up your sales and stuff like that, and it’s easy to get outside of that. And that’s back to that repeatable nature. So what do you think number three?

Nick Smith 19:58
Number three is we listened. Then we had time management.

Matt DeCoursey 20:03
I don’t know, overcoming objections, overcoming objections.

Nick Smith 20:05
So can I talk about Saile for a moment? I owe my career to overcoming objections we had at a previous company, the same one I mentioned before, we would meet every Monday at 8am. And we would have an overcoming objections meeting where we would throw out objections and answer them in front of everyone. We do it a little differently at Saile. We just had this meeting today. It’s called the objections hotseat where one salesperson is in the hot seat and we all rotate, throwing objections out to them, and then coming together and learning from them. Because it’s so important to really sell value. It’s also important, you know, I’m big on words and audio and, or writing. And I think that making sure the person’s picture in their mind is actually what’s being sold is really important. And some of their objections will tell you what they’re envisioning instead of what you’re actually selling. So I think that’s important. I will tell you, you know, we’re doing a lot of vision and roadmap exercises for Saile as well. And Saile bots, you know, overcoming objections is a big value add. But I think today, if I had a Saile bot, you know, it would be able to serve me those objections quicker, because the human has to be good at overcoming them to really sell.

Matt DeCoursey 21:25
I think good experience and bad sales people look at objections as someone not being interested. It’s the exact opposite 100%, the exact opposite, because people are apt they have an agenda. And so what do I mean by an objection? That’s any kind of question you’re asking about the service or the product? Or hey, is this the right you know, do you think this is the right thing for an eight year old? That’s an objection? Technically, yeah. And then the answer is going to be Yeah, this might be this is a great product for an AR Because it’s really simple to use. Yeah. So we overcame an objection.

Nick Smith 22:03
You know, it sucks as a salesperson is the unknown, the unknown when someone says maybe, or when someone doesn’t follow up with you. Objections should be a dream for every salesperson because it takes the unknown out of it when they’re throwing fastballs out your head in a meeting that’ll wake you up. That’s your time to shine and read that selling?

Matt DeCoursey 22:22
Well. I’ve learned that people that don’t have objections, usually don’t.

Nick Smith 22:27
They are not interested and not invested enough to get there.

Matt DeCoursey 22:29
So with that, and knowing that there are objections, like that’s always my reason to call or reach out. Hey, I just wanted to give you a lot of information yesterday, next or anything I need to clarify. Yeah. Because you might not even because busy people oftentimes aren’t going to vocalize their objections because they’re busy being busy.

Nick Smith 22:48
I think my problem as a founder is if someone gives me an objection today, I can tell them what we did three years ago, why we changed it, what we do now, and what we’re going to do moving forward, it’s almost like information overload. Sometimes I can overcome the objection, I think as long as you’ve given the person a safe space to give you an objection, and you really hear them, and address it, while also, you know, of course, spinning it toward the value you provide. That’s the role of a salesperson, let’s key the value.

Matt DeCoursey 23:21
And, you know, during the objective when handling an objection, you need to remember that it’s not the feature that the people are interested in, they’re interested in the advantages and benefits that said feature provides at some point during the process of building that value. I haven’t done an effective enough job to help you understand and clarify your needs.

Nick Smith 23:51
And when you understand, I don’t know, good salespeople, or wouldn’t you rather have them overcoming objections than searching for email addresses? Yeah, I think that’s the nexus of this, you know.

Matt DeCoursey 23:58
well, and then there’s the next on the list and I won’t make you guess it’s building rapport. Well, that’s sometimes hard to do when you’re in the weeds with 10 million things.

Nick Smith 24:09
Sure, yeah, but also like building rapport. How many salespeople wish that’s how they could spend their time. Some salespeople I know are some of the most charismatic, genuine, honest, solutions driven people, but they’ve been reduced to prospecting machines. Yep. Those doing robotic tasks should be replaced with an actual machine.

Matt DeCoursey 24:32
Next, nonetheless, managing their pipeline. This is back into that whole process. It’s like okay, wait, so I have to spend all this time selling. I got to spend all this time handling objections. I gotta go look for all this business too.

Nick Smith 24:55
I got to put data on to something and do a lot of this other crap like not a lot of that sounded like selling. We talked in Saile about the jungle dirt road highway. What stage Are you or what stage is this department and if they’re in the jungle, they need to move to the dirt road and then eventually the highway starts and I think all of us are great at having highway ideas while being in the jungle.

Matt DeCoursey 25:14
Competitors tires and snow tigers, maybe.

Nick Smith 25:16
More than, etcetera. Yeah. Bugs.

Matt DeCoursey 25:19
Hello, I don’t know, man, I’m going back to the Philippines in a few days, I’ve seen some bugs around that place. It is legitimately scary, so it’s not just those stages of jungle dirt road highway.

Nick Smith 25:26
But when you’re hiring people, and especially salespeople, I’ve been doing a lot of reading about hiring them for the stage you’re in. And so basically, when you hire a salesperson, think about it like a renaissance sales rep. These are the ones that are really, really hard to find, the ones that can create their own sales collateral, the ones that sit and think about objections and how they’re going to answer them. The ones that aren’t going to need a prompt, they can manage their own pipeline. So when you describe that, it’s really hard to find great salespeople, it’s even harder to correctly align them with the stage you’re at.

Matt DeCoursey 26:06
Well, that’s also why adapting change is adapting to changes. Number six, like you’re on a startup, I guess I run a startup. I know you’re not a startup, I don’t know. I don’t know, Uber, they called Uber a startup even after they went public. And I’m like, Dude, if you name your company a verb. Yeah, the startup anymore. But, adapting to change. And I think that this is a key thing. And this is, you know, like, don’t move my cheese. What do you mean, the process changed? Well, process changing for the better? And if that has a lot of that process occurs in the background? So much like it is, it’s so much better, so much better?

Nick Smith 26:41
What about change in other ways, like change in commission structure? No. How about the sales reps that regardless of changes to structure, or product, or internal things still find a way to be on top year after year.

Matt DeCoursey 26:57
I mean, I did that when I was just a salesperson, I actually worked for a company I won’t name and I came in under one, one thing, and then they changed their whole model halfway through and they, you know, I went to a meeting and they’re like, this could result in you making less money. And I was looking at it, and I was like, that’s not gonna happen.

Nick Smith 27:17
And then I did. Yeah, I did.

Matt DeCoursey 27:19
Because I was in that Renaissance. Yes, I found I just had to kind of shift my mentality about the way I was selling, which is also why the company had to shift their mentality because they had a bunch of old school dudes and they were all dudes. So I’d say that yeah, in a non sexist way. But they had a bunch of old school dudes that were just kind of like, they’re, they were like, order takers. Sure. And, you know, as and, you know, technology wasn’t as advanced as it is now. But I was looking around, I was like, man, it gave me more pay to find new things and new business. So the change was, is like, so if you have these accounts that are legacy for 10 years, you walked into this, I inherited a huge account list. And it’s like, I didn’t do anything for that. Like, if they want an order taker, they gotta have someone in 100 number they didn’t need me to take the order definitely was the point. So it rewarded more new opportunities and growth within the existing opportunities not just to pay and I was I was really excited about and some of the other guys quit. They went and did something else.

Nick Smith 28:28
And if they would have dropped you in the middle of the jungle, you would have found your way out. Yeah, or commercialized the jungle, but maybe both, maybe both.

Matt DeCoursey 28:35
Alright, so next on the list number seven, closing deals. I mean, if I have more time to focus on that, I mean, now what now for me, like, okay, so, you know, if we had either Top Gun Maverick or the original Top Gun, and this is our comparison, like you’re going from missile lock, that was like the big thing, whether they’re in training to real life, you know, you want to hear that tone that you’re locked in. When I get that you’re not getting me off your tail. Yeah, I mean, I think that that’s, and I think it’s difficult. I think too many salespeople are worried that they’re going to offend someone, like, do people come and fill out that form? FullScale.io? Because they need a solution. I’m not afraid to tell them about it. When I have the right solution. I’m gonna keep asking like, yeah, what do you think? What do you think? What do you think? And like, we’ve even gone through this, like, some of this is like, hey, like, sometimes people look at your opportunity one way and say, I just want to challenge you to look at this a couple different ways, because sometimes the solution that people want, isn’t necessarily available. Yeah, totally requires a change in thinking or a change in approach. And you know, and that’s how you end up making deals, man finding options, and putting enough feasible ones out there until the people that you’re presenting them to find one that they’re comfortable with, don’t you think?

Nick Smith 29:59
that close happens earlier than most realize in the process. I think it happens during the presentation handling objections.

Matt DeCoursey 30:04
Yeah. Because if you do both of those effectively, it’s just I mean, people have asked me, dude, what’s your big closing long? Do you want to go ahead and get this? Yeah, like, that’s it? Yeah. Like, when can we start?

Nick Smith 30:18
Right? It’s not about a tactic or some sort of move. It’s all of the steps that are prior to basically everything that you’ve listed here. If as long as a lot of these things are in place, the deal should close itself. What’s the name? What’s that book, the score takes care of itself?

Matt DeCoursey 30:36
I don’t know, right? I don’t read books anymore. Time. I’m too busy fighting around with my sales process.

Nick Smith 30:42
I think that the Saile takes care of itself. If the other parts of the process are in.

Matt DeCoursey 30:49
Well, look, if you’re listening to what someone needs, and you’re so this is the problem, salespeople make it way too, like broad and cloudy and right. And so you start by listening, Hey, what’s up? I’ll literally ask, “What’s the biggest problem you’re trying to solve right now?” And I just listened to him say, and I’ve really come to realize, as I’ve gotten older, and more experienced, that peace of mind is a real thing that people buy, and it’s maybe the most valuable component of all of it. I think this is where salespeople mess up. And if you’re listening, uh, you know who you are. But I had a guy that pitched me some landscape stuff. And he gives me a $15,000 bed. Yeah, actually a larger bed, but I was very unclear about what I was buying. And so it was like, so the thing was, if it didn’t, there was no peace of mind with it. Because i Hey, we could put five trees here. We could put six plants here. We could do whatever. And then let me know what kinds of trees or plants you want. I don’t know, I can’t even name more than three pine trees. Ficus. Like what else, like birch. Yeah, Maple. I’m just naming types of woods. That table is built out at this point. And you know, but with that it was like, it wasn’t it wasn’t defined. It didn’t put me off, so the peace of mind part of that and the convenience of buying were out the window. And the reason I was able to bring this up is because the guy actually after failing to sell to me actually reached out because he’s a podcast listener, okay. And he’s like, What am I doing wrong? I’m like, You made it too difficult for me to buy, there was no peace of mind with me, with my purchase, like because I have 10 million things to do. Sure. And there was a list of other stuff that needed to occur in there. So peace of mind can be like, Okay, it’s such a headache. I’ve gone through this with the Full Scale client. It’s a headache for us to bring bigger groups of developers on. It’s okay, well, let’s do this. So let’s bring on three. And during this process, we’re going to document the entire thing. So you don’t have to do it next time. Guess what, this one is our biggest account now. Wow. That’s great. That’s it, though. Like what because the peace of mind was the problem there like because their issue at the time was they were every time they put a new developer and they pair them up with another developer. And the end that and it really was there already, but they were behind on some deadlines and stuff like that. So the peace of mind was out the window. They’re like, I don’t want to slow down what we’re doing well, we shouldn’t have to, because this is a repeatable thing. It’s the same thing again, and again and again and again and again. And so we put someone on doing that. And yeah, I mean, that’s what was more important than anything else.

Nick Smith 33:40
You also talked about how easy it was though. And I feel like the harder I feel like a difficult process or difficult concept or roads, peace of mind to write it works against it.

Matt DeCoursey 33:52
I’ve done that with our onboarding Full Scale. So I used to ask a whole bunch of questions and I’d sit around? Because I have no life. And think about how many steps I can remove from things. Yeah. Because of the last step, so okay, why is Amazon so successful? Because I trust the process, right? I know that my stuffs gonna get there on time. I know it’s easy to return stuff if needed. And three, I can buy it with one click, tap Done. Right? They really, I mean, they’re the crown jewel of removing steps from the process. And that’s why it’s easy to buy there. And so the easier you make it and that and that’s the thing that I think it’s hard for a lot of salespeople to understand. It’s like, you know, it’s like, okay, go do this and go do that and go do this and go do that. How many of those things guys just did for you? Because that’s what a thought like, like thoughtfulness and sales is really important.

Nick Smith 34:56
Draw it back to overcoming objections. Yeah, you hear the same objection. 35 times do not try to address those issues. Yeah, you’re now No, you’re achieving you’re overcoming it before they’ve even thought about it. And you know what’s going to be there that makes it easier in their mind. Now they have even peace, have more peace of mind and credibility, which I don’t know if credibility is on the list, but establishing that credibility of okay, this person, no, it’s building rapport. Yeah. So this person knows what we’re up against. They’re, they’re fighting for us and trying to win us over.

Matt DeCoursey 35:30
Tell you what my biggest objections to Full Scale are. They’re related to time zones. Yeah. Okay. So in my presentation, I’ll say that all of our technical staff are going to have some portion of their day that overlaps with yours. There’s a quality issue, because a lot of people have had struggles with offshore teams that sucked. Yeah, so we only hire one in 30. Developers, we developed our own assessment process to determine what skills were in the table. So what does that look like? It’s not full of trivia questions, because I’ve yet to meet a PHP developer that was better because he knew what PHP stood for. Yeah. Right. So that’s not a good assessment. And also a lot of the assessment tools that are out there, the answers are all over the internet. Right? We’ve also, so you can kind of get down to that and then English language. So, the Philippines is one of the most fluent English places in the world, like the official business language of the Philippines is English. So with that, I don’t have any employees that don’t speak English. Yeah. Because it’s a key ingredient. If you can’t communicate, you can’t build software. So those three things right there are and so that’s a part of my, my, my brief value prop. Yeah, so I go through that. And that says, if that’s done properly, you can satisfy a lot of objections. I think any and all products have like four or five that they always get no matter what.

Nick Smith 36:57
Yeah, no, but every once in a while, you get something really out of left field. And sometimes it’s really good. I tend to compliment the prospect. Oh, yeah. I haven’t heard this one in a long time. That’s a good one. So really good, right.

Matt DeCoursey 37:07
But it’s rare. And the thing so I listen, I refer to listening for the echo. So when that echo resounds, and it’s just like, they’re like, that’s usually something that can be handled. Okay, number eight, staying organized? Yeah, I mean, we already talked about keeping track of tasks.

Nick Smith 37:26
But you know what, this brings up a good point. So we live in this crazy, I don’t know if I love this phrase, but sales enablement. So you know, there’s like, 10,000, sales enablement, solutions, or something like that. And a lot of them do the, the, the not hard part, but the inconvenient part, they automate that. So if you need reminders to follow up with someone, or you need, you know, a playbook or something like that, to remind you of next steps with the prospect, that’s not really hard. It’s not a hard task you’re automating. It’s just not convenient. And I think most sales enablement solutions live in that category.

Matt DeCoursey 38:03
I think it’s hard to build those into my own platform. Yeah. Right. Like, that’s just like, walking you through it. Sure.

Nick Smith 38:10
Yeah. It’s part of the natural part of the process. I think, though, that I can see that working against sales executives, I think the best ones, despite their disorganization are still really successful. They would just be even more successful if they were organized.

Matt DeCoursey 38:27
Yeah. Or I just think I will literally hire people to be organized for them. Yeah. I mean, I’ve done it and that so I worked at a company Roland that was in the music industry. And we and Fiona if you happen to be listening, thank you. We love you. Because we have this angel. Yeah, named Fiona who fixed all that she was like, there to perfect all of our imperfections. Yeah. And you know, this was back when like, so we didn’t even have a sales tracking in there. And that ordering system was still DOS based. So yeah, that was like, and then you talked about the processes like you needed to have a secret code to meet the gnome under the bridge that no one knew that was there down the third warp tunnel on the fourth level of Mario Sure. Like, because like, I mean, how the fuck was I supposed to know that you had to hit f7 to open up something else. I’m like, I don’t even know, we serve? How do we even make it to where we’re at? I managed to have retail stores that I will probably describe more there. It’s like, you’re trying to bring on a new cashier. And like, I mean, there was just like, there was always one person, there’s always this old lady or someone that worked at the back of the store that you know, we’d always have to call up and say, Can you come up to the front because we’re not smart. I’ve been using this system for 11 years. Gotta hit f3 And f7. Then where is there something that says that? Right? Where is there something on there? Not there never was in there. Alright, so staying organized. And here’s the thing this is, this is going to play into what I was saying earlier. Number nine staying motivated. sales can be highly pressured and demanding, and salespeople may struggle to stay motivated in the face of rejection. And then long periods of time in between sales. People aren’t consistent. Oh, my whole point earlier, people that show up every day. Now, dude, I’m, like, overflowing with Drive and energy must be.

Nick Smith 40:31
I think, yeah, a bot would solve that, the bots are motivated by greed.

Matt DeCoursey 40:33
Yeah, right.

Nick Smith 40:36
Saile bots don’t know, you know, emotion. Yeah, that’s the good part. Yeah. Or they don’t, they don’t have bad days. Right. So they’re automatically doing that process. And I think they don’t have bad days.

Matt DeCoursey 40:47
Like, they may have bad days, like, maybe their results aren’t there, but they’re gonna get up and do it again. Wow.

Nick Smith 40:53
I mean, all of our customers are great. So if they’re not getting results, and that means a prospect had a bad day. So it was fun. But I would say this, yes, Saile bots are bots in general and don’t tend to have bad days. But I think by taking these tasks off someone’s plate, hopefully they have more good days, because they’re more in charge and in control of their day. And, you know, creativity is not something you can just turn on like that. creativity comes when your mind is free, when you’re not overrun with tasks and follow up things you have to do. And so, you know, out of that, if out of using a Saile bot, comes a more creative human, I think that that’s a really good benefit to them attacking their prospecting process.

Matt DeCoursey 41:39
You know, the salespeople at Full Scale, when we explained Saile, they were like, wait, they were almost confused. They’re like, Wait, we don’t have to do that stuff anymore. And that’s it soon. Wait. So once again, just to confirm, just to confirm, I don’t have to do all the shifts that I hate. Yeah. And yeah, what’s going to happen from it? Well, I’m going to sell a lot more stuff, because I’m not going to spend all this time doing this other crap. Alright, number 10 out of 10 communicating value. This is something about this can be automated to, if this is in fact, this can be highly automated, because any bot or repetitive or automated process is going to repeat the value proposition that comes in it.

Nick Smith 42:24
Not only that, but let’s talk about where a Saile bot how a Saile bot comes to be in the automation accordingly, right? The Saile bots built based on you or based on your team. You’ve heard objections, your whole career or your whole time at the company, you know, what types of buyers are buying from you. So you know who and how to communicate that value directly. Now that you know that it’s time to automate it, right?

Matt DeCoursey 42:50
Yeah. No, there’s no doubt about no doubt about that. There’s no doubt about that. So when you know, alright, so these are legit. Yeah. And a bot gave me that.

Nick Smith 43:03
Automated and seen. Yeah.

Matt DeCoursey 43:07
You mentioned one thing: it’s, you know, chatGPT has been so popular for a lot of people to talk about. I think the one problem that it solves is, honestly there’s a creativity side to this, like, yeah, go ask it. 10 things to talk about, give me 10 topics to talk about for a sales podcast. Sure. It’d be 10 more and just keep going and going and going. I’m like, Wow, I did that way faster. Yeah, and I would have done alright, so here we are. We’re at the end of another episode of Startup Hustle, which was once again powered by FullScale.io helping you build a software team quickly and affordably. Once again. Saile.ai. That’s s a i l e.ai. There are links to both Full Scale and Saile.ai in the show notes. Back here. We are the founder of freestyle. What would you like to say on your way out of today’s show? And thanks again for joining us.

Nick Smith 44:02
Yeah, absolutely. Thanks. Thanks for having me. Again, founders freestyle. I would just say, Is this supposed to be two founders?

Matt DeCoursey 44:10
Now just, it’s a fancy way of saying, what are your closing remarks? Oh, closing remark. I let people freestyle. I’ve had some people literally wrap to like a lot of stuff.

Nick Smith 44:22
I would say I would leave you with this. You know, the one thing that all those 10 points sort of said but didn’t say in some of them was trust, right? So trust your own process. But don’t be afraid of something helping you with that process. You’re likely an expert in some part of what you do if not all of it. And if you’re the expert on it, that means you can give direction and can provide that direction to other people or to a bot. So trust what you know, trust that experience you have, and don’t be afraid to let something make it easier for you.

Matt DeCoursey 44:59
Well, I think the tool polls are the key, and you know, I’m always talking about the founders for Saile, and I’m saying you can rap and do whatever. So speaking to tools, I asked chat GPT to write me a rap about sales. So here we go. Okay, listen up, y’all. I got a story to tell about a hustler and sales. He’s doing well. He’s got a gift for gab and a heart of gold. He can sell anything from young to old selling. That’s the game. He loves to play, make deals, and close every day. He’s got the skills, he’s got the drive and the flair. He’s the king of sales without care. He’s got a smile that lights up the room and a style that makes you want to groove. He knows how to take lessons and how to care. He’s got what it takes to take you there. Selling it’s a game he loves to play, making deals and closing every day. He’s got the skills, the drive, and the flair. He’s the king of sales, with AdvoCare probably coming in a lot of different directions. I’d say that it was more of a poetic reading, but I liked it. Anyway, I’ve been encouraging people to rap and freestyle for long enough, and there I did. I finally did it myself. And I think that’s a perfect way to end the show. Mic drop.