Podcast: Build a Sales Cadence for the Australian Market

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How to Build a Sales Cadence for the Australian Market - An Ethical outreach strategy

In this episode, host Shahin Hoda welcomes Mark McInnes, sales trainer, coach and author of Tactical Pipeline Growth.

Together, they talk about how to build a sales cadence that adjusts to the particularities of the Australian market. Mark explains the process and provides examples of specific actions to achieve success while engaging in ethical conversations.

This episode’s guest:

Conversation segments on this episode:

• [01:06] About Mark's background
  
• [01:51] The importance of a sales cadence
• [03:00] How to build a sales cadence
  
• [04:13] Quality over quantity
  
• [06:36] Smarter targeting and Australia's particularities
  
• [11:34] The challenge of getting into the right mindset
  
• [14:09] The process to create your own cadence
  
• [21:40] How to structure a voice message
  
• [25:45] A note about channels for the Australian market
  
• [28:51] The importance of understanding the commercial output
  
• [30:04] The decline of the SDR model
  

Resources mentioned on this episode:

• Tactical Pipeline Growth
• Building a Cadence - Webinar
  
• BOSS Podcast, by Mark
• Outreach
• Hubspot's Data: How COVID-19 Is Impacting Sales and Marketing

About the Growth Colony Podcast:

On this podcast you'll be hearing from B2B founders, CMOs, marketing & sales leaders about their successes, failures, what is working for them today in the B2B marketing world and everything in between.

Hosted by Shahin Hoda & Alexander Hipwell, from xGrowth

Get in touch!

We would love to get your questions, ideas and feedback about Growth Colony, email podcast@xgrowth.com.au

Episode Full Transcript:

[00:23] Shahin Hoda  Hello, everyone, welcome to another podcast. I'm Shahin Hoda with xGrowth. And today, I'm talking to Mark McInnes, Chief Sales Officer at Mark McInnes sales training and author of Tactical Pipeline Growth, we're going to be talking about how to go about building a sales cadence for the Australian market and the Australian B2B buyer, because there's a lot of noise. And there's a lot of methodologies that come from places like the UK and the US. It might not necessarily apply to what we have here. Now, on that note, let's dive in. Mark. Thanks for joining us. 

[00:58] Mark McInnes  Shahin, thanks very much for letting me come on and have a chat. I really appreciate it. You've got a great community, so pleased to be part of it. Thank you. 

[01:06] Shahin Hoda  No, it's a pleasure to have you part of the community and have you on the show. Thanks so much for joining us. Now, Mark, for those who might not be familiar with yourself or haven't heard of what you do, can you give us a quick background and intro? 

[01:20] Mark McInnes  I talk a lot about my background, ex-military, ex-soldier, so I'm very much systems and processes-oriented. We don't spend too much time on that. And as a result, I go into organisations and help them start new conversations, find new customers and start that first part of the pipeline if you like it. 

[01:35] Mark McInnes  Prospecting is really my thing, particularly in the B2B space, and help organisations start ethical conversations with their perfect clients. But very much systems and processes-orientated. And that's why I use that military phrase as the introduction because that might make a little bit of sense as we talk.

[01:51] Shahin Hoda  I love it. And, you know, you recently wrote a book a Tactical Pipeline Growth, and I read it, and there's just so much inside amazing points in there. And I definitely have some questions and follow up questions on some of the points that you've made there. But before we go, let's do a very quick, you know, kind of 30-second approach of why do we go about building a sales cadence? Why is that important? 

[02:16] Mark McInnes  Because people don't answer the first outreach. So you and I think that our products and services are awesome. And we could write a really long email with all the reasons why our customers should engage with us. And we send it off, and we know that nine times out of 10, that's going to be deleted, even if it's you, we think it's a perfect email, right? A single outreach just doesn't work. 

[02:33] Mark McInnes  So if you have a look at your inbox, you have a look at your telephone or anything else. You know, there's a reason why marketers do retargeting, right? They send the same message to you multiple times, because you just don't respond the first time, it's not because maybe you're not interested, it's because we just, we don't accept messages that way. So we need to have a system in place, a process in place to deliver our message in an ethical way to our clients and prospective clients. So that they're gonna be able to hear what it is that we want to talk to them about. One outreach doesn't work. 

[03:00] Shahin Hoda  Yes, money is in the follow up, as they say, right? Now, how does one go about building a cadence? Like, what is that process? Like, do I just go and say, okay, I'm gonna do one phone call and two emails and one phone call and then one voice message. And that's my cadence, hey, here we go. Like, what is the science behind it? How does that work? 

[03:20] Mark McInnes  Okay, you've got to start with really understanding your buyer. So what we're talking about in the sales space, of course, is building out an ICP, you know, an ideal client profile. What do they look like? You know, what do they do with their day? What are their communication methods, you know? What and how are they likely to respond? How are they less likely to respond? What communication channels do they use at the moment? 

[03:38] Mark McInnes  So, an example that I might use is, you know, sales directors, for example, you know senior salespeople are significantly more likely to answer telephone, we know that for a fact, because they've spent a lot of time on their telephone. Whereas senior HR leaders and marketing CMOs, etc, very shy to answer the telephone, you need to have a different method to be able to communicate, to them. So we start at that very starting point and going, okay, what does outreach look like? So what I call it smarter targeting, so we need to really hone in on our target audience, and build out a communication channel that's going to support reaching out to those people. Does that make sense? 

[04:13] Shahin Hoda  Yeah, it does make sense. It does make sense. And I know from our previous conversation, you're a big fan of quality versus quantity right? And so yeah, spell space. You know, we talk a lot about quantities. Like, have you had your numbers, you know? Have you done hundred dollars? No. let's do $150, you haven't got results to $200, right? Get your activities right. But you also are a very strong believer of quality. What do you mean by that? What does that mean? 

[04:40] Mark McInnes  Well, you know, the thing that upsets most sales leaders that I talk about is, you know, I tell them that their sales team have probably got too many leads in the front of their pipeline. And of course, most people will tell you that there's not enough leads in the pipeline. And that's because in our sales, let's just call him a rep right whether they be an AE or SDR the sales function is a representative, sales representative. The sales rep has got so many leads in the front of their pipeline that I can't put them through any kind of deliberate follow up sequence. 

[05:08] Mark McInnes  So they make one phone call, they put them in the pipeline, they send them an email, two weeks later, they call them again, you know, in three months time when they've got a product or a promotion that comes out of marketing that I think might be suitable. It's just prospecting via mystery, you know, there's no system in place. But when you go to look at those, that salesperson's pipeline, they have got lots of deals in there, but they're not deals. 

[05:28] Mark McInnes  So what I'm suggesting is, you should put five or 10 leads into the front of the pipeline, and then pursue those five or 10 perfect clients, all the way through a deliberate cadence to the point where we think that we're going to be likely to engage with them. And so instead of doing random acts of prospecting, we should be making deliberate acts and going, okay, Shahin is a perfect client, for me, I've done the research, I'm now going to reach out over a set period of time in a set fashion, that's going to be significantly more likely to get him to start a conversation with me than just, you know, calling every time I think about it, or emailing every time I think about it, or every time a promotion comes out. And that last example, is pretty typical of what most businesses have, is that very random acts of prospecting. 

[06:09] Shahin Hoda  Yeah, just looking at the if there is a CRM, looking at the CRM and being like, oh, you know, I gotta probably should follow up with this person, not having a very clear visibility of when was it the last time that we followed up, that system is really, really important. Now, I want to change gear a little bit here and talk about cadences and some of the differences based on culture and the geographical location that we're at, right? 

[06:36] Shahin Hoda  And we previously, just before we started recording, we talked about how things could be different in Abu Dhabi, in the UAE, and how it could be different in Malaysia and Australia. And there are also a lot of differences between what is happening in the US and what is happening in the UK versus what is in Australia. But what I also see is that in a lot of sense, there is a lot more outreach and sales activity happening in the US and the UK. 

[07:00] Shahin Hoda  And therefore some of those methodologies kind of move to the Australian market, and people start to adapting those. But, the way we do business, the way we go about things are a little bit different in Australia, and therefore some of those models might not necessarily work really well here. What is your experience is that, you know, have you experienced that, or, you know, you like not what works in the US works here, over here as well. 100% of the time. 

[07:27] Mark McInnes  Okay, so if I was to take, it very much depends on the persona inside the geography as well, so the geographical location. So this is what I mean by smarter targeting, we can't take it over. You can't just take a geographical view. You need to take a geographical view, as well as the ICP. And then the person that you're trying to reach as well as the industry. But we can come to that. 

[07:47] Mark McInnes  So if you take one of the American software suppliers, you know, so companies like Outreach, and those sorts of things that do automated cadences for, for sales functions, so in the sales enablement tools, very cool, great pieces of kit. And they supply a bunch of research around Outreach, and it's all focused on the US market. And if you have a look at those, they'll tell you that Outreach needs to last somewhere between 11 and 15 touches. And they'll say typically, phone call in the morning, email in the afternoon, visit someone's LinkedIn profile, three days later, email in the morning, another two days later phone call email. And that's pretty much the process. And there might be another social media interaction in there across those 11 to 12 touches or living 15 touches I should say. 

[08:28] Mark McInnes  So if I was reaching out to VP of Sales, that's probably you know, here in Australia, that's probably going to work because again, as we mentioned, VP of Sales are pretty heavy on the phone front. But it's not gonna work everywhere. And that's the danger is, I actually have clients who have got these sales enablement tools. Use their standard outreach cadence and need to change it for our market.  

[08:48] Mark McInnes  So in Australia, you would need to change that up to might because we don't answer the telephone anywhere near as many as often and as fast as what the US market does, as Australian outreach. And if we add, look at email during COVID, I'm not sure if you've seen some of the stats that have coming out of people like HubSpot, for example, there's like a 40% increase in email volume. And this is in the sales space. In the marketing space it was even more, but I don't know the numbers so talk to the sales base. 

[09:19] Mark McInnes  Forty percent increase in email volume from in sales and a 30% decrease of baseline in response rates. So there's a 40% increase in volume of baseline and of baseline there's a 30% decrease in response rates. So people aren't answering emails. So what are you going to do? So you take those standard cadences and apply that today in a time when people are desperate to start new business conversations with their clients. 

[09:40] Mark McInnes  If you take one of those standard cadences that you know everyone says is fantastic. Call in the morning, email in the afternoon. You know, I'm just giving you some examples where you're going to be significantly unsuccessful and your reps are going to stop, the sales reps are going to stop following that cadence after they get to seven or eight and they've been unsuccessful. If we add some different methods in there, then we can increase the chance that someone's going to pick up a telephone or engagement. And so I'd be advocating. And I'm assuming this is the next thing you're going to ask is what would they look like. 

[10:07] Shahin Hoda  That's right. You got it. 

[10:08] Mark McInnes  It would be things like text message, you don't want to know in Australia, people going, ah no, don't text me. You know, a text message, voicemail and people gonna say only 30% of people are going to answer voicemail. Yep, that's right. But these are exactly why we need to add different methods. 

[10:24] Mark McInnes  Direct Mail, where, you know, just, it could be something as simple as getting your favorite piece of content, printing it off in black and white writing on a post it note. Hey Shahin, thought this was particularly interesting for you, really thought that the second page was going to have the most impact because you're in B2B marketing, sticking in envelope, write on a poster,and send it to your desk. Ring up two days later, hey did you get the the letter that I sent you? 

[10:46] Mark McInnes  Cheap, easy, scalable, a bit old school. But if you've got something on your desk, and then you're getting a couple of phone calls and text message, and I'm visiting your LinkedIn profile, maybe I'm sending you a LinkedIn invite as well, you know, you're building up a story. And that's what I talked about, you know, like is we have a story, instead of trying to get them knockout meeting with one email that people aren't going to read anyway. 

[11:08] Mark McInnes  Like, build a story, build up some prospecting pressure, to try and start a conversation so that after you've had four or five touches across multiple platforms, you're like, you know, this guy, this girl obviously has a message that they think is very important for me, I'm going to take the call, I'm going to take the email. So let me ask you Shahin, how many, so think about people that send you spam emails, you know, the classic is the SEO, how many times did they reach out to you before they stopped? 

[11:34] Shahin Hoda  Look, majority do one or two? Right? And I think that's a big problem. But I think, you know, it's an interesting question that you bring up, how many times they reach out, even if they reach out multiple times, I think one of the mistakes that a lot of people make is that we reach out multiple times through one channel only, right?

[11:52] Shahin Hoda  It's just through email, there might be one additional component that they would put put maybe a LinkedIn invite in there. But that's it. And I think there is a lot of they leave a lot on the table by not utilizing a lot of things that you talked about, direct mail, you know, being even more active on LinkedIn, phone calls, you know, there's a, especially in the smaller businesses of a 100 and or 150 and above and below, there is a resistance on making cold phone calls. Have you experienced that as well? 

[12:24] Mark McInnes  Yeah, there is. And that's because, you know, people don't want to be seen as unethical. Like sales people want to be professional. Salespeople typically understand the value that they bring to their clients when they're successful, right? So when people buy your products and services, and get a real benefit out of it, they get a result. So if you have that right mindset going into the conversation, you shouldn't have any cold call reluctance, but they do. 

[12:45] Mark McInnes  And I think this is part of the challenges, you need to set salespeople up in the first instance, that with the right mindset, they're going to have a conversation with people and the products and services that the vendor supplies is a real value. You know, so that you're actually bringing something that's going to be worthwhile to the person on the other end of the telephone. And I think once you've got that mindset, it's significantly easier for you to build out cadences like this, because you know, that once you've had the conversation, the worst thing they could possibly say is, you know what, great conversation. We've already got one, you know? 

[13:16] Shahin Hoda  I'm not interested, thank you very much. And I've had that, you know, I've people are like, oh, this is a great initiative, but I'm not interested right now. 

[13:23] Mark McInnes  But that's not for me.

[13:24] Shahin Hoda  Yeah. 

[13:26] Mark McInnes  But too many salespeople come in at from features and benefits side, right. So they go, oh, you know, we've got, we're selling some security software. And you know, you just plug it in, and we've got six more USB outputs, and then there's competitor. Download speeds three times faster. You know, like, no one cares about that stuff, right? Yeah. But if they said, look, chances are you're running a lot of zoom meetings, and I bet you hate it when you freeze up. Will you know why that is? That's because you've probably not a good enough plan and you need to get a faster download speed. We can help you with that. Is that something that's gonna, that would make it easier? Oh, yeah. So you know, it's about moving away from it. But salespeople aren't so good at that sometimes. 

[14:05] Shahin Hoda  They're getting there. We're getting there. 

[14:09] Shahin Hoda  In your book, you talked about building your own cadence. And you talked about the eight week kind of cycle plus one week for going back into the cycle. Can you tell us a little bit about that? 

[15:17] Mark McInnes  Yes. So I understand that starting a process like this can be difficult. So I've broken it down into a process. Again, this is this military training, where people can start almost immediately. So if you think about a typical outreach in a B2B situation, I might say, how long do you think we should be pursuing exploits for a start a conversation? And the sales rep might say, well, eight weeks would be a reasonable amount of time. And he said, okay, well, how often do you think we should reach out? So and this is where it's a little bit different to America and America, they'd say, oh, three times a week. 

[15:47] Mark McInnes  So I'm in Australia, for example, we're more likely to say probably once a week, maybe once every four business days. But to make it easy for our math, let's say once a week, it's like, Okay, so we've decided that in an ethical outreach strategy to start a conversation with your business would be eight weeks, we're going to have one outreach a week, that means we need to plan eight strategies. Eight outreach strategy needs to have multiple touches. 

[16:08] Mark McInnes  So for example, that might be, most definitely start with  an email and a phone call. It's our introductory phone call. And it might be a visit of their profile. We're now, so we can figure out how to do that we can build that script in possibly half an hour. Okay, and we probably got the email ready to go because we've got an introductory email. We deliver that across those three or four, five prospects. The next thing we do is we can prepare for next week's content. So next week, we might decide that we're going to send another email, maybe we're going to make a phone call, leave a voicemail, and send them a text message. 

[16:39] Mark McInnes  So we can prepare that content now. So to start of week one, in preparation for week two. So there's no need for us to go and build out a whole bunch of marketing collateral or sales collateral, because we can build it as we go. So the first week, if we put five customers, five prospects into the pipeline, into the cadence. We're gonna send five emails and make five phone calls, right? The second week, we add another five in and they get that first week's activity, and the first weekend becomes, moves into the second week. 

[17:07] Mark McInnes  Because we've already prepared the content for the first week, we don't need to prepare anything for the second group of five. We've already got them. So all we need to do is take action. I've done my sums on six minutes per outreach, eight outreach attempts, so each attempt is multiple channels. So at the same time, I would call you, may or may not leave a voicemail, but let's just say I call you, you don't pick up. I then send you a follow up email, I go and visit your LinkedIn profile. That's one attempt, multiple channels all happening straightaway. 

[17:35] Mark McInnes  Okay, total preparation time, all I need to do is have a script for the phone call, you probably not gonna answer anyway. And introductory email. I'm not asking for the knockout punch, because I know that I'm going to tell a story across the eight week period, I've now got those resources and every time I put somebody into the first week of the funnel, I just regurgitate to do exactly the same thing. The second week, we move the first group along to the second week, we conduct the second week's activity, which could be you know, an email and other phone call, we might leave a voicemail this time, and we might leave a text message. 

[18:02] Mark McInnes  So we prepared that content the week before at the end of our outreach on week two, we've now got 10 prospects in the pipeline. So that might take a maximum of 60 minutes worth of outreach in total. And we spend 20 minutes preparing for the third week's outreach. And we might know, you know what, let's make a video message. Let's video ourselves talking against their LinkedIn profile. So when it lands in their email, you know, there's a picture of the prospect and me in the corner saying, hey, how are you going? 

[18:27] Mark McInnes  You know, I've been trying to reach out over the last couple of weeks, I think there's really valuable reason for us to have a conversation XYZ, thought I'd send a video message just to break up the routine. What I'm going to do is reach out again next week, I'm really looking forward to having a chat, that sort of thing. So we then start to prepare next week. So we're now up to Week 4, we've got 15 people in the pipeline, and we're about to put our 20th people in, five people per week. 

[18:48] Mark McInnes  I didn't write a little, I go to the printer, I print out my favorite case study or write a little hand note, hey Shahin, thought you'd like this case study. It's really relevant because xyz, please go straight to page four I've highlighted the areas I think's most valuable for you. Put it in an envelope, handwrite it stick it in the mail. When I ring next week, guess what I can say, hey, Shahin, did you get the letter I sent you last week. And it doesn't matter whether it's a arrived yet or not, right. So if you get a letter from somebody, they've been your LinkedIn profile, you've got a message on your mobile phone, like you're starting to think this is unusual. 

[19:18] Mark McInnes  Now I get that these all these channels aren't going to work for everybody. But as you build, you know, so people want on a construction site might not have as much access to email, you know what I mean? But they're going to be more likely to answer their mobile telephone. People that are sitting behind a desk, for example, might not answer their telephone and might just let every single one of those slide through. But if you can refer to your phone calls, they're going to start to go I can see how this guy's or this girl's reaching out. They've obviously got something of value. Let's have a conversation. 

[19:46] Mark McInnes  As you highlighted the bar for most outrageous, so low, two or three emails, if we're really lucky two or three hours in a phone call. That's it. So if you can make a message that's ethical, short, users influence as in, you know, persuasion and is targeted, personalised, there's a high probability you're going to get a very high success rate. And so I've got B2B teams that are getting response rates of 60%. So if we put five people into an eight week cadence, by the time we get to the end of the eight weeks, there's only two people who haven't responded. And I want to be clear here, right? So we may well have had one of those three that have responded that have said no, and through our professional persistence, we're going to get more nose physical nose responding than just people ignoring us because of the persistence. 

[20:30] Shahin Hoda  Yeah, and you want to get to know, right? Because no one allows you to say, all right, this is out, I don't need to spend any more time on it put in fresh prospects that I can follow through. So that's amazing. To get to know it's not a bad thing. If somebody's listening be like, oh, well, if they just said, No, that's what's the point of it. But it's the Connect rate, which is really important. 60% is amazing. And then refilling that pipeline. That's really cool. 

[20:54] Shahin Hoda  And I really like your approach with drip feeding those numbers at the beginning. Because I feel like, you know, in a lot of situations for salespeople, there is a massive barrier of, okay, who am I going to reach out to, I got to prepare this list, I got to have this, maybe 200 people that I want, and I have to like get their LinkedIn profiles and now and I have to get insights on them and what they're talking about and get their email addresses and all that stuff. 

[21:22] Shahin Hoda  And that could be extremely daunting, and could really kill someone's let's call a stamina, or that just, you know, the flow of going ahead and reaching out to people, and it just kind of could, you know, building a proper list could take a month, right? And it completely derails the whole process. 

[21:40] Shahin Hoda  I really like that approach of put five in, do some work, put another five, put another five, that's really awesome. What about, you know, you talked about voice messaging over here. And I'd love to get your input on that as well. How do you go about structuring a voice message? You know, is it the blend, you know, hey, this is this person, I'd like to have a chat if you could give me a call back or there is you keep it super simple, or there is an art to it? 

[22:08] Mark McInnes  Well, I don't think there's an art to it. But I certainly do something or subscribe, prescribe something a little bit different. And I don't expect a phone call back. I tell my clients not to expect a call back on the voice message on voicemail. And I don't think many people listening to voicemails these days, I think there's a small section of the community, maybe 30% that do. But because 30% do that's pretty good response rate, or that's a pretty good open rate for want of the better word.  

[22:31] Mark McInnes  So I would just say hi, Shahin, it's Mark; and I've just sent you an email two minutes ago, or I've just called you and couldn't get through. What I'm going to do is I'm going to try again next week, there's a bunch of resources I've sent through on the email, look forward to speaking shortly. So I wouldn't even ask for a callback. So it's really just part of that touch, it's building a story. When you build out a cadence, you remove the necessity for every touch to be a winner. There's less pressure, right? So if you know that you're going to reach out eight times, and you're going to use two or three vehicles, two or three channels every time that 16 to 24 touches.  

[23:01] Mark McInnes  So if my voicemail doesn't work, that's one of 24 so there's 23 left. If my first email doesn't work, which is why I've still got 22 left. If he doesn't respond to my connection requests, it's close to 21 left. What I see time and time again, I go into businesses and their emails are like every single reason possible why you must take a meeting, you know, like, we're the best. We're ranked number one, we work with BHP, we've worked with Rio Tinto, you know, we've worked with Coca Cola, we've done da da da da da da, you know, and we've written a book.  

[23:25] Mark McInnes  And you know, here's a link to my blog, and here's linked to my LinkedIn profile. And and and and and. And you're like... And what happens is, it looks like sales spiel, right? Like vomit. When it lands in your inbox, it looks like everything else. Like oh, man, that's killing me, delete. It could have been the best message, it could have been the best product in the world. So if you take that typical outrage and spread that across four emails, I did this last night with a team in a middle Asia in Vietnam and Thailand. So you know, they literally their first email was all of those things, everything we've got there, we just need to break that up into four emails. 

[23:58] Mark McInnes  So I had a link to a blog, there are 16 reasons why people should engage with them. You know, all their authority pieces. I said, oh, great. Let's just use that. And now I email this and that one. The voicemail piece, I think he use the same approach. And then what I do immediately after that, and this is where I get some push back until people have tried it. As soon as you send a voicemail, you send your business card in a text message. So you know how I can send your details to somebody else. So you create your own business card in your mobile phone, right? 

[24:25] Mark McInnes  So I've got Mark McInnes, my email address, my phone number, my business name, all that stuff, right? You haven't picked up your phone, I've left a message that said, hey, you know, this is why I'm calling, completely understand you're not picking up. I'll send you an email, have a look at some detail in there. I don't send you a text message that says, hi Shahin, completely understand you're not picking up a mobile number you didn't know. Here's my contact details. Gonna be reaching out over the next couple of weeks to try to have a conversation, best, Mark. That's it. 

[24:49] Mark McInnes  All I'm trying to do is getting their mobile phone and you'll be surprised people will respond and say, ah cool. Can you call me tomorrow? Can you call me next week? Like that actually happens. So you're not pushing but people will open that. We've got a 97% open rate of text messages in Australia. So people will see that they'll then go, oh, hang on, I've got an email in my inbox. Two seconds later, because you've sent a little template and we're not massive emails. It's just like, hey Shahin, these are the things I want to talk to you about. I think they're important for you because this is how we should respond. And that's it. 

[25:18] Mark McInnes  And then you're going, okay, this person is starting to surround me in a nice way. Next minute, you're on the bus, when we used to get on public transport, and you'll be on your, you'll be on LinkedIn, and someone's sent me a connection request someone's viewed my profile oh, it's Mark again. Nobody prospects this way. But if you believe that what you take into the marketplace, if you believe what you deliver to your customers has real commercial value. Why wouldn't you be persistent enough to take this approach? 

[25:45] Shahin Hoda  Multi-channel, multi-threaded? That's right. That's right. I love it. There is so much that you've talked about that salespeople should include their cadence that they're not. You talked about video, you talked about direct mail, you talked about text message. Is there something that you think it's like a note, especially for the Australian market? It's a no, no, or, you know, it's a bit iffy to kind of have in a cadence you've come across. And you're like, not so sure if we should do that?  

[26:11] Mark McInnes  Yeah. So look, I would say that text messages and phone calls in some sectors of the Australian market don't go down very well. So I've spent a year prospecting for an organisation to a head of HR, like a very senior HR. And in, you know, Australia's top 20 organisations. They don't take kindly to unsolicited phone outreach. So I would be reluctant. And my advice would be not to do that in that marketplace. And this is why the building of your ICP is very important. Because I think you need to find a more credible way to get there. These people are decision makers, you know, spending a lot of money. And they do get a lot of merch sent their way. You know, a lot of you know, books, that sort of thing. 

[26:50] Mark McInnes  So I would be an advocate of a handwritten note, you know, that I mentioned before. That's going to have a significant higher level of cut through something that's authentic. And the reason why I said before, when I said send a direct message, send the direct mail, just highlight the pieces that are important is we're still asking people to donate some time to read a piece of content or to read, you know, whatever it is that we send them. 

[27:11] Mark McInnes  If we can cut to the chase and say, look, the second paragraph on page two is the piece, I really want you to have a look at. The reciprocity angles just going through the roof, because this person's just sent me the information plus, they've saved me a whole bunch of time, and I can consume this information in three minutes. You know, how many people have sent you a white paper with four pages? And you've gone a bit there, there's some value in there, but I've never read it? 

[27:29] Shahin Hoda  I'm not going to touch it. That's right. There are so many white papers on my desktop waiting right now to be read. In fact, it's there's so many, have to create a folder, grab all of them and put it in there. Guess what, that is never gonna get open. It gets open in very, very rare cases. And yeah, you're right. 

[27:50] Mark McInnes  But you put something else in there. 

[27:51] Shahin Hoda  That's it. that's the only time. So you're right. And making it easy for them, making it in a way that they don't need to think, it becomes super fluid is so super important. And also shows that you bloody care, right? 

[28:06] Mark McInnes  Yeah, yeah, that's right. So you're lifting the level of authenticity, you're also lifting the level of them really understanding that you're not just, this is not a tactic that you do to 1000 people at once, right? Because you come in handwritten notes you can send out today, we've probably seen 50. But you've got to remember that most salespeople in Australia are managing both existing business and new business.

[28:27] Mark McInnes  So if they can do five brand new prospecting activities into their pipeline, five brand new prospects into their cadence every week, I think that's a win, because then using a quick example, they're going to be managing a maximum of 40. Most salespeople don't have that many new opportunities in the front of their pipeline. They might have 40 names and one of 100 names, like I said before, but they're not deliberately pursuing them to have a conversation. 

[28:51] Shahin Hoda  That's very true. Now, this has been very insightful. And it's just been a lot of golden nuggets been thrown around. Before we wrap up, is there anything that you think I didn't ask that that could be valuable from the conversation that we had that you want to cover? 

[29:05] Mark McInnes  So maybe the biggest blow back that we get is if people just think this is significantly hard to implement, and the realities, the very starting point, we have to get our sales people and put them aside and really start with what are the outcomes that we produce for our clients. So the stronger that the sales rep, and using that, as an umbrella term, understands the commercial output, or the commercial results that our clients get, the stronger they're gonna be able to hold the cadence. 

[29:31] Mark McInnes  So if they know that this you know, I'm selling to CFOs, and that, you know, the product or service that I produce means that the CFO has more clarity, if it's a CRM tool, or the CFO can forecasting more with more accuracy, for example, and you can take those conversations all the way to the CFO, you can be more likely to stay with a cadence. The challenge is that most sales reps will go, I'm not comfortable sending out a video I don't I'm not sure I should be texting. When you realize how important those conversations actually are. You're going to push through those barriers and go, yep, I deserve to have this conversation. And that's the hardest challenge, I think. 

[30:04] Shahin Hoda  Yeah, yeah, that's all it, you have to believe that you are the price, right? Yeah. And that's going to allow you to push through that. There was a point that you previously mentioned. And I said, this is going to be the last one. But I really wanted to dig a little bit into that. You mentioned that in Australia, a lot of salespeople manage both existing clients, and they have to generate new opportunities. Do you think that's a flawed model? Like, do you think we need to move away from that, and have that kind of SDR, AE model or nah, that's not gonna work? What are your thoughts on it?

[30:34] Mark McInnesOkay, so there's actually a lot of conversation at the moment that the SDR model is on the decline globally. And I agree. In Australia, and this is the reason why I've developed this methodology specifically for us here in APAC is that we don't have 350 million people. In America, you can burn through leads really quickly. In Australia, you can't. We don't have the same amount of people, you know. New Zealand's even less Singapore's, you know, only 25 million people. So, you know, so each one of those regions, we just don't have the opportunities that we do in America. 

[31:02] Mark McInnesSo I would say no, we should be staying with that sort of senior BDM, senior AE also has to find a new business, partly because they can carry that conversation that I just talked about more strongly. If you're part of, you know, if I'm in your business, I can see the results that I'm that our products and services are creating, at a commercial outcome or commercial business outcomes, I can then take that back to my prospects and say, look, I've just helped a business just like yours that's got 40 people that's in the marketing space. 

[31:27] Mark McInnesAnd these are the great results they're getting using our tool, I think you're going to benefit from having a conversation at very least I can share some insights. If you're an SDR typically they start at a relatively young salespeople, they don't have that commercial view. They're stuck with the quality of their scripts. It's hard to write a script that's going to bring commercial insights. So I think the BDM model, or the salesperson doing both new and existing is probably here to stay and the SDR model will be on the way out. 

[31:54] Shahin Hoda  Very interesting. All right. Well, Mark, thank you very much for this chat. I've definitely enjoyed it. And I think a lot of the listeners will get a lot out of it as well. So thanks for coming on the show. 

[32:04] Mark McInnes  Absolutely. My pleasure. And thanks very much.