How to SCALE Your Sales Team Ft. Jed Marhle | Revenue Reimagined Ep. 014

Jed Marhle's approach to scaling an SDR team starts with founder or leader-led testing before bringing on a single rep, establishing a repeatable baseline process first. He details his progression from taking the first calls himself to hiring reps in pairs, ensuring new SDRs have a proven path to hit quota before encouraging them to innovate. This methodical approach limits early attrition and gives reps a reliable framework for success from day one. A major theme of the episode is the critical relationship between SDRs and AEs. Jed explains the importance of creating clear SLAs for qualified opportunities, building mutual empathy, and utilizing data to identify the right coaching moments. He specifically highlights the value of peer-led coaching, where top-performing reps share their distinct winning tactics with the rest of the team, fostering a collaborative culture rather than a top-down mandate. As AI floods the market with automated cold outreach, Jed advocates for hyper-specific targeting over just clever copywriting. Finding the right buying triggers and building personal brands on LinkedIn helps reps cut through the noise. Additionally, he highlights the tactical advantage of securing customer reference commitments early in the sales cycle to leverage in future deals.

Discussed in this episode

• Why transitioning to Sales Ops is an attractive career pivot for sales leaders.
• Using individual rep strengths to lead peer-to-peer team coaching sessions.
• Defining strict, documented SLAs to qualify opportunities between SDRs and AEs.
• Avoiding emotional coaching based on a single failed call or successful email.
• Why hyper-specific list targeting matters more than copywriting in the AI era.
• Identifying niche buying triggers to stand out in a crowded market.
• Testing messaging for three months to build a baseline playbook before hiring SDRs.
• Negotiating customer reference commitments at the point of close for future leverage.

Episode highlights

1. 0:00 — Introduction to Jed Marhle
2. 2:15 — The appeal of Sales Ops
3. 6:30 — Peer-to-peer coaching strategies
4. 10:45 — Avoiding emotional coaching decisions
5. 14:10 — SDR and AE relationship SLAs
6. 18:20 — Targeting vs copywriting in email
7. 25:15 — The playbook for hiring SDRs
8. 34:10 — Securing customer references early

Key takeaways

• Hire SDRs in pairs to benchmark performance and mitigate early attrition.
• Let data, not emotion or gut feel, drive your team coaching strategy.
• Relevant list targeting will always outperform clever but generic copywriting.
• Use peer-led coaching to showcase top performers and motivate the wider team.
• Secure future customer references by negotiating them during the closing process.

Transcript

And I I'm very transparent in terms of the numbers we need to hit on the closing side with the SDRs. So I say, look, this is the revenue number they need to hit. And I try to get them to see their perspective. Both so they can see what it's like to be an AE, but also understand, look, if we're hitting these revenue numbers, that means more opportunity for you to get promoted.

Welcome back to another episode of The Revenue Reimagined Podcast. Our guest today is none other than Jed Marley, who is the director of sales at Mailshake, the creator of the Practical Prospecting Newsletter, which goes out to over 13,000 readers by weekly. One of the few newsletters that I actually do read. Um, and previously prior to Mailshake, Jed started his career at PandaDoc, uh, another product that I actually do use, helping scale and manage his B outbound SDR team from three to over 20.

Jed, thanks so much for being here, man. Yeah, thanks guys. Super excited to be here. Thanks for the intro.

Awesome. Thanks for being here. So, we're going to kick this off a little bit for reimagining your, uh, your position. So, you're in sales, but let's say you had to go into a different, uh, position to go to market strategy.

What department would you go into and why? Ooh, a separate, if I had to go into a different department than sales leadership. Yeah. You can't sell, you can't sell anymore, man.

No more selling. I would definitely do sales operations because to be honest, uh, it, it sounds nice to not always have to talk to people all day long. And I understand and I know that sounds contradictory being a sales leader, but it does sound nice. I understand then you probably have to deal with all the internal slacks and everybody else's problem, but I do love the operations side of things and I'm really deep into looking at different, uh, tech tools and how they work together and that sort of stuff does really excite me.

So, if there ever does come that time, it would probably be sales operations. I love that. You know, it, it's funny you say that. Dale and I talk about this a lot with work we do together, like what, what does he like to do and what do I like to do and I happen to and I'm very much the, you know, extrovert, outgoing sales leader, right?

Very similar to you. Um, but I love the op side. I love sitting down and building out our Monday playbooks and like looking at the tech stack and integrating stuff together and making sure that it's working. Um, and to your point not talking to anyone for a few hours is sometimes a very nice thing.

But sales It's funny, like a lot of sales leaders actually do talk rev ops, like they're like, I'd love to like do rev ops. I think one of them said, hey, I, I love to give unrealistic quotas to people and like get things out there where they have to just like start doing their own, uh, doing their own input to to sales force and that kind of stuff, so, it's kind of funny. Well, yeah, and that's the thing, at Mailshake too, we have, uh, a relative, it's, you know, a smaller startup. I've been here for a year and a half and, um, that's just comes with part of the game is that you're not just sales leader, you're also doing sales ops, enablement and everything in between.

So, I've, I've gotten to kind of try my hand in all of different stuff. So, it's funny, you say that and I love that, but when we talk about rev ops in a lot of companies, rev ops isn't rev ops, right? Rev ops is sales ops. Rev ops is some person who's a sales force administrator, who's like building custom fields and, and that's about it.

I, I'd love to know like you worked at PandaDoc when they were small. You, you're at Mailshake now, arguably small and growing, like, in your mind, what is rev ops? And how does it differ from sales ops? Yeah, I mean, that's a good question.

I guess, I don't know if I'd have the best answer for that, but, um, I, I would say it's just enablement. Like, getting really in the weeds with the sales reps and figuring out where are they actually slowing down and what, what's kind of like getting them caught up, which is hard to do when you're remote, is one thing that I've noticed, because when I was at PandaDoc, half my time there, I was in person, so I could actually see people's screens and see where they're getting slowed down. Um, specifically in like sequencing tools. Like if I'm talking about an SDR team, the process of like, getting leads, um, getting those into a sequencing tool, following the steps.

There's so many extra buttons that folks click and little things that kind of slow them down. And it's hard to catch those things when you're remote. So like, kind of to answer your question, it's just finding all the little broken pieces and folks' processes and finding ways to enable them to be much more efficient, which again, is really hard when you're remote, but what I try to do is, you know, jump on Zoom calls and do entire like process walk-throughs with every rep from beginning to end and it's super painful and slow and nobody loves to do it, but you always pick up on little things. And if you do that with your whole team, then you can come through and say, hey, here are the little things I noticed and let's, you know, work on ways to fix this, whether that's, I mean, hopefully not, you know, adding additional tech, but finding new ways to leverage the tech you already have to, you know, kind of put things together more efficiently.

And I, and I love what you're saying, so it's, it's super interesting. Most good sales leaders do a lot of coaching. Like, how do, how can I make you more effective? It's not like, go do this or go do that, but, but the good leaders are all about effectiveness, all about helping out their team.

So, what's, um, what, when you go through that process with your team, what's the best way or what are some little tricks and tips that you can give leaders out there to be more effective in the coaching that they're giving their, their teams? Yeah, um, I try to have, uh, other reps on my team kind of coach them. So like, what, what you try to do is like we have coaching calls every week, but every person on your team is typically the best at one specific thing ideally, right? Like they do something that's better than everybody else.

Everybody kind of has their own strengths. And so, I try to kind of play into that. And so, like one thing I've found that's helpful is like having them coach the team. So we'll jump on a call and we'll say, hey, I've got a rep on my team, Caesar, who's by far the best cold caller out of anybody on the team, right?

And so, they see him putting up the numbers every day. Me as a sales leader, I still get in there and cold call sometimes, but I want to leverage the fact that Caesar is the one that's booking the most meetings from cold calls. And so they want to learn from him and what he's doing as their peer, who's doing it every single day more than I am. And so I try to get them to, uh, and it's also a way to kind of challenge them and if they want to get into management, it's a way to kind of give them some opportunities.

And so, um, you know, I like to set it up. I say, like, here's the clear data of why it's working for him. He's clearly, you know, in this example is Caesar, booking more meetings than anybody else on the phone. And then work with Caesar like one-on-one first to kind of come up with a plan in terms of how he wants to present what's working well, and then have him coach the team.

And so, uh, I guess the, yeah, to answer your question is like, finding the strengths of folks in your team and then using that, uh, to coach the rest of the team. So I think there's so many people. I, I love that you said that for starters. Um, using the data, finding what's working and using it to coach the rest of the team.

Whether you're a sales leader or whether you're a founder, I find a lot of folks struggle with that, right? It, it tends to be a lot of this gut feel, um, I think this works. It's part of the reason I, I shared with both of you and anyone listening, like I, I don't have my hoodie on today, right? So like I'm, I'm onsite with a client.

Um, and that's one of the things that we're going over now is like rather than this gut feel, Dale's just impressed I actually have a collar. Um, rather rather than this gut feel, like how do we make decisions based on data? How do we use that data to make the rest of the team better? And I think a lot of sales leaders and a lot of founders, like I was saying, don't know how to do that.

They get wrapped up in this gut feel. As someone who leads a team of what I believe is the hardest role in all of sales, um, you know, SDR BDR outbound. Um, how do you not fall in that trap of, uh, you know, Bob says this is working great or like I think this is going to be good. Like how do you make sure that you really are data focused and get your team to buy into that?

Yeah, there there's two sides to that, because the other side to it too is like, um, like, so I have I manage a team of kind of executives and SDRs as well. So like I'll take an example where let's say I listen to a an AE's call and they just, they, they butchered something. It's so obvious and I'm sure sales leaders have seen this and you're just so frustrated, right? And you're like emotional in the moment.

You're like, damn, I need to coach the whole team on this because we just got this wrong, we blew this opportunity. And so what I try to do is like, cuz I get emotional with it a lot, you know, I'll hear things or I'm like, I know we've coached on it, I know we can do that better, but it's, it's, so like there's a flip side to it when you hear something negative, not not just coaching on that immediately because it happened one time. Also on the positive, right? Especially managing SDR teams, um, my SDRs and I think most are particularly creative and they'll always come up with new ideas, um, for, for how to source pipeline or, oh I have this new email template that's working, right?

Well, you have to kind of dig in a little bit deeper and not just let the excitement or the negative emotions, uh, you know, draw you to immediately coach on that, because an SDR will book a meeting with this one template and say, this is the golden template, guys, we have to use it. But you have to, you know what I mean, you have to, Booked one meeting, it's perfect. Yeah, yeah, exactly. And so, I try, again, it kind of most of my coaching style kind of comes back on the team and I say, like, okay, great.

I mean, how many times have you sent this template? Um, what do you think are maybe some of the frameworks around this template that's working, uh, and also like, I guess asking them questions to get them to see the full picture. Like was it just the template that you used or were you just targeting the right, did you do something some sort of strategy with the type of lead you were targeting or, um, was it a particular sequence? And so, uh, kind of like getting them to see the full picture beyond that and, uh, and, uh, and kind of coaching from there is, is, is probably my strategy.

The, the why is super important. I think a lot of people don't get to the why, like they say, go do this and they don't tell them why they, why you need to go do that. And so, I love that you, you actually talk to them about the why of it. So, you actually, you don't, you don't ever give me the why.

You just tell me to go do shit for you. Well, that's you're different. You're, you're a, you're, you're a different, uh, different world. Ever feel like keeping your CRM updated with call notes is a nightmare?

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tech. Um, so you, you manage both SDRs and AEs. And so, when, how do you manage it when like an SDR flips a like completely crap lead over to the AE or flips that like a really good lead goes to the AE and the AE totally blows it? And now like the SDR is like, hey, I just gave him all these good leads and like they're blowing it.

Like, how do you balance that between the two teams? Yeah, that's really tough, cuz I remember, like, at at PandaDoc for a long time I was just managing SDRs and, uh, I never saw that other side of the picture before I started closing a little bit. And and, uh, you know, you always have that frustration, like, just take the damn opportunity. Like, you know what I mean?

And so, and so now here, at Mailshake, I'm seeing both sides of it, right? And, um, I think there's a few things. So, like in the beginning, we had no, uh, I guess SLA for what a qualified opportunity was. And that wasn't very clearly documented.

So there was a big gray area in terms of, uh, like what was qualified and what wasn't. And so I think that's the number one, like most tactical thing, is just having it well documented where everybody can see it, what is a qualified opportunity, so that we know what we need to be passing over. But then also, kind of to your point earlier, giving them the why behind it. And I think, particularly at an early stage startup, the SDRs as well and just, I mean, at any company really, but particularly at an early stage startup, the SDRs have to understand that, like, we're not just booking meetings to book meetings, like we need revenue.

And so, and getting and and helping them see their career path in that. And saying like, look, and I'm very transparent in terms of the numbers we need to hit on the closing side with the SDRs. So I say, look, this is the revenue number they need to hit. And I try to get them to see their perspective.

Both so they can see what it's like to be an AE, but also understand, look, if we're hitting these revenue numbers, that means more opportunity for you to get promoted and to move into those positions. But if we're passing them over opportunities that can't be closed, we obviously don't have that opportunity to, you know, continue to grow the team and things of that nature. So I try to get them bought in on that side. And then on the AE side as well.

I mean, it's easier if that AE was an SDR recently or before. Yeah. So, so they kind of have that and. Some empathy around it, some like, yeah.

Yeah, exactly. But I also try to tell them too, just from my experience as an SDR, um, for the reps who maybe don't have that much experience, I'm like, hey, just so you know, like our just try to give them perspective. Like, we had one rep who was, uh, who, who was getting, uh, just, I guess, better opportunities, more opportunities. I'm like, why do you think they're getting more opportunities or better opportunities?

It's because they have a really good relationship with the SDR team. And so I was just, basically trying to get them to see, like, look, if you really value your SDR and you just, uh, you kind of go that extra step for them, somehow magically, you're probably going to end up getting more opportunities, you're going to get better opportunities, uh, in the long run. So it's kind of 100%. So Jed, I, I used to manage both sides as well and one of the things, and as when I used to carry a bag, I used to like, love hanging out with my, my BDR, my ACR, like, um, account planning with them.

Like, if if as an AE, you can actually help your SDR grow through the process, you'll get much better results out of the SDR BDR. And the AE should realize in general that they're lucky to have this resource that, because if they didn't have the resource, they'd have to go source a lot of it themselves. And so, um, and and then the other side of it, I always made my AEs source 20% of their, their own leads. Like, you still got to go source your own stuff.

Like, you're going to feel the pain if you're if you're not doing that as well. Yeah, yeah, 100%. That that SDR BDR and AE partnership is so important. And we we spent a lot of time focusing on that at Toast.

You know, almost to the point that if the AE wasn't helping coach, helping guide that BDR, providing valuable feedback and not being an A-hole about it. Um, we would actually pull the BDR. Like if you can't create a partnership and mentor and if you can't treat people right, like, this is a privilege, not a God-given right that you get, you know, an SDR to help build your territory. I, I love Jed, how you talked about like that if it's that that one email that worked, doesn't mean that we suddenly all need to change and that's the email that we need to use, right?

Or conversely, you know, the one person who said unsubscribe, doesn't mean, wait a minute, we have to abandon this. And I, I talk a lot about more so with customers, but I think it ties in here, like, is what we're hearing important and actionable or is it just loud? Like, do you have a customer who's just being an A-hole and they're loud or is this like legit a problem? And I think that same mentality could be applied here when you look at, you know, hey, this email booked a meeting or two meetings, that's great.

Let's double down and see if it continues to work and then let's continue to tweak it. When you look at, you know, cold email and and sequence building now, like, AI's changing the game. We all get, you know, hundreds of emails a week, sometimes a day. Um, I literally probably have 54 emails that I've gotten this morning.

How are you building and coaching your teams to stand out from the noise? Aside from like the technology of Mailshake. Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, of course.

Um, yeah, so there's there's kind of a lot that goes into that. First of all, on the AI side of things, we do use AI, um, quite a bit. I do think it's important, just because it's changing so fast and you don't want to be the one to kind of left behind. Um, but I think the most important part of like cold email and of course we teach copywriting and all that stuff, but I think it's more so like who you target.

And so we actually spend more of our time on like who we're going after rather than like how to write a better email. Because, you know, we can use templates with, we can coach on copywriting and that sort of stuff, but if you're targeting the wrong people in general, it's kind of the foundation of everything else you do. So if you have a bad list, you can write a great email, but the results aren't going to be as good. But I've found if you have really hyper-specific targeting and you're going after the right people, um, it almost doesn't matter as much how well you write your email.

If it's relevant, they're going to respond. It's kind of that concept of like, uh, I forget who talks about this, but it's like, there's the hot dog stand outside of a baseball game. Everybody's hungry. There's nowhere else to get food.

It's like, that's the crowd. You can sell that hot dog for 20 bucks and everybody's hungry. If you can find that crowd in your prospect list, it doesn't matter what email you send them. They're going to respond because they need it.

And so, we spend a lot of our time, we use AI, for example, um, to help us with with targeting. And so, for example, there's like, I mean, there's a tool, like we use a tool called Clay, for example, to help us get really specific with our targeting. Clay's cool. Yeah, Clay's really cool.

And you can do like a free trial on the, and and, you know, I know not everybody wants to go buy additional tech. There's ways to do this with Sales Navigator, etc. But what we do is we every month, the SDRs are looking at all the demos that they booked. And they're trying to break down, how did I book that demo?

What are the commonalities across all these accounts and contacts that I can use to kind of further focus my energy next month? So, maybe they found that, hey, we're particularly booking with this specific title of this type of company. They have this team size, they're using this technology stack. And so when we're building our list, we're getting really hyper-specific with who those folks are.

And, um, and and and that's really where most of our success from email comes through. It's looking for really intentional buying triggers. Um, like I'll I'll give you an example. We noticed that a lot of our customers, you know, we sell an email deliverability software as part of what we do.

Um, folks who sell to security, uh, ICPs, they have really strict firewalls. So it's hard to get your emails through their inbox. And we noticed that a lot of the customers that we were closing were folks that did sell to security or legal teams that, um, have strict firewalls. And so we started targeting a little bit more intentional towards companies that sell to those markets.

And we found a really good kind of buying trigger to go after. And so, um, kind of a long-winded answer, but again, uh, yeah, most of our email success and what we're doing and how I'm coaching my team is on the targeting side of things because I think copywriting is actually much easier to learn, um, uh, rather than the targeting side of things. Yeah, I just saw a video that you posted on, uh, what Jordan was doing, right? So Jordan's like, don't, don't look at the ICP from a, from a, um, uh, a number of customer number of employees, uh, customer perspective, but look at who they're hiring and why they're hiring and start pulling triggers and identification of why that's happening, because it may lead into certain trigger points like you're saying, like what, what's like really the value proposition that you can deliver.

Mailshake can deliver, like, deliver emails and it's really hard to deliver emails if you're trying to get through a firewall. So, like if, you know, it's a really hot trigger point. And then if you can B2B market that on the top side, like if you can give air cover around that, it makes it so much easier for the BDRs and the and the AEs to get meetings because now they're like, people know who Mailshake is, you understand the the value proposition and it's like, oh yeah, then you get an email and like it's not the copywriting is less important. Even though it is important, but it's less important than it would be traditionally.

Yeah, 100%. Jed, let me let me ask you. So you you started at PandaDoc early, you started at Mailshake early. Um, one of the things that we talk about a lot of times is kind of that transition from founder led sales and how to properly build out a sales team.

And a big part of that is how to build out a SDR team. And a lot of founders have this mindset that like we just hit whatever that revenue number is, let's say, you know, 850,000 ARR, a million ARR, um, you know, we need more deals. We're just going to go hire 10 SDRs and they are going to go blow up the world with phones and emails and bring people in. Um, we know that that's not right, but I'd love to know your thoughts, like early stage building an SDR team, um, from the ground up, like, what are you looking for from like a milestone perspective and then how do you go about doing that the right way?

Yeah, so when I joined Mailshake, um, we had, uh, there was no AEs on the op-on side of things. I had one SDR that was hired from a previous sales leader that was still there. And so like the first three months were just me and her prospecting. And so I wanted to get to a point where I could consistently bring in, like my number was 20 opportunities a month, quality opportunities a month.

Um, uh, to where it's like repeatable. So I was just testing a bunch of different hypotheses. I was looking at, you know, the customers we had to try to form like who should we go out outbound based on the customers we currently have. I was listening to customer calls, talking to our CS team, talking to our founders.

And then just testing different sequences, different targeting methods, um, different cold call scripts, things of that nature. And and me and her were doing it. So I I I I told her, I'm like, hey, this is just testing period. I don't care about like your quota or anything like that.

Like let's just figure some things out so we can go hire some reps. And, uh, and she was bought into that as well because giving her that opportunity like allows her to, uh, potentially take over the team and manage in the future if that's, you know, something she wanted to do. So, after around the like three month mark, once I started test, just was in that testing period and and found a kind of repeatable method, it was really just about documenting it. So coming up with, um, uh, kind of like a path to how future SDRs could get there.

And then I like to hire two SDRs at a time because if one of them isn't a fit, you know what I mean? You're not stuck with zero and you have to go re-hire again. So we went and hired two two SDRs. Um, and I just taught them on that process.

I said, look, this process worked for me in the last few months. I know it can work for you because I didn't do anything special. I just followed this process. I coached them on that process to a T.

And I said, once you kind of master this process and are hitting this number, I don't want you to just stick to it. I want you to try to figure out new methods. And so, that's kind of like the, the, the rotation of how I do it is, master this process for three months, we're hitting quota, and then try to innovate, try to find new ways, hire new SDRs, repeat. And then on the opp-on side of things, I mean, it's, it's kind of the same thing.

We had to build out the the sales process. But once we started getting some pipeline in, I was the one closing the deals. Again, I was trying to come up with the process. What is our messaging?

Because we have a lot of different competitors. Uh, what is that main differentiator we can use to kind of unsell some of these other competitors. And then, um, you know, hire the AEs from there. And I can kind of go in more more depth and specifics, but that's kind of like the high level overview of of how I approached it.

Yeah. I, I love that, I love that. And I've heard several, um, threads through this conversation about, um, uh, employee journeys. Like, like getting employees early on, coaching them up, really helping them, and giving them a path to an AE role, for example.

So, are you of the belief that you bring them in as an SDR, coach them up, give them a path to AE-ism? I guess is the, the best way to put it. Um, is it, is that the, is that your mentality as you look to hire? Yeah, absolutely.

I mean, when I, when I looked to hire SDRs, I I'm looking for folks who are like incredibly motivated and, and people that are excited about it, not necessarily the experience, which I'm not that's not like super un-common or something wild concept, but that's particularly what I'm looking for. And then, uh, they don't necessarily have to want to move into an AE role. It could be management. Um, but that is what I'm looking for, and I'm trying to like, give them a path along the whole way.

Yeah. That was one thing I thought Salesforce did really well, early, early days. I don't know if you remember, but, uh, Kyle used to, he used to publish if the, if the SDR hits this many meetings, this many, like you then went to SDR1, SDR2, to SDR, like he actually documented and published it. And it was the first time I saw someone actually publish it in, in public.

Um, and so I love that because I think it just gives clarity. Like people come into positions, and as a leader sometimes you're like, I don't know if I really want to bring you into a the next level role because now I got to backfill, but having that path is super important. There, I, I've said it before, and I'll say it again, the number one sign of a good leader is how many people you get promoted. Yes, revenue's important, revenue's great, but if you are constantly afraid that you're going to have to backfill, or if you're constantly afraid that, oh my God, this person's going to get so much better, and like my job is at risk, I want everyone on my team to want my job, and candidly, I want you to take my job.

Um, because that means that I have trained you, and we have worked together, and you're doing so well that you're ready for that next step. Versus Dale, to your point, um, and and you're rarely right, but in this time you are, of like, why why why build in public, right? Like I'm going to give away all these secrets or people are going to understand, like, you there's no great one secret out there that makes anyone that much better than anyone else. It comes down to the people, the process, the timing, and the fact of the matter is, you, me, and Jed could all send the exact same email to the exact same ICP.

And we all get on the phone and someone's just going to like one of us better. Probably Jed first, me second, you third, um, but someone's just going to like one of us better. you take my job. It's all good.

You you you you you're easy to knock off the case so. you you you can have it, my friend. You can have it. Jed, when you when you look at go to market now, um, it's changing, right?

Like the world's changing, whether that be AI, whether that be community led growth, people led growth, product led growth, like talk to me about, you know, in your role at Mailshake, like, what are you really bullish on from a go to market perspective? Hmm, um, I guess so I Ever feel like keeping your CRM updated with call notes is a nightmare? You're not alone. Most sales leaders would rate their CRM hygiene a four out of ten.

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It's uh it's really about like, okay, so with there's a lot of tools, especially I'm in the sales engagement space, so I'm I'm really deep into this, but there is a lot of tools that um are basically allowing you to have minimal tech stack, tech stack, but send out a lot of like really relevant emails, blast a bunch of people really fast. Like there's there's inboxing tools that will let you get into the inbox and blast a bunch of emails and you can use AI to write things really relevant. And so there's like a ton of noise, right? And so, um, I think now is more so the time and as we see AI kind of take over more and more jobs and I I I do feel like the SDR job is the one that can get automated the most.

I don't think SDRs will ever go away, but I do think that folks will, you know, and we're already seeing it happen now, you'll need fewer SDRs to hit the same pipeline number, which isn't a bad thing if you're an SDR listening to this and you're the one who takes advantage of that. And so, I guess I say all this to say that, um, like kind of the the what I'm most bullish on it from a GTM perspective is that it like being a little bit more targeted and focused on the accounts you can help best and and really have, and I know I've spoken about this already in this episode, but I do think it's really important, it's just taking more time to figure out who are you really best for? Um, and and what I've found most and and I still run into this is that we're still too wide in terms of who we target. And, um, if you're one of those people who's just kind of like blasting all these, you know, AI emails or whatnot, yeah, you'll pick up on some of that 3% of the people who are still in the market, but we try to get like really hyper-focused and I I think now's the time where we're going to see it happen more and more that you're actually going to be targeting less accounts, but fewer and more intentionally.

Um, and that's the best way to kind of break through the noise. Um, and just doing more touches on those accounts in general and so, um, yeah, I mean, high level that's kind of like the biggest thing for us is just to kind of stand out from the noise. Um, we want to get really specific so we can have messaging that speaks to those folks, um, you know, more intentionally. Yeah, it it's very difficult.

I think we, and this isn't just in the AI space but every market, financial, whatever it is. There's pendulums that swing, right? And so we we swung a pendulum way over to the AI side, lots of emails, lots of content blasting, uh, email, um, engagement platforms. I think we'll start seeing seeing it swing the other way.

I don't know if we'll go the fully personalized. Um, we're talking with a marketing leader, Mark Killins, and he was saying one of the things is like, scale the, like, try to work on the unscalable pieces. And I think that's what you're coming from. Like, get the work done, like you got to do a lot of the work.

If you do that properly, like you're going to get better rates to close. And oh, by the way, you'll probably have better customers. And oh, by the way, you'll have less churn, and your NDR is going to go up. And so, like, the downstream implications, like we've been so focused on the upstream implications, top of funnel, ARR, we haven't been focused on NDR and churn.

And I think that pendulum's swinging. So if we as sales, sales and marketing leaders, bring in better ICPs, better by by buyers, we'll have less churn, we'll have happier customers. And I think that is better for the whole industry. Yeah, and I guess there there is one other thing I want to add on that too because, um, particularly in our market where we sell to sales and marketing folks, but part of our kind of GTM strategy has shifted a little bit because we have so many competitors where we're not necessarily like, it like we when we're reaching out, we don't necessarily have the goal of like just trying to book every meeting.

We're trying to provide as much helpful content and resources around the problems we solve. So, as it comes like sales engagement, email deliverability, all of my reps are super focused on building their own brands on LinkedIn, for example, talking about this, so that because even though there's a bunch of competitors, they'll see they'll be, oh, you know, this person's been talking about it. Jed's been talking about it. That's why I want to go with that company.

I think that's another angle to it too, is because obviously in SAS, there's so many competitors in every single niche. Um, if you kind of get your team to just be their own marketers on LinkedIn, for example, Oh, I, I, I have to interrupt you because I feel like this could be a whole another 45 minute episode in and of itself. There are so many companies. I was talking to someone the other day, I was doing a coaching session and he's like, you know, I'm interviewing for this role and the CEO's telling me that they're really protective about what their employees post on LinkedIn and everything has to be approved.

Like, whoa, timeout. Like, you should want your company, you should want your employees to be the experts. And so your point, Jed, it's not posting, like, hey, please come look at Mailshake, we're the best thing in the world. Um, it's look at the value, we're the experts in this space.

Look at all the education that we're providing that you naturally want to come talk to us because we're giving you so much that, well, shit, if this is a problem, you guys are clearly the experts in this space. Let me at least have a conversation with you. Yep, yeah, 100%. So good.

So, so Jed, one of the big things that we're big on is giving more than getting or receiving, and I know you want to give something out to the audience, so, uh, let them know. What do they get? Oh, yeah, absolutely. So, um, like you mentioned earlier, Adam, I, I have a, a newsletter called Practical Prospecting.

It's a bi-weekly newsletter. Uh, little over 13,000 subscribers. There is a, um, uh, a further package, which is the paid plan, comes with all the archives, there are 70 plus archives, pretty much documenting, goes back to my early days at PandaDoc as an SDR, everything I've pretty much done, I just document through the newsletter, so you can learn about all the the things I, you know, went through and the things I learned and and pretty much all the processes I'm doing. So you get access to all that.

There's two eBooks in there with email templates and just process, you know, kind of goes deeper than what's in the newsletter. And there's also a course. So you can get all that stuff for free. Um, I'm not sure who the winner is, but I'm giving that away.

Yep. And, uh, you'll get access to everything. And also that comes with that is a Q&A. So you'll get all future paid posts, you'll have access to Q&A to kind of pick my brain a little bit deeper on some of the topics I'm talking about.

So definitely sign up for the newsletter because this thing is like full of chalk, uh, chalk full of, uh, information, so, we appreciate it. I, um, I want it myself. There are a few newsletters that I read. I selfishly, and I will admit this publicly, I subscribe to a shit ton of them to see what is out there, how people are formatting, um, what topics people are saying.

There's very few that I read through and through. Um, five or less, easy. Um, and yours is one of them. So this is definitely something that people want to get their hands on.

All right, as we wrap up, let's roll into some rapid fire. Uh, Jed, what song would best describe your revenue strategy, man? Yeah, you you asked me this at the beginning. I've been thinking of answers.

Um, my favorite song of all time is a song by J Cole called Love Yours. Uh, I actually have I have a tattoo of it as well. It would probably be that one. Because, uh, I guess maybe this is a corny answer, but if you, if you, if you love and care, you know, enough about your revenue strategy and you're actually invested in it, it's going to be more successful.

So I would say probably that. Yeah. Awesome. Um, one of the questions we ask, we've we've kind of beat the dead horse, so we'll go to the next one.

Uh, on the context of revenue generation, what, if you had to choose just one, what would be more important to you? Revenue, uh, gener- uh, top of funnel or retention? So, acquisition or retention? Yeah, I mean, I feel like, uh, myself as just someone who's spent much more time on top of funnel, I would probably say top of funnel.

Um, but it seems like right now, retention is far more important. We're seeing it here as well. I mean, I think, um, we're employ, deploying some more strategies on like upselling expansion and, um, there's a lot of gold in there too, especially if you you're a smaller stage company and you let your SDRs kind of prospect into that area and taking advantage of the customers you already have. So, um, just just based on my experience, I'm going to say top of funnel, but, um, uh, yeah, that's that's probably my answer.

I love it. I love hearing people's different perspectives on that. And I think it has shown to be highly dependent upon where people work, um, in the right. Just I haven't seen that angle as much, you know what I mean?

But I know how important it is. We're seeing it right now more than any any other time. Of course. What would you, um, what would you say is like a lesser known tip or tactic, something that's just kind of like in your back pocket that, you know, most people don't know about that's actually made a really big difference in revenue outcomes for your teams?

Hmm, um, having a good source of references. And so, uh, what I mean by that is, if you can proactively give, uh, folks who you're talking to in a sales cycle a reference call, um, and we all know that that feeling where someone kinda tells you like, hey, can we speak to a reference customer and you're like scattering, oh shit, I got to find somebody to to take a reference call. But like if you incorporate that into like when you're closing a sale, right? If you're ever offering a discount, like, hey, part of this contract is like, you'll do one reference call with us or trying to, you know, going to bat for a customer when you close them and then having those people in your back pocket, so then when you're on that call, you're prepared.

You can you can even bring it up. Say like, hey, I'm sure you have maybe some questions or concerns. I'm happy to give you, you know, set up a reference call with one of our customers who's similar to yours. That's made a huge impact on revenue.

Um, because I think reference calls are one of the most impactful things you can do to close a sale and just being prepared with them is great. Gold. I love that everyone who's listening like gold, cuz think about it. And I, I say this all the time.

I don't do it as often as you do. I love what you just said, Jed, but like I'll tell a customer, listen, man, like, I'll be honest, I get paid to tell you this is the best thing in the world. Like, that's just a fact. But Bob, Bill, Sam, Jenny, whoever, they don't.

Chat with them, pick any one of these four or five people you want to talk to because I don't want them to feel like I'm giving them the one like perfect one. They're all perfect. But you know, pick pick pick pick pick one of these folks and be totally transparent with them. Um, I love, I love that you pulled that out because I I myself don't even think about that enough.

Yeah, and if you get better customers in the top of funnel, you'll have much better customers in the bottom of funnel. So they all work together. Yep. Uh, okay, let's wrap this one up.

So earlier in the show you said you'd be in Rev Ops. So tomorrow morning, alarm's going off. What's the first thing you're doing as a Rev Ops leader? Oh boy.

Uh, probably answering a million slack messages for uh, things that are broken, you know what I mean? And that's kind of half my job anyways. There's always things that that break that you have to fix. So, uh, I feel like it'd be just catching up on uh, all the things that are broken that you need to fix.

I don't know, that's seems to be my perspective of it. I love it. Jed, thank you so much for joining us, man. This was, um, incredibly valuable on a ton of fronts.

I think that everyone, whether you're a founder, a BDR, um, a sales leader who's listening, um, there's certainly some great actual takeaways that people can get from this. Where, uh, where could people find you? What's the best way to engage with you, man? Yeah, LinkedIn's great.

Um, there's not there's not a million Jed, so search Jed and you'll find me and, uh, yeah, subscribe to my newsletter if you want more. I post stuff on on LinkedIn all the time and, uh, yeah, thanks Adam and Dale for having me on. This is great. I, uh, I love the energy between you two.

It's, uh, it's fun. Thanks, man. I, I, I mean, I he he's he's all right, but other than that. Appreciate it.

You wore a caller today, so Jed, you must feel, you must be important. Yeah, well, I don't know. I mean, I I I I I have to impress our guests, you know, it's not so much.