Dan Nedelko 0:00
And in 321,

Hi

Joseph DellaVecchia 0:05
everyone. Welcome to sales Reddit stories. I’m Joe, he’s Dan, and today we’re going to be reading some of the most relatable sales and marketing stories from Reddit. This is a new segment, a part of live at the hive digital marketing from the trenches here at honeypot marketing. Dan, how are you today? I’m good. Joe, I’m good. I’ve been very excited for this episode ever since we talked about setting this up. Since Reddit is probably one of my favorite websites in the world to go visit on a regular basis. It’s a true treasure trove. Anything you want to find on the internet, you’ll find on Reddit, any interest, any genre it exists,

Dan Nedelko 0:43
it’s true. It’s true. And let’s be honest, this is inspired by Smosh’s Reading Reddit stories show with Shane top and that crew over there, which is a little bit of a guilty pleasure of mine, and I know your partners as well. But in all seriousness, uh, there’s a lot of really good sales and marketing conversation that does happen on Reddit. It’s a great place to to kind of find stuff, and then, and then, obviously, you get down into LinkedIn lunatics, which we’ll talk a little bit about. But in terms of, you know, the way that everything washes out for B to B, sales, techniques, marketing stories. It’s a it’s a treasure trove of information. For sure,

Joseph DellaVecchia 1:27
you can, you can always find something that’ll make you laugh, even make you cry,

Dan Nedelko 1:31
make you cry

Joseph DellaVecchia 1:32
today. Dan, I think we’re gonna be doing a lot of face palming, a lot of relating, and I think at the very end, we’ve got a special treat that’ll get us all laughing, yeah.

Dan Nedelko 1:41
And I think we have, we we’ve also got some good stories for salespeople and for marketers, about ABM, general sales, all sorts of stuff and and also, I think, yeah, on that outro, what not to do on LinkedIn? Because oftentimes we’ll hear, what should I do on LinkedIn? How should I post, whether it’s for their company, or whether it’s for you personally, but these are definitely what not to do. So with that, let’s dive right in. I know you got your first pick of the day.

Joseph DellaVecchia 2:11
All right, awesome. Our first story, Dan is coming to us from our slash advertising. Okay,

Dan Nedelko 2:19
let’s go. The

Joseph DellaVecchia 2:20
client requested a business plan and roadmap for a homegrown end to end ecommerce solution, everything from a website with a secure shipping cart and checkout process to source pick and pack and fulfillment capabilities from multiple warehouses across the country that complemented their existing fulfillment capabilities. No, this is around 2008 so this is no small feat. At the time, multiple millions of dollars would have changed completely the complexion of our agency with this one project spent months prepping, had an airtight solution that was a reasonable budget wise my boss, who was brilliant, put the entire proposal together using the legwork I’d done, designed to be about a two hour conversation, ticked every box and then some. We were pumped. Day of the presentation comes four of us and eight clients, including VPs and the CMO and the CTO of this fortune 500 company. We get two pages into the discussion, maybe three minutes tops, and the CMO takes his hefty spiral bound, leave behind, throws it down onto the table, and our team stands up. Well, you really missed the mark here. Then he walked out of the room, leaving us all to stare at each other. Later that day, he made a call to our president requesting that my boss, who I will repeat to this day, one of the most brilliant minds I’ve ever worked with, never be allowed to work on his account again. We found out after the fact that somewhere between the original ask and the meeting, he decided, and told nobody else that he really wanted was a turnkey storm storefront where they just sell the product at wholesale, and the vendor takes everything from there, worst meeting ever.

Dan Nedelko 4:07
So much to unpack in that so much to unpack so much.

Joseph DellaVecchia 4:10
Well, first things first, and in 2008 I was barely 10, so Dan, you are in the marketing world at 2008 so you can speak a bit more to the the landscape and E commerce at this time.

Dan Nedelko 4:21
What are you trying to say? I’m

Joseph DellaVecchia 4:22
saying that you have more experience, and you were doing this in 2008 that’s

Dan Nedelko 4:26
nice, in a roundabout way. You’re saying I’m old, which is totally fair, and that’s okay, yeah, in 2008 this was no laughing matter, right? Shopify didn’t exist. None of these easy SaaS platforms. In fact, the cloud didn’t even really exist at that time, either. So, you know, you’re looking at a huge tech lift. Really is what it comes down to. So, yeah, it’s not, it’s definitely not what it is today, 100% but I think there’s, there’s quite. A few stories. I mean, what are you getting out of this one? What are your thoughts on it for first and foremost,

Joseph DellaVecchia 5:04
my first thought is that, like, well, never to this caliber. I understand this situation where the client makes an ask. You prepare for that? Ask you go in and the client’s like, this is not at all what I was asking. And so I just think, from from an account management standpoint, first is just, it’s so important to get aligned and ask the questions. Even if I see this probably the most common example, a client will come and say, I need SEO. I want SEO. Ask about their goals, ask about what they’re looking for, and ask what their current understanding is. Because a lot of people in small businesses, you know, SEO has been thrown around a lot, and it’s something that they’re told that they need, or they think they fully understand, and it’s okay if they don’t fully understand, or even if they have the understanding wrong, that’s what the marketing team is there for. But a lot of the times, in my experience, I’ve had a lot of people come to me saying, I need SEO, and what they’re really looking for is silver bullet, inbound leads, which is a whole other conversation, but it’s they’re not looking for the same thing that they’re telling

Dan Nedelko 5:59
you, yeah, 100% I mean, the takeaway that I get from this story is number one, if you’re dealing with a fortune 500 expect that the people that you’re dealing with are corporate people. Like that is what they are. Their job is to work within a large organization. So it has a completely different dynamic than mid market and small business. That’s kind of thing number one, then thing number two, I’m getting out of this is, and, you know, the mistake on jump driver, who’s the OP, or the original poster of this, whoever was where they dropped the ball on this was going two months or several months, prepping without actually circling back and making sure that you’re keeping in touch with that person, you know, they change their mind. From a I can take it from the client standpoint, right, to say it’s not my job to update all of the vendors. In a sense, it kind of is, if you’re doing procurement like that, right? If you got a whole bunch of vendors bidding on a project, well, you can’t just change the bounds of the project. That’s what RFPs and RFQs are for, right? But if I were to take it from the perspective of that agency or jump driver the original poster, I think one thing that you could have done in this scenario is not wait a couple of months, right? That’s a very waterfall method. It’s like, well, I talked to you in April, and now we’re in July. You know, the entire world could change. Since then, it doesn’t sound like a whole lot of fun to be in a meeting like that. It’s going to be embarrassing, stressful. And the guy that was his boss, you know, he’s claiming up and down, that this guy was brilliant, which is, you know, 100% could well be the case. I think what this comes down to, from a sales side, is keep in touch with your prospects before you’re closing a deal on a regular basis. To see that, like, to your point, Joe, like, do they understand what SEO is, you know? And oftentimes it’s true, you know, that’s like saying I need a carburetor for my car. When you go to a mechanic, I don’t know what I need. You know, I need the outcome. I need my car to run really well and not break down on me. Can you tell me how to do that? And that’s typically what agencies should be asking their clients, is like, what do you want as the outcome? And in this case, obviously that changed, not a pretty situation, but yeah, in in terms of that, from a sales perspective, one thing I like to do is to keep in kind of an iterative approach, to say, hey, here’s where we’re thinking of going with this, and maybe just shooting like an outline, not sending, you know, the the end clients, not preparing the budget, but getting a pulse check on that on a regular basis is is a really good idea to avoid that. I love

Joseph DellaVecchia 8:56
the analogy that you used with the car in the carburetor. That’s just that that’s in perfect way to explain it,

Dan Nedelko 9:00
it Yeah, and you know what? It’s pretty funny. I think a lot of times, you know, we’ll get people coming over to us on on the marketing side and in the sales side and telling us what they think they want. You know, from a salesperson’s perspective, is, don’t ask your clients, like, do you want SEO? Do you want Google ads? Do you want a brand repositioning? Do you want a content strategy? Because, like, all of that stuff may work together in concert, depending on what the outcome is, right? Yeah. So you should be asking your clients and your prospects, like, what are you looking to achieve from this? You know, you can sell on pain points and and and on solutions, but don’t sell on the tactic for sure. All right. And you got a story for us? I got one that pretty much everybody in sales and or marketing ever have probably run into, and it’s never a good feeling. So I’ve been an AE at a digital. Marketing agency for the past two and a half years. In my first six months, I signed a franchise of med spas to handle their organic SEO for their website, local SEO for their 16 locations and paid Google paid social media ads. This contract resulted in them spending around 20k per month with us, which in turn grew to my biweekly paychecks. Grew my bi weekly paychecks by more than 100% on Friday, they emailed my team saying they’re terminating all contracts, pulling our access to their accounts, and they’re pursuing a contract with another agency, sad music tier, running down face. This was out of the blue with no explanation. They fired their marketing manager who hired us, and said they are terminating all business with us by November, feel like my sales spirit has been completely broken. The account was nearly half of my monthly revenue. It took us months to sign them with us, and it was out of pure luck that they were transferring agencies at the time, I had the biggest account by far in my market, and now it’s gone. My goals are going to be unattainable. Now. My paychecks are going to be a fraction of what they used to be. Feel like I’m gonna wash the F out, and eventually my manager will see I’m useless and fire me like they probably should have, since I’m going to be costing the company money. Now, I’m still shell shocked from the news yesterday. I can’t see any positive outcome from this, and I feel like I should just quit and find something else to waste my time on. That’s all I have. That’s pretty that’s pretty dark, that’s bleak, that is bleak. It’s extremely bleak, bleak. And I think it’s a story, plus it’s a psychological profile. But what are your thoughts on this one? Joe,

Joseph DellaVecchia 11:33
my thoughts are is that it’s something that you see all the time. You know clients are going to churn. It’s going to happen. There are clients that you will form long term relationships with that you know may never leave you. There are clients where you know they’re going to churn and you know we’ve seen it before. I think anyone who has worked in marketing agency life has seen it before. Losing a champion can be detrimental. You have that person who you’ve worked with closely understands what you’ve done, knows what you’re doing, and is there to back you up and back up the work that you’re doing to the higher ups, and especially in a corporate chain, that can be very, very beneficial, because then someone else comes in, and I put it as as a comic book reader, I put it as it’s when somebody new is going to write Batman. You know your Batman is Bruce Wayne. His parents died in Crime Alley. He’s Batman now, but then you’re going to put your own spin on the mythos. Someone new is going to come in and want to put their own spin on the company and leave their footprint right there to make a name for themselves, to show that they’ve been made. It’s the right decision to put them in this higher position, or for them to take over this project. Yeah. And so most of the time with marketing, it’s we’re gonna get a different team that can do more and better and aligns with my

Dan Nedelko 12:45
vision, honestly. Oh, go ahead. Go ahead. I was gonna say, one of the

Joseph DellaVecchia 12:49
things I can say right there in that situation is get in front of that and align with that new person. If your champion is gone, yes, it sucks, but now you have a new person to make.

Dan Nedelko 12:59
Yeah. Well look, this is my biggest pet peeve with marketing managers and in the marketing industry in general, when you start a new position, regardless of what level you’re at, CMO, VP, marketing manager, whatever, stop firing all of your vendors and getting brand new vendors. It really is a short sighted thing. And there’s a couple of comments in that Reddit thread that speak to the same thing. It’s like, every time someone new comes in, they’re firing all their vendors and they’re getting in so they can, you know, plant their flag, show leadership, they’re doing something new. It’s a really short sighted thing for those people to do, but it happens all the time. It is probably the most common thing that I see. So if you’re on that side of it, don’t like, look at the ones that are showing value, keep your good vendors and make the changes where you need to. I mean, don’t you don’t need a carpet bomb when you can snipe right, and it doesn’t prevent you from doing that. I think that’s like, my first thing. Second thing is, well, there’s a, there’s so many things. I’ll be honest, this poor guy or gal, whoever it is, this poor person, understood your sales spirit is completely broken. It happens in every agency. In every sales role, you’re going to lose a client, or they’re going to lose the bidding process and never get the client, or you’re going to have a great client and you’re going to lose that client. It does. Client. It does happen all the time, and I think the first thing, and I try to say this to my kids with things like sports, something I used to do back in my sporting days, is you get 15 minutes to cry about it, right? Give yourself 15 minutes, and then you just kind of move forward, because you’re not going to change it, right? It’s already happening, but you can’t wallow in this, like this person’s going down. I’m completely broken. I’m useless. They’re going to fire me. I’m still shell shocked. I mean, if you had a, if we had a psychologist on here, taking this apart, I think there’s, there’s probably some other like confidence issues going. And on with this person.

Joseph DellaVecchia 15:03
I don’t disagree with that, but, yeah, no, I think you’re 100% right. Like, especially in sales, you’ve got to be you got to be hungry, and you got to be ready to jump back on it and go. And just because you know you’ve lost this big client, let’s say they said 20,000 let’s say you lose this one client of 20,000 Yep, does. That doesn’t mean you can’t get into the $20,000 client. But if your issue is, you know, that’s a big client, it takes so long to close and focus on 10, $2,000 or five, $4,000

Dan Nedelko 15:30
yeah, that’s, that’s good advice. That’s something I always kind of run through in my brain, is, is the kind of, if this, then that, right? Like, if something’s gonna happen here, what’s going to happen there, and I think so, I think you need to take the time to kind of, you know, have the funeral, go through the grieving process, but put a time limit on it, and don’t let it go for a week, right? You have nowhere to go but forward and kind of come up with those solutions in general, I think you’re right, Joe. I think the one thing that’s really important is if you’re in sales, or if you’re in an entrepreneur or whatever leadership position, you have to always be thinking of if this, then that what happens if, and kind of have a playbook you can’t cover every scenario, but you can certainly have a playbook where you have a plan that’s one two. Never take your pipeline for granted in a business or as a salesperson, you can’t you can’t say, hey, things look good today. I closed a bunch of deals this quarter. I’m going to be great for the next quarter, right? In fact, when things are good is when you should be working on that pipeline even more, right? And fostering those things. You can either grow the business there, but I do see a lot of what happens is this kind of lackadaisical attitude, especially when you’ve got a whale, right? So for this person, actually like this, obviously, this client was a whale. Call it a quarter million bucks a year. And they rode that wave until the wave dissipated and kind of went its natural course. That’s the second thing. I think the third thing and final thing is, as a business, you should always have a termination runway, right? Whether it’s 30 days, 60 days, 90 days, depending on the model, there’s all sorts of different ones. There are 12 month contracts with penalties for early termination, and enforce that contract so that you’re not waking up one day and having a rug pulled out from under you. And it’s like, Oh, my God, I’m whatever. I’m not going to make my pipeline next week I won’t be able to make payroll. If you’re a business owner, you know, contracts are there for a reason. They were signed for a reason, and they should not be just walked on by a new client. Like maybe that marketing manager has no idea that there is a 90 day termination clause. Well, they can pay it out and fire you, and you can walk away. They can get the value for the next 90 days. But certainly, if you’re in sales, you should be well informed, if you’re not about what the terms are of that thing, and you should really make sure you make it, make it known. Like I said, so much to unpack inside of this thing. So much poor, this poor person, though I, you know, like, I hope that they’re not, like, beating themselves up and what is it, flatulating themselves like whipping themselves, hmm, I never know what that what, what that term is, but whatever. Don’t be. I just

Joseph DellaVecchia 18:41
always think about the Da Vinci Code, that scene, right?

Dan Nedelko 18:45
And there was that guy. I read The Da Vinci Code and I saw the movie. There was the one guy, the one character in the book. I know that he was in that, that sect that, like he had barbs in him, so every time he moved, it would like stab him. And that was his penance, yeah, yeah. Don’t be that person that’s that’s the lesson,

Joseph DellaVecchia 19:01
don’t be the barb guy from The Da Vinci Code, right? Yeah, that’s our first piece of merch for this podcast. Is

Dan Nedelko 19:10
sorry. Tom Hanks, sorry. Dan Brown, can’t remember the book or the movie. All right, moving right along. Joe, over to your next one. All

Joseph DellaVecchia 19:20
right, awesome. This one is from r slash marketing Dan, and this is someone talking about their first internship.

Unknown Speaker 19:27
Okay, sounds good. This

Joseph DellaVecchia 19:29
was my first internship. I was asked to help make company merchandise, including towels, pens, erasers, mugs and car air fresheners. Mid project, two distant neurons finally communicated, and I began to wonder why a relatively unknown B to B ship repair company that gets most of its revenue from two contractors, merch. I went to the CEO and pointed out that the whole marketing team me agreed that spending 60,000 euros, approximately $64,865.90 Cents on merch that no one will buy is nonsensical. To my amazement, after several months of boxes full of worthless merch sitting in our warehouse, each employee received three towels, two mugs, five pens and a handful of car air fresheners. When I asked why, the response was, see young man, now every employee will market our company wherever they go. At first, I thought it was genius, but then the same two neurons turned back on and pointed out that our employees are really unlikely to be seen with the merch anywhere in public, not to mention, even if some get noticed by a big shot manager on a beach with a towel, they won’t go back running to their bosses saying, OMG, this guy I saw on the beach used a towel with a relatively unknown brand fixing pipes on ships. Really, really well and really, really cheap. We should hire them. Then I have so many. But what are your thoughts on this one? Well,

Dan Nedelko 20:58
this is a perfect time when the CEO should not be doing this, but all too often, especially this, again, I’m guessing this is a this is a small company, right? Small business, or is it not really B to B, B to

Joseph DellaVecchia 21:14
B, ship repair, so I don’t really know. Honestly. I mean, not too much details, yeah.

Dan Nedelko 21:19
I mean, let’s just say their marketing department is probably pretty small, regardless of the size of the company. I mean, they’ve obviously got 65k us, so you’re looking at 85k 90k Canadian. More than that, actually, yeah, more like 90 is a especially the the you see young man kind of quote. It sure seems like that CEO was stepping outside of his lane a little bit and trying to be the smartest guy in the room and then saving face. He’s probably a good talker, but, yeah, that’s a that’s a great example of probably the intern is the only person in the marketing department. Have never seen that before? Have you? Never the intern is the only one in the

Joseph DellaVecchia 22:04
marketing department. I was that intern is the only one in the marketing department when I finished college my first job,

Dan Nedelko 22:09
right? So it does happen and the CEO wants to be the smartest guy in the room. Happens all the time. Yeah, that’s my initial take on it. That I think, is the landscape. How about you?

Joseph DellaVecchia 22:24
I think my initial take is it goes back, I think, a few episodes, to when we talked about Google business profiles, which is, know your audience, know what they’re looking for and know what is the best way to appeal to your audience. In that episode, we talked about how if you’re a small and local business, if you’re doing one thing, it’s use Google business profile for that Visio, just like this right here. It’s knowing your audience. How are people going to see you? How are they going to know you? How are they going to get the word out? Seems like this is a pretty specific B to B operation with specific targets and decision makers you need to reach. Sounds to me a lot more like Account Based Marketing is going to be way more effective here than merchandise. Now, it’s cool to have merchandise. I’ve seen lots of B to B companies have merchandise on their like, on their websites, or it’s just something that, you know, they hand out at a meeting, or something like that. Seen that before, and you know, maybe you make a little bit impassive revenue. Or it’s a really great thing for brand awareness to have no argument there. But if you think that is what’s going to take your business to the next step and elevate it when like the person, like the intern, points out, nobody is going to see this, and even if they do, they’re going to be on vacation and they’re not going to get the information they need from seeing your logo on a towel. Yeah, this is a product or service that requires education,

Dan Nedelko 23:39
yeah, for sure. And I mean, it screams, you need ABM, most of the revenue comes from two clients. So there’s probably two more clients out there that would double the revenue of this business with 60 grand. We’ll call it 90 grand because it sounds better and it’s Canadian. If you were going to do that, well, you would then have $45,000 to wine, dine, schmooze, send custom tools, or whatever the heck it is that they do, you could find something and do, and that’s the whole point of ABM, right? Is like, get rid of the merch. Get rid of the towels like you, because you only have a small number of Tiara clients and real key targets that you want to go after, even if they’re in the hundreds, and if you’re a bigger organization, even if they’re in the 1000s, if this guy has two, I mean, think of the things that they could do, right? They could send custom tools over to their prospective clients. They could offer a $45,000 discount for the first 12 months. I mean, for right, like, I mean, there you go. That certainly is a door opener in terms of loyalty in those types of spaces. But, you know, I think it also comes down to a really important point on this one, is the intern is obviously too junior to kind of stand up to the CEO of the company. I don’t think the power dynamic. Could be any further across the spectrum than that, right? You’ve got a, what is probably a young intern in school or fresh out of school, talking directly to the CEO, so like, there’s no intimidation there, right? I think one of the tactics that I would use, and I have used in in my past with this kind of thing, especially on the agency side. Because, you know, we you do run into this. You certainly do is a very plainly written, so not a whole lot of like, flowery language, not like this is a terrible idea. You shouldn’t do this, etc, etc. I would send it in an email, very matter of factly. Like, this is my recommendation. You can take it or you cannot take it. But I need to state this clearly. I like using that technique too, which is, when someone does something, it’s like, I can’t argue with you, because the power dynamic, you are the person in charge here, right? And quite often, you know, the person in charge is not actually the person in charge. I mean, I work for every one of our clients, right? I’m not like, I’m, by far, not a boss, right? So you have to convince the recipient of this. And a way to do it is just to say, This is my recommendation. I couldn’t be more firm about it, or I couldn’t, you know, recommend this more strongly. Here’s what I think you should do. Here’s why I think that this will not work out well, but ultimately, it’s your call. But I have to, kind of, you know, it’s like being in court. I think it’s like for the record, like, I have to go on the record as saying this so that, you know, I can wash my hands of this, like Pontius Pilot, like, I want nothing to do with this. If it tanks.

Joseph DellaVecchia 26:42
I have nothing else to add. I think that’s a very perfect summary of it.

Dan Nedelko 26:46
Cool, yeah. And I mean, I really do think, like when you in this really does relate to Account Based Marketing and to sales is oftentimes, you know, people talk about merch and they talk about promo stuff, and it’s always pens and post it notes. And, I mean, you go to a conference, right? You’re gonna get, you’re gonna get a whole bag of the same stuff,

Joseph DellaVecchia 27:10
right? Branded stress ball. Yeah,

Dan Nedelko 27:12
exactly the branded stress ball, the calculator, the coffee mug, you know, USB, terribly underpowered USB drive, like three gigabytes or two gigabytes or something. You know, you know the drill. The reality is, is that merchandise, like free promo stuff, can work, but you’ve got to really think about it, and please God, don’t give people post it notes and pens, although people do love pens, at least get nice pens, right? Like it’s something that’s memorable in those things, and really tailor it in ABM so you could send it directly to your prospect in a wrapped box with a nice thing that they will actually use. Yeah, it’s, it’s a, it’s a way that you can kind of contend with that. So alrighty, moving right along the story for us. Dan, I’ve got, I think this is our final story, actually, final story, final story of the day. We’re trying to last time we said we were going to do a half an hour, and we ended up doing an hour. So you know, we don’t want to necessarily do that. Let’s see here. Okay, so this one is on the sales side. This one is started a new SDR gig about a month ago, selling software development Pro Services. The SDR function sits under marketing. So my boss has never worked sales in their life. I’m being told to do 100% ABM messaging since the other SDR was having no success from high volume outreach, spent about two hours making an ABM campaign only to queue up seven people. Since our target segment is sub 500 million annual recurring revenue, talking to people is why I like sales. I need to find a way to spend more time on the phone. Even if no one answers, it still feels like I’m getting something done. If you look a salesman being forced into marketing, sitting and writing, except I have a quota hanging over my head. No experience selling proserve or to start up this small 15 total headcount is ABM really the only way forward. So that’s the scenario. Any thoughts right off the top, Joe, so

Joseph DellaVecchia 29:21
I think my thought right off the top is that this just screams, and we talked this In last episode. The biggest pain point we see with ABM, there isn’t an alignment between sales and marketing and ABM is sales and marketing alignment. If this, this marketing team should be working with the salesperson to help make that process easier, and the salesperson should be working with the marketing team to help understand the product. Understand the product and their process so they can create an effective strategy together. I think the salesperson also needs to understand the importance of building that personal one to one connection with the target account, contact whoever it is, and how valuable that’s going to be. One thing that I’ve seen a lot in my. Experience of working with sales people from across B, B to C, wherever. Is that, when they have a technique that works, they’re very resistant to change or to try a new technique. No, they’ve got like, Nope, I got this. I know I can get someone we said the last time. You know, you always hear like, if I can just get them on the phone, if I can just get them in the room face to

Dan Nedelko 30:19
face, if I can look them, if I can look them in the eye, right? That’s a big one, and that’s

Joseph DellaVecchia 30:25
and that’s then where it comes to, like, okay, maybe, but like, face to face, look him in the eye. That’s closing the deal. That’s your last step. Let’s get you there, and we have effective ways to get you there. So I do say this with a little bit of the marketers lens on, I’ll admit, but ultimately, it’s just the importance of alignment and working together, and not just the marketing team saying, Go do ABM to the salesperson who’s never done it before and just has a vague understanding, right?

Dan Nedelko 30:49
So I think that, I think that’s the first thing you hit the nail on the head, is, you know, what is ABM to this person? I don’t think they really clearly know, and I don’t think that their marketing director knows what it is, because in true ABM, you do not tell a fish to climb a tree, which is exactly what’s happening here. You don’t take someone that’s very good. That’s like saying ABM does not include outbound calling, and that’s not true. That’s not true at all. Account Based Marketing does not increase the divide between digital and what you would call traditional sales method. In fact, it merges the two. So why would you take someone that has success with calling, that knows how to call, and say, now don’t call, because we don’t call at this point in our funnel. The funnel has to be flexible enough to say, Oh, we can accommodate that that calling portion of it. And in fact, I mean, you’d be crazy to do ABM without any calling whatsoever. Now, should you do cold calling? Where do you do it? How do you do it? There’s always a nuance to that. And this poor soul spent two hours making an ABM campaign, not sure what it was, probably an email sequence of some sort, and not having any luck with it at all. So the the other dynamic here is that they’ve put the SDRs, the sales development reps, and the BDRs, the business development reps, which are usually really what like that fundamentally comes down to, is they’re the call setters for the for the salespeople. That’s, that’s their job is to nurture. Sometimes, organizations will put those people under the marketing team, which isn’t a bad idea, as long as the person running marketing has sales experience or can appreciate what goes into that process, right? Doesn’t sound like that’s the case here, and it’s a huge problem. So, you know, if I were giving this person advice, you’re in a small company, your total headcount is only 15, I would just go right to the President and the marketing leader, whoever that is, sit them down and say, Look, this is how I’m successful. I can’t be successful. It’s not going to work, right? Like, this is going to fail for all various reasons. So, like, you could take that approach in this scenario, right? And there’s a really great comment here, I want to kind of go over to because some of the comments actually have a lot of really good feedback here. So wait, I understand this, seven contacts per lease per day, this ends up averaging out like 34 unique activities at full volume. That sounds like a part time job, or it’s multithreading at the lead stage is necessary, getting into and through to accounts. That’s really like you got to talk to other salespeople here, because that’s not enough. You’re never going to close. You need more volume than that in order to close that to get to your sales targets. Like, you’re going to be basically staring at the wall and and if you see the like Thelma and Louise, right? Like, if you if you know the car is going off the cliff. I you’d be like, Thelma and Louise and go right on over. They do that, right? I got that, right? They do yes, but you don’t want to be rolling towards it like hoping, like, Gee, I hope I can get out going really slow. You know, if you’re, if you’re going at two miles per hour towards the cliff, and the cliff is a couple of miles away, get out of the car like any time and figure out the right way to do it. Don’t just slowly, you know, that would be really sad just to be sitting in that car slowly going over the edge of that cliff after a year or so of doing that.

Joseph DellaVecchia 34:36
So 100% Totally agree it’s Yeah, and we said it before, you know, we’ll say it again. The worst people to talk about sales and marketing alignment

Dan Nedelko 34:48
with, yes, they typically don’t align so well, it’s the thing. It’s true

Joseph DellaVecchia 34:53
for ABM to work, it’s gotta, it’s gotta have that synergy. And just on your point of that’s not enough. When we work with clients and we start where. With them on ABM, we always say, you know, your target account list started with 100 you need to have those 100 target accounts, right?

Dan Nedelko 35:08
Yeah. And I mean a couple of things. One, we come at it, and I hate that it’s called Account Based Marketing, because it’s, it’s, it’s sales and marketing alignment is what it is, right? So sometimes we meet sales teams, and there’s some resistance to working on this, like all you wouldn’t know you you know it takes, it is a significant boulder to roll up a hill, if it’s not phrased and introduced properly in the sense that we are aligning with the best activities that sales does. So whatever’s working for you right now, we want to know what that is, and then we’re going to enhance it. We’re going to make it better, because we’re going to take what’s working, integrate it into a full flow for the stuff that we know works, and everything’s going to get stronger, but it’s going to follow what you’re doing right now. So yeah, the sales and the marketing alignment, super duper important in terms of how this whole process works, and so the sales teams and the marketing teams are often, and it’s often not all at war, right? It’s a Cold War. It’s a war of inertia. It’s a war of lack of response. It’s a war of lack of engagement. It’s a war of a lack of communication. These are problems inside of organizations that organizations constantly need to be aware of, because it’s the silent killer, right? It’s like, well, no, our sales teams and marketing teams, they don’t fight, but they also don’t work together. They don’t collaborate, and it’s so it’s very polite, right? It’s very friendly, it’s very corporately friendly, but it certainly isn’t collaborative and moving that thing forward. And that’s that, that’s that internal resistance, that silent killer that really needs to be addressed specifically by sales leadership and marketing leadership, that mom and dad get along, everybody else on the team gets along, and this is how we’re going to do it, right? So that’s all

Joseph DellaVecchia 37:06
I have to sum it up. If ABM is rolling a boulder up a hill, don’t be Sisyphus.

Dan Nedelko 37:12
I think that’s the second Sisyphus reference you’ve had this week. Or was that last week? Last

Joseph DellaVecchia 37:18
two weeks,

Dan Nedelko 37:19
the last one? Okay, I’ve gone about 25 years without a real Sisyphus reference. Just for anyone that is unsure about who Sisyphus is, Joe.

Joseph DellaVecchia 37:29
In Greek mythology, Sisyphus is the one that is cursed to roll the boulder up the hill. And once it gets to the top, it will roll back down, and he will forever be forced to complete his task, essentially, getting to the height only you have to restart from the bottom, a modern day reference of Sisyphus is Darth Mauls complete Star Wars arc from The Phantom Menace to Star Wars. Oh,

Dan Nedelko 37:48
wow. You just nerd it out. And you had a Star Wars reference in the middle of a Sales Marketing podcast. Good job. You go Star Wars three would be proud of you, wouldn’t you? Yeah, there you go. All right, we have now hit the time. Finally, what not to do? Yes, go ahead, Joe. I want,

Joseph DellaVecchia 38:07
I want to put it like this. You know, I understand people coming to us and saying, What should I do on LinkedIn? You don’t really know what to do LinkedIn advertising. I feel like they don’t even know what they’re doing. They’re changing the rules every five seconds over there. But you know, sometimes it’s like what not to do. Okay, you know, maybe you shouldn’t post this type of content, or maybe you should structure your content this way. That’s what I would think the What Not To Dos. But sometimes people do things that you think are very obvious what not to do, but they’re still doing it, and that’s why the subreddit r slash LinkedIn lunatics exists. It’s a subreddit Damn that you actually turned me on to and it’s filled with people posting, some of it satire, but most of it, I’d say about 90% of it, is people posting things on LinkedIn that they really shouldn’t do. And the only way to really emphasizing at this point across, I think, is to go through some real examples. Yeah, really awesome things we found,

Dan Nedelko 38:59
if you’re having, yeah, recently. I mean, this stuff is all hot off the presses. None of this is like old. Sometimes you’ll find memes and they’re a few years old. LinkedIn lunatics is one of my favorite places. If you’re having a bad sales day, go check out LinkedIn lunatics. If you’re frustrated because your LinkedIn post isn’t getting any traction, go visit LinkedIn lunatics. I think the important thing about this LinkedIn lunatics is super entertaining. Even the satire is great. The best part is when it’s absolutely real. That is the part that makes it even more entertaining. And please God, you know, don’t do these things. You know, in the quest for LinkedIn engagement, people are willing to go to great lengths to do very, very well, what would con the the thing about common sense is that it’s not so common anymore. Isn’t that your old man? Funny

Joseph DellaVecchia 39:50
thing about common sense is that it’s not so common anymore, right? My but my martial arts teacher used to say to me all the time,

Dan Nedelko 39:57
right? So people are con. Constantly asking us, what should I do on LinkedIn, and what shouldn’t I do? And, I mean, you know, would you do it in real life? Like, if you wouldn’t do it in real life, then please, you probably shouldn’t do it on LinkedIn. That’s the first one. So why don’t you kick us off with good old Steve Rigby here? Yeah,

Joseph DellaVecchia 40:13
I wanna talk about Steve Rigby here. Steve Rigby is a principal at Rigby Associates, and it looks like he’s trying to be a thought leader on LinkedIn. We’ve all been there. You know, you want people to notice and respect your opinion and see you as an expert in the field. It’s true. And so Steve commented on this video. The videos crop. We don’t really know what the video is, but Steve’s comment on the video is, they earn so much. There is never a personal risk. CEO bollocks, I am afraid. I’ve worked with them. So he’s, he’s right now making a comment and calling out CEOs and saying that, you know, there’s no personal risk

Dan Nedelko 40:46
for them. And the first, yeah, oh, go ahead. I don’t want to interrupt. Go ahead and you know. So you look at this, you see

Joseph DellaVecchia 40:51
a comment. And usually, you know, if I’m making a comment and I want to see traction again, I’m going to sit back and I’m going to wait and see if anyone interacts with it, see if anybody starts discussing it with me and form a discourse from there, Steve did get a comment back. He got one comment back, and this person is agreeing with Steve. And so you think that would be great for Steve’s engagement and for people to see him as a thought leader. The only problem is that he’s common. Agreeing with him is from Steve himself one minute after making his original comment, Yeah, where’s Steve Rigby comments tagging Steve Rigby saying, great point, Steve, good

Dan Nedelko 41:34
job. Steve. The

Joseph DellaVecchia 41:35
comment also has one like which I assume is Steve Rigby liking his own comment. I cannot

Dan Nedelko 41:42
be. The only way to make this better would be for Steve Rigby to fully go into an entire back and forth thread. You know, have an argument, have a debate. You know, go down that rabbit hole. Steve, yeah, you know, you’ve got to have at least one friend. I mean, I think I have one friend at least. I mean, I’ve got kids, so that’s okay. Get your wife, get your mother, get your cousin, get somebody to, like, even reach out and ask them, Can you please, like, you know, throw this comment down, but don’t do it yourself. That’s it’s not a good look. So it’s

Joseph DellaVecchia 42:19
the one person liking and reposting all your LinkedIn stuff. Me, my your one LinkedIn friend. Yeah,

Dan Nedelko 42:24
well, you might be my one friend. So there’s that. And I think I have to pay you for that, so that’s good, too. All right, moving right along. Dennis hegstad, I’m gonna, actually, this is your gem, Joe. So I can, I can get

Joseph DellaVecchia 42:41
my gem. And so then I phrase it to you like this. Dennis HEG said, tweeted essentially a would you rather question? And you know, I think it’s, it’s an interesting question that we should take a moment and discuss. Dan hypothetical here, would you rather if I could give you one of the following two things? Which one are you going to take? Would you rather take a $1.2 billion winning lottery ticket, or 100,000 LinkedIn followers.

Dan Nedelko 43:07
I mean, it’s, it’s not even a pause, even though I paused, you would obviously take the 1.2 billion for like, for 1.2 billion reasons. But what did Dennis say? Dennis

Joseph DellaVecchia 43:20
said he’s choosing option B, 100,000 LinkedIn followers every time. He says, You should never underestimate the power of having a personal brand online. And I will agree with one thing. Dennis is right. You should never underestimate the power of having a personal brand online. We’ve seen it happen with many in many different ways, in many different cultures. What power a brand can have for you. However, I did the math before we sat down, Dan and 100,000 LinkedIn followers. At $1.2 billion is $12,000 per person. I cannot imagine a world where 100,000 people follow you, where you pay $12,000 to have someone follow you, and they make up that value over time, they somehow bring you in new business. They somehow elevate you to this whole new level. I cannot see you spending $12,000 per person and having a positive return on investment on that.

Dan Nedelko 44:11
I mean, I guess LinkedIn. I mean, I guess you could treat this like a thought experiment, but I don’t think Dennis has really thought through the thought experiment fully, because if you got a $1.2 billion in cash, you could easily get yourself a million LinkedIn followers, simply by taking, I don’t know, a quarter million dollars, which is a small fraction. So I think also people forget about what a billion is, right? 1000 million dollars, that is an enormously large amount of money, not even close, right? So you get 1000 you get 1000 $200 million even if you took 50 of them, of the millions, and solely put it into LinkedIn. I mean, I. Good lord, you could certainly get 100,000 LinkedIn followers for that. You could certainly have a ghostwritten book, you could have a TV show, you could do all sorts of things. So the thought experiment here falls to pieces. I think the lesson for me in this one is, I mean, don’t try to be too friggin clever. I think Dennis was really trying too hard here. Probably had somebody ghostwrite this and didn’t check it. You know, Twitter slash x right now is, well, actually, I think we’ve got an example coming up. I see so many of these, like, you know, Apple released iOS 18. Here’s nine things you need to know about. Or, I watched the Avengers last night. And here’s nine things I learned. Like, I mean, it is the most overdone contents, pasta, content, copy, pasta that you could possibly see. I think that’s possibly what happened here, because it’s, I’m a little embarrassed for Dennis, and I, I don’t well. I hope he doesn’t have a professional life to account for on social Well,

Joseph DellaVecchia 46:03
the first thing I want to say is I appreciate you trying to find the lesson in an r slash LinkedIn post. I think that’s and to find an actual, real lesson is true. Also, that’s a valuable skill you’ve got there. But I want to go back to your point of just understanding how much 1.2 billion is in people not realizing. And it reminds me of when I was in high school in math, my math teacher put a line on the board and put one end and one end. He put zero on the left end and 1 billion on the right end. He gave me the marker. He said, Joe, go mark on the board where you think $1 million is between zero and 1 billion. I walked up and I put the line right in the middle. Made sense to me, you know, grade nine math. I’m like, yeah, it’s right in the middle. And then we went through it, and where it actually stands is that it is very, very close, like a centimeter, maybe two centimeters away from zero on this line is where he put the mark for 1 million. Because zero to a million is a lot already, yeah, but then you have to redo that 1000 times, and that’s how you get to a billion. A billion, yeah, billion is so much. It’s like, yeah, it would be like, but like, here’s Yeah, I love my job. If I had $1.2 billion Dan, I’m sorry I’m not coming into work

Dan Nedelko 47:17
tomorrow. I don’t blame you, and I don’t think I would. I would tell you, I want a billion dollars. They’ll see in, like, I don’t know, a month, whatever happens, I don’t really care. I think, I think that’s pretty normal. Yeah, I think of the math side of it, you know. And that’s the interesting thing, when you see influencers talking, whether it’s on YouTube, on LinkedIn, on Twitter, on wherever it is, and, you know, even if you say like I’m a millionaire because you have a business, you’re not a millionaire. Otherwise I’d be a millionaire and I’m not a millionaire. But if you have a legitimate millionaire comparing themselves to Elon Musk or Jeffrey Bezos or anybody that’s on the billionaires list, right, it’s not even a valid comparison. The two are just so wildly off in terms of economies of scale and exponential growth. So yeah, I think that. I think beyond that, I think the takeaway is stop trying to be too clever, right, and beat this one to death. All right, moving on to our next one here. This is a this is a good one again. Please stop trying to farm engagement on LinkedIn. This is definitely something you should not do. And it was Business Insider, right? Like this guy. So Business Insider, not one of my favorite publications. I think that they, they do a lot of just like anything for the click, but here’s the quote, my divorce was the worst job I ever had. Make no mistake, it was an unpaid job with unreasonable hours. So I decided, like any job I’ve had to put my divorce and my LinkedIn resume says, Carl Dunn. Good job. Carl.

Joseph DellaVecchia 48:57
Can I say something that might just be a hot take that I want to preface. I have no pre information. I’m just, I’m making an assumption here. Okay, this guy got divorced because he was married to his job and not his wife.

Dan Nedelko 49:11
Either that or he was really bad at creating content to try to, like, farm content. One of the two, either way, I’m happy for his ex wife. Yeah, congratulations, you did a good job. I don’t even know what to say, you know, like, yes, we talk about being witty. We talk about, you know, be creative, be witty, be funny. I can’t tell if any of those things are at play here, but it certainly is not in great taste to and I mean, maybe he just hates his ex wife. I mean, cool, but, yeah, I don’t. I don’t really have much else to comment except don’t do this.

Joseph DellaVecchia 49:50
This one’s just funny. This one’s for our amusement. Honestly, yes,

Dan Nedelko 49:53
this is for our amusement. And we’re going down the route, oh, sorry. We’re gonna say something there. I

Joseph DellaVecchia 49:58
was just gonna say, Dan, like, our. Last one that we’re going to talk about, which I think is what you about to segue here goes back to that trend you were talking about, where people are overusing those content copy pastas, where they no longer original or creative. They’ve kind of become a meme at this point. And one of the most popular ones that we’ve seen is what this taught me about B to B sales, and people trying to take real life experiences and translate that to B to B sales, one of the most common, overused ones is people proposing, taking the event of proposing and saying what my proposal taught me about B to B. Sales, and I always find it really weird when they then talk about negotiating. I’m like, why are you negotiating in your proposal? Your marriage proposal, doesn’t I have comments about that.

Dan Nedelko 50:41
There’s, there’s actually, that’s interrupt you. There is a great LinkedIn lunatics threat about that very thing, yeah, yeah,

Joseph DellaVecchia 50:49
yeah. But you found one Dan that absolutely like, I think takes the

Dan Nedelko 50:53
cake. Yeah, it’s, it’s a good one. And if you’re watching on YouTube or on the video, you would have seen it already. And, you know, just hang on so bow tied. Cool surf. I’m not sure if I’m saying that right, but I’m gonna try. My wife got pregnant by another man. It’s been a challenging nine months knowing he’s not only my son, he’s not my son, but I’m so excited to raise him like my own. Nice thought. Here’s nine things that taught me about B to B sales. And I wish we had nine failed trumpet I wish we could. We could find them. Maybe we will find them for a future episode in the world of analogies, this is wrong on so many levels. I don’t think it taught you anything. Anyways, I don’t even know what to say they’re really I can’t tell if this is satire. I am hoping bow tied qual is, is a satire channel, and this is taking a jab at everybody that posts these nine things that taught me about something, not just B to B sales, but anything. I got nothing. I got nothing on this except, like, don’t be this guy.

Joseph DellaVecchia 52:02
Like you’re, you’re just airing out your personal laundry for clicks at that point. And the shock factor up at the top, which, I mean, there’s so many other ways you can talk about shock factor. People on LinkedIn love a good statistic, lead with a shocking statistic. Don’t lead with your wife got pregnant. Yeah,

Dan Nedelko 52:20
I think there’s a difference, just like with anything. I mean, if we’re gonna take this down a slightly serious road as we wrap up for this episode, is, you know, it’s not anything for clicks, because LinkedIn is full of that. There are people that their job is just LinkedIn engagement, and they farm it as much as they can, and the tropes are tired Well, well, the content has become a trope, right? A content has become a meme because they’ve used it, reused it. They squeezed that lemon a million times, and they just keep doing the same thing that is not someone to follow that at all. I think what you need to do is you actually need to find your own voice and provide value to the people that that you are intending to be valuable to, and that can be a really small group. It doesn’t matter. It doesn’t have to be millions of people. So don’t just try to and, I mean, I think on Tiktok now, right? It’s the is it a Gen Alpha? Like a Gen X tries to speak. Gen alphas is a bit of a thing for farming engagement, right? Yeah. And once it’s funny, and okay, you do it. I see this real estate agent. I think he’s done like two dozen of these videos, and he’s farming engagement at that point, it’s a bit too much right. Like you’re you’ve gone over, you’ve crossed over a line of providing valuable content into really damaging your own brand, looking like an idiot using these things in the wrong way. And like I said, my hope is that this is actually a jab at that format, this copy PASTA format, which is really like, if you go on to Twitter, my my Twitter timeline is just polluted with this stuff. There isn’t nine things that I haven’t been taught by, everything from the Samsung product release to the Apple WWDC to the last episode of of House of Dragon. Like it’s, it’s just done, and it’s ridiculous.

Joseph DellaVecchia 54:25
Here’s what the last episode of House of Dragon taught me about B to B sales, bring a dragon with you to get what you want.

Dan Nedelko 54:30
Yeah, exactly. Well, no, here’s what the last episode of House of the Dragon taught me about B to B sales is. Don’t give away the climax three episodes before the end of the season. There you go. That’s it. That’s all because that’s exactly what happened. If you haven’t watched house of the dragon, I think it’s eight episodes. Episode Five really is the constructive season finale, which is the big battle scene with the dragons. Everything else after that is just talking

Joseph DellaVecchia 54:59
you. Not in a good way.

Dan Nedelko 55:01
No, not in a good way. I was, honestly, I like the show a lot. It’s, it’s, it’s, it’s a vast, vast worlds better than the last few seasons of Game of Thrones. But, I mean, I was like, why am I even watching this? I don’t even care at this point, this, these last few episodes, especially the final episode of the season. So anyways, that’s a different rabbit hole.

Joseph DellaVecchia 55:25
Or Dan’s thoughts. I’m sure there’s a pop culture and movie streaming podcast he’s been on before to talk about these types of things,

Dan Nedelko 55:32
and it would actually be 21st century cinema

Joseph DellaVecchia 55:38
TF, streaming, wherever you get your podcast, that’s right. Search I hear the host is really good looking. Search

Dan Nedelko 55:42
up TF CC, 21st century cinema, hosted by Joseph dellavecchia. And you can hit up the number one most streamed episode ever of TFCC is guest host

Joseph DellaVecchia 55:58
by Dan nedelko. Yes, it is true for no

Dan Nedelko 56:01
lack episode, for no lack of opinion on popcorn versus cinema. Popcorn, film versus cinema. So anyhow, with that, I think we can do a graceful exit. We said we were going to do 25 minutes. We are now at pretty much an hour again. So yeah,

Joseph DellaVecchia 56:17
you know. But if you’re here and you’re listening. That means you like it. That’s, that’s, you know, we found our people. They’re okay listening to us Blab. When we say, Hey, we’re gonna go for 25 minutes and we go for an hour. Dan, I think you have the same experience as I do. Where my wife I say, I’m gonna blab for 25 minutes. At 26 minutes, she’s like, can we go? People are here and they’re and they’re staying for it. If you think we’re on the right

Dan Nedelko 56:40
track, if you think for one second I’m inserting myself in a conversation between you and your wife on a recorded podcast that will live on the internet, you gotta be insane. Katie’s

Joseph DellaVecchia 56:49
right. You’re a talker like me. I’m assuming you’ve had a similar experience. Oh, I

Dan Nedelko 56:53
have, I have, my wife just zones out. She just zones out, like, like, I’ve

Joseph DellaVecchia 56:57
watched, she’s learned. I’ve

Dan Nedelko 56:58
watched Star Wars, uh, episode for A New Hope, well over 175 times in the almost 20 years we’ve been together, every time I turn it on, it’s as if she’s never seen it before. She is so good at just she legitimately does not watch it, but it looks like she is watching it, but she’s not. She’s not absorbing it. So that is a special superpower of hers and hers alone. All right, no, if you’re still here, no, that’s fantastic, and that’s great. You know, we do these relatively unscripted, and we’re continuing to do these with a focus on sales, marketing, ABM, agency, life, sales, life, all of those things. So thanks for being here. Thanks for subscribing, thanks for following. If you’re listening to us on Apple podcast or Spotify, please leave us a like comment. Follow us and give us a star rating review. That stuff is really, you know, it’s the lifeblood of podcasts. And we’re back, and we’re going to be, I think we’re every other week now, right, Joe,

Joseph DellaVecchia 58:04
that’s the goal. We’re every other week, every other week,

Dan Nedelko 58:07
with another episode and probably some smaller ones to be inserted, so you can expect a good, consistent flow. And we’ve seen amazing growth in live at the high digital marketing from the trenches, or it’s digital marketing from the trenches live at the hive. We’re a bit schizophrenic on it. We even picked out some really fancy new podcast music that we will be introducing probably in this episode. So that’s it. That’s a wrap for this week.

Joseph DellaVecchia 58:37
We’ll see you guys next time with another exciting episode.

Dan Nedelko 58:40
That’s it. That’s the outro. Boom. Thanks so much. We’re signing off. Oh, I think I used to say peas and carrots. No, that was my kids stream. Anyways, have a great weekend. Have a great week. We’ll see you on the next episode of digital marketing from the trenches, peace!