Richard White - The Sales Evangelist Podcast Transcript

4:07PM Jan 18, 2022

Speakers:

Richard White

Donald Kelly

Keywords:

sales

notes

call

rep

team

listen

richard

manager

talk

sales rep

people

fathom

minutes

sales team

zoom

challenges

hear

prospects

tsc

deals

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Zoom, zoom, we have these online meetings, from teams to zooms and all whatnot, every single hour of the day. And next thing you know, when we're all said and done, we are know what the heck we spoke about from one meeting to another, it just all gets cluttered together. Imagine if there's a way that we can take all those meetings and make them so organized, that we get the right information, and our teams can get the right information they need. Man, ladies and gentlemen, I got a tool for you today that I love. And I think you're gonna love as well. Hey, hey, hey, everyone. Welcome to another great episode of the sales evangelist podcast. I'm your host, Donald Kelly, The Sales of Evangelist. And I'm so excited for another great episode. I'm so excited to be here with you today. And I have the opportunity to talk to Richard White, he is the founder and CEO of a company called Fathom video, you can check them out, but we're going to talk about them today. Because here it's go back to the scenarios that we were talking about when we're selling in this in the one of the sales challenges that we face in this hybrid environment or the remote environment is that our teams not together, we don't get a chance to connect. And then our teams were running all these teams and zooms in and all of these other Reddit whatever platform types of remote meeting on those meetings, it's very difficult to be able to effectively look in a camera, talk to someone and take great notes. And when you do take the great notes, it's hard to go back to those notes. And to get a sync process of what you're supposed to do and how things are supposed to happen. Well, Richard's going to talk about how he and his team were stumbling across this problem and how they've solved this problem for many different organization. He's listened to over and had over 300 interviews with different sales reps and sales leaders and heard this challenge over and over and over again. And he's like, forget it, we're gonna fix it. And that's what it did. Listen to how they did that. Richard, welcome to the show.

Thanks Donald.

Well, I'm excited to talk to you today. And as we kind of addressed it a little bit before, and I bragged about, you know, teaser a little bit, how you're going to give us so much wisdom, from your experiences, working with teams working with individuals, and helping them as they're going through the challenges that salespeople face in the pandemic. But before we dive into all the fun stuff, man, tell us a little bit more about what you're doing what you guys do.

Yeah, sure. I mean, so I'll give a quick backstory, you know, I don't have a background in sales, but backgrounds more kind of like workflow automation and optimization. But I early last year, right before the pandemic had this period, where I spent about 300, to 300, like sales calls in span of six weeks, but 10 to 12 a day. And I was now very well accustomed to like, oh my gosh, how challenging it is to try to so many sales calls to try to him back to back. And really to try to have a conversation and take notes at the same time. Right? Like you're trying to talk to someone, you've only got a limited amount of time, and trying to like talk to him and bang out notes, trying to clean up those notes afterwards. And then two weeks later, you don't remember anything useful about that call and share with you. And then you hand that off to your boss or your team. And they don't understand your notes or what really happened on that call either. So, you know, we set out to kind of solve that. And we've really spent a lot of the last year talking to reps, managers, you name it, to really understand, you know, how's my problem kind of look like everyone else's? And I think we found is a lot of people have this challenge with talking and typing at the same time, right? And a lot of managers have challenges with how do I get my team to take good notes, even when they do take good notes. You know, it pales in comparison to actually hearing that objection, that pain point firsthand. And so we built out a free app for for zoom for folks on Zoom. That kind of real time records, transcribes and most importantly like highlights the key moments of your call so you can kind of sit back and have a conversation instead of trying to like hurrily type while you're talking to your prospects.

So and I think there's it that is in itself. I was having a conversation last week with a friend who was trying to connect with a multiple different he was doing a similar thing. Like he has an executive assistant and he was trying to get her to like go back and listen to his calls and pull out key things. And it was just like Nah, bro, that's like such a big pain and he has He's discovered some ways that can make it easier. But the point is, though, if I'm a sales rep, that is one of the big things, because all my meetings, like you're saying are remote, like, every meeting pretty much is a Zoom meeting and one zoom call ain't gonna lie can get blurred with the next zoom call right afterwards. And if I'm in a sales situation, I'm gonna quickly monkey up those waters.

Yeah, the number of reps that said, you know, had five back to back calls today if it wasn't for Fathom recording. And again, I think you put another good point, which is like, it's not enough just like to transcribe the call, because I don't want to go back through an entire call that I've already had and pick out parts, right. In fact, yeah, we found that people finally about 15% of calls noteworthy. And so to go back and repeat that

again, because I think that's important for people to hear. So out of 100%, were saying, you saying 15% of the call, typically are noteworthy.

Yeah, that we find, you know, because we give basically people interface be like, yes, this part was noteworthy, right with flag that part of the call. And so yeah, that makes sense. Why none of us wants to go back and re listen to a call what like, you know, one, we already did it. And two, it's, you know, forfeits of it's not that interesting, right?

Yeah. So, so go back to these challenges here. So the note taking part why, I guess why is it critical, though, in your experience, or some of the benefits of having effective notes on these calls? Like, are there any studies or any note, things that you guys are seeing where it enhances? Or improves the seller? Because I can go to Devil's Advocate part, and I can say, Yeah, only 50% of call really matters. And I can remember those, you know, key things, contact them this day, or something, you know, they're a huge pain is this issue, but why is it even that important for me to take someone to take notes? Or to have a tool that can help me to take those notes?

Yeah, I think what we've seen, you know, like you said, a lot of these calls in the board together, right? Because you're asking a lot of the same questions, you're giving a lot of the same pitch, right? And so people's answers don't get the sound, the sound often sound the same. And so, you know, it's always we're helping or a lot of days is auto generated notes for people when automatically putting them in your CRM, logging a call. And in some ways, that's kind of like Netflix sending out DVDs, right long term, I actually think that what we've seen is more successful thing is, rather than you take me take a bunch of notes, you can't take notes after the call. But really, what I want to do is I have an intro call with you, when I go to the demo call, I just go back and pull up that Fathom recording from last time, and I watched the highlight reel of the three minutes that mattered and watch the last minute. And it really sparks this like, mnemonic in my brain where I'm like, Oh, my gosh, it feels like I just had that call, right before this call, right? And like, the amount of like, just that creates kind of like a much more magical experience for the prospect, but also just makes your life as a rep so much less stressful.

Oh, yeah. I mean, I can only agree with that. I think I can only imagine like, the thing that you got me there was one of the things that we always push the sales rep is prep for your call. And you know, we try to recall that back in, I think I can't remember the data's or what exact thing but I for so much of our memory, we like the things that we think we remember, oftentimes not even the right thing, like you know, it was some some study that it showed, and it's not that we're all liars. But it's just that it's hard for us to recall data effectively. And overtime. I mean, even before this call you and I were chatting, and it's a perfect example like we chat while we're driving. And some of the things got blurred is forgot what we talked about. And as soon as you start talking back, you're like you reminded me I was like, oh, yeah, this isn't the things I want to talk to Richard about. So anyway, it just kind of goes to show like that can happen to anyone and everyone. And narrative. When you have that evidence, so to speak, when you have a three minute recording that I could listen to our highlight reel that helps me now to go into the right frame of mind to be able to prep for the next one. So

yeah, I love it. Yeah. And you know what I was doing on those calls last year, I'm actually pretty good note taker, I was pretty diligent. I like we spend much time on the call spend much time after the whole cleaning up. And literally, I would go back two weeks later and be like, I don't remember what this is really related to right. And, you know, there was a period of my last company where I was running the sales team. And I can't tell you the number of times where I would like talk to someone at Pipeline review. And so they didn't buy because of this, or this objection. And I only read up read from the notes. And they didn't really remember the nuance either. And I was like, gosh, the number of times I said just like, what did they actually say, right? And the tone they said with and like, you know what that looked like. And so part of this is like we can auto generate notes, put your CRM for you as the rep so you can have better recall, and you have less stress on the call cuz you're not worried about missing something. But as the manager now when I see these icy diversionary notes, here's the pain points which uncovered here's objections which are covered, I can click a link and go directly to that part of the call and watch that 30 seconds, right and now, okay, well, I have a walk, I can I can do a lot better job of coaching my rep on how to overcome that or what our next step should be.

So let's talk about from a manager standpoint, you kind of bring that into it like, you know, cuz that's one of the other challenge if, if I'm a remote team, and I think what the key there is that salespeople have happy ears, right? And we're going to only remember the things that we want to remember that we feel that could be, you know, somewhat meaningful or somewhat important. So if I'm a sales rep with happy ears, I'm going to remember that you probably said, Donald, I am excited To learn about this, yes, I want to watch a demo. But I didn't listen to the part where you said, Yes, we already have a product in place. And, and, you know, our team is not looking to switch right now. But you know, I'm open to taking a peek at it, you know, my happy years going for the things that I want to hear. But if my manager comes in and said, Donald, so you could talk to me on that standpoint, like, how does this component can help a sales rep or a sales leader who may be new in her role? Or somebody who's been in in maybe she's been in a role for a while, but how can this help her with a remote team, or even a hybrid situation where half the team comes in or several days a week? I've been blabbering there for a minute, but you get the point?

Yeah, I mean, in some ways, we are trying to enable kind of the the remote, you know, Salesforce, right, where you used to get this on the ambiently. Because you could hear you know, often If I hear one half a sales conversation from a rep, I kind of have a sense of like, okay, I know, how's it going or whatnot. Right? And I know what I coach them on, but we don't have that anymore, right? Because it's yeah, they're doing it from their bedrooms, their living room. So there's two things we're doing. So one is, we are mapping all of these highlights, generally to a sales methodology. Right? So you know, you know, if you're using medic, or if you think that that and, you know, the rep actually is not just highlighting, you know, oh, here's the objection. But like, here's what they said their pain points were, here's what they said their situation was, here's what they said their impact was like, those sorts of things, right. And so now I as a manager, without having again to watch the entire call, which I don't necessarily have the time to do, can double click on, okay, this deal is gonna say this deal is gonna close this quarter this month. Let me go double click on what they said about pain point, let me go double click on what they said about timeline. I want to hear that myself. Right. And so that is, I think, really, really game changing for a lot of sales managers. The other scenario, this is a little orthogonal to the original one. But there's other things we're doing to kind of facilitate almost real time collaboration on calls. So one of the things we do that's unique is you can do, like zoom has a cloud recording built in, you can record a call, but you often don't get that recording until, like 30 minutes after the call. We're recording in real time. And so one of the things that allows us to do is we can, you know, send, you know, anytime there's an objection, we can send that to a Slack channel, within like 15 seconds of that objection happening. So now I actually as manager, not awaken, come back at the pipeline review, and listen to the objection, I get a feed of objections that are happening in real time with my sales team. Come on. And so you know, where this also gets really cool. I'm really sad about his technical questions, right? I've got a technical product, you know, usually at the demo or later stage, I bring an SE to every meeting. Well, what if instead, whenever the rep hears a technical question, they just smash a button says technical question. Within 20 seconds, that question is in a room with my SES, they can listen to questions so they can jump on the call and be like, Oh, hey, you know, I just heard you're asking about our Yep. Oh, author, SSL think the answer is this, right? Like creating those kind of like magical, clever experiences in a hybrid environment, which Yeah, right. Like, that's people like how did you do that? Right. And so that kind of stuff, I think is also good outside of meat, potatoes, just like we're going to remove the note taking piece but like really impactful for a lot of teams.

As you can tell already, I'm a believer in the power of skipio. Text messaging, allow me to communicate with my clients and help to schedule more appointments. It works. But don't take my word for it. Hear what Ben Hodson, the CEO of job Nimbus has to say about it. Prior to using skipio, our average number of people that would show up and actually come to our demo sessions was about 72% of all of our so we booked an appointment, about 72% of those people end up showing up. But with skipio went almost 90% was like 88.5 or something like that. So it was a huge jump. But the neat thing about skipio is that you don't even need your management to be involved to do it. You could start using this right now as an individual contributor. One of our employees used to be at skipio. As he was doing his daily sales work. He was getting more people to attend his appointments than other sales reps were. And the word sort of got out on the sales team and other people were asking, how was he getting such a higher rate of people showing up those appointments. Turns out, he was using his old skipio account, to send text messages, reminders, and to interact with those customers in a way that we just weren't doing at the time. And I found out we had a bunch of reps doing it. We were seeing great results. And we went to Skippy O and we became a customer. Hey, don't take our word for it. You can try skipio for free for yourself. Go to skipio.com and you will get one month free on any plan. Again, that's skipio.com Use promo code t s e 100. Again, that's t s e 100.

You know just reminder Richard is kind of like you know, you know when the bank is getting robbed and they hit the silent button underneath. Yeah. My, my my, my sales engineer at that point. Just like tap, tap, tap, tap tap. Exactly right, bro come in here. I don't know what they're talking about speaking German.

Right? And they're like, you don't want to have to try to come back after the call. Like, I think they said this. And here's my notes, like, you know, like you just, you know, as a technical person, I always just like, you know, what did they exactly say? Right? Yeah, hear that? So, yeah, I mean, our whole goal here is just, we've, we spent a lot of time to strive here. What are all the things that make it stressful to be an on call? Right? And let's Yeah, what are all the things that need to be shared in the org? So I'll throw out one more thing that's really interesting. I also learned that there's a bunch of platforms more recently that have sort of giving you like coaching metrics, right? Like, yeah, how much of the college? Yeah, what was your talk time on the call? Or did you monologue a lot or, you know, eccentric cetera. But they're always giving reps these metrics, like after the call. So it's kind of like, okay, well, maybe I'll try to do better next time. But we're not actually doing that during the call. So like, on coaching the rep and like, if I talk for more than 90 seconds and fathoms on my call, then feather will pop up this little notification be like, cool, you've been monologuing for 90 seconds, right? Just a gentle reminder that like ask a question or stuff like that? Well, we'll tell you talk time, every five minutes will tell you, you got 15 minutes left in this call, your talk time is this, you know, you got two minutes left in the call, that sort of stuff. So trying to basically figure out all different ways we can support someone so that they can just focus on the conversation, and we focus on doing all the things computers are good at telling you about,

you know, what I really like, you know, and I mean, I think their data tools like Gong, and in some way, you're talking about some of those capabilities, are we programming those things in as a manager to say, you know, about the 90 minutes? Or are those some of the things pre built in, that can help my team that are best practices for sales?

Yeah we build all that stuff in, it's kind of all built in. If you want to tweak it afterwards, we can do that. But our whole goal is like, which is building all the best practices to start, right? So in our onboarding process, we ask you, what your sales methodology, what's your CRM, and we just provision all the things that you need, right? Okay, here's, here's the model duration, here's the button through to set up for that match your sales methodology, let's go and connect your CRM, we just do all of that. So you know, our goal is also you know, I think there's a lot of tools out there that try to do some of this stuff, but you know, have a multi week multi month setup process, or self service app, you can get up and running in three minutes. Right? That's beautiful.

You know, one of the things that you mentioned too, and I think all of these things are helping because if I get my manager is not there to sit over me and say, Hey, Donald, answer this, you know, or answer this way. Or Donald Go ahead. And, you know, if I'm even on to pull my manager on a zoom call, I know it was kind of like ridiculous to kind of think I can get my manager to jump on every call that I had. Right. But if I quote unquote, I can get that right along. And I'm sure it's same thing with the SE, the same thing happened to the manager, I think he did say that like, you know, manager can get that notification in a Slack channel or whatnot. But the idea though, one of my coaching clients, one of the things that he does, we talk about it, but he went ahead and actually built it into his talk track. So at the very end of his call, he has the last five minutes to plan the next step. I mean, how cool would it be, and I'm sure your tools can do that. We can say your five minute left in a call Donald, now it's time to talk next step. So therefore prompting all of my team, whenever they're on a call that last five minutes is that next step portion? And obviously I can listen to that as a manager and be like, you know, bro, the last five minutes, you know, 20% of my team's doing the last five minute planning, no wonder why our deals aren't moving forward. You know what I mean? Right?

Yep. Yeah, that's the next step for us, as we now is building in some of those playbook type things, right? Like, here's what I want to be covering, okay? Or you know, and also an inverse, right, your three minutes in, you should be past intros. Now, like, let's get Yeah, right. So yeah, with that stick, we don't yet have that product, but it's something we're actually actively working on. It could be or like, basically, beta testing with a bunch of teams right now.

That's beautiful. Man. I think it's a it's a next iteration of where we're going as, as organizations as sales organization, it's like, just kind of, it's making us perform work smarter and harder. And we're mimicking that. I guess. It's not necessarily just like having robots doing our jobs. But it's having I think this is where I see the future of sales where you have aI interacting with human behavior and helping us to be able to do the job more effectively. Right. I think that's go back five years ago, when they're talking about, you know, we're gonna have aI take over sales. It's like, yeah, there's gonna be automation but I'm not necessarily think we're gonna have iRobot yet where we're, you know, we're sitting around the country is run by robots, per se.

Yeah, we were a long way from that. Right. And so, there still is very much a human component. But there's still a lot of things that the bot can do to support you in the call, right?

Yeah, for sure. I think it's like what you're saying. It's that it's a assistant? What Yeah, yeah, to what we need to get done, and I'm making our lives easier. So better perform. Wait, if I can do that take off if I if you give me an extra 40 minutes of my day, like bro, that means I can do one more demo. Yeah. And that's huge. So I love that or a discovery call or even like 45 more minutes prospecting, like all day every day. That's good for me. So man, love it, man. Anything else that we're missing Richard that can make the you know, work help out with this, this whole remote environment where I may have hybrid or I may have like total team remote, like, what else? What are some of the challenges you guys see that you guys are addressing? That could help us out.

One other thing we saw, so my last company user voice, we basically sold a platform to product managers. So we sold product management. And we helped them kind of listen to your customer feedback coming in from sales success, support, you name it, is it funny, we did a survey, which, you know, which teams feedback do you trust the most? And it was like, basically, like, you know, it was like, Oh, we trust the support team. We trust the CSM team. And then it was kind of like 50 feet of shit, we trust the sales team, right? You know, and because of it, the happy years and stuff like that. And so the other thing we started doing some of these, like live feeds of what's happening in the call is we always provision like a product feedback highlight, right? And so the product teams now I think, from a sales perspective, you know, how do I create credibility around like, we need this feature, we need this thing. I'm losing deals because of it. Well, sharing a clip with a pm or someone, right and the engineering team of here's a customer explaining a Gosh, I wish I need this. And here's why I need it. Like, yeah, now you don't have to do the job of internally lobbying for here's why this stuff's important. Customers can do it for you. And literally even set up channels where it's like, here's the sales feedback channel and slack. And you know, there's something about that, that I think, does that job for you. And you can just focus on selling.

Oh, man, that is? Yeah, I think that's gone to the next level stuff there, man, some really, really effective and really, really good things. I'm sure people would love to take a peek at this and to see it more so in action, what's the best way for them to go about doing so to take a take a look at it?

Yeah, absolutely. Go to fathom dot video slash pod. Again, we are completely free products for zoom. If you go to that link, fattened up video slash pod, you'll immediately skip the waitlist. We have about 80,000 people on the waitlist right now. But you can skip it by going to that link. Also, if you have any feedback on the project. Any questions? I'm on LinkedIn, Richard White on LinkedIn fathom, feel free to reach out to me there. I'd love any any thoughts and feedback? And you know, yeah, I find this this problem space actually really interesting from a workflow perspective. So any ideas you have, I'm open to it.

Biggest takeaway from our conversation today that somebody needs to leave with the they're listening, they got, you know, got their happy ears. But they may have missed this one piece. What's that one major piece of advice you want them to walk away with Richard?

Zoom calls don't have to be as stressful as they are.

Boom, I love it. So via sales manager, sales leader, you heard it, zoom calls don't have to be that stressful, check out Fathom some of the cool things that they're doing, making life easy for us as sales professionals, whether you're an individual contributor, whether you're a sales leader, or whether you're a team, I'm loving it, and I highly recommend it as well. So thanks so much, Richard, appreciate you.

Thank you, Donald.

That was Richard White. And if this is your first time watching one of our videos listening to one of our podcast episode, I asked you to please go ahead and hit that subscribe button, leave us a rating and review. And we'll promise you, we're gonna keep giving you more actionable tips and ideas just like this on every single podcast episode, if you want to connect with Richard, you can find him on LinkedIn and some of the many other platforms where he's at check them out, you can also take advantage of the offer that he gave us for this opportunity for you to check out fathom. In addition to that, ladies and gentlemen, speaking about offers, our sponsors are giving you some amazing deals, I mean, some amazing things. I mean, I'm hustling and negotiating for your behalf with them. And I want you to take advantage of check out what they're offering. See how it can benefit you and your team. As always, I share stuff like this because I want to help you, I want you to check out Fathom as well and see some of the amazing things that it can do for you and your team. I want you to find more of your ideal customers. I want you to know what to say when you reach out to them. I want you to close more deals. But most importantly, I want to challenge you to go out each and every single day and do big things. Stay tuned for a scene for our next episode. And the final myth is that anyone can do anything. Well, you may believe that and I'm not saying I'm being pessimistic Yes, we can. We can all have the positive thinking but the reality is that everyone can't do any everything. I appreciate you listening to this episode today, there are many different things you could be doing but you took the time to listen to this podcast. And for that I'm truly grateful. If you haven't done so already, go ahead and leave us a rating and review on Apple podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you're listening to the show. Our show is produced by TSC studios. Our audio engineer is Gerson or bale artwork and video was designed by the one and only destined Coronado show note was created by Jake Luke Menosky. Our podcast production manager was Joshua Harris. You can find audio credits to each of our music inside of the show notes. And I'm your host your coach your guide down the sales journey Mr. Donald C. Kelly, the sales of Angeles pod sales Podcast Network If you haven't done so already, make sure to go over to skipio.com and take advantage of their offer for yourself. You don't need to worry about getting ghosted by prospect skipio is a powerful way that you're able to communicate with your prospects the way that they want to be communicated to as a TSC listener. skipio will give you one month free on any plan, simply go to skipio.com Use promo code t s e 100. Again, that's t s e 100.