00:06 Hi guys, really happy to have a good pal of mine and good acquaintance, Alex Olley of Reach Desk here today. He's the founder of Reach Desk, one of the founders. Myself and Alex have been doing a fair bit of work together over the past couple of months. We've been in contact over the past couple of years. He's been selling to me at various different companies and then we've been doing quite a bit of work together in terms of pushing out things around account-based marketing and account-based sales, getting our message out there. He's very active on LinkedIn.

00:36 like myself as well. But yeah, like really happy to have you on, Alex. Thanks, man. Great to speak to you. I think we're speaking every week at the moment, it sounds like, just sharing stories from the trenches, what's working, what's not working. So it's a pleasure to be speaking again, hopefully sharing it out in a more open forum this time. Absolutely. So it's funny, like we've been.

01:01 We've had plenty of different stories from the trenches. I've been interested here in some of your use cases because you guys are a lead feeder customer, but we can get to that a little bit later. But tell us what's been working well for you guys lately. So, God, we had to change quite a few things, every business has, right? We've really like dropped the level of automation on a lot of things, to be honest with you, specifically when it comes to like...

01:28 BDR outreach, sales outreach, how we kind of sell within the deal process. So yeah, but you know, beforehand, I'd say we were probably automating, yeah, let's when it comes to sequences 25, 30% of it, and that's kind of gone down to about almost nothing. Everything that we do now is really personalized, is really contextual. So we've kind of reduced as much automation seems quite silly, a lot of businesses that are trying to automate as much as possible.

01:56 So we can get more out of people. And actually we've kind of flipped it. And we've found that's given us a way more human way of selling and the perception as a prospect is, you know, the impact has been huge. And I get messages from some of our prospects saying, can you teach us how to, how you're training your BDR team? Because we like the way that you're treating us. It's on a real human level. So I think that's the first thing that we've found to work pretty well. That's super interesting, you know.

02:22 I was speaking with somebody about this the other day and say, somebody asked me like, how do you hack it? How do you manage to get this amount of messages out and how do you manage to get this amount of business into the door, blah, blah, blah, blah, in the shortest amount of space of time possible? I was like, I don't think it's possible. It's possible for some very irregular businesses can manage that. It's not something that you can just conjure up. It's like when your CEO says to you, hey, I want you to create a viral campaign.

02:51 It's like it's never going to happen. It happens, the virality of it happens organically. It's just something that catches on. And the chances of it happening are so low. It's basically like saying, hey, go down to the shops and buy the winning lottery ticket. It's basically the same odds. So this personalized approach that you're saying there, I think that there's no way really of automating things so that you get a better result.

03:20 I think their better results come out of hard work. There's no way of making it easier and making sure you can sit up, put your feet on the desk and chill out and have something running in the background. No, it's bloody hard work is what gets you there. It's exactly that. The one thing I've always trained salespeople is that sales isn't difficult, it's hard. There's that distinction. If you appreciate that it's just hard, there's no exact science to it. You just need to...

03:49 make it about your prospects as much as possible, but put it in the hard yards, then you'll succeed. That applies even more so now than it did three, six months ago. You can do certain things to optimize that obviously. You can't just sort of say on a one-to-one basis, tailor every single step. You know, what we built was a matrix, right? So you have all your personas, right? We've actually added in new personas because our use cases have changed slightly.

04:16 Quite a few of our customers are starting to use customer success and HR purposes as well as sales and marketing. So get your personas out, right? Then you try and segment them by industry as well. So you have persona and industry related snippets. Then you basically ask yourself three key questions. The first one is, what key questions are your personas asking themselves right now? What are their real challenges? You can take that question, right? Then you say, well,

04:46 based on that framework, how is your business going to help them with that specific challenge for that specific persona? What are those things? You don't talk about features and benefits, you talk about the outcomes. We're going to help you do this so that you can have that perceived outcome and then you then address what the actual value is going to be. So when you say, like, to give you an example, a field marketing manager, for example, all of their events are now canceled.

05:14 So they're flipping everything to online events, big online events, some of them like two, three day events. But one of their challenges is actually getting people to turn up to those events, to participate, to stay. So you ask themselves that question, are you struggling to get that big online event to get the right attendance you need to fill your pipeline? Have you thought about gamifying it and delivering a better experience that incentivize someone to turn up? Because if you do so, you'll get higher engagement and your pipeline will fill quicker.

05:42 using these methods. Here's how we do it. So you can do that. You can build up that matrix based on all your personas, all the different use cases and take those three steps. And that's what enables your reps to be able to use that as a starting point. And then you personalize. I noticed this about that specific event and something you discussed in that online forum. Here's how we can help you. Super interesting. How much effort did it take to update that persona's matrix that you did?

06:11 Is it a trip exercise? It was at the beginning because it was all guesswork. What we did instead is we started interviewing our customers. Go to your customers. See the ones that are adopting your product the most. And ask them what those key questions are. That was the mistake I made at the beginning, as we assumed it are. Whereas salespeople should almost be going into customer success with the CSMs, account managers, whatever you call them. And

06:40 and say, look, how are customers using us right now? And then make, like, over-communicate that internally. Your customer success team should be overly communicating to your sales team, through marketing, perhaps, how the best customers are using you right now, which ones are coming on board and why they came on board. Right, and then you can start building on that matrix based on that. So don't make any assumptions, talk to your customers. It's the best thing I think we did, and then you have those snippets and those templates that you can work from. For sure.

07:08 Harry, you mentioned something there just around communications between the different teams, so customer success, sales, marketing. How are you making sure that information is being fed back from customer success all the way through sales and then through marketing or whatever way you have it there? How are you making sure of that? We have a weekly meeting and this applies to everyone in our team. So the US team, the team up here in EMEA, we have an hour long.

07:35 stand up every Tuesday where we break it down. So BDR is what's working for you, customer success, share, the use cases for their new customers, and it communicates everyone. There's a follow-up and a report. Every deal that's closed, there's a win report that's circulated to those teams. Why they bought us, why now? What were those triggers? What were the drivers? What were those kind of hooks that really made that something they wanted to do right now? How did we get it across the line? Those are just really simple things. Win reports, getting everyone on the same call.

08:05 sharing those use cases and making sure that all those teams, sales, marketing, and customer success are on that call as well. That's awesome. Are you using your CRM to facilitate that or is it just Google Docs or what are you using for it? Just to get that information presented to people. Just Google Slides and Google Docs, really simple, right? Yeah, it's not rocket science, but everyone needs to know why people are buying from you right now. And then you start to spot the trends. Hang on a second, this industry?

08:35 We hadn't even thought about that, but we've got that many inbounds in that industry, that many is closing. I mean, I think that's what marketing should be really zoning in on. But to enable a team where they go, this is what that industry is doing right now, it's actually booming. We hadn't even thought about it. We're getting more inbound there. We're having more conversations. Those guys are closing quickest. Now let's put a lot more focus into that industry. And that's where we've actually started designing account-based programs.

09:01 the specific accounts within those verticals and using all that information in context. Okay, so you've had to do some chopping and changing, obviously, in terms of which verticals you're selling into and pivot slightly. How difficult has that pivot been over the past six to eight weeks? Happened quite fast, to be honest with you. We're not a massive organization. We're relatively small. We're sort of going from that startup to scale-up mode where it is a bit easier.

09:30 it to kind of make that change. It's about finding the right sources of information and truth really and I'd say people have been working longer hours as a result because you know you've got to do those morning sessions you kind of have to do a daily stand-up with everyone because I think from what I'm seeing like sales is changing almost every week right now like six weeks ago.

09:54 Everyone was like, oh my god, LinkedIn has this new feature where you can send a video message. Everyone's like, ah, that's mad. We can do voice notes. And I was like, OK, everyone's getting videos and voice notes. What's next? So it's actually like we did this really amazing thing. It wasn't my idea at all, where two of our BDRs, one Jimmy in the US and Scott over here in the UK, were just sharing those best practices. And then they saw that the BDR community was like, yes, we've seen that. And have you thought about this? And actually, via the video.

10:23 communities like LinkedIn, you can get those guys to share all those ideas and you can reuse them. So you kind of always that one step ahead. So they've done a really awesome show just called BDR Best Practices, which they film in their bedrooms, put it out there, get some feedback. And they always get some really good new ideas from it. I've seen that. I think the guys are doing a really great job. Like you've managed to hire some real gems there from the BDR SDR perspective.

10:50 And this is because personally from my side, I, you know, when we met in a previous life where I was working at a different organization, I was running the SDR team or BDR team back then. And this was always a struggle, you know, I was trying to find good, good SDRs or, you know, solid SDRs that are willing to put in the hard yards that are willing to learn that don't just want to jump from one position to the next, I even move from an SDR position into sales when they're not ready, you know.

11:18 How have you been managing to find such good talent?

11:23 I mean right now is an incredibly good time to hire because of the situation if you are in that position. But this time last year, being honest with you, it was just me and my two co-founders. It's quite scary to think back to that. But I've always tested for like five things that will enable not only people to start in sales, but to be able to continue and work themselves up the ladder.

11:50 And if you can test for those things really early on, it doesn't matter what degree you've got or what you've done before. You can set people on that path. And those things are coachability, curiosity, intelligence, work ethic, and drive and motivation. Those are things that you can test. And if you have what I call a sales hiring formula that allows you to score that and then benchmark people and go, that candidate did really well. He had all those attributes.

12:19 Let's look for more people that have those attributes as well. Then it doesn't matter. You know, we're not saying hire an army of clones, but test for those things that allow you to assess early on what those qualities are for your organization. And from there, you can you can get building really, really good team. I think we've got a really talented team who have those those attributes, all of them, and they've all been really successful. Alex, what's been, you know, you mentioned to me previous to this call that

12:47 A lot of people are asking you guys, you're a direct mail company, you guys send direct mailed people in their offices, that's what your product is, in the lead up to the whole COVID crisis and everything. What have you had to do as a fundamental change to your overall product, your core, in order to survive the wave that's been coming at you over the past six day weeks? Yeah, there were two main things. We built a whole new product called ReachDesk Remote.

13:16 And that's basically a means of recipients being able to redirect mail to their homes. So let's say I wanted to send you something, you had like a discovery call with you and I just wanted to send you like a gift afterwards, for example, to kind of really build that relationship. I could just send you an email saying, and it would say Alex Olly wants to send you something from ReachDesk. You'd just click on that email, it would just ask for your personal address, have the right little tick box saying, you don't have to consent to marketing communications, it's literally just to send you something.

13:45 enter your address and then whenever it is next day, two days later, that gift will arrive straight to your front door. So that was just a little widget we had to build. Then we started building custom landing pages because our customers were like, we want it really nicely branded part of our website. So you can do anything with these now. I've seen some unbelievable use cases where people are like, there's a demand gen campaign sending personalized sneakers. So you go to this page, it creates this whole experience.

14:14 They say, hey, we'd like to send you something to your home. Click here, and it has a link to that retailer. You personalize these sneakers. That goes all through ReachDesk and actually gets sent to your home. So it's like you can connect to pretty much anything now, brand it up, and use it for like demand gen, ABM, sales acceleration, velocity, those kind of things. So those are the other things. As well as the second part, we added in a lot of e-gifting.

14:43 So, you know, you guys are a Nordic business. We realized we had to have a lot more of a global presence. So doing those small things that allow you as a sales rep to be a bit more enabled using the means of digital gifting. Give an example, one of our BDRs, did this awesome one the other day. Well, it's just like an Amazon gift card, right? It's just an Amazon gift card that appears in an email. But that rep could research their prospects. They understood that they're a baseball fan and they just had a kid.

15:13 right now they said the reason I'm getting in touch is because of X Y and Z you know make sure that's person that's but also congrats on having a kid by the way I thought you'd like this this I think was a blow up baseball bat for your kid hang it on the wall when he's big enough you can you can teach him how to play ball right and it had a screenshot of that and then a digital gift link to Amazon where you can actually buy that baseball bat for himself okay all right so it's like really really personalized and that person straight away was like

15:42 Oh my God, this is one of the best experiences I've had. You've understood my problems. You've understood everything. And you're adding that value because you know that personal, that moment that mattered to me in my life. So we've added about 700 different e-gifts from Amazon to Uber Eats to charitable donations, to those small things that matter to your prospects so that you can use the power of gifting but by digital means. That's fantastic, Alexis.

16:10 It's really cool to see a company that's been able to pivot so quickly. And it seems like a lifetime ago when we spoke on that, when you were trying to get back from the U S that day, back in March, after Trump had just decided to close the borders, just to, yeah, so myself and Alex spoke back then, I think it was maybe the 16th of March, it was the Saturday and Alex was in JFK and I asked him, Hey, how's it going? He said, well, I'm in JFK. I'm trying to get the hell out of the U S right now.

16:38 And that seems like a lifetime ago. And between now and then, you've managed to completely pivot your organization. You've managed to create a product which is actually, it's probably better than what you had before, to be honest. But it's everything. It's way better. I mean, it was good in the first place, but now I think it's killer. But yeah, that was a long time ago. I remember I was top of the Empire State Building, got push notifications saying, travel to the UK will be banned as of Monday. And I was like, oh God, here we go. But yeah, it has been. But...

17:07 As I said to you earlier on, the only means that we're actually able to do that, some of it is a bit of a gamble, but the majority of it is literally by going to your customer base and just talking to them and being open. Buy them lunch virtually if you want, but go to your customers and say, how do we really help you right now? And that's where all the answers came from. It was really good advice that our CEO, Mark, gave to me and he said, you just need to go and focus on our customers.

17:38 pipeline generation, don't think about anything else, focus on your customers and they'll give you a lot of the answers and that's where the source of all of our, let's call them pivots, but that's where a lot of it came from. That's amazing, that's amazing. Okay, with that note, speak with your customers. I would say we'll call it a day, Alex. Thank you so much. Thanks for having me. Always a pleasure, Andy. Take it easy.