How to enable an outsourced sales team w/ David Zeff

David 0:00

When you look at like sales enablement and marketing enablement and just trying to create those processes, one, which is about creating a very effective onboarding process, a very effective onboarding, I'm talking about both for staff and also for customers. Yep. Like being able to take a lead and walk them through to purchase that buyer journey is very, very important. And getting that right is very, very important. A lot of the time some companies make it impossible for you to work with them.

Tyler Lindley 0:30

Hey, y'all, I'm Tyler. And this is The Sales Lift, a sales enablement podcast hosted by yours truly, Tyler Lindley. Today is Episode Two, how to enable an outsourced sales team with David Zeff. David is the CEO and founder of Whistle, an outsourced top of the funnel sales agency located in Israel. We discuss a ton of great ideas including outsourcing parts of your sales process, why agility is important in sales, how AI and robots can actually help you sell better, and some great ideas for better marketing and sales alignment. This is an absolute fire episode and I'm thrilled to bring you the sales lift your business needs right now.

Hey, Sales Lift audience. It's Tyler Lindley, your host here. Today I have David Zeff on the podcast. Welcome to the show, David, how you doing?

David 1:25

Pretty good. Thanks. How are you?

Tyler Lindley 1:27

Hey, doing well doing well. So David, tell the audience a little bit more about yourself and what you do.

David 1:33

Yeah, sure. So, my name is David, as you know, I'm CEO of a company called Whistle and we're a top of funnel agency we focus on basically making sure that we deliver qualified leads to your sales teams. And we mostly service growing startups, but also large companies that are making pivots into new markets and don't necessarily have the time to set that up themselves, so looking for an agency with full marketing and sales development capabilities that I can just plug in and address my audience and figure out, you know, what's going on and set up those, you know, sales qualified leads as well.

Tyler Lindley 2:16

Wow. Interesting. So it sounds like you've you mentioned outsourced? You know, I think a lot of times people think of this as something in house that you're marketing and top of top of the funnel type sales. That would be something that a company does in house. Why outsourced? Why do you think why is that the model that you're you're setting up with Whistle?

David 2:34

Yes. So this has been cooking for the last six months and I think now specifically why it's become such a big topic right now, which if it hasn't been discussed. It's going to be discussed very, very soon. is just factoring You know, what's happening around the world right with the pandemic and the you know, I don't know if we can call the recession yet or a depression or I don't know depends on your definition. But I think that we've seen massive layoffs of staff, highly qualified staff also seen companies that are those that are surviving on needing to adapt very, very quickly. Those that have died, died. And there's a chunk that are in this kind of hibernation mode and are waiting for the world to get back on its feet. When that happens, you are going to have to if you've gone into hibernation mode, let's say you've cut 50 percent in your staff, you let your whole sales team, go your marketing team, whoever that is, you're going to have to spend a lot of time and money, rehiring and retraining and onboarding staff and that is not necessarily something that you want to be doing when the light switch goes back on. And that can be a six month nine month process, ultimately, right.

So I think there's going to be a gap there where agency work and outsourced work is going to explode. It's been a model that a lot of companies use for the same kinds of reasons, anyway. And now it's like ready to go. And you guys know what you're doing you like we don't have that in house capability in that in-house intelligence. And so we want to outsource it and maybe maybe after we outsource, and we'll bring it in house, maybe it's only for a period. In some of our clients, they only want us to work they like I've had a conversation with one that said that we never ever want to do our own outbound, like, we only want you to outbound. And okay. I mean, that's, that's great for us. But I think that it's a dynamic model, and I think it's going to suit the world post this, you know, COVID recession.

Tyler Lindley 4:38

Right. It's interesting. So it's almost would you consider Whistle then a marketing agency, a sales agency, a little bit of both, or, you know, how would you, how would you classify or kind of where Whistle sits in that in that respect?

David 4:52

Yeah. So this is the discussion I keep having with my CMO. Which is like, how do you define it? Because there's, you know, there's marketing agencies and that means your SEO, Digital Marketing, etc In this like a sales agency, isn't that just a consultancy or whatever? And then there's these Outbound SDR companies an outsourced an SDR. And basically, I think, you know, we classify ourselves as top of the funnel. So outsource top of the funnel. And what that means is if you go for let's say, hey, I want you guys to do everything for me, we're going to deliver the inbound leads. So write all the content that copy runs, social channels, etc. Run the SDR program for you, whether it's for inbound or outbound. And then all you need ready in-house is the sales team. And marketing resources, I guess that can kind of supply that at least with some sort of like, if not collateral than at least direction that you maybe got. So there's a lot of startups that's in the startup model. There's a lot of startups have raised money, they've got like a founder, maybe like their initial kind of heads or whatever that need to ramp up and they need to sometimes ramp up more with results than they're going to necessary to ramp up with like, you know, headcount. And so that's where they're going to go, okay, just get us in leads. We just need leads when you do your close deals. And then once we've closed a certain amount, we're going to expand our team and maybe use you less or use you for something very specific. Mm hmm.

Tyler Lindley 6:16

Right. It's interesting, because I think a lot of you know, you mentioned you know, a lot of companies doing this in-house it's it's a lot of work to do this in house. It's it's expensive, you know, does whoever's on board on the, at the executive level that they know how to set something like that up, whether that's a marketing department or marketing strategy, a sales top of the funnel sales department, a bottom of the funnel sales department mean, there's a lot of moving parts there. Do you think it comes down to maybe those people just not having that domain knowledge? Do you think that's the real opportunity, David?

David 6:49

Yeah, I think 100% I think that domain knowledge is a very expensive thing, when you factor in time, and it can only come from time. So a lot of let's go, I'll run a couple different scenarios. The first one obvious one is a startup. I'm a founder, maybe I'm a Product Founder. Okay, I've got a great product. I've got myself a CTO, we've got some initial customers that we've closed with merit of what we're doing, but I don't know how to scale this up into like a world class competitive organization. I've never done that. That's a completely different skill set. So I read books and I talk to people, I just don't have it. It's just not me. So my choice is I have to hire someone. So I hire my VP Sales or CRO or whoever it's going to be. And that's an expensive exercise on its own, because I don't even know if I'm going to pick the right person, right and then committing that's it usually comes with a commitment and equity and a whole thing. And then I gotta trust that person to know what they're doing in terms of hiring and training and onboarding, everyone that comes after them. I think that that's like one scenario where it's a challenge.

I think another scenario that we address is we we for example, dealing with a really really large and private equity company they own and manage for-profit Universities. And so for them, they're like, we just need to get leads in ASAP. And our team is to capacity and we just like, we need to outsource that. And so that's where we come in. And I think that agility is going to be the currency of I hope it's 2020. But if this doesn't resolve itself in 2020, then 2021 I think that, um, the businesses that are quickest to get back into gear, when the lights go back on are going to win. And all of those that kind of hid under a rock and said, like, oh, like, What's going to happen? We'll wait till like things fix themselves and you'll figure it out. They're going to start six to nine months behind people that are ready to go.

Tyler Lindley 8:41

Right. I love your line there. "agility is the new currency." I think that's so true. I think that's why you might start seeing people start outsourcing things that otherwise they never would because those outsource companies can be more agile. When you think about, you know, agility, how can an agency, whether it's a marketing agency or a sales agency or hybrid agency, like the one you have. How can an agency you know, prepare itself to be agile if that's what companies are essentially buying? What makes a service or product like yours agile?

David 9:17

So I think it's ultimately about process and systems. And this is why, you know, sales enablement and that whole space, marketing enablement as well for that matter is so important. When you understand what you can, what you need to do, let's take you know, I used to be in the fitness industry, so let's, let's say I want to lose weight, okay? So I know I want to lose 10 kilos, or I've done what that is in pounds. Think about it, whatever the conversion is there, four pounds five pounds. So now I know like, Okay, I got to restrict my diet and I've got to run around the block, but I don't know exactly how to do it every day. Right and there, there is a process you go to a personal trainer, like I once was, and I can say to you, hey, let's track your calories let's track like your activity level. And now we can adjust all of this. And if you just do these little actions every day, you're going to get the result. You don't have to starve yourself and eat cucumbers for a week or whatever, right?

But that's the same analogy, like in with an agency. It's the same kind of concept. It's basically saying, hey, I need to get to this point. And I'm here. And, like, how do I bridge the gap? Do I just like, do I just call people or what I do and how to do it? So there's a lot of guesswork. And I think that we, I don't know if we ever really had the time for it, but maybe people just kind of went on with that. And that was just the way it's done. But I feel like post this period, that's just going to dramatically change at least for nine months or so no one's going to have the time for that.

So when you look at like sales enablement and marketing enablement and just trying to create those processes, one, which is about creating a very effective onboarding process. A very effective and onboarding, I'm talking about both for staff and also for customers. Like being able to take a lead and walking through to purchase, that buyer journey is very, very important. And getting that right is very, very important. A lot of the time, some companies make it impossible for you to work with them. You know, you leave your details for them, they don't get back to you. Or you do talk to them, and they like, give you a weird pricing, you know, proposal, whatever. So I think that that's like the key trait is going to be being able to set up that process as much as possible. And then because we live in a very technological age, it's also about setting up the right systems as well, that enable that whole buyer journey and also that the journey of your internal team as well being able to understand what's going on. And so that's the gap that, you know, I really look to fill with what we do at Whistle and that's really where we sit is, is being able to kind of shine a light on that.

And whether you decide to take that process internally afterwards and say thanks very much for showing me the way Yep, and we made money together and like we're on our way, thank you very much we'll make use you for little projects here or there. Or whether you say great, just keep going. This is like a very easy exchange for me. And I don't have to worry about overhead and office space. And then any of these things that, to be honest right now, no one necessarily knows what that's gonna look like. Great. Yeah, that fits really well.

Tyler Lindley 12:20

Yeah, that's interesting. As we think about, you know, sales enablement, it's almost, you know, your model is almost outsourcing a lot of that sales enablement, because if you're outsourcing, you know, the marketing and the top of the sales funnel, you know, that handoff is kind of happening by you. So, which I think that's a tough it's a tough concept for a lot of folks to understand, like you said, you either have this domain expertise or you don't, and that's a part of why I started this podcast is to answer the question of what is sales enablement? I think a lot of people are sitting here thinking about, you know, like, you either outsourcing this, or how do we do it better? How do we do it more efficiently? How do we do it with less headcount? You know, we talked a lot about AI as well in our in our Yeah, before the interview started, and your time at Exceed, which I'd love to get into a little bit as well. I mean, what do you Where do you think automation kind of fits in here? And tell the audience a little bit more about Exceed and what you did there?

David 13:14

Yes, sure. So I was Head of Sales at Exceed for the last year and a half. Automation is really, it was specifically with AI, is really a way of reducing as much friction as possible between the buyer and the seller. And I think that when you look at like the definition of, you know, sales enablement, as for me, it's basically about getting out of the way of your team and getting out of the way of the buyer. It's crazy how many times you'll go to a company's website and not understand what they do. You can visit the website and like, the jargon that's on there I actually don't understand what you guys do, what problem you solve, why why am I here. And the journey to getting just like you know, when the meme was like, "take my money, right?" It's just like, Please, I'm trying to buy.

And then also your team, right? Having been a salesperson at a couple of companies. Sometimes you feel like, guys, just let me sell, like, why am I doing all of these processes? And why do I have to create this report in Excel when I've got this in the CRM anyway? And, you know, why are we having these three hour meetings every week? Where we, you know, break down everyone's deals. So I think a lot of it is about reducing that that friction. And I think with regards to AI, there's something very exciting there. And I think the first thing I'll preface is that AI is not a replacement for human intelligence. And thankfully, it's not and I don't believe that you'll have general intelligence with AI in our lifetime. If we do that's like Terminator type stuff, and then we should be very scared. We're all in. We're all in trouble. We're non-existent. Right if you create a sentient being with AI intelligence, which Elon Musk goes on about all the time. Right. And

What AI can do though is it can create very logical conclusions from responses that it gets and can drive let's say in the context of lead generation and, and not just lead generation but qualification scheduling that's to the MQL to the SQL journey. That's a great place for AI, being able to ask qualifying questions and automate the follow up and handle the back and forth and driving through the funnel. This is a beautiful place that AI can exist, and it can do something that traditional marketing automation has been unable to do, which is handle responses. All right. So if you're running a marketing automation campaign, you'll get an active response. Yes, no, try me later. You'll get a bunch of passive responses: no longer in the company, out of office, on holiday sick today, whatever. Someone's gonna do something with that. And a lot of the time either someone doesn't, okay, which is like no one setting the task. Okay. He's back on the 14th of November. Let me just you know, set a task on the 15th to get back in touch with them. And also, that's one and then no one, if they are doing it, it's so time consuming, so expensive to do. And you don't even know if there's a value yet in, you know, at least commercial value in talking to that lead. So AI is really important there because you can automate that. And when you can automate that you can focus human time on human tasks, which are, you know, valuable, and technology on technological things, following up, back and forth like typical questions that you get asked. You see this with the rise of chatbots. Right? How much does it cost or blah, blah, blah? This is a great place for AI to exist in the sales world.

Tyler Lindley 16:40

Right, and I think it's a good point to that AI is not here to take your job, necessarily. It's to it's to shift maybe the focus of what you do on you know, only things that a human can do. Like you said, AI in terms of scheduling an initial meeting, gathering information can do it a lot better and a lot more efficient than an SDR can. And make it actionable. I love your idea of that passive versus active responses. And the that's a drawback to marketing automation, cause it truly is is that, you know, is someone actually following up with those leads? And what are they doing with them? Because if they're not, then money's being wasted getting that person to the site, getting them to opt in, because not everybody's going to come in and be elated that they're on your site and give you buying signals from day one. They're going to come and give a lot of vague responses and and you've got to sift through those and still take action on them. Because there's there's gold in those. I'm sure so, yeah,

David 17:32

yeah, for sure. And that's the frustration of marketing, right? Is that like, they generate leads, they're very, very expensive by the time they get to sales, because they've gone through the qualification. It's a lot of human time. And then it fails on following up with them or those leads are not communicated past a certain point to drop off. Yeah, they're in the bin. Like, that's crazy. Yeah, you're just gonna send them random pieces of collateral because you thought it was interesting this month, like, Where's the intelligence there? Right. So This is where I think AI is so exciting because you can have personalized conversations with people and provide them with personalized content and then drive it back into the sales funnel when they're ready.

Tyler Lindley 18:12

Yep. What else do you feel like? As we're thinking about marketing and sales alignment, other than just having a good handoff process, which I think that's kind of where marketing and sales alignment starts, is making sure that handoff is seamless, making sure it's happening at the right time, there's a clear definition of an MQL versus an SQL and, and all teams are aligned. But what do you feel like are some of the other keys to sales and marketing teams working better together? Because it does seem like the two are at odds more than they should be. Everyone has the same goal. What can marketing and sales teams do to work better together?

David 18:46

So I think it's some that responsibility ultimately lies within the people that set up those marketing sales teams and I think that too often it's seen as like a no a journey, a straight line, where the lead comes in. Marketing takes it to this point, you know, solicit sales development takes a sales team sales team takes to close. Yep. And at each point, they're like, "Well, done my job", right? They'll say, Yes, we can as a salesperson, when you close the deal you're like, customer success!

Tyler Lindley 19:17

Ding Ding,

David 19:18

Like I always used to say like, I always say, the customer service managers. I'm so happy, I never have to speak to that person again. Like, you have to speak to them every day.

Tyler Lindley 19:27

Right.

David 19:27

And I locked them in for three years. Right? And so that mindset is like ridiculous. Because on a on a, the amount of conversations a salesperson has with a buyer and the amount that they understand about the space. That is amazing domain expertise to feed back to marketing. Yep. Because marketing apps. You've seen this now everyone company that exists right now, if you go on to the website is talking about remote, whatever. And you know, being flexible and agile and whatever. In the new environment, everyone's addressing it. Why? Because they know the feedback off the floor. But that's happening in the healthy companies that should be happening all the time, hey, in this industry, they really really focused on addressing this issue. And it's a huge topical issue. We need marketing collateral and whatever.

The other way around, like as a salesperson, you're always getting asked "can you send me a case study or do you have a document on this and this?" So being able to have marketing support you in that sales process is so critical, like that sales marketing type of sales marketing type position, where you're actually producing very small bits of like, collateral that's needed right now by a sales team to close an enterprise deal. That's like, That's amazing. They can produce better, you know, better reports, better looking reports, beautiful presentations. Salespeople, I mean, I don't want to generalize, but if I'm one of them, then that's not my specialty, right. So let's kick it back to the team. So I think instead of looking at as, like, one sort of straight line, it should be a circular look at it as like a little circle where it's they're feeding, you know, feeding off each other. And it's just it's going along. Yeah, the process. And that's what you're going to get the best results from both.

Tyler Lindley 21:13

It's interesting, too, I totally agree with your point. It's not just marketing and sales, I think it's also sales to account management or customer success because that handoff is just as important. And that relationship almost becomes the most important relationship because they're now inheriting everything that marketing and sales has said or done to them. And, you know, hopefully, most of that is accurate and factual. Regardless, they're inheriting that and they're responsible for, you know, creating a great customer experience at that point. So if the teams aren't aligned, you know that you really could be setting that team up for failure. You know, post sale, which is the worst time people are already having buyer's remorse and wondering why they bought this and thinking about the return policy and you don't want to give them any excuse to but but You know, elate them and, and have them over the moon about, you know, the next steps once they purchase. So,

David 22:05

Yeah, for sure. And this one, like, I used to joke about it a lot and say like, you know, marketing promises this, and then sales promises this. And then like, it's like, yeah you bought the product. You know customer success is like that's like that funnel. Yeah, that's, that's, you know, that is the, you know, we talked about marketing and sales alignment all the time, the real wars between customer success and sales that I think is the real breakdown. Because there and you know what, even bringing marketing because you need to almost, I don't want to use this word wrong, but you need to almost remarket and resell your solution at all times to your customers. Remind them why they bought it, what value they're getting out of it. If you're talking to technology sense, have the tech speak that value to them all the time. Hey, here's how much time you save, here's how much money you've made him, you know, whatever it is, that's like that's so critical. Because every time you open an app or whatever you're using, you're always thinking about if it stops working that day or whatever. You know, like, I mean, we're on Zoom, and they've had a huge boost from this whole thing. And one thing I noticed yesterday was I was using someone I was using a free Zoom account, I think it was, and it popped a little pop up came up, hey, you're at your 40 minutes. But you know, we're extending another 40 minutes on us and the button said, love this. I was like, yeah, click love this. And I was like, That's such a brief who thought of that? That was so clever. Yeah, you know, like, and I just felt like, yeah, I do like this!

Tyler Lindley 23:30

Versus $20 a month. Want more?

David 23:34

Sorry, you know, this conversation has been cancelled.

Tyler Lindley 23:37

You're screwed now.

David 23:41

So someone got together and thought about it?

Tyler Lindley 23:43

Exactly. Because that's a good way to frame it, too. It's like you're trying to capture those moments of delight. Regardless of when they're happening. They might be happening at the top of the funnel, the middle of the bottom post sale, like they could be happening at any time. And at the end of the day, the customer is just having that experience. So anything you can do to make You know, and your Zoom example anything you can do to think about Oh, Zoom, I didn't know, I didn't know I was at that limit, you know, and I you know, I love this tool this tool is really valuable to me so maybe I do need to think about that and they could drop in a maybe an automated campaign you know, towards you to start talking about some of those features now so fantastic.

David 24:17

And that's like, I think so critical right now when everything is so competitive and people are not necessarily loyal. Like again, I'm talking to technology, software space because that's you know the world I know well. SaaS, you're not going to get the loyal most loyal customers and you know, they say sales tech, marketing tech, if it's not working for me, there's a better option, cheaper, faster, I'm there, I'm not staying with you because I like you know, I like Jared, my customer success manager. That's it, I'm out. So you've got to think about all the time just always proving yourself.

Tyler Lindley 24:48

On such a competitive space to I mean, you look at all the thousands and thousands of Martech solutions, sales tech solutions, there's new CRMs popping up every day. Everyone's running a platform play. I mean, it is extremely competitive and only, only getting more and more competitive. So you really, like you said, you have to continue to make that sale every day. And I do agree. I love that idea of remarketing, reselling after the sale, because I think it's something I think it's, as I mean, you and I both know we've we've been in sales, it's our job is over, you know, good luck, you know, you've inherited whatever I've done now. But at the end of the day, it's like It's on us to make sure that client has a good onboarding it, that handoff is smooth and make sure that if there's anything we can do to make sure that that customer success manager is set up for success and they can, you know, have the ability to resell and remarket, then we need to be enabling them to do that. Because it's, it's it's our responsibility too So

David 25:42

Yeah, I think I think also, that's why it's on, it's on the responsibility of ultimately, whoever sets up that team. Yeah. Because people do what you pay them to do. Yeah. So if I'm paying a sales to close a deal, that's what I care about. I'm not if I'm not paid on retention, and it sucks because if you're paid on retention, then you know you're can be you can be penalized for something you can't control. I think that we do need to think of a more wholesome model, right? It's the same with marketing, like, I'm just paying on how many MQLs are evaluated on how many MQLs and sales gets and how many conversations you have between sales and marketing? Why did you send me this? This is obviously clicked on an E book. Okay. Maybe you just want to know, maybe he was was a mistake. Yeah, maybe he would just like the name of the e book. He didn't read it and didn't say he wanted to buy anything.

Tyler Lindley 26:32

Right. I feel like that is a tough question, though, that I think a lot of teams are trying to figure out that perfect commission structure that equally gives everybody the piece of the pie that they should serve. It's so hard to try to cut that up. Usually sales gets a large lion's share of the pie even if they had very little to do with the sale. I think it's it's certainly something sales compensation and how do you compensate other parts of the buyers journey and folks that are touching those customers i think is important. I think it's something that, you know, should be thought about, especially in terms of sales enablement, cuz that's gonna end up, you know, promoting those behaviors. Like you said, Yeah, people do what they get paid to do. So how can you set up your compensation structure to align with that fact? So

David 27:16

Yeah, I mean, one of the best, you know, I'm here in Israel, and one of the big successes here is Monday.com Yep. Yeah, like in the, in the work, workplace automation, or whatever. However, they phrase themselves. And they've got a very interesting kind of sales structure, bonus structure and it's very collaborative. And how they basically work is they will pay as a base salary, probably about 70% OTE. Like so they pay a very high base. So you join them and as long as you're on target, you're getting paid. And how it works basically, is each person the team is like, so if I'm on my target, it doesn't really pay me that much to go above my target. I'd rather actually help this guy, I would hand over that lead to this guy. And it creates a, it's like it's a completely different culture. So in some ways, it's great because it's like, hey, it's a new way of doing it and less aggressive with our customers and a more collaborative team. And on the other hand, the like A player, you know, lone wolf style salespeople will not go to a structure like that, because I'm used to hitting 110% 120 150 and all the perks and all the kickbacks, you know, so you have to think about it. It's going to be product dependent, industry dependent. And I think you got to factor in the journey of the buyer, and then you can get a better sense of you know what to do.

Tyler Lindley 28:40

Yeah, exactly. I do think it's important, though, that that conversation is had and like you said, it really does depend on the industry depends on the product and the service, the sales cycle, that kind of things, how are the team set up? However, at the end of the day, anything I think you can do to delight the customer at every stage of the buyers journey is a positive and and creating a more collaborative environment internally, I think is extremely important. You know, one thing that's interesting about collaboration internally, if you're outsourcing, let's say, the top of the funnel like someone would with Whistle, how do you keep that sense of collaboration? You know, when you're outsourcing a good chunk of that buyers journey, that first part of the buyers journey? How do you how do you maintain that? When you have this handoff from a team that isn't internal, it's outsourced to the internal team.

David 29:26

So this is so critical and something I like thought about a lot when we first started. So the first thing we do is like on the agency side, I advise that you handpick your customers. So you should not take people just because there's a deal there. You need to be able to hand pick for a few reasons. One is that your whole business is going to be driven by referrals and success. People are only going to pass you on to the next person if they're actually a successful company. And had a successful experience. The other is that the process has to work right So, if you're working, like I know, you know, I figured it out pretty quickly, like if you're working with a company, and they just don't get like, I'm coming to somebody, and we're gonna run outbound for them, and they've never done outbound and they don't get it. They think it's like, why don't you just why don't you just get them to a meeting today, like you called them? I didn't get through like the first 50 times when people don't know what message this is. So they go into the wrong title, your targeting companies too high, you're shooting too low. So all of this needs to be figured out, right?

So I think as an agency, you have to one you pick your customer but the other side, you have to once you do pick them, you have to be willing to consider yourselves as just an extension of that company. And that you the people that you place that work for them, for all intensive purposes are you know, almost like they're their employees, they learn the product. They understand the pains and the By the way, they share that feedback all the time. You have to have that feedback loop, specifically the top of the funnel.

I mean the the feedback from SDRs is probably the best feedback that could equip marketing and sales that you can get. Because if you're running marketing campaigns, and you don't know enough about your target audience, you have no idea whether these ads are going to work or not work or who's clicking on them and why. And it's a very slow, inexpensive exercise to figure that out. Whereas outbound, if I take a guess, and I like I can start to figure out very quickly take a list of 500 companies and target them and get on the phones and get rejected every time. They're saying I'm not the right person, I'm not the right person. And you feed that back, you suddenly adjust all your your your whole parameters so that being able to have that discussion and being able to, you know, really embed yourself with the company I think is what makes an agency really successful. And also, you know, the other way around, make sure your company fits your agency you shouldn't take on everyone you've seen. I've seen you know recently like some agencies just crumble because they were too opportunistic and trying to take on take on And then, like they have too many losses. So, you know, their boxing record isn't looking so good after a while.

Tyler Lindley 32:07

Yep, yep, exactly. Now it's such an important point. You need to choose your clients just as much as they choose you. So think about the ramifications of those choices. So awesome. I want to take us to our lightning round David, a few questions that we like to ask everybody to wrap things up. First question, what book would you recommend to our audience and why?

David 32:26

This is a great book actually, is a series of these but this SaaS Sales Method. Okay. Okay, it's by Jakob under Coolidge. kayo ij. Okay, a couple of others. But what I like about it, it's a very, very scientific, it's called sales as a science. And it's a very, very scientific breakdown of like the whole process. And there's always a debate on the science and, and I like Personally, I'm more of like, the artsy kind of creative person but it's There is a method to this guy's like there's actually a process to it. It's the magic is knowing how to do the process. Right. And so, I love this book. I think it's great really, really often that's what's sitting above, you know, above Yeah. So yeah, that's if you want to commend to people, whether you're a sales leader or an AE Yeah, and sales enablement as well.

Tyler Lindley 32:28

Awesome, perfect. We'll link to that book in the show notes as well if anybody wants to check that out. What is your favorite home cooked meal made by you or someone in your family?

David 33:29

So it's definitely not something made by me. That's for sure. My wife makes a killer meat pie and being being Australian that's like a huge thing. So when when there's meat pie then it's it's very dangerous, you know,

Tyler Lindley 33:44

What kind of meat does she put in the meat pie?

David 33:47

Some magic meat and some meat but a mushroom I think just comes up. Great man meat pie I think is I'm going to lock that one in

Tyler Lindley 34:00

What software tool or app could you not live without?

David 34:03

Whatsapp ?

Tyler Lindley 34:05

Whatsapp. Okay. Why Whatsapp?

David 34:08

Like, so much communication across that platform. It's so multifunctional and specific, like, even on a personal and professional level. The video calls the SMS could be sending files. It's a great platform. It's an amazing solution. And I just loved that they took like, basically SMS and upgraded blackberry messenger, and just upgraded it and created a massive success out of it. Yeah, I think that's hilarious. But um, yeah, they're there. That's a great, great tool.

Tyler Lindley 34:38

Cool. If you could go back in time, 10 years and give yourself one piece of advice, what would it be?

David 34:46

And I'm one of those people that just kind of really happy for the journey that I've had. Yeah, there's plenty of times that I can turn back and kick myself and say, like, why didn't you you know, why did you I think on the whole like, you know, just The most important thing for anyone as they kind of evaluate and rebase their value of their lives and they were getting to Dr. Phil but specifically now, right there's a lot of people that are unhappy right now. And so I think that most importantly is to trust yourself and to understand that you know, change happens and you move on and you learn you grow and so when you've we forget to grow from those experiences that's really when you suffer so I would tell myself to you know, keep looking at the challenges that come up as opportunities for growth and I think that that's something that for me personally is helped me through a difficult situations.

Tyler Lindley 35:39

Yeah, I think it's a good message now, as it's a great message anytime, but yeah, I like that. I like that thought a lot. Finally, how can my listeners find you online, David?

David 35:52

easiest way you can look me up on LinkedIn. Just look up David Zeff, probably not that many of us. You can also find me on Instagram. IamDavidZeff. And you can find out more about Whistle at callwhistle.com

Tyler Lindley 36:09

perfect. We'll link to that and your social handles in the show notes as well. So everybody if you want to check those out and learn more about David or get in touch, you know, definitely reach out to him and check out the show notes. So David, I want to thank you so much for coming on today is a great chat. Hope to have you on at some point in the future. hear more about the success you're having with whistle. So

David 36:29

thanks, Tyler. Appreciate it.

Tyler Lindley 36:30

Thanks. Have a good one.

Thank you so much for listening to today's show. You can find all the links discussed and the show notes at the sales lift calm. That's thesaleslift.com. Have questions for me, email me at Tyler at thesaleslift.com. We look forward to seeing you back here next week. And we hope today's show brings you the sales lift. Your business needs. Remember, ideas plus action equals results. You've got new ideas. Now it's time to take action and the results will follow. See you next time.