How to SCALE Your Sales Team Ft. Jed Marhle

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

Welcome back to another episode of the Revenue Reimagined Podcast. Our guest today is none other than Jed Marley, who is the Director of Sales at Mailshake, the creator of the Practical Pros Expecting newsletter which goes out to over 13,000 readers bi-weekly—one of the few newsletters that I actually do read. And previously, prior to Mailshake, Jed started his career at PandaDoc, another product that I actually do use, helping scale and manage his outbound SDR team from three to over 20. Jed, thanks so much for being here, man.

Yeah, thanks guys, super excited to be here. Thanks for the intro.

Awesome. Thanks for being here. So we're going to kick this off. Let's reimagine your position. So you're in sales. Let's say you had to go into a different position to go-to-market strategy. What department would you go into, and why?

A separate one. If I had to go into a different department than sales leadership—yeah, you can't sell anymore, man. No more selling. I would definitely do sales operations because, to be honest, it sounds nice to not always have to talk to people all day long. And I understand, and I know that sounds contradictory being a sales leader, but it does sound nice. And I understand that you probably have to deal with all the internal Slacks and everybody else's problems, but I do love the operations side of things. I'm really deep into looking at different tech tools and how they work together, and that sort of stuff does really excite me. So if there ever does come that time, it would probably be sales operations.

I love that. You know, it's funny you say that. Dale and I talk about this a lot with work we do together—like what does he like to do and what do I like to do. And I happen to, and I'm very much the extrovert, outgoing sales leader, right, very similar to you. But I love the ops side. I love sitting down and building out our Monday playbook and looking at the tech stack and integrating stuff together and making sure that it's working. And to your point, not talking to anyone for a few hours sometimes is a very nice thing. But funny, like a lot of sales leaders actually do talk RevOps like, "Hey, I'd love to do RevOps." I think one of them said, "Hey, I'd love to give unrealistic quotas to people and get things out there where they have to just start doing their own input to Salesforce and that kind of stuff." So it's kind of fun.

Well, yeah, and that's the thing at Mailshake too. We have relatively, you know, smaller startup. I've been here for a year and a half. And that just comes with part of the game—you're not just a sales leader, you're also doing sales ops, enablement, and everything in between. So I've gotten to kind of try my hand in a lot of different stuff. So it's funny you say that. And I love that. But when we talk about RevOps in a lot of companies, RevOps isn't RevOps, right? RevOps is sales ops. RevOps is some person who's a Salesforce administrator who is like building custom fields, and that's about it. I'd love to know, like you worked at PandaDoc when they were small. You're at Mailshake now, arguably small and growing. Like in your mind, what is RevOps and how does it differ from sales ops?

Yeah, I mean, that's a good question. I guess I don't know if I'd have the best answer for that, but I would say it's just enabling, like getting really in the weeds with the sales reps and figuring out where are they actually slowing down and what's kind of getting them caught up, which is hard to do when you're remote. Which is one thing that I've noticed—when I was at PandaDoc, half my time there I was in person, so I could actually see people's screens and see where they're getting slowed down, specifically in like sequencing tools. Like if I'm talking about an SDR team, the process of getting leads, getting those into a sequencing tool, following the steps—there's so many like extra buttons that folks click and little things that kind of slow them down. And it's hard to catch those things when you're remote. So like, kind of to answer your question, it's just finding all the little broken pieces and folks' processes and finding ways to enable them to be much more efficient, which again is really hard when you're remote. But what I try to do is jump on Zoom calls and do entire process walkthroughs with every rep from beginning to end. And it's super painful and slow and nobody loves to do it, but you always pick up on little things. And if you do that with your whole team, then you can come through and say, "Hey, here are the little things I noticed, and let's work on ways to fix this," whether that's—I mean, hopefully not adding additional tech, but finding new ways to leverage the tech you already have to kind of put things together more efficiently.

And I love what you're saying. So it's super interesting. Most good sales leaders do a lot of coaching—like, how do I make you more effective? It's not like, "Go do this or go do that," but the good leaders are all about effectiveness, all about helping out their teams. So what's the best way, or what are some little tricks and tips that you can give leaders out there to be more effective in the coaching that they're giving their teams?

Yeah, I try to have other reps on my team kind of coach them. So like, what we try to do is we have coaching calls every week. But every person on your team is typically the best at one specific thing, ideally, or like they do something that's better than everybody else. Everybody kind of has their own strengths. And so I try to kind of play into that. So like, one thing I've found that's helpful is having them coach the team. We'll jump on a call and say, "Hey, I've got a rep on my team, Caesar, who's by far the best cold caller out of anybody on the team, right?" And so they see him putting up the numbers every day. Me as a sales leader, I still get in there and cold call sometimes, but I want to leverage the fact that Caesar is the one that's booking the most meetings from cold calls, and so they want to learn from him. And what he's doing as their peer who's doing it every single day more than I am. And so I try to get them to—it's also a way to kind of challenge them. And if they want to get into management, it's a way to kind of give them some opportunities. So I like to set it up by saying, "Here's the clear data of why it's working for him. He's clearly, for in this example with Caesar, booking more meetings than anybody else on the phone." And then work with Caesar one-on-one first to kind of come up with a plan in terms of how he wants to present what's working well, and then have him coach the team. So, I guess, yeah, to answer your question, is like finding the strengths of folks on your team and then using that to coach the rest of the team.

So I think there's so many people—I love that you said that for starters. Using the data, finding what's working, and using it to coach the rest of the team, whether you're a sales leader or whether you're a founder, I find a lot of folks struggle with that, right? It tends to be a lot of this gut feel. "I think this works." It's part of the reason I shared with both of you and anyone listening—I don't have my hoodie on today, right? So I'm on site with a client. And it's one of the things we're going over now—like, rather than this gut feel, Dale's just impressed I actually have a collar. Rather than this, "This doesn't happen often," rather than gut feel, like, "How do we make decisions based on data? How do we use that data to make the rest of the team better?" And I think a lot of sales leaders and a lot of founders, like I was saying, don't know how to do that. They get wrapped up in this gut feel. As someone who leads a team of what I believe is the hardest role in all of sales—you know, SDR, BDR, outbound—how do you not fall in that trap of like, "Bob says this is working great" or "I think this is going to be good"? Like, how do you make sure that you really are data-focused and get your team to buy into that?

Yeah, there's two sides of that because the other side to it too is like—so I manage a team of sales development reps as well as AEs. So like, I'll take an example. Let's say I listen to a rep's call and they just butcher something. It's so obvious, and I'm sure sales leaders have seen this. And you're just so frustrated, right? And you're like emotional in the moment, you're like...

Damn, I need to coach the whole team on this because we just got this wrong. We blew this opportunity. And so what I try to do—because I get emotional with it a lot, you know, I'll hear things where I'm like, "I know we've coached this, I know we can do that better"—but it's so like, there's a flip side of it. When you hear something negative, not just coaching on that immediately because it happened one time. Also on the positive, right? Especially managing SDR teams. My SDRs, I think most are particularly creative, and they'll always come up with new ideas for how to source pipeline or, "Oh, I have this new email template that's working, right?" Well, you have to kind of dig in a little bit deeper and not just let the excitement or the negative emotions draw you to immediately coach on that. Because an SDR will book a meeting with his one template and say, "This is the golden template, guys. We have to use it," you know what I mean? You book one meeting. It's perfect.

Yeah, yeah, exactly. And so I try again—most of my coaching style kind of comes back on the team—and I say, "Okay, great. How many times have you sent this template? What do you think are maybe some of the frameworks around this template that's working?" And also, I guess, asking them questions to get them to see the full picture. Like, was it just the template that you used, or were you targeting the right leads? Did you do something? Some sort of strategy with the type of lead you were targeting? Or was it a particular sequence? And so kind of getting them to see the full picture beyond that, and kind of coaching from there, is probably my strategy.

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

So you don't ever give me the why. You just tell me to go do it. For you, that's—you're different. You're a different world.

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So you manage both SDRs and AEs. When an SDR flips a completely crap lead over to the AE or—flip that—a really good lead goes to the AE and they totally blow it—and now the SDR is like, "Hey, I just gave him all these good leads, and they're blowing it." How do you balance that between the two teams?

Yeah, that's really tough because I remember, like, at Pavilion, for a long time I was just managing SDRs, and I never saw that other side of the picture before I started closing a little bit. And you know, you always have that frustration. It's like, "Just take the damn opportunity," you know what I mean? And so now here at Mailshake, I'm seeing both sides of it, right? And I think there's a few things. So, like, in the beginning, we had no SLA for what a qualified opportunity was, and that wasn't very clearly documented. So there was a big gray area in terms of what was qualified and what wasn't. And so I think that's the number one, like, most tactical thing: just having it well documented where everybody can see it. What is a qualified opportunity? So that we know what we need to be passing over. But then also, kind of to your point earlier, giving them the why behind it.

And I think particularly at an early-stage startup, the SDRs—and just, I mean, at any company really, but particularly at an early-stage startup—the SDRs have to understand that we're not just booking meetings to book meetings. Like, we need revenue. And getting and helping them see their career path in that, and saying, "Look, I'm very transparent in terms of the numbers we need to hit on the closing side." With the SDRs, I say, "Look, this is the revenue number they need to hit." And I try to get them to see their perspective both so they can see what it's like to be an AE, but also understand: look, if we're hitting these revenue numbers, that means more opportunity for you to get promoted and to move into those positions. But if we're passing over opportunities that can't be closed, we obviously don't have that opportunity to continue to grow the team and things of that nature. So I try to get them bought in on that side.

And then on the AE side as well, I mean, it's easier if that AE was an SDR recently or before, you know? So they kind of have that empathy around it.

Some like, yeah, yeah, yeah, exactly. But I also try to tell them too, just from my experience as an SDR, for the reps who maybe don't have that much experience. I'm like, "Hey, just so you know—" or just try to give them perspective. Like, we had one rep who was getting better opportunities, more opportunities. I'm like, "Why do you think they're getting more opportunities or better opportunities?" It's because they have a really good relationship with the SDR team. And so I was just basically trying to get them to see: look, if you really value and you just go that extra step for them, somehow magically you're probably going to end up getting more opportunities. You're going to get better opportunities in the long run.

So 100 percent.

So Jed, I used to manage both sides as well, and one of the things—and as when I used to carry a bag, I used to like love hanging out with my BDR, my SDR, like account planning with them. Like, if as an AE you can actually help your SDR grow through the process, you'll get much better results out of the SDR or BDR. And the AE should realize, in general, that they're lucky to have this resource. Because if they didn't have the resource, they'd have to go source a lot of it themselves. And so then the other side of it, I always made my AE source 20 percent of their own leads. Like, you still got to go source your own stuff. You're going to feel the pain if you're not doing that as well.

Yeah, yeah, 100 percent. That SDR, BDR, and AE partnership is so important. And we spent a lot of time focusing on that at Toast, you know? Almost to the point that if the AE wasn't helping, coaching, guiding that BDR, providing valuable feedback, and not being an asshole about it, we would actually pull the BDR. Like, if you can't create a partnership and mentor, and if you can't treat people right—like, this is a privilege, not a God-given right—that you get, you know, an SDR to help build your territory.

I love Jed, how you talked about, like, that if it's that one email that worked, doesn't mean that we suddenly all need to change and that's the email that we need to use, right? Or conversely, you know, the one person who said unsubscribe doesn't mean, "Wait a minute, we have to abandon this." And I talk a lot about, more so with customers, but I think it ties in here: is what we're hearing important and actionable, or is it just loud? Do you have a customer who's just being an asshole and they're loud, or is this like a legit problem? And I think that same mentality could be applied here. When you look at, you know, "Hey, this email booked a meeting or two meetings—that's great. Let's double down and see if it continues to work." And then let's continue to tweak it.

When you look at, you know, cold email and sequence building now, like AI is changing the game. We all get, you know, hundreds of emails a week, sometimes a day. I literally probably have 54 emails that I've gotten this morning. How are you building and coaching your teams to stand out from the noise aside from, like, the technology of Mailshake?

Yeah, absolutely, yeah. So there's kind of a lot that goes into that. First of all, on the AI side of things, we do use AI quite a bit. I do think it's important just because it's changing so fast, and you don't want to be the one that's kind of left behind. But I think the most important part of, like, cold email—and of course, we teach copywriting and all that stuff—but I think it's more so like who you target. And so we actually spend more of our time on like who we're going after rather than like, how to write a better email. Because you know, we can use templates, we can coach on copywriting and that sort of stuff. But if you're targeting the wrong people, in general, it's kind of the foundation of everything else you do. So if you have a bad list, you can write a great email, but the results aren't going to be as good. But I found if you have—

Really hypers specific targeting and you're going after the right people. It almost doesn't matter as much how well you write your email if it's relevant. They're going to respond. It's kind of that concept of like the hot dog stand outside of a baseball game. Everybody's hungry. There's nowhere else to get food. It's like that's the crowd you can sell that hot dog for twenty bucks because everybody's hungry. If you can find that crowd in your prospect list, it doesn't matter what email you send them. They're going to respond because they need it.

So we spend a lot of our time using AI, for example, to help us with targeting. We use a tool called Clay, for example, to help us get really specific with our targeting. Clay is really cool and you can do a free trial. I know not everybody wants to go buy additional tech. There's ways to do this with Sales Navigator, et cetera. But what we do is every month the SDRs are looking at all the demos that they've booked and they're trying to break down how did I book that demo? What are the commonalities across all these accounts and contacts that I can use to kind of further focus my energy next month?

So maybe they found that, hey, we're particularly booking with this specific title of this type of company. They have this team size using this technology stack. And so when we're building our list, we're getting really hyper specific with who those folks are. And that's really where most of our success from email comes through—it's looking for really intentional buying triggers.

I'll give you an example. We noticed that a lot of our customers—we sell an email deliverability software as part of what we do. Folks who sell to security ICPs have really strict firewalls, so it's hard to get your emails through their inbox. We noticed that a lot of the customers that we were closing were folks that did sell to security or legal teams that have strict firewalls. And so we started targeting a little bit more intentional towards companies that sell to those markets, and we found a really good kind of buying trigger to go after.

So kind of a long-winded answer, but again, yeah, most of our email success and what we're doing and how I'm coaching my team is on the targeting side of things because I think copywriting is actually much easier to learn rather than the targeting side of things.

I just saw a video that you posted on what Jordan was doing right. So Jordan's like, don't look at the ICP from a number of employees customer perspective, but look at who they're hiring and why they're hiring and start pulling triggers and identification of why that's happening because it may lead into certain trigger points like you're saying. Like what's really the value proposition that you can deliver? MailShake can deliver emails, and it's really hard to deliver emails if you're trying to get through a firewall. So if you know it's a really hot trigger point and then if you can B2B market that on the top side, like if you can give air cover on that, it makes it so much easier for the BDRs and the AEs to get meetings because now they're like people know who MailShake is. You understand the value proposition. And it's like, oh yeah, then you get an email and it's not the copywriting is less important, even though it is important, but it's less important than it would be traditionally.

Yeah, one hundred percent. Jud, let me ask you so you started at Panda Do early. You started at MailShake early. One of the things that we talk about a lot of times is kind of that transition from founder-led sales and how to properly build out a sales team. And a big part of that is how to build out an SDR team. And a lot of founders have this mindset that like, we just hit whatever that revenue number is—let's say eighty five thousand AR, a million AR—you know, we need more deals. We're just going to go hire ten SDRs and they are going to go blow up the world with phones and emails and bring people in. We know that that's not right, but I'd love to know your thoughts. Like early stage building an SDR team from the ground up, like what are you looking for from a milestone perspective and then how do you go about doing that the right way?

Yeah, so when I joined MailShake, we had there was no AEs on the oppo side of things. I had one SDR that was hired from a previous sales leader that was still there. And so the first three months were just me and her prospecting. I wanted to get to a point where I could consistently bring in like my number was twenty opportunities a month—quality opportunities a month—to where it's repeatable. So I was just testing a bunch of different hypotheses. I was looking at the customers we had to try to form like who should we go after outbound based on the customers we currently have. I was listening to customer calls, talking to our CS team, talking to our founders, and then just testing different sequences, different targeting methods, different cold call scripts, things of that nature.

Me and her were doing it, so I told her, "Hey, this is just a testing period. I don't care about your quote or anything like that. Let's just figure some things out so we can go hire some reps." And she was bought into that as well because giving her that opportunity allows her to potentially take over the team and manage in the future if that's something she wanted to do.

After the three-month mark, once I was in that testing period and found a kind of repeatable method, it was really just about documenting it. Coming up with a path to how future SDRs could get there. Then I like to hire two SDRs at a time because if one of them isn't a fit, you know what I mean, you're not stuck with zero and you have to go rehire again. So we went and hired two SDRs and I just taught them in that process. I said, "Look, this process worked for me in the last three months. I know it can work for you because I didn't do anything special. I just followed this process." I coached them on that process to a tee and I said, "Once you kind of master this process and are hitting this number, I don't want you to just stick to it. I want you to try to figure out new methods."

So that's kind of like the rotation of how I do it: master this process for three months where you're hitting quota, then try to innovate, try to find new ways, hire new SDRs, repeat. And then on the oppo side of things, I mean it's kind of the same thing. We had to build out the sales process. But once we started getting some pipeline in, I was the one closing the deals again. I was trying to come up with the process. What is our messaging? Because we have a lot of different competitors, what is that main differentiator we can use to kind of unsell some of these other competitors? And then, you know, hire the AEs from there, and I can go in more depth in specifics, but that's kind of like the high-level overview of how I approached it.

I love that. I love that. And I've heard several threads through this conversation about employee journeys like getting employees early on, coaching them up, really helping them, and giving them a path to an AE role, for example. So are you of the belief that you bring them in as an SDR, coach them up, give them a path to AE-ism—I guess is the best way to put it—is that your mentality as you look to hire?

Yeah, absolutely. I mean, when I look to hire SDRs, I'm looking for folks who are incredibly motivated and people that are excited about it, not necessarily the experience, which I mean it's not like super uncommon or some wild concept, but that's particularly what I'm looking for. And then they don't necessarily have to want to move into an AE role. Could be management. But that is what I'm looking for, and I'm trying to give them a path along the whole way.

Yeah, that was one thing I thought Sales Hacker did really well early days. I don't know if you remember, but Kyle used to publish if the SDR hits this many meetings, these may like you would then went to SCR1, SCR2—like he actually documented and published it, and it was the first time I saw someone actually publish it in public. And so I love that because I think it just gives clarity. Like people come into positions and as a leader sometimes you're like, "Huh, I don't know if I really want to bring you into the next level role because now I get a backfill." But having that path is super important.

The number one sign of a good leader is how many people you get promoted. Yes, revenue is important. Revenue is great. But if you are constantly afraid that you're going to have to backfill or if you're constantly afraid—

Oh my God, this person's going to get so much better. And my job is at risk. I want everyone on my team to want my job. And candidly, I want you to take my job because that means that I have trained you and we have worked together and you're doing so well that you're ready for that next step.

Versus Dale, to your point—and you're rarely right, but in this time you are—of like, why build in public? Right? Like, I'm going to give away all these secrets or people are going to understand. Like, there's no great one secret out there that makes anyone that much better than anyone else. It comes down to the people, the process, the timing, and the fact of the matter is you, me, and Jed could all send the exact same email to the exact same ICP and we all get on the phone and someone's just going to like one of us better. Probably Jed first, me second, you third. But someone's just like your job. It's all good. You're easy to knock off the pedestal. You can have it, my friend. You can have it.

Jed, when you look at go-to-market now, it's changing, right? Like the world's changing, whether that be AI, whether that be community-led growth, people-led growth, product-led growth. Talk to me about, you know, in your role at MailShake, like what do you really feel bullish on from a go-to-market perspective?

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Not to kind of beat a dead horse, but for us, you're fine. It's really about like, okay, so with there's a lot of tools, especially I'm in the sales engagement space, so I'm really deep into this, but there are a lot of tools that are basically allowing you to have minimal text, but send out a lot of really relevant emails. Blast a bunch of people really fast. Like there's inboxing tools that will let you get into the inbox and blast out a bunch of emails, and you can use AI to write things really relevant. And so there's like a ton of noise, right? And so I think now is more so the time, and as we see AI kind of take over more and more jobs, and I do feel like the SDR job is the one that can get automated the most. I don't think SDRs will ever go away, but I do think that folks will, you know, and we're already seeing it happen now, you'll need fewer SDRs to hit the same pipeline number, which isn't a bad thing. If you're an SDR listening to this and you're the one who takes advantage of that.

And so I guess I say all this to say that the what I'm most bullish on from a GTM perspective is that it's like being a little bit more targeted and focused on the accounts you can help best. And really have, and I know I've spoken about this already in this episode, but I do think it's really important. It's just taking more time to figure out who are you really best for. And what I found most, and I still run into this, is that we're still too wide in terms of who we target. And if you're one of those people who's just kind of blasting all these, you know, AI emails or whatnot, yeah, you'll pick up on some of that three percent of the people who are still in the market. But we try to get really hyperfocused.

And I think now is the time we're going to see it happen more and more that you're actually going to be targeting fewer accounts, but fewer and more intentionally. And that's the best way to kind of break through the noise. And just doing more touches on those accounts in general. And so, yeah, I mean, high level, that's kind of like the biggest thing for us is just to kind of stand out from the noise. We want to get really specific so we can have messaging that speaks to those folks more intentionally.

Yeah, it's very difficult. I think we, and this isn't just in the AI space, but every market, financial, whatever it is, there's pendulums that swing, right? And so we swung a pendulum way over to the AI side. Lots of emails, lots of content blasting, email engagement platforms. I think we'll start seeing it swing the other way. I don't know if we'll go to fully personalized. We were talking about market marketing leader Mark Hint, and he was saying one of the things is like scale the unscalable pieces. And I think that's where you're coming from. Like get the work done. You got to do a lot of the work, and if you do that properly, you're going to get better rates to close. And by the way, you'll probably have better customers. And oh, by the way, you'll have less churn and your NDR is going to go up. And so the downstream implications—like we've been so focused on the upstream implications, top of funnel ARR—we haven't been focused on NDR and churn. And I think that pendulum swinging. So if we as sales and marketing leaders bring in better ICPs, better buyers, we'll have less churn, we'll have happier customers, and I think that is better for the whole industry.

Yeah, and I guess there's one other thing I want to add on that too. Because particularly in our market where we sell to sales and marketing folks, but part of our GTM strategy has shifted a little bit because we have so many competitors. We're not necessarily like, we, when we're reaching out, we don't necessarily have the goal of just trying to book every meeting. We're trying to provide as much helpful content and resources around the problems we solve. So as it comes like sales engagement, email deliverability, all of my reps are super focused on building their own brands on LinkedIn, for example, talking about this. So that because even though there's a bunch of competitors, they'll see, they'll be, oh, you know, this person's been talking about, or Jed's been talking about it. That's why I want to go with that company. I think that's another angle to it too. Is because obviously in SaaS there's so many competitors in every single niche, if you kind of get your team to just be their own marketers on LinkedIn, for example.

Oh, I have to interrupt you because I feel like this could be a whole another 45-minute episode in and of itself. There are so many companies. I was talking to someone the other day. I was doing a coaching session, and he's like, "You know, I'm interviewing for this role, and the CEO is telling me that they're really protective about what their employees post on LinkedIn, and everything has to be approved."

Like, well, time out. Like, you should want your company. You should want your employees to be the experts and to your point, Jed. It's not posting like, "Hey, please come look at MailShake. We're the best thing in the world." It's, "Look at the value we're providing. We're the experts in the space. Look at all the education that we're providing." That you naturally want to come talk to us because we're giving you so much value. Well, if this is a problem, you guys are clearly the experts in the space. Let me at least have a conversation with you.

Yep, yeah, 100%.

Good. So, Jed, one of the big things that we're big on is giving more than getting or receiving. And I know you want to give something out to the audience, so let them know what they get.

Oh yeah, absolutely. So like you mentioned earlier, Adam, I have a newsletter called Practical Prospecting. It's a biweekly newsletter with a little over 13,000 subscribers. There is a further package, which is the paid plan, comes with all the archives. We have 70-plus archives, pretty much documenting. Goes back to my early days at PandaDoc as an SDR. Everything I've pretty much done, I just document through the newsletter, so you can learn about all the things I went through and the things I learned, and pretty much all the processes I'm doing. So you get access to all that. There are two ebooks in there with email templates and just process, you know, goes deeper than what's in the newsletter. And there's also a course. You can get all that stuff for free. I'm not sure who the winner is, but I'm giving that away, and you'll get access to everything. And also that comes with that is a Q&A. So you'll get all future paid posts. You'll have access to Q&A to kind of pick my brain a little bit deeper on some of the topics I'm talking about. So definitely sign up for the newsletter because this thing is full of information.

So we appreciate it. I want it myself. There are a few newsletters that I read. I selfishly, and I will admit this publicly, I subscribe to a ton of them to see what is out there, how people are formatting, what topics people are saying. There are very few that I read through to end. Five or less, easy. And yours is one of them. So this is definitely.

# Transcript

Something that people want to get their hands on. All right, as we wrap up, let's roll into some rapid fire. Jed, what song would best describe your revenue strategy?

Yeah, so you ask me this in the beginning. I've been thinking of answers. My favorite song of all time is a song by J. Cole called "Love Yours." I actually have a tattoo of it as well. It would probably be that one because, I guess maybe this is a corny answer, but if you love and care enough about your revenue strategy and you're actually invested in it, it's going to be more successful. So I would say probably that.

Yeah, awesome. One of the questions we asked—we've kind of beat the dead horse, so we'll go to the next one. In the context of revenue generation, what if you had to choose just one? What would be more important to you: revenue generation at the top of funnel or retention? Acquisition or retention?

Yeah, I mean, I feel like myself as just someone who spent much more time on top of funnel, I would probably say top of funnel. But it seems like right now retention is far more important. We're seeing it here as well. I mean, I think we're deploying some more strategies on upsell expansion, and there's a lot of gold in there too, especially if you're a smaller stage company. You let your SDRs kind of prospect into that area and take advantage of the customers you already have. So just based on my experience, I'm going to say top of funnel, but yeah, that's probably my answer.

I love it. I love hearing people's different perspectives on that. And I think it has shown to be highly dependent upon where people work. I haven't seen that angle as much, you know what I mean? But I know how important it is. We're seeing it right now more than any other time. What would you say is like a lesser-known tip or tactic—something that's just kind of in your back pocket that you know most people don't know about—that's actually made a really big difference in revenue outcomes for your teams?

Having a good source of references. And so what I mean by that is if you can proactively give folks who you're talking to in a sales cycle a reference call—um, and we all know that feeling where someone tells you like, "Hey, can we speak to a reference customer?" You're like scrambling, like, "Oh, I got to find somebody to take a reference call." But like, if you incorporate that into when you're closing a sale, right? If you're ever offering a discount, like, "Hey, part of this contract is you'll do one reference call with us," or trying to go to bat for a customer when you close them and then having those people in your back pocket—so then when you're on that call, you're prepared. You can even bring it up. So like, "Hey, I'm sure you have maybe some questions or concerns. I'm happy to set up a reference call with one of our customers who's similar to yours." That's made a huge impact on revenue because I think reference calls are one of the most impactful things you can do to close a sale, and just being prepared with them is great.

Gold. Everyone who's listening, like, gold. Because think about it—and I say this all the time. I don't do it as often as you do. I love what you just said, Jed, but like, I'll tell a customer, "Listen, man, I'll be honest. I get paid to tell you this is the best thing in the world. Like, that's just a fact. But Bob, Bill, Sam, Jenny, whoever—they don't chat with them. Pick any one of these four or five people you want to talk to because I don't want them to feel like I'm giving them the one, like, perfect one. They're all perfect, but pick pick one of these folks and be totally transparent with them." I love that you pulled that out because I myself don't even think about that enough.

Yeah, and if you get better customers at the top of funnel, you'll have much better customers at the bottom of funnel. So they all work together.

Okay, let's wrap this one up. So earlier in the show you said you'd be in RevOps. It's tomorrow morning, alarms going off. What's the first thing you're doing as a RevOps leader?

Oh boy, probably answering a million Slack messages for things that are broken, you know what I mean? And it's kind of half my job anyways. There's always things that break that you have to fix. So I feel like I'd be just catching up on all the things that are broken that you need to fix. I don't know—that seems to be my perspective of it.

I love it. Jed, thank you so much for joining us, man. This was incredibly valuable on a ton of fronts. I think that everyone—whether you're a founder, a BDR, or a sales leader who's listening—there's certainly some great actionable takeaways that people can get from this. Where could people find you? What's the best way to engage with you, man?

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

Thanks, man. I mean, he's all right, but other than that, appreciate you being a caller today.

So, Jed, you must feel you must be important.

Yeah, well, I don't have—I mean, I have to impress our guests, you know?