Jake Dunlap, Founder & CEO, Skaled
Jake is the CEO and Founder of Skaled, a consultancy focused on helping global 2000 companies and start-ups grow. As a C-level sales leader and entrepreneur with more than a decade of experience, he has developed and led high-performing sales and operational functions, specializing in building out repeatable, sustainable processes.
jake@skaled.com
https://skaled.com/
https://www.linkedin.com/in/jakedunlap/
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AUTOMATED EPISODE TRANSCRIPT
[00:00:01] You're listening to Scaling Up Services where we speak with entrepreneurs authors business experts and thought leaders to give you the knowledge and insights you need to scale your service based business faster and easier. And now here is your host Business Coach Bruce Eckfeldt.
[00:00:22] Are you a CEO looking to scale your company faster and easier. Checkout Thrive Roundtable thrive combines a moderated peer group mastermind expert one on one coaching access to proven growth tools and a 24/7 support community created by Inc award winning CEO and certified scaling up business coach Bruce Eckfeldt. Thrive will help you grow your business more quickly and with less drama. For more details about the program, visit eckfeldt.com/thrive . That’s E C K F E L D T. com / thrive.
[00:00:58] Welcome everyone. This is Scaling up Services. I'm Bruce Eckfeldt. I'm your host. And our guest today is Jake Dunlap. He is CEO of Skaled Consulting. Jake's been on the program before. But I wanted to bring back and talk a little bit about how to approach sales in this global pandemic.
[00:01:13] This COVID19 situation we're in, we're recording this the end of April. We've been in this a couple of weeks now. You know, best guess, you know, we're gonna be in it for a while. It's certainly going to impact the economy. It's going to impact business for many weeks to come, many months to come. So I wanted to have this conversation. So, Jake. Welcome to the program.
[00:01:30] Awesome. Look, it's good to be back and looking forward, at least hopefully giving some nuggets here to it to help folks as they're going through this right now.
[00:01:38] Yeah. So let's kind of talk about the situation at this point is, you know, businesses are still locked down. It looks like we're coming out of the social isolation shelter in place kind of thing in the coming weeks. At least different parts of the country are kind of getting released to some extent. But your business has changed. I mean, what's your kind of take on how you kind of sum up or how you kind of see the new world order as it relates to kind of marketing and sales and this whole kind of prospect area? What's the impact or what? How have things changed for you?
[00:02:04] Yeah, I think that this is important. I mean, look, if you're a CEO, an entrepreneur, I mean, I think it's important for anyone who is running a business to like you said, I think we see now whether we're over the crest or we can kind of start to peek over what's on the other side. It feels like we're kind of getting there. You know, and I talked to probably 20 to 30 CEOs, VPC sales. You piece a marketing every week. And I can just tell you, like the temperature is okay. Things are kind of gradually, you know, kind of like like people didn't miss their numbers as bad as they thought and not as many deals pushed as they thought. So overall, I think it's the attitude is starting to kind of like we're going to this optimism. I'll tell you, I was talking to the head of marketing at its CMO at a company called Trip Actions last night. I've talked to her a few times. And I think the question I'd asked her question, too, about this kind of idea of the pivot, they pivot. It's super hard right there in that corporate travel space. Right. So you to make a massive pivot. They unfortunately had to do some layoffs. But what they did is they literally in one week and they pulled out every single one of their sequences. They had 60 plus sequences, hold all of them out, work the entire weekend and updated the entire messaging and put it back in. And it's. And so as we talked about that and, you know, I was talking to team at G2, it's a big software review site.
[00:03:12] Same thing. They created a whole new playbook for the team. Got the whole sales team certified on it. Here's how we're talking to marketing. Here's how we're talking about events and virtual and all this stuff. And I think what what I feel like happened is that over the last four to five years, we got satisfied with incremental small changes. The one percent tweak here, two percent. We stop being creative. We stopped looking for, you know, this concept of incremental gains. First, monumental leaps. We stopped looking for monumental leaps and we been in a coma. The last like marketing and sales last three to four years in particular. We've got all these new sales technologies. They helped us to do all these little optimizations and we stopped innovating. What I feel like is going to come on the other side is a renewed appreciation for the customers, you know, messaging and customer experience. And so if you ask me the question about what I think marketers learned in sales, leaders learned and hopefully CEOs is like, you have to be specific. You have to really understand what your customers are going through. You can't keep sending the same generic stuff and you're wondering why your response rates are lower than ever, etc.. I think we have a new appreciation for the customer coming on the other side of this, and we're getting more specific and tailored and customized with our messaging. This forced us to do it, but I think we're going to do a better job of it on the other side, too.
[00:04:20] Was the change just making everything virtual or I mean, just what else has changed in terms of the messaging? I mean, do they tend to these people went in and rewrote avatar sequences. What were the changes they made?
[00:04:30] Well, I mean, if you think about it, there was a different buckets that people start to get looped and do. Everyone immediately at first went into what I called like the turtle shell bucket, which is we can't sell. It's impossible. You know, we we have to just, you know, say, hey, I know times are hard. Generic, generic, fake empathy. Let's say I'd love to catch up. Let's let's talk in two to four weeks. So a lot of sales teams ran to that. And what they didn't really appreciate is, look, there was actually there's three buckets. There's people, action industries that are doing just fine. Yeah, they were affected. Right. If you're selling bread makers, you just had your most all time ever the best time ever to sell bread makers in yeast ever. Right. And that's it. Like a very micro example. There's a lot of other industries are doing fine. There's industries on the flip side of the bucket that which is that we're doing really bad. Like travel, tourism, hospitality, you know, all these things. That's. And then there's a whole bunch of companies that actually fell and this like third bucket, which, you know, I call like the middle. Where if they could just reposition a little bit of who the product like what the product does, that then they could be more like, hey, we can help you right now. And I think that's what it was it's looking for. So what they did it trip actions, for example, is they've pivoted everything. They got their dev team and they stopped talking about, you know, corporate travel as much. But they did start to talk about like worker safety. What countries are blacklisted up today? Getting a live feed from the CDC so that you can manage your people remotely, you know, kind of manage the travel and how they come out the other side of it.
[00:05:50] It's interesting. It's almost like figuring out what is the new problem my customer has. I do want to address that.
[00:05:55] That's exactly it. You know, I was talking to a well-established human capital management company. They've been in business for 15 years, 500 plus employees. And they they usually were leading with their compensation tool. Let me think about coal plants right now. So as we talked about, we you know, we talked about it. We work that. We said, okay, what's the next thing that usually get your foot out? Well, we've got this performance management like, okay, well, let's talk about that a little bit. And it's like, okay, so we don't sell a performance management tool. We sell a remote work engagement tool. Same product, same features. But instead, we're changing the positioning. And I feel like it's forced us to be smart. Again, it's forced us as sales leaders and marketers to have to really think, what are our customers going through? And no matter how we think we should position it, what's going to resonate with them right now? And I think that's the the important.
[00:06:38] Have you seen any interesting strategies for people to actually develop that insight? Because I think it's easy to kind of all my clients are in crisis. I'm gonna go with this crisis. But as you mentioned, you know, some people are fine. How do you get that information? How do you have that conversation or how do you do that research to really understand what are my customers going through? Because you may not know or may not be obvious to you.
[00:06:54] Well, Bruce, this is gonna be rocket science.
[00:06:56] You go talk to your customers software area code, talk to your customers.
[00:07:02] Jesus, like, that's the other thing. It's funny. So, again, same conversation I was having. So I do a Wednesday wind down that I've been doing just for marketers. We've had 20 plus marketers there every single Wednesday and Wednesday night. I might have one, maybe two glasses of Pinot Noir.
[00:07:15] We talked about the recession.
[00:07:18] Yeah. Then maybe maybe it's three something. Who knows? Right. So you know what? We're talking about this last Wednesday. And I posed a. I really put them on the spot, you know, and I said, look, you know, I said, well, tell me about how you view your current customers as a part of this. And they're like, yeah, that I did that. And then it's like, you know, are we going to carry that through with us? Like, it's marketing. And then when I realized I mean, holy shit, this girl called it out. The chat marketers aren't incentivized to retain customers. And it's kind of interesting. You're like, oh, yeah, they aren't. And it's like it's kind of like this HoJo's. Like, I don't know how it like I didn't see this before, but I'm like, that is a problem. And I feel like what we are going to see though is a renewed focus on customer like satisfaction and customer happiness that we're going to have to our buyer. Behaviors have been changing. We haven't been keeping up. Marketers have been doing the same bullshit e-book to gated content to blogs, have been running the same play for 10 years. Man HubSpot developed that play in 2010 and we've been running the same play. Now marketers are realizing, look, these people and access to information quickly. They want less friction. They want this stuff. And here's why buyers are going through. So talk to your customers. And I think marketing departments and other people are going to be doing a better job of that going forward. I hope you know.
[00:08:25] Have you seen any issues? I've run into a couple issues where, you know, the company themselves is in crisis and they're trying to figure out how to sell and pitch to companies that are not necessarily croissance. But it's a real kind of headspace game. Anything that you've seen or any strategies that you've kind of worked with for companies that they're in crisis right now with their business model is, you know, is upside down. But they're trying to sell and they're just stuck in kind of the mindset and the kind of the position that the mental position of being in this fear. But they're trying to sell and the people that they're trying to sell to are not necessarily in crisis. How do you deal with that situation?
[00:08:56] Well, as a CEO or, you know, someone who's a leader in that organization, it's your job to soften the blow and to help to create the messaging showed the people there's another side to this. You know, you might have to make some tough decisions. You know, we had to do a small kind of workforce reduction. You know, we did it quick. It was apparent to me like, look, you know, the next month or two months we're going to be difficult and we needed to make some changes. And so we made the changes and we're stronger, kind of leaner and better on the other side of it. It's unfortunate, but, you know, I think that's just part of running a company. Guess what, friends? It's not all upside economy. You know, like, guess what? This is what running a business looks like, you know, like. And if you just want to run a business where it's only and the easy times and you know, you price should just quit or sell every five years, you know, like, I feel like you just have to make the decisions for the business that you need to make.
[00:09:44] And then you've got to be able to make the decisions and insulate the team, you know, from give them hope and inspire hope with the team. And that's that's your job. And go confide in your buddies and other people and peers and, you know, peer groups. And, you know, you do a great job that Bruce and have those conversations. But to your team, you know, they need to see you as a person. You know, you can be vulnerable. And I'm where I'm, like, overtly transparent, but our cash flow, everything with our team. But also, I know that, you know, look, they're looking to me to do that. And it's my job as a CEO to make sure that they feel, hey, that we're gonna take care of you and if we need help, we're gonna ask them for help. Hey, guys, we need you to do this or that that you kind of see what kind of team you have to you know, it's hard to sometimes gonna make tough calls.
[00:10:21] You know, I know that you were in New York during the various kind of crises we've had with 9/11 and Sandy and blackouts and things like that. But I really feel like this one's different in many respects.
[00:10:32] I mean, as a CEO who's been kind of through crises of different times and different sorts, how how have you kind of sort of seen this one as, you know, similar and or different in terms of how you need to respond or kind of the strategic planning you need to do? I'm just kind of curious in your take as having been through some of these before, what your take is on this one.
[00:10:50] I mean, for me, I was I was still in college and 9/11, you know, stop, Bruce, your daily trying to act like you know that.
[00:10:57] But I'll tell you, I mean, I really grew up in my sales career during 2007, 2010. I worked at CareerBuilder, which at that time was the largest job site in the US. So I was managing a team that was selling jobs between 2007 and 2010. And I know and I've learned this about myself and it's a weakness in other times, but I love it like I'm built for it. I'm what you would refer to as like I don't think that there's been times I've been a great peacetime CEO, like I'm built for Pivot's. Like, that's why I started a sales consulting company, because I like the pivots cetera. So by the nature of our business, I think we were more prepared for this. And for me, my mindset is like it is what it is. So why spend any time dwelling on why this has happened, how this has happened? I was thinking about what if something happens well in advance of this, right. What happens if the economy goes bad? Well, we've been on it pretty all time, Rod. It's gonna happen. And if you, as a CEO or V.P. sales were caught with your pants down, that's partially on you two guys. Like there was going to be there wasn't any quarantine, could you? You couldn't isolate for all the variables at why it happened or how it would happen. But you did know that something would happen. So for us, like what we knew would happen is this and I'll just play it out for you. We knew that there would come a period where the economy would take a downturn. What would happen is people would lose jobs just like they do. Then what the companies would want to do is they're going to hire back. Are they going to hire back in full force or are they going to hire part time people? Right. Staff, augmentation contractors, people that they can potentially like replace down the road. They're not tied to fixed headcount. Guess what we do?
[00:12:28] We do part time sales operations, part time sales leadership. So that's not the messaging we led with in April. But you better believe that's the whole marketing plan. It may. Yeah. So we've been thinking through, like, how is this thing going to write out? So I feel like one, these times always happens. As a CEO or sales leader or marketing leader, you need to be prepared for those you know. You need to think about it. And then to, you know, just try to think like there will be another side of this and how you get to position yourself as the things play out.
[00:12:54] Yeah, no, definitely. I think this whole thing is accelerated, you know, a whole bunch of trends. You know, I think you you know, the whole kind of gig economy thing is definitely being pushed forward. What else do you see? What else do you think are going to be kind of general changes to the way business operates that people need to kind of have on their strategic plan or their roadmap in terms of figuring out how they need to kind of change their offering, their positioning, how they operate to kind of address the new world that's going to be, you know, evolving over the coming months, over coming quarters.
[00:13:21] I mean, I'll try to talk to the things that I know versus, you know, speculate or things that I I mean, I get exec. I guess I can't really know or thinks I might have a higher likelihood to be right on. Look, I've seen the trend for a long time of people being very focused on efficiency, over effectiveness, that we've developed all these technologies that make it more efficient for us to do things. And again, it goes back to that point of like incremental, like eking out these small changes. And what we've done in a lot of marketing and sales organizations is really just beating the creativity out of people. We've said go execute the process. This machine is going to tell you what you should spend. And therefore, again, what we're always looking for those ones and twos in the messaging that becomes generic. It becomes generic enough to be applicable to like a relevant enough subset to where there appears to be some amount of effectiveness. So I really feel like the big trend is like organizations and sales and marketing and marketing has done a better job of this historically just because they've had paid media so that they're used to that kind of optimization culture. I feel like all parts of your revenue organization are going to have to develop that always optimizing mindset. And I feel like especially in sales organizations, there's a set it and forget it mindset. You build a new playbook, right? That thing runs for a year and you look at it from time to time as opposed to like you're constantly making small improvements. Same thing with your tech stack. You make an investment, you like it kind of crank for a while. You know, you have this strategy around social where you do X, Y, Z.
[00:14:42] So I just feel like there's going to be a renewed focus on doing things that are maybe not quite as a plug and play. They have elements of plug and play. They're technology enabled. But we're gonna have to bring the human kind of like back to it. And I think we're gonna have people being more creative coming out of this and that. I think teams are now going to therefore kind of carry that over and hopefully create better buyer experiences and sales experiences as a part of that. That's my I think my my big trend because we've already been heading this way. And B to C, right. I track you. I show you a cookie, I, I customize this experience and website B site B2B. We have been really lazy. Around that, it's very one size fits all. Oh, you're a finance director. You're the exact same site will know a finance director in a manufacturing company has a completely different set of problems than I mean. And then a finance director in a H.R. technology company. Right. There was margin issues. There's labor issues. And I feel like before it's this, like we treat all finance directors, like finance directors. And so I think there's going to have to be an appreciation for the nuances that we maybe it's like we used to have it because we had to we didn't have there was that technology didn't exist 10 years ago to just hit send all and do some customizations you had to kind of dig. And now, because so much is spoon fed to people, I think that it's not they're not taking that extra step. But I think that that's going to change.
[00:15:58] Yeah, definitely. I've sort of seen this trend in kind of A.I. and kind of a system, enhanced processes where, you know, the idea does a great job of gathering data, analyzing it, giving you kind of options and probabilities and things. But, you know, the humans actually need to make the final step of making the call and finding the insight.
[00:16:17] Let me give you the perfect example. This is this is this is one of my favorite sectors. We've got we've got a client partner. We've got a tech partner in this, too, that I think that's a really wonderful job. Predictive forecasting, like the bane of forecasting for sales and marketing organizations, has always been there's actually one one major variable. All of the data is based on the sales person's perspective of what's happening. It's pretty wild if you think about it, right. It's most of the data. That's it. Ninety nine percent of the data other than like what website they visited or, you know, did they accept a calendar invite? There's certain things that these tools are pulling in that is that, you know, like, you know, if you want to improve your forecasting accuracy, you know what the actual fixes you train the team how to ask the customer like, hey, where we added the process, what are the next steps like? It's like the way you need a predictive forecast. Like, no, you just need to retrain the sales team how to, like, ask better questions and, you know. So I feel like that's a good example where we were starting to rely more and more on technology instead of just having the human questions. You know, like no amount of meeting attendants can tell you that actually Susy's get ready, go on maternity leave. And this this and this is happening. And that's you know, it's that type of like mix of technology and human that I think we're gonna see us start to focus on as we go through this. I think we go through these evolutions in sales. And certainly we had the technology evolution over the last four to five years where we kind of removed a lot of the human. It was very, very human relationship. Now it's more technical. And I think we come out the other side with with with a nice hybrid.
[00:17:45] You know, what you think is going to happen to some of these industries that rely upon these physical events? So much of my operating a couple of industries that, you know, it's all based on trade shows and, you know, these conferences and things like that. And I mean, I, I don't think we're gonna see any, you know, large gatherings, you know, certainly through the end of 2020 and probably a good part into twenty, twenty one. I mean, how are these industries that are relied upon, you know, some of these venues and events and stuff to really build these connections, what you think's going to happen with some of the stuff?
[00:18:13] Well, what we probably the first thing to come back will be small events. Right? So maybe you can do dinners, right. Or you can do. And people have been moving that way quite a bit. Right. These like micro events. So I think the first thing to come back will be that. So we'll be able to go back to some of those plays where we do dinners or, you know, small gatherings and conversations. And so I think the key is what you want to be, if you think about this, is you want to be the hub that people to go to for information. And so whether that's via virtual events or physical events and I think is there Xoom fatigue. Sure. You know. Yeah, for sure. And we we had we just ran a conference last week. We had our sales engagement masters conference. We had twelve hundred registrants, almost six hundred show up. And, you know, look, we had throughout the day, you kind of started people started to trail off and we learned we're like, okay, so end up being about five hours, you know, okay, that's too long. So maybe next time we do our virtual conference, we'll just do two days, two hours each day
[00:19:05] Right. And then, you know, we think that that'll fix some of that fatigue. So I think, like, look, you just kind of move to virtual. People are attending. We put this thing together in three weeks. Twelve hundred registrants. I'm overweight, like almost 300 either like VIP to sea levels, attend, attend or register. So I feel like you got to pivot to that and then you got to pivot the other pivot other than this virtual, which is kind of like the the easy answer is, I think the idea of like a community around topics that you need to be the curator around topics that you can own, because then those are communities that you can activate on an ongoing basis and get your customers more involved in those communities to, you know, using your customers as advocates. I think Rassi arise and customer advocacy and bringing that. And there's a really awesome play, actually. This guy, Jeremy, from Lead IQ shared in our sales and gave him brasseries conference where their play is. What they do is a direct message.
[00:19:52] Someone on LinkedIn, they say take current customer. Hey Kirchhoff. Hey, tell me how you find success with lead IQ around this pain point. And then the customer responds, I take that a screenshot and they said its prospects and I'm like, that's serious. Like everybody should be doing it. Or you said what a cold email like so stupid. Right. So I feel like there's a creativity element. There's a customer advocacy. This kind of community customer advocacy. I think that is where my head would go right. Where what we're trying to do. You know, I could just tell you at scale. Again, like we're doing this marketing happy hour, right? We want to be a place that if you're looking for like. What are marketers doing? And be to be it come into happy hour. You learn things, right? We've got different marketers from different companies joining every week, different sales leaders, joint kind of deal, like an ask me anything on Mondays. And we have different sales leaders that rotate in on that. And, you know, we're getting ready to launch a group in May called Revenue Nation, where we're gonna be focused on know data and insights for frontline sellers. You know, we see that there's a lot of groups out there for sales leaders and for others, but not enough for sellers to sellers. And I think that this idea of community is is an important one. And this idea that marketing is not just about asking all the time and selling all the time, but also about, you know, building brand.
[00:21:00] And there is a value in brand equity that I think maybe we forgot about, too, that, you know, as opposed just everything's performance based. So I think you've got to get more creative and think about some of these ideas. There's a lot of companies, I think, that are doing a really good job of this, this right now. And they're building communities around topics. And that's something that you can do that. You know, I was talking to success like Oceanica company at Nova Scotia. It was a Wednesday.
[00:21:24] And it's like they are like the leader in deep ocean microphones. I'm like, great, you're going to own hashtag hashtag ocean. Sounds like it's like because again, like, will that go viral on Instagram? Maybe you could put down a tick tock. Maybe. Right. Like. And you become the Ocean Sound Company, you know, like people like you. There's an affinity for you people. It also makes people want to work with you. That's what people don't get about brand is like, although they might not have found you through it. It might be that. But man, that people want to work with you. You know, they're like, oh, wow. Yeah. That's that guy that. That's that team.
[00:21:55] Sunny, good practices. You know, I can see a lot of people kind of putting the other communities. But in terms of keeping them together long term, leveraging them from, you know, really thought leadership position. What are some of the things you can do as a kind of a community manager community gather that's gonna make that effective and valuable and ultimately, you know, convert you?
[00:22:13] You have to have the community in mind first. The community experience, first selling and marketing to them has to be a very distant second. Why you see so many communities not make it is the intentions become obvious. You see that like I see what they do. Let me go to the next thing.
[00:22:32] Right. And they're just needed. You're waiting for the pitch. Yes, that's it.
[00:22:36] So I think, you know, Gary Vaynerchuk talks about this. I'm a big Gary V fan. And I said, jab, jab, jab, right hook. Right where you give, give, give, give, give. Then then you ask. I think most companies, they build community. They're asking every other thing or they're promoting something. I think if you really want to do it, you have to maybe understand that that community will never have an R y for you that you can measure. And I think that is a terrifying proposition for marketers. Ten years ago, they have been like, yeah, that makes sense. And now it's like, what? Like, why? And I feel like, you know, it's when people asked me, Jake, you know, look, you post on LinkedIn twice a day. What's our of a post? I don't know. I do know that we close millions of dollars in business from it last year. What croi of one post? I don't know.
[00:23:19] You know, like so I feel like we have to start to invest in some of these things that we might not be able to directly attribute one to one hour away with. And that that's OK. That marketing is kind of a mix of these brand activities and these more measurable activities.
[00:23:33] Yes, exactly. There's been a pleasure. If people wanna find out more about you, about skilled, what's the best way to get that information?
[00:23:38] Yeah, definitely. Look, if you're you're trying to work through any marketing or sales challenges, please. Please reach out. I'm always down to try to help her get one of the team who can have a conversation at a minimum. You can email me, Jake, at scaled scaled with a K. So it's skaled.com. You can find me on LinkedIn. It's just for its lastic don lapses. If you type in Jake Dunlap, if you're looking for kind of bite sized tips, you know, if you're like, hey, I. I want to get some more like sales or if you want to see all the videos that we've been doing and all these webinars I've talked about head. I'm on my YouTube. It's Jake Dunlap sales and all these different webinars and all these different things. You know, we've been aggregating all of that there. So I think those are some some good spots to start.
[00:24:17] Perfect. I'll make sure that those links are in the shownotes so people can click through. Thank you. This is a great I'm very curious to see how things play out. Maybe we'll do another follow up on. Yeah, couple more.
[00:24:26] We'll see. I'll take my Nostradamus hat off. We'll see how it if I was remotely correct. We'll open the envelope. Thank you so much for taking the time today. Appreciate it. Awesome. Thanks, Bruce.
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