Don’t Get Stuck In The Spam Dog House With Patrick Baynes

Posted by John Livesay in podcast0 comments

 

Annoyed by your emails getting caught by spam filters? You need to have a go-to-market plan so you don’t get stuck in the spam dog house. Stay on the right side of the internet and build a positive reputation as a sender. Join your host John Livesay and his guest Patrick Baynes as they discuss how you can increase productivity for better sales. Patrick is the CEO of Nerdwise and he is helping clients by giving out solutions that will help them on their sales journey. Learn how to generate leads and use the internet to your advantage.

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Listen to the podcast here

 

Don’t Get Stuck In The Spam Dog House With Patrick Baynes

Have you ever wondered why your emails end up in the spam doghouse? Our guest Patrick Baynes, the CEO and Founder of Nerdwise has the answers for how you can avoid that happening. He’s got a lot of other answers too in terms of how salespeople should be spending their time to get those numbers where they need to be. He said, “Stop hitting brick walls by having bad systems in place. Find out how you can help companies transform their open rates on emails as well as their sales.” Enjoy the episode.

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Welcome to the show. Our guest is Patrick Baynes who’s the Founder and CEO of Nerdwise. He’s an award-winning entrepreneur and marketing executive. His career started at LinkedIn in 2007, which led to the founding of Peoplelinx in 2009, which was acquired by Frontline. In 2015, Patrick became the CEO of Nerdwise where he leads vision, execution and customer relationships. Welcome to the show, Patrick.

Thank you, John. It’s great to be here. Thanks for having me.

I’m always interested to hear people’s stories of origin. We’ll get to this interesting way to start your career at LinkedIn, which is quite intriguing. Take us back if you would to childhood or school when you went, “I’m interested in computers or connections.” Was it always a dream to run your own company? How did that all start?

I had a moment when I was 16 or 17 sitting in class when I became self-aware. I don’t know if this happens to other people but I remembered having an out-of-body experience and recognizing who I was as an individual and how I was maybe different or unique from other people. I can still remember it clear as day when it happened. I had a little bit of enlightenment around wanting to find my own path and do things my own way.

That’s always been there but the other factor, which is a big opportunity for everyone, is when I was growing up, I only knew about 2 or 3 different career options. My dad was in the military. My neighbors were in financial services. Maybe I knew a football player or a WWE star. I didn’t know a few other people besides what you see on TV. I had an uncle who owned his own company and that made it accessible to me. I could see that path. Tech wasn’t a thing at the time. When I was in high school, AOL was coming up but you don’t think about getting jobs at startups. In any case, the dots connected for me in terms of my career in tech.

In 2006, I saw a video about what it was like to work at Google. They promoted a lot of free-thinking creativity. You spend 20% of your time on the things that you want to work on. You wear what you want to work. Culturally, creatively, it seemed like the best fit for me to look for opportunities in the tech startup sector but also aligned with my interest in starting a business and having my own business one day. That sent me to the search engines looking for tech startups. I got very lucky. That was clever at the time.

I use Google News search regionally. In the regions I was considering moving to, I was typing in a startup tech company, seeing who was making headlines in those various areas. That landed me at an article about LinkedIn opening a customer service headquarters in Omaha, Nebraska. At the time, I didn’t even have a LinkedIn profile. There was like, “If you’re interested in applying, email April Kelly.” It had her email address on there. I sent her a very polite email. I said, “I’m considering moving to Omaha after college and would love to come to check out what you guys are doing.” It was in Omaha because it’s the same founder as PayPal. A lot of the same people. They have about 4,000 employees in Omaha. In any case, I found my way into LinkedIn in the early days and started my track into tech and entrepreneurship.

[bctt tweet=”Spend time on targeted follow-through.” username=”John_Livesay”]

Many people have a dream of making these lists, 30 under 30, Forbes. You made 40 people under 40. Tell us about that.

I’ve coached a few other people who had asked me how I did it. A lot of those lists have a dark side to them. A lot of accounting firms post these top entrepreneurs regionally, nationally and so do a lot of publications like The Business Journals, Forbes, Fortune and Fast Company. The dark side to it is they want to get all of these up-and-coming companies submitting their information so they know who the CEO and founder are. They know all their financial data. Court is a polite word. They court you into being an advertiser, essentially. They give you an award and invite you to dinner. The dinner is $250 ahead if you want to come. They treat you like a piece of meat, to be honest, but it is nice.

Was it Ernst & Young? Is that who you were trying to think of?

That’s what it is. They’re building their database. For Ernst & Young, there might be 40 but they get 4,000 applicants. They get the CEO, founder, their email, financials and a lot of great info. The point is if you want to make one of those lists, you have to know what they’re looking for and they’re looking for prospects. You want to pump up. If it’s a media publication, they’re looking for ad dollars. You want to show that you’re making some money. You can spend some money. They care about things like headcount and revenues.

Maybe if you align a little bit with their brand or their image, similarly for the accounting firms. At the end of the day, it’s the story that you can tell to get those awards. The work that you’ve done, the work you’ve put in to tell those stories is what’s going to get you noticed and get you those awards but there’s a dark side to them.

Were you already at Nerdwise when you got that?

I was at PeopleLinx, if PeopleLinx shot my profile to the moon for a few years when we raised a bunch of venture funding and things. At Nerdwise, we’ve been bootstrapped so not quite as much attention.

The thing that also was interesting to me is the kinds of clients you have at Nerdwise. The one that jumped out at me is years ago. I was selling LexisNexis as a service to lawyers. The premise was if you go into court and your competitor, opposing counsel, has access to the latest case and it’s not in the library yet, they’re going to have a huge advantage over you. It was crazy expensive per minute way before Google Search words on how to find those cases. That is a fascinating company. It’s not the car company for those of you who heard Lexus and thought of the car company. It’s spelled slightly differently. Tell us about that client and what made them pick Nerdwise.

LexisNexis, an amateur where you’re pulling that as a client reference, they’re PeopleLinx client. They were a great client and a great partner. They were a reseller of PeopleLinx, as well as a customer.

 

You’re one of the few people I’ve interviewed and I’ve done over 350. When you have someone who’s a customer and a buyer on the other side of the fence, investors love that because you would love it enough as a customer to want to invest in it and vice versa. Maybe let’s back up and explain to people what PeopleLinx did that made LexisNexis want to work with them on both sides of the table like that.

We were the first enterprise level. We could work with smaller companies. LinkedIn focused LinkedIn management platform to help optimize your employee profiles, the types of connections they were making and then the content that they were sharing. We get companies to control over. They could configure, “John, you should have this description of LexisNexis. You should share this article. You should connect with general councils or principals at law firms,” whatever it may be. You could figure those types of recommendations and have teams within your organization that were on a leaderboard competing to be the best on LinkedIn against each other.

It allowed us to provide all this interesting data around how we were improving branding, connectivity into the marketplace, content reach and distribution. We were a little bit early at the time but we were the first in that category. We took off like a rocket ship in professional services because, in professional services, it’s your people that are driving the business. They are, in many cases, the brand, the salesforce. We had all the big four management, consulting companies. We had a lot of the Am Law 100. A lot of financial services companies, Prudential, Allianz, all of them were using PeopleLinx.

We were the most famous company that LinkedIn ever cut API access on as well, which is a whole another story. LinkedIn, not knowing how they want to do, build their ecosystem of partners. They opened up their API. Like any good developer, we built on it. We were a learning platform. We started adding LinkedIn inputs and then LinkedIn said, “We think we want to be in this business. We’re not sure but we think we do.” I spent about six months petitioning them. They cut us off along with dozens of other people. We were a few years ahead of everyone else. That led to the selling of PeopleLinx and getting out of that game.

Was LexisNexis the first customer?

They approached us. They had their eyes on us because we were getting so popular in the legal industry. When either ILTA which is a legal technology conference or another one came around, we had a booth at it. They beelined right for us and said, “We’re so-and-so. We want to learn what you guys are doing.” They knew that it was a hot space. They were hoping we could be a connector between LinkedIn data. They have a CRM at LexisNexis as well. The name is escaping me but it was their CRM group that contacted us initially.

They liked our current client base. They said, “We like reseller programs.” It was like an inbound partner lead. I learned a lot at this stage of my career. I was 27, 28 years old and I was leading partnerships at a fast-growing company. I was learning a lot. They flew up to Philly. We all went out to dinner and then our CEO was right as we were in the room about to sign the reseller and partner papers. Our CEO goes, “Shouldn’t you guys be a customer if you’re going to be reselling us?” They go, “Yes, we should. What does that look like?” We drew up the customer contract right there. They’re getting ready to arm their sales team to resell us. It makes all the sense in the world.

Two weeks later, I flew down to their headquarters. I was training their sales teams on reselling our solutions. It was a great customer and partner for us. For the time being, we’re still very good friends with the whole exec team over there. Many have moved on but we’re all still buddies.

Let’s cut to January 2015. You see a need in the marketplace. Let me ask you the story of origin because I love this as well. What made you come up with Nerdwise?

I made a lot of mistakes out of the gate. In 2015, I was a little bit bright-eyed and bushy-tailed. I learned a lot at my last venture and I’m thinking, “I can do this on my own. I don’t need to raise outside capital.” I had a little bit saved up from my days at LinkedIn and PeopleLinx. I thought, “Building a business is going to be easy this time around.” Essentially, what happened is when I started off, it was a little too product-focused. I’ll spare some of the details but it took me a couple of years. Maybe in the first year, I started to pivot. I listen to our customers and to the market a little bit more.

[bctt tweet=”Don’t punch a brick wall with a bad sales system.” username=”John_Livesay”]

One thing I was good at was generating leads for myself. I learned how to build a lead gen engine at PeopleLinx. I knew how to run sales operations and that side of the house I was pretty good at. I had a good lead flow. One of our first customers, a company by the name of Reflective Energy Solutions, saw me winning all of these new franchise clients. We had a franchise revenue stream that we were going after. He said, “How are you guys getting all of these customers?” I explained my system for generating leads. He said, “Could you do that for us?” I said, “I could do that for you guys.” That moved us.

What we were doing at the time was a form of social media content automation. We had some other bolt-on services and then we started implementing a prospecting system into this one client. It went very well and I realized these guys were willing to spend more money. They get more value out of our service than where I was focused. Over the next few years, we’ve been building out that solution stack, including our own software platform and services. It was a constant iteration. Not maybe the sexiest story there. I’ve learned a lot.

You saw the big problem. You were solving it for yourself and people started saying, “Can you help us grow faster than we currently are? We’re not sure if the problem is we don’t have enough leads, we’re not closing those leads, the competition is beating us in presentations because our technologies maybe not be the best or our pricing’s too high. We don’t know what the problem is but we know that we have to figure out how to hit our goals.” Why it’s so successful and needed is because you don’t take one part of the funnel. You’re tapping into getting more meetings to drive more potential in the pipeline. I don’t see other people doing this.

The increased productivity, how to get two or more selling hours a day is a great premise and what a smart foundation. Every salesperson I have ever worked with when I was in the field, we hate meetings. It’s a waste of time. Do we need to listen to everyone else’s projections for the next three months? Yet you’re supposed to be a team player. We’re going to have another meeting on this.

Sometimes when you burn people out on meetings and many of them being virtual, the core reason for having a meeting is like, “Let’s practice what we’re going to pitch and customize it to this client.” The energy’s not there because there’s another meeting and they’re not differentiating them. That’s my experience and observation. I would love to hear if you agree with that or if you say, “The real problem is or how we help people spend more time selling instead of being in meetings is.”

I do one thing personally that drives 7 out of 10 of my prospects from nuts, which is a surprise to me. It shows where the world is going. I don’t do Zoom calls until I have to. My first call is a phone call and I want to know, “Is this a fit? Is this not a fit?” We then can move down to what I would consider being more of a structured meeting where we block the time. We plan on going through a little bit of a deeper dive. I have prospects sometimes who say, “Where’s the ZoomInfo? I didn’t see ZoomInfo the meeting.” I’m like, “I got five of these. I want to talk first and let’s figure out if it makes sense to do that.” Have a process that you can put people through that make your day and your life that much easier.

I could put on a blindfold and earmuffs and run through my sales process over and over again at this point. It’ll be effective because it’s taken a long time to get it there. In terms of giving salespeople more of their time back, as it turns out in 2020, in 2021 and beyond, there’s a lot of great technologies out there that can augment the activities that we do and the way that we go to work every day. The problem is those technologies require other resources to come together for them to work.

The classic example I use is people will spend tens of thousands of dollars on Marketo, Pardot and Outreach. They’ll buy these expensive platforms for their teams and never get used. It turns out that the sales reps don’t know how to use them, don’t want to use them or the marketing leader tried it for a little while and it fell by the wayside.

I’m starting at a high level. We could put a system here that will take sales activities, make these tools productive and take sales activities. Drive them on behalf of teams using technology but also give them a roadmap so it’s repeatable. We can go back to the well anytime and continue to drive that productivity. I’ll give you an example. If you’re selling into local healthcare, you’re working the old way, pounding phones, researching the next health care company, digging around on their website, figuring out the email and doing all those mundane rat wheel activities. You don’t have to be doing that anymore.

 

That’s why ZoomInfo is a $15 billion company because people don’t want to spend their time doing list research. Right there, you’ve taken a valuable sales activity by providing qualified lists to your reps so that they can work off of those lists. What if you could also augment their outreach using an Outreach tool like Outreach.io or Mixmax and so forth? It turns out you need messaging, plan and all these things.

What we’ve done at Nerdwise is almost like a prescription. We interview our clients, learn about where they want to be in the market, where they have the most traction, what their value prop is or what they think it is and then give them a prescription around, “Here’s a system that we can implement very quickly that will help your sales team do these activities that you want them doing anyway.” The key is that there were augmenting real core activities that they should be doing to give them that lift and also give them more direction on how they should be spending their time and taking it off of some of those rat wheel activities.

That’s what we do at the end of the day. A sales rep who’s using Nerdwise doesn’t have to do a lot of the initial research, the initial outreach and follow-up. They get a regular flow of replies meetings. Where we’re going is around marketing intelligence tracking who’s in your funnel but not taking action and giving that to the individuals that we’re working with so they can do what we call targeted follow-through. That’s where reps should be spending their time on the follow-through on opportunities, not on the outreach and follow-up to create those opportunities. They need to have a lot of that work done for them in advance. At least if you can, you should.

I’m looking at one of your case studies with Tech Advisors. You were able to get them an average open rate of 50%. Fifteen is usually way higher than the norm. Are you crafting the content for the emails per client that gets those open rates that the reps maybe don’t know how to write?

In marketing and sales, people will say, “There’s always this tension between marketing and sales.” They’re right. Those two worlds don’t always play nice together but there is so much magic when they do. More and more so, marketing and sales are holding hands and skipping down the street together. That’s happening more often than it used to.

Down to the emails that the reps are sending, we are bringing marketing best practices and marketing elements into their emails that most reps would never have the acumen or experience to do themselves. One example is the go-to-market plan that I talked about. That enables you to know who your audience is very explicitly. If I know that I’m intentionally going after financial services companies, I’m going to use a unique language that’s unique to financial services companies. I’m going to talk about the outcomes that they care about, not generic outcomes.

In financial services, they don’t want sales. They don’t talk about funnels or even leads. It’s about relationships and clients. Maybe pipeline gets talked about a little bit there, effectiveness, closing, reducing, cycles or timeline to your next client, whatever it may be. That language is going to be different. The outcomes are going to be a little bit different. To get those 50% open rates, 50% as low, we’ll go. We have clients at 70%, 80% open rates. It takes a number of factors to get there but you have to start small. There’s lots of testing. I can tell you some fun subject lines if you want.

Let’s hear those. I tell people, “If you think of an email like an ad, a headline that grabs your attention, that subject line is everything.” Most people don’t spend any time on it. They’re following up or whatever, something boring.

The subject line can get you the open but then you got to have the rest if you want to get some action. One thing that we use pretty universally that’s effective is the recipient’s name in the subject line but not in a generic way like, “John, are you interested in this?” We don’t do that but it might be like intro, John Smith/Patrick Baynes. I’m like, “Is this an intro? Am I getting introduced to somebody?” The one that triggers a lot of action and high open rates is sending a reply to that first email so it goes out as a legitimate reply. It’s like, “John, did you see my email? Please, let me know if this Thursday at 2:00 PM works for you.” Some go, “This isn’t automated. That person went back and replied to that.”

[bctt tweet=”Marketing and sales should join hands.” username=”John_Livesay”]

There’s another one that’s fun. This one got me a few months ago and we brought it to our clients. It’s cute and clever touching base. It’s like, “What are we touching base about?” I clicked it. As soon as I clicked it, they got me. Some of those work. I got one with no subject from somebody trying to sell to me and that got my attention. I’m like, “What is it?” Only people who know you might send you a no subject. I pay attention and see what gets me but then you got to have the rest of the story in there.

I want to go back to what you said about how important it is for salespeople to be spending time on targeted follow-through as opposed to trying to find leads. One of the keys to my success, when I was in sales, I was adamant about the follow-through. If I promised somebody I’d have a proposal to them and they said, “Call me back in a week,” or whatever it was, I would do it. I was amazed at the number of people who didn’t.

To me, that’s table stakes. That alone separates you from half of the herd of those who don’t follow up because they’re so distracted by 101 other things. They don’t have a system in place for that targeted follow-up. What have you found works when people are following up versus have you said yes or no yet? Sometimes the follow-up can be like, “Congrats. I saw your quarterly earnings were up. I saw you got some great press.” It doesn’t always have to be pitching something.

It shouldn’t be, almost never pitching something. One of my favorite sayings in sales is, “How do you catch a cat?” Do you know how to catch a cat, John?

I know you don’t grab its tail.

You let it come to you. Even if you’re following up, you don’t go to grab it. You don’t go, “Are you interested? Are we moving forward?” You don’t try to go forward. You got to play it cool. You also have to give them time. You got to be a little bit cool about it. When I do my follow-ups, typically, I’m saying something like, “Does it make sense for us to connect later this week or sometime next week?” It doesn’t make sense. Another one is you can ask, regardless of the sale, “Do you have ten minutes to connect this week?” It’s a quick one. Also, give people an out. If you’re not interested say, “Let me know. I don’t want to keep bugging you.”

Can we talk about the other case study you have here a little bit before I let you go, which is Lynk? I always love when a case story starts with some exposition. Paint the picture. How long ago did they approach you? Where are they? The problem is they’re not growing as fast as they want you to get market share. How do they find you? Where were they in their market share? How did they even become aware they had that problem?

We found them using the same system that we sell to our clients. We generated our own lead from Lynk. When we reach out to clients, from our perspective, we’re offering a way to help them generate more leads, accelerate their pipeline and get them to market faster. There’s a lot of that language in there that resonated with them. They’re a very interesting company. It’s like a blockchain FinTech, very cutting-edge stuff. What we were able to do for them is get them out of their own heads where they were so heavily focused on the technology that they had, where the market was going and all of these things but their target client doesn’t care about any of that stuff.

There are two dots I want to connect. One of your early mistakes was focusing too much on your own product development, which is a common thing that most tech people do. They love it. Their head is down on that. I’m assuming that what’s important to me is important to the people who will need our products. You’re not speaking the language that grabs people’s attention is what I’m hearing. When someone like you comes in and goes, “You got some cool stuff here, blockchain and all that other stuff but nobody cares about how it works. They just care about the outcome.”

 

Even if I had gone back to when I started Nerdwise and I knew that lesson a little bit in a more hardened way, I may be a different business because I would have been so much better at marketing and selling the stuff that I was doing but they got us at the right time. We met them at the right time as well. There was the whole system that we put into play. There was an accelerator but the biggest change that we made to their sales process, their sales outreach, to the stuff that they were doing was getting them out of their heads, showing them, “This is what this should look like to your target client.” The case study says 90 meetings for 30 days. It was outrageous. 1 in every 8 people we reached out to took the meeting.

Did you find a lot of people that work with you don’t have a system in place or the system they have in place needs to be tossed out and you start using yours? Are you starting from scratch? Are you redoing something that exists?

It’s a mix. When I went to a trade show in San Francisco, it was a lot of tech companies and people would say, “What do you do?” I said, “Does your company run outreach sequences for you guys? Do they do any sales orders?” They go, “Yes.” I go, “How’s it going?” A lot of people say, “It sucks. Sometimes it’s good. I don’t know.” Most people don’t know how it’s going. When you get to the person who’s running it and you said 15% open rates, if you have 15% open rates, that means for every 100 prospects you reach out to only 15 of them are even reading your email. You’re punching a brick wall. You’re never going to make headway with that type of performance.

When we engage with the client, either they have no system in place or they’re not getting the performance that they need. I always wish I had like, “Here’s a crystal ball, silver bullet. This is going to get you guys.” People always want to know like, “What messaging you’re using? What subject line is it?” I won’t tell you all my messaging. I’ll tell you all of the subject lines. There were about fifteen things you have to get right for a program like this to work well. I could try to go through all fifteen. There’s a lot of them. Did you know that if you have multiple links in your email, it’s going to get caught in spam filters? Did you know email signatures oftentimes carry 3 to 4 to 5 URLs? Did you know that there are volume issues and trigger words?

Some people are using the wrong technology to do things. Some people have hurt their reputation by throwing 100 prospects into a machine and blasting them and suddenly, they’re in the spamdoghouse. It all starts with a good go-to-market plan. You have to know who your audience is. There’s something called warming up a domain, which is critical. You can Google that term. Microsoft, Google and all of the big players provide clear instructions on how to do this right because people do it so wrong. It’s how you stay on the right side of the internet and build a positive reputation as a sender. That’s how you can get and keep a very high open rate engagement rate with your emails. All of these factors are critical.

The thing that comes to mind is you’re like a master chef. If you only want to make a basic hamburger, that’s not that complicated but if you want a gourmet meal with multiple courses and having it all get done at the right time, that’s a big part of serving a meal.

If you want to serve 100 customers, 5 people, 10 salespeople or 3 markets.

You leave one ingredient out. The temperature’s wrong. You open the oven and it doesn’t rise. That analogy is helpful. It’s not just one thing that makes a great meal nor does one thing that makes a great campaign. Therefore, you need your expertise because you’ve been moving those like what a master chef does. Put one more sprinkle of salt and it’s going to ruin the taste. Without it, it’s bland. That helps people understand what your secret sauce is playing on that analogy. There’s a recipe that you’ve created and it’s your own proprietary. You clearly are getting stellar results that people don’t even know are possible. If someone wants to figure out, “Are we good for what Nerdwise is offering? Will it work for us or not?” What are the criteria? Is it only B2B?

It’s anything in B2B that we can work with. The only challenges I run into are when folks are working on super niche industries like government contracts or something where this may not be the right fit. Sometimes the people don’t have enough of a sales operation, meaning that it’s still an owner-operator, maybe nine folks on delivery or whatever the mix maybe. Even though that can work well, a little bit of maturity around your sales ops helps.

 

The other thing to go with that chef analogy and I love that I’m walking away here with a story that I can use to go and sell with is chef prep. They need their ingredients the day before. They need to prepare and line up those ingredients. They need to know where they’re going with everything. There’s so much before that comes before the dish, before the next dish and so forth. All of that is critical as well.

Most companies don’t even have a sous chef in sales development or they’re going to the farmer’s market at the wrong time and all the good stuff has gone. That means it continues to work in a lot of ways. Nerdwise.com. You’ve got your own website, PatrickBaynes.com. Anything else you want to leave us with a quote or a favorite takeaway?

A big high five and a thank you, John. I appreciate the opportunity. Great conversation.

Thanks for sharing your insights. What a wonderful story. Thanks, Patrick.

 

Important Links

• Patrick Baynes
• Nerdwise
• Peoplelinx
• LexisNexis
• Prudential
• Allianz
• Reflective Energy Solutions
• Marketo
• Pardot
• Outreach.io
• Mixmax
• ZoomInfo
• Lynk
• Tech Advisors
• https://www.Nerdwise.com/blog/how-to-leverage-the-power-of-storytelling-in-sales-with-john-livesay
• Better Selling Through Storytelling Method Online Course

 

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Tags: Generating Leads, Go To Market Plan, Increasing Productivity, LinkedIn, Sales Activities, Targeted Follow Through