Tried, True and Tested Approach to B2B Sales: Steve Schmidt

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Mark Evans: As a b to b SaaS marketer, I recognize the importance of creating partnerships with sales to drive growth. I know that marketing and sales are powerful one two punch, but to be honest, I've been remiss in not having enough sales leaders on this podcast. So today, I'm gonna address this situation by talking with Steve Schmidt, chief revenue officer with Sellics, which helps companies expand their sales teams without making a hire. Welcome to MarketingSpark, Steve.

Steve Schmidt: Hey. Thanks for having me, man. It's a it's a good time to be alive. It's a good time to collaborate with marketers and, you know, whether that's people like yourself and messaging and focusing on that. I just got done clipping up content from Beck Holland this morning. We were really diving deep into per, you know, flip the script personalization and relevance. And just I said, you know, Beck, I'm hearing this so much right now, and so this is why I was excited to chat with you because I get to talk to you too. Like, we get to dive deep and say, hey. Right now, this landscape is kind of freaking out. And so today, I can't wait to talk to you about, like, the importance of really what people are seeing is how do we how do we focus on personalizing? How do we focus on quality over cranking the volume up, man? This is this is a fun time to be alive. That's what I say.

Mark Evans: There's a lot of things to talk about from the sales and marketing perspective given the Yeah. Economic, landscape has shifted so dramatically and so quickly. But before we get into that, I did wanna talk to you about your entrepreneurial journey before Sellics. You were the founder and CEO of Tidal, which focused on sales for early to mid stage companies. Can you talk about the journey from Tidal to Sellics? What was happening at Tidal, and how did the merger with CELx happen?

Steve Schmidt: So this is, I'll give you the play by play. So 2020, for me was kind of this year of an evolution. We all go through these things in life where we kind of feel a significant shift. And for me, the way that COVID affected me was not in a bad way, but it was just, you know, that story of here I am working out of my son's bedroom. Everybody had a an overwhelming sense of uncertainty, which has sustained itself, I think, for the better part of two and a half years now. We can unpack that later. But what I did was I kinda sat there and I looked at my wife and I said, you know what? I'm I'm I'm finding myself here back again as an account executive after leading sales for a long time. And I said, I just I feel I'm at a point right now where nobody wants to hire me because I'm from South Dakota. I don't have a bunch of software on my resume, and and that's where I was, you know, trying to break into again. But I was really successful with being able to break into new businesses, and so I I did that at T Mobile. I did that at AT and T. Verizon Wireless over the fifteen year span before in 2017, I went to outreach. And so the only reason I didn't have a job in SaaS and was sitting there wondering about it with my wife was because I had moved from Minneapolis to South Dakota, and what that was a pretty significant part of my life. I'd gone through a divorce, relocated, and here I am happily remarried, happily sitting there going, wow. I have a choice now. I have a spouse who's very supportive, she looked at me and she said, Why don't you go out and do your own thing? Consulting, as you know, is a vast sea of a lot of things, and so I said, I want to be on the execution side versus the strategy side. I called a couple people. Jake Dunlap was one of them. I said, hey, Jake. Do you know anybody who would need really good top of the funnel services? And he had a couple companies in mind, and so we got to work. Before you knew it, six months later, we had 42 clients and 30 employees. And then another year later, that that grew to 52 employees and over a 118 clients. 7 and a half million in revenue. So that bedroom turned into an office. The office turned into a company of 52 people, and that company, was sought out by Sellics. And Sellics had seen some posts on LinkedIn. Right, Mark? You that's how you and I met. And, their venture capital pre seed company, 4,500,000 in 2020, had seen a post, they said, hey. I think you guys might wanna consider contacting this company. They look like they really have it together. At least it appears that way, and you guys might wanna consider merger and acquisition versus organic growth as you kind of flex forward in your a round and kind of unroll and unpack this and release it to the public. So they contacted us, came in on a blind demo, didn't really tell us what they did. They were in stealth mode, and so we didn't know that we were being I didn't know I was being interviewed essentially to say, hey. We wanna hire you. And Dean Glass, who's now my boss, turned 30 the other day, very young guy, sold his first company to TikTok, founded Sellx, and two years later, he's sitting there going, Steve, I need you to come over here and lead this thing for me on the revenue side. You know how to do this. You know how to, you know, as a practitioner, you're passionate about it. And I said, not without the rest of my company. And he said, well, that's not really what we were thinking. And so about six months after that, what had happened was, you know, 38 employees from title came over to CELx, and then we opened our operation together on June 16. And that day forward, CELx now went from a company of seven to a company of 40, and we brought in rev ops, client success, data quality, call quality, agents. And so we had all the infrastructure that they didn't have, and we perfected that in the services world in a relatively short amount of time. I think perfected is a strong word, but I'd say we did pretty good at it. And so now Sellics today is a software SaaS offering, and we have that services backbone. But I will end with this is right now, like, the most the funnest part and the most challenging part is, like, transitioning the mindset to still have services and being of service at the top of mind, but to to fold that into a SaaS offering where it's meant to scale with velocity. So here we are today. The company's thriving, but also challenged with the same economic conditions as everybody. So here we are, and, growth is on the mind, and and that's where we're headed up into the right.

Mark Evans: As a seasoned sales leader, I have to ask you what it's like to have a 30 year old boss. Obviously, very smart. He's got a track record for success. What's the dynamic like when when you've got all this experience and you've got this entrepreneurial track record and you're dealing with somebody who's who's relatively young and and for that matter, relatively inexperienced?

Steve Schmidt: Yeah. Good good thought. That was the first thought that came to my head was this guy's young. And, turns out he had a ten year entrepreneurial track record back to college. And so myself, relatively a young spring chicken two and a half years into this, I thought, this guy knows things I don't about venture capital, about the things that, quite frankly, I didn't wanna learn about because I knew it was available. But running a services company, venture capital isn't really an option because the margins aren't there, the growth skill isn't there. So I never paid attention to what that can do or, you know, I certainly knew the bad components of venture capital and and and sort of the idea of what it can do to ruin a company or sort of force growth. Right? But the part that I really liked about Dean, and it reigns true today, this has not changed, is he grows slow. Although it appears fast on the outside, he doesn't like to make quick decisions operationally. And he's constantly asking us, what do you think about this? What do you think about that? His feedback loops are extremely tight. And so what I've learned to grow is I'm sure there's a challenge in the gap of maybe, call it, experience in terms of years on earth, but he knows so much about the part of business that, quite frankly, I don't want to have to learn. And I know things about revenue and top of pipe that he doesn't want to have to get to know. He appreciates the hell out of it. He founded a company around it, but that is not where his expertise is going to lie. His is gonna be steering the company, leading the company, and pushing us forward.

Mark Evans: Before we hit the record button, you and I were talking about the economic landscape and how a lot of b two b and a lot of b b SaaS companies are and I'm not using this word too dramatically, are desperate for leads. There's a lot of anxiety right now because the economic landscape has shifted so abruptly. 2020, 2021 were awesome years. The rising tide lifted all ships. Yeah. That's changed with rising interest rates and economic volatility. I'd be really interested to get your perspective on how the sales landscape has changed and how salespeople and sales organizations need to operate differently.

Steve Schmidt: Collaborating across other departments has never been more important. So I think those companies who have demand gen marketing arms and all that messaging tied quickly into sales, and a lot of that's done through automation of the CRM. A lot of people have, pardon me, abandoned the ability to sit and have a conversation without taking it personal. So for example, revenue right now and client success, like that that intra battle of handing things off once you have a customer. Right? Always kind of this toxic relationship. And we're looking at it right now going, like a lot of companies, how do we expand the revenue we have as well as think about top of pipe? And so when I talk to other CEOs, they are panicking right now. And they also don't necessarily have the economic favorability to just make a bunch of mistakes. And so we have this really important time where you can see in their eye the hesitation. They're asking for guarantees when guarantees have never been a thing from companies in a time where we all feel this slight grasp of desperation. Right? And so I also think the more we talk about it, the more it proliferates the future of that. And and and so I think that what will happen here, which is very common in human nature, is we'll talk about it. It will get solved at a macro level that we couldn't quite understand. And before the just like when VCs and tech felt it three to six months before everybody else felt it, we will feel the emergence of capital injections again before the public markets and consumer markets realize it. So I predict that by the '4, early q one, we will be coming out of this mostly because there will be desperation from people that we need to start getting this thing moving again. So six months is about as much as our country tolerates these days for any sort of change that it can affect. So I think right now is it's you have two choices, and this is what I'm hearing. Number one, take action and and take a hold on the market while everybody sits on their heels. Or number two, sit on your heels, protect capital, and derisk everything, which is boring but also very effective.

Mark Evans: Yeah. It will be interesting to see which option companies select. Early twenty twenty, a lot of companies sat back on their heels, tried to ride it out. Mhmm. Other companies pressed forward really aggressively with sales and marketing. And when things picked up again, they were well positioned. The one observation I will make about the sales and marketing landscape is that a lot of entrepreneurs are leaning heavily into tactical execution. The need for leads is being fueled by the fact that if we do more tactics, if we do more stuff, if we have our fingers in more pies to drive brand awareness and consideration, that'll fix the problem. That'll help us address this this pipeline issue that they're suffering from. And I almost feel like they're putting the cart before the horse. It that they're not planning the work and then working the plan. Is that what you're seeing out there?

Steve Schmidt: Yeah. Well, yes. I also think that we've seen that enough where people are now saying, well, what are you doing? And and so we talk about dark social and and the conversations that happen behind the curtains. And in the peer groups that I'm in with other c e r CROs, so not at a macro level like a community like Pavilion, but call it a group of five to six people. And Sixth Sense puts on a really good CRO monthly coffee session where we sat there, and so I just listened. I wasn't there to pitch our services. I just said, hey. Me too. Right? And the talk was is really around what are you doing so then I can derisk it by saying, okay. If you're gonna do that and I kinda know that you're reputable, then I'm gonna do that too because that feels like the safe move. So I also think right now that dark social will continue to emerge as sort of this, hey. These people are coming out of nowhere where in fact they're forming little pods of trust saying, hey. If you're gonna do this, then I'm willing to do that too versus, you know, hey. We're just gonna forge ahead and do this because we feel it's best. I think it's that's what people do is they typically don't wanna lose a loan in a time where risk can be can lead to failure, you know, in a big way.

Mark Evans: A loaded question for you, and your answer may have changed given where we're at right now. What makes for a great salesperson? And as important, are there ways to assess a salesperson's success other than sales?

Steve Schmidt: So the second question I'll answer first is I feel like a true quality salesperson does bring their whole self to work, and I'm not saying that to ruffle the feathers of those people who want, you know, work life separation. It's just it is so hard to succeed in a job like that and win unless you're always on right now. I know that just kinda right everybody goes, wait. What? I'm supposed to turn myself. I I get that. Be present with your family. Do that. But I will say those people who tend to check-in often and frequently and have a sense of urgency, I would say are the people who are first and foremost going to succeed in sales. Now I've seen a lot of introverts lately, especially, who have the ability to pause and look at data, to pause and actually do research. So I think the seller today that I would say what makes a good salesperson today is more than ever, it's self awareness. Who are you going to forge trust with that you don't know today versus who are you going to hustle your way into? So I feel like, whether that's, call it at a macro level influencers, I don't wanna go down that path necessarily and unpack it, or practitioners and then consultants. Right? You start to look to those people to go, well, those people can be an extension of that, and I need salespeople who can come into my company and build these personal brands enough where they still have a sales backbone to say, I'm bringing a little bit of hustle. I'm I'm bringing a sense of urgency, but I'm also willing to go out there and take the time on the background to, over time, build trust in a marketplace where I can offer value without talking about my company, and that's where we see content. And and backing up to 2020, so when the recession started last night or pardon me, when when COVID hit, the last time people were hanging on the money, we came out of the gates with title, and and we didn't we weren't anything before that. And so we came in with a storm when everybody else was sitting back on their heels, and I was the first salesperson because it was just me. And we were hungry, we were going after it. We were coming in with energy in a time where things were flat and people were scared. And I think what that did was it it was like a bomb where people went, woah. Who the hell is title? Who is Steve Schmidt? Who is this guy? And I'm just sitting there going, hey. We're here, and this is what we're doing. And LinkedIn and and and just that platform itself allowed us to thrive and grow. And, you know, 90% of that revenue mark came from, you know, over 6 and a half million from LinkedIn posts. Now I I I wish I could tell you that every one of those people we had a very successful experience with, but what we learned, and I'll and I'll say this, is through that selling experiences is trust. Right? So trust, trust, trust. So that's how people are gonna do it, and they're gonna go to dark social in their communities and go, hey. Have you heard of this? Have you worked with these guys? Are they legit? And so right now, those salespeople who are willing to establish trust and be patient are going to win in those channels. And so immediately, I don't think it's gonna be the person who busts out of gates and crushes top of funnel. I think it's gonna be someone who, over time, can do a little bit of that upfront and over time can do a lot of it by evangelizing without the title in the space versus the company that they work for. And so I think the modern seller should be half evangelist, half content. Well, a third evangelist, a third content specialist, and a third very traditional salesperson who knows process, who knows fundamentals, and can see things through from from front to finish.

Mark Evans: I was reading a post this morning about the new SDR and how they need to operate. And one of the things that the author emphasized was that they need to be smarter and more strategic is that they have to be armed with with deep intelligence into a prospect and really understand the prospect inside out before they even reach out. So it's the idea that if you're not prepared, then you're probably gonna fail because your your sales pitch won't resonate. How do you get sales reps to think that way, and and what do they need to do to actually arm themselves with the information they need to be successful?

Steve Schmidt: I would say that we might wanna rethink that entire idea and think that they the traditional mindset of selling might not be where we need to be thinking today. And that's why we're starting to emphasize more discussions with that SDR organization reporting into marketing because if it is indeed in a direct extension and within that ethos of how you're creating demand and how you're circling, whether that's an ABM, ABS correlated campaign, or whether that's as simple as here's our marketing event and how are we going to approach this with sales together and focus on outcomes versus MQL. So another hot topic, right, is how do we start to marry that up? So I think the modern SDR to have them lead with content, to have them lead with community is not your traditional seller. Mhmm. And that's why a lot of those sellers are struggling right now because the seller of the future cannot simply transition and take a course on social selling and perfect it tomorrow because that's not why they got into the job more than likely. They got in because they were told, hey. If you hustle, if you do this, make some cold calls. Like, it's gonna work out. And that worked, and it still works to a degree. But if your entire organization is depending on only outbound with no coordination on collaborating with messaging and an overall impact to the market, then you're simply throwing darts at a big board that everybody else is throwing darts at. I would rather distinguish myself as a seller and establish a team of sellers, which is what I'm doing right now. I'm hiring four more account executives right now, and not one of them is coming from a traditional background of I've sold, I've developed funnel, and done this. They've certainly done that, but now they've gone on to do other things within content, within advertising, within media, where we can now start to become a media company who has one hell of an offering behind it because I believe that that's the company of the future.

Mark Evans: I noticed a post you mentioned EQ or emotional quotient as Mhmm. As a key ingredient for sales. Can you talk about the importance of leveraging and controlling emotions by salespeople and how they can build that into their sales processes and workflows?

Steve Schmidt: Yeah. I I laughed a little bit because I was just thinking, I was reading a watching a TikTok by Leslie Vanessa and just kinda, like, talking about the emotional fragility of salespeople and how we, by nature, at least the salesperson of today and what we've known, is tends to go from high to low, tends to really celebrate wins and really get down on themselves. And we go, well, good, because that's gonna motivate them because they don't wanna do that again. And I don't know if we're living in a generation where fear is the primary motivator or pain or risk avers aversions. I think people are looking for what causes me pleasure more than pain. And so EQ allows you to be self aware and aware of what others are going through. And empathy versus sympathy by definition is saying, not only do I feel sorry for you, but I'm able to sit in your shoes and truly understand and listen to you talk about it and truly understand that. And so by doing that, naturally, we're extending out to the market saying, hey. If it isn't about us, then what am I saying about you that makes you get value? That's why I deliver content that people can take away and apply every day if they want to for free. We all know that strategy is what is hired and and people will pay for it, but very few people are willing to execute on it. That's why the free methodology of giving yourself away works so well is because they're gonna go, Hey, I like this, but I'm not equipped to do it, or I don't have time to do it, but it resonates with what you're talking about, resonates with my business. And so that kind of selling takes time, and people want immediate wins. Took four months for me to get one lead off it. Now we're getting four to five a day. And so that is what you can do over time. So I think that you need to be willing as a company to have longer, call it, ramp periods where you're augmenting funnel, whether it's internally or externally on on the front end, but that person is building themselves as a trusted adviser, whether they're hired from the space or whatnot, to go in and evangelize for the customer versus for the company.

Mark Evans: You've talked about trust and empathy and the need for salespeople to do their research. And this is an interesting question given the fact that Sellics is both a services and a a SaaS company. Curious about the fact that a lot of marketing and sales are automated by software. And Mhmm. Curious about how do you feel about the mix between technology and people where one plus one could equal three. You get the you get the scale through technology and automation. You get the personalization through relationship building and and establishing trust. And what's that balancing act look like to you?

Steve Schmidt: I think it's it's a well, it's a loaded it's a really good question. I think it looks like and I'll give you a very tactical example of what it might look like at the rep level. I think a rep could use software to help simply automate connections only, but no messaging, no cadence, no DM, no pitch slapping

Mark Evans: Mhmm.

Steve Schmidt: Because that will help populate your audience within your ICP. Right? There's a lot of tools out there that do that today. People abuse them and use them, then they get banned. So it's this kinda taboo thing. But let's say you automate that so you don't manually do it and then it claws back, you know, the invites that don't go out. Okay. That's about as much software as I'd wanna use in that effort. Now on the other end, what I'd still do is who cares about the DM? Because if you're creating content, you are now getting that first page of their newspaper developed. So as you expand your audience, and this is the secondary tool, and I've given this idea to a few people. I said, so do that now like this, situation. Have once, twice, five times a week your ICP on and do a micro twenty minute podcast. Just talk about them and talk about the problem that they're facing and just let it be all about them. And then what you do is you post the content, tag them, give them the assets, and they go, oh, wow. Cool. I'm gonna tag myself, show my friends and family because I like me, and I'm a human. So when I get this stuff, it makes me feel good, I also wanna advocate for myself. And so now that travels onward, and you're also still connecting with your audience. And so while that's building over time and you're developing trust, credibility, and relationships, you are also working traditional funnel through outbound, inbound, whatever. And before you know it, you have so much funnel and credibility that you don't know what to do with it, and then suddenly you have to build a company around it like I did just to support your efforts. So if that can happen out of one person with 58 people in a company doing 7 and half million, what could you do if you had the infrastructure of a company to help support that initiative and drive that out? Now the problem is is they don't a lot of these companies don't encourage creativity, so they're gonna go, yeah, I'd love to do that, but I'm afraid to go out on my own and post anything to LinkedIn because HR will come down and say, what the hell are you doing? Or my boss will say, well, geez, it'd be better if you're on the phone making cold calls and making videos in the break room. And so I get that. And if I were you and you really didn't like that, you wanted to get out of there, get the hell out of there because that environment is for different people than you. That environment can have a very traditional seller who wants to sit in a great cube, thrive. But if that isn't you, then that kind of sales role, I think, is the biggest need for SaaS companies right now, especially those who are willing to invest in taking a little bit of a, quote, unquote, risk by allowing people to flex a little bit and enabling them with, call it, the mechanisms of video editing, you know, a content team to support their initiatives, go do it, fail a little bit, win a little bit, and then have them build that too because whatever it does for them, that's good. Don't worry. You're getting the benefit in the meantime. When they move on, which they will anyways, they'll move on, and you'll still receive the impact of their brand. And by the way, if they suck and they're toxic and they're bad, you'll also receive the negative benefit of that. So be careful on who you hire and who you allow to do that and make sure that they're very authentic And they're more interested in you than they are themselves. That's the secret ingredient.

Mark Evans: The other angle to sales that I'd like to explore is messaging. That's something that you wrote about recently and how it allows salespeople to connect with prospects. As someone like me who focuses a lot on positioning and messaging and the ability to be clear, coherent, and consistent in how you go out to market, What's the role of messaging and storytelling within sales?

Steve Schmidt: It's everything. We use a proof point as the second p, problem, proof, persuasion, and that proof is an emphasis on telling a story. And telling a story in words that people understand. Salespeople tend to be very verbose. Me too. Right? We all wanna talk. But when we when we when we stop and think and remember that the words that they hear and the story that they hear very simply, even if it's the same story over and over again, needs to be clear, concise where you say, this is who it was. This is how it was before. This is what they did to solve it, and this is their life now that they solved it. And that's how we appreciate stories in human life. Hey, Mark. I went out, was outside this concert, ran into your buddy, Tom. Tom's awesome. He was like, hey. How's Mark doing? And I was like, oh my god. Mark's awesome. He's so busy now, you know, da da da, raising kids. And he was like, you know what? We all gotta get together. And you know what I said? I was like, you're you're damn right. And so what I did is I set up a time, and I want you to go. And then you're gonna go, okay. Cool. A little bit of me in there, you know, that's good, and it makes me feel good. And you told me a story that wishes I was there. Man, I missed that. So how do I get a part of that next time? I sure as hell am gonna let's get that on the calendar right now. That sounds fun because it made me feel good because someone missed me, not because I missed the event. And I think that that ability to personalize that and make it about other people versus more about you is what's probably the biggest challenge for a lot of people.

Mark Evans: Now one of the talks topics that I have to ask you about, and this is, I guess, controversial, and people are very polarized in terms of how they view it as cold. Cold outreach, cold calling. You have one camp that says it's alive and well, and it's what you need to do to reach prospects, particularly when they're busy these days. And then the other camp says, listen. In a world full of relationships and authenticity and trust, it's just not gonna work anymore. And and to me, this is a really fascinating topic because there's no right answer, but it would be interesting to get your view on cold and and how cold fits into your sales methodology and your sales workflows.

Steve Schmidt: The worse the targeting, the worse the messaging, the colder it will feel. So I I I think if you got, you know, deep and wide with the fishnet, you're gonna get a few in there, and you don't need super great messaging. You just kinda need to get lucky. And that's why some companies have survived. It's called the old spray and pray, but right now, I think cold will always have a place. It's kind of like I met my wife kind of coming in cold. When I approached her, she was not looking, and I wouldn't have gotten and call it what I want if I would have sat on my heels and waited for it. I think that those people who are bold enough to come in cold and have a very good idea of who their ideal customer is and the messaging that that customer wants, they can still survive with cold. And they will survive, and they'll still have the benefits of an outbound message. But what we're seeing is traditional cold bound email is more than dead. Email is deader than a doornail. We did it to ourselves. DMs are deader than a doornail. We did it to ourselves, and cold mail cold calls are deader than a doornail because we did it to ourselves. We kept calling people over and over again with no relevance, and they already feel like you're barging into their life. Now I'll I'll end with this as I think a warmer cold call is one that you can start to and Chris Walker will roll over, you know, if he hears this. But, yeah, let them raise their hand a little bit and cold call. You know, now it's time to go out and get them and lead the horse to water, because they might have a problem, and it might not be the first one. It might be the third one, but now might be the time to capture their awareness. Because if you do not, demand capture on that and go out and grab the lead and generate it in your funnel, which is now lead gen because your awareness created that, but you're going to grab it and point them through, now you are forcing things to happen. If we look at amount of things in life that have happened due to force, whether it's how North America and America came to be or the history of man, many things that happened in a big way were not due to people sitting back on their heels and waiting for the perfect situation. They were happened because of bold initiatives, and they were certainly pattern interrupts at the at the least.

Mark Evans: I have a client that has desperately tried for the last six months to leverage cold email. They've they've done it through ABM. They've done it through extracting information from Apollo. They've tried tried different creative approaches. And time after time, the response has been almost zero. Very few opens, no engagement, no conversations. Mhmm. Why has cold email died so quickly? It it used to be the fact that you could get some engagement. You could get some conversations going, but it seems to have crumbled. And if it's if it doesn't work anymore Is it dead? And if it doesn't work anymore, then what do companies do from a from a cold perspective?

Steve Schmidt: I think cold creative companies are going to alternative channels to come in cold. So think about the really nontraditional ones like Quora. Think about Reddit. Think about WhatsApp. Like, different mechanisms to come in on and and stay away from SMS cold. Just stay away from it. Trust me because it's illegal, number one, and all these other things. And I think that the idea is that cold is going to feel cold, so why did we not start looking at the other channels and exploring that? Although I might not know it, there are certainly millions and millions and millions of people who do. And and for example, Quora, very much, unfamiliar to me until I started diving in, and then now you have to be engaging with people. And now there's these little subcommunities that happen out there where although you're now still cold to them, they don't know you, you can find the time and the topic to insert yourself. And that's where I think the younger generation, the most part, because they grew up in that ecosystem, is going to look at, like, by the way, I could go to Facebook and have a successful b to b prospecting campaign by messaging every one of my prospects and adding them as a friend. There you have a much better chance than doing that through DMs on LinkedIn. By the way, I mean, I tested it. That works at scale. There are, you know, a lot of different things you can do that feel cold by simply selecting a channel that's not being tapped into. And so I think it's less the art that's fatigued and the channels that are fatigued. There are cybersecurity solutions that will keep you out of inboxes. Enterprises pay people millions of dollars to make sure your email never gets delivered there. Companies like Gated are now keeping you out of the inbox. Right? And so when you look at your chances, you've got an offensive line of steel curtains from from sideline to sideline. So why are you focusing on pouring more money into a channel that no matter what, a, doesn't strike up a conversation that you can actually get benefit from? B, although it's your lowest cost channel, could also just, you know, harm your domain and all sorts of terrible things that you can do by trying to depend on that. I would wait for the invention of seeing what Web three does to allow you to diversify your email delivery. Elon Musk has delivered a email technology that supposedly is going to be able to allow you to get through those barriers. And so I think with any sort of obstacle becomes innovation to get around it. So that'll be the interesting part to me is seeing who is, from a technology standpoint, going to crack the code on email because nobody's done it yet, and people have spent billions of dollars trying.

Mark Evans: We're bouncing around a lot, but I did wanna ask you about how sales and marketing should work together. Off the top, I talked about the fact that it's a one plus one equals three proposition. That if sales and marketing can create a very cohesive collaborative partnership, then it becomes a virtuous circle. Sales is feeding marketing the intel they need. Marketing is providing sales with the assets and the narratives and the messaging that they need. And then Mhmm. They can move forward in lockstep. That the fact that they can be very aligned in terms of how they're going to identify prospects, engage prospects, and and and attract them. Yeah. How do you make that happen with an organization? Because sales marketing tends to operate in silos, and the head of sales and the head of marketing have their own fiefdoms that they protect. That world doesn't seem to strike me as as feasible anymore. So how do you make these organizations blend together and work together?

Steve Schmidt: Yeah. You force it to happen. I think that's the only way, and I know that that sounds forceful. But, here's a really good example of something I implemented is what I would do is take sales and marketing, and every Friday, say, we are going to do a ten minute micro podcast where you two are gonna get on and do one together, and you're going to deliver that news to the company on what you're trying, what's working, and how you're succeeding. And you're forcing that to happen, which will force collaboration across the rest of the week. Now it might start off bumpy depending on your relationship, but now not only are you getting those two departments to work together, but you're reporting back to the rest of the company, which is now opening up your communication channels, which is every company's biggest problem. Right? You might be in sales and all of sudden a campaign rolls out. You're, woah. What happened there? You know what? I didn't see that one coming, or we're certainly not in lockstep. So I think something as simple and tactical as that really works well versus hoping and praying or hiring a trainer or to or some moderator to come in and intervene between those two people. So that's just really tactical, and it's free. You know, it's really free, And the the outcomes will be significant.

Mark Evans: I wouldn't be a good interviewer if I didn't ask you about your approach to LinkedIn. Have you establish yourself as a leading and authoritative voice? But before we get into that, I wanted to get your take on the biggest mistakes that salespeople make on LinkedIn because a lot of people are obviously jumping on the LinkedIn bandwagon. It's a great place to connect and have conversations, but all of us are feeling the pain of salespeople who are DMing us, cold DMing us, commenting on posts that have no relevance or posting stuff that is clearly sales oriented. Can you sort of look at some of the mistakes that they're making, and and how would you, as a sales leader, advise people on how to take a better approach to LinkedIn?

Steve Schmidt: Well, I think right now we're seeing what happens in social media, which is, two years ago, we were saying, hey. Everybody like, LinkedIn works. Where is everybody? And now we're seeing everybody going, okay. I'll try it. So we see, you know, caught the number one thing is there's a lot of SDRs on LinkedIn. We all know that. Right? You know, they they sell. They hit quota for one month, and two months later, they're starting seven side hustles and selling ebooks. And so if I'm a buyer or a prospect or someone looking at you, I'm going hell to the no. Do I wanna work with this person? So I think the number one thing we do is we don't represent what we do and the company we work for as well as we should. And we've taken the idea of personal branding and and just crushed it and said, oh, cool, man. I can get a side hustle. Well, guess what? You know what a really good side hustle is? It's something where it's infrequent and that pays you a lot of money. And so master what you do today so well where someone's willing to pay you less for time and more for value. And the best value is coming from successful outcomes from existing customers who refer you to other people over a period of time. And so rather than forcing this to happen, at at breakneck speed, realize that LinkedIn is is still a really good platform if you go for trust before, you know, call it, reciprocity. If you go for getting before you go for receiving. And so comments to me, like when I see people commenting just for the sake of the algorithm, it really turns me off from them. It makes me also wanna not like them because I'm going, I see what you're doing now. I also respect it because I know you're playing that game, but you probably got a team of five people behind you helping you do that. Now, I've got a ghostwriter. She does not write my posts. She takes what I talk about one hour a week and breaks it down and rewrites it. Do take advantage of a team. I have a video editor, real simple, but those are the people that I use on LinkedIn and it's always me. When people DM me, it's me. And so I think that now when I look at how to do it right is over time, I build value. Over time, we've somehow got a catalog of 500 videos and posts that people have I get messages from people who are like, Man, I implemented this, and I went from the worst SDR to now on the top AE in a year. I'm like, man, that makes me wanna cry. Like, that makes me happy because I now started storing those in case I ever need those for a rainy day, but just to know the impact you had without asking people for it. I've never asked anybody for shit on LinkedIn. Pardon my French. Never. I've only given. Now I have people who probably can't no. I know I have people who can't stand me, who would think that I'm not their kind of person, and that's okay. I used to get concerned about it. Now I don't even blink. I don't read the comments that are negative, and I if I if they're toxic, I delete them and block them just because you know what? It's my LinkedIn. And so if I'm gonna put the time and energy into putting what I believe is quality out there, I'm not gonna let a troll come in and crash it. I'll let someone with a strong opinion any day. If they wanna disagree with respect, let's have a conversation in public. I'm all for that. But when you get disrespectful and you're one of the millions of trolls out there, then move on. And that's where I think LinkedIn is, yes, you want to have an open and candid conversation, but we did not show up to watch two people argue about petty things. Take that offline, and let's get back to call it business, which is how do we make each other better? How do we make each other profitable? At the end of the day, we're all in business to make money. Let's be honest. How do we help each other do that more without just trying to get money? And and that is built by value. And you know this, Mark, because this is your spaces. When you do it for people and you do it well, they're gonna start to refer you, which is how you grow your business.

Mark Evans: Peel back the onion a little bit on the on your tactical approach to LinkedIn. Do you post every day? Do you do you look to post different types of content? I know, for example, that you you leverage video in a big way, but also text post. Walk us through how your day to day approach to LinkedIn and and how much you plan in advance versus what you do spur of the moment.

Steve Schmidt: My morning posts are always written in real time. So that's me sitting down over a cup of coffee. The evening posts are always Mackenzie and me. We sit down and peel it apart, so that's typically when the video will happen. And now we're getting into pillars. So our approach is centered around what are we really talking about this week? How do we get themes in place so people don't feel like it's all over the place? Right? And when we look at the analytics on the post, which is where I look at the success of it, it's always founders and CEOs one and two who are getting the impressions. What that means to me is those are the people who it's resonating. Whoever your target audience and this is the tactical exercise I would tell everybody. Go to LinkedIn. Go to your latest post, and look at the audience impact. And is the one, two, or three within your targeted persona? And if not, what are you gonna do today to change that? So stop writing posts that other SDRs are like, who cares? Like, yes, it's great to have a community, but that's not what this is for. It is for you to establish yourself in a space where people who could potentially buy from you are engaging with your posts, not a community of other people struggling like you. Right? That's great, but you know what? I call it That's a community. Right? Go You can find that in Rev Genius or whatever positive influence. That's an awesome community. Go in there and they will love you and treat you and take care of you. They do it awesome. LinkedIn though, if you're an SDR and you're selling to manufacturing, man, I would be researching manufacturing. Would be listening to every manufacturing podcast. I would be following every manufacturer thought leader and I would become an expert in man I would wear a freaking hard hat and I would just be the thing because to me, that's the only reason you should be doing that job is because you love the space. If they know you love the space and you care for the space and you want the space to thrive, now they're gonna let you in to the the circle.

Mark Evans: That's great insight because my experience from LinkedIn is that a lot of my comments are driven by marketers, and a lot of the content that I'm commenting on is by is written by marketers. So it's it's a this sort of community of like minded people who are focused on the same thing.

Steve Schmidt: Good too.

Mark Evans: Yeah. Yeah. When I look into my analytics, my top three audiences consistently are CEOs, founders, and the head of marketing, and that's all we care about. To me, that is that is success. And if that keeps happening, then you know you're on the right track.

Steve Schmidt: 100%.

Mark Evans: One final question, and and and this is the the question that I should have asked you right off the top is to talk about Sellics. What does Sellics do? You mentioned it's it's a services company and SaaS. Who does it serve, and why would someone wanna hire Sellics versus do sales in house?

Steve Schmidt: Yeah. Sellics is a company that we are a platform. So we currently have the offering of, call it, what is traditionally known as out outsourced SDRs. We have 300 plus XDRs. We love the x. Anything. Right? So we're trying to, over time, when we talked about this modern seller, how do we do that for people in more of a modern way? And modern doesn't mean email and digital. It just means thinking about it differently. And so when people wanna use our platform and have us do that, that's what we do today. That's we do that soup to nuts. Like, we write the content. We develop the the ICP. You probably know your ICP, so we're gonna pull data, clean data. Now what we found over time is we are not the best fit for companies who don't know, especially if they don't have a product fit. They don't have a TAM identified. They had never flexed on outbound at all. If they don't have risk tolerance, that's gonna be us really going out and, you know, tip of the spear. Like, okay. Like, this is gonna where are we marrying up with marketing? Where are we marrying up with messaging? And a lot of companies go, what do you mean? Like, we're just supposed to do this thing called predictable revenue. Right? We got an SDR and AE. You guys just make it happen and we get rich. And I'm like, well, no. I mean, that was Salesforce. They had they had a secret thing called, like, the world's best CRM that they built over time, and that's how they built their business. Our targeted customer tends to be, because of that environment. SaaS is is is really that, call it, 3 to 100,000,000 is the sweet spot. Typical people we talk to are CEO, CROs. But that platform that we're now, calling a revenue enablement platform is as we walk into q four and get bigger, right, and now that we're gonna be able to beef up engineering and come in, with some really exciting news pretty soon is is we're gonna be delivering a SaaS product that we will compete directly with Outreach and SalesLoft. And we will be instead of a revenue engagement tool, we will be an enablement tool. So we can not only be a tool that you can use for your teams, but not just your sales teams, your demand gen teams, your marketing teams to get insights and run campaigns. And that is the central nervous system that Sellics wants to become. And we have partnered with Salesforce, HubSpot, Calendly, Chili Piper. We're about to partner with companies like Clearbit. And so when you come to Sellics, you can start to plug in those things you need natively within us. So you think Salesforce and their app marketplaces, we're building that same sort of marketplace. The people are one item you can get in the marketplace. If you need a CRM that which would be, I guess, weird, but if you needed to buy Salesforce, you've never bought it, you could also buy Salesforce. And now we sync unilaterally with both HubSpot and Salesforce. That'd be a good thing to have. You could also say, you know what? I don't have a tool like Clear, but I guess I've never been tracking my okay. Let's talk about that. Because if we actually went and took your website visitors that you're not doing anything with today and then repurposed that to outbound, we have such a stronger ability to capture things. And so we're trying to not just be the lead gen. We're trying to say, how do we think about your entire revenue motion, and how do we deliver software and people if that's what you need that can allow you to push that forward? So that'll be the transformation you see, and we'll always keep that that people part as a emphasis point. But when I think of center right now with that, think of having that be more left to right than in the set. And that'll be something you can do on the platform that no other company as a software company can offer. And so that'll be a very unique distinguisher where companies can throttle us up and down with people as they need us versus going to find the next lead gen firm on Pavilion because you need to put a Band Aid on a little bit of a wound.

Mark Evans: Final question. If people want to learn more about Sellics and you, and I know the obvious answer if they wanna learn about you, where do they go?

Steve Schmidt: Yeah. TikTok actually is where I'm having the most fun lately. Steve sells stuff is my TikTok name. LinkedIn is still somewhere where I hang out quite a bit, but TikTok's been super fun. And, man, I'm telling you right now, first deal came out of TikTok last week. Like, we've got our first real deal that went to contract, and a deal velocity was five days from first conversation to contract.

Mark Evans: A lot of the b to b marketers, lot of b to b salespeople are still on the fence when it comes to TikTok.

Steve Schmidt: Yeah.

Mark Evans: What sort of put you over the top?

Steve Schmidt: I needed a place to be entertained as much as I needed a place to learn. And, honestly, like, I don't go there, and I don't want my kids on TikTok because, man, there's some serious weird stuff to it now, especially with their, now feature they just released, which is super creepy. But I do know that people are going there, and I'm a little sick and twisted to say no matter what. I was not first to LinkedIn, but I will be first to TikTok. And so when there's market capture happening there, I'm gonna like Chris Walker, good luck catching up to him right now if that's your goal. It doesn't need to be. That's kind of what I wanna get that far ahead. So by the time you have a million I have a million followers, the next person goes, man, I have 20,000. This is really tough. Not because I wanna compete and beat everybody, but I want to be someone who is called the voice of reason within sales and the voice of TikTok in a generation that's all about bits and bytes and soundbites.

Mark Evans: Well, it sounds very inspiring, man. I think for for people like me who are just starting to get into into TikTok, it's good to know that people like you are already there and already starting to build an audience.

Steve Schmidt: It's fun. Right? It's a fun creative process. It's it's it's a break from the call it, like, oh my god. I gotta get CEOs and founders. It's like, I don't know who's gonna watch this. And by the way, I'll end it with this. As I turned to TikTok post just out of curiosity, marketers will love this, into a paid ad just to see what would an organic TikTok would do on TikTok as a paid ad, put $20 into it. And it had, I don't remember, a 140,000 views, 2,000 likes. No business. Right? But the traction you can get on there, I think it's a lot like Facebook where I'm like, I don't know where this is going, but people are looking at it. So nothing came out of it. So I'd say until you have a clear message on TikTok to put ad money, just have fun with organic because that's where you're gonna get the biggest reach. Hold on to your ad money on TikTok till you can figure out what you want to be the outcome of that versus saying, oh my god. TikTok, we gotta go there. Like, redirect all our spending. Just do little tests. Do little tests.

Mark Evans: Well, this has been a great conversation. We covered a lot of ground. We bounced around a lot, and we've, hopefully, we've explored some of the inner workings of sales that people need to know about. So I wanna thank you for

Steve Schmidt: your

Mark Evans: time, and I wanna thank people for listening to another episode of Marketing Spark. If you enjoyed the conversation, leave a review, subscribe via Apple Podcasts or your favorite podcast app, and share via social media. And to learn more about how I work with b to b SaaS companies as a fractional CMO strategic adviser and on positioning and messaging development, email Mark@MarkEppen.ca or connect with me on LinkedIn. I'll talk to you soon.