A case study like no other. In this series of sessions at BoS Conference USA 2023 we’ll deep dive into how Autobooks retooled their business and ask the question, “What Happens if Product, Sales & Marketing Work Together?”
By focussing everything they did on the needs of their customers and helping them grow, they also grew faster, made their lives easier and changed the way they think about collaboration across the company.
More on the Autobooks case study sessions.
Part Two
Kyle Bazzy and Derik Sutton pulled back the curtain on how Autobooks reimagined its sales and marketing strategy to focus on what truly matters: customer progress. By breaking down silos and embracing “Jobs to Be Done” thinking, they aligned sales and marketing around a shared language and reshaped how they worked with both customers and each other.
Kyle shares the bold moves he made, from overhauling compensation plans to empowering his team to say no to demos that didn’t align with customer needs. Derik explains how recognizing where customers were in their buying journey—whether passively exploring or actively deciding—was the key to creating messaging and processes that resonated.
Together, they reveal how these changes transformed everything from sales cycles to deal values and even their company culture.
Part One | Q&A
Slides
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Transcript
Derik Sutton
Yeah, well, we can joke about fixed time, like Chris just told us this whole hour long presentation about fixed time, and he ran over time. So there’s probably something there.
Kyle Bazzy
All right, so we’re gonna be talking about, can sales and marketing speak the same language? I just hit with many of you yesterday, which was a real gift. How many of you are wondering something similar? Thinking, we gotta generate more pipeline right now, right we need more leads, and then you have the marketing team speaking out the other side of the mouth, talking about closing more deals and having the sales team do more.
We got flyers, five flyers, features benefits, features benefits, features benefits. Invoicing. You need invoicing for your small businesses. What are you doing? Banks. My favorite though, is we had 17 banks under contract, but apparently we have an award. We were award winning at the time for what? I’m not sure. And then, and then, lastly, my favorite part of the slide, did you guys notice this? We don’t even have the same damn logo on our tablecloth that we do on our computer. What the hell did I get myself into? So freeze frame. This is me taking over and supposed to be scaling a venture backed company’s sales process with this as my marketing. Holy hell. How did I end up here?
So we’re gonna be talking about this today and in our journey with jobs we’ve done over the last few years. But first, let’s start with how it all began. So in 2019 I joined Autobooks to help transition from founder led sales to a scalable sales process. So at the time, we had 17 bank logos, bank contracts under contract, and I find myself months after meeting Bob and learning jobs to be done and figuring out how we can apply that on the go to market side, at a conference with 1000s of bank executives. And bank executives have a certain way of doing things, and I immediately thought, shit, I’m there with my head of marketing. It’s just us two. That’s our booth. So think of picture yourself at a conference, right? And you can see we got conference swag, tchotchkes. Hey, we got some Advil because everyone gets drunk the first night of a conference is hung on conference is hung over visiting booths the next day, trying to learn about your product.
Derik Sutton
Yeah, I mean, to be fair, I was new at marketing as well, so it was truly terrible, though truly terrible. So the one thing that Kyle will not mention is notice, notice how he’s, like, pulling apart his his jacket. You guys know why he’s pulling apart his jacket? You know what he’s wearing at the time? So, like, not only he shows up, yeah, he’s complaining about marketing, but this guy..
Kyle Bazzy
Revolutionary attire.
Derik Sutton
He’s backwards hat on, but he’s, he’s wearing a shirt that that’s a zipper shirt. Anybody ever heard of zipper shirt?
Kyle Bazzy
Eddie Stratford, anybody? Come on? Give me anybody?
Derik Sutton
So he’s, yeah. So it’s literally a shirt. It’s a dress shirt that has a zipper that you fold over. It has faux buttons.
Kyle Bazzy
Visit, visit my Bodega outside. I’ll explain it.
Derik Sutton
Why? I don’t know. And he’s like, trying to sell everybody at the conference on zipper shirts. And I’m like, why don’t you go set up a bodega and sell your stupid zipper shirts? And like, I’ll help sell some bank software. So, but the one thing we did get right for everything we got wrong, for the banter, for the for the conversations, we got these three questions right. And Bob yesterday talked about first thought any of that, that quote from Clay Christensen, the questions are places in the brain of which answers can be placed or an answer can fall into.
And so we’d started our journey with Bob, and we’d started to understand and unpack the jobs of the financial institutions. So we’ll refer to them as FIs or banks. So these banks had three reasons that we found three jobs of why they hired Autobooks to help them make progress with their small business banking problem. And so we had these three questions on that, on that monitor. The booths around us were, you know, $100,000 booths, $50,000 booths. We literally had that table tabletop exhibit. And bankers were walking through the aisle and looking at those questions and stop you kind of get the conference thing, where they’re like, avoiding you? And they’re just like, kind of walking back, and then they just. Look there, and we would just be sitting there, I’d be arguing with him about a zipper shirt, probably. And they just come walking up and they say, how do you do that? And we’d say, what? And they said that on the screen. And we would say, Well, what about that interest? People like, why is that important to you? And they it just became a conversation.
And so they weren’t walking into our booth, and we were talking about invoicing features and recurring you know, how we do recurring invoices and invoicing scheduling and all these things. We were talking to them about the progress they were trying to make with their small business banking problem.
Kyle Bazzy
15 years enterprise sales, back, tech companies. This is the moment I was convinced. Where you have bank CEOs that know nothing about us. As he said, You know that, like that really nervous walk through.
Derik Sutton
He did that.
Kyle Bazzy
I know, but you didn’t do it good. They walk and the bank execs you, they catch you the sales guy’s eye and like they jot, they saw the question. So this is all about how you take why customers hire you, and you match it with creating space in their brain by asking questions. This one thing revolutionized the next several years for Autobooks.
Derik Sutton
By the way, this would be a theme. Marketing has already solved the problem, sales has to come in and repeat it so that they..
Kyle Bazzy
Well you did, so you understand.
Derik Sutton
So let’s talk about the old way and the new way.
Kyle Bazzy
So how many, how many of you have a sales pipeline like this? MQLs, smqls, demo? How many customers have already said, Hey, I’m in the proposal stage, guys? Where, yeah, right. Is this our language? That’s the old way, before demand side sales and so sales reps are. These are our alter egos with our mustaches in the month of November. So you have Carl in sales and Darren in marketing here. Carl is always bitchin. I got a bunch of leads. They’re trash. I don’t wanna work these. These are wasting my time. Get me better leads. We need the right leads all the time.
Derik Sutton
Yeah. And of course, Darren and the marketing team saying, Hey, we got a bunch of MQL form fields. Like they’re all in your pipeline. We got meetings booked. You’ve got demos scheduled. Like, you guys just can’t close this stuff, right?
Kyle Bazzy
Yeah, but marketing’s worse. Marketing sitting there and essentially creating arts and crafts projects. Yeah, the slick looks great. My deck is in, you know, our color scheme of the company. What are, what’s good? A bunch of cards in a fishbowl. Nobody’s actually trying to buy. They just wanted a tchotchke. Like, don’t give me that stuff.
Derik Sutton
But it doesn’t matter. Like, whatever we build, however we do it, they won’t use it anyways. They’re just like cowboys shooting from the hip, just like, whatever it takes to win the deal. They got their little weighted probabilities of probability to close. They’re already pre purchasing their wife,s Lexus. You know, they’re looking for the for the for the end of your watch. They’re trying to make quota, bro. So they’re just cowboys, right? So, like, what do we care? What do we need to do?
Kyle Bazzy
If that’s the old way, this is the new way, from MQLs and SQL in a sales funnel that our CRM gave us to understanding and mirroring how customers buy and their timeline and aligning to that, this is the new way.
Derik Sutton
Yeah, so really demand side sales for us is taking jobs of how a customer wants to buy, and then our implementation of the things that we say and do that help them make progress along that journey, and so effectively, what it does is it’s the translation tool between sales and marketing. So sales is no longer speaking nonsense. Marketing is no longer speaking gobble you. We’re both talking customer. It’s the customer’s progress that matters, and that’s where we need to land on the decisions and the the content we’re building and the approach that we’re taking.
And so first thought is making space. This is, like, one of my favorite sections, but the making space, right? So there’s several ways that you can make space for a prospect. You can like the running dialog behind the scenes.
And so where that really started to stick and land for us was when we were meeting with Bob in 2019 and so we go to Grosse Pointe, and he starts to lay out, not only the timeline, because Chris had come into the business. We we were we understood jobs. We understood the progress, the forces of progress. We understood like how to uncover why people buy or hire a fire solution. But what we didn’t have yet in place were the systems, the things that we would do and say along the way in the sales and marketing journey to make that happen. So yes, on our product, but when it came to enterprise sales, like convincing a multi billion dollar bank to implement our solution on behalf of their customers, we needed to start to frame that out. And so what we’re going to do in the talk is basically take you through the timeline. We’re going to like, illuminate, I said the wrong word earlier when we were practicing, but we’re going to illuminate what we’re trying to accomplish at this point in time. And we’re going to kind of like review the tactics that we used in these places.
Kyle Bazzy
Come on everyone. Try to interrupt us like That’s. All, we’re still gonna have the best talk. I’m still gonna win presenter of the conference. I don’t that’s an award, but we’re voting.
Derik Sutton
So when you’re making space, you can do there’s different things you can do. You can ask questions, you can give a stat, you can state the obvious, or you can tell a story, or tell somebody something that they didn’t know. But the only way to really make that space and to be able to do those things well is by truly understanding the customer. And so in the old way, when you’re in first thought, or like, early stage of trying to bring somebody in, you’re thinking about the fishbowl. You’re thinking about, what thing can I put out? What can I do to get somebody to fill out a form or book a meeting? How can I get somebody to dump a business card into my conference booth so that I can follow up later and put them on my email newsletter or what have you.
In the new way we’re actually working with product and engineering, inviting them into our booth to interact with customers, to ask questions, to dive into the why, to try to understand the progress they’re trying to make.
Kyle Bazzy
Hang on. Let’s say that again, sales is comfortable in the new world, having product engineering sell. You can see Kristen and Justin in the booth. In the New World, you can do that. In the old world, could you imagine bringing that engineer into the sales booth? Can anybody, some of you are the CEOs and engineers like you guys know how you feel in that sales booth, right? This is the new world.
Derik Sutton
Yeah. And so how that played out was, we were building pieces of content like what you see on the left, building the business case for Small Business Banking. Why that title? So whenever we were working deals, we commonly heard financial institutions say things like, they would ask us for something, and we’d say, well, why do you need that? What are you doing with that? And they commonly said, we’re building the business case for Autobooks. Ah, okay. We hear that twice. We hear that three times. We hear that four times. What do we need to do? We obviously need to build the business case for these financial institutions. So you produce this deep content, and you help the bankers make progress on the decision, because it’s something they’re going to do anyways. So now we can anticipate the need. We can fulfill the request before they even ask for it. So the next bank that comes into the timeline the business case is already there, waiting for them, and then in our social media feed, we’re able to ask questions that they’re already asking and then start to talk about the answers that they want to hear. We can give stats. We can tell stories. And social media engagement goes from 800-900 views a post to 20,000 40,000 60,000 because of the engagement, because they’re in the conversation, they see themselves in the stories.
Kyle Bazzy
So real quick going back there, one really important part here is that when, when you do the jobs interviews, how many have done jobs interviews with their customers, to some degree so far? When you do these jobs interviews to figure out why they’re hiring you so you can build better products and solutions, you also learn and find patterns of how they buy and building the business case was one that stuck out to us when we only had 17 logos, and this was actually a top 50 bank that purchased us, and their their literal asset was the business case that they, thank goodness, sent to us. And that’s what turns into your beginning of your pipeline, your beginning of your timeline.
Derik Sutton
Yep, and so I call this candy marketing versus trail mix marketing. This actually came to me on a run. I remember calling Bob afterwards. I’m like, I get it.
Kyle Bazzy
Did you make this up? I thought you read this?
Derik Sutton
No, I made this up. So candy marketing, because, like, if you think about your marketing teams and like driving MQLs or getting fishbowl leads, it’s easy to offer something sweet in the moment, like put some packaging around it, talk about the latest trend, do whatever it takes to, like, satisfy the appetite at the time or, right? You know, like somebody wanting a piece of candy. But what do we know about candy? It’s like short lived, right? It’s got the crash. It doesn’t sustain versus trail mix, if I’m going on a journey, if I’m going on a hike, I need something that’s going to sustain me. I need something a little bit more hearty to fill my stomach. I need something to keep me going along along the way. And so trail mix marketing for us is, like, really diving into what prospect needs to take them for the full journey. It’s not doing the minimum to get them to do a form field. It’s about building the full level of content. And like, not accepting the fact that, like, oh, that needs to be reserved for a sales conversation. No, let’s unpack that sales conversation, repurpose that, build content around that, so that the prospect can make their own way without even having to interact in a one to one manner with the sales team moving forward.
And so that takes us into passive looking. So now in passive looking, where they were making space, we’re now transitioning them into learning how. And learning how is like educating them and providing the value that they need to understand that, hey, I need to keep making progress here, because I could just stop, you know, if. If it’s the candy thing, but like, there’s something to chew on here. I need to learn how this actually offers true value to my organization. And so in the old way, let’s say, like a MQL to book a demo, your demos would look like the pie graph on the left. So as soon as they book time with the sales team, someone like Kyle, that loves to talk does a 10, 10% of the time as an intro, like we’ve all seen, like the Company Intro slides, about the company, about the team, about blah, blah, blah, blah. And then they get right into what April talked about earlier today, which is the product walkthrough. And they get into all the nooks and crannies of the product, and they talk about all their favorite features, and they tell their same jokes that they hope are going to land, and that’s the beginning of the sales journey.
And so how is somebody learning how to make progress in that world? They have no context around how your product actually solves problems for them, or how they can actually move that project forward and internally to their team. They’re just learning about the depth and breadth of your product at that point in time, versus our new way which, which Bob helped us, like uncover, called Demo number one. So we actually broke our demo process down into multiple demos, and this was demo number one. Demo number one now became, hey, we’re gonna do 90% of the first call where you said, Yeah, I want a demo as a prospect, and it’s actually a conversation. And so we kind of take back those three questions that we showed in the booth, and we would flash those up into the beginning of the presentation, and Kyle and I would actually have running backs of, How long could we keep the prospect going and just have them beg us to demo? And so we started to call demo one, like, begged for the demo.
Kyle Bazzy
37 minutes on an hour call. That was the bar that got set the longest engaged happy customer, happy prospects, to be clear, because they would piss prospects off, and it’s marketing – 37 minutes of an hour. And they said that was the best presentation they’ve ever received from a FinTech partner as a bank.
Derik Sutton
Yeah, this is important. Like, we’re not wasting their time. We’re truly asking about how we we aligned to their to their job. We’re trying to understand, are they in this? Are they looking to acquire us for ROI reasons? Is it because they want to advance their digital technology forward? And this is an important thing, from their from their board down. Are they actually really care about their customers, and they know their customers are in pain and they need this tool to better serve them. So, like, we’re just asking, Why? Why? Why? We’re trying to dive into the needs and the progress that the bank’s trying to look for, and at the end, it’s a highlight demo. So it’s just like, this real quick, little snip, little like, little Hey, yeah, we have those things we talked about. If you’d like to learn more. Let’s, let’s go to the next stage.
And so I think the the important thing here was, and when call I did this early on, is I presented a good chunk of those early demos. So worked with the sales team as the as the head of marketing, and said, Hey, I want to jump in, and I’m actually going to give the presentation. I’m going to give the demo. Have the sales ride along. But what this enabled us to do, we didn’t, kind of know it in the moment, but like, what it enabled us to do was I was able to prototype messaging, able to prototype that message much more rapidly than I could in any other way.
So if I’m meeting with the prospect, if I’m standing in the conference booth, if I’m able to, like, go back and forth with these questions, just think about the number of iterations and turns on messaging I’m getting in that hour long meeting. I’m getting real time feedback of did that messaging work, what landed, what didn’t land? I’m starting to see the reaction of the banking audience, either virtually or in person, of that hit that didn’t or, you know what you the answer you supplied there is okay, but like, I need more. And so I’m just like receiving all this real time feedback that enabled us to then say, Okay, go back to the drawing board and iterate in a way that we couldn’t if it was just like building website content, just producing PDFs, just producing what the sales team asks. So the number one hack for everybody in here, you want to bring sales and marketing together.
First thing you do, have marketing present the sales pitch and ride along for a two week period of time.
Kyle Bazzy
Yeah, just pause there. Have your marketing team do the sales demo with the sales rep who gets credit for it, shadowing.
It’s revolutionary in helping both have, you know, we have a principle called proximity creates empathy. We didn’t, we didn’t come up with that, but we certainly embrace it once they both get close to what’s happening when marketing was throwing MQLs and leads over the wall and going back to get more business cards in a fishbowl, once you get them together and feeling that transition and the struggle of that transition, it becomes real.
And there’s a quick sidebar. We did this to you all the last couple of days, up until two hours ago, we changed this presentation. Why? Because every single person that came up to us talking about go to market or breakout sessions fell into three buckets. One of those three buckets are: I’m CEO or founder, I can’t keep doing all the selling. I need to make my first hire, or I just made my first hire, and I need to transition to a scalable sales process. Many of you said that; Another one. I said, What’s your biggest problem? They said, We need more leads. We need more leads – pipeline, pipeline, pipeline; And then the last one is, we’re not, we found our way to get to here, our first handful of customers. But how the hell do we get to there? How do we 10x our company? We’re VC backed, where we have investors that expect a certain amount of growth, and we’re lost because what got us here, we’re learning, isn’t going to get us to that next level.
Those are the three buckets that everybody fell into that talked to us anyway, and the ones that didn’t talk to us, well, this isn’t for you, I guess.
Derik Sutton
And so the outcomes of that, because we were the marketing team was diving into the process. We were, we were getting our hands dirty, if you will. We started to be able to produce content that was that trail mix, sustainable content. So we go from like in 2020 or 2019 terrible booth, really relying upon customer conferences to get engagement with prospects, to talk to people, to by 2022 we’re running like our own virtual events, where we’ve got hundreds of banks showing up. So these are individual financial institutions representing $2 trillion of assets in the banking world. Which is, which is really big. Was really big for us at the time. You got, you know, sales leaders like Levi reaching out using our materials. Like, it’s not marketing saying, Hey, this is the presentation deck to use. It’s Sales Team pulling that out of marketing to say, hey, like, I attended your last event or your last webinar. It was really great. Can I get those slides? Because boom, boom, boom. And they’re using, we’re all using the same common language.
And then now scaling that forward in 2023, the compounding efforts just keep building upon themselves. So now we’re hosting a quarterly event with financial institutions. And you see, we’re getting 655 attendees at a virtual event representing 323 financial institutions. So we used to love to get that in our conference agenda for the year that cost us $250,000 to sign up for all the conferences, ship everything out, fly people around the country. We’re now able to run a singular virtual event and get the same type of audience connection, month over month. And so now let’s go into active looking. So this is where in the timeline marketing starts to the marketing content and the trail mix. Marketing continues to work, but now the sales team starts to pick up.
Kyle Bazzy
This is where it gets good. All right, so let’s sit back in context real quick. First thought, we’re making space, passive looking, we’re learning how. Typically learning how was when marketing threw it over to sales in the new way marketing is taking them all the way up to active looking. We’re later stage. And if you go back a slide, real quick. First off, I just want to say it’s really important in this moment, on this handoff, to understand the goal and incentive alignment. Derek and I owned, and we got our CEO to buy in at the time, the same revenue goal ultimately. So when we broke out into our quarterly KPIs for each team, they all were judged against the same outcome. We say we need more leads, but how many times are you judging leads to the revenue outcomes? Which has a shared dependency among sales and marketing organically? So take that note down. We’re happy to share more about how to do that and different different learning lessons.
Also important to note anything that we found to be valuable in work. We found 10 to 15 to 20 things that we fucked up. Oh, can I say that? We fucked up before we found the thing over the last several years. So like you’re gonna go through that struggle tells you they’re cowboys. But now I have, I have, I have leads coming over to my sales reps, and they’re elated, because now you have multiple people at an F you can see the bottom right, 323 banks, 655 registrants for that one.
So you have two people at each bank attending the webinar you have in an enterprise sale. How often are you selling to one person? Never. You have multiple people that need to get involved, if not have decision making power or veto power.
So now we’re getting much healthier trail mix. I didn’t know he made that up. I guess I have to adopt it, because I’m on stage learning that trail mix marketing leading into sales reps wanting what they have.
So now we’re going to active looking. Now it’s time to see possibilities. That’s the goal, the phase. And here’s the systems that we use.
Derik Sutton
This is pretty cool, actually.
Kyle Bazzy
Old way, ready. What? Frequently, I won’t say too often. It frequently happens after you give a really great demo, what does the prospect want to know? Huh? How much price? And the sales rep’s doing his happy dance going, hell yeah, I got a late stage deal riled up. And then what happens? Bob talked about it yesterday. They ghost you, right? Prospects ask you for so much, and if you give it to them, you’re responsible.
And so the old way was, here is our mumbo jumbo. I’m glad it’s small text, because it’s embarrassing. In the new way of all of the things you requested. And we edit it and alter it. And, you know, we work on? We work on tactics of you have 15 minutes to follow up, right? I remember reading that sales leader, 15 minutes to follow up. Don’t book back to back demos. Follow up, quick, right? Follow up, quick. And get ghosted to the new way.
So one of the, one of the ways that we change this, and you’ll learn, you’ll hear throughout this presentation, is the sale, the incentives to the sales reps along the way. Some are unassuming, and others will be very obvious. This is an unassuming one I called. I called Bob one day. It’s fun having someone as your mentor now that gives you great imposter syndrome. And I’ve asked Bob over the years, why are you doing this with like, why are you giving me this much time? I don’t get it. I’m not on that level. And Bob just kept saying, like, you know, it does this like, and I come out of it, not really knowing where I’m at, but still excited about where I’m headed.
The betting table. Ready for this. Every quarter, I’d put the sales reps into tiers and I’d give them tokens or points that they could use the following quarter based on their performance in the past quarter, that they could use to essentially spend on the next lead. So naturally, so you can think about in Hayes. Are you in here? I’m really excited to learn more from him. He’s talking about geography based territories, right? Makes no sense to me. So you’re going to have, you’re going to reward mediocrity, mediocrity, right? Sales reps that aren’t that great, but they have the best lead because they live in that area. And then the other one is round robin, right? It’s if I can do provocative, lazy. I was lazy for my first 15 years, and creating this system now they bet and so they’re incentivized and aligned to understanding what a good lead looks like, because they know which good leads become good customers. Does that make sense? You align them to the customer progress?
So how you walk away from this? How are you helping align sales reps to marketing based on their own progress? Right? We’ll talk a bit more about that. I had one guy go, I’m betting all my chips on this one, because my wife is just pestering me about the new tile in our kitchen, because that’s your sales reps progress, right? Half of their comp is made up in incentives. So the old way versus the new way?
Derik Sutton
Yeah, the new way. I saw this play on the first time. It was also a forcing function for the sales team to really learn and buy into the timeline. Because if you’re having to place bets on a customer likely their likelihood to advance to the next stage, versus, just like filling up a task list. It makes it a lot more interesting. And the salesperson has to, like, really get into the details. So you’d start to see them do things like, reach into the sales team to say, like, hey, what content has this prospect downloaded? Which events have they attended? Like, you know, started to say, like, What job do you think they are before they’re making their bets? So the sales team like reaching in, learning about the customer progress, not just taking a funnel and just saying, hey, whatever dumps in my way, I’m going to start to work. But they’re having to be much more strategic about the projects that they pick up and decide to place their time on.
Kyle Bazzy
And then I got to give credit to, his name’s Lee. He was one of my senior sales reps at the time. But in this industry, for 20 years, longer than I’d been in my career. And he gave me this language. Decks have legs, right? What happens after you give a demo or give a presentation and they say, can you send me the and you, what do you do? You send them the – why? Are you trust your champion that early in the enterprise sales process that they’re going to articulate this to executives and others that have never met you or your company, right? And so what it does is creates conflict. Your champion is asking, because that’s the only way they know how to do but what they really want is help me connect the value that I see so that others can see it too, so we can continue to make progress. And so what we ended up doing was shifting from the presentation deck to the follow up deck, and the follow up deck didn’t have screenshots, it didn’t have features and benefits. It went back to the continued system that marketing created, which was the business case, just custom and tailored, aligned to what they are looking to make progress on and struggling with.
Derik Sutton
Yeah, because the whole goal, basically, in sharing the deck and getting the next stage is to get them to demo number two.
Kyle Bazzy
Demo number two, so demo number one. Real quick. Bob gave us this language. Demo is not a stage. Demo is an activity, right? Demo doesn’t tell me where a customer or prospect is at. Demo is what I do to move them along. So we split the demos from demo one now to demo two. It’s not the same demo anymore. Demo one transitioned into demo two with the sales team. Demo two was all about, first off, knowing already the alignment to the job that they would hire us for the progress they’re trying to make, and the struggling moment that got them there, it became now a full feature demo. But guess what? I judge my sales reps, not on what did you demo? But it’s not what you say yes to. It’s what you say no to.
So I’d say, What did you not demo? Even if they asked for it. And we coached them up, and they started to realize when you create contrast on the demo, it’s a forcing mechanism for the prospect to say, but we want bill pay. Well, why didn’t that come up before? Let’s unpack that, and let’s go back to alignment, right? Rather than rattling off who, if you’ve ever maybe it’s just me. I hope not, because this will be embarrassing, because I feel like I’m a decent sales decent salesperson. Have you been on a call and it’s just dead silence? We’re like any questions, and it’s crickets, and you start sweating, right?
Worse yet, I’ve had one. It hasn’t been in a while, thank God, but I had one where they were this, this, this isn’t what we’re looking for. This talks, and the champion starts to bicker with the other people that he brought onto the call because the call, because there’s no proper alignment prior, right? So now they start fighting in front of you, and you feel like a child at the dinner table with mom and dad arguing over what’s best for you, right?
The new way is 100% alignment with all parties, if not, you shut down the demo and you go backwards to the alignment to achieve a greater outcome with the demo. April really articulated this well earlier that you said, Why are we asking prospects to take our features and benefits and go internally without us to translate that to remember what she said, value so somebody that just had two demos and met you at a conference booth and you got a business card from you now are trusting with your solution to align it to how their other stakeholders and executives get done alignment first, then the demo works, right? So that’s demo number two.
Derik Sutton
Let’s, I’ll give a practical example just to land the plane there. So this, this transitioning into the demo. So the reason this stage is important is because they are going to share this with the champions, or, I’m sorry, the rest of the org. So think about, typically, early in the sales process, you were engaged with a singular champion, maybe two. But in an enterprise deal, decisions don’t get made by singular people. They get made by committees. And so what you have to be careful of is the committee just bombing in and showing up to demo number two unprepared, because what happens is they start asking questions and going down rabbit holes that don’t matter. And so decks have legs aligning to the job to ensure that’s shared throughout the organization.
Marketing team put that as a HubSpot link with attribution. You can start to see the sharing of the deck throughout the organization. You can see how long they spend on certain slides. You start to see what’s important to them as an organization, so that when they show up to this demo, somebody on the call doesn’t start asking about invoicing functionality that a large enterprise business needs. It starts bombing the demo when we are clearly meant for micro and small businesses. And so that diatribe that they’re on doesn’t even matter, and you have to spend time unwinding that you start to lose trust. People start to lose confidence. That’s when all of a sudden you get ghosted, versus what happened like a healthy demo, whenever we’d show up, is you’d go through the demo, it’d be a non event. You want to hear things like, makes total sense. We get it. It’s because they’re aligned to where they’re at in making progress with your application. So then we start to move into deciding and making trade offs.
Kyle Bazzy
So if you think about active looking again, is seeing possibilities, now you’re in deciding, and it’s making trade offs from those possibilities. Okay, so let’s talk about the old way. This is. This is where sales, sales reps get just a terrible reputation. Product doesn’t trust them. Engineering doesn’t want to talk to him, and marketing gets really upset, but the CEO is kind of on their side, so they win, right?
So the old way is begging, borrowing, stealing. April said unconscious white lies, right, like they don’t know they’re lying. But I was just at a conference last week where the gentleman Head of Sales wants us to take him through this as he’s on a call with his CFO and his his boss, saying it’s just one more red line. Just let it through. Just please let it through. Right? How many of us have done that or compromised right? The new way? I just I love Jerry Maguire. Help me. Help you. In sales, the definition. And I got to give the credit to somebody. Bob created a blog post on this, and he summed it up so well – in sales, the definition of making a trade off isn’t about compromising. It’s about their progress, and the trade offs to make that progress, right? Not compromising. And so when you do this really well, what it looks like during that period is say, Okay. You wanted to achieve this. I know that because we aligned to that, you’re saying you want to go faster, right? Well, faster comes with this. We need to train your team on how to sell it at the bank. The bank’s branches are their sales arm. If we don’t have time to do that, you recognize what it’s going to look like.
Derik Sutton
Yeah, dungeon is going to be lower, right? So we may need to, you want to go fast? Great. Let’s increase the price, because we already know you’re not going to get the adoption we want. So let’s make the trade off decision. You need to go fast. You need to get the project through great higher price. You want to do it our way, where we know we’re going to adopt. Then price comes down. So now you start to offer trade offs to the prospect, rather than just give, give, give.
Kyle Bazzy
If, so this came up a lot yesterday, and it’s come up a lot in the last couple of years, as people started to learn what we were doing with Bob, if you’re saying no, you’re doing it wrong. And everyone feels like, Well, how do you say no, right? Like, what position of power are we in? You’re in the position of power because you are the way they’re going to make progress, but the way you do it is optionality, right? So go to the next slide. A lot of sales leaders at this point go like, Oh, this is all great, but like, if sales reps can’t make ote on target earnings, it doesn’t mean shit, right?
So just the contrast is, I took some 15 year and one of them was actually in the industry for 30 years, twice my age. He just got fired from a FinTech after a long, storied career at one of the big banking partner companies, and he’s looking at me going, like, here we go again. You’re going to revamp the way that I’ve made money in sales for the last 30 years. It doesn’t work unless they are able to achieve ote or believe they can better than anywhere else. And I can give you examples in the Q and A or afterwards to share how much money they’re making now compared to before.
The big part of this is how we took their incentives and commissions. And again, this is the obvious one aligned it to customer success. So before they even sign a deal and we give most of the money up front, based on our estimate of that bank producing for auto books our company over several years. The problem with that is, after enough misses your CEO, a CFO, I’m sorry, during the budgeting process, it’s a little bit more what heavy handed in the commission structure, right? You lose the right, because there’s not alignment to ultimately what matters, Customer Success should obviously create your company’s success and progress. So what we did was we split the Commission into two. 50% was at the time of signing still. And what we did was we put addendums in the agreement, the contract that laid out the three big buckets of what all successful customers adopt and do before we even knew that was a thing, right? So one is their commitment to marketing contractually put in there.
The other one was a commitment to training their staff their bank branches to help us sell what’s inside of their internet banking platform to the small businesses, and the last one was a cadence of how we’re going to continue alignment and be put into their what turns out to be a scorecard. So banks operate off of a scorecard. If we’re not in their scorecard, you walk into a branch, and these people are getting paid $15 an hour, and if they learn 50 products to sell at the bank, when really the training they listened to was, if a guy walks in with a gun, what do you do? Right? That’s the training that they care about. And so you’re trying to compete with that. And if you’re not in the scorecard, it’ll never happen. Those are the three things. So now my sales team had ratchets. You get zero, you’re still going to pay you. None of those addendums. You get one, you get two, or if you get all three, and on all three, they got paid way more than they would have in the prior, old way.
Okay, the second commission was set six months after go live. Banks move wildly slow. If anyone wants to argue with you, get the slowest moving prospects and customers, unless you’re working with the DOD and the government, it’s banks and so what’s good is signing a deal that only goes live three years later. And yes, we have examples of this. And I think even worse, okay? And that was the old way. So now you get paid six months in, and six months in is based on early outcomes of the small businesses signing up and starting to use our payment tools, and the number of those based on how many the bank told us that they have. And so you align to customer success. And again, this only works if they nail it. They could sell one contract in the new way that equaled five contracts in the old way. Why?
Because we made five times on the new contract when it was fully aligned. Then if they sold five contracts in the old way, the five contracts in the old way, still have the same amount of cost, account managers, implementation, support and service, right? So again, I’d question, are your incentives across the teams aligned to what your customers care about, and then you benefit from as a company, and then it gets us the first use. So now it’s signed. What happens when you sell a contract and implementation and Customer Success takeover? What’s the one thing that happens on that kickoff call? And I used to dread this when the head of client success or the head of implementation would set a meeting with me when I knew they had a kickoff call that day. What happened? What was their complaint? The hell did your sales rep say that we have? What did you guys promise, right? And the sales rep is nowhere to be found. He’s on PTO today, right? That’s the old way.
And the new way, the first use go back one. The goal the this stage is to start making progress, right? And this goes back to understanding what progress they were looking to make originally. So what does that look like, right? That’s our head of implementation, right there. What are they saying, right? And then the new way is, if you this is called different things in the sales world. We call it map, M, A, A, P, anyone heard of that, except for my sessions yesterday? Mutually agreed action plan, super simple. This is actually pulled front as a discovery tool and used not only all the way through the sales pipeline, but beyond. And so what we did is we took this map that’s created by the client, the prospect, and your sales rep, and you can you probably can’t see this, but in the right column, we actually list out who’s responsible for each thing, because this is what success looks like during the process. In order to get the outcomes after you sign, right? So we’re very upfront. If you don’t want to do x, we’re going to share with you what happens when you don’t do X, right, that you need to own because there’s things that you need to do in addition to us. And so when we talk about earning a demo or earning a proposal or earning a contract, it looked like this. It wasn’t because we didn’t want to give or don’t want to give you one, but it’s helping level your champion up.
So a quick pro tip, how many times do you evaluate the quality of your champion at an enterprise sale and ask them, have you ever gotten a project done at your bank? But you’re trusting them, right? You’re trusting them a lot when you’re investing how much time into a sales pursuit? Why aren’t we evaluating and showing them how other banks that are killing it with your company or your clients that are killing it with your company? What does that look like in the sales process? Right? We all do case studies in white papers, right? We all say, Look at what chart Have you shown in a case study that wasn’t up and to the right, right? Or they were widely successful? Have you done a case study on your worst performing customers? You put publicly, no, that’s why your sales pursuits aren’t going well, or a lot of them aren’t going well. And your answer is, I need more leads, right? Because we know x percent convert. Let’s double that conversion percentage and create way more successful outcomes. That’s what the alignment looks for. First use. Then we use this. Lastly, with the handoff to implementation and account management and so sales alignment across the entire org are all these microcosms of incentives.
So what I did was a sales rep when they signed a contract, do you know what their anxiety in that moment is? Will my sales leader get this into the next payroll check, or might only wait three months for that, that first commission check? Right? I can see some heads nodding. That’s their biggest concern. I did the I did the work. Pay me for my work. So what I did is say, like, no longer up to me. You have to have a kickoff. You need to be on the call with implementation and customer success. They need to give the green light. And then that deal gets auto sent to finance for review, for the paycheck. So again, there’s these microcosms of alignment to get sales out of their own way and align them to that customer progress. So this isn’t done. The map isn’t done, the mutually agreed action plan. You don’t get paid. Okay all right.
Derik Sutton
I mean, but the point here is, like, it’s sales alignment across the whole org, not just sales to marketing. It’s into implementation. It’s into first use. We actually did this exercise where we had an off site with a leadership team, and we actually mapped and then took this out to the whole organization, where we started the first thought of a banking prospect, all the way through marketing, into sales, into implementation, into launch, into their customer, first using the app. And like, where all the teams fit into that. And like, what are the handoffs? Where does, where does everything need to be right and true, so that when it reaches the end and that customer wants to get paid, what all had to happen along that journey? And that’s like bringing the whole team into the recognition of, like, it’s not a silo of sales and marketing to do something, to throw it over the wall, the implementation, to do their things, to then get it into product for them to, like, you know, rebuild, or what have you. So it’s the similar version of Chris’s paper shredder, right? Like, we’re not taking these prospects putting in the shredder. And you get this piece. You get this piece. It’s one continuum of the customer’s progress.
Kyle Bazzy
What gets measured gets done. Here’s the outcomes. So how many banks Does anyone remember that we had when we joined and took this process over from the CEO 17 in tune it took us two and a half years to get 270 and then another two years to be in the 1000s. So we talk about the scalable process now, Chris, this is your shout out. Chris didn’t want to hire me when Steve introduced me to him before they actually brought me on autobooks. So this is a quick little side story. Derek thought we’re going to run over, by the way. That’s why he wouldn’t let me control the mouse. He’s like, I’ll click. Yeah, if you’re going too long, Mr. Sales guy, we got 14 minutes there, so I get to tell more stories. So Chris didn’t want to hire me, not because he doesn’t like me. I’m a likable guy. Is, you guys know?
Derik Sutton
Not, hey, there is one. I’ve been looking at me, and…
Kyle Bazzy
I’m not done marketing.
Derik Sutton
You should be that close to him taking your picture.
Kyle Bazzy
I’m not done marketing. Back up a little.
So Chris, don’t want to hire me. Why? It wasn’t him and me, it was product and sales. I just I joined recently. Like, here comes another sales guy that’s full of himself, that’s going to be like, just asking for the world from me and my CEO is going to vote for sales because we need growth, and I’m going to have to figure out how to ship products and features and benefits that no one gives a shit about, right? So not once did we ever Request a Feature or benefit something in the UI, something that the bank said their small business customers needed to during that entire period, not a single time. And that’s the promise I made to Chris when I joined, I was like, I’ll like you guys already, if Steve, Steve was my mentor for years before that, our CEO and founder, as if Steve can sell banks as an engineer, I promise you, I whatever you have, like, I can sell it way more than he can in a lot faster and a lot better. And we held true to that, because we didn’t compromise.
Kyle Bazzy
If this isn’t what you want, then your struggling moment is not enough. It’s not enough because this is the progress you’re looking to make, and you’re on the fringes asking for stuff that you don’t even actually know you need, right as the bank for your small business customers. And those are the those are the trade offs. If you need that, we can’t ship it. We can’t promise it. We can’t put that in the agreement. What we will do, though, we’ll interview your customers, and if we’re wrong, I will work with product to figure that out. And not once did we need it? How many banks asked for it? Over half, over half of those customers that we signed asked for stuff and made it clear that they’re the bank right? CFO would pop up his chest and say, Well, I don’t know if I can sign off the budget, if we can’t get this. And I said, that’s fine, when you’re ready, call us back. You know what happened? I get a call from the champion and his boss minutes after the presentation, saying we got this. We’ll call you tomorrow, right?
Derik Sutton
So now let’s move into ongoing use, so sales into implementation. Now the program needs to work. So Chris talked about invoicing tool. So the business model is, yes, we can sell something to a bank. We can charge them a monthly license fee. But the real growth takes place when their users use the application. Okay? We need businesses adopting the app. We need them sending invoices, getting paid, sharing the payment link, doing tapped pay on iPhone, upgrading to accounting. We need all of that to grow the program. Okay?
So when we grow the program, the bank gets revenue share, so there’s some mutual incentive, but really, that’s our business model. Get this in the hands as many banks as possible get access to their customers so that they use our tool and so building habits is important. Financial institutions, banks, credit unions, they’re not really used to driving product growth. It’s not their bag, right? They’re used to selling checking accounts, pushing commercial loans. They’re not like product led growth organizations. And so what we have to do is mimic the same behaviors and rebuild the tooling so that once we’re installed in a bank, we understand the progress that the operators inside the bank are trying to make when it comes to servicing their customer.
So executive team makes the purchase, hands it over. They’re not kind of doing the thing we’re doing. They’re literally dumping the project on the retail team, the head of training, the customer support group, head of the digital product, and they’re saying, Go, make that thing work, right? So now we’re having to go instead of doing one to one account management, which we had so one account manager for every 10, 12, 15, financial institutions, meeting with them weekly, going over best practices, coaching them how to build these habits, asking them if they’re training their team. Are they pushing out the latest marketing assets or what have you? That’s great whenever we’re scaling from 17 financial institutions to 170 right? And we start to add account managers, then you start to do the math, wow, we’re gonna enable this app across 1000 financial institutions. Do we have to hire an account manager for every 10 banks, we put on? 15 banks? 20 banks? How does that impact our OpEx? Right? Like we can grow revenue, but can we grow out of it fast enough to add an FTE for every 10 to 15 employees?
So now we’re stuck with this new challenge, if you will, of how do we scale growth? How do we scale habit building? And so we’ve actually then started to kind of like, basically take account management. We’ve compressed it down to three people. Where we used to have like eight, nine account managers servicing, you know, two, 300 banks. We’re now down to three people servicing 1000 how we basically align the growth teams to the same habit building capabilities, the same demand timeline of the internal stakeholders.
So like when this project shows up to the head of retail, what’s their first thought? How do they make progress? How do they see possibilities? How did they learn? How so now what we’re doing is basically taking those same kind of trail mix marketing principles, I’ll say, and we have these ongoing use. These tactics that we’re using.
So once again, we’re like really dialed into this, able to push out content, host a virtual event that’s a one to many session, that enables a singular team member to make an impact across hundreds of financial institutions at one time. That’s only possible because of the muscle we built of understanding the progress they need, what their customers need from the tool, how we fit into their story, how we can provide the level of content they need to, like, you know, basically convince them to attend this thing. And then what we’ve already found measuring and attributing everything.
So what we’ve already found is the financial institutions that attend these sessions outperform those that don’t buy 3x so we start to see we’re on to something. So how do we scale that further? We found common growth tactics where account managers used to have these one to one conversations, they would kind of like figure out this one hack, maybe one patch of the of the account management territory is doing well. Others are struggling. We can now look across the whole spectrum and find the common growth tactics that we want to coach into the organizations to scale that message, right?
Derik Sutton
So now it’s not just reserved for hiring a good account manager. It’s now saying, hey, let’s get the best practices and principles stripe it across all 1000 financial institutions. Let them all make the similar progress so that we’re able to grow and exceed revenue targets with an even smaller team. So the progress auto books is made with demand side sales and like, what we’re what we’re essentially saying is, like, there’s two questions to kind of ask yourself, right? So, like, you’re sitting here in your first thought or passive looking moment when it comes to this.
Derik Sutton And so if we’re going to ask you a question to put space in your brain, the question would have to be, are you marketing and selling the way your CRM system wants you to market and sell? Where are you at? Are you helping your customers make progress? Thank you.
Kyle Bazzy
VP Sales, VP Customer Success, Autobooks
Kyle started at Autobooks in 2019 as VP Sales and is now VP Customer Success. He leads sales and focuses on how Autobooks can make their customers successful, the strategy at the heart of their growth. He geeks out over the challenges faced by small businesses and financial institutions.
He has a Bachelor’s degree in Business Administration from the University of Michigan where he split his time between studying, playing volleyball and hanging out with startup entrepreneurs. Post degree, alongside his burgeoning career, he found time to work with startups and accelerators including Tech Stars and co-founded Detroit Startup Week.
Derik Sutton
CMO, Autobooks
Derik Sutton is a product and marketing executive with a track record of helping to build, market and sell products in the financial industry. He joined Autobooks in 2018 as the VP of Product and Experience, and has since taken on the role of Chief Marketing Officer.
During his career, Derik has helped bring two digital banking platforms to market that are now leveraged by over 1,000 financial institutions. He founded Become Labs, a product and design company that focused on fintech companies and financial institutions. During his time there, Derik helped companies launch new brands and digital products, consulted with financial institutions on their digital strategy, and helped financial institutions build new custom online and mobile banking experiences.
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