Sales and marketing don’t have to be at odds. Autobooks proved it.
Their secret? Breaking silos, rewriting playbooks, and rallying around Jobs-to-Be-Done.
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Transcript
Mark Littlewood
Hi, I’m Mark Littlewood, and I run Business of Software. We did a really interesting session a couple of years ago at BoS Conference USA, where we had four people from the same company talking about different aspects of what they’ve been doing, and a lot of that was framed around jobs to be done thinking which traditionally has been applied to products and thinking about how you make great products, but increasingly is being used by interesting organizations and interesting people who’ve been using it in all sorts of fields – HR, people, hiring, sales, marketing, all sorts of things.
Now, Kyle and Derik, who I’m going to introduce in a minute, were part of that team at Autobooks that actually went from being a super scrappy startup that I think you’d raised something like 30,000,000. You went from 25-person company, very, very founder driven sales, understandably to think about how they could incorporate jobs to be done thinking into different aspects of their business, and really think about how that could make a difference to how the company works. So that slightly long winded introduction. Let’s introduce Kyle and Derik.
Derik Sutton
So I’m Derik, I’m the CMO of Autobooks. I started with, yeah, I got started with Autobooks in late 2017 early 2018 I think we had about 1015, employees at the time. And, now we’re what we are. And started in product, actually. So like, started on the product side, working in the business, and then move my way into marketing and now inside the marketing organization, with Kyle in sales like, we’ve actually just merged everything into one revenue team. So we kind of don’t have, like, marketing and sales anymore. It’s just revenue at Autobooks, which is pretty exciting.
Kyle Bazzy
I’m Kyle Bazzy, so I’ve been working in FinTech for almost 20 years now. I joined Autobooks after Derik about a year. I think we had, at the time Derek, like 20 ish banks revenues under contract. And really that transition from we talk a lot about, you mentioned it Mark, like the founder led sales, especially when it’s a non sales founder, you know, kind of helping into the more scaled processes and hiring sales reps and teams and stuff like that. But to Derik’s point, really important to continue to harp on like we have the same goal between the two of us, and we also really look at this as, like, revenue versus departmentalizing, you know, the marketing versus sales as the belief in solid one thing. So, yeah, so been here about going on seven years now.
Welcome Ors and Tiberius. If you have any questions, you can say hello, you can type them in chat. Or you can even, well, I’d say put your hand up and ask, but you can just put your hand up. Sorry, you can just ask. Yeah, are they there? No, they’re very quiet. Mark Stephens.
Mark Stephens
Yeah, so I’m curious. You’ve been talking about scaling up, and you’ve been curious. You talked about merging marketing and sales. I had a two part question on that. Is one, how is increasing the size? Because you talked about cross functional teams, and obviously, the bigger the organization, the more complicated that gets to achieve. So I was wondering how you felt scale had changed what you were doing, or how you were applying jobs to be done, and also why you merged. What was the rationale on emerging marketing and sales?
Mark Littlewood
Can I just jump in? Because Ors, you’ve had the bravery to come on screen. Congratulations. Welcome. Very nice to see you even better looking than I was imagining you’d be. So you shouldn’t be shy next time. Where are you from?
Attendee
I’m from Pennsylvania.
Mark Littlewood
I was expecting a Transylvanian theme or something that’s amazing. What’s your business?
Attendee
I’m from Mobiscroll. I represent the sales in the Mobiscroll team, and we are in calendaring UI kits, mostly calendaring UI kits that we we sell.
Mark Littlewood
Is there anything you’d like to learn from Kyle and Derik today in particular? We can bear that in mind as well.
Attendee
Well, honestly, I am pretty new to this jobs method, and we are trying to implement it right now. So at this moment, I’m still new to this. I don’t really have questions, because I haven’t hit any obstacles yet.
Mark Littlewood
Have you’ve hit an obstacle of not starting. Well, that’s, funnily enough, the easiest obstacle to overcome.
Attendee
So we overcome that. So, okay, so that’s not a problem anymore. We are just progressing slowly and implementing as as we get on.
Mark Littlewood
Oh, great. So I think that’s one thing I’d love to bear in mind here, because I know that people, when they watch these sorts of things and they’re like, how does that relate to me? So let’s use you as the guinea pig for, okay, well, how is what we’re talking about here going to come in and make a difference to someone that’s starting. So, yeah, great.
Kyle Bazzy
I thought I was going to be the good looking one on camera, so, oh, off camera. Now, like, feel free to Mark told me I’d be the best looking here at this, like, all the day.
Let’s get to the real mark on his question. So, yeah, so I think that a couple of things, it’s really in my role in sales, you know Derik, this is his first real role in marketing, which is, I think, just very interesting in the conversation and the context here to your question. Because where I came from getting kicked in the teeth and not having a partner on the go to market side creates a lot of headwinds for sales, especially sales internship.
And so I think that road time served me really well at this point in time and moment, which was a really unique opportunity with how much jobs to be done DNA, obviously, is in our organization, with our Chief Product Officer being Chris Beck, who was the pioneers of rolling this out through a firm called rewired for their consultancy work, and really championing a lot of the stuff that we now know well today.
So all that leading up, I think that the to your question, we started with it, and it’s the reason we scale. So that is a slightly different context of like a large organization, perhaps, and injecting it into the DNA, where there’s already a culture in a way of go to market and processes and people already built up.
However, since then, Derik and I have also rolled it out, or helped, I should say, roll it out to some other, other startups and other companies of various sizes to varying degrees of success. What I’d say is this – it’s so important to get your head wrapped around, especially if you’re the CEO, founder of leadership, and you’re passing this off to leaders or VPs or things like that is Derik and I just had this natural alignment early on to we have one goal.
So everything that either one of us then went off in our respective areas of the business to measure was all leading up to that same and measured by that same outcome. I think that I’ll give you a one quick example and pass over to Derik, like where I felt for the first 10-15 years of my career, things went awry. It’s like, we start selling stuff, then marketing would start measuring like LinkedIn likes, or how many tweets got re shared, and if you can tie that to revenue, that’s one.
Mark Littlewood
Sorry. Is there another metric?
Kyle Bazzy
I think the simple thing is, like, you know, our session Mark was called, like, talking the same language, right? And using the same language, which is the customer’s language. And so I think that at the end of the day, that was what kind of cascaded everything else down. And then Derik’s just got a unique way of seeing things in our market and how we’re doing our business, where we were so willing to try things, and I mean, he’ll attest to it, like 95-99% of it failed, but we found the one to two, 3% that ended up working, and just codified it to scale it up. So if we go back to that point of the story, in 2019 like that was a big part of now, looking back at it, how we got here, for you know, the amount of success that we’ve been on that.
Mark Littlewood
So just just wind back to that point, just to kind of give the context, and almost you’re in this situation, what’s the progress you want to make, or what’s your fear about carrying on the way that you were going? Why did you decide?
Derik Sutton
Yeah, so every company needs a framework where everything’s accidental, you know, and it’s just random collisions
I mean, honestly, most founder led sales are that way. It’s very collision based, it’s very referral based. It’s very, you know, happenstance in many ways. And so it’s hard to create predictability of revenue around founder led sales because of that, because it doesn’t scale to the next person. The next person that you bring into the organization doesn’t have the same collisions that a founder does. So therefore the impact and the surface area of lead creation, revenue creation, storytelling. A founder can commit in a conversation to go do something to a client for revenue, whereas your sales people don’t need to do that. You know, sales person one, two and three.
And so we actually just met with a BoS member this past week, I don’t know, this week or last week, caught up with him, and he just hired his first so he’s kind of scaling out of founder led sales and his first kind of, you know, the people that were helping to build the team, they just raised another round. He added in his first Vice President of Marketing and his first Vice President of Sales.
And what they’re struggling with right now, Mark is the, well, my marketing person has this framework and likes to do work this way, and my sales person likes to do things this way. And now the CEO is, like, I really like this jobs thing and this demand thing. And my advice to Ivan was just simply, well, you have to pick one, you know. And you’re the CEO. So, like unless anybody’s got a reason, a compelling reason as to why they shouldn’t go with what the CEO wants, then I would just suggest you go with what you want to do. But the main thing is, pick one thing and everybody get on the same page, right?
So that’s the only opportunity for scale and for how this works. So let me I’ve got a little visual aid.
So I was actually just on a panel a couple of weeks ago, kind of talking about this. So just as a kind of a reset for those that don’t know, you know, ORs and others. So, you know, this is the timeline of a customer, this is their demand, you know, when it comes to their job to be done on making progress.
And so in when it comes from marketing on the left to sales in the middle to implementation and customer success on the right, the customer is on one journey. Can we all agree? They’re on one journey, okay?
It starts with an individual champion in the organization, and then it’s the role of marketing and sales, or what we would just say, revenue, to then equip the champion, to then advocate the cause to the organization to then take the organization through the exact same timeline as the individual champion.
So I just want to say that again, oftentimes, what happens in the sales process is people get so focused and enamored on moving one individual through this place of “Wow. They’re really learning how we can, we can generate, you know, create opportunity in their org.” They really see the possibilities of how our calendar widget or our software app, or our implementing our new infrastructure modernization thing can really make progress in the organization. They really get it like, I’ve got this deal. But what about their boss? What about the other stakeholders? What about procurement? What about the CFO? What about everybody else?
So essentially, you have to repeat this process with a prospect at the individual level, at the committee level, at the company level, depending upon the size of the word. So you may have to do this multiple times. Okay?
So this is the timeline Bob spoken extensively on this. I’m not going to go in and go into detail here. The main thing I wanted to communicate through this visual is your your organization then has an org chart around these systems of output from your company. You have a marketing system, you have a sales system, you have customer success. And when you look at these systems, as Kyle was saying earlier, is this system being measured on likes, comments, impressions, social media, what have you, this system is being measured on something else. And, you know, like marking system, lead generation, or whatever this system is being measured on, ultimately, did the deal go through, and then this ystem is being measured on ultimate success of the customer.
And so our argument, and we’re kind of Bob yadas, was, why did those have to all be working in their own siloed way of doing business. And could you actually just build one company system that plugs into how the customer makes progress? Right? Because at the end of the day, you’ve got two choices, I think – you can go build operational workflows from the inside out and say, customer, this is just how we work, deal with it, because that’s really what you’re doing. Let’s be clear, if you work from the inside out, around what’s best for our team structure, and, well, this person’s been in New York for this long, and like, they’ve got to own these people. And, you know, like, okay well, just because marketing does it this way, I’m the sales leader and I’m going to do it this other way. And well, just because sales sold it to you doesn’t mean that’s how we implement it. How many times have you heard that? Right? So now, customer success is operating differently.
And so if you want to work from the inside out and just make the customer fit to how you do business, then that’s one way of doing business, right? We think that leads to a lot of dissatisfaction from the customer, and ultimately, doesn’t lead to the most optimal, you know, opportunities of success.
Conversely, you can flip it and say, what does the customer need. What progress are they trying to make? And how do I build a singular system that clearly communicates the value in the capabilities of what we offer, you know, and helps the customer basically move within this time and space at the individual, the committee and the corporate level, and if you can get your company systems organized around all working and saying and doing things in concert, we just think that’s a better, more efficient way of operation.
Kyle Bazzy
So Mr. Stephens, let me give you a like a tactical example of this. So the first thing I fell in love with when Bob Moesta and we had dinner with him for the first time about this six years ago, was demo is not a stage. And I’ve ever heard that from him, but whenever you look at a sales pipeline, demo was always a stage. Why? Because the CRM, when you set your pipeline up, Salesforce, Hubspot, whatever it is, head demo is a stage.
Derik Sutton
So that’s inside out thinking by the way, that’s building a system based upon the tools and the inside operations and making the customer fit into it. That’s a practical example.
Kyle Bazzy
So the evolution of this was we actually have three different demos in our sales pipeline now. Now you can repeat a demo over and over again, but you know exactly where they’re at on this discharge, because our pipeline actually looks like this.
Our sales pipeline is first thought, passive looking, active looking, etc. I’m not saying you have to implement that exactly. What I’m getting at is understanding when somebody asks you as a prospect or a client to do something like a demo, what are they really looking to solve, and then mapping it back to their journey versus yours. So you know, the cardinal sin in sales is always, if somebody asks for a proposal, you got them at 90% probability to close this quarter, right? Without any other context around why were they asking for pricing? Those are the things that I think really matter to these conversations, or is, if you’re experiencing some of the stuff early on, it’s like, you get so excited that they asked for something like a contractor pricing, but you learned that, you know, the person that asked for it just wanted to review it themselves to make sure you guys weren’t outlandish for something that they could sign, or a price point that wasn’t even worth bringing up to their boss.
And so I think that this is where Derek’s got this really tuned in on the systems, is like we have our systems, but then we also know, based off of patterns, and looking at the data and analyzing over the years, how do we quantify, or how do we objectively evaluate where a prospect is from passive looking compared to active looking? And then what are the ways that we’re measuring that with the sales team to keep that feedback loop? I think that’s a more accurate picture of like, this is the philosophy and then applied in a way that you can start to really chip away at, even if you’re at a larger organization right now.
Yeah, Mark, do you have a follow up on that, Mark Stephens?
Mark Stephens
I was gonna ask. I think it’s brilliant. You’ve got everything into a single, essentially tier. My limited experience of a lot of customers is they aren’t as efficient as that. So you’ll actually have a lot of scenarios where actually there are competing groups within the organization, and also they’re at different phases. So our sales process, for example, the develop we essentially sell to developers, so the developer will identify it, then it’ll be kicked up to legal and compliance, who will have a completely different set of, you know, issues and concerns. So you actually, so I think having a single, single tier, from your point of view, is brilliant. I’m just wondering if it can work with these companies that are far more dysfunctional.
Derik Sutton
Mark, do you think that
Mark Littlewood
they work in financial services? Banks, companies more dysfunctional than financial services. All the time. You were talking Derik and Kyle about, oh, you know, companies would you know, they can just make you work this way. I was thinking of the seven and a half hours I’ve been interacting with my bank to open a new user account last two weeks.
Kyle Bazzy
So let me answer that question. So this is going to be a little bit Show and Tell for me, Mr. Stevens, I’m going to keep going. That’s what we want to hear. That’s what we came to hear, all the gossip every time I say Mark Littlewood things I’m talking to him every time. So I’m going to keep saying Mr. Stephens.
What I was going to get at was, and I can show you our outline of our sales process, if that’s helpful. The what you’re actually getting at is discovery and something called multi threading. And what we’re really looking for is qualifying this into active looking so let me ask real quick. I don’t want to go too deep on the phases here, unless the group’s kind of all informed. But have you seen this chart before? Have you seen this concept of taking jobs to be done into a demand side sales framework that Bob Moesta rolled out had not mischievous. Have you seen this before?
Mark Stephens
I’ve seen it. Yes.
Kyle Bazzy
Okay, so let me just touch on it at a 201 level, real quick. So the difference between learning how an active looking, so it’s important in this context. You can see in the bottom company supply side, horizontal charts or bars there.
Marketing systems really own first thought into passive looking. The way that we run it at Autobooks today, it’s not the only way is a sales deal is assigned to a rep when it crosses from passive looking into active looking. Okay, so kind of think about passive looking as like the old world SDR stage where they’re qualifying it. They get a, you know, sales rep on the phone, and then if the AE goes, this is a real deal, you know, then it gets assigned and gets qualified. That’s our active looking.
I’m gonna hit your question, because we actually consulted on a couple of companies that were selling to developers. First off, don’t assume that they know what they want based off of what they’re sharing in the words that they use right? as a prospect. Our job in sales is to unpack that further, to help them understand, are you strategically aligned? And how do you know? And so for instance, in your case, it’s very much a discovery playbook at this phase of the journey, understanding the patterns and understanding what needs to be true 80 to 90% of the time based on the deals that you have won, and looking back at the like that time of the deal, what they were saying, how they were communicating it.
So here’s an example. You know, the old world, there’s very simple ones that we can use still, like divert a band, like budget authority, timeline, things like that. Those are good at the surface, but really unpacking, here’s one of my favorite questions, how long have you been trying to solve this and how much money has been invested to get it done, right? But you can actually in what you’re doing very, very sincerely, and you got to be genuine in this, because if you’re not, you’re the old car salesman, right? But if you think about it, as the individual wants to solve this, so bad. But there’s a concept in demand side sales that Bob taught us.
One of my first question, same years ago was, how do you view the individual that wants this done, like the champion, or the executive of the department that wants this project versus the company? And he calls it customer versus consumer, and that’s probably what is at the center of your question is. The consumer, the department head, the developer, the VP of whoever you’re talking to really wants this thing solved, or really wants you to be the one that solves it. But the questions that you’re asking them through discovery are more around. Is there alignment to the customer, which is the company that they need to go sell this to, right? at an exec committee or a budget committee, or to the CFO or CEO.
And so I think it’s really more understanding that our job in sales sit on the same side of the table as that champion or exec sponsor, and ask the questions of like, when’s the last time you got a project done at this company? What did that look like? Tell me about that process, right? Not, don’t talk about yourself or your solution or your project. Give me some historical context of like, has your champion ever sold anything at that company? Meaning they got budget approval for a project? So I’ll pause it there or stop it there, but it’s really more of understanding how things work in that you’re not selling them, you’re selling with them to their bosses or their board or to their CDO.
And I think that that framing really changes the process of how we ask questions, to unpack that in what you’re really doing, is a part of a process we call champion building. That is the most important function, especially at this phase of the journey, is now you got somebody that wants to do something. How do we help articulate to them what successes look like in the past with other companies similar to them, to help them succeed and get promoted, because their job to be done as a champion, Mark, is not the project. That’s the companies their job is. I want to get promoted. I want to get more money at the annual raise. I want to use this to show it off and talk at conferences, so I have job security to other companies if I ever want to leave. There’s an actual there’s nuances to the jobs to be done on the individual level versus the company level that you’re selling to. And I think that, you know, we can go a couple hours on that, because it’s one of my favorite topics in sales, but that’s probably where you want to focus on discovery, playbooks, things like that.
Derik Sutton
Yeah, Mark, so let me ask a question. What you’re describing to me, sounds like classic, struggling moment here where marketing is building leads. They’re then passing those leads off to sales, and then the sales team has to figure out, Okay, I’ve got this lead. I got this one individual person, this developer, that’s interested in our widget or our tool, and now as the sales entity in the organization, it’s my job to now try to work with that individual to convince them and their company to implement our developer tools? Is that fair? Is that kind of how it’s working?
Mark Stephens
Yeah, that that makes a lot of sense what you’re saying.
Derik Sutton
Okay, so that’s the problem, right? Like, that’s a big part of the problem, because that right there means that marketing and sales are not incent or not aligned, because marketing is now what you’re effectively saying there is, it’s the role of marketing to go get individuals and all of these companies excited and interested in our tool, but not to qualify. Does that individual have purchasing power? Right then and there, you guys are unaligned, okay? And marketing can go off and be in the arts and crafts room and just doing all the whiz bang stuff that they want to go do and justify, you know, operational dollars to go do this thing or that thing that has nothing to do with qualifying leads that are going to lead to revenue.
Now, if marketing actually partners with sales to say, our role in this process is to first. So there’s almost, there’s like multiple levels. There’s multiple passes through this. Okay, so pass one – individual. I’m going to go get individuals interested in our content, our story, the value prop that we offer, and I’m going to get them to a point of active looking. They’re going to engage with our Sales Team at this point, and this, oftentimes, is the first demo that we do at an individual level, right to get them interested. And then I’m going to kind of play off of Kyle here. Kyle, you’re the sales leader. I’m the sales rep. I’ve got this individual person, Kyle, that wants to go see a demo. I’d like to move them in the pipeline to deciding, Kyle, can I move them? Because Kyle ultimately owns the as the sales leader. He owns whether or not I get to move a prospect from active looking to deciding, okay?
Kyle Bazzy
Yeah. So I’m gonna answer no based off of what deals that we’ve won in the past have looked like and what was required.
Derik Sutton
So now I’m the individual rep. Hey, Kyle, man, I’ve had three meetings with this person. They really get it, and they’ve communicated this. They’ve done this. I’ve done that. Can I move them to deciding? Kyle, can I do that right now? He’s gonna say, No. Kyle, why are you telling me no? You can go and answer. You’re part of this conversation.
Just give me the simple like you like the simple thing, I got an individual here.
Kyle Bazzy
Oh yeah, there’s no there’s no alignment to the customer who’s actually going to be buying it. You have one person that wants to solve a problem. But as it hasn’t demonstrated, the ability to get a project approved.
Derik Sutton
Right? So Kyle is basically saying, Derek, you’re not multi threaded. You’re building a champion fair, right? But you’re not multi threaded in this organization. In order to move them, I need you to get multi threaded. What multi threaded looks like is you need to identify and ask the qualifying questions of, is there a committee involved in this? Do you have budget for this project? Like you’ve got to ask some of the detailed things, because those are the trade offs, Mark, that you talked about, right? Well, I get somebody interested, but, like, is their budget, or they have this other thing, this other Okay, so to get making trade offs, it’s not the champion making the trade off, it’s the organization. Okay? The champion can’t do this unless they’re a very small organization. They can’t do this right? So in order to effectively make trade offs, you then have to pass through this and say, Okay, I need to get you multi threaded sales individual, and you need to get the committee or the other group here, okay? And then I need you to be able to answer a series of making trade off questions about this deal before you can move it into deciding, all right? So that’s the sales team working right?
Marketing. So you’re like, Okay, well, that’s the sales, but where’s marketing’s role in this? Marketing’s role is, at the end of the day, to produce content that leads to revenue. Now, content are not just LinkedIn ads. It’s not just the website. It’s the content required for champion building, for procurement, for compliance, for finance, it’s all of the content the organization needs to consume in order to make a purchasing decision for our company, it’s the unsexy stuff. It’s the, you know, it’s, it’s taking, it’s building a lot of PDFs, it’s a lot of PowerPoints behind the scenes. But the sales team oftentimes gets bogged down and building this individual, ad hoc, one off documentation that they’re using in a deal to help the this individual developer get through procurement. Okay, why can’t that be standardized and codified into one beautiful content system where you are basically already at the ready with the champion to say, hey, based upon past deals, I love it that you’re excited. I need to ask you these qualifying questions. You have budget, who’s the committee? Blah, blah, like, go through the detail things. And great news, I’ve already got a lot of the information you need to help you walk through that process, right?
So you’re actually, now you’re, taking the weight off their shoulders because you’re anticipating what they’re already going to have to go through because of past, you know, times that you’ve done similar deals, right? So, like, Hey, I already got our compliance documentation. Already have our financial implementation. I already have an ROI built for you. Blah, blah, blah, right? So there’s all this content to be built that shouldn’t fall on the shoulders of the sales team, right? It shouldn’t be ad hoc. It shouldn’t just be, you know, this one off stuff. It should be part of a codified system that gets better and better over time.
All right, so now I’ve gone through past two. I go to Kyle. I’ve shown him I’m multi threaded. We’re starting to make these trade offs. Kyle lets me move it into deciding, okay, now I have to go through past three.
Past three is ultimately who’s going to be signing this deal. Okay, so I love it. You guys have a committee. I think we’re there. Who’s, who does this live under what, who manages that organization, who’s signing this? What does success look look like for them? Blah, blah, blah. This is oftentimes your demo three at this demo, you’re just trying not to screw it up. You’re giving enough information that gets that ultimate executive excited about the project. You don’t have to go deep in the weeds. You’re just trying not to have an own goal here with because you’ve already built the champion. You’ve already got the committee on board. You’re just doing the final pass trade offs, right? And then you start to based upon all the information you’ve given them, this cohesive story of how to make progress, finance, operations, implementation, you hand it off to the success team, and they’re not having to go re trade the deal, as far as like, I know they told you that, but that’s really not how this works. Because the same marketing and content team that’s built all of the previous content builds the first use documentation, right?
Customer success is not responsible for building their own stuff. It’s just one it’s one thing because that’s building around the system of the customer, right? Just trying to, like, land the plane that’s building around the system for the customer. Are they told the same thing at every step in the journey is the same value prop communicated all along the way. Is the value prop you communicated to me in your first LinkedIn ad matched up to the compliance, the operational, the financial documents me, gave me, you gave me. Like, is everything true, inconsistent through this whole thing, right? So now you can start to hopefully see how way you’re maybe kind of doing things in an org versus we work in a very complex environment. You know, we work with in the US banking system, there’s 12,000 financial institutions. Imagine that there’s 12,000 financial institutions. They all have their own compliance groups and operational groups and CFOs and blah, blah, blah. They all have their own committees, right? They all think that they operate and act, you know? Oh well, you never met a bank like ours. We’re going to put you through the ringer like we hear that every deal every day, you know. But we found a way to codify most of these things. And yeah, you’ve got variants on the margin, but by and large, most of. The content is is very similar, if not exactly the same, that you’re going to deliver to Bank A to bank B to bank triple z. So hope that was any follow up questions on that?
Mark Littlewood
I would love to check in with Ors at this point, because I’ve Thank you very much for letting me volunteer you was, by the way, well, I shall tell Levy.
Attendee
I actually would have questioned, but it was related to the to what Kyle was saying on how how to approach, how to talk with clients and and try to figure out customers side of their problems and what they want to solve, and to try to see things from their perspective. Honestly, this is what I’m trying on a day to day basis. My problem from time to time is that some of these customers, or the ones who reach out, they ask for a price, but they don’t really want to go through a couple of questions. I usually try asking them some questions to get to know their projects, their company, what their difficulties are, what they’re trying to solve with our solutions. So I can highlight value, what we bring to the table to them. But sometimes they just push for the price. They don’t want to to answer the question. Don’t want to give an inch so, I can work with something.
Kyle Bazzy
Okay, love this. So first of all, are you selling like a software platform? Are you selling like professional services as your main kind of revenue?
Attendee
So what we are selling is calendaring solutions for other softwares. So developers who are working with this, they implement it in their projects. So it can can be a lot of types of projects, from scheduling tools to whatever this is where our tools can be implemented, so they can develop it faster.
Mark Littlewood
I remember you Derek and Kyle were talking with a guy called Levi, who is Transylvanian, who is the founder and CEO, at the conference, which he’s certainly kind of aware of this kind of whole jobs thing, which I guess is one of the channels that you may have been introduced to it.
I’m curious. You know, on that, on that, say, marketing, sales, customer success bit is there, are you responsible for all of that?
Attendee
No, I’m only, only responsible for the sales.
Mark Littlewood
Okay, and who does the marketing?
Attendee
Well, I think he should be here too.
Attendee 2
Hi, guys. Yes, it’s me. I’m sorry. I hear everything, but I have a five year old guy here near me, and unfortunately, he’ll he make a lot of noise. So that’s the reason why I put everything.
Mark Littlewood
Amazing. Okay, that’s fantastic for context to be thank you for. I mean, it’s just so much easier in organizations when this stuff is kind of happening in parallels, it’s just trying to sort of establish where you were in the.
Attendee 2
Actually, actually, I’m, I’m the new new guy at the Mobiscroll. I’m the, I’m the new guy, actually the new colleague of Oz. And I’m, I’m responsible for the marketing department right now with mobiscroll to answer your question.
Mark Littlewood
So have you do you recognize the the context, the setup here?
Kyle Bazzy
So let me dive into that orange, because this is, like, you know, one of the this, this question, this problem, this effort, will never go away, regardless of size. And so what’s important here is, have you ever heard of, like the old root cause analysis method called the five whys? If you haven’t heard of that, it’s essentially you need to ask why, five times to actually get down to the root of what someone’s actually asking you for or saying.
And so I think just let’s, let’s get out of the business context for Psych wars. That’s just the human thing is we don’t know how to articulate exactly what we need, why we need it, whether wehether we’re guarded or not. So I think that number one, this is a very consumer psychology, human psychology thing. So getting back into your sales context, somebody asks you for price. I think it’s important here. Like context matters and like, let’s just play a couple of scenarios out. Is it the individual champion that is like, wanting to choose your solution asking for price? How early on in the cycle or journey of your deal are they asking for it? If it’s a group setting, or they have an executive on the call that’s signing the contract, like that. There’s different contexts to understand, but it’s always about your champion, your if you do champion building right. And is my screen being shared right now?
Actually, this is our high level. This is actually our sales process right now for our mid market bank sales at Autobooks. I’m gonna, I’m gonna concretely share with you how you measure this, because that makes, I think things a lot more real, and a second orders when they ask you for price. I’ll play it out with you real quick. When they ask for it again, I can absolutely send it over to you. Are there, there are certain structures in our pricing model that have some flexibility. Let’s talk about what couple things that matter to you, and then I can make sure I tailor this thing to get it over to you.
Number one, never share it on the call, like, always reserve the right to go offline or or, the way I would do it is, you can’t approve the pricing by yourself. That’s like that, even if you can, that’s always a really great thing to kind of give you some time to think about it and work as a champion. But when they’re asking for price, a Champions often, I mentioned this earlier, it’s just asking to make sure that it’s not sticker shock before they start to get excited and tell their boss that they think they found a solution, only to find out that the price is so high that there’s no way they’re ever going to be able to buy it.
So there’s different reasons for asking for price in those contexts, versus, hey, we’re going to committee, and I need pricing so we can put that into the proposal or the business case in order to get approval. Those are kind of two simple examples on the opposite edge of the deal spectrum that have very different meanings. So how do you communicate that to your champion or the prospect? It’s very much around, I’m here to support you to sell this in the next steps. So help unpack for me, one is this just for you right now? Like you know, I’ve worked with clients in the past, and let me pause here for a second.
Big pro tip, you’re never telling them the reality. You’re sharing prior experiences from your clients that were successful or not successful, to help that individual or group avoid pitfalls that you’ve experienced with your clients. That framing changes the vulnerability of those calls in the relationship. I never worked at a bank. I never tell a bank how they should do it, but I tell them we have 2500 banks now, I tell them how others like them have done it, and what’s worked and hasn’t worked to help them and inform their decision. So I think pricing is the same thing. Don’t make it weird, right? I always tell the sales guy, Don’t make it weird. They’re asking for pricing. Let’s figure out why, and we know there’s three or four reasons they’re asking and pricing is not always we’re moving forward and getting approvals. It’s don’t get me fired by telling other people I like the solution before we actually see a quote, right? And so I think that that’s share those stories, unpack that. If you want to give me a couple of like scenarios right now that like are your real life, let’s do that, because I think that’ll be helpful for some of the context too.
Last thing I’ll say before that, though, is row seven. Everything is pipeline, stage, exit criteria. So Derik’s incredible. He can talk about the philosophy all the time, but he’s still a marketer. So let’s give him, give him a little bit of a break. Is that on row seven, this is how we we objectively measure it. So Derik and I get hit by a bus, and the team takes over. There’s there’s a lot less ambiguity and how to be successful moving forward, which are stage gates.
You can see in active looking in order to be inactive looking for a deal, the price, the one page business case has to be in a version. This is part of a process we do where the exec sponsor, the champion and the sales rep on Autobooks have had a live conversation about the business case that they’re presenting next steps on before we’re willing to give them, like, an official approved price quote. Okay, so there’s some more tactical stuff to that, or is I’m happy to get into offline with you in terms of like, I also am willing to share something verbally, without any commitment or paper, or don’t write it down. Hey, it’s around five grand a month. I don’t know exactly where it lined up, but roughly, from what I understand, five grand could be 10, could be two, but likely to be five. And then that way you can kind of overcome some early deal funnel, like you got to put a whole pricing proposal together, kind of thing too. So there’s other ways to adjust to that, but that’s that’s secondary.
The first principles, thing to focus on is understanding the intent behind the ask so you can answer it in the most accurate and supportive way. Does that make sense? Am I barking up the right tree on that? Our developers that you want to, you want to riff through, because they are developers are a different breed, but it’s still similar patterns. So give me an example of when someone has asked for a price quote and you struggle with it, the more vulnerable you are, the more I can help
Attendee
Honestly, from the top of my mind, I have nothing right now to have an exact story, but maybe in a couple of minutes I will have something.
Kyle Bazzy
Very fair, dude. Yeah. Let me know. If you want to go deeper on that.
Derik Sutton
I would just say, in general, this is the this is the reason why to have a framework and why to have, you know, we’re willing to do things at certain stages or not, because it takes some of the randomness and the collisions out of it. It sounds kind of tacky, but like at the end of the day, you don’t want the customer dictating the sales process to you. You need to be able to consultively help them through the process, because at the end of the day, it’s going to be a better end result for them. So if they’re just coming over and lobbying a price request or, like, I want a detailed demo right off the bat, like you’re not aligned, you know, you may get some of those deals, but likely not, not as many. There’s a reason.
I don’t know if car buying, you know, where you’re from, is the same in the US, but car buying in the US is a pain in the ass, but everybody knows it’s a pain in the ass. And everybody knows that you’re going to go through these sales tactics from an individual to the dealer. And the reason that people still use those same sales tactics is because they work. You know that framework for selling cars definitively works, and they have a system around it. They have reporting around it, blah, blah, blah. I’m not saying you need to build a car buying like experience, because that’s not great, but the analogy of building a system that your team understands how to operate, of like, when you’re willing to give price, when you’re not, when you’re willing to do a detailed demo and when you’re not, that’s the most important thing. If you in your marketing lead can get on the same page as to like when you’re willing to invest the effort with with a customer or prospect, versus when you’re not that will solve a lot of your problems, because you may be doing a lot of busy work around proposal generation and things of that nature, and debating and arguing. You know, the price per unit when the prospects not even at that level yet? Does that make sense? I think you said earlier something though about learning. What was that first part? Or was about learning about the customer, why they’re buying. Is that kind of how you let off that question?
Attendee
Well, it depends how they are reaching out. I mean, I usually get some information about the first sentence they even say, I start get to know what they’re looking for, and then I start asking them about what kind of challenges they are facing. What are they trying to solve? Why are they trying to solve it? Now, because these, these kind of answers, can help me get to understand, not just their perspective, because if they have another committee or something, they usually put those into these answers, also as as Kyle said five whys I try to ask as much as possible with the least amount of questions, so I can get as much as much information I can, I can possibly can, and then go on from there.
Derik Sutton
Okay, some blunt advice here, real quick, in the next 60 to 90 days, I would challenge you to do the following. Have you guys interview? How many clients do you guys have live?
Attendee
By life? What do you mean,
Derik Sutton
Like, how many? How many customers you have?
Attendee
I don’t know, a lot, okay, perfect, perfect. So, so not, not every customer of ours is going through our sales channels, because some of our licenses can be purchased from our website, which is a different kind of thing, yeah.
Derik Sutton
Okay, so you need to interview somewhere between three to 10 of the clients that have gone through your sales process. And ultimately, you know, using the jobs to be done methodology, you may not be an expert in that yet, that’s okay. Just watch a quick video primer, talk to those customers about why they purchased your solution, how they got there, and kind of just do the whys, just ask a bunch of questions to them about how they got there, what was going on, three months, six months, nine months before they found your solution, what was their struggling moment? Blah, blah, blah. So you need to just read. You need to do these interviews and like, just talk to these people.
AI is great these days. Record all of those interviews. Put all of those interviews into a chatGPT. Load up the jobs to be done framework and have chatGPT give you a baseline analysis of the push, pull, anxieties and habits of those customers. Okay, document that into a summary to say what are the jobs of these customers? Even a loose approximation to get you somewhere? Okay, you’ll probably come up with two to three jobs for those customers, right? Once you have those two to three jobs as a salesperson, you use those in the following way.
Somebody comes in and they say, hey, I’m interested in this. Whatever their question is. You can then get into the reframing portion of engagement to say, okay, you can say the following, that’s great. I would love to learn more about that, because our customers typically find success in one of three ways. You then state the jobs of those customers back to your prospect, right? So as an example, our jobs were, hey, you know, like our customers usually find success because they’re trying to build an ROI for this within the next six months, or they want to be first to market. Or we have a lot of customers messaging in and have pain around payment acceptance, and we need to solve that problem.
Okay, I can then now say that’s great. I understand that’s where you’re at, okay, based upon that, those clients that have had success with the same problem you have found benefit from the following. Here’s some information about how we drive ROI. Here’s some information your CFO may be interested in. Here’s some information that, even though this is mainly ROI, other team members may value, because we’re actually a really great customer service tool and blah, blah. So now you’re starting to actually reframe them away from their request, and now you’re actually kind of reframing them back into, oh, here’s how I can learn how to make progress on our journey with this company.
So part of this whole thing that Kyle and I are learning is much of what you have to do is retrain somebody how to buy, because everybody’s thinks you buy in a certain way. I’m going to call in, I’m going to message in, I’m going to ask for a demo, I’m going to ask for a proposal. And, you know, life’s going to be great. That’s not the way it works, right? So you have to just reframe them, because they just think that’s the habit of what you have to do, and it’s not the best way to get results. So they’ll find it refreshing. It may feel a little uncomfortable at the beginning yours, but they actually love it. They love it. What Kyle’s implemented, that whole sales framework. We’re able now using AI and chatGPT. We have different gpts built. You know, for what we do, we can jump on a call. That call is recorded. Once that call is recorded, we immediately download that recording, we put it into a chatGPT, and with one prompt, we can build a value story back to that client, where they leave a call with our team, and within five minutes, they’re given a three page document that reinforces everything we talked about.
The call suggests next steps on the project based upon what we know that other deals have gone through and our jobs to be done system tuned into exactly what they said and how they said it, and gives them the next suggested step and documentation they likely need in their organization to make progress. So what used to take an individual weeks to build at an individual level now takes minutes, but I’m going to like pull it all the way back, unless you and your marketing cohort go through the process of talking to your customers about why they bought, document that job and start at the very beginning. The other stuff won’t work yet.
So the 60 to 90 day challenge is find the customers, talk to them, come up with the jobs as best you can. You’re not going to be great at it at the beginning. You gotta it’s like anything you got to put in the 1000 hours of work, but start somewhere, get those jobs and then use those jobs to help reframe your your sales process, you know, for the next quarter and see what the results are.
Attendee
This is great. Great advice. Thank you.
Derik Sutton
Stephens, any questions?
Mark Stephens
I think you did a brilliant job of answering the questions. And I hope Mark post the video of this, because I will get my sales people to be watching it.
Mark Littlewood
Missed a Littlewood to you.
Kyle Bazzy
Stephens, what’s your role? I’m sorry I may have missed that at the organization. What’s your role?
Mark Stephens
So I’m the founder, so I’m basically building the team to replace me. So this is really interesting for me.
Mark Stephens
If you could send me the link, that would be brilliant.
Kyle Bazzy
Yeah, so I don’t know why, but I accept it, embrace it nowadays, that God in my professional world, created me to help folks such as yourself transition into that part of the business. There’s a one more adjacent framework that I use, called sales acceleration formula. I’ll put a grid into the chat, but it’s a really great just kind of mental model for you, and especially your top lieutenants on this side of the business that you’re you know, hoping to transition to around, what are the, what are the different elements of like founder led to a scaled sales process where you’ve both get what you need. Because I think that I’ve worked with a lot of founders now, and I can’t do what a founder does. I can’t do the zero to one. I just I wanted to, I thought I it was what I was meant to do. I had a lot of ego and being a founder. And what I learned was that’s a different set of skills, nine times out of 10, than taking this thing to scale with a process. And so how are you thinking about like, if you were to, like, sketch that out so you can sit down with your VP of sales, let’s say. What does that look like for alignment? So, like, that’s probably a good a good topic, a conversation for you as well. If that’s if that’s of interest.
Mark Littlewood
Nice, yeah, sorry. I was just putting in a it’s interesting all this sort of talk of documentation and process, which we have a talk next week at the Raleigh Conference, which is on overcoming founder advantage, which as you scale. And I think, you know, you’ve quite rightly identified, you know, founder advantage becomes founder disadvantage. And actually this is a talk that’s been kind of cooking up, partly off the back of talking to you and that, and how do founders scale and taking different approaches, but a lot of this writing stuff down.
Kyle Bazzy
So to me, like, I know everybody talks about AI and chatGPT, like we actually implement it and like we’re seeing tremendous results. Mark one way to, both Marks, both ways to scale your voice and the founder. Like to keep the founder in the business is actually easier than ever before, because of AI and chatGPT, very simple schedule, a 30 minute to an hour meeting with your Head of Content and or maybe your Head of Sales every week and talk through the most interesting conversation you had that week. Whatever’s on your brain about, like, the value you guys offer, where you see the market going, just free form talk, okay? What’s in your head about where the business is going, like what you see now? They can then offer their own feedback about what they’re hearing in the front lines because the bigger you get, the more disconnected you get from the front lines. Okay?
Derik Sutton
Now build content for prospects. Now build newsletter content for customers. Okay, so there’s ways that you can essentially just talk today and get all your thoughts out in a way that you used to maybe have to journal or blog and take all this time. Just set up a conversation, you know, and then let that conversation then become the voice and the tone and the guide for the content that you’re creating in the engine that you’re building for sharing that on a repeated basis.
I’ve got 1000 of these things, recording little videos, sharing videos that we use, you know, like, I use it regularly. I’ve just got, like, a little video recording tool, like Vidyard, if, if I hear something that my sales team like they’re dealing with a client or a prospect, and, you know, like, Jake’s working with somebody, and they talked about this. And I have a very distinct point of view about how we could help with that solve that problem. If I jump on a call with them, and we have a video, and they can see me and Moab be like, dude, that is a big problem. We love that and like, that’s what we’re built to do. We are there to solve that. If I say it in that way and demonstrate it in that way, is that better than if I typed out the bullet points of how we can solve that problem? Absolutely right. So do I have five minutes of my day to pop up a video recording and be like, hey, you know bank XYZ? I heard that you guys are meeting with Jake, and I love the fact that you guys are struggling with this, and we’re seeing that in market all day, and we understand you’re under attack from this, we built this company to go solve that problem. We have demonstrated results with other clients that look just like you. Jake’s going to share some of that information. I just wanted to introduce myself and let you know that we are here to help you solve that problem. We’re here to partner with banks so that you can blah, blah, blah. I can do that. I can give that to Jake. He can share that to the champion or this, or the the sales team, and now all of a sudden, they are introduced to the founder mentality, about, like, the passion and what you’re building and what you’re trying to take down in the market. You know what I mean?
So you basically have this conversation that merges between where you see the business going in the market and like what’s happening on the front lines. And so things start to get pulled back together. And then you basically then create a series of prompts and reviews through chatGPT to build content that gets shared, right? So you want to talk about a content machine and a content engine, and keeping the founder in the business. That’s one of the best ways to do that, okay, that then can get sent out. Be like, okay, distill this out, give a summary to our sales and marketing team about, like, what’s going on in the business, what’s most important in the business?
So that’s one way that you can keep interjecting yourself at scale. You know, for your organization, you could record a video specifically for yourself, you know, hey, here’s note from the founder. Send it to prospects, you know, like there’s so just get creative with this stuff.
Yeah, we just did it this morning. So you guys landed on my favorite day every month at Autobooks, which is our monthly product webinar, because Derek’s team has done such an amazing job leveraging this for top of funnel for my sales team, specifically back to the things we’re talking about. Bankers want to see, like, what are you releasing ongoing and if you can demonstrate that during a sales process, it’s like, it fuels the energy that that institution will have in buying or signing a contract with us.
So basically, what we have is a monthly webinar where we talk about our product. So it’s things that we’re shipping, things that we’re thinking about, and then, like a little light review of things we’ve shipped in the past, we invite any and all to come to that, prospects, customers, competitors. It’s open. What happens, though, as an output of that is it’s not just us sharing stuff about the product. Comments come in from customers good and bad. We get to address those in front of everybody. It’s transparent, it’s authentic. It reads people into how we think. It lets them know, and we’re not admitting we’re perfect, but when we hear something that we’re doing wrong, we’re willing to address it. And so the benefit we get out of having one conversation once a month about our product leads to and is a huge tool for customer acquisition. And you know, like leads into our product roadmap, because we also now invite our product team in there, and they’re brought in close to customer pain points or questions every month. It’s just a live conversation about, how are we doing, and how are you doing?
Kyle Bazzy
So let’s take this in the sales process. So everybody, if we’re not eyes glossed over and we’re still doing well, like, this is geeking out real quick, if that’s cool. So I’ll just drop the screenshot, by the way. Like, this is a Mark Littlewood zoom call. So like, hopefully, you know, I can go pants down a little bit sharing.
Mark Littlewood
I just, you know, if anyone’s got a problem with geeking out, just raise your hand. Yeah. Well, when no one’s got any arms.
Kyle Bazzy
If you haven’t heard, if you haven’t heard of me, say this yet, like Mark Littlewood, first I met you. You’re my spirit animal.
So, like, real quick. So if you look at the screenshot, it’s really simple. So what Derik’s talking about is the reason this product webinar has become became so big. We regularly have hundreds of banks on this thing, guys, and Derik and I will get fintechs in our space asking, how do you guys do that? Like, what do I do? Like, how do I set the webinar? It’s not about that. Our webinars sucked in the beginning, from a like the technology, software set up, and our landing pages and all the stuff well, like what we did so well, or Derik, this is it’s credit to him. I don’t like to give Derik too much credit, because of his ego and his head gets big, but that’s a separate webinar.
But this webinar in particular does so great, because banks struggle. They have an anxiety around vendors. And the vendor anxiety across the board in this industry is everybody tells us what they’re going to do, not 30% of it ever gets done. And of that 30% none of it’s done on time, right? So how do we operate our bank? Because banks don’t build technology guys, they don’t have developers. They buy everything from vendors. So that’s the context of why this webinar has been so incredible for our live clients. Think about it that way, but then also our prospects.
So this email is to one of the most important deals that we have right now in this sales process. It’s a very large institution, and I, we have verbally been told we’re moving forward, and we’re a final selection of three vendors out of like the 12 or 15 they looked at. And it would be like our marquee deal if we signed it in 2026. Everything in a salesperson wants to see. Hey Renee. How’s it going? Hey Renee, what’s the update? Hey Renee, what are we coming on site? Right? It’s all supply side. Tell me what I want to know. Instead, what we I require in the sales process is add value. Add value to every prospects life, and you’ll get everything you want times 10 as a sales rep for all the books.
And so you look at this, this was just from notes that we had on the deal that said, Hey, I knew they had a feature they really cared about that we didn’t have based on their project. I resurfaced it for today’s webinar. Derek already sent me an email. She already signed up, and now we have a call for an hour tomorrow that she asked for after not hearing from her for two weeks. I think this is really good sales context, right when we get into the examples of like, this is the life we live every day. And you know, Stevens, you as the founder, are thinking about, I’m going to hire people to carry on my legacy as a founder for this thing I built out of thin air years ago. How do I help them carry the water to care like I do, because the sales reps will never care like a founder does, period, full stop, like by definition. But if you help Institute. We help them make progress, and your commission checks will only grow. And I can give you a lot of references from sales reps that have left auto books and become the number one sales rep at their organization in FinTech, as well as outside of our industry that will definitively say I’m making way more. And I did not want to learn this at the beginning, because no sales rep wants to learn another philosophy or sales process, to be quite honest. But when you can back it up with what happens afterwards, I think that again, you don’t convince people to buy. They convince themselves you support them and their own self convincing, and the way you do that is by addressing not features and benefits, or what we call push in demand side sales, but rather the two things that lead away from a purchase, anxieties and habits of their organization.
So this person is an SVP of product over treasury management at this institution, and her anxiety is not what happens if we don’t launch this project, as much as it is, what if we do and it goes horribly wrong, and then I’m on the hook for championing this thing. So what am I showing her? Trust. Hey, remember when you asked for a feature two or a month ago, when your EVP, the big honcho boss was on the call. I didn’t even tell you that this was coming, even though I thought it was. And now you get to see it live. Oh, by the way, it shipped last week, right?
So the context of that is what Derek’s been so brilliant on. I don’t think he this is the one case I’ve he’s become a good friend of mine. I have never seen him underestimate himself. He always overestimates himself, but that’s where I need him to be, but this is where he’s been so brilliant, it doesn’t give himself enough credit. Is the webinar today is addressing anxieties, and then she’s going to see a hundreds of other clients on the call with us, talking to us, pressuring us, asking us hard questions. So she can look at it and say, I’ve never seen a vendor do that before we signed the contract. And I think that, again, I’m giving you a context of Autobooks right now, but this is they’re human beings. We can do this with developers. We can do this with whatever business that we’re talking about, because it’s we all are operating in the same way, just with a different context of our industry.
So I think this is a really good technical example, like this is the kind of stuff that will hint or catapult you so much further in your sales process. So Stevens, imagine giving your top of funnel with this kind of context before it gets to a sales rep, you de risk the quality of the next five sales reps, right? Because you’ve already got prospects in a mindset and. Lot of like, they’re aligned, they’re qualified. They have a real project. Your sales reps aren’t wasting time on following up with people that are ghosting them as much all the way on down to when you do a proposal and price, you get negotiated less. I mean, Derek, you can attest to this. In the past 12 months, the level of pricing negotiations in our terms of our contract, I ignorantly just doubled some of it, and I took their term out to five years, when they said they wouldn’t buy it for more than a year. And the amount of pushback has was much different than I think a lot of expectations might have been.
Derik Sutton
It’s a great way to scale too, right? So, like, I started the product webinar where I led it, and now it’s like at a leader level. We’ve got a young man that leads it now, and I just participate, but I just get to have input into it. And it scales down. So Mark, it could be something that this is your time to and then, or is on your side, you know, it could be, you know, your founder or leader. This is their time to, like, have their voice be heard by prospects and customers, it’s still people still know, oh, that person’s still in the business and like, operating and like, there’s transparency, there’s trust, there.
People don’t expect perfection today. We all know there’s going to be mistakes, but they just want to know somebody’s at the other end of the line to go correct it. So you could start this Mark and like, do it, and then that’s your one time a month to get your message out and continue to share your vision with customers and prospects, that then you can start to introduce somebody else to kind of be like a participant. And then over time, you kind of just back off, but you still pop in from time to time. Like, I’ll still pop in and kind of lead it when there’s something big or important that I want to share, I’m like, Hey, Jake, sorry man, but like, I’m doing this one. So it just get creative, hopefully that helps.
Kyle Bazzy
If you guys want to ask us how, like, how many things we did poorly or what didn’t go well that we never we don’t do it anymore. Like, that’s a much longer list, just to be very clear.
Derik Sutton
I tried to do a, do you guys watch YouTube reactions? I feel like Littlewood may watch YouTube.
Mark Littlewood
I’m usually the one creating the reaction, to be honest.
Derik Sutton
Yeah, that was like, my unwind for like, last year, when we were stressed out, like, I would just watch YouTube reactions or like bands that I like just because it’s like, I don’t have to think about anything. You listen to a song, and it’s really cool, because you get to see somebody interacting with a like artist that you like for the first time, and kind of relive, like me, I remember, like, when I used to get, you know, so, like, I just became, like, really enjoyed it. So then I tried to build this series around having business owners react to our new product releases. And I thought it was brilliant. I thought it was great. And, like, built this whole pomp and circumstance around it. Didn’t move the needle. So I just had to back off of it, right?
So, like, not everything’s gonna work, but you have to be willing to be like, I had to look at and be like, do I like doing this? Yeah, I actually liked doing the series. I thought it was creative. I thought it was, like, well executed, but at the end of the day, it wasn’t delivering results. So, is it about me? Is it about the customer, right? The customer wasn’t finding progress in that video. Other people in the industry thought it was niche and thought it was really cool. Maybe we win an ad award for it or something stupid, but like that. Ad awards don’t pay my mortgage. So, you know, just be practical with it. You know, you have to be willing to pull the trigger quick. But just find ways that make progress.
Mark Littlewood
Always worth remembering that an experiment is never unsuccessful, unless you repeat the same experiment, expecting a different result, in which case you haven’t learned anything, because the unit of value of an experiment is what you’ve learned, right?
Kyle Bazzy
Just to demonstrate how humble I am as a sales leader,
Mark Littlewood
Yeah. Comment, Kyle, try that.
Derik Sutton
Donald Trump is he’s the most humble of all sales the most humble.
Mark Littlewood
Do you need time to compose yourself, Kyle before?
Derik Sutton
Exactly yeah, yeah, yeah. He’s got his freaking championship belt.
Kyle Bazzy
One I this is like, the one idea that I was so, like, off the reservation that I thought, like, Derik, like, this is never gonna work. Now, mind you, Derik’s been in this space almost his whole career, versus me in the last seven years. This is a belt called the Small Business Champion belt. Now, again, this was when we were the conferences or for, you know, our champions that did case studies with us and stuff, it’s the individual, the consumer, not the bank. It’s the individual at the bank that championed this thing, because small business was not a category that had budget before Autobooks. So the whole point of this was like to evangelize them. Right? Our jobs that they hire us for are all on here, which is kind of cool. These are, it’s like, $170 belt. Like, it’s legit. And Derik’s like, we’re gonna buy a bunch of these and take him to a conference, and, you know, Baker’s gonna walk with them on their shoulders and stuff. I’m like, Derek, like, that’s like, let’s get back to, like, more tactical stuff. And that’s insane. Like, this isn’t gonna take off. This has been, a banker have this in the back of their like, you know, they’re at home. They got like, a built in Shah of books and stuff that’s there for all their calls now. Like, they Yeah, so we love.
People were like, walking around the conference. They’re like, wow, like that are booth and like, can we take a picture with the belt? We’re like sure,
Mark Littlewood
Wow, you got likes and clicks.
Kyle Bazzy
Yeah, here’s the thing. To get serious about it. Why? Because, as an individual, I had a fight to get budget for small business users, not big companies or not. You know, personal consumer checking accounts at my bank, and everyone says they want to help small businesses. But why aren’t there dollars behind it? I’m had a fight to get a real budget line item for the first time for this user segment. That’s why it worked, because they felt like this was their representation of what they did and evangelize we just happen to be the vehicle.
Derik Sutton
There’s also another level to that too, because oftentimes you go reward the person signing the contract, right? Like the executive comes in at the 11 hour and you take them to the state dinner or go to play golf or do whatever. Instead, we were rewarding the champion that first recognized the opportunity that took us through the deal. We rewarded them. We took pictures of them, we promoted them online. We did a whole content series around called like small business champions, where we featured them, but they’re talk about customer referrals at scale, right? Like, immediately they’re sharing. They want to be on the next webinar. They want to talk about their thing, because they want this, have a belt sent to them. They want to walk around the conference with a belt. We had two CEO or two keynotes of conferences hear about the belt. And like, basically came by and like, hey, we heard you guys were the like, think, like, we’re at like, a 5000 person conference, and the keynotes like, hey, I want to hear about the belt. You know, they come over and like, we’re now, we’re taking a picture with the keynote at our booth. We’re in the belt because they think it’s so cool, you know. So, like, there’s, there’s just, but that’s just comes out of a bit of listening to the customer, listening to, like, what they what they were trying to do, and, like, recognizing they were, like, trying to champion this thing inside the organization, and they were fighting for it, you know. And it just kind of led us down this path of trying something, and it worked out. Yeah, so, all right, so I know we’re getting close to time.
Mark Littlewood
We are just flying by here. I’m really sorry.
Kyle Bazzy
Yeah, I wonder, like, how are we gonna fill up 90 minutes with this?
Derik Sutton
No doubt.
Mark Littlewood
Let me ask a question. Let me ask Mark and Oz/TB, a question. So Mark first, what have you taken from this that’s gonna make you think a little bit differently about things, and I’m using you as an example of someone that’s quite into jobs and is being using it very extensively in the company already.
Mark Stephens
So I think there’s a really interesting dynamic of what these guys have done, which is really interesting is flip the whole sales and marketing and turned it on its head, and sort of turned it inside out. And I think essentially, by by reframing the problem, they a lot of the original problems that exist have actually ceased to be problems. And I think that’s a really interesting thing. So I want to go and think about how I apply that. I also think it gets rid of a lot of silos, even in even in the smallest organizations. You know, the standard joke is, we go to an event, if it’s if we get a sale, it’s a marketing trip. And if we get if we get a sale, it’s a sales trip. And if we get the we don’t get a sale, it’s a marketing trip. I think this false dichotomy between sales and marketing is is quite damaging. And you do get these sort of, as you say, we judge it on clicks. We’ve got the clicks. We’ve got loads of clicks from no one who’s got a budget, and sales are useless. So I think that’s my key takeaway, is taking their idea of essentially, get turning sales and marketing on its head, and focusing it as a single entity.
Mark Littlewood
I think, yeah, I’m excited about that. It’s really interesting. I mean, the thing about the belts as well is, like one of those examples of on one level, you look at this and your consumers within your customers are quite undervalued, under, represented, underrepresented, under appreciated people, and what you’ve done is created a tribe and mobilized it. And you know, lots of people when they’re selling B2B, go, there ain’t no way you can create a community about your product, but that that’s the sort of thing that really is interesting and does it? There’s another company called PDQ, who do sysadmin tools, and they essentially encouraged a Reddit forum for people to talk about stuff, and if anyone ever kind of came in and bitched about PDF and their product, literally, the entire community. Unity would just take them down again. It’s really interesting how powerful those things become.
Kyle Bazzy
Yeah, it’s so great. It’s so great. Like on the webinar today, you’ll see bankers that will, as well, answer the questions of other bankers before we get to them in the chat, like taking us a while to put up to but it’s all evangelist. It’s like, why is it happening? Why is it tried created? It’s because there was a shared, common sense of struggle and purpose that we help them fulfill, and we were the vehicle to do. So that’s really, that’s really what it’s ended on. So anyway, thought that that might be, might be useful. Stephens, let me know if any of this stuff but resources or anything on your unique context, like, I don’t know how Littlewood gives out our information, my LinkedIn, my email, whatever. Happy to keep sharing some things, as you said, to think through it.
Mark Stephens
That would be brilliant. I think the fact you’ve got the human aspect in as well. And it’s bizarre what takes off. Because the founder of Atlassian did a talk at Business of Software, and he said how they gave away $1 t-shirt, and that was the most popular when people got to choose which tier they went, you know, pay $100 more for the dollar t shirt. But just having that slight, quirky human interaction.
Kyle Bazzy
We’re all humans. You got human no matter what you’re selling, you’re selling to humans at least, at least today, still, maybe in 10 years, that might change, but at least we’re selling to humans right now. And I think that at the center of this, you just gotta get back to it your own unique way. By the way, everything we’re talking about we stole from other people with permission, right, so to speak, but great artists just put their spin on it for their unique context. None of this stuff is rocket science. It’s just about figuring out a simple way to put it all together and then, just like we said earlier, test and iterate to your point.
Mark Littlewood
So Ors and TB, I think you’re still, what have you taken from this? And I’d love to know two things, what’s the kind of big takeaway that you you’ve you’ve had that’s maybe changed your thinking? And then the other thing is the urban element, you know? What’s the kind of if you can take something from this and see, well, okay, that means we could go and do this. Is there something that you fear would hold that back or stop you?
Attendee
Well, I am at this moment, I have nothing to fear. I’ve taken a lot of notes on what I should try to implement and try to do from what Derik and Kyle said, and I’m eager. I probably when I close this call, the first thing is, I’m gonna do and try to work on these little bit. Because, well, everything you said and everything you explained were really good. I wouldn’t say everything was new. So we were kind of heading in the in in this direction. Well, actually, this is what I was hoping for from this Q and A to get some experience, to hear some of your experience, on how and what have you faced until this point? Because we will probably face some of those too, and when, and when we get there or get to some challenges, we will already have some information about those.
Mark Littlewood
TB, I know you’re marketing, so you’re duty bound not to agree with anything that sales said. Oh no, from this moment forward, you’re talking as one.
Derik Sutton
Yeah, we’re all one.
Mark Littlewood
Thanks so much. Is everybody. Does anybody have any objection to being CCed into an email so that you’re connected? You can all say that’s fine here, but email me straight away if actually you’re just doing that for the show.
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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