Podcast Transcript

[00:00:00] Sean Steele: G’day everyone, and welcome to the ScaleUps Podcast where we help first time Founders learn the secrets of scaling so they can fulfill the potential of their businesses, make big decisions with greater confidence, and maximise the value and impact that they can create in the world. I'm your host, Sean Steele, and my guest today is Luigi Prestinenzi from Scalable Growth Podcast and the co-Founder of the Growth Forum. How are you mate?

[00:00:20] Luigi Prestinenzi: Mate, I'm fantastic, Sean, and thanks for having me on your show. I know that this is a, we've been discussing this for a long time, so I'm so happy to finally get a seat on your podcast.

[00:00:30] Sean Steele: Me too. It's been a long time in the making, hasn't it? And you and I had known each other really well, so I'm full disclosure. You know, I've engaged you as a consultant on a number of occasions to help me build sales capability in different businesses. Most recently, in the Adventure Co group, we had a big IT training business, and we had to do a full transformation of the sales environment, I'm sure you remember, which ultimately was very successful. Thanks to the effort of a lot of people in that business, and you really helped us kick that along in the early stages. So just quick background for the audience. So, you were the co-Founder of Sales IQ Global, which was  I guess sales transformation coaching L&D, which you ran for like nine years, and then for the last almost, five years, you were running the Sales IQ podcast, which has now become the Scalable Growth Podcast.

[00:01:18] Luigi Prestinenzi: Yep.

[00:01:18] Sean Steele: And you are the co-Founder of a new business that you started in December last year called The Growth Forum, which is a community with content collaboration, learning around, sales, marketing, entrepreneurship, personal development. Is that, am I missing…

[00:01:34] Luigi Prestinenzi: Perfect summary. Yeah, perfect summary. So, it would've been 10 years in April when I started Sales IQ. Yeah, so I sold my shares late last year. Wanted a bit of a change, and yeah, it's just been an awesome journey since I've been loving, just exploring new ideas and growing a business from scratch again.

[00:01:59] Sean Steele: Oh, I've been, you know, obviously because we know each other well. I've watched you for many years with the Sales IQ branding and just all and everything that's gone with that. And it's been so cool to watch that transform into what you're doing now. And you know, the reason I invited you here today because people kind like, well this is great, you know, Sean and Luigi know each other, but why we're having this conversation? Well, I think your LinkedIn profile descriptors says it best. It says, “I live and breathe sales. I'm not a guru. I'm a practitioner. I teach sellers the exact principles that I use to close six, seven, and eight figure deals.” And that is why you are here today. Because in our audience we have lots of seven figure Founders who want to scale up to eight plus, and that's what we help them do. But right now, in the current kind of market environment, there is a growing number, particularly those who service like larger, like kind of mid-cap to large B2B clients. And those clients are really hurting in the current economic environment and they're stopping projects and investments are being put on hold. And you can see, you know, people shedding staff and rebuilding cash reserves and finances. Expensive. And so, there's a whole bunch of headwinds not in every sector, but in a lot of sectors that's really flowing down into service-based businesses who are servicing those people. And I notice I always say to people, if you've got a good business, like, if you basically can deliver stuff well, building a seven figure business is not all that…I'm not saying it's easy. It's definitely not easy. But a lot of people, once they've got a business model that's working and it's hitting a need and all the rest, they can often build into seven figures without actually amazing sales and marketing. Like many businesses just get their, because they just do a great job and people refer them and blah, blah, blah. But it's very difficult to break through eight figures and really scale a business without good sales and marketing process, resources, systems, you know, like proper people who do that for a job. And so, what I was keen to do today was I'm noticing people like all of a sudden, the opportunity is growing up. All of a sudden, they look at their pipeline going, geez, this is not looking great for the next six or 12 months. And it's usually Founders, usually Owners, like directors of the business who are all of a sudden the ones who have to go and drum up opportunities and they just actually have no idea where to start because they haven't had to do it before. And so today I was like, you know, just like the practical things like, you know, well who should I focus on? Do I focus on existing customers? Do I focus on building new relationships? Do I go back to people who've worked with this before, would've completed, how do I reengage these people in a conversation? Like  how do I rebuild the conversations that might lead to sales or opportunities when I haven't had to do that for some time? And so it might feel a bit basic for you, but I think people are really going to get a lot of value out of that today based on their audience.

[00:04:41] Luigi Prestinenzi: Yeah, absolutely. And I think, just on that topic, right, or Founder-led sales because a lot of businesses, if you think about it when they start, the Founder, regardless whether they've got sales experience or not, will ultimately go out and engage their first degree network, when they're starting to get their first lot of sales, right? And what often can create a bit of a false sense of security is that; Hey, I've been able to achieve X number. Great. I should be able to on this run rate, on this conversion rate. I should be able to grow my business now by three or four times. Right? But then they hit a bit of a ceiling because they've exhausted their initial contacts and they haven't built that system, that scalable system or the scale up system to be able to grow through that ceiling. And then when economic markets, and the economic climate does get a bit tough, all of a sudden having those conversations with even your first degree contacts gets even harder. And so I think, you know, for most businesses that are still Founder led or directors, they're trying to get to the seven to eight figure number. I think, there's absolute merit in not just coming up with strategies for themselves to drive revenue, but thinking about how do I create a proper system here that is not dependent on me either, right? I can actually plug somebody else into this system so it can grow without my attention and energy on it.

[00:06:17] Sean Steele: Hundred percent. And guaranteed they're also being hit up by VA companies and stuff every day who are like, oh, we can generate leads for you on LinkedIn and all the rest, which I'm not saying is a bad thing, but they don’t know where to start because they haven't, the foundations aren't laid yet. So it's like, well, how would you use that to amplify something that doesn't exist today? Like, they're not going to come up with a great sales methodology system. So, where would you encourage them to start? Like, how should they think about, who should they start with at, or, you know, what, what's the starting point?

[00:06:47] Luigi Prestinenzi: So this is a great question, and regardless, like I've had the pleasure and I'm still coaching a number of people, you know, from the HubSpots, from stripes of some really big orgs to some smaller orgs. And there's a common challenge that I see occur when pipeline is not where it needs to be or opportunities aren't flowing through your pipeline. Often where they're spending their time. And if we think about it, especially if you're a Founder, right? Or if you're a director of a business, you don't have an abundance of time because you are also, you're not just running sales, but you're probably looking at operations, you're probably doing accounting. There's a whole range of things. So, your focus is diluted. So, you've got to be careful not to spend your time selling to the wrong type of customers. And if I look at just salespeople, you know, the statistics show a seller spending an average of about 32% of their time actually selling. Now, if they use that time, the limited time that they've got, focusing their attention on the wrong type of customers, what's happening is, and again, the data shows is 50% of people's pipeline is filled with the wrong type of customers. They're just not a good fit there. So, the first thing we need to do is go back a step and really give consideration to who is our target audience? Like who is our ideal customer, or ideal account profile. So go, well, if I'm targeting mid-market businesses, which mid-market, it's not everybody, not everybody is right for our product or service. And by just taking the time to do that exercise, and I'm doing this with a very large professional services firm at the moment, by allowing them to get laser focused and get really, you know, intentional with who they want to serve, the problems that that particular sector's going through, and they know that they can help them and achieve a particular outcome, it allows them to get laser focused. And then the next step is to give consideration to who is the people, like, who are the people in the buying committee within that organisation that need to be part of the conversation. And then once you've got that, you're laying the foundation. That's foundational, right? Because if you don't lay that foundation, what happens is it's like just throwing dart at a dart board and hoping it lands and hoping you hit your target. And hope is not a strategy, right? You got to get that foundation in place first because otherwise it's just a bit of a house of cards.

[00:09:23] Sean Steele: So, let's just, why don't we take an example as we kind of roll through the practical steps, because I think that might make it easier for people to get their heads around. So, let's just say we've got a consulting business where we do, I don't know, like Microsoft Dynamics, let's say we're basically working like CRMs. So, we do integrations and implementations and we help optimise. And so, to your point, that's a great example of a service that can be used in lots of different in good times where the clients might be really focused on sales, marketing and acquiring customers and all the rest. And so that might be a kind of key concern for them, but also in tough times. What might they be spending money on, or what could they spend money on inside that environment where they've got different problems, you know, they might be trying to shed staff, they might be trying to automate workflows to reduce headcount or there's a million other things. So, let's imagine hat's what we do and our, and we've figured out that our key audience is, I don't know, our financial lender, right? Like, you know, lenders are our kind of key client inside financial services sector, and we think they've got some real challenges at the moment. Why don't we start there? So, let's assume that we've got to that stage.

[00:10:31] Luigi Prestinenzi: Yeah, so the first thing we've got to do, we've got to make sure that the audience does have a problem that we can help solve because if there's no problem, there's no sale, right? What's the purpose of us having a conversation if there's no problem in their business that's causing them concern, right?

[00:10:45] Sean Steele: Yep.

[00:10:45] Luigi Prestinenzi: So, when we do our assessment, we're saying; Hey, we are looking at this particular sector and we know that 80% of our sector is experiencing X problem and we have a solution that can help them. That's the kind of the first thing we need to define, right? The second thing, when we're actually looking at that sector is saying, what part of that sector has an appetite for what we sell? Because for example, you talk about Microsoft, there is a portion of that market that Salesforce would be absolutely immersed in that business. And it's not just Salesforce, they've got we know that if you've got Salesforce, there's probably six or seven other pieces of tech that's connecting into Salesforce to get it run optimal. So, you've got to ask yourself, you know, if I target customers that are Salesforce, that's a Salesforce shop, the probability of them changing might be low. Now, I'm not saying you ignore them, but from a pursuit perspective, there's probably other people within that sector that are not in that position. And so, we think about our ideal customer and say, well, actually I want to talk to businesses that haven't gone full suite, huge CRM, they might not have the whole process automated. They might have a couple of systems that they've sort of connected together, but it's not working to the way it needs to be. That looks like more of an ideal customer for me than somebody that's completely got Salesforce or HubSpot, et cetera, in place. Or they might be using Microsoft Teams. They might be using Office 365, but they're not taking advantage of deeper integration. So, they're the thoughts of things that you need to process from a thought perspective and start to really add into your ideal customer profile or ideal account profile first, because then when you start to build your list, right, and start to go, okay, I need to actually build a target list to start to engage with them. Regardless whether you're doing inbound or outbound, the same process applies. I've got to get clear on who they are, and then I'll start to develop my strategy on how do I actually get them into my funnel. So that's the very first step that I'll do because again, otherwise what happens is you'll go out to a larger audience. Again, if you're spending money on paid ads or you're proactively reaching out through a sales development process, your message won't resonate because you're trying to go too wide. So, again, this is about niching. This is about getting very narrow in our focus and going; yeah, the addressable market for this sector CRM could be, there could be 10,000 customer. The reality is it's probably a thousand that's right for us, so let's focus our attention on the thousand and let's not ignore the 9,000, but that's a longer-term play, that it's going to take a lot more time to educate them, and we have to kind of wait for the time that it's a right time because it has to be a compelling reason. And as you know, changing a CRM, that's a big process, right? 

[00:14:05] Sean Steele: So, let's say, you know, in this circumstance, they wanted to go after people maybe who'd done a dynamics implementation, or to your point, hadn't gone for a full suite CRM that was connecting everything together. And so, it was a bit hodgepodge. So probably maybe, smaller end of the market, less sophisticated lenders who therefore kind of got that gap in that problem. How would they go about, how do you figure out that that's the customer? Like, how do you find those people? How do you coach clients to find those?

[00:14:34] Luigi Prestinenzi: So the first, and again, going back a step, what we do is we look at the customers that look like that in our own database, the ones that we're currently serving as well. Because we'll get a lot of information. So, go to your existing, if you're an established business, which this particular case study they are, you would already have customers that look like that. So, you can pull a lot of information and data about improvements, what's worked well, et cetera. So that's the first step because you've got to then develop your message, right? You've got to get very clear. when I do start to reach out to these customers that, I have to have a message that creates interest and desire for them to take action, right? And so again, if we go back, we develop an ICP, so we get clear on the customer profile. We then identify who are the people within that account that we want to talk to. Is it the CFO? Is it the head of IT? Is it the head of sales or head of marketing depending on our strategy for pursuit. So, for example, if we know that the lender can, by bringing that marketing automation component in from a CRM can actually drop the cost per acquisition and et cetera, et cetera, then maybe our pursuit is through the marketing team, right? Or if it's sales and we know that the lender can actually speed up the sales process and increase conversion, maybe we go to the head of sales. Because it's not always IT that drives the initiatives. It's coming from, and you know this back in your days.

[00:16:08] Sean Steele: Which problem's being solved. Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, I mean that's a perfect example. You know, as a person running sales and marketing, the Salesforce sales people would come to me because there was a sales development opportunity that weren't go to the CTO. I would engage the CTO and go; Hey, let's look at this together. But they're coming to me because I'm the one with the problem or the upside or the benefit.

[00:16:29] Luigi Prestinenzi: So, that's why it's important to give, you give thought to that before you start to reach out to them. And you know, whether it's on LinkedIn, doesn't matter which channel you use, you've got to get clear on, “well, what's my purpose of my reach out and how does it benefit them?” So, once we go through that process, then it's about establishing the right message and really giving consideration and saying, okay, let's think about…You've really got to hypothesise the problem because until you're in there…

[00:16:58] Sean Steele: So, let's hypothesise one now to just to kind of help us along.

[00:17:03] Luigi Prestinenzi: You me under the spot.

[00:17:05] Sean Steele: No, that's all right. We'll do it together. We'll figure it out. So, we've got this dynamics business. You know, we've got some good case studies of where we've been able to help other clients drop their cost of acquisition. And because it's a bit of a tough market, you know, maybe, you know, six months, 12 months ago, they were just not that concerned about cost of acquisition because they were just spending crazily and they're like, you know, there's just money everywhere. Now all of a sudden money's getting tight. They're going, geez, we actually really need to refine the sales and marketing features or elements of the way our CRM supports our sales marketing processes that we can bring our cost of acquisition down. And as a service provider, we've got good examples of where we've done this before and we've got good testimonials and results and outcomes. Let's say we've got some kind of case studies, if you like, you know, kind of lined up so we know what we're doing and so we're not making it up so we know there's a problem. We know who the client is, which is going to be head of marketing or sales, I guess, depending. It's going to be one of those two, and we know we've got some experience in the background. What do we do next?

[00:18:04] Luigi Prestinenzi: Well, we've got to do a little bit of research first, right? So, we need to start to look at that list and say; great, now that I've got my, I've got my list built out and I, and I think this is a really good target list. I'm going to conduct a bit of research first. I'm going to have a look because there are ways in which we can see how does a business operate. I might jump on their site, I might have a look at their payment, if they've got an econ portal, um, website, there's certain things that I'm looking for that tell me that there's potentially a problem that aligns with what we do, right? So, we do a little bit of research first, because, again, if we can do that little bit of research when we create that message, it's highly relevant for them. Now, there are things you…

[00:18:48] Sean Steele: There’s a simple example, if one of the things that we've used successfully is, I don't know, chat, you know, like chat is part of the conversion process on the site and that integrates with the CRM and it's being triggered by the fact that someone's been there for two minutes and there's a popup and so on, and we go to their site and we go, oh, they don't actually have chat integrated. That's interesting. So, we're thinking, well, there's something insightful about this customer. There's a gap already. Yeah.

[00:19:12] Luigi Prestinenzi: So that's a key for us. We needed to define what are some of the gaps. And look, there are some other things that you'd look for, some triggers that you'd also look for as well, that would make your message even more relevant. But the first thing is just to define, okay…

[00:19:25] Sean Steele: Like, what? What are you thinking about there, Luigi?

[00:19:27] Luigi Prestinenzi: So, triggers are like, there are some triggers that you always want to look out for announcements. So, for example, if you know that a company's releasing a new product, that's a trigger because you're like, okay, the new product they're trying to grow, entering a new market, the CFO or head of sale, somebody in a key role changes because we know, thinking about when you first became CEO, what did you do the first 90 days? You did your assessment on the business to find the quick wins. So, you are open to discussing change, right? So there are things, or it could be economic, you know, interest rates have gone up. Cash could be harder to get. That's a trigger. It's like, okay, now they've got to get smarter. In the tech sector, we knew that 12 months ago, the valuations of tech were overinflated. So, it was growth that it just growth that it didn't matter. They just wanted to grow. Now, we can't just grow at all costs. It's got to be sustainable, profitable growth. So, things have changed, right? So, there's some of the things that we are thinking about, but when we actually go and say, right, we've got our list, we're going to establish the message. The one thing that we should, we've got to try to avoid is leading with a feature led statement. It's not about us. And if we think of top of the…

[00:20:39] Sean Steele: Which sounds like…

[00:20:41] Luigi Prestinenzi: Oh, we have a product that does this and these are the features like a chat bot

[00:20:48] Sean Steele: Yeah. Hi John. We haven't met before. I run a Microsoft Dynamics consultancy and we've had some great success with other clients in helping them reduce their cost of acquisition by implementing chat.

[00:21:01] Luigi Prestinenzi: See, that's actually not too bad, right? Because you've said we've helped other companies drop acquisition because that's an outcome.

[00:21:07] Sean Steele: Uh, okay. That's an outcome.

[00:21:08] Luigi Prestinenzi: But you don't talk about the product in that and it's really important to say; Hey John. I've just recently been on your site and I've been having a bit of a mystery shop of your customer experience, and I've actually got some insight I'd love to share about how you could reduce your cost per acquisition and also turn more site visitors into paying customers. Would now work to chat? Or when did you want to put some time in the calendar? Now that what it'll do, it'll peak the prospect. They're going, oh, hang on, you've taken the time to research me. So, the key thing to that is you've showed them that you know them. You are also earning the right to have a conversation. And then you are leading with the word ‘insight’. So, remember establishing a really good point of view or your message, it's based on business outcomes. So, think of a event, business outcomes, pains, and your insight and expertise.

[00:22:08] Sean Steele: Right?

[00:22:08] Luigi Prestinenzi: So, when you think about that structure and you create a point of view to say, I've got some insight about this that can help you achieve X, it's going to go. Okay, well, tell me more. Because the purpose of reaching out to new prospects is not to sell anything. It's just to start a conversation. Because you are at that pre-contemplation awareness stage. You're trying to create awareness, and the conversation has to be around. There's got to be an exchange of value for time. So, the first thing, a customer that John, you know, first thing John is thinking is what value will I get if I give you time? And the value has to be, I can teach you something that you don't know. Because I'm an expert, I've worked with hundreds of companies implementing CRMs. I see hundreds of sales processes, marketing processes. I see where they lose money. I see where they make money. That's insight. John sees things from John's perspective in the one company.

[00:23:16] Sean Steele: Yep.

[00:23:16] Luigi Prestinenzi: I have a sort of an eagle eye view, right? So that's insight. And if I can distil that in a really clever message and say, I can share this with you. And then when I'm in that meeting, let's discuss, you know, is this actually a problem and how has it impacting you? What happens is the gap becomes real, right? And then we've got a current and a future state gap. And then we can start to talk about, well, let me show you how others are fixing this problem. Would it make sense for us to maybe, discover further if this problem's even worth investing in and tackling? And it goes all the way back to that very first interaction you have with the organisation. But that's the big, and it's funny when I changed roles, and I posted about this on LinkedIn, I have in, as of the end of Feb, I think it was end of Feb, I had 101 emails of people reaching out to me in under two months. That's not even in my junk mail, by the way, Sean, because they were using a trigger, they were looking for triggers on, because there's automation that does this, a job change. And if I show the emails and out of the 101 emails, only one of them personalised. The rest were generic. We've got VAs, we do lead gen, we do this, we do that. Cybersecurity. None of them were talking about the outcomes that were important to me. They were just feature dump. One person personalised and they all were sequenced because they've got a sequencing tool, they're just jamming it in. And so, think about that's what you are competing with. You are competing with other people sending poorly crafted messages and jamming people's inboxes. And the average person gets about 131 emails a day. Right, and you don't want your email, if you are emailing as part of your prospecting strategy, you don't want your email to be clustered with all the other stuff that they're getting that's feature focused because you, you don't have time. Remember when you were CEO E of Adventure Co, you don't have time to just to read through and go features. I don't need this. I don't need another tool. I don't need another service pro. What I do need…

[00:25:28] Sean Steele: I mean, you usually have your little outlook or whatever tool you're using. You usually got like, what about 10 words that you see? And you judge the email in the 10 words and you're like, Hmm, no, just delete or Mark as read or whatever. Okay, so let's take a step back because you jammed a hell of a lot of value very quickly into that little piece, which is I think that key frames that you talked about there. One is kind of earning the right and the fact that you can show that you've actually done some research. Number one, you're going to building credibility. Two, that you've got some insight that they might find valuable that's linked to an outcome that they're likely to care about in the current context, given their company, given the environment and all the rest, and then inviting them to a discussion. Would you do this, if you didn't know the person and therefore, for example, you actually had to make a LinkedIn connection first. Would this be like, would you put this in? You know how when you go to connect on LinkedIn, if you don't know them, you can add a note. Would you be putting this in the note with the connection? Or like how do you, if you don't have the connection already, how would you do that?

[00:26:33] Luigi Prestinenzi: Yeah, that's a great question. So, and I answer this in two ways and I'll explain why, because I want people, you know, your audience to think of their funnel. And we all know sales funnels, right? Or marketing funnels, whichever way you want to call it. I want them to break their funnel into two. One's, what we call the sales funnel and one's the relationship funnel. And I'll explain the difference on the two funnels in a moment, but when we are looking for certain attributes and certain triggers there, things will pop up that go right. This is the right time for me to have a chat with you that's going to go into my sales funnel immediately and my intention when I reach out to you is I want to talk to you. So, there's nothing wrong with saying; Hey Sean, I'm connecting. I just was on your site. I noticed X. I've actually got some insight. I'd love to connect and share this with you. Now, there's nothing wrong with that, and if they accept it, they're like, yeah, I'm open to hearing that insight. Then it's about; Hey, thanks for accepting. You might drop a voice note. If your audience don't know, you can do voice notes on LinkedIn. You can send a video. Enrich the process. Yeah. Another powerful stat just to talk about why you want to enrich the process is what influences buyers. 54% is the experience to have with the sales process. 18% is the product and service, and 18% is brand, and 9% is price. So, the experience you create in the sales process matters. So, doing things like sending a voice note, sending a video, it matters, right? Because you are bringing a human element to the process. So, I wouldn't…

[00:28:13] Sean Steele: And people, by the way, I mean, I don’t know about you, because I've been given that suggestion before and I'm only just sort of starting to do it now. But when you think about it, how many other people do that? You've got the opportunity to humanise the person and it doesn't need to be a perfectly filmed video. Like the fact that it's authentic. It's like people aren't expecting that anymore. Yeah…pull out your phone, wherever you are, in the hallway, like outside, it doesn't matter.

[00:28:39] Luigi Prestinenzi: It's funny. I surveyed a whole bunch of buyers. This got a bit about 30. How many videos you get, it's like under 5% of them are getting videos in their email. So, this is just something I want them to think about. Like, your audience is that regardless of what medium, if you're on the phone, if it's an email, if it's a LinkedIn note, if it's a letter, right? If it's a, whatever it is, right? A pigeon with a note, just don't be afraid. If you've noticed something and it's relevant, they'll be open to engaging with that message. And if they don't, That's okay. Right? You can still be persistent, you can be respectfully persistent and you might try another channel. That's the other thing. In 2023, we can't be single channel dependent. So, we can't just be dependent. Like if your only strategy is LinkedIn, you're missing out on major opportunity. And the data actually backs this up. The more channels that you use.

[00:29:37] Sean Steele: So let's just take that as an example. The head of the marketing department and the financier, they've accepted our connection, and maybe that was our little sort of pitch was in the note, you know, it's now sitting in the LinkedIn. We said; Hey, we'd love to, like, when would be a good time to set this up? You know, here's my calendar link, or you know, give me your calendar link or whatever it is. And then you get a nothing response and you're thinking, okay, I'm going to have to either come back or I'm going to have to try another channel. How would you have access to another channel? How would you think about that?

[00:30:12] Luigi Prestinenzi: So again, we're in a really great from, I'll tell you why I love selling in 2023, right? Because, I'm 40, I'm turning 41. I loved saying I was under my…

[00:30:27] Sean Steele: Welcome to the Club

[00:30:29] Luigi Prestinenzi: But when I first, yeah, because I've been selling my whole life. I remember when I first started, we didn't have this incredible platform called LinkedIn where you could find who is the person responsible for X function. You'd have to do it the old school way. You'd have to…

[00:30:46] Sean Steele: Gatekeepers.

[00:30:47] Luigi Prestinenzi: Drive down a street, write the name down, go back to the call, the receptionist “Hey, can I speak to…? And then try strategy two. But now we can.

[00:30:54] Sean Steele: Call them back with another voice. You know, like call them with one voice to get the name and then call back with a different voice to get them.

[00:31:00] Luigi Prestinenzi: Or you'd have to go to a, you know, a networking event and try to meet the person and get their business card and then call them on the Monday after their footy event. But what we've got now, you can literally, in Sales Navigator or LinkedIn, you can find the profile. There are tools that you can click a button and you get a mobile number, an email address, so you can…

[00:31:22] Sean Steele: So, does Sales Navigator give you the email address and the mobile number, or you have to pay for a third party?

[00:31:26] Luigi Prestinenzi: Nah, there's a tool called, I'm going to advocate a tool, a client that I work with, right? So, Lusha, they're a Tel Aviv, they're from Israel, incredible platform. I've been using it for a couple of years. It's just a Google Chrome extension. And it'll literally just pop up their details on the side panel and it'll give you mobile, email, address information on the company. It's amazing. If you haven't got that as part of your stack and you're trying to grow your business, you need to get it. And you know, full disclosure, I've trained their team globally. And because I love the platform. It's helped me win so much business. But you know, one thing that we have to get used to when selling is get used to silence because we might reach out to someone and they go, yeah, sure. They accept a connection request and then we might send it again and we don't get a response. We're like, what's going on? I just want us to, we always got to put ourselves in the position of the buyer and say the buyer when they open a message and think of our own, when we see a text message or an email, we're often doing something else and we see it, but we forget about it because we go back to what we were doing and then another three or four messages have come through, and then before too long they're forgotten. So, you have to follow up. And the follow up can't just be, “Hey, following up on my last message”, it could be something like, “Hey, I know that this is what I wanted to share, here's a bit of value about X that I think you might find valuable. When works for us to connect?” Yeah. Just drip a little bit more value into it. Send a text message. You know, 93% of text messages are read within three minutes. Yeah. And so many people don't use text messages.

[00:33:24] Sean Steele: Do you get people, because I don't know how many people on LinkedIn realise that their mobile number is accessible through a tool like Lusha. So, do you get people who kind of go; well, how'd you get my number? I'm like…

[00:33:35] Luigi Prestinenzi: Yeah, sometimes. And you know what? I use that because I sell to sales leaders. Whenever they said that to me, I'm like, “well, this is why you need to meet with me. Because if your team aren't accessing numbers, then they're not generating enough leads.” They'd be like, “Okay, let's meet.” And you sometimes get it, but that's when you need to be, I'm a big fan and you know me, Sean, transparency, integrity, they're the values that in which we sell. You got to be honest, you say, “Hey, that's a great question. I actually use a tool that integrates with LinkedIn to get this information and it's all ethically sourced data.” So, they're like, “okay, cool.” And you know what? People are aware of AI and stuff and I haven't really had, when I called the CEO of NAB, he got very upset with me when he answered the phone. But outside of Andrew Thoburn, not many people get too upset with me. So, yeah.

[00:34:30] Sean Steele: That's good. Yeah, I like that. Okay, so we have, let's assume now we've gone through LinkedIn. We've reached out, we've established, what was the Venn diagram again? Insight. What were the other two?

[00:34:41] Luigi Prestinenzi: So you got, if you think of the three circles, you've got Business Outcomes at the top. Pains. So, the pain and the problem on the right and your Insight and Expertise and in the middle is your Point of View. So, that's how, and your point of view needs to cover three. So, you are leading with, “I noticed x about your business. I have some insight about how you could mitigate X problem and achieve X outcome. And I’d love to share this insight.” And you can even social proof it by saying, “…and we've worked with other companies like ABBX Proprietary Limited and achieved great results.” Is it worth a chat? Right. And it's a soft approach, but that's a framework you can apply on the phone. You can then back that framework up and I can send you some structured template for this. And then you can back that up on email. But again, what's key to this is you're not leading with what you do. You're leading with what's important to the prospect and to the buyer. Right. And even inbound, you know, there's a lot of companies talk about inbounds, the holy grail. It's the only way, and I see this so many times, companies spend money to acquire inbound, and then the first thing they do to respond to inbound is let's just drop all the features of our product into your inbox and let's just try to sell our product. But again, just because they've asked for a call back, it doesn't mean they're ready to buy. It's your job to kind of, again, lead with outcomes, talk about problems, and start to establish what does the scope and the business case need to look like to turn this into an actual closed opportunity.

[00:36:27] Sean Steele: So, if you were then going to give somebody the frame, you know, obviously we've only got a certain amount of time, but you know, kind of the frame of that first conversation. So, they've now got the meeting, right? The person goes, “Hey, cool, let's chat.” What's the frame of that meeting?

[00:36:39] Luigi Prestinenzi: So, the frame up of the meeting and I've got a very specific structure for the first meeting because I lead with, my message is about, I'm leading with an insight I want to share. I want to give value first. So, I can't start the meeting by saying, “Hey, thanks Sean for taking the time to meet me today. So, what's going on in your business?”

[00:36:57] Sean Steele: Yeah. They're like, hang on a second. Where's the insight?

[00:37:00] Luigi Prestinenzi: Because you are looking for value first, right? So obviously you set your agenda and then you'll say, “Hey, when we spoke, I mentioned working with a whole bunch of organisations. These are some of the trends that we're seeing. This is what's impacting performance. This is how X is happening, and these are some of the things that we're seeing companies do to mitigate X and achieve B by doing A, B, C.” And they're like, “oh, okay.” And they're thinking, because what you want them to do in order to have a successful first meeting, a new pattern of thinking needs to occur, right? So, once you start to drop that insight, then you can ask a question on the back of the insight to say, “Hey, based on what I've shared, how is this current trend or problem impacting your business?” And then what happens is the relationship tension drops, they're thinking a little bit differently. They're hearing stuff, they're going, “Well, this is how it's impacting me…” And then the discovery starts to occur. And then you start to ask questions and they share, you drill down because that conversation, it should be a dialogue, not a monologue. And I see a lot of salespeople go into meetings, even Founders will go into a meeting and they do the show up and throw up. So, show everything about me, and it's a monologue. It's me talking and you are listening and I hope something sticks. It’s going to be a dialogue.

[00:38:21] Sean Steele: Yeah.

[00:38:22] Luigi Prestinenzi: So, the premise of the first meeting is to share insight, get them thinking, and get them into a point of, “You know what? This is problematic for me. Maybe it's worth investigating further.” Now I'm not talking about transactional sales here, right? And you know me, I've sold, you know, 30 grand deals to just under 20 million transformational deals. So, I'm talking about deals that require multiple people, it's going to require multiple meetings before you get to a point of close, they've got to be able to think a little bit differently, assess that there is a problem worth investigating, and then we'll start to build a business case around it to quantify, is this worth our time and in and money to make this happen?

[00:39:06] Sean Steele: Yeah. That's so good. Because the thing that is, that I noticed with Founder psychology is when they get to a situation like this, they go, “But I hate selling and I hate people selling to me, and I don't know how to sell.” And I'm like, Yo, your job is not to like, if you think selling is like calling people and telling them I need to take stuff, then that is upside down. Like selling is a server sand you have no idea whether you've even got what they need until you actually get to the point of understanding the pain points and the problem. So, like just put your detective hat on, like your job so that excludes the whole frame of like getting to the meeting. But once you're in that meeting, get your detective hat on. Like, do you see a detective in a documentary series or, you know, something you watch on Netflix, ask three questions and then go, "Yep, I've got it.” “Yep. This is what happened.” No. They're like, Dog and a bone, because they know until they fully understand all the context and the pieces and the all the elements where they don't have a hypothesis. And so how can you have a hypothesis when you don't actually fully understand the problem yet, how it's impacting them, and then whether you actually have the right solution. And that stage, they know what your job is to, is explain it, right? It's like, it takes the…

[00:40:21] Luigi Prestinenzi: Absolutely. And I love that analogy, and I also use a doctor's analogy, right? Like if you go, you wouldn't go into a doctor's surgery, and go into his room and the doctor starts saying, “Hey, check out all my degrees I've got behind me.” You know, “look at all the awards.” "Have a look at all the drugs that the pharmaceutical companies are trying to pump right now. Which one do you want?” Right? You'd be like, whoa. You go there because you know you've got a potential problem you don't know the answer for. And the first thing the doctor's got to do is a bit of due diligence to sort of think about, can I identify it first? And if I can't, I'm got to do further tests to identify. So, I always like that example because if we're in sales and we're diagnosing something, you know, without actually doing an investigation, it's malpractice. Right? So that's another thing. And the other thing is Founders, because I've worked with a lot of people that are not salespeople as well. Their relationship with sales is based on the experiences they've had before being sold to in a very, you know, car real estate, like it's the least trusted profession. I think the only other profession that's least trusted is politician at the moment. Right? But it's in the bottom three. So, their relationship is based on the experience that I've had before where I want your listeners to really think about changing that mindset and perspective. Sales is about helping, educating, nurturing, problem solving, being creative. They're the key elements that make up a great sales process. And when we are doing that, we're not having to force our product on anybody because we're helping our buyer really uncover what's possible. So, I think that's probably my biggest takeaway for Founders that are looking to really try to scale and then build an operating system, a sales operating system for people to take on board. It's got to be value driven as well. It's got to be strong values that underpin your sales process. That's what's going to drive sustainable outcomes.

[00:42:26] Sean Steele: Have you seen, so let's just say there's a Founder who's now doing this well, okay. So they've gone into, whether it's current customers they're trying to reengage with or previous customers like, yeah, I always think well, you know, if you're in a tight position and you need to generate opportunities quickly, the starting points can be places where people already know who you are, because the credibility factor is already there. So that might, you know, you're going to run out of that at some point, but sensible starting point. And then, you know, this clearly works well certainly for going out to new prospective clients. So, my question is the scalability of that as a system. If you're a Founder and you're like, “I don't need like thousands of appointments, but I would love to have more meetings than I've got time to do this process with.” Have you seen people succeed in taking on a VA or a part-time? Like how would you get someone, because there's a clear tailoring and level of consciousness and intelligence and language capability and all the other stuff that goes into doing this well. Have you seen people find a way to scale that a little, not scale it like massively, but like a bit to accelerate.

[00:43:34] Luigi Prestinenzi: I have, but I've seen them scale, like a part, like could be the list building process. It could be, think about like, I want you to think about revenue raising activities versus low revenue raising activity. Like your high payoff principles, low payoff. I think, and especially in markets like Australia, I mean, I've trained Asia, Europe, US, I've had the pleasure of seeing most markets. In Australia, we don't like contact centres and people from Asia calling, like it's not a racial comment. It's just, for some reason it's not received well. And to be honest, my opinion on this is, you can use a VA to do certain parts. Like I said, the laborious parts, the list building, the data enrichment. Absolutely. If you want to outsource that, do it. But if you are trying to build a scalable system and you haven't got a team in place, there's a lot of merit in doing it and actually setting that system up because you need to learn the process or bringing someone that can help build that process. Because if you put people into it and the process isn't developed, it breaks.

[00:44:46] Sean Steele: Mate, I'm so with you. I like the number of people I have seen, and I'm sure you have seen many more than I have who think I'm going to hire a salesperson and they're going to bring all that with them.

[00:44:58] Luigi Prestinenzi: No, not going to happen.

[00:44:59] Sean Steele: Incorrect. You are not going to hire a sales development rep who's got a perfect sales process that's purpose fit for your business. Who has the right, like, people have to be trained. So, to your point, either get an expert to help you or figure it out yourself. Like do the learning. Figure out how to do it, get it right, and then train somebody else, and you can always bring somebody else in it. Am I correct?

[00:45:19] Luigi Prestinenzi: Correct. Process, map it, you know, think about the, the bottleneck, et cetera. But I would be reluctant to use an outsource VA look, there are outsourced, you know, sales development services in Australia, for example, and globally that are very good at what they do because they only do top of funnel. But then you've still got to have a system to take the lead from that discovery to point of decision. If you are trying to scale your business, you're probably not trying to scale it over the next three months. You're looking for 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 years growth. Take the time to invest in getting that process done now, because you'll actually see, there'll be a point where once it's going to just, it's like a hockey stick, right? It'll start to really accelerate. So, that's my biggest piece of advice. But for Founders right now, they'll just, I know that we're, we're coming to an end, but the, for Founders right now, what I would say is if growth is high on your priority list, the best thing to do right now is get proactive and start reaching out to your target market. Because if you don't do it now, the 90-day pipeline, it'll just look horrible. And then they'll get themselves into a real rut, and panic mode will kick in, anxiety will kick in, and then the next 90 days after that, it'll just look even worse. Right? And the best time to start is now.

[00:46:44] Sean Steele: A hundred percent. Man, I've really enjoyed this conversation and you and I could just spend all day, you know, playing with the practicalities and the details and the tactics in the sales process because it's really fun and I know it's super valuable for the tribe, but you know, it's a podcast and at some point you've got to shut it down, right? People won't listen forever. But that has been massively practical and tactical, which is exactly what I think right now Founders who are in that position, they don't have time to go and hire somebody else. They're like, need to do something now, here's a great way of getting you started with much better frames that are really going to increase your chance of success. Get started. You've got network there. Like go and start leveraging the network that you've already got. You've probably got 3000 or 5,000 or 10,000 followers and people who you've never actually spoken to before, but have had some kind of, the details are available to you. Go and pay your 150 bucks a month or whatever. It's your sales navigator and get onto it. Like it's not crazy money.

[00:47:45] Luigi Prestinenzi: And I'll give you one quick hack and takeaway before we finish up. You just jump in Sales Navigator, if you've got it. You come up with your target list and there's a feature, and it'll show you your first degree. How are you connected to that person within your target account, and then you can go, well, how well do I know that person that's connected to them? And if I know them well just ask for a referral, right? Because referrals will always convert at a higher rate. And that's just a very little quick hack that they can do to generate a list, to reduce that sort of tension on it, or reaching out to a cold list. I'm at least getting referrals into that list.

[00:48:25] Sean Steele: Yeah. Nice. Luigi, thank you so much, mate. How can people get in touch with you, follow along with what you're doing? Where would you direct them?

[00:48:33] Luigi Prestinenzi: Yeah. I'm pretty active on LinkedIn, as you know, Sean. Just jump on LinkedIn, type in Luigi, not many others come up, which is really good. And then check out the Scalable Growth Podcast. This is the type of content I talk about every single week. We break down. And then obviously my website, growthforum.io. We've got a lot of free resources as well for people looking to learn more about sales. So, yeah, let me know what you think of the episode. Let me know if you enjoyed it. Love to hear from you on LinkedIn.

[00:49:08] Sean Steele: Absolutely. That's beautiful mate. Thank you. Folks, if you enjoyed today, I would suggest could you do a couple of things. Yeah. Do one of three things, like starting point; subscribe on your podcast apps so you make sure that more people get access to it. Two, leave us a review, or three, share this episode with Luigi, with someone who you know who'd love it, who probably needs it right now. And that would mean the world to, Luigi and to myself and to our team. But if you are listening to this and you are one of the people finding it really challenging at the moment and the market's kind of changing under your feet. This is probably the best time to be actually re-looking at strategy for the next three years because it's not about hibernating and just crawling into the dark and then hoping, waiting for it all to go away. And then, okay, now kind of rebuild after. This is the time to reposition, refocus, prioritize, make sure that in the next couple of years, you're actually focused on the right things, so that as the tailwinds return, which they always do, you come out stronger, better, more competitive, and more able to scale. And to do that, you need a kick ass growth strategy. And that's exactly why I'm going to be teaching Founders like you in our inaugural ScaleUp. That's a hard word to say. Inaugural. ScaleUps Roadmap Course or I'm going to be sharing the methodology that I developed after generating a hundred million bucks in revenue in four companies over eight years with my teams to make sure that you've got a fit for purpose strategy for the next three years. The doors are opening on that program in May for the very first time, and they're only going to open three times a year. So, if you want to find out about it, you can go to scaleupsroadmap.com.au. Apologies for the relatively crap landing page. There is a new website coming pretty soon, but it's fine. You can stick your name on the wait list and you'll get all the details as they come. But please join me and thanking our guest today. Luigi Prestinenzi. You've been listening to the ScaleUps Podcast. I'm Sean Steele, and look forward to chatting to you next week. Thanks, Luigi.

[00:50:49] Luigi Prestinenzi: Thanks.