The latest episode of the Grow Fast Podcast features Matt Green, the Chief Revenue Officer (CRO) of Sales Assembly, a company specializing in helping B2B tech companies scale their revenue operations. In this conversation, Matt shares his insights on the importance of investing in revenue operations early and its impact on scaling a business. He discusses how Sales Assembly provides companies with the tools, training, and resources necessary to build a solid revenue infrastructure, that drives sustainable growth.  

Matt also delves into the common challenges companies face as they attempt to scale, such as the pitfalls of prioritizing short-term gains over long-term strategy. He emphasizes the need for alignment between sales, marketing, and customer success teams to ensure that everyone is working towards the same goals. Throughout the episode, Matt offers practical advice on how companies can avoid these pitfalls and create a cohesive strategy that supports their growth objectives.

You can find the whole episode of the Grow Fast Podcast with Matt Green here:

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This is the transcript for this episode:

Mark Shriner [00:00]

Matt, welcome to The Grow Fast Podcast where we talk with leading sales, marketing and personal growth experts about how companies can accelerate sales, optimize marketing and grow their businesses fast. Let's go, Hey, Matt, how are you?

Matt Green [00:15]

I'm good, good, Mark. How about yourself?

Mark Shriner [00:18]

Pretty good. Now that we solved that technical difficulty there. That was like, sales guys. It was all me, man. So hey, where about you located?

Matt Green [00:29]

I'm here in Chicago, Illinois.

Mark Shriner [00:31]

Chicago. Well, I hope you don't think it's weird, but I was kind of going through your LinkedIn profile, and I think you went to Seattle University.  

Matt Green [00:38]

I did, I did, yeah, this seems like ages ago.  

Mark Shriner [00:41]

Wow, yeah. So, I'm out in the Bellevue area, and my oldest son went to the University of Washington, and my youngest son is going to Seattle SPU, Seattle Pacific University.  

Matt Green [00:54]

So, oh, wow, yes, small world. My wife actually grew up in Bellevue. She went to Eastside Catholic High School. Oh, yeah, yeah, which probably right around the corner from you, right?  

Mark Shriner [01:05]

It pretty much is, yep, yep. Well, hey, I'm really looking forward to talking to you about some of the best practices when it comes to training sales teams. I think that you know when you're when you're in a sales role or you're leading a sales team, that's kind of always be learning, and continuous education is super, super critical, especially today with, you know, the changing landscape in terms of prospecting and all the tools and everything like that. So I'm looking forward to talking to you about that. But first, maybe we can do a level set, and you can tell us a little bit about sales assembly. You know, what it is that you guys do, and how do you do it?

Matt Green [01:39]

Yeah, thank you for asking, and thank you again for having me sales assembly. So, we've been around for about seven years now, a little bit over seven years. What it is that we do is, we provide all the, day-to-day skills training for the go to market teams, both sales and post sales, B2B technology companies. So, kind of where we see ourselves sitting in the space is there's product training, which is self-explanatory. There's process training, right on, you know, training on medic or med pick, or training on the methodology like challenger Sandler. Then there's skills training, right? And that last component, that's all that we do. We noticed that there was this gap in the B2B tech ecosystem where a lot of sales leaders, or sales enablement leaders, they spend a whole lot of time on product and process training, not nearly as much time as they should on skills based training, teaching AES how to get better at negotiation or teaching account managers how to get better at multi-threading. So that's kind of where sales assembly slots in and fills this training gap within B2B technology companies.

Mark Shriner [02:42]

Well, that's awesome, because you just answered a couple of my other questions, and so I don't have to ask those, but because I was wondering about, you know, what do you do for B to C versus B to B? But if you just focus on B to B, and it sounds like B to B, specifically technology, what are let me ask you. You mean, you picked a kind of a pretty narrow slice of the overall business landscape. What are the characteristics of B2B technology sales that are different when it comes to, because you're providing skill-based training, you know? Why the focus on that area? And why is that different from just regular old B2B sales?

Matt Green [03:19]

Yeah, we so when we first launched this we, you know, we did so under the thesis that if you are an account executive, a, CSM, a, BDR, SDR, whatever the case may be, at a company like LinkedIn or outreach or gong or Sprout Social, whatever the case may be, you're selling different products to different people. But the fundamentals of how you do it, when you check under the hood, it's all pretty much the same from company to company. So, we thought that there was this degree of consistency. Again, if you are an account executive at any one of these companies, becoming better at deal management, right at Discovery, or team selling, or multi-threading, that kind of stuff is important anyway, right, regardless of the product that you sell or who you sell it to. So that's what we focused our training on. To your other question, how does that differ from under from other industries? We do understand that if you're looking at like a Venn diagram, right of the training that we provide and training that sellers in a B to C environment might need, or a services environment might need, there is going to be a good amount of overlap, but not nearly as much as there is in just B2B technology companies. So, we did decide intentionally, and have continued to decide, year over year, to remain singularly focused on this niche of B2B technology companies, For that reason.

Mark Shriner [04:44]

It makes a lot of sense. And one of the I guess rules that, or, you know, I guess guidelines that I like to offer teams that I leading is targeting is really, important, knowing which industries, which companies in those industries. Which people in those companies do you want to target? How do you want to target and why? Because if you try to go out and do everything for everybody, that's a recipe for a failure right away. So, what are, if we talk about the skill sets in this area that you've decided to focus on, what are some of the most important skills that you help go in and kind of, I guess, teach or reinforce.

Matt Green [05:23]

Yeah, for when you take a look at the landscape today, you know, August of 2024, the most in demand across the go to market spectrum on the new business development side, right? As you can imagine, it's all just rent pipeline generation, right? So, cold emailing, cold calling, best practices, what works, what is effective, in this day and age, compared to even two to three quarters ago, if you're an account executive, in a closer role, again, with there being more and more stakeholders involved in every single purchasing decision, when essentially, regardless of the traditional buyer that you're selling into, everyone is essentially selling to a CFO. Right? Now, that concept that we spoke about before deal management, right? How do you effectively sell your product or solution when you're not actually in the room to convey to the actual buyer? Again, see above the CFO, here's what the product or solution that we're offering is going to bring to your organization. And then on the post-sale side, where we've been doing a lot of work over the past two years, it is really just this high-level theme of, how do we get CSMs or account managers, depending on how you define them, within your organization, to become more commercially minded, right? How do we get them better at identifying and taking advantage of expansion opportunities and going from much more of a reactive team to more of a proactive, revenue generation, focused type of organization?

Mark Shriner [06:55]

Yeah, I mean, those are all super important, and I curious about some of the specific skills, because a lot of what you're talking about are also, I guess, kind of interweaved with any company's process as well. And so, let's, let's kind of go through those three different areas there. If we talk about, you know, basic outreach, or cold calling, cold emailing, any type of cold prospecting, what are some of I mean, just give me some examples of some of the key skills that people need to be working on. Because I tell you what, I know, it's a lot different than when I started in sales, and it's a lot, even a lot different than, I mean, some of the tactics, I guess, are very different now than even a couple years ago. But you know what? What are some of the key skills that you're training on?

Matt Green [07:39]

Yeah, and I think where some of the you just said that the tactics, right? That is something that sales assembly in our training sessions, that we're going to be heavily focused on, you know, we want to focus less on theory and philosophy and more on like, Okay, here's something that you could take away from this course and start putting into action straight away. So, if we're hosting a series of courses on the concept of cold communication, right? Cold calling, cold emailing, or even social outreach. What our courses are going to dive into are going to be again, some of the tactical things, as far as like, Okay, how do you structure subject lines and the first opening line of the preview text of an email, right? What are the most effective call to actions in this day and age, you know? And what are? Oh, go ahead, please.

Mark Shriner [08:26]

Oh, no, no, I'm just because I want to know. Man. It's funny. I just had a discussion last week with our CRO in terms of, I think it was like a half hour discussion about subject line for some emails that we were doing, and, you know, different generations, different perspectives, different continents, and we would just, and I was like, Why is this so hard? Well, the reason it's so hard is because we're all bombarded, inundated with all of these spam, kind of prospecting emails. Most of them, in my opinion, are not very well done. And so, I started kind of doing reverse engineering and saying, which emails am I opening and why am I opening those? But I'd like to hear from you some, some, just give me some, some, some tidbits about that. Like, you know, how would you kind of coach that or have that conversation?  

Matt Green [09:12]

Yeah, so, you know, digging a couple layers deeper. You know, the conversations that we're having a lot of now is, okay, how do all these weave together cold email and cold calling and social selling, right? Because the ultimate purpose to your point a moment ago is what is going to get you more to actually open the email in the first place? And so, we need to think of it, less of them from the standpoint of like, okay, what is the best subject line that's going to get you to open this email? And more of like, okay, do I recognize the person that's sending me the email, and do I see him or her as a helpful advisor? That's what as an executive, you know, we're banking that. That's what's going to make you more or less inclined to open the email that I send you. So how does that play out from a training and development perspective? Can go back to what I meant. Question A moment ago, how do we leverage these different levers, right of cold communication, calling, emailing, social selling, to build us to a point where it's not about getting you to open, open and respond to my very first email, right? It's about making sure that when I do send you that email that does have that compelling call to action asking you for a meeting, you're going to be like, Okay, well, yeah, this guy, Matt Green, at sales assembly. I've seen him on LinkedIn. He's been providing value there. He called me, left me a voicemail. You know, a week ago I didn't call back, because I don't respond to cold calls, like a lot of executives don't. But, you know, I opened an email that he sent me two weeks ago. He didn't ask for anything. He just provided value. The resource he provided was helpful to me. I'm going to open this email because, hey, maybe it's equally as valuable. So part of what And sorry to go on along with the grant, but part of this is, this is awesome, yeah, part of what people are working to impart on a lot of these BDRs and SDRs right now is thinking about it less of like, okay, well, I gotta get good open rates on this one email that I send. It's like, oh, how do we put together a true sequence, a true campaign, right? That builds components of value over the course of a period of time, so that when you do go in and get them and ask for the meeting, you've actually earned the right to do so, you feel as though the executive on the other end, on the receiving end of that email and saying, like, Yeah, this is someone who, just based on my limited experience with him or her over the past few weeks, as I've been seeing them on social they've been popping up in my inbox. They've been, you know, blown up myself on whatever the case may be. There's someone that has been providing value along the way, so I am going to give them the time of day. That's just the hurdle that a lot of reps need to get over right now is, how do we convince someone like you to give us the time of day in general?

Mark Shriner [11:51]

Makes a lot of sense. And I also believe that, you know, providing value in every interaction you have with a customer prospect is hugely important. And some of that comes down to, I hear that a lot these days is people need to focus on or spend time on developing their personal brand. Because when you know, when you reach out as Matt, or I reach out as Mark, if they've heard me on a podcast, they've seen my email, something like that, maybe they've we've met, hopefully, ideally, we've met, right, ideally. But how do you balance, you know, building your personal brand versus building the, you know, promoting the company, and because sometimes you can get what's the word, maybe distracted and doing too much of one, and dilutes your effort on something else.

Matt Green [12:33]

Yeah, no, that's a very fair point. And to be clear, it's less about building. You see a lot of people building a personal brand, I think, just for the sake of building selfishly, a personal brand, and when I say selfishly, I mean in the sense that it is in no way, shape or form, meant to benefit the company that they're working with, which, to be clear, is fine if they want to do that, right? But that is different than if you are a BDR and SDR leveraging the concept of social selling by building a personal brand, again, to your point a moment ago, just in the way of providing value, right? So, rather a tactical example, rather than what a lot of reps do is they take the content that is provided by their marketing or their communications team, and they just click repost on a platform like LinkedIn that is different than if I'm trying to sell into you, Mark, I'm looking through your LinkedIn activity. I'm seeing when you're posting about something that has to do with your business, your industry, and rather than just hitting repost on my company's content all the time, I'm dropping into your comments, like, Hey, Mark. You know, by the way, this post, here's something that that we just came up with that we think would be valuable that ties in to the topic of the post that you just made. So it is, it is sort of interacting with you as a human. It just happens to be doing so on a social platform. That's what we talk about when we're talking about building an effective brand for the purposes of furthering the business of the company that you happen to be working for at that time.

Mark Shriner [14:08]

Yeah, it makes a lot of sense. Let's go back to the email for a second. Cold emails. Can you give me some examples of how you provide value in those exchanges? Is it just providing information, or what do you do?  

Matt Green [14:21]

Yeah, so a clear cut example, real world example for this, my friend Todd always highlights this example, an SDR from a company I forget the industry of the company, what was trying to sell to him a few not that long ago, and he did research on the company, knew when the schedule the board meetings, and about a month or maybe three weeks before their next board meeting was meant to be scheduled, the SDR just popped into his inbox. Hey, by the way, here's a template that other people have found effective for their board meetings. Thought you might find this valuable. Yeah. Right? That was it. Like, no, ask. Like, no. Like, hey, let's hop on a call. Let's chat more about this. We'll tell you more about what we do. It's like, Hey, Todd, I know that you're going into a board meeting in a couple weeks, just case the template here you go, right? Wow. And then a few weeks, yeah, and then a few weeks, I love that example, yeah. But then a few weeks later, he did that again, right? Like, Hey, I saw your hiring, right? Like, Hey, by the way, here's a market report on salaries and OTEs for AEs right now in Q3 2024, just thought you might find this valuable, right? And then you do that three or four times.

Mark Shriner [15:29]

Nothing about, nothing about, hey, can we get a meeting? Or, Hey, can I, can I sell you on this? Or, Hey, here's a link to how great our platform is, something like that. Just say, just, just being a service. Yep.

Matt Green [15:43]

Yeah, yeah, exactly that. And then you do that three or four times, and then again, going back to what I mentioned a few moments ago, by that time, when I'm popping into your inbox for the fourth or fifth time, when I am truly asking for a meeting, number one, you're going to be much more inclined to open my email in general, because I've been providing value along the way. And number two, when you see me ask for a meeting, you're probably going to be much more inclined to actually accept it.

Mark Shriner [16:11]

I would agree it would work for me, or work if somebody was prospecting me and they were sending me all this useful information, because it's amazing how you know we all get spam, spam, spam, and 99% of it is spam. It's not anything that's helpful when you talk about, you know, the if we go from SDR, which is kind of more cold outreach, and then you want to go to like, account executive, what? What are some of the key skills that you focus on?

Matt Green [16:38]

Yeah, some of the key skills that we focus a lot on these days are going to be multi-threading. Multi-threading is big. Multi-threading and empowering your champions to sell without you in the room, right? So, the two different things are making sure that, number one, to the extent that it's possible, you're getting in touch with all the right stakeholders, but at the same time preparing those stakeholders to sell without you needing to be there.

Mark Shriner [17:09]

So, if we, if we want to say we want to make sure that we're at least first off informed who all the stakeholders are, and then that we're in touch with them, I think that a lot of account executives, especially if they're relatively junior, they're afraid to ask those kind of questions. What are some ways that you can kind of uncover who else is involved in the buying decision in a kind of tactful, none, I guess, threatening way?

Matt Green [17:35]

Yeah, they all boil where we've seen success and where a lot of people that we work with have seen success is really, as you alluded to before, boiling down to find the tactful way to just ask the question, right? And there are a couple different iterations of this, you know, one that we see people are, I'm sorry that that has apparently worked really well for people. Has asked, like a, you know, who else should be involved in this conversation. Who else would feel left out of this conversation? If, yeah, if we're scheduling a second call, who would feel left out if they found out that they weren't invited to that call? You know us at sales assembly, given how we sell to revenue leaders, day in and day out, you know, we can get a little bit more to the point it's like, you know who's going to hold budget for this? Right at the same time, there is an argument to be made for regardless of who you sell into asking that direct of a question, where's the budget going to come from for something like this? And it's like, Okay, do you know if Mark is the holder of that budget? Do we need to make sure that he's involved in the max conversation? So again, it comes down to just at the end of the day, rather than trying to dance around it, finding some clear-cut way to just ask and hopefully get the clarity that you need directly from the prospect.

Mark Shriner [18:58]

Excellent. I want to come back to the next part of the question, which is, you know, how, once you find out who those stakeholders are, how do you prep them, or prepare your champion to help them, educate them, or, you know, kind of sell to them? But before we touch on that, want to back up a step. And, you know, I sit in on a lot of B2B SAS calls, because we're getting sold all kinds of different sales enablement tools, and I mean, just everything, you know, everything's B2B SAS these days. And it seems that a lot of times the initial call, and I've even, I don't know how many times I've booked a demo, booked a free trial, and then the first call is not a demo, and it's not a free trial, it's a somebody who's a qualifier, and we spend 30 minutes doing this dance where they're asking all the questions that they want to know, but not really helping me. And it gets frustrating. And I don't know if you have seen something similar out there, but if you. Know how do you coach that? Okay, we know that you have your internal qualification kind of metrics that you have to go through, but how do you balance that with actually, you know, providing some value with that to the prospective customer?  

Matt Green [20:11]

Yeah, no, that's, that's a great question. I mean, fortunately, we've seen, and this has happened pretty rapidly over the past year, a lot of companies that used to do that, and I've been on the receiving end of either those calls, or, more frustratingly, those emails like, great, before you hop on the call next week, answer these 10 questions. Like, no, you're trying to sell me what? Why am I doing work? Right? We have seen this pretty mad dash away from the seller centric type of approach to much more of a buyer centric type of approach. We see a lot of organizations, and we do encourage this. We encourage them to look at the data and come to the realization that by the time you're talking to any prospect, they've already done a considerable amount of research. So, while on the one hand, like sure, you want to make sure that there is some level of qualification going on that's not wasting your time, the reps time, going back to what you mentioned before, you want to find some way in instilling value in that conversation. And that is what has helped transform some of the XDRs teams that that we work with, where they're not again, just going through the checklist, but the organizations are empowering them with enough product knowledge, but more importantly, enough business knowledge, enough business acumen, to actually have, you know, a quote, unquote, adult conversation with a prospect in a way that does not feel like they're just going through An interrogation and saying, like, Okay, now, Mark, you're worthy of talking to someone.

Mark Shriner [21:45]

You just described exactly how I feel going through an interrogation to determine whether or not I'm worthy. It is funny, because I literally, last time it was Wednesday or Thursday, had a call with a platform. They, they allow, they provide, like a market Intel kind of prospecting platform. And on their website, it said, sign up here for a free trial. And then the first call was with a, you know, Junior SDR type role, who then told us, actually, we can't give you the trial until you talk with me, and then I will pass the information on to an account executive who have a follow up call with you. And at that point, I'm like, I'm done, yeah, but I went, I went through the call because, you know, one, I'm already here. I maybe I can learn something. Two, I can learn something about their platform. But two, I can also learn something about somebody's sales, style, their process, their techniques, and, who knows, the United and but at the end, it came down to, yeah, it was just, it was just a qualification call, and it was kind of frustrating.

Matt Green [22:51]

So, I was gonna say sorry to interrupt. You could also learn other thing. You could also learn what you don't want your team to do going forward.  

Mark Shriner [23:00]

Absolutely, absolutely. I should have recorded that and said, do not do this. Let me ask you. Go back to the earlier question in terms of, okay, you know, you're an account executive, and you figured out who the stakeholders are, who the other you know, who else is going to be involved in this decision. How do you prepare your champion, or the person that you have the contact with to go out and kind of internally, I you could use the word sell or promote this idea, or, you know, kind of just educate everybody else involved in the in the process.  

Matt Green [23:32]

Yeah, that's where, where we, not only as an organization, sales, assembly, but we do have a lot of sessions that will revolve around this, teaching the concept of, okay, how do you put together a compelling business case? Right? A true business case, not a pitch deck, right, but a true business case that does speak to the value that you and when we talk about value, both ROI, return on investment and COI, cost of inaction, right, balancing both of those sides. How do you prepare something that speaks to that, that can be easily digested by the other stakeholders, primarily the CFO or controller, or whoever is going to actually end up writing the checks? And you know, the one thread that that we that we like to constantly reinforce when we're putting together, when we're coaching people to put together these types of business cases, and again, we seen this in our own experience, is that executives and CFOs, especially, they like summaries, they don't like stories, right? So shorter the sweeter, right? It is natural for verbose salespeople like ourselves to, you know, load up slides and like, hey, don't forget about this feature and that feature. It's like, no. Just focus on based on what you've discovered throughout the sales process, throughout working with your champion, what is going to be the most impactful for the organization? Maybe develop the business case in conjunction. With your champion partner, with them on it. Have them take a look at the draft of the business case that you are preparing and give them the opportunity to say, Well, no, no, let's change this word, and let's change this term. And you know, let's focus on this. Have them coach you on how this will land a little bit better within the organization, and do as much work for them as possible so that all they have to do is click forward on an email and say, Hey, see below. See attached. Here's something that I think we should seriously explore, and here's why.

Mark Shriner [25:30]

So would that be something like, you know, here's a current problem, here's a proposed solution, which will result in X amount of savings or x increased amount of product productivity, or X number of wins, etc., and it will and then I would assume you probably want to put the cost in there at some point, some something like that. But maybe, yeah, and make it just kind of, I wouldn't say bullet pointed, but make it very easy to understand and clear, right? So how do you teach now, I want to come back to your platform. How do you teach that in a virtual environment? Because, I mean, now you're sounding like I could teach that in a classroom environment, where I'd say, Okay, here's all the information. I want you to distill it down into an executive summary. Everybody go, and then we're going to we're going to see what everybody's done, and you're going to pass it around, and you're going to grade each other, or kind of critique each other. And then we're going to share some, some, some great examples up here on the on the board, and then I'm going to give you my worst case example that I'm going to prepare, and you're going to, you know, help me kind of improve it, something like that. But you're not doing an interactive environment, are you so? So how do you teach that?

Matt Green [26:35]

Yes. So it's a great question. To an extent, we're providing an interactive environment. So for context, the way that we structure our training curriculum is, number one, yes, to your point, everything's virtual, but number two, it's all live, right? So, yeah. So we are, rather than having a whole lot of pre recorded, on-demand content, which can be valuable, we think that there's a whole lot more value in providing a lot of collaborative training for two reasons. Number one, research shows tends to lead to much better learning outcomes for the people that are participating. And number two, it creates this really interesting pull effect where, when the individual contributors from the companies that we work with start going to our training sessions, they want to continue going to more. Because if we're doing a session on negotiation, for example, for account executives, within that session, there may be 100 AES from a few 100 different companies that we work with, not only learning from the facilitator, but also learning from each other, right? So bringing this back to to your point, when you take a look at number one that the cadence of training programs that we're offering five to seven programs per week, week in and week out at all throughout the year, it does allow us to invest more time over the course of rather than just a single session, but a series of multiple sessions on the skill of like deal management as we as we talked about before. And within that curriculum on deal management, we will have dedicated 60 minute courses on how to write a compelling business case or mutual action plan. Right, you know how to multi thread a little bit more effectively, how to drive urgency throughout the sales cycle in an organic and meaningful way, as opposed to manufacturing fake urgency by saying, like, Hey, if you buy by the end of this month, what will give you a discount?

Mark Shriner [28:27]

Do you know that's, that's another one. I mean, you probably can come up with a better way to summarize my thoughts around that, like, but it's just, you're trying to manipulate me. Man, would you just stop it, you know, because these days, almost, it's funny. It seems like these days that at the end of every, you know, demo or trial, they always want to come back and say, Hey, if you sign by the end of this week, or if you, you know, I'll shop with my boss. But I'm pretty sure if you, if you sign by the end of the month, I can get you this, this and this. And it's like, you know, I think we're starting the relationship off on the wrong way. I prefer that we just have transparent, open discussion. And don't want to feel like I'm being kind of really shoved into a deal, you know. And what do you advise companies in that scenario?

Matt Green [29:15]

Yeah, well, you used the word a moment ago, transparent. I'm not sure if you're familiar with Todd Capone or his book, The transparency sale, but he has a really great framework, which we do bring him in to teach to the sales assembly ecosystem throughout the year. But it is, again, as you can imagine, this whole concept around transparency and communication, especially when it comes to negotiation. So his framework would essentially maintain that you as the seller, you should always keep in mind that there are different levers, right? So for example, if we're getting to the point late in the sales process where, where it is time to talk about the commercial structure, and you're saying, like, hey, you know, well, you know, can I get a discount on this? Or the other thing, you know, the response is, okay, you know, the price is the price. But you know, if we are going to provide some type of flexibility on the pricing, here's what we're going to need in exchange, you know, here's what's important to our business, right? One thing right could be important to our business is length of the contract, right? Sure. So, I mean, you know, if you're willing to go for two years as opposed to one. Yeah, we, you know, we could pay you in the form of a discount of 10% off of the off of the contract price, if you're willing to commit to longer. Another thing that we're interested in is having more seats, as opposed to less. So sure, if you buy more volume, we're going to be able to pay you in the form of a discount of another 10% off the deal, and just going through that, down that checklist like that, and again, laying it out clear as day, so that you and the buyer could come do the agreement that makes sense for the both of you is going to be much more effective than trying to manufacture fake urgency by saying, like, I don't know if I get this approved, but maybe you can sign by August 30. You know, we could get you 20% off.  

Mark Shriner [31:03]

Yeah, that's totally agree with you on that, and that's awesome that you're kind of training that in that direction. If we go back to the mode or the style of training you mentioned, there could be, like, 100 different participants in a online training program. It's live, but it is online. How do you provide opportunities for interaction? Or do you is it via chat? Or do you do, what do you call it, breakout rooms? Or how does that work?

Matt Green [31:30]

Yeah. So, we do make sure that as a point for all the training programs, that there is always going to be some level of interaction, right? And we have tested. So we do all these all the programs via zoom. We have tested doing small breakout rooms over the past few years. What we found tends to be a little bit more effective and a little bit more seamless is having just interaction throughout the session with a large group, right? So that will come in the form of the facilitator engaging with attendees in a one on one fashion while the whole group is listening. They'll also come in the form of attendees engaging with other attendees, right? And this is where the collective mind share comes to bring a whole lot of benefit. Because going back to your example a few moments ago, if we're talking about templates for business case, right? You know, we may have someone, a rep in the room, share what worked for him or her. Then you may have someone else come up in and say, like, hey, you know, yeah, we've done something that looks sort of like that, but we made this one change, and it works so much better for XYZ reasons, right? So, in addition to the structured facilitation, you have this really great level of osmosis that comes along just by having all these really great individual contributors in the room who, again, are all doing the exact same job, just the different B2B tech companies.  

Mark Shriner [32:53]

Yeah, it's interesting you say that, because I start almost every training program that I've conducted. I start off by saying, Hey, if you expect me or just any other trainer to come in here and tell you how to do your jobs, it's not going to work. What we have to do is, we have to harness our collective experiences and know how. And we have to, we have to create a framework that we can share and collaboratively, really learn from each other's, you know, success stories, you know, challenges that we faced, maybe, you know, things that we've done wrong, but we can learn from that, and ideate upon all that. And so it's hugely important, I think, to get that kind of network effect. Sounds like you're doing that very effectively. Let me ask you this, though. I mean, some companies might be reluctant to have their sales people. What's the word participating in a training program with the competition? Because you mentioned there could be multiple companies. So how do you deal with that scenario?  

Matt Green [33:58]

Yeah, that's we get asked that question a lot, as you can imagine. What we found in doing this over the course of seven years is that the companies that, and I won't mind using names, but companies like outreach and sales off right companies, you know, direct competitors, and there was a time where they were, you know, going at each other publicly. We worked with both of those organizations, what we found is that when you got the ICS, but just as importantly, the leaders in the same room with each other, but you know, the guard comes down, right? And like, we're all trying to do the same thing, right? You know, we're all here to better ourselves. So sure, you might have some companies that might say, like, hey, you know, we want to make sure that our reps are not talking about, like, internal, you know, roadmaps, you know, product initiatives that we're working on to give any insight into the competition, but if they're all there just to learn about how to become better negotiators, right? Or how to become better. Qualification, we see the guard coming down pretty quickly, and they're more than happy to engage with each other.

Mark Shriner [35:06]

Okay, that makes sense. Let's, let's take it to, I guess, take it even further back, and in terms of how, take me through, like how sales assembly does its outbound sales, and what the different meetings look like. And, you know, and I mean, you're running a sales team, so do your sales people take these courses as well? And, you know.

Matt Green [35:31]

Yeah, eat our own dog food, so to speak. So, our gourmet cookie, gourmet cookie, exactly, yeah. So, our outreach, if you want to call it, that is so what, where we've never found success personally as an organization, is with traditional cold outreach, where we tend to do really well, is leveraging social, specifically LinkedIn, just because, again, we sell to revenue leaders and B2B Tech. A lot of our buyers are on that platform. And as we spoke about earlier, it is really organic way for us to provide value, build name recognition before going in and asking for a meeting. Because, let's be honest, very, very, very few people or organizations are actively searching right now for like, hey. You know, I could really use some skill development for my team with the limited budget that I have so we leverage social I like to think in a relatively effective way to just build the awareness again, not only of us, but you know, when we make posts or drop into people's comments about like, Hey, have you tried this? They our buyers look at it and say, like, Oh, that's interesting. What is the sales assembly thing that I keep seeing on there? So we have some systems built internally that gives us pretty good clarity to how often we've interacted with our buyers on LinkedIn, our potential buyers on LinkedIn, before we go in and actually ask for a meeting, right? Because we do want to make sure that we have laid the groundwork to an extent we leverage in person, in person meetings to a pretty significant degree. We bounce around to different cities every month across the US, and we put together dinners for the VP and C level revenue leaders of B2B tech companies in the area, vast majority of which are going to be prospective members of sales assembly. And to be clear, the purpose of those dinners is not to talk about sales assembly. It's about building relationships, right? Meeting people face to face, building some sort of authentic human relationship that we could then see if, afterwards, there's an opportunity. You know, if I, if Mark, if, if you, if I fly to, let's say, New York City or Seattle, you know, if I fly to Bellevue, and I put together a dinner for 2025, VPN, C level, revenue leaders, and you're in that room, and you and I, we have a great conversation, great meal over the course two to three hours. When I email you a couple days later and say, okay, Mark, you know, would you be open to catching up? You know, hear a little bit more about sales assembly, going back to what we spoke about earlier, you're going to be much more inclined to say, Yeah, sure. Why not? Absolutely. So leveraging those two things together, heavy on social, heavy on providing value, and really heavily leaning on in person interactions. That's worked really well for us as far as getting meetings with the buyers that we're looking to get in front of.  

Mark Shriner [38:33]

Yeah, it makes sense. And one of the I guess the things I like about your platform, or the way you deliver it is, if I was, if I was a traditional content provider, and it was just one way content. So, you can go and take this online, digital course. People, some people are self motivated, and they'll go through it. Some people just realize they've got to check the box and get through the course, because there's no real interaction there. So that interaction is important, but it's also important. I would think, for you the content developer, because my, one of my questions was going to be, how do you come up with, you know, new content ideas, but if you're actually delivering the courses live, you know, your content almost develops itself. Because, you know, two years ago, you might not have heard about some of these sales enablement tools. They weren't even developed yet, and everybody's asking about it, which tools should we use? And they're like, well, maybe we should, you know, do a module on the prop the appropriate use of tools, tool selection and tool usage, I don't know, but you're, you know, you're constantly there. Is that part of your process?

Matt Green [39:36]

It is. Yeah. So, two things on that. Number 1, the vast majority of the facilitators of the programs that we're hosting throughout the year are going to be other operators from across the ecosystem, right? So, for example, later on this month, in a few weeks, we have a session on again, driving urgency throughout enterprise level deals. That's led by the head of enterprise sales at Sprout Social, right? So, she not only is going to be able to bring a perspective of like, Hey, I'm going to share with you what's worked for us, but not only is worked historically, is still working today, right? Because I'm still in the role, right? So I'm still working on this stuff with my team. To your point, nature of sales has changed, you know, God, I mean, over the past two years. Just think about how much has changed over the past three quarters, right, as far as what works and what doesn't work in BB sales. So having operators come in to provide that real world like, Hey, here's what's working today helps us keep our content relevant. But also the second thing that we do is, every month we have standing what we call peer group calls. And what a peer group call is it's just a zoom call. We have 12 different zoom calls a month, one for the VPs of sales and CROs of all the companies that we work with, one for the enablement leaders, one for the AES, one for the BDRs, so on and so forth. And these calls that we do every month are not training. It's just a forum for all these people that have the exact same job title responsibilities to get together in a room, raise their hand and say, Hey, here's what I'm working on. Here's some struggle with, how would you handle this? How would you handle that? And it's given the opportunity to exchange ideas and best practices, as you can imagine, just overhearing the signals month after month from what hundreds of people are struggling with at the companies that we work with, that also gives us some really great insight into like, hey, we need to probably find a way to solve for this, because we hear a lot of AEs, BDRs and CSMs continue to struggle with it month in month out.  

Mark Shriner [41:49]

That's awesome! You know, because your focus is in B2B technology, that's your focus market. I'm assuming that you have some markets that are very active versus other markets that are maybe not so active. I mean, if I'm on the West Coast, so, you know, the Pacific Northwest, there's, there's a big B2B, kind of technology startup environment, a lot of SMBs as well. And then if you go down to Silicon Valley, Los Angeles, what areas are you, because, when you fly out and you do these dinners, what areas are you primarily spending your time in? Mostly spending your time in?  

Matt Green [42:25]

Yeah, the cities will be some of the ones that you could probably guess. You know, here in Chicago, course, New York, San Francisco, Austin, Denver and Boston, so that's where we'll do a lot of stuff in person. But as far as the teams that we train virtually all across North America and, to an extent, Western Europe, right? We have a lot of teams that engage with our trainings that are based in London and the western part of Europe. You know, it's interesting just over the past couple of years, you know, huge disparity between where the company may be based, but where the actual individuals are within the companies. Because everyone is so spread out, we've made sure to make our trainings, from a timing perspective, conducive for both North American and Western European audiences.

Mark Shriner [43:18]

Makes a lot of sense. Okay, let me ask you just a couple more questions here, in terms of your own personal development and growth. You know, where do you where do you go? What do you do? Are you a reader, podcast or seminars? What do you do?  

Matt Green [43:34]

Yeah, I'm big reader. I like to think, and by reading, I mean audio books. I'll always have audible. Got the monthly subscription, so I get a new book every month, big in the podcast as well. And I do have sort of a cheat code, because all I'm doing day in and day out is talking with other revenue leaders in B2B Tech by function of my job, right? And hosting that monthly peer group that we have for the VPs of sales and CROs, where 3040, 50 of these people are on talking about what's working what's not working in their respective world. So, combining all these three things provides me, I like to think, a good amount of insight into best practices and trends, so much so that I actually have started making it a point to not consume sales related books or sales related podcasts, because I do need some sense of balance.  

Mark Shriner [44:33]

Exactly. It's funny too. And I think there's some great sales books out there, but I think at this point in my career, I don't want to sound like I know it all, but I've covered enough of them. And I also look for the variety. I also find that some, some of the books are kind of formulaic, where they spend so much time talking about we found this problem, and we did this research, and they give you all the background. And if you just cut to like the final three chapters, you know. Yeah, you could, you could, kind of can condense it down, but if we talk about that, if you were going to make a book, recommendation doesn't have to be sales related. Could be just something that helped you. It motivated you. Like, give me a couple recommendations.  

Matt Green [45:13]

Yeah, two recommendations. One of them I alluded to earlier was the transparency sale by Todd Capone. The other one, much newer, is called selling with by Nate Nasrallah. When you talk about just the entire conversation that we had about 10 minutes ago, selling to champions or selling to buyers when you're not in the room, that book should be considered as sort of a Bible for how to do that, my opinion? Oh yeah, it's, it's well written, extremely tactical, all about templates, you know, things that you can put into practice straight away.

Mark Shriner [45:49]

That's, that's awesome. And what about, how do you stay? Because I'm really getting into the subject of energy these days, like, you know, because we all have, everybody says time is your greatest asset, I would argue that your energy is actually pretty important as well, because it's what you can get done in those limited number of hours that we have every day. So, what do you do? What energizes you?

Matt Green [46:16]

Interesting questions. So, what energizes me is, you know, it sounds a little bit hokey, but I'll, I'll run through the list anyway, outside of what I do, you know, through work, I do tremendously enjoy the conversation, especially one on one conversations I have with revenue leaders throughout the day. To your point, a few moments ago, about balance. Big thing that energizes me is spending more time with my son, allowing myself to recharge and refresh, at least to an extent, you know, depending on what we're doing. But also, yeah, I mean, I, you know, I'm not, I'm the furthest thing from, you know, those people that talk about, like, biohacking and stuff like that, but I do believe it's important, especially for people that are getting to our rifled ages, basic things like eating healthy and working out a lot, those are also two things that I'm big believers in. I like to think that I do relatively well, and have for the past 20 years that has allowed me to an extent when building this business, while also raising a son, and, you know, having a family and all that could set all the other life priorities, maintain some level of energy that I need to not only get through the day, but get through the day in an effective and efficient manner.

Mark Shriner [47:38]

I totally agree with you there, and I say that, you know, sales can be incredibly enjoyable, but it's also it can be, it can be difficult, you know, and you get more nos than you do yeses, and you have, you know, there's a lot of things that we can't control. They're out of our control. Macroeconomic environment, the competition, whether or not we ship on time, don't ship on time. And if you let that stuff wear on you, it can really take you down. But if you can keep yourself focused on the positive things in your life and stay energized and then celebrate those wins, and then they come in, hey, it can be a lot of fun. So yeah, well, Matt, I, you know, I've really enjoyed this conversation, and I am actually looking forward to seeing some kind of samples of your content. I'm very curious right now. I'm sure you've got some kind of program that you could send my way. But thank you so much for coming on The Grow Fast Podcast.

Matt Green [48:31]

Yeah, no. Thank you for having me, Mark. I really enjoyed this conversation. I appreciate you sharing the space with me.  

Mark Shriner [48:37]

Likewise. Cheers.

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