This is the transcript of this episode:

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Mark Shriner [0:01]:
Welcome to the Grow Past 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 Mario, how are you?

Mario Martinez Jr [0:16]:
Mark, I'm doing fantastic. Thanks for having me, buddy.

Mark Shriner [0:19]:
Hey, my pleasure. Hey, I think you are in the Bay Area.

Mario Martinez Jr [0:22]:
I am, right outside of San Francisco in Lafayette, California. If you don't know where Lafayette is, it's right next to Walnut Creek.

Mark Shriner [0:29]:
Awesome. It's a great place. Has spring arrived yet, or is it starting to?

Mario Martinez Jr [0:33]:
Spring is in full swing. Unfortunately, it's a little early. I was telling my wife just this morning, we have this beautiful passionfruit vine that we planted a little over a year ago. We planted it in October. It’s weathered the storm, it survived, it grew about 25 feet wide, massive, and it was just a little small vine before. It’s an aggressive grower. The downside is it produced a bunch of passion fruit, but because we’re not in the warmest climate, it’s taken a long time for that fruit to ripen. Usually, in the February timeframe, at the latest like March 1, you’re supposed to cut it all the way back by 90% so it can regrow all the new growth. Unfortunately, because the fruit was green and not purple, I actually couldn’t cut it back. And now all the new growth is coming in. So I don’t know what to do.

Mark Shriner [1:26]:
It’s kind of awesome when you plant something that grows that much because it makes you feel like, “Hey, man, I know what I’m doing. I’ve got farmer skills.”

Mario Martinez Jr [1:33]:
Exactly. In this case, it’s all the genetics of the plant.

Mark Shriner [1:37]:
Well, hey, I gotta say, as I was prepping for the show, I was looking at your LinkedIn profile and some of your other web pages, and you've got some serious sales chops. In addition to being the host of the Modern Selling Podcast, which has over 262 episodes and is ranked in the top 1.5% of all podcasts globally, according to Listen Notes, you’re also the CEO and founder of Vengreso, which we’re going to talk about. By the way, you’re on several advisory boards, and I looked at your recommendations and it just kept going. It was like an endless scroll of all your colleagues, former colleagues, and people that you’ve had in your workshops and training programs. So, you know, it’s a real honor to have you on the show.

Mario Martinez Jr [2:22]:
Mark, thank you very much. I appreciate that. It’s been a fun track. I’m honored to have had so many great things happen in my career, as well as meeting so many great people that I’ve encountered and had the chance to mentor or be mentored by.

Mark Shriner [2:39]:
Yeah, that’s one of the things I like about sales. You get a chance to meet a lot of people, and you can learn from those people, and you can help those people. What I want to talk to you about today are some of the different sales enablement platforms that are out there, because it’s becoming increasingly super important and almost a necessity to keep abreast of what’s available and figure out what platforms to use and how to use them. I also want to talk a little bit about social selling and maybe some other sales topics. But before we do that, I mean, clearly, you have a lot of passion about selling. There are people who avoid sales at all costs, and then there are some people who are reluctant salespeople. Some thrive at selling but don’t give a lot of deep thought to it. Then there are people like you that obviously give a lot of thought and time to what it takes to be successful in sales. Then you develop programs and platforms for people to be successful. Where does that passionate interest come from?

Mario Martinez Jr [3:42]:
Well, that’s a really deep question. I don’t know if I’ve ever thought about where the passion comes from. It’s just always something that I’ve done right. My first sales job was given to me by a gentleman by the name of Hunter Anderson. I worked at Ritz Camera Centers. If anybody’s listening and they’re old enough to know, we used to take our 35mm film and bring it to places like Walgreens or Costco to develop the pictures. Ritz Camera Centers was one of those companies. I was a photo finisher, and I got accepted in my senior year to Cal Berkeley. Unfortunately, I had very little money and came from a poor background. As a result, I had to pay my own way through college. My first year, I applied for a couple of hundred scholarships and ended up getting enough money to pay my way. So I had to work my first year to pay for my second year. I applied for a transfer. I was in Concord, California, and I applied for a transfer as a photo finisher to the Berkeley store. Hunter Anderson came in and said, “You know, can we talk?” I said, “Sure.” He was the regional director of the retail stores, maybe a couple of hundred stores or so. He said, “I received a request for a transfer and I’ve got good news and bad news. Which one do you want first?” I said, “I’m always a bad news guy. I prefer to hear the bad news first.” He said, “The bad news is I can’t approve your transfer.” My heart just sunk to the bottom of my stomach. I was panicking and sheer fear crossed my face. I was like, “What do you mean you can’t approve it? Why not?” Hunter said, “Well, I’ve got some questions for you that I need to understand.” I said, “Sure.” So he opened up the book. It was the book of volume sales. This was the old school days, you remember, Mark, where we had the perforated tabs you could pull off the side of the page and all those little dots?

Mark Shriner [5:35]:
Oh yeah.

Mario Martinez Jr [5:36]:
These are the old school binders, right? So anyway, he opened up the book and started showing me my volume of sales closed. Now mind you, I was a part-time high school kid working at one of the smallest Ritz Camera stores in the entire region that he oversaw. What he pointed out to me was that I was in the top three in sales as a part-time associate. Now mind you, I was not even a salesperson, I was just a photo finisher, right? So he asked me, “I need to understand what you’re doing.” I said, “What do you mean what am I doing?” Immediately, I felt like he was attacking me, in the sense that I was doing something shady. That’s what I felt originally, like as if maybe I was faking the volume, putting data in that shouldn’t be there. We went back and forth, back and forth, and I was like, “I don’t understand what you’re asking me or what you’re insinuating. Are you saying that I’ve done something wrong?” He said, “No, no, just take a step back. You haven’t done anything wrong yet. What I’m trying to figure out is how you, as a part-time photo finisher, are leading the region for the last year in sales in the top three. I’m trying to figure that out myself. What are you doing?” I had no idea what I was doing. I didn’t understand what he was asking for. He said, “Alright, walk me through. I come in as a brand new person into the store, ready to pick up my photofinishing. What do you do?” I basically said, “Alright, so when I’m doing photofinishing, I take all the pictures because we have to sort through every single one of them, make sure it’s got the right colors, magenta, blue, cyan. I pull out all the right ones. If I can color correct, I color correct. But some of them are just messed up because they used the wrong equipment to take the picture, like it’s a blur of their kid at the soccer game. I put all the bad pictures on the top. They would pull them out and say, ‘Oh, Johnny, oh no, this picture didn’t come out.’ So I would say, ‘Are these pictures of things that you’re trying to take pictures of consistently?’ They would say, ‘Yeah, of course.’ I’d ask, ‘Okay, what type of equipment do you have?’ They’d tell me the equipment. ‘Do you want to actually have these pictures come out correctly?’ ‘Yes, of course I do.’ ‘Okay, well, you have the wrong equipment.’ So I would just walk them through what was wrong. I found the problem and walked through what was wrong. At the end, they would say, ‘Well, what do I need to do to take shots that come out clear?’ I’d say, ‘Here’s the equipment that you need.’ By the time that was done, honestly, they were walking out with about $700 worth of merchandise—equipment, warranty, film. Because I was wearing the white lab coat, I was the technician.”

Mark Shriner [8:51]:
So you were the camera doctor.

Mario Martinez Jr [8:53]:
Exactly. I’m the camera doctor. At the end of that whole discussion, he said to me, “So what you’re telling me is all you were doing was helping a customer.”

Mark Shriner [9:01]:
Imagine that.

Mario Martinez Jr [9:03]:
I sat back and thought, “I guess so, if that’s the way you want to look at it.” He said, “That is the way to look at it. All you’re doing is helping a customer, seeing a problem and helping them fix it.” So, to fully answer your question, a long-winded one, what drives the passion is that he ended up telling me, “I can’t approve your transfer to the Berkeley store, which was the number two store in the region in terms of volume of sales. Actually, it was the largest store in the entire region. I can’t approve it.” He asked me what the good news was. I said, “Alright, what’s the good news?” He said, “I will approve you going in as a sales associate.” I was like, “Oh, okay.”

Mark Shriner [9:42]:
Congratulations, I guess. I’m a salesperson now.

Mario Martinez Jr [9:44]:
He said, “You get a whole $1.25 raise on your base salary.”

Mark Shriner [9:49]:
Were you getting a commission or were you incentivized in some way in that role?

Mario Martinez Jr [9:55]:
In the new role, I would get commissions, a percentage of budget. In the former role, they would give spiffs, so even a photo finisher could get a spiff. It was like a 10 cent spiff on an extra roll of film or something like that. My commissions now all of a sudden went up, and that’s actually how I started making money to pay for my second year, through Ritz Camera Centers and selling there. Eventually, I was moved from the Berkeley store within four months to the highest-grossing store in California, which was the Rockridge store. They moved me over there as a part-time seller, and I stayed in the top five always for the next year that I worked for them. That’s where my kickoff was. I guess the answer to your question about what drives the passion is that if you think about the art of selling, sales is the art of helping. That’s really what it is. So I’m always looking for—you said, you know, the camera doctor—I’m looking for the problem, I want to understand the pain, I want to understand the issue so that I can help apply a solution. And probably what drives me is…

Mark Shriner [11:02]:
You were asking questions, asking questions, asking questions, and then trying to figure out what they needed and offer a solution. So that’s awesome. I, you know, back in the day, I remember dropping off the film and having to wait like a week or 10 days, and it seemed like it would take forever. And then somebody came out with this Express 24-hour service, and we were like, “Oh my God, you can get it back in 24 hours.” And, you know, obviously, it’s a different world today. The other thing that’s different today is the tools that we use for selling. It used to be back then, you know, if you were in a shop, people would come in, but if you were doing outbound sales, you would have your phone, and then we had fax machines. Some people would send faxes, but it was basically the phone, and then maybe a CRM tool, just very basic stuff back then. Now, I don’t think you can survive doing outbound sales or any type of sales without some of these new sales enablement platforms. So I’d like to talk about that because, in our lifetimes, the landscape for selling has changed so much, and tools are becoming increasingly important. Let’s start off with Vengreso, for example, because I am a neophyte user of TextExpander. The reason I started using TextExpander is that I was listening to Tim Ferriss’ “Tools of Titans,” and he is one of the people he interviews in there, talks about it. So I started to use it, but I don’t feel like I’m optimizing it. So why don’t you talk a little bit about Vengreso, TextExpander, and some of the kinds of use cases?

Mario Martinez Jr [12:41]:
Sure. This is very much a workflow tool for an individual seller or business owner, for sure. We actually developed a whole other use case for non-sellers. About 50% of our users are accounts payable, doctors, lawyers, physicians, physical therapists, mortgage brokers, real estate agents. Essentially, the idea behind a text expander like Vengreso created a tool called FlyMessage. We are actually the fourth largest tool out there in the market. We’re the up-and-coming. Right now, we’re sitting in the contender spot, actually. The idea for a text expander tool is you and I usually have snippets of text, messaging templates, those types of things that we use over and over and over again that we have stored on a Google Doc, Word Doc, OneNote, Evernote, Notepad, notebook, draft email, or worse yet, we hunt and peck for it in our Sent folder. Every single time we go to find this content, it takes us anywhere between 30 seconds to up to 15 minutes to find this material.

Mark Shriner [13:44]:
It’s the most frustrating 15 minutes ever because you know you have it, and you’re like, “Where is it?”

Mario Martinez Jr [13:50]:
Exactly right. The idea behind a text expander—TextExpander is actually the original founder of this technology from 18 years ago, about 19 years ago when they started the company. It took them 19 years to actually get into a swing, and they actually got funding, which they got about two years ago with about $40 million in funding. So it took them a long time to build up their platform to about 400,000 users. Subsequently, what they did was take all these snippets, put them into a platform, the cloud, and then with a few short keystrokes, you can build it out anywhere. The best part is it can be used across any platform. So with FlyMessage, what we were doing in our sales prospecting training, which is what Vengreso LLC was known for, we became the largest digital sales prospecting training company, really helping sellers and business owners focus on how to utilize digital channels like LinkedIn, video, and email to engage with their target buyers. One of the problems we were having was we had a playbook, a 27-page playbook that we gave to our enterprise clients. Inside there were 60 different sales scripts, everything from a cold email outreach to how to wish someone a happy work anniversary and convert it into a meeting. All of these things we did, we had them on a Word Doc. What we noticed is our clients like Cisco, HP, ADP, even the world’s largest vanilla extract company with their 15 sellers, Virginia Dare, they were taking these playbooks, and they had the Word document, and they would have that plus one from their manager, plus one from the enablement team. They may have some of these other engagement tools that had templates inside them, but the problem with all of these solutions was that generally, it was a document, or it worked only in one application. We were creating a problem for our sellers, so we created FlyMessage. We were actually using a tool called Auto Text Expander, which was acquired by GetMagical, one of our competitors. It was a basic, simple tool, and I was like, “We could build this ourselves and control all the content in the templates since those other tools didn’t have templates inside them.” So we did that, and we built a tool, we put all of our templates inside there so that when we onboarded training users to go through our training, they would have access to the templates, and with a few short keystrokes, they could build it out on Salesforce, LinkedIn, Outlook Online, Gmail, SalesLoft, Outreach, anywhere and ubiquitously. That was the idea behind FlyMessage: put it as a text expander. Then we said, “Wait a minute, greater than 50% of our user base is the sales line of business,” which naturally made sense because most sellers are utilizing templates or at least some sort of template they can modify and customize to an individual. We started looking at, “Alright, great, we’re saving people time. That’s phenomenal. We’re saving roughly about 20 hours a month by using a text expander so they can quickly deploy these messages anywhere online.”

Mark Shriner [17:03]:
Before you go any further, could you just give an example of one or two kinds of messages? Because I think we’re deep in it, we understand it, but for people who are listening in and aren’t familiar with text expander, just give one or two quick, simple use cases.

Mario Martinez Jr [17:17]:
Yeah, so in FlyMessage, you can program something, a keyboard shortcut called, I have one that’s “dash BAM” for book a meeting. So “dash BAM.” Now when I type out “dash BAM,” it says, “Hey, [First Name], happy to host a conversation. In order to avoid email scheduling volleyball, I’ve attached my link here. If that works for you, go ahead and click on it. Otherwise, send me three dates and times or your link, and I’ll be happy to schedule from there. I look forward to talking for the next 30 minutes. Mario.” Normally, that would take me 60 to 90 seconds, maybe 30 to 90 seconds depending on how fast I type. But if I type in “dash BAM” anywhere online—LinkedIn, Outlook, Gmail, Salesforce, Outreach—it automatically populates that entire script. All I have to do is double-click for the first name and change it to Mark, Bailey, Susie, Mary, etc.

Mark Shriner [18:15]:
You know, you talked about the time savings if you were to type it out yourself. But even if you were to copy and paste it, in my experience, that takes more time. Then you have formatting issues because every time you copy and paste, if you copy something from a Word document into LinkedIn, or from an email message into LinkedIn, it just messes everything up. It doesn’t really matter what platform, it’s always going to have some issues. So what you’re talking about is it comes out, it’s there with the formatting.

Mario Martinez Jr [18:46]:
Yes, as a matter of fact, we actually are the only text expansion tool, FlyMessage, to do the following. Number one, things that you have like hyperlinked and images, none of the other expansion tools, when you use that in rich text format, it builds out correctly. Great, hallelujah. But when you move that over to a simple text messaging platform like LinkedIn messaging, where you can’t have a hyperlink and you can’t attach an image, we’re the only one on the market, which is why our sales use case is so important, to auto-convert all of those images into a link. We’re the only one on the market that if you have a word hyperlinked, we will take out, strip out that URL from the word and put it in parenthesis next to the word.

Mark Shriner [19:20]:
That’s awesome.

Mario Martinez Jr [19:21]:
That’s really important because we found this as a use case specific to the sales line of business. So as we started on this path, on this journey, we began seeing that, first off, there was a whole product lead growth aspect to our product, meaning non-sellers, which represent a little under 50% of our user base, but it represents only about 15% or 20% of our total revenue. The other portion of our revenue started coming from the sales line of business. We saw that what we could do is take our legacy on-demand training, which we grew to become the most well-known for sales prospecting training, and bring that over to FlyMessage. We created a FlyLearning component. FlyLearning is all around 14 hours of sales prospecting education for the individual or for the sales team that teaches you how to write messaging and how to engage with your buyer online. Then we give you a tool, FlyMessage, the text expansion portion to quickly deploy that messaging anywhere online in that one-to-one hand-to-hand combat. Then we also noticed a very specific problem that our sellers were having. We taught you how to engage with a target buyer, but every time Mark wanted to sell to Mario, you would go to Mario’s profile, you’d go to his posts, and then look at my posts and determine which one you could comment on. So you’d watch, you have to read every single post. Then as you read every single post, you started thinking, “What could I write?” Then you selected one, and you wrote something, and that would take you anywhere between six minutes to 12 minutes per post per customer. So we said, “Wait a minute, we’re typing and writing templates. What if we just incorporated AI to write for a seller a response to a LinkedIn comment, or sorry, to a LinkedIn post via comment?” Our whole impetus was to save sellers time. That’s what we started doing. We took seven years of our training, brought it into AI, and now directly embedded into LinkedIn, if you download FlyMessage, any post written in up to 39 languages, you can utilize FlyEngage, which is a feature under FlyMessage, and click optimistic, thoughtful, or curious reply, and we will write a response back to you in up to 39 languages for you to the author of that post. What that did was take a six to 12-minute process and think about this, Mark, if you were prospecting to 50 prospects in a day, and you had to go do LinkedIn commenting, six to 12 minutes would be 6.5 hours to 12.5, or 12 hours. That’s how long it would take you to go through and do LinkedIn commenting. What was happening was, in our interview, in our study, companies like the ones we have trained—Cisco, ADP, HP, the mid-sized companies that we worked with—we trained them. What we discovered was, nobody was commenting. All sellers began doing was like, like, like, like, like, thinking that that would get the attention of the buyer.

Mark Shriner [21:26]:
Yeah.

Mario Martinez Jr [21:27]:
We went back and said, “Why are you not doing this?” Number one reason on the board, top answer, Family Feud: it takes too much time. Number two reason on the board: because I didn’t know what to write. Number three answer on the board: because I wasn’t sure if what I was writing was appropriate. So we took a six to 12-minute process and brought that into under 90 seconds. In some cases, our users report less than 30 seconds to engage with a comment. We’re now writing insightful comments that are engaging with buyers, and we’ll never—this is important—auto-post. We’ll never auto-post. Then we said, “Wait a minute, there is something more important here,” and this is the fourth item that FlyMessage now delivers to the sales community, and that is, “Hey, there’s an unknown secret. I don’t know if you know about this, Mark, but if you and I connect on LinkedIn and message one time back and forth, I message you, you reply. For the next three weeks, you will see my content in your newsfeed.”

Mark Shriner [24:15]:
Wow. Okay, that’s worth the price of admission for this podcast right there. I think, I mean, I wasn’t aware of that. I’m on LinkedIn every day, just like everybody else, it seems like in the whole world. That’s huge. Please continue because I know where you’re going with this. You want to semi-automate that process, right?

Mario Martinez Jr [24:36]:
Well, not automate it. What we want to do is make sure that the technique—so if I’m going to connect with you, I have to give you a reason to want to connect with me. That’s the common thing. That’s the FlyEngage. Then you look at my profile, or you reply back to me. Phenomenal when that happens. That’s called a trigger event. Now I go to your profile, I send a personalized connection request. I use FlyMessage, the text expander, to do “dash Li connect,” LinkedIn connect, and it puts out a template. Inside it says, “Hey, [First Name], thanks so much for viewing my profile and for engaging on this post. As a leader in the space, I would love to be connected with you,” or whatever the template might say. Now you do that, you hit send. Now Mark connects with me. Alright, what do we teach in FlyLearning in our training? We teach you that once you connect with that person, you must at that moment in time welcome them to your network or say thank you or give them a reason. But what most sellers do wrong is they accept a customer or buyer accepts a connection request, and they immediately try to pitch. They may try to book a meeting. Wrong. What you do now is use the FlyMessage text expansion, and you send a—my shortcuts are “THX conn ect,” one word, thanks connect. It has a template inside. It says, “Hey, [First Name], thanks so much for connecting,” and then you have a line for personalization, right? What was the reason why? Maybe there was a trigger event, maybe there wasn’t. Then it says, “Generally, when I reach out to IT leaders, sales leaders, marketing leaders, whatever they might be, they are usually trying to solve this particular problem. That problem might be in the case of sales, trying to book more meetings for their sellers. Directly below is an article I thought might be of value to you and your sales team. I encourage you to send it out. It’s how to get a 60% yes rate to a meeting.” Now if you’re a sales leader, and you read that, and you know you have a problem with prospecting, which I haven’t met a sales leader who hasn’t had a problem with prospecting, then most likely, you’re going to see that and say, “Oh, well, that’s interesting. What is this article about?” Boom, you click on it. Now what happens is I send you this article and then close out with a question, “By the way, are these one of the challenges that you guys are dealing with?” Now what I’m looking for is an opportunity to solicit engagement. Hopefully, they respond back to me on LinkedIn. But if they don’t, and I’ve done marketing right, guess what happens? I brought them to my website, we now cookie their computer. Now marketing begins to do advertising on the marketing side. But on the sales side, they might say, “Yes, thanks so much for connecting. I do have this problem. I’ll take a look at the article.” Boom, right there, at that moment in time. Now if I’m smart, all my comments and all of my posts have an opportunity to show up in Mark’s newsfeed for the next three weeks. So what does that mean? It means that not only do I reach out to connect and personalize, not only do I send you a welcome message with a valuable piece of content, but I also then should be commenting on other people’s posts so that you see that, and I should be posting content so that while you’re sitting on the toilet going through your newsfeed on LinkedIn, you see Mario Martinez’s thought leadership. That’s why we created the fourth product inside of FlyMessage’s feature set. It’s an AI social post generator called FlyPosts. Putting that all together, it can help you write that thought leadership content you’re looking for. You literally use our prompt, we put a prompt up on the window right there on “Start a Post,” and right inside, you change the topic, put whatever topic you want inside, and AI will write a post for you. Then you can add your color, your story, your tags, whatever you want to add. That process might take a wild guess—the average length of time it took in our study for a seller to write a post, guess how many minutes that was?

Mark Shriner [28:44]:
I’m going to say less than a couple because you’re using AI, so go ahead.

Mario Martinez Jr [28:48]:
Well, no, no, no. Before AI.

Mark Shriner [28:51]:
If somebody has to write their own post, definitely more than 10.

Mario Martinez Jr [28:54]:
32 minutes to write a post. So what do sales leaders want? They don’t want their sellers spending 30 minutes writing social media content. Nobody wants that. Why did it take that long? Because nobody’s been trained as a social media marketing manager. They had no idea what was right, what was wrong, what to say, what not to say, how to get the algorithm to respond. So what we did was put our seven years of content training for sellers into the AI, and now we’re writing the posts for you. That process went from 32 minutes down to less than nine minutes for an individual seller, and sometimes even shorter than that for an individual seller. The point is, if you’re not thinking of this as an omnichannel approach, meaning you’ve got your phone calls taking place using tools that you can use for phone calling, you’ve got your email cadence going using sales engagement tools like SalesLoft, Outreach, Apollo, you name it. Then you’ve got your social environment taking place. You cannot do social selling hand-to-hand one-to-one on every single prospect, you need tools to enable that. So what we did with FlyMessage was we said, “Us, TextExpander, TextBlaze, GetMagical—all four of us say the number one buyer of our product is the sales line of business.” Well, for us, we are the 800-pound gorilla in the sales space. So we created workflow tools that allow you to quickly get the messaging out, quickly write messaging for your buyers on their posts in their language, and quickly help you write your social media posts so that you can stay in that person’s newsfeed because those first three weeks are the most critical weeks after connecting.

Mark Shriner [30:42]:
Everything you said makes sense, and I’m a firm believer. It used to be you would call people and you should have this structured conversation or pitch, engagement strategy when they pick up the phone. These days, I don’t know how many people are actually calling with cold calls. Then it was emails, and then there was the do-not-call list and the do-not-email list. Then it was LinkedIn. Now on LinkedIn, everybody’s getting inundated. So you have to work the engagement strategy that you’re talking about. Even that used to be, what did you say, the one-to-one hand-to-hand combat method. It just doesn’t scale, right? It used to scale, and now it doesn’t because people are blocking a lot of stuff, and we’re all just inundated with so much information. Here’s my question, though. You use a tool like this, which you pretty much have to, but sometimes there can be a perceived trade-off in terms of the authenticity of the content that you’re using. I don’t want a machine writing for me, I want to be authentic in terms of my message to you. My message to you might be a little bit different than my message to another prospect. How do you address that kind of concern?

Mario Martinez Jr [32:00]:
Great question. That’s the whole purpose of creating human-assisted AI. We’re not replacing the seller, we’re augmenting the seller. If I were to line up 100 sales reps, Mark, and answer your question, if I were to line up 100 sales reps and say, “Write a comment to this post,” I would probably have at least 50% of them take a long time to figure out what they’re going to write. The other 50% would write something, and it would be all over the map. But if I were to give those same 100 sellers versions of something they can edit from, they would accomplish that task of writing a response far faster than doing it from scratch. That’s the whole idea behind human-assisted AI, which is what we’re doing. We’re not doing automation. You still have to click the button, you still have to read it, and you still have to click Post. That’s very important. My belief is that the sales engagement tools, when they came out, were important. But the problem is we began to spray and pray. As we sprayed and prayed, our results didn’t get better. Before we had a sales engagement tool like SalesLoft, Outreach, or Apollo, we were getting less than a 3% response rate. After implementing them, we’re still getting less than a 3% response rate. The difference was, instead of reaching 100 people, I got to reach 10,000 people. So now it looks like volume went up and my response rates went up, but they never did. It’s still the same amount. You just got to do it more. That was the scale part. The same thing applies to when you’re engaging with somebody. You’ve got to use your brain. This is why we tell people in our training, “Hey, when you see a comment, never ever post that comment without doing two things. Number one, mention the individual. Why? Because if Mark doesn’t see that comment in his notifications within 24 hours, guess what’s being sent to his email box? A notification from LinkedIn that Mario Martinez has tagged him, and the first two lines or first line, I think it is, or first two lines of my comment will show in his email. Now why do we want that? We want that because there is a 100% deliverability rate of an @linkedin.com email address getting into my box because no spam filter blocks that. We want that. Now what I’m doing is not only mentioning and getting in their notifications, but within 24 hours, I’ve got that plus an email coming from LinkedIn telling them that I mentioned them. That is why it’s so important to use your brain in sales. If I wanted to automate this, I could, but that would negate the value of having a salesperson. We don’t need you. The reason why we need a salesperson is because we want somebody to think, “Is this comment right? Is it contextually relevant?”

Mark Shriner [34:53]:
Totally makes sense. I also like the fact that the platform is built upon years and years of training content and programs that you developed to help people create effective responses or outbound messages. Let’s go over to that aspect for a second. If you’re going to send a comment first, and then just a cold outbound message, what are some of the key ingredients to include in there? You mentioned the mention, of course, for a comment, but…

Mario Martinez Jr [35:29]:
So on a comment, first of all, you got to make sure that whatever you’re writing is contextually relevant to the post itself. Specifically, you’re looking to do one of two things. You’re either looking for acknowledgment of their individual post and to create a question about their specific post that creates curiosity, which creates engagement. If they reply back to you, that is a knock on your door for you to be able to reach out and actually connect with them individually. The idea is to create engagement, and that’s what LinkedIn wants you to do, to create engagement on their platform. The second part you may be looking for is an opportunity to incorporate specific messaging about your product or service. For example, let’s say I’m a personal coach and I help with stress and anxiety as a busy business executive. You may post something about the struggles of being a leader and how being a leader is hard because you’ve got so many different people. You may post something, I may write a comment that says, “Mark, that totally makes sense. I’ve been there, done that. I see the challenges that people have had. Thanks for sharing this particular post.” I may stop it there. I may tag you, you may say, “Okay, cool,” and like the post. Or using my brain, I may write a comment that says, “Hey Mark, great, I really appreciate that. I’ve been there before, and one of my last clients I worked with struggled with this very same problem. What I think is valuable are three things to deal with stress and anxiety.” Now I become very insightful and I’m adding value to the conversation. Then you ask a question to solicit engagement in that particular comment. That’s really the key in terms of LinkedIn commenting: am I adding value to the conversation that will drive Mark to respond back to me or Mark to like my post? If I can do that, now I earn the right to go and ask Mark to connect. That is the key right there, to create value. On the email side, we have a methodology. If you went to pvcsalesmethod.com, PVC like PVC piping, pvcsalesmethod.com, we teach in our training program there, first off, 111 words or less. That’s your target, 111 words or less. You have a P, a V, and a C in every one of your messages. What’s the P? Personalization. Two ways to personalize: hyper-personalized to the individual or personalized to the persona’s pain. Example, “Hey Mark, I love your podcast with [Fill in the Blank]. I loved it when you guys talked about [Fill in the Blank],” hyper-personalization to the individual. Or, “Mark, generally when I’m talking to CEOs of a SaaS company, which is what you are as well, they have two common problems: one, boom, two, boom. You may have struggled with these very two problems.” Now I get to the value part, the V, the value. “Included in this message is an article on [Fill in the Blank]. Most CEOs have said thank you very much because this was super helpful,” or a white paper, an ebook, a webinar, or a video. You don’t start with, “Let me show you my client testimonial and see how great we are. Let me show you our product page. Let me do a product dump.” That’s called diarrhea of the mouth. We don’t need more diarrhea. Nobody wants diarrhea. So let’s stay away from diarrhea. We bring in the value. What’s the value we’re bringing to the buyer?

Mark Shriner [39:15]:
Well, I just think it’s super cool that you can take that methodology and then build an AI-powered platform on top of that. If you didn’t come from your background and were to build an AI response platform, it wouldn’t have that intelligent design response framework built in. So I think that’s super cool. Let me ask you, in terms of other sales enablement platforms, what are some of the up-and-comers or some of your favorite platforms?

Mario Martinez Jr [39:51]:
Yeah, so I’ll answer that question. I forgot to tell you the C for my PVC method: call to action. Have a call to action, ask a question to solicit engagement to get a response back. Now, in answer to your question on up-and-coming sales tools, there are so many of them. It used to be macro-focused like we had Salesforce, and then we had LinkedIn Sales Navigator, and that was it. But now the market has been so micro-niched. We have things for RFQ and RFPs and quoting tools in that segment. We’ve got prospecting tools. Underneath prospecting tools, there might be engagement tools like I mentioned earlier in this conversation, but you might have automation tools for your sales cadence. Specifically, you might have tools for gift marketing, tools like a Hippo Video, or OneMob, or Loom inside sales engagement. Then, of course, you’ve got tools like social selling. FlyMessage is a portion of that social selling. Then on top of that, you might have productivity tools like FlyMessage or other tools that help speed up your process and engagement with buyers. All of these particular tools—oh, and you also have sales intelligence tools like Seamless.ai or ZoomInfo. You have all of these different types of sales intelligence tools to help there. Oh, and I forgot about this. You also have scheduling tools, so that’s part of productivity. So these categories: you’ve got productivity, scheduling tools like Calendly, and then you have writing tools. These writing tools might be Grammarly or Linguix. Soon, with FlyMessage, we’re going to be releasing some really hot sentence rewrite and restructuring tools to help you with writing the right type of message, using AI to help you clean up your writing. Most of us write like we want to write like we’re college graduates, but we really write like we’re seventh graders. Actually, there are studies that show the most responsive types of messages are written at the seventh or eighth grade level. Anyway, there are all kinds of other tools that people utilize for sales prospecting and for engaging with their target buyers. Those are just a few. It doesn’t take away from some of the other tools like Seismic, Highspot, and Showpad, which are content tools that help you bring content forward to a buyer. Actually, forget the category, maybe they’re under sales engagement. Those are some of the tools out there to help sellers today.

Mark Shriner [42:56]:
Okay, so there are a tremendous number of tools. Part of the process is going through and evaluating which tools are most appropriate for what a given organization is trying to accomplish. You have your own sales and marketing organization, and I think you also coach and advise other organizations. How do you divide these tools that should be used by marketing teams versus sales teams? There’s a big crossover right now in terms of what is a marketing activity versus a sales activity. It used to be more cut and dry. What are you seeing there, and in terms of your sales team, obviously with FlyMessage being a huge part of it, what are the must-have two different other tools?

Mario Martinez Jr [43:50]:
I’m a big believer that let marketing do what marketing does. Marketing should have its own set of tools to drive leads into the organization. If you are one of the very few companies where marketing is driving 100% of all of your appointments, don’t change anything. Whatever you’re doing, keep doing it. I have yet to speak to an organization where sales is not responsible for at least 60% or more of their own lead generation. Marketing barely touches the surface when it comes to this. You’ve got a great marketing department if they’re producing 30% of your appointments. You’ve got a great marketing department; that’s usually what I see or below. The way I talk to sales leaders and what I say to them is, if you are in that category where you’re producing 70% or less of your meetings, and you’re generating that, then you’ve got to do it on your own. Forget what marketing is doing. Sure, marketing may help with some of the things like Bombora and some of the sales intelligence tools or intent tools, those types of things. They may do that, but let marketing do their thing. You focus on the hardest part of the selling cycle. We did a study with over 1,295 respondents across the globe, across every vertical in every industry. We asked a question, “What’s the hardest part of the sales cycle? Is it getting the first meeting? Is it presenting? Is it closing? Is it getting a proposal out?” Those four items. 69%, we did it four times, four studies across three years. Each time, the lowest percentage, at any time we did that study out of the four, was 69%. The hardest part of the sales cycle is getting the first meeting. So what I would do as a sales leader is spend 70% of my budget at a minimum on sales prospecting tools, sales prospecting education, and sales prospecting training. That is the hardest part of the sales cycle. The other 30% is all around the hello to the close. If you think of a spectrum, being on both training and tools, you’ve got pre-hello to the hello, which arguably is only 30% of the effort, but 70% of the hardest part. Then you’ve got from hello to the close, which is 70% of the effort, but only 30% of the hardest part. Spend your money on the sales prospecting tools. If you walk away thinking about one thing, you have to have an engagement tool like a sales cadence tool, you have to have a phone that you’re using to incorporate in your sales cadence as well. So phone and email, those are the must-haves. Less than 3% response rate at best on all those two channels. But you better train your sellers on how to utilize a third and a fourth channel, LinkedIn. They need to know how to do it right if they’re a B2B seller. Incorporate a fourth channel, which might be video, gift marketing, or direct mailing.

Mark Shriner [47:12]:
Explain gift marketing.

Mario Martinez Jr [47:16]:
There are platforms like Sendoso, Postal.io, as an example. I may use it as a lure to you, Mark. I may reach out and say, “Hey Mark, by the way, I noticed that you were a 49ers fan. As a way of saying congratulations and I’d love to book a meeting with you, here is something that might be of interest to you.” That’s a very overt, direct, lots of money that you throw away, and people get stuff for free. On the other hand, you might do something like this: to get into your office, I may send you a gift marketing box. In that gift marketing box is a pre-defined package. This is oftentimes what happens on an ABM level, where I’m targeting a swath of executives that we know fit our target market and that are definitely people we want to hunt. I send them a gift marketing box, they open it up, and it’s got a video inside. It’s got maybe a coffee mug inside and some other things, but now it becomes very memorable. That person remembers who I am, and they’re like, “Who is this from?” Generally speaking, you can book those types of meetings. So there are two sides to gift marketing. Gift marketing is pretty hot, and it works really, really well. Insanely well, in terms of helping to book appointments. It’s costly, but it works.

Mark Shriner [48:35]:
Well, it’s all relative, right? If it costs you a couple of hundred dollars to book a meeting with a C-level person, and you book five of those a week and convert with two of them, it’s all good, right?

Mario Martinez Jr [48:46]:
Absolutely.

Mark Shriner [48:48]:
Well, hey, Mario, I’ve got to wrap things up here. You’ve thrown a ton of information out here. What do you do for yourself in terms of keeping abreast of the latest tools and also sales philosophies, techniques, and strategies? Where do you go and what do you do?

Mario Martinez Jr [49:07]:
You may not know this about me, but I hate reading books. Someone asked me this question a couple of weeks ago, “What was the last book that you read?” I said, “I haven’t. I don’t read a book end to end. I never read a book end to end unless I was in college,” which was “Maus I” and “Maus II” about the Holocaust. Those were the last ones. Interestingly enough, I read thousands of blogs per year, and I watch hundreds and hundreds of short videos. Those two-minute-long videos. I use multiple sources from sales influencers that have competing views against myself and those that have similar types of views as well. I read lots and lots of blogs. Then, of course, I select some of the top sales engagement tools we talked about earlier, and I read some of their blogs because a lot of companies are writing content. The content marketers have never done sales. All our blogs on Vengreso, 1,000+ blogs, they’re from people who’ve done sales. It’s tried and true. So I trust those blogs, and there are some good ones out there that I read that are pretty insightful.

Mark Shriner [50:16]:
That’s awesome. Well, I’ve learned a lot and I’m sure we can keep this conversation going. You’ve got such a wealth of experience. Thank you so much for coming on the Grow Past Podcast.

Mario Martinez Jr [50:29]:
Thank you for having me, buddy. I appreciate it. For anybody interested and they want to use FlyMessage for free, just go to flymsg.io.

Mark Shriner [50:35]:
I’ll put that in the show notes. Thanks, Mario.

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