Modern B2B sales success lies in shifting from scripted selling to strategic listening—by elevating discovery calls and building trust through thoughtful messaging, Leslie’s approach turns reps into advisors and conversations into conversions.
Dive into the latest episode of the B2B Go to Market Leaders podcast, where Vijay interviews Leslie Venetz, a B2B sales strategist and founder with deep experience navigating outbound sales in enterprise environments. Leslie unpacks her journey from learning the ropes in sales to helping SaaS companies refine their go-to-market strategies with bold, focused tactics.
She emphasizes that real progress comes not from hustling harder but from selling smarter—prioritizing meaningful discovery conversations, segmenting accounts with care, and aligning messaging with executive-level pain points. Leslie’s methods helped one team double their close rate and trim nearly two weeks off the sales cycle by simply reworking their approach to AE discovery.
The conversation explores everything from the mechanics of outbound strategy to why building your personal brand on social media is essential, not just for visibility, but for attracting talent and creating credibility. Leslie challenges the myth of company loyalty and shares why, in today’s landscape, your reputation is your leverage.
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Earn the Right: Leslie Venetz on Building Trust in B2B Sales
The listeners love this prompt, the opening prompt, which is, How do you view and define go to market.
Ooh, I very much view go to market from an outbound sales lens, because that is my specialty. And I also spent the majority of my career penetrating the C suite, like the enterprise C suite. So I think that I do have a slightly different approach or a lens for GTM than other folks, which isn’t to say that I haven’t done a lot of consulting and advisory work for PLG companies. I know, I was the number one employee at a bootstrap startup for two years. So I have done the plg work, and I have done the early stage work, but when I think about where the biggest gains are made for my clients, it is in creating a go to market strategy that builds the the territory and the messaging and the Micro campaigns to ensure that they are going to market to the right people at the right time with the right messaging on the right channels.
Yeah, yeah. Now I think you hit all the key aspects over there, right, which is the right messaging, even before the right messaging is the right segment, the right people, and the right channels. The one thing that you didn’t touch, upon which I hear from other guests, and which I strongly believe in, is, in addition to the market, the problems, the people, the channels, there is also the product or services, right? That’s fundamental. If you don’t have that, what is the offer that you’re taking to the market?
Yeah, well, I am pretty lucky, because I am a founder, so I’m my own boss, and I’m also a solopreneur, so I don’t have some of the pressures that other folks might have to, like scale the client, tell I can serve. So I stopped working with folks that are pre-PMF or pre-revenue, yeah, so I don’t have to stress about that as much.
Generally, if I look at like my retro from 2024, the majority of my long-term clients, people who were with me, like the entire year, at least, you know, like six to nine months of the year, they sat in the 30 to 50 million annual revenue bucket. And I also serve a lot of service-based companies that aren’t in a subscription model, that aren’t in a recurring revenue model, which is a slightly different flavor of GTM as well. So I am lucky. I’m going to call it lucky, because I have had the privilege of going up channel a bit and getting to work with companies that have a really solid product, and now they are struggling with maybe inbound leads drying up, yeah, or they simply don’t have the volume of inbound leads to get them to their next milestones. It’s a lot of instances of like, what got us here won’t get us there. So what? What is the evolution of our go-to-market strategy? Or a lot of folks that have grown through merger and acquisition, and so they just need to reevaluate their go-to-market strategy, but they have a pretty solid product Foundation, and often they have a pretty good reputation in their space.
Very cool, yeah, I’d love to dig into a lot of those points that you just mentioned, but let’s take a step back and for me and for the listeners, why don’t you share your journey, starting with day one of your career path, and what led you to what you’re doing today?
Yeah, day one of my career. Gosh, I had only been in Chicago for, I think, nine days. Okay, you just moved from Montana, like small-town Montana. I was born and raised there. I went to uni there and moved to Chicago without a job. But I did the interviews, lined up. I did the interviews. They were mostly with, like, not-for-profit organizations and for marketing jobs. And when I realized that those jobs were offering, you know, 20. $28,000 a year salary flat, and maybe, if you played all of your cards right, you might be eligible for an up to 3% raise in two years time. And I did not want that for myself. I did not feel that that matched my work ethic, my ambitions, my like the the curiosity and growth that I saw for myself, so I took a sales job, and in the back of my head, I took it, thinking, I’ll just do this until something better comes along.
Like, I still sort of viewed sales with a degree of shame, like I just thought it was kind of like a trashy profession. Yeah, and I would it maybe took two weeks for me to realize that I was just I was really good at it. I really like doing it. I was having immediate success, so I fell in love with sales very, very quickly, and I then spent my career before becoming a full-time founder as an individual contributor. I spent much of my career in player-coach roles because I was often the first hire in the country, or in the region, or within a product line for a company. So I stepped up and built a team around me.
The majority of my career I spent in sales leadership, but it was just a real gift of a career, and I didn’t understand it. Vijay at the time, I actually had like, shame isn’t the right word, but I had a lot of doubts about my expertise, or about, like, the validity or the credibility of my expertise, because I didn’t come to SAS until later in my career, and I came at a time where, like, it was SAS or bust, yeah. And I also spent my career selling a lot of different types of products to a lot of different ICPs. So I didn’t have this deep domain expertise because I’d sold to, you know, marketing agencies for a decade, or sold HR tech for a decade. And I thought for a while that that was a weak point, and then I realized when I started doing the work I do now, but as like a passion project, side hustle, that it was actually my core strength, okay, because I had all of these experiences from seeing all of these different types of products at different price points and different sales cycles in different industries and ICPs, and it put me in this really unique position to figure out sort of what would work and what sort of wouldn’t work, and what I should pull over and what I might need to tweak instead of yeah, here’s the playbook that I’ve used in my last four orgs. Let’s drop it here as well, and that’s what I’ve been doing the last three years for organizations specific to outbound go-to-market.
Yeah. So let’s double click on something that you touched upon earlier, which is that you specialize in and your expertise is essentially figuring out the right target segment, mapping out the territory, the messaging, and using the right channels, and so on. So let’s segue into something more concrete, like, Who do you really serve? Like, where are your customers and clients, and why do they come to you? Like, what kind of problems did they come to you with?
Yeah, B2B, SaaS and B to B, and service-based organizations who are generating at least half of their net new revenue through outbound. So these are folks that are doing a lot of outbound, and they’re doing it in-house, yeah, and they the the stresses I should say that I hear when I’m on Discovery calls are things like my team just won’t make phone calls, like they’re skipping All of their phone call steps, or, you know, we used to get incredible results from our outbound, and it just like nothing converts. We’re just not getting the open rates, the replies, the responses that we used to or, you know, like I mentioned earlier, a huge one that I get is we used to get so much of our revenue from inbound, and now that we are out of that, like growth at all costs, or money was just flying in the air time, the inbound has dried up, and they need to understand how to generate revenue going directly to customers. So it’s a lot of woes around what used to work doesn’t work anymore, or I’m really struggling to get my reps to feel comfortable doing cold outreach, yeah, whether it’s proper social selling or cold cold. Calling or cold email, or even being direct on-site with events. But those are the two big, big kinds of buckets of woes I hear from folks.
Understood, and at what revenue point, like, what are your what is the typical revenue range for your ICPs?
Yeah, you know, I’m in the process of going a little bit up channel, so right now, like my LinkedIn headline is 15 to 50 because it has a nice, memorable ring to it. But when I did my retro for last year, it was predominantly 30 to 50 million for consulting, like done with your consulting gigs and most of my kickoff and keynotes were 300 million to like 1.3 billion.
Wow, that’s a big range.
I know, I know. So I think my offerings are going through a bit of an evolution right now. And I, I love, love, love doing the done with you, consulting work. I like, you know, getting in there and like going deep with my clients and really making sure that together, we create a strategy, and then a set of processes to back up the strategy, and then a set of skill sets and mindsets within the team so that they can deploy the processes that back up the strategy. I love that work, but it is deeply time-intensive, whereas the keynotes are like, they really fill my bucket in a much different way. It’s so cool to see everybody leaning in and having these light bulb moments, and I get to travel, and it’s a higher profit margin. So we’ll see what happens when the book comes out. One of the things that is a privilege of being a solopreneur is that I really have this space to like listen to my audience, and I can react very quickly to what they are telling me they want more of or less of. So we will see what that means as my product evolves in 2026.
Very cool. So let’s make it even more real. So, something that I ask all of my guests is for them to share a go-to-market success story and then a go-to-market failure. I wouldn’t call it more like a failure, but more of an insight and then a pivot. So if you can share from your vast experience, Leslie, a go-to-market success and a failure story, and I’ll leave it to you.
.
Um, I will share a failure because it’s my own. Okay. Um, so one thing that I always tell my clients to do with their outbound is to set of baseline. So when you are creating your sequences, your messaging, your steps, etc, you know, do what you know works most often, get that data so you know what good looks like. And then from there, you know, you can iterate. You can be creative. You can be kind of unhinged. And because I am running a referral-based inbound funnel right now, I’m not doing a ton of outbound. Yeah, I didn’t have that like, what good looks for? I just skipped straight to unhinged. And I have a second company called Revenue Revelry. That’s a company that does live master classes, yeah, and so we sent out some emails for events, for our Arizona event, and I use TikTok-inspired subject lines for all of them, which I think is hilarious. The emails were so fun to write, they were so fun to send. I had a blast with it, but some of them were very badly received by sales leaders, who, I think, personally, take themselves way too seriously, and they probably are not a good fit for the tone, the tenor of the master class, which is pretty laid back and Pretty joyful, but it was like, like, no cap, say less, get ready with me. If you know, you know it was just that they were so funny. But that was a failure, like it did not general, did not generate the ticket purchases that I hoped it would. It did generate a few very angry email responses from people.
Wow, that’s funny and sad, but clearly you also taking some lessons from that. What were the lessons like from that, Leslie?
I mean, I still think I would do it again.
Okay!
I’m being honest. I mean, it was a pretty small test batch overall, and it wasn’t part of a sequence. We just sent a single email out to people. And I think it’s always difficult, if not impossible, to gain the success of something unless you are running. It’s within a sequence, because we know that, like, one touch one email just isn’t going to do much, yeah, um, but it also was a reminder that salespeople take themselves so seriously sometimes, like, we are not saving lives. We do not work in the ER; we send emails to strangers and ask them to buy stuff from us. And that doesn’t mean that the work that we do isn’t important. It is important. It is an honorable profession. We do have this incredible ability to truly help our clients, but at the same time, it was a reminder to me and the core work I do at the sales led go to market agency to challenge my clients, to challenge my audience, like, with a reminder that like, sales should be fun.
It’s allowed, like, we are allowed to, like, feel joy and have fun and be creative in the profession. And so maybe that goes back to the beginning, a learning would be set that baseline of data, so that you know what good looks like. And then don’t stop there. Be silly and be creative and have fun, because you never know what is going to resonate with your audience. And maybe this time, it was a miss with the TikTok-inspired subject lines. But the next time, maybe that’s how you run a, you know, a viral sequence.
Yeah, yeah. Now this is good. So let’s actually pivot to a go-to-market success story, and if you can share something that maybe you did while working with one of your clients, that’ll be a good learning experience for listeners.
Yeah, one of my favorite recent success stories is that it’s a long-term plan. I’ve been working with them for like, three years, but we recently redid the SOP for their AE discovery call process. It’s a fairly transactional price point. It’s a B2B SaaS product, and it’s like 198 to $298 a month is usually the package that that folks buy. Uh, MRR, yeah, like, you know, fairly transactional. And we rewrote the discovery process for the calls to be longer for much, much, much more of them to be the actual discovery and the needs analysis, and they do demo a little bit on the call, which don’t let Keenan hear me say, It’s okay to demo on the disco sometimes, but we transition To much better discovery and needs analysis and holding qualifying questions and the demo back towards the end of the call. And so when they get to the demo, they’re only demoing two to three features now, and they are asking much better questions. And the goal of this entire pivot was to get more one-call closes and to generally shorten the sales cycle. And I don’t know what the most recent data is, but the data from the end of Q1 was an increase from like, I should have looked this up before we talked, but it was something crazy. It was like a 23% overall close rate to a 45% close rate, and the sales cycles went down by 13 days. And I don’t remember the exact stat for how many more one-call closes they were doing, but significant.
So I mean that’s crazy. Like that almost doubled the overall close rate and decreased the sales cycle by 13 days on an already pretty transactional product. So that’s a huge win, and that really came about by having a more robust pre-call plan so that the reps were showing up to the calls having not just done the research, but having set 15 minutes aside to connect the dots. So they’re saying, Okay, here’s what I found out about this client. What do I think it means for them? What does it mean in the context of our other clients and our offering? And now that I’ve connected those dots and I’ve developed a point of view, what type of questions am I going to ask them to highlight that expertise and share insights and relevant value? So it changed, I mean, it just completely changed the vibe of the call that they’re no longer getting on and sort of like interrogating the prospect to get the qualifying questions done before they switched to a demo that was just sort of like word bombing all the features. So that’s a really fun that’s a really fun one. There’s such a I just really love working with them,
Yeah. So that act, that story, by the way, congrats to you and the client for that success. That. Actually reminds me of a common theme that I see with many of the clients that I work with, as well as in my previous work history and employers, right, which is sales people like SDRs, AES to less extent, but it’s mostly the SDRs, especially they are the ones who have to qualify the MQLs and then do the SQL and pass it on to their AES sales accepted leads and so on, and typically they just follow the script verbatim, very mechanical, versus intentionally and genuinely, make an effort to understand why someone actually reached out to know more about the product and a company, because there’s a human on the other end, try to connect with that human and then find out why did they even reach out, versus just from your uni direction lens, trying to sell, because that’s your job and you need to meet your day to day.
Yeah, I’m seeing the same thing with signals. Yeah, that people will get a signal, like somebody’s new to a job, or somebody you know raised around, and they don’t spend any time thinking about what that means. They just hit the send button on the Congrats on your series A email. And I, I think the the next evolution of elite like, what we will see the most elite, SDRs, AES, CSMs do is take the time to figure out what those signals mean, what those bits of research that we’ve collected mean, and really, you know, hopefully we have, like, bought all this time back because we’re using all of this AI to, like, speed things up and automate and delegate, etc, and hopefully that time will be repurposed into more intentional, strategic thought, so that we can show up to every interaction with our buyers having earned the right to their time and to their attention by having a point of view, by having An opinion that’s informed by the, you know, the dots that we strung together and why it’s meaningful to them.
Yeah. So what would be really helpful, Leslie, is if you can double click on what you mentioned in the sales script, and what you taught the sales people to do is spend more time listening and cutting short the demo. So, if you can spend some more time on the actual structure and how you actually coach them into doing it.
Yeah, um, so like, I guess the probably the easiest way to start answering that call is before I worry about the structure of the call. I worry about making sure reps are enabled with the skill sets to execute on this, structuring the script that I am teaching, and because this particular process was so heavily indexed on asking great questions and doing great needs analysis. The place that we started was actually with active listening, and we did two different active listening workshops. It’s one of my favorite workshops to run with clients. I start as many engagements as I possibly can with it, and I walk folks through a 4R framework.
So the first is to reinforce those, like you know, verbal, nonverbal cues to tell the person you want them to keep speaking. The second R is resist. And this is where folks have most of their aha moments. Because when we think of active listening, we often conceptualize it as just the absence of talking or the absence of interrupting. And what I share with them is that active listening is really about showing restraint so that we can listen to understand, not just to respond. And that’s hard in all conversations, like with our family, with our friends, etc. It’s hard not to start renting space in your head with what you want to say next. It’s hard not to want to jump in and share your own relatable story.
But I have found that in sales, it’s particularly difficult for two reasons. One, we have to resist the temptation to judge, and I don’t mean judge and like tis test, but like judge that we understand what they are saying, what they are trying to share with us, because we often hear the same things over and over and over again, and so it’s hard to not just assume that you know what they’re trying to communicate without doing the work of understanding and being sure. And I also think that part of what sellers have to resist is the temptation to jump into what they think is helper mode. Mm hmm, because they’re so excited you said something that I can help you, like, I have the answer. But what it feels like to the buyer is that we’re jumping into, like, hard sale mode.
So I think that those resistance pieces are so, so, so essential. And then the next two steps. One is to restate, like, making sure that we actually got it right, that we did understand it in the way that they wanted us to. And then the final step is relevance, and that’s where you start doing things like the needs analysis, with storytelling, etc. But that resistance piece is so essential. And so when I’m teaching something like that specific discovery process, where I’m not actually teaching the process where I’m teaching those soft skills that underlie the sales techniques that I later want them to use.
Yeah, no, that’s good. I mean, I love the framework that you mentioned, and you also touched upon the key skills, which are active listening. And a lot of people misjudge and misunderstand what active listening is, and something else that actually caught my attention, Leslie is holding back, holding ourselves back from judging that that’s a big thing. It’s very easy to judge and also conclude that, hey, by the way, I think your problem is very similar to this XYZ customer that we have, and we can solve it for you. And here’s a product, and here’s a demo, pretty easy to get into that mode.
Yeah, it’s so interesting that that’s like, that’s what you picked up. Because one of the biggest areas of pushback that I get from sellers is around the value of storytelling, yeah? Because I’ll say, you know, one of the things that you need to resist is jumping in and telling a story, or, like, you know, telling your own relatable story, or even telling a customer story. And they’re like, Well, wait, like store, everybody says that storytelling is the most important thing that we’re supposed to be doing. Yes, and if we tell stories too early, we risk telling the wrong story because we don’t actually understand what they are trying to communicate to us. But more importantly, storytelling, especially when you are like telling your own story, versus a voice of customer story, is that you’re trying to skip the hard work, and so you’re trying to prove to the buyer that you understand by talking about yourself.
Like, that’s not even the opposite of active listening, that’s just talking about yourself. But you’re trying to skip the difficult work of actually taking the time to understand and asking the questions to go deep by just telling your own story and hoping that they will believe that you understand. So I always think that’s really interesting, and that that one’s really personal to me, because that is the one I struggle with the most I want to, Oh, I totally get it because XYZ reason, or I get it because I did this project with ABC customer, so that, like that part of the resist framework is one that I still work on and I still put deliberate practice behind.
Yeah, no, totally. I mean, for me as well, because I’m a solopreneur myself, which means I also sell and have to sell, which I enjoy the process doing selling. And contrary to a lot of others, people’s opinions or understanding of selling is actually fun if you do it the right way. Selling is all about making a human connection and really understanding why someone was interested in even talking to you in the first place, and seeing and genuinely feeling that you can either help or you can say a polite no, and respectfully say a no so that you’re not wasting anyone’s time.
Yeah, I love that. That’s well said.
Yeah. So that’s something that I and for me, it’s not that I mastered it. I continued to practice. And just this morning, right before this call, I was on a sales call, a discovery call with someone, a prospective customer, and I was sharing the proposal that I had, that I presented to my current customer. Not to say that, hey, this is the exact blueprint that I can do for you. Is just to say it’s more to show the way of operating and how I work, but also to show that these are the possibilities. And just doing that, it really opened up the doors of that founder, the CEO on the other end, saying, Hey, this is great by these are the problems that I’m struggling with. You make them feel comfortable so that they open up and share their problems from their end.
Yeah, I love that example. Vijay, because you are blending the use of like, social proof and like lowering the zone of resistance, or, like, the fear of messing up by saying, Hey, here’s here’s my expertise. Like you can see that I have done this for another client.
Right!
I’m not telling you to buy this. I’m just sharing this with you transparently so that we can have a like, open dialog, and that I can better understand what parts might serve you, what parts don’t like, you know, what’s missing. So I think that’s like a really beautiful example of blending, like some of the storytelling or the social proof or voice of customer with that process of needs analysis.
Yeah, no, yeah. I think you said that very well, and that’s so true, right up until that’s just an example. And the reason why I want to share this is to share with the listeners and hopefully to your audience as well, that you’re coaching, which is around, there’s a way how you can help and put others to ease in the first place, put the buyer at ease, and they’ll automatically open up once they can see that you’re there to help them not trying to sell and meet your quota.
Yeah, yeah. The power of transitioning in the buyer’s mind from a seller who is just there to do a transaction right to a human who is there to get a win-win outcome for both of you is one of the most powerful sorts of conversational transitions that can happen in sales.
Yeah, no, for sure, so you mentioned teaching active listening. Are there any other critical skills that you want your students to learn about management? There you go.
Okay, yeah, if we’re talking about sort of things that are considered, quote, unquote, soft skills, and I will say, Vijay, like one of the things that really gets me when I advocate for including time to focus on skills like curiosity and active listening and time management is that they are not often regarded as skills, meaning, like, if I told you that you needed to, you know, be 70% accurate on your free throw, or I told you that you needed to be able to code XYZ, you would immediately know that that would require practice. Like, just immediately, like, of course, in order to accomplish that goal, I would need to practice that. When we talk about soft skills, people often believe that you either have them or you don’t have them, yeah, which is, which is nonsense. That’s total nonsense.
That is actually not true, certainly because of like, societal factors, you might be more empathetic at present or more curious, but that doesn’t mean that you cannot develop and hone those skills with practice. And so, so true for something like active listening. And I also find that’s extraordinarily true for one of my favorite time management skills, which is deep work and the ability to focus, yep, particularly with how many folks now identify as neurodivergent and know that they struggle with focus. I just like it breaks my heart when I’m working with reps and they’re just like, oh, I can’t focus. Or I just I can’t do that for more than five minutes, or I’m always distracted, or I feel like I have worked hard all day, and it’s the end of the day, and I have nothing to show for it, because they are multitasking in their hair, and they’re there, and they’re answering every slack and distracted by every email. So time management, more generally, is a skill that I love to work on, but specifically empowering reps to own their time and to practice deep focus, where, even if it’s not deep work, but even doing something like the Pomodoro Technique, where they are doing a single task for 25 minutes with their slack and their email and their phone and everything turned off, right? That is such an incredible hack that enables reps to work better, to enjoy work more, to feel more accomplished, and to be more effective. So that’s another I don’t I don’t feel like very many sales trainers are like, I’m going to come in and work on deep focus and active listening.
But when I think of. What has enabled my success and the success of my teams over, you know, the 15 years that you know that I was in the corporate sales world, it’s those soft skills first, and then once those are mastered, it’s time to add specific sales techniques and sales hard skills on top of them.
Yeah, no, for sure, it’s very counterintuitive, right? So a lot of people are wired by default that if they are not busy and doing a lot of things, which means they can move faster. Yeah, but it’s the exact opposite, which is, first of all, you need to pick only a few things that really matter. That’s number one, second is spending time on those few things will actually, actually make you feel and actually make you be more present, which means a task that normally takes like 10 hours, you would typically just take about two to three hours. If you really hone your deep work muscle.
You’re so right. You know, I did a time management session for a client just a few weeks ago. I’m going to be, I’m going to be live with them in Omaha next week. And you know, as we were preparing to live together, I just uncovered that sense that a lot of a lot of the rep have huge books of business, very transactional service-based sales again, and that the reps were just feeling so overwhelmed by their book of business. And what we are going to do live on site is like, go through a territory management strategy and work on like sales messaging and how much research they should be doing based on the tier and, you know, based on the propensity to spend but what I uncovered preparing for the in person work is that the sense of overwhelm and the lack of ownership of their time and of their calendar was going to be a big hurdle to accomplish the other work that we wanted to do.
So I did a virtual time management session. And one of the things I always say during those sessions is that multitasking is a myth. And then I say, why? You know, like you’re not actually multitasking. You’re not doing two things. You are rapidly task switching, and the data clearly shows, just like you said, that it means you are doing both tasks worse, and that ultimately it will take longer to do both of them than if you just did one at a time. You were doing better. You would do them faster. And one of the reps DM me on LinkedIn afterwards, and they said that that was the first time that anybody had ever told them that, that they still thought like multitasking was, like, something that they should break about, or something they should be trying to do, something that was advantageous. And I get it because, like, circa 2010, I had multitasking as a bullet point on my resume. Right? Like we were told that multitasking was, you know, a skill set, and now we know that it’s, it’s quite the opposite. Multitasking is just detrimental to our success.
Yeah, so continuing on the topic of improving sales and improving the pipeline. What aspect of pipeline building is, do a lot of salespeople actually overcomplicate or spend excessive time, or not enough time?
Oh, the list is long. It’s every aspect. Um, I would say either territory management or sales messaging. I think, if, I think, if it’s a sales leader,
Yeah!
I would say territory strategy, because most reps don’t choose their territory, like they’re given a set of accounts. And so I think, I think sales leaders get it wrong in helping their reps understand how to have that like CEO of territory mindset in approach to book of business. And instead, they’re just like, go down the list and put 10 new accounts into your sequence every day for reps, it’s usually sales messaging that they are just like twisting themselves into a ball of stress trying to write the most perfect sales message ever. And it is either, yeah, I’m your sales rep from XYZ company, and we sell an our company and our product because they’re trying to tell this person everything that needs to be told, or they’re like, four paragraphs, because they’re trying to communicate everything they could possibly need to say in one email. So it’s the good news is that it’s an easy fix. Mm, hmm.
And, like, the immediate mindset, mindset shift for reps is, this is why we have sequences, take that one email that you’re trying to make perfect, and that’s actually everything that you’re going to say through every single like, sales message, touch, point, and channel throughout. The entire sequence, but it’s, it’s, I see reps putting so much pressure on themselves to write a perfect email. And first of all, there’s no such thing as a perfect email at full stop. That’s why we use a sequence, because different people respond to different types of messages on different channels, and ROI versus COI language, and all of that. So keep your emails short and simple, short, simple sentences. Optimize them for mobile. Keep them focused on what matters to the buyer. So like, really audit to reduce the I, my, we, our language, and remember that you have that entire sequence to tell your story. You don’t need to get it into one email.
Yeah, very cool. And something else that I’m noticing, because I interact and speak with a lot of founders, and the big thing the founders want to do is invest more time in building the social profile and social following. It’s related to sales, but it’s actually pre-sales. And I’m looking at your LinkedIn profile, and you have, what about 47, close to 48,000 followers. So, tell us the story of how you did it, and any lessons that you can share with the listeners.
Ah, thank you. I have almost the same on TikTok as well. So I’m really, really grateful to have a pretty big audience on two separate platforms, and I’m building YouTube right now. Good gosh, YouTube’s a beast. I think it is so smart for founders to have a social profile. And the way that I look at it is that it is not just a potential lead source, it is also an incredible recruitment tool, because folks will follow that founder and see what they’re saying and what they aspire to work for them, clamor to work for them. So if you’re thinking about how to get the absolute best talent into your pool, having a founder social profile, I think, is really helpful from a branding, social selling position. I mean, I run a 100% inbound and referral-based funnel, and most of my inbound leads ultimately come from LinkedIn.
They first find me on podcasts, on webinars, on TikTok. So they they often find me first with video content, and then they follow me to LinkedIn, where I post every single day, and I have posted every single day for over 1500 days, so I have a huge amount of social authority and a really clear voice and perspective and sort of cache of knowledge that I’m sharing for free there, and then often they will see like a catalyst post and then message me, Hey, I’ve actually been working on this and you posted about X, and let’s talk about why. So, for founders and a founder-led sales model, being able to tap into that type of inbound lead that’s like an absolute no-brainer. But even if it isn’t that sort of straight line to leads, I think having a founder profile is so important, just for like, the credibility and the authority.
I mean, we know based on what set of data you’re looking at that buyers are doing just a tremendous amount of research.
Yep!
Before we even know they’re in the market, they’re doing a tremendous amount of research before we maybe even hear from them that they’re interested in considering working with us. And so having a founder with a clear, you know, brand point of view, perspective out there is quite valuable. But I would also add Vijay that there’s a big difference between social selling, which is the act of doing outbound on a social channel and brand building, yeah, which is an activity for inbound, like, I would say, like posting content and engaging in the comments and creating that brand That’s very Demand Gen, whereas like going into people’s LinkedIn DMS, like hosting LinkedIn live events and then following up with the people and creating sequences around that, that’s very lead gen, which I think is something that people struggle with on LinkedIn, because it really, really blurs the lines between sales and marketing and lead gen and demand gen.
Yeah, for sure, you touched upon lead gen, you touched upon demand. And there’s also brand building, which is sort of related but different, right?
I mean, it starts with having a point of view that that’s the first and foremost. And once you have a point of view, you’re genuinely posting something that’s of value, and even before you get to that point, first of all, you need to continue to post and see what’s resonating and what’s not. And someone put it right. It’s a signal-to-noise ratio, because especially in the first few months, when you’re posting, you’ll start to see the signals and see what kind of posts resonate. Is it the value add pose, or education post, or entertainment pose, or hey, this is why I picked my entrepreneurial founder journey, right? There are all these nuances. And so where I’m going with this is, yes, in addition to demand gen and lead gen, there’s also the brand building, the following. And a lot of those are even like outcomes; if done right, those are more like the trailing indicators.
Yeah, I just got a notification that it’s already five to three. This went so fast. I have to be live on LinkedIn at three o’clock. So we’ve got to wrap up with our last questions. This one’s so fast. This was so great. Thank you for the conversation.
Absolutely. And good timing as well, because I was coming up with my last question.
Perfect!
So the question to you, I have Leslie, is, if you were to turn back the clock and go back to day one of your career journey, what advice would you give to your younger self?
Um, if I was gonna go back to day one of my career, I would tell myself that company loyalty is bullshit, and to not fall for that narrative, which that might be a kind of unpopular thing to say out loud, but one of the biggest injustices that I did to myself in my career was stayed with companies for too long because I thought, I thought loyalty to a company was, like, really important and would be rewarded. And that is unequivocally untrue for, you know, 99% of companies. So I would go back and I would say, like, only be loyal to yourself and to your integrity and to your reputation. Like, always stand true to your values. But that doesn’t mean that a company deserves loyalty from you if they’re not giving loyalty to you.