Episode #59 The Top Sales Strategies that Work in 2024 ft. Eric Iannello

In today's episode of Revenue Reimagined, we're joined by Eric Iannello, Head of Sales at SalesRoom.

Eric shares his passion for outbound sales and the top sales strategies that work, like the importance of focusing on conversions rather than meetings. He emphasizes the need to understand the value of conversions, target the right audience, articulate a clear message, and balance sales and marketing efforts. Iannello also discusses the shift from traditional outbound sales methods to more personalized engagement, the importance of building relationships and networks, and the role of outbound marketing within a company. Additionally, he touches upon productivity hacks and the significance of respecting others' time. Throughout the conversation, Iannello emphasizes the need for clear direction, proper methodology, and effective strategies in sales and marketing processes.

During today's show, Eric shares his secrets on:

- why meetings set is NOT a good metric for success

- the importance of leveraging and building a following

- the top sales strategies that work

Any founder, entrepreneur, or business leader can steal the lessons Eric shares in this episode and use them for their own success.

Follow Eric - https://www.linkedin.com/in/eric-iannello/

PS - huge shout out to Sendoso for sponsoring our show.

We could not do this without you.

See how Sendoso can help increase pipeline, ROI, and customer retention.

🎁 Lastly, we have a gift for you!

Struggling to understand why your revenue isn't growing at the rate you want?

Take your free GTM Gap™ Self-Assessment to uncover reasons why and what to do about it.

https://revenuereimagined.typeform.com/gtmgap

Transcript

Adam Jay (00:01.368)
Welcome back to another episode of the Revenue Reimagined Podcast. This one is a little bit special because while we have a guest, it is an RR crew here today. We have Eric Ionello, who is our head of outbound, and we are going to talk about all things outbound. Now, the interesting thing here is Eric just isn't the head of outbound for RR. I have worked with Eric before. I brought Eric into RR.

He's someone that I worked with previously who I have stayed in touch with, who I have an immense amount of respect for, who gets the outbound game better than most. And one of the things that we hear every founder say to us all day, every day is I need pipeline, but pipeline doesn't just magically appear. Eric, thanks for joining us, man. No, it doesn't. Amazing, right? You can't, you don't just send an email and book a meeting. I wish.

Dale Zwizinski (00:49.238)
It doesn't.

Eric Iannello (00:50.948)
Be shit, man.

Eric Iannello (00:57.433)
That's like applying Rogaine and just magically sprouting hair, right? Or am I wrong on that one? We'll get you Dale.

Dale Zwizinski (01:00.481)
Ugh.

I feel like I should be in the middle of you two. I feel a bit out of place here, I'm good. So Eric, welcome to the show. Welcome to the group. Super excited to have you in the team. So talk to us a little bit about why outbound, why are you so passionate about it? like that whole, like we talk about origin stories a lot, but I'm curious from an outbound perspective, why you doubled down on the outbound motion.

Eric Iannello (01:32.323)
Yeah, I've got a sick sense of humor. We'll put it that way. No, think I think it would originates from is that I wasn't I wasn't born in B2B, right? Like I kind of moved over here as many did through the COVID expenditure when my previous life was shut down and that was working B2C, right? I was really much that brick and mortar. I've worked off a commission only and so a lot of it was riding on me, right? I was the business card. I was that kind of representation to it and I had to generate all my business because if I didn't, I wouldn't be paid.

Dale Zwizinski (01:36.267)
Yeah.

Adam Jay (01:51.876)
Mmm.

Eric Iannello (02:01.439)
so luckily enough, think through all my previous experience, it hospitality, be it, you know, physical therapy and personal training and just working on various odd jobs, I was able to adapt not only whom I am as a person, who I am as a seller, but then also my tonality and how I'm able to articulate myself and to understand the person on the other side, be it phone, email, in person, whatever that may be in a

general sense, I think that's what gives me the success and the ability to teach others like how to identify their strengths and their capabilities and how to generate, how to repeat the success. So yeah, a long -winded answer, but I think it's deeper than just who I am and what I do, I guess.

Dale Zwizinski (02:48.27)
I think the sick part is definitely true, but okay, we can move on from that.

Eric Iannello (02:50.905)
Yeah.

Adam Jay (02:54.894)
So we've said over and over again, outbound is broken, right? I don't think anyone disputes that.

But we still have founders, even what I don't want to say unskilled, but earlier in their career, revenue leaders who believe that it's possible to spin up a couple domains if they even do that, build a sequence that basically says, you know, because you are Dale, the chief whatever, RR, you must struggle from this problem and I could solve it with, you know, this solution. And they think that that's going to get

response and we could shift to phone conversations either With all the noise out there and there is a lot of noise Eric Like why do people think this still works? Why do people still think you could just spray and pray with zero personalization and grow a business?

Eric Iannello (03:52.955)
I think it's threefold, right? The market's changed dramatically. You guys can attest to this better than I can. The selling market, or even the buying market, at that matter, isn't the same as it was 18 to 24 months ago. The shit ain't easy. I don't know if I can cuss, forgive me. I don't know if it's acceptable to un -pod. But anyways, point being though, it's not easy, right? You can't just point and shoot, point and click, and then deliver a message and return on value. The metrics have to be changed on the way that we measure because that's the,

Dale Zwizinski (04:05.208)
Yep.

Adam Jay (04:05.912)
You have you have you you met me?

Eric Iannello (04:22.971)
Well, it's a different market in its entirety. We can't look at meetings books translating to revenue generated. That's not, they're not a direct, they're not linear by any means. What we need to be looking at, and I think this is where a lot of founders go a little bit naive to your point, Adam, is that they think that a meeting is a tangible metric, but it's not. What meeting just says is that you've captivated attention.

Cool. What now? And this is where the outbound process needs to be redefined or re -imagined. Got it. So what it needs to come in is this applicable value of conversions. We need to make sure that what we're doing, who we're targeting, what we're targeting to, how we're articulating that message, the pain point that in which case we're highlighting, and then most importantly, how can we get to money? How can we attach a revenue sticker to that? So where many founders lose that kind of translation between the two is the conversion.

Dale Zwizinski (04:52.92)
Yeah.

Eric Iannello (05:14.683)
conversion metrics, the conversion tangibilities. That in itself needs to be the bread, butter, and the baseline to every foundational outbound motion. So before you click point, trigger, call, say hi at an event, what converts? I could give a damn if it hooks me a meeting. It's just a waste of time if it's not converting.

Adam Jay (05:18.329)
Mmm.

Dale Zwizinski (05:33.888)
Or that meeting that you convert into could be a waste of time for the sales reps that you're converting it over to. So there's a lot of reasons why it's not just the meeting booked, but it's actually meeting held, conversion rates. Then do you really map to the ICP? like, yeah. Yeah.

Adam Jay (05:50.02)
I say it all the time. could forget my third. I mean my 13 year old Dale. Your your 16 year old. Your sienna's what 19 your 19 year old like we I could train anyone to book a meeting right is the meeting with the right person. I promise you and we've all seen this leading revenue teams. If the goal is to book a meeting and that's what the BDR is getting paid on, I promise you'll have a shit ton of meetings booked.

Dale Zwizinski (06:03.02)
Yep.

Adam Jay (06:19.502)
But to Dale's point, are they ICP? Are they with the right person? And are they gonna convert to pipeline? But doing that and taking that approach of targeting takes longer, right? It takes longer to personalize. It takes longer to target the right ICP. Eric, working with founders, how do you have the conversation of this is gonna take time and time isn't seven days?

Eric Iannello (06:44.793)
Yeah, I, before working with founders, man, I had a full head of hair. Let's put it that way. And I mean that in the utmost respect, right? Adam, you can kind of attest to this, but neither to say what it comes down to is, is the visionary practice, right? We can give them the tangibles all day long, but if I show them the faults and the cracks basically in process showing them pipeline fallout, the commonalities of it, why we don't translate or convert to this specific IPP, why we need an ICP matrix so we can understand who to multi -thread to, who do we convey message with, who to build around buying parties.

Dale Zwizinski (06:49.027)
Ha

Eric Iannello (07:13.997)
If we map that out, right, and build essentially an entirety of that foundational process, it usually becomes a little bit more crystal clear, right? Color between the lines is how I kind of typically convey the message. Understanding the pathways, right, and having very finite detail, really granular process, because again, this market, right, it's not a buying market. We need to have a rock solid process, both within pipeline progression, but in pipeline generation, both within reduction return, both within customer acquisition costs, both within speed to lead.

We need that to be the core component of it. And before we even press send, it's just like a bunch of junk frat guys throwing darts, right? Like what the hell are we doing at the end of the day?

Adam Jay (07:54.862)
Did he just call us fat?

Dale Zwizinski (07:55.234)
Yeah, let me. Pratt. So so so let me double click on this a little bit, because. I I I wrote a LinkedIn post last week about. Awareness and I think one of the biggest challenges that most founder companies or startups have is they build out an outbound engine with limited to no marketing and so.

Eric Iannello (07:57.945)
I said a bunch of drunk frat guys.

Adam Jay (07:58.422)
alright. Alright, alright. How do you know this is bourbon?

Eric Iannello (08:07.589)
you

Dale Zwizinski (08:24.302)
I've always had this hypothesis that, yeah, sales can build awareness and generate that awareness piece, but it's probably gonna take 12 to 18 months with doing a lot of emails, doing a lot of calling, doing a lot of LinkedIn messaging, whereas in a marketing world, even though it'll still take time, probably more three to six month timeframes, depending on what market you're in, where you're at. Talk to the audience a little bit about how marketing can actually help

the outbound efforts that someone like you are executing on to make it more effective and efficient in the overall scheme of things.

Eric Iannello (08:59.419)
Yeah, I think I'm going to hit with a controversial point, especially with three salespeople in the call, right? And that I think the first hire needs to be marketing. And that's simply just because of brand awareness, brand generation, brand buzz, just make them a freaking blip on the map. I think that seems to be the pivotal point in which case the founder can obviously lead it, but that needs to be the first trigger that they Thus being because sales process and acquisition, all of that has dramatically increased over last eight to 24 months, right? We're talking about two different markets.

To your point, like the two actually, let's start with the two function of an outbound generation is either capture demand or generate demand, depending on which step they're on. If they don't have brand demand, guess what step you're on. If you already have brand demand, guess what movie you're at. So with that in mind, right, to capture the demand usually takes an ROI clause of about six months, right? And that's simply because people don't want us to be sold to, people don't want to buy, so you kind of have to figure out the ins and outs and all those fun tricks of the trade, right? The real fun cap.

But on the flip side of that, the 12 to 18 months of just generating the demand, generating the brand awareness, generating the buzz, that in itself needs to be priority one. And without one, there isn't the other. So again, it's exhausting protocols, but again, not exploding your TAM or your total sellable market, whatever you want to classify it as. So it's a process, and it's a balance. And I think I just bounced around that answer too much.

Adam Jay (10:08.984)
Hmm.

Dale Zwizinski (10:22.722)
Yeah, I still don't. let's say, because a lot of founders will go with the sales motion first, which I actually think it's the right motion followed closely by the marketing motion, just because you got to get some revenue in the door. And then the challenge a little bit with the marketing side is it's a fairly decent expense if you're not doing guerrilla marketing. So if you're not getting people on podcasts, if you don't have like a face of the company,

Like there's some other things that you got to figure out on the media, on the, marketing side. So I think you can gorilla push your way in the sales. You could probably get the first 10 customers through just brute force that needs probably some, some not manipulation, but some management to get through the process, but then quickly bring in the marketing side so you can drive the awareness, whether it's podcasts, dare I say webinars, content, you know, all of those types of pieces.

Eric Iannello (11:10.235)
Mm

Adam Jay (11:19.736)
labators.

Dale Zwizinski (11:21.902)
so that's kind of more where I was, my, my head was at because someone like you going in and like trying to just cold call people or like send emails and have conversations. If they don't know who XYZ company is, I'm sure your connect rates and your conversion rates are a lot lower than if they have some brain awareness.

Eric Iannello (11:44.635)
No, you're absolutely right. And we're in a world where we're fighting for 1 .5 % reply rates. know, every percentage or even every hundredth of a percent counts. And where TAM is dramatically decreasing, right? It's not in a progressive motion. It's not in an upward motion like many like to think in every founder claims. But what it needs to say is that we need to capture what is already there and then obviously exploit and expand. With that, yeah.

Dale Zwizinski (12:07.672)
Well, and one thing on that, yeah, one thing on that, like TAM is such an investment PE, VC type statement. When we're thinking about it, we really need to think about total sellable market, people that are actually going to buy from you. Like these TAM conversations are like, I don't know, I think we get stars in our eyes when we talk about the TAM. And it's just to figure out from a PE or a VC perspective, is it investable or worth investing in?

Adam Jay (12:16.152)
Mmm

Dale Zwizinski (12:35.266)
But like when we go to execution on to go to market, we need to eliminate that nomenclature out of our mind because if not, we're just going to get false sense of hope. So sorry, Adam, cut you off.

Adam Jay (12:47.82)
No, you didn't cut me off. You might have cut him off, but you didn't cut me off.

Eric Iannello (12:48.217)
No, no, but to your point though, at TSM.

The battle the battle personalities I was just gonna say the TSM right and that is a great help that you bring up is gonna be substantially lower than the The TAM is a glorified number. There's nothing trackable about it. It basically says that you know there's 42 ,000 people who don't have hair. Well of course we're not taking into consideration the people receiving hairline who soon to be like it's just it's such a skewed number that I'm like that's not again to your point but now VC evaluations and all of those are starting to come on the back heel because they realize that those are exploitable numbers.

Adam Jay (12:54.734)
Go ahead, Eric.

Dale Zwizinski (13:01.762)
Yeah.

Eric Iannello (13:22.373)
So again, side tangent, but now.

Adam Jay (13:25.028)
But this is the problem with vanity metrics, right? It's just looking at it in the reverse. It's the same thing as saying, we have a 58 % open rate. Big fucking deal. Your subject resonates. Or your spam checkers are opening your emails. Like, who cares? I don't care about open rates. I care about a few things. And it's changed over the past 30 to 45 days. We talked about it earlier. Meetings booked and pipeline generated, of course. But.

How many times does it take reaching out to someone until a meetings book? The data shows between nine and 15. So if I email Dale and he doesn't respond to the email and I email him three times and he doesn't, but boom, Dale pops up on my website and I could see that through all the great technology we have. And now I could create an automated motion to take that website visit, pop it into Clay, validate that he's ICP or did he push the email to someone below him and say, hey, check out this technology, see if it makes sense for us to take a call.

Now, depending on who it is, I send either a personalized video or personalized message, whatever it happens to be, that also is generating interest, right? It might not be the meeting today, but there is a action that was taken from my outbound that is driving awareness that it's now on us as revenue leaders or outbound professionals to now take that and further convert that. The days of someone saying, man, Eric, this is the best fucking email I've ever got on email number one, and I can't wait to talk to you about your product. Please, you know what?

Forget 30. Let's book a 60 minute meeting. Those days are gone. Right, send the docuSign right now. Those days are gone and we're all buyers and we all know it. So when we're talking about, you know, open rates and whatnot, it's the same thing as TAM. Great. You have a massive total addressable market. The VCs might love that and that's great. What's your total sellable market? Who can you actually sell to? Who are you going to reach out to?

Eric Iannello (14:55.675)
Send me the Ducky sign. Yeah.

Dale Zwizinski (14:57.976)
Yeah.

Eric Iannello (15:01.669)
Yeah.

Adam Jay (15:20.088)
that should pick up the phone and have a fucking conversation with you. Because I promise you, it's not your total addressable market at all. So let me shift, go ahead.

Eric Iannello (15:28.507)
Well, No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no,

Adam Jay (15:32.354)
I don't think I've been this rolled up on an episode in a long time.

Eric Iannello (15:35.767)
No, no, no. And I love this. And we could do this all freaking day, know, pour me a little whiskey. But what it comes down to is the ideology of like this broken out down model. And now we're moving away from the modern predictable revenue and, you know, plug in SDR and throw more bodies at it to a different verification process. Right. And that verification process is veering away from the vanity metrics. I'm not going to give an SQL to an SDR and hope that they book me a meeting. What it needs to be is exactly your lead flow. Sorry, did I just throw it out there? But what it needs to be is exactly that lead flow through a verification process. Right.

Adam Jay (15:42.296)
Mmm.

Dale Zwizinski (15:58.763)
Thanks

Mm

Eric Iannello (16:05.499)
And I can actually sit here and give three BDRs rather than 12, an entirety of lists of verified ICP through a total sellable drossable market, whatever you want to qualify as. And now we can reduce the steps. And everybody talks about speed of leave, right? That's the coolest thing since last thread now. Now we're reducing speed of leave. Now we're reducing customer acquisition costs. And now we're reducing all the ideas that every influencer loves to talk about a broken model. I went there.

Adam Jay (16:29.614)
So let's shift gears a second, because we're talking a lot about email. But outbound isn't just email, right? Outbound is email, outbound is phone, outbound is LinkedIn, outbound is any plethora of things. And I shit you not, the other day I got, and I posted about this, I got four phone calls in a row from a number I didn't know. Now they didn't spoof the area code and prefix, because we all know that trick, and anyone who's doing that, please stop.

We all know if the first six digits match that it's spam. But for phone calls, and everyone knows I've had a lot going on with my kid and whatnot. like phone call number four, like I'm thinking something's really wrong or someone really needs to get a hold of me about something. And I answer it and it's a cold call. Now you both know me well enough, like when I'm not slammed, like I do take cold calls. So I'm not being an asshole here, but at phone call number four, you can imagine I had nothing nice to say. And then you could imagine that whatever that product is, no matter

Eric Iannello (16:59.365)
It's cute, right?

Adam Jay (17:27.63)
how bad I needed it, you're dead to me at that point. Why do people do this and what is the right way to cold call?

Eric Iannello (17:32.741)
Hey, Black Bolt.

Eric Iannello (17:36.601)
Leadership problem. I'm calling it as I see it. And I've been on the other side of that one. It's a leadership problem, right? They're told and most likely it's not like everyone's inkling is going to be like, let me call out of four times unless it's me trying to like, you know, give you shit on a random Thursday, which I do excessively. But needless to say, if I'm actually trying to actually human nature is not to be over the bar. Human nature is not to be that persistent, right? Is a top behavior atypical, right? Let's just talk about the typical motion. It is a top behavior.

Adam Jay (17:38.983)
Mmm.

Eric Iannello (18:04.761)
When I was handed a list, right, they're going, you better call this until you're blue. That narrative is going to skew everything. So what's happening is a leadership down method, Basically VC, and we can talk about this all day long, VC has given them skewed numbers. They're not funneling the message properly. They're not giving clear direction, in which case it's going to be, let's just call it a good method. And then ultimately speaking, right, it's just not going to lead to retained value, which is simply that if I cold call Adam,

Dale Zwizinski (18:12.75)
Yeah.

Eric Iannello (18:34.565)
four times in a row hoping to make that opportunity, well now I just pissed him off and he blackballed the entire company. And guess what? He also has a presence online and then all of a sudden now it's that snowball effect. All because of leaderships and capability of being able to funnel the message, give clear direction and teach the actual proper methodology.

Dale Zwizinski (18:47.535)
Thank

Dale Zwizinski (18:51.64)
That's, yeah, that's one of the things that you said in that message is that people are starting to have personal followings, bigger followings. You don't understand the downstream implications. Like a lot of times we're getting, people are connecting with us to evaluate technology, potentially recommend technology. We don't use any, we don't recommend any technology we don't use. So I think that part is super interesting. And I think that's one place where

like an outbound motion, an SCR, BDR, can start figuring out like getting into communities versus just like sitting on the outside trying to do the typical, cold calling, emailing, LinkedIn. Talk to me a little bit about your evaluation of BDRs or salespeople getting into communities, finding kind of like the, the, the partnership type stuff where

they can hear signals that you wouldn't hear in other places like whether it's Red Genius or Pavilion or any of these communities. Talk to a little bit about the secrets and give the audience a little bit of a sneak peek on how they can do it even better than they're just sitting on the outside.

Adam Jay (19:50.542)
Mm.

Eric Iannello (20:03.355)
Yeah, I'm gonna give a nod to our good friend Scott Lees, right? He posted an incredible post a couple, it may have been a couple of weeks ago, if not last week. Scott, big fan, anyways, I was actually talking to him this weekend about you. Degress, he posted something about it. He is much more likely to hire somebody unbiased to their previous experience to someone who has 100 ,000 followers to someone who has a hundred or a thousand followers. The reason being is because

Adam Jay (20:09.188)
Don't fucking give that guy any credit. No, I'm kidding.

Dale Zwizinski (20:11.98)
you

Eric Iannello (20:32.079)
you can argue until you're blue in the face, but your net worth or your network is your net worth. And that is because of curiosity partnerships that you're actually building and relationships that you can actually tap on either behind the times ahead of times, whatever that may be. Right. And I think, and I will say this again until I'm blue in the face, but the only reason I'm standing on my two feet today, after all the shit that I've gone through, but side my professional market of like being able to do outbound is again through network. That's between connecting with people on LinkedIn between

just building relationships outside of it. Hey, if you know Adam, I would love to chat with you. Or if you know Dale, definitely kick rocks, because I don't want to talk to you. It's that kind of ideology that you want to make sure that you actually preach what you're practicing. So I'm much more likely, I look at somebody, be it an AE, a BDR, a leadership title, whatever, have you? What is your presence? What is your connection? And how can I back channel them? How deep is their back channeling? And just having that understanding. Go with products. There's products I won't touch, simply because of experience that Adam

Dale Zwizinski (21:08.641)
Hahaha

Eric Iannello (21:30.671)
There's products I would actually give the time of day just because of the experience that they'll have. So that all plays into accountability. And I always joke about this. No matter how big we think that our world is, it is so freaking small.

Adam Jay (21:46.148)
It's a very big, very small world out there. That's true and everyone knows everyone. So you're talking to a founder who, any founder, it doesn't matter whether you're, let's just say you're earlier than series B and they reach out to you and the conversation is we don't have an outbound motion. Most of our business has been either

Eric Iannello (21:50.515)
For better or for worse.

Adam Jay (22:14.594)
referral -based or event -based, little bit of inbound but not a whole lot, and we want to start an outbound motion. Where do you begin? Where do you start?

Eric Iannello (22:23.513)
The very first question I ask is, me the playbook. Hand me a physical playbook. Or let's call it a process, right? And they say no, and well, now we know where we need to start. Right? I'm not going to just, again, I used the joke. We're not going to be blind, frat guys throwing dartboards and hoping for something. Because I'm not going to blindly promise them meetings. That's not the tangible. We're going to be delivering repeatable process. We're delivering a foundation which they can obviously teach others and hopefully take to scale.

Adam Jay (22:28.269)
No playbook.

Yeah.

Eric Iannello (22:51.749)
But the blatant question is, is the who, the what, the why, the when, and the where. Those are the simple ideas when you come into an outbound. Be it a TAM, be it an ICP, a TSM, be it an ICP, be it previously messaging, success rates. Why did this progress? Why did Utah attack this individual? Tell me all of those meaty questions, and then that's where we can begin. But without those, can't even have a start. And I think that's where I'm going to hit them where it hurts.

That's why agencies fail early founders so often. These people that just are promising meetings. And again, I have friends that are in agencies and I mean, no qualm to them whatsoever. But these false promises to just say, Hey, I'll book you 20 meetings in the first month. Like you said, right? My three year old man. He's three and he can book you a meeting. Obviously it would be with this gorilla, the stuffed gorilla in his room. But my point being though, you know what mean? Like it's the same ideology, right? It's the false narrative. And that's why so many agencies fail. And that's why they give

Dale Zwizinski (23:24.962)
Hmm.

Adam Jay (23:43.213)
Love it.

Eric Iannello (23:50.991)
people the bad name for building a process because they want the false meaning.

Adam Jay (23:56.036)
That's agencies, that's consultants, that's everyone who comes in and and Dale, you were probably gonna go to the same place, I'm sorry, but let's, I could build you a strategy or I could give you a slide deck or I could fix this. And they're so worried about getting, you know, the five, seven, 10, 12, whatever thousand dollars for a few months that they're so short -sighted that it's, I'm gonna get this revenue and then it will be someone else's problem. Well, yeah, until Revenue Reimagine now has six clients that came from the consultant who couldn't deliver and now you have a name for yourself.

And it's not the name that you want, right? You don't want to be known as the agency, if you will. And it's one of the reasons why we deliberately decided to never use the word agency, who can't deliver. And there's so many people out there who make these false promises of, we all get those emails. What if I could guarantee you 100 leads a month? Dude, if you could guarantee me 100 leads a month, qualified leads, you would be filthy rich and you would not be reaching out to me. I promise you that. You'd be a millionaire.

Dale Zwizinski (24:56.398)
Yep, 100%. Really quick, Eric, where should Alpond fall? Should it fall under marketing or should it fall under sales?

Adam Jay (25:03.32)
Hmm

Eric Iannello (25:05.455)
Ooh, ooh.

Dale Zwizinski (25:07.714)
And I said really quick knowing that this is not really a quick conversation.

Eric Iannello (25:10.043)
Right, right. This is early in the morning. I was gonna pour a beer for that one. I think I think it's a bridge in between, right? And it you know, even the flirting idea now is it should should it fall up to rebounds, which is again, and now we safe form. I think it depends on what stage it's in, right? Are we capturing demand or regenerating demand? If we have a full functioning demand, we have a marketing that is just, you know, plugging and chugging on all fronts. If we have a sales team that has taken progression to pipeline that is

and progress it to close, then we know where it needs to fall. And that's why I always call it the bridge in between. It's always going to have that flexibility. And this is where I see a lot of teams go, this is why I don't think that agencies are going to bode well in the future, you know, three to five years. I think they have it in an end date because they don't know the flexibility between work and between both. Where does it fall? It may differ between days. I may look at, you know, marketing project being great. We're going to capture content syndication. We're going to make that the landing pick. Cool. The narration would be marketing. But

If I'm looking to pilot between an ICP matrix or retargeting a vertical, now we're talking about sales, I it's a swing idea in the sense that it's not one, but it's all.

Dale Zwizinski (26:22.316)
Yeah, I think they sit between, but you got to obviously kind of report up into somewhere. But it's kind of the glue I see between sales and marketing, where you're sitting front end with people, with prospects. can definitely get the insight, bring that back to marketing, but also enable sales to know what marketing is doing from a macro perspective. What campaigns are we running? How are we going to run them?

Here's what you can expect. it's that back and forth. actually think it's a much, we always say it's a really important position, but I actually think it's more important now more than ever, especially if you can tie back to meeting conversions, conversion opportunity types of things than anything else. I always think this ends up being a compensation conversation at the end of the day that will then roll into where things fall and tie through the buyer's journey.

Adam Jay (27:21.156)
person.

Eric Iannello (27:21.295)
I think it really just depends on where the stage is for the company. Early stage, it's all under one umbrella. I think, you know, the later stage, the more separated it may be. But again, that's because the roles are defined, the lines are defined, and there's not really any gray areas in the matter. But again.

Adam Jay (27:37.848)
All right, let's do some rapid fire as we wrap it up I'm gonna try to think of ones that I don't know the answers for for you Eric

Eric Iannello (27:48.331)
That's hard. We've known each other for a while now.

Adam Jay (27:51.588)
I know. What's your favorite guilty pleasure snack?

Eric Iannello (27:57.891)
Trader Joe's gluten -free cookies with the salted chocolate chips.

Adam Jay (28:02.177)
Is that guilty if there's no gluten?

Eric Iannello (28:05.752)
I man. I'm old now. I don't process gluten like I did in my yester years.

Adam Jay (28:08.172)
Yeah, I'm with you. My wife brought me some glass of green shit this morning that, yeah, Dale loves it because he drinks it every morning. you could taste the ginger. I literally thought I was like at the sushi bar. I was like.

Eric Iannello (28:17.098)
Wow.

Dale Zwizinski (28:17.326)
About time. I drink it every morning. My wife brings me the...

I've been drinking this for 10 years,

Adam Jay (28:28.319)
Yeah, mean that explains why that skin is so beautiful.

Eric Iannello (28:29.243)
I was a personal trainer for 10 years and I never touched that. Yeah. Yeah, yeah.

Dale Zwizinski (28:32.92)
That's why I hair. Anyway, okay, I have one that Adam probably won't, Adam probably should know this one. How many texts a day do you get from Adam?

Eric Iannello (28:44.155)
Is it on average or is it a weekend? I think it's a first.

Dale Zwizinski (28:45.358)
Thank

Adam Jay (28:48.632)
And is it work related or are we just shooting the shit?

Dale Zwizinski (28:53.004)
work -related shit, mostly over the weekend.

Eric Iannello (28:55.067)
Let's put it this way. We text so often that we have to define what the criteria of the question is. Let's put it that way. That's a better way to just answer that.

Adam Jay (29:01.069)
Mmm.

Dale Zwizinski (29:03.596)
Work related, work related over the week.

Eric Iannello (29:07.789)
Over the week? over the weekend? No, I think we're pretty respectful in each other's time that, know, unless it's like a personal allocate, we really kind of...

Adam Jay (29:08.802)
Weekend, work related over the weekend, hardly ever.

Adam Jay (29:14.838)
Now Dale's going to say, why aren't you fucking respectful of my time? So the next question that we're going to ask, what's your go -to productivity hack?

Eric Iannello (29:18.517)
HAHAHAHA

Adam Jay (29:34.05)
Not texting Adam over the weekend.

Eric Iannello (29:38.043)
Depends on the founder we're dealing with right now. It differs. I don't know. I've been nerding out in clay a little bit. Are we talking about tool wise or just like in general?

Adam Jay (29:39.586)
Mmm, touche.

Adam Jay (29:49.078)
In general. Like for me it's time blocking.

Eric Iannello (29:53.173)
yeah, God no, I'm terrible at that. No, think productivity hack is... God, I don't even know. That's a great question. I'm in the midst of a shit show where I need your productivity hacks. I'll put a pin in that one. We'll defer back.

Dale Zwizinski (30:06.09)
There you go.

Adam Jay (30:06.606)
Fair enough. All right. All right.

Dale Zwizinski (30:09.836)
What's the first app you check when you wake up in the morning?

Eric Iannello (30:13.273)
instantly, for sure.

Dale Zwizinski (30:16.47)
instantly.

Eric Iannello (30:17.615)
Yep, instantly, and then LinkedIn.

Adam Jay (30:17.72)
What's the one word to describe your startup journey so far?

Eric Iannello (30:23.577)
I can't say that there's kids around. No, it's been fun or that or the other word will switch between it.

Adam Jay (30:25.314)
Yeah, fair enough. Good point.

Dale Zwizinski (30:25.73)
Hahaha

Dale Zwizinski (30:32.93)
The F word, just fun. Last one, last one. So dream vacation destination.

Adam Jay (30:34.552)
Take us home, Dell.

Eric Iannello (30:34.959)
Just fun.

Eric Iannello (30:40.731)
I've had my eyes set on Alaska for a while. I think it would be really fun to go out there mostly in summer and either fish for salmon and look at bears from afar. I think that would be pretty fun.

Adam Jay (30:56.644)
Love it, love love it. Eric, I seriously thank you for joining. You're not being paid for this, obviously, but I appreciate it. I think that this is definitely something we need to double click on even more. It's a hot topic. It's one that's super important. And I think it's one that not only is so crucial to get right, but if you get it wrong, you're screwing yourself. Whether that be your domain, whether that be your messaging, whether that be burning through your total sellable market.

Eric Iannello (31:07.749)
You

Eric Iannello (31:22.181)
catastrophic.

Adam Jay (31:25.89)
You can't afford to make the outbound mistakes that you made in the past. Where can people find you,

Eric Iannello (31:33.371)
I'm on LinkedIn like a 13 year old's on Snapchat, man. It's a bad obsession, but that's where my ICP is, so that's where I'm at. So yeah, just on LinkedIn, sweet and simple.

Adam Jay (31:39.021)
I love it.

Go find Eric, you could also find him at revenue -reimagined .com. And thanks for joining me.

Eric Iannello (31:48.059)
Thanks for having me guys. Talk to you soon.

Dale Zwizinski (31:49.045)
Thank you.