Latest / Selling AI / "No Decision" Is Not a Close-Loss Reason — Why Your CRM Data Is Lying to You

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"No Decision" Is Not a Close-Loss Reason — Why Your CRM Data Is Lying to You · Selling AI

• Warren Kucker: Hey there and welcome to another episode of Selling AI. Today we're diving in into the evolution of rev ops, specifically why most rev ops teams are stuck doing CRM cleanup and reporting when they should be building an intelligence layer that actually drives new revenue. I have Liam Whedon on the show today. Liam is the founder of GTM Layer, a rev ops consultancy focused on enterprise go to market and he's worked with dozens of companies, including building everything out from client implementations to forecasting models. Here's what makes this conversation interesting. Liam is on a mission to shift rev ops from just static CRM data tooling to actually driving real buyer signals. Also wants to make sure he's pulling the right insights from sales conversations, methodology frameworks, and giving his sales team and revenue leaders actual market context that they can actually act on. In today's episode, Liam and I talk about why conversational intelligence is massively underutilized in rev ops, how to get creative with client scale without burning through tons of credits. and why the RevVoss builds are really kind of the future that's driving anything from marketing, sales, and to customer success. Great. All right. Let's do it, Liam. It's great having you on the show today. Liam Weedon: Yeah, thanks for having me. Warren Kucker: Awesome, so first let's dive into a little bit of your background. You've been in rebops for a while, both online and to the corporate side, now your own consultancy. Walk us through the journey. How did you end up kind of breaking out on your own and running like a rebops consultancy? Liam Weedon: Yeah, so I actually worked in sales and sales ops related roles in commercial banking for a long time. Moved into FinTech, obviously then in the startup space, and that was during COVID, right? So I was in two startups over that three years. given the economy was at a standstill, there was not a lot to do. So I kind of did a lot of projects with like products, right? I involved in a lot of the digital journey stuff, the automation, the CRM build, and then kind of got exposed to that from the technical side. So after that, I just kind of dived in. I found Hotspot, learned that, and then really just went and kind of drilled down on... kind of enterprise sales and HubSpot. And then that really just expanded into, you know, wider DevOps. Obviously now with AI and everything else going on, there's a lot, a lot more to that. But yeah, that's how I got here. Warren Kucker: Awesome, cool. Well, obviously like rev ops, go to market engineering has become like a really like hot area of the sales process over the past like 12 to 18 months. Have you seen that conversation shift over the past, I'd say 12 months and how do you see it shifting over the next, well I'd say two years or so? Liam Weedon: Yeah, so it's funny when you look like two years ago and it was like Apollo, Apollo, Apollo, right? You just basically looking for loads of data and loads of leads and just trying to spin up a lot of volume. I think, know, signals is becoming very important. think obviously everyone's now getting a lot of emails, a lot of messages, there's a lot of noise. And I think people are now starting to understand that there's more targeted ways to do outreach. I think with AI people are understanding that, like what they are and how they can do it. But I think it's very important to really look at more data and more context, not just kind of ICP fit, right? So my thing's always, you know, you want to look for external signals, of course, but if you've already spoken to these ⁓ companies, particularly an enterprise, like what is the... ⁓ activity history or the meetings history and all of that kind of data. You have all of that now and we can now use all of that but the more you can put together from these different kind of data points the more you can kind of use that to kind of be able to mention in a conversation. Warren Kucker: Interesting, do you have any specific examples of some really good ⁓ signals, data points that you use to help build that momentum? I know you're probably doing a wide breadth of different sales processes, but what's a good example of this? Liam Weedon: Yeah, so I worked for the company recently that were, I was building. something in in clay just to look for different signals that they they wanted to look for. But I combine that with a simple AI prompt right to look for like web research and things like that. But I also then plugged in HubSpot. So if I found something relevant and then I looked up the company and the history of that and like the lifecycle stage and just kind of paint a picture of like where they were, I can use that and put it together to give it to the sales team, right? So it was actually one that there was a very strong signal like critical event that was in the news. They were actually speaking to that company like trying to go through the expansion process, right? So it was actually a very relevant thing to use at the right time. And I was able to put that together and actually like give that for the team. So, you know, it can be news indicators and things like that, but I also think, you know, team size growth and other things, there's a lot of like creative ways you can infer signals. like that but yeah I think again you need to make sure you understand like where you are with the conversation already um what that signal means not just use that signal and try and stick it into an AI email right and send it out on the side you know Warren Kucker: Right. Yeah. That's awesome. that like more, you find this more valuable on the outbounding side or are you using it all on the, let's say, sales process, opportunity process for the sales team? Liam Weedon: I think, well, it's more an outbound, just pure volume and priority seems to always be outbound, right? But I think there's a lot, you know, data enrichment and context is really important for the team. the, you know, I think RevOps doesn't need to just focus on like automations and workflows and things like that. Like the more context you give someone to do that. conversation or that step manually, but better, that's actually like way more important, more valuable. So I think it does go across the whole kind of funnel, right? But yeah, I think there's a lot of different ways to kind of input it in different places. Warren Kucker: Right. Yep. That's it. Cool man. Yeah. So let's get tactical. mean, Clay is out there in the ecosystem. I say is like, what's interesting that I found interesting about Clay is it seems like it was like a overnight success, right? It's actually been around for about seven and a half years now. I'm assuming it's about a half since I've been telling the story for a while. Six years took to get to 1 million revenue. Seventh year, 100 million revenue, right? So amazing for them. I love Clay. That's great, right? It's interesting. It's really the layering of the LLMs that took Clay from like, we want to be the Zapier of sales and go Liam Weedon: Mm. Yeah. Warren Kucker: to market tools to something that's really actionable and new. find that most people, like I'd say 50 % of go-to-market folks have kind of heard of clay and most people aren't using it. Let's say you have someone that's just starting from scratch, like they're getting into clay, they're maybe just using it for basic enrichment, right? Like that's how I used to use Apollo. What are they missing? What's step two that they should really take to help drive it? And maybe it isn't the final step, there's a lot of things you could do with clay, but what's like that? How do you go from like just finding phone numbers and emails into something else that's important? Liam Weedon: Yeah, so I think what I see a lot of is, again, like you said, Apollo, right, people look at the clay and they start off on your table and they're using these basic thermographic filters and they get a big list and then suddenly they start to jump to qualification and there's a lot of enrichment and a lot of cost and there's a lot of like... you're kind of missing a process in between of like trying to understand more about that business, right? What you're trying to do, you your ICP is only like what, 10 % of the market, it's not the whole market. So you wanna try and look at different things that infer signals that make it an ICP and then put that together before you then run all of this and reach all these contacts and all this stuff and then realize actually none of them are relevant. So it's like, for example, you might have a list of... I 10,000 companies in banking and finance, but then like, do they have an actual SaaS product? Is that something that you do? Do you sell to teams, like specific teams, maybe security teams, like 10 or more, right? So you can start to look up and count these things and start to paint a picture of like, what's going on? What's their tech stack? How big is their team? How quickly has it grown? ⁓ You you might scrape some data around incidents or things from regular websites or whatever. it's going to be like a critical event to them. So it's really just like these are all very like specific individual steps. They're not normally that difficult to build because you're just looking up something but I think people don't know or don't think about how can they look for this signal that they would normally get maybe on a meeting. You know what They'll have to ask the question. So it's like translating that into like a stepping clay and then narrowing that down and then you can do the image print and then you can start to do more stuff. Warren Kucker: Yeah, so ⁓ I've actually found that most companies I come across ⁓ are pretty far away from having a really tight ICP that they're targeting. They're like three steps. Generally, they have one broad stroke. We've been talking about, let's say, firmographics for a while. So maybe they're like US companies that have engineering function. Liam Weedon: yet. Mm-hmm. Warren Kucker: And then it's like, great, like that's really broad. Like, let's get that. We've been talking about the fact that we should be more now for a while, but most people aren't. They're just broad brushing it, right? Do you feel the same? And do you feel like that companies are starting to make that shift and seeing that, or is it still like, ⁓ because we've always been so poor at it, it's hard to get them to be like, great, no, actually your, your ICP should be one fifth of this. These are truly the 8,000 accounts that you can actually sell to. Have you found that that's been easier or just as hard as always because we've always done it that way. Liam Weedon: Yeah. Yeah, I think people are open to it, but then they don't know obviously the outcome of it, right? It's a new thing. And I think there's still the element of, okay, we still need to do volume. I'm talking about higher thing, new video art, so we still need to get loads and do the whole market, right? But I think actually... when people spend time on it and actually think about, okay, how do we build this and get those signals and actually spend time on it, it does become more relevant. It's not a very quick thing to build, right? Because you can build that kind of... smaller ICP maybe kind of market, then you've got other signals and then you've got to combine it with the CRM part and the sales process and that kind of thing. I do think people are open to it. I just don't think people are aware of how ⁓ and what that looks like. And they still want to kind of hang on to, okay, let's do loads of emails as well. Warren Kucker: Right. Yeah, agreed. think there's like two things at play there. think there's like one, oftentimes the true signal is like undiscoverable. You couldn't know this publicly, right? So like that's one aspect. You're just never gonna know this, right? Like this happened and they're in the market for my product now, right? Like there's the true signal, the best one isn't there. And so you get stuck on that. But on the flip, I'd say like, and let's, I'm kind of thinking of a mindset of companies under 30 to 40 million in ARR in this scenario, right? Liam Weedon: Yeah. Warren Kucker: In theory, you look at your customer base and you try to like collate what publicly available information about my customers could I then use to go after the other companies that look like them as best, right? Like that's what you would do in reverse. I actually find under 40 million, obviously you get to 100, you get to 200, you have a bunch of business line, you have a bunch of units, right? It's a different story. Under like 40 million, there's not enough collating between there's not actually like a great, if I actually really dove in and tried to figure out my local customers, I might have like, Liam Weedon: Mm-hmm. Yeah. Warren Kucker: 10 % of my customer base that fits in that like category, right? And then I have like another variable with a different product and a different line that kind of look like this, and you still don't really have a tight ICP. Do you find the same when you go into this or do you find that like if you take that exercise to look at your customer base, you often get to the right publicly available information you could find to kind of hit that ICP. Liam Weedon: No, it's definitely difficult. Like you said, a lot of it is just not available, right? You can infer a lot. Like I said, there's a lot of things you can ask on those initial meetings, typically in discovery that you might be able to find and assume based on data that's there, but it's not the full picture you're ever going to get to. There are ways, I think... Warren Kucker: Yeah. Liam Weedon: Going back to analysis of your customers and deals one to kind of understand the lookalike part, there's different ways to do it, right? So not just looking at, again, thermographics or like what, like who the buy roles were and industry and that kind of thing. But again, if you look at... meeting transcripts and you look at, okay, all the closed one deals and what did we speak about? What was the theme on that? Maybe we can actually see what the problems were or the most common problems or maybe there's like objections that we didn't handle or maybe that kind of, maybe we're not angling it in the right way or something like that. So yeah, you can't always get everything right before you speak to them right. But I think there's other ways to look at. your customers to understand the themes and maybe use that to find lookalikes in a different way. Warren Kucker: Yeah, that's a great pivot into the conversational aspect of this. How have you seen how our access to conversations in sales and marketing really, but I'd say sales is the ones having the conversations, has kind of evolved over the past couple of years and what do you think is possible over the next couple? Liam Weedon: Hmm. Yeah, so I think of course, know, note takers and all these tools, right, the transcripts and the actions and all that kind of stuff is obviously very useful. And I think there are mostly, you know, when I speak to teams, they are using that individually on the meetings, like on the deals and actually looking at information to help to like, the momentum and block deals and stuff. fine. But I think what's missing is like looking at all the meetings and like the roll up of that and how that actually looks across. the board. So like what's actually going on across the whole thing. Like I said, if there's like particular problems that... coming up a lot or sales objections and whatever. It's not just about using it to help that deal, but actually look at like, you know, think the CRM data is not, CRM data is static, right? You can look at sales cycles and, you know, average time in stage and all that kind of thing. But I think, you know, there's a lot more you can see. And if you look at all of those meetings across all of the pipeline, ⁓ I'm really starting. Analyze it properly with AI of course, but there's a lot more insight there that you can use. Warren Kucker: Yeah, yeah, let me press into that. Tell me where I'm wrong and where I might be right. So from a Revoss perspective, to me what we were doing with conversational data is one, making sure our meetings are recorded, which I don't know if you would agree or disagree. I'd say over 50 % are still not recording their meetings somehow. Everywhere I go, there's people that are like, I... I thought I was recording my meetings, I don't have any transcripts, right? So that's one. But then more importantly, like what you would do is like three years and this was cool, right? Like you would look for like key terms, right? You'd load key terms into outreach or fathom or something like that. Like where are these key terms said on these calls? How much were they said? If I heard a competitor name, maybe I could surface up. I remember like, great, you hear a competitor name on call and outreach, it'll surface up a battle card. Liam Weedon: Mm-hmm. Warren Kucker: Cool, useful, very useful, no, because no one's paying attention to the battle card that pops up, unless there's just like once in a while it's very useful, right? And that was revops, right? That's your job to kind of do that. Maybe some sales enablement, right? To cool that. Liam Weedon: Yeah. Warren Kucker: Now it's like you have this cloud of information you just never had access to before, right? Like now it's like you don't have to load in key terms, think about the key terms, you can ask questions of your conversations. I think the software is actually not really caught up to that 100%, but it's gonna get there. Would you agree or disagree with this? Now that we have this kind of information, what do you think might be the coolest thing we could do with that data going forward? Liam Weedon: coolest thing. There's a lot of things we can do with theatre, right? think there's a lot. Yeah. I think the... Warren Kucker: I'll them then, yeah. Liam Weedon: So my thing is like, I said this a few times to clients, right? But like, if you had the perfect sales process, everything went well, there was no objections and all this kind of stuff. Like you wouldn't have any additional meetings other than the core ones, right? And you'd only have discovery and demo and everything else. You wouldn't need to have these follow-ups and things in theory, right? Because everything is moving. So if you complete all of that and then it's like, it's kind of like that's, whatever's in those meetings is kind of what you need to solve. So if you, again, you roll that up and you understand that, forever, upside that. can we see what is not happening that is causing these delays or additional touch points and that kind of thing. I think that's quite useful. That's something I'm trying to do at the moment, even for myself. if I like operations as well. So I've got Claude every week, he's gonna take my further transcripts and then just summarize what am I talking about the most or what is coming up a lot? what, do you know what mean? Like what is... Warren Kucker: Yeah. Yeah. Liam Weedon: Urgent or important or what am I spending a lot of time explaining and like how can I deliver that differently? That's really useful to me. It's gonna be the same for sale because it's like, okay, if we're spending a lot of time answering this one question and there seems to be a big objection, but we can use that now in like content, enablement content or in marketing. We've reframed the conversation. We've got themes. So I think that's cool. Warren Kucker: Yep. Right. Yeah, right. That's interesting, I might thought of it this way. I think this is where you were going. It's almost like if you could, you can almost determine the frictionless buying journey, right? Liam Weedon: Yeah. Warren Kucker: So it's like, great, like we get on a call, you tell me your problems, I tell you how we solve problems with your ideal customer. Then I show you the text so you know that it's not like vaporware, right? Like what it looks like and could you see yourself in this technology? Then you maybe get some IT validation, you validate the ROI, the CFO kind of agrees and like half buys your ROI picture. You sign a contract where everyone's risk is covered and you move on your way, right? Like you have this like. Liam Weedon: Mm-hmm. Warren Kucker: frictionless baseline of a repetitive sales process that there is no, you didn't have to repeat yourself, there is no odd objections, momentum was maintained, everybody was involved that needed to be involved right off the rip, right? Cool, could you figure out one, that baseline, better now, but then two, understand all the times you veer off that core baseline, which is gonna be 93 % of the time, right, or 95 % of the time, but then you can determine all the times you veer off, cool, like how can you solve for the veering, right? Like how could you then push some of that into the frictionless scenario? Is that kind of where you're getting, that's actually really like Liam Weedon: Mm-hmm. Yeah. Warren Kucker: really cool way to frame the problem. Liam Weedon: Yeah, for sure. think it's, again, you can look at deal inspection on weekly sales calls when you're talking through your pipeline and it's like, how do we unblock this and what's going on? But okay, so if you've got, I mean, enterprise, right, it's always contract sent and then. Warren Kucker: Yeah. Liam Weedon: disappears for six months, right? Whatever. It's like, okay, well, what can we pull all the meeting transcripts from like the stage before? Are we actually asking these questions? we actually getting all the people? Do we have buy-in? Was there actually eight people on the call? Seems to go really well, but there's one person that actually didn't seem that interested and was negative and we didn't spot that and therefore they are now blocking it, right? So there's things like that. it is individual, but again, it's themed, right? From a Revolt's perspective and like top down, Warren Kucker: Yeah, right. Yeah. Yep. Liam Weedon: Okay, well this is about next. Okay, so what's happening? What are we not doing or what's going on in the meetings before? You know, not just looking at the stages and like, ⁓ I've sent all these follow ups and say, but that's follow up thing and what? Like the conversation, like what was the outcome and what was next? Warren Kucker: Yeah. Yeah. And one of your core themes is that like what you would have done before, a contract goes out, like contracts like out for signing and it goes blank for a month, two, three, and then close or lost or close one because they popped their head back up. Before all you do is like, look what was in Salesforce, right? This is just like the rep told you what happened beforehand. like, oh, what happened in Salesforce? Oh, well, we didn't get IT sign off or like the ROI was never signed off as review. And now you're saying that you could actually like, who cares about what's in Salesforce, actually go to the... Liam Weedon: and Yeah. Yeah. Warren Kucker: the three conversations before, if that's relevant, or the conversation where you're about the contract, or like, ask like 10 questions, what are 10 reasons why this could have gotten off the rails, and ask those 10 questions in all the conversations you're having? Is that, like, that's the shift there? Yeah. Liam Weedon: Yeah, I think it's like, still need the foundation of the right stages and like clarity and like what you're meant to be doing, like built into the system. So people need to do that, those key things. But you're not going to really get that much information out of like how to solve that without the meeting. So you might look at the funnel report and then like, okay, we've got a bottleneck here. And it's like, okay, well, I'm going to assume based on what, like the average time of the day and kind of. Warren Kucker: Here. Right? Right. Yeah. Yeah. Liam Weedon: emails in itself, like what do those emails say? Like what is it on the back of? What's the context? It's always context. The more context you have, the easier it is. Warren Kucker: Yeah. Yeah. Do you think there's a scenario actually where like the conversational intelligence just replaces the need for the CRM, like the deal level field filling out, right? Obviously there's like a value and I want to know what stage it's in, great, but like hey, did you ask if this integrates with this tool? Yes, like those types of fields. Do you feel like the conversation might just eliminate the need for that altogether? You just like know what happened? Liam Weedon: Hmm. Yeah, I mean, I always see blank fields because no one fills them out anyway, right? So you can ask for a medic or you can ask for these specific things and, okay, cool. But there's a few things that will get kicked off. But if it's only on 50 % of the deals, again, it's redundant, It doesn't give you any information. So, I mean, you can already deal with, you know, even further, right? Like spiced fields and all that kind of stuff. What I want to do... Warren Kucker: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Liam Weedon: or test out in the next couple of weeks if you look at the meetings in Fathom just because I use it. If you have another meeting with the same people to then call for the other transcripts and summarise it together, an app or something, as opposed to just trying to update stuff. So I know you can do that and go on whatever, but I think it's not that difficult anymore, right, just to kind of plug these things together and just actually get that. Warren Kucker: Yeah. Yeah. That's... It's funny, because I've had a mindset, so like reps hate admin, right? Right, that's what you say, everyone says, right? Rep ops in particular probably have this tattooed as soon as they become a rep ops venture. So they hate admin, said like, employment and their data in HubSpot or Salesforce has been like the face of the reps hate admin, right? But there's a bunch of other admin like sending emails and they hate everything but taking meetings and cashing commission checks. Like if we're being honest, sales rep wants to come in at 8 a.m., meet with people until 4 p.m., and then cash their commission check and do nothing else, right? So that's a perfect day, right? Liam Weedon: Mm-hmm. Yeah. Warren Kucker: of like, great, now that we have access to the conversation, you can update the CRM and they don't have to do that anymore. ⁓ Liam Weedon: Yeah. Warren Kucker: But you know what, it's almost like why should the CRM be field based anymore? Why isn't just, if you know, if you have access to every interaction that you've had with an account, right, from like, all the way from marketing interest, all the way through to the conversations you've had, I think it's like something like 38 % of deals have had more than one opportunity open when they close one, right? So it's like, you have more than one opportunity. What's the entire journey of this workflow? Then who needs the Salesforce stages? You have just conversation stages almost, right? Like, do you see, like is this like, Have you thought of this this this way and like do you is that actually like part of your core thesis? Yeah. Liam Weedon: Yeah, kind of. So I think closed loss is a good reason, right? So I always go in and like, everyone's, no one's ever bothered to put like a drop down of like closed loss reasons. like, okay, just let's just. Warren Kucker: Yeah, right. Liam Weedon: Now you can actually use that. Now you've got a reason. Again, it's context, but it's very simple drop down. Now you've got context to reach back out. But you can't just say in six months time, oh, this was lost to pricing. I still need to think about as a sales person, I need to think about how I'm going to handle that. But if you have the summary of like, okay, well what around pricing were the concerns or what was spoken about, now I can use that together. So, you know, the CRM fields are useful, but not when they are relied on to be input manual makers. Warren Kucker: Yeah. Yeah. No, close loss is a great one, right? Close loss is really important, right? Like why did you spend time on an account that you thought might pay you for your service or product? And they didn't, right? So that's close loss. And what does it result in? Close loss in Salesforce is a drop down. Generally a reason, but the reason is always like, so the number one reason in Salesforce would be no decision, right? Like decided not to make a decision. That's baloney, right? Like that's not the reason, right? Like that's completely wrong, but that's all you have. Liam Weedon: Hmm. Hmm. Warren Kucker: Right, and then you go back and sales name says well 72 % of the time we use this PDF we don't lose it to no decision, right? Like well now like there's like that's such a reduction of what happened It's almost like great if you could tell Claude This is what a good sales process looks like and then you a close glass and it looked at all your conversations They should claude should come tell you why Liam Weedon: Yeah. Warren Kucker: And then could it eventually collate it with all your other collo-glots? Like why even had the fields almost drunk? Like I don't even know. It's so like one line, like who cares? It doesn't mean anything. Liam Weedon: Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I never keep like the free text field. It's just going to say pricing or ghosted or don't force a word. it's not, it's not like that. But like, again, go back to like combining signals. So if you have Warren Kucker: Yeah, right, pricing or indecision. Liam Weedon: Closed last due to pricing. And then now you've got a summary of like what that was and why that was like why it was lost pricing. And then that sits in a clay table with signals on it. And then six months later, there's a signal that has something. Now you've got an external signal, maybe like a critical event. And now you've got context and you know the reason or like the gap you're trying to fill in terms of like proven value. So it was versus value. Warren Kucker: Yeah. Yep. Liam Weedon: Thank you, Mr. Speaker. Warren Kucker: Yeah, that's a yeah take that all the way back up up bound right and then again why you reengage an opportunity right later on you may close a lot of pricing if that's truly the case right and in order to To have that be true. I would think you would have to review pricing They tell you it's too expensive compared to either doing nothing or like another option, right? And then let's take one step further. What was the ROI that was discussed? Was it discussed would be like probably 50 % of the time really no Liam Weedon: Mm-hmm. Yeah. Warren Kucker: Right and so I'll say the ROI was good kid Claude really call in and say or open AI great like actually ROI was discussed They agreed but it was the type of agreement that's just like a head nod from your prospect, right? Like yeah, yeah this ROI is that right which is most of ROI discussions. Take that all the way back great Let's take a cybersecurity example then like six months later. There's some sort of cybersecurity issue at that account You sell cybersecurity software Maybe pricing isn't an issue anymore and you're using that closed-gloss. No one's using closed-gloss all the way up through outbounding There's just no way that that's happening. That's an interesting use case to pull that all the way through to top of funnel. Liam Weedon: Yeah, because I think, you know, it doesn't hurt to just follow up every quarter or something, maybe, but I don't think it's, it's like just sending bump emails, right? It's not really adding any value. It's just hoping that at that point they want to maybe have a conversation. So like when people are doing these like quarterly, like nurturing sequences, don't really add anything. Not. Warren Kucker: Yeah. Liam Weedon: great right but if you then just okay well they it was lost we're gonna now wait and try and frame it around the right time like said if there's a breach or an incident that obviously cost money like a lot of money and we could have solved that obviously that now looks pretty cheap do you what mean so now you've got a lot of points to use Warren Kucker: Yeah. Right? Yeah. That's interesting. That's really interesting. Cool. There's something else. So let's talk about signals. Let's go back a little bit further to, I know we kind of discussed it before. I've always found some signals to be tough, right? So people like to look at hiring. I was like, oh, they're hiring a VP of sales. That's a signal, right? The data is pretty scratchy. Liam Weedon: Mm-hmm. Warren Kucker: Right? Like it's hard to get that data at any sort of scale. Have you found, one, tell me if I'm wrong and how you might get that data, but two, is there like a signal that people don't think about that you think actually works really well where the data is like pretty good that you've used in the past? have an example of a signal and how you got that signal? Liam Weedon: I think if you combine... different things together, you have a better signal. So the example for for rev ops and GTM engineering. So if you say, okay, here's my TAM in a boarding clay. And like I said earlier, if you just quickly look for it, okay, is it actually a SaaS and really kind of drill it down and just get that point. But then if you look at, okay, maybe I'm going to look up the tech stack and they use Salesforce. And I'm going to look at the people and there's no one with a sales ops or rev ops role. But their first scene, if you can drill into the text act stuff in Belworth, the first scene was like 2012. Okay, but they've got 12 salespeople. They've used it for 14 years. They've got no people. I can assume actually there's a bigger thing for rev ops. Warren Kucker: Right. Liam Weedon: using those together and it's just using like simple simple talk. ⁓ yeah, I think the best thing obviously is if you can get very specific around, know, scraping very specific like for your ICP signals. So for example, I went with a company that did ⁓ e-discovery for like ⁓ healthcare and things like that and lawyers. So ⁓ the ICO is up there. Warren Kucker: Right. Interesting. Yeah. Liam Weedon: GDPR breaches and all that kind of thing for healthcare in the UK is all listed there. So all the decisions when someone has breached GDPR is there. And I can just go and scrape that and then, okay, well, if one of those is on here and they've breached this specific issue that this solves, I'm going to use that to trigger to find the chief information officer in which contact and go say, ⁓ I saw you just. Warren Kucker: Okay. Liam Weedon: reach this, do you know what mean? So it's just really thinking about what is relevant very specifically and just scraping that and putting it in. Warren Kucker: Yeah. Yep. When you engage with a new engagement, how do you run that exercise with, let's GTM leadership? Do you have a process to kind of walk them through? Great, let's find a signal. Most people actually don't, couldn't. Especially a combination of three signals, these three things mean that we're a fit right now. How do you kind of walk through that exercise so you can learn to find, so that you can then build the signal process that well? Liam Weedon: I think... Before the signals part, I mean, I look at a lot of tables that people have built and there's very standard or simple things that you can tweak and actually turns out there's like 10,000 more companies. ⁓ So going back to like FinTech, you look at using industry and you have to, it's either going to be software and some keywords for like finance, what it might be in financial services with keywords for software. People don't look at that and maybe they've like limited their scope already. But then, yeah, there's just simple enrichment steps. Like I've just said, like look, the count of people in particular or look up if there is anyone with you know Jira in their job title or look up. whatever else is relevant to them. And then you've got, it's still like target market. You haven't done any signals yet of try to refer that, but you've got a better understanding of that. Cause I think it ultimately comes down to cost, right? As well. think people don't realize how fast you've through credits. And like, if you're trying to do all of that, like I said earlier, if you jump from total time to qualification, you've only got 10%, or that was a big waste of money, right? And that now you can't spend that on the signals. So it's like, okay, like disqualify fast. Warren Kucker: Yeah. Liam Weedon: get that and then you can I think it's easier then when you've got more of that information in this table for people to understand ⁓ yeah, actually this is useful If we had this like I said, okay, where can we get that information from? Warren Kucker: Gotcha. So getting them off a blank page, a baseline of data, getting them to some sort of highly logical, you've talked to them for a couple hours, you understand the market enough to get them down two tiers, and then that kind of helps uncover the thing that maybe you don't know as someone who's just new to the business, right? That could kind of unpeel that back. Liam Weedon: Yeah. Yeah. Warren Kucker: ⁓ That's a good way to put it. I've actually struggled with that myself when I talk to people like great what do I see people people that have a marketing person is there I see if I'm like well I mean like we had to go everyone has a marketing person right so like we gotta go a step further right so that's a good way that's a good framework ⁓ cool I take maybe yeah god yeah please do Liam Weedon: Yeah. Yeah. I think I've got, did it recently. I got a list of 23, 25,000 companies down to a thousand for my ICP. And I know it's right because I've got my old clients are in the list. So it worked, but I've disqualified. I only spent about 1500 credits on clay and like $8 on open AI. So in that I confirmed it was a SaaS. Isn't just like. Warren Kucker: Okay. Liam Weedon: obviously no BTC, it probably does have an enterprise go to market motion. I haven't got as far as like enriching that, but there is a high probability. I've got their buyer personas that they sell to. I've got the founder date, the number of salespeople, the number of all these other decision makers and whatever. And if they use or not. So now I've got quite a lot of information for like $12 and a thousand. Yeah. Warren Kucker: Right. Yeah, right, that gets you down to 15,000, right? Now you can look for highly personalized signals, right? You scrape news over stuff to get that 15,000 down to the 2,000 you should reach out to the next two to three months, right? That's a good way to put it. Excellent, cool. How do you manage like adoption, right? Like how do you, like you're in rev ops, you're building systems and processes, like sometimes you can make them use it, sometimes you can't. Like how does that work for you in the past? Liam Weedon: Mm-hmm. Yeah, so obviously having worked in sales, wasn't very good at that either. So I think that helped. But I think, you know, like there's, if I start an engagement and I'm like, oh, well, this is what we're trying to build with the problem we're trying to solve and trying to update the process. I think you need to then, okay, here's the goals and the targets and what we're trying to solve from like, you know, commercial perspective. But I need to work with the team to understand how they're using. like HubSpot or how they're using the tools and not just, oh, we've got this tool and we need to integrate it or this kind of thing, right? Because it's not actually fit for what they're doing, out, do know what mean? So there's simple things of like, okay, well, know, exit criteria and making it super easy and super like very basic workflows of like, okay, if this is really important information that no one's filling out, but it's on the contact, like just build a workflow to populate it and just build a data on it. Warren Kucker: Right? Liam Weedon: and prompts for things of like, know, inactivity, it's just like a reminder, or if there's just some way to like prompt that process to make it not admin, it's just like a reminder of like, you just need to do this one little thing, like I can't automate it, but you just need to like do that one thing, you what mean? And make it really like easy. But I think if you, if I speak with the sales team like early on and I get all of their kind of... Warren Kucker: Yep. Liam Weedon: complaints and understanding of what they're all doing and what they actually want to solve themselves. Once you've got buy-in, it's a lot easier because you then get feedback continuously, right? Whereas otherwise it's like, well, here's the process you need to follow. Don't want do it. But it's like, okay, what about this? So I think if you work with them, they will work with you. And I think that's really important to look at. Warren Kucker: Yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. If you're adding, if you're planning on adding friction into any frontline seller's day, you're probably barking up the wrong tree, even if you think that you have the buy-in as the organization to like force them to do something, right? That it's just not gonna work, right? So you have to take a significant amount of more friction off the table, even if you're gonna add a little bit more. Liam Weedon: Yeah. Warren Kucker: in some areas, so it's a really good call out that like the types of enrichment or like this is part of the process that's gonna be better for you. This is the reduction of work. Salespeople always think they're overworked. Some are, most aren't. ⁓ If you're like here's a reduction of work so you can do things that help you make commission more. Honestly, that message falls on deaf ears a decent amount of times, but it's a little bit better than like hey, we have this new process you have to follow kind of a message there. ⁓ Liam Weedon: Yeah, exactly. Warren Kucker: Cool man, maybe last question, hot take. Anything in particular that you're looking at in the horizon, you're doing something different than you're doing right now two, three years out, or something in sales that you think is gonna change moderately or drastically over the next couple years? Liam Weedon: ⁓ I think, well, AI is everywhere, right? I think everyone's using it, but I think what I've started to realize actually over the last couple of weeks as well, ⁓ interestingly is like the more I look at it and whether these systems people have built, I don't think people understand like the opportunity cost and like what they're, I don't think they're actually getting any benefit from what they've built and like the existing, like, I think there's a big change in like rev ops very soon of like actually looking at. Warren Kucker: Okay. Liam Weedon: So for example, obviously you get these cold emails, obviously AI generated and you look at it, obviously this isn't, whatever, but the problem obviously was we need to do more volume and top of funnel, right? So they've solved that with AI. They're not looking at the right thing. I think people are not looking at what's going on. Like, okay, I've automated this whole process with AI and all this data is now generated. But then I speak to the team and it's like, ⁓ no, it takes me longer because I have to double check everything, right? Warren Kucker: Mm-hmm. Right, yeah. Liam Weedon: Right. There's all these different things I've just started to notice. I think actually like rev ops, there's going to be, yeah, I think the way you approach system building and reviewing like optimization stuff is going to be very, very different because I think there's a lot of. There's a lot more problems and maybe solutions at the moment I've seen with AI and I think it's good. It's like patchwork, right? You know, when you build a workflow and then it doesn't work and you add one thing and then something's later, it doesn't really fit with the rest of the process. That's something different right now, right? Everyone's using stuff that's not built across the function. And I think that's what's going to be next. But yeah, I'm just starting to see a lot of things. like, hmm, good practice. I don't think it's well- Warren Kucker: Yeah. Yeah. Interesting. Yeah. No, it's interesting. I've gone through a personal evolution with this. Let me see if this fits into this example the right way. Personalization in email, right? Doing your research, what's happening in the company, and then using that as the first line in the email, right? For a while, most people didn't do it, right? Or they did it really bad, right? And then some people started doing it, let's say, two years ago, right? So it was happening more, and it kind of became like table stakes, right? If you're not gonna do it... Liam Weedon: Mm-hmm. Warren Kucker: then you're not gonna be successful, right? So became Table Six to do it. Now the cost of doing it has gone down. Most people still aren't doing it, right? But it's almost like the value of it has dropped because the cost of doing it has dropped. So when someone gets an email, they're not like, oh wow, I'm impressed that they saw that I hired a CTO and raised a Series B, right? But it's like, yeah, it's the same, right? So it doesn't matter. So now it's actually like... Liam Weedon: All the same. All the same. Same as... yeah. Warren Kucker: back to the core, don't waste your time and let's say money and credits, our AI generation and research, trying to figure out a personalized route, because no one values it, just nail the persona, right? Just nail the problem and the solution and hope they're experiencing that problem right now, right? That evolution is like a funny one, right? Like where it's like we've kind of come on the other side and I'm like, you know what? Liam Weedon: Yeah. Yeah. Warren Kucker: I'm not sure, I'm still unsure. I still kind of do it, I kind of don't, I pulled it like a half out. I don't know if I should do it anymore. And you're seeing things like instantly.ai has put this out that they don't think you should personalize anymore. It's all persona based. Is this part of that? Like is that something like a system that becomes overly burdensome that like almost should be like, what do we get out of it? Not much anymore? Is that? Liam Weedon: Hmm. Yeah, yeah, I think of all the effort and input and it's like, okay, we've just done this and now it's great and it works and so it doesn't work though. Like it does, it does numbers and it's volume or whatever. It's like the wrong, you're looking at the wrong thing altogether. It's just not, it's not it. And I think, yeah, like follow ups, right? It's like, okay, I need to follow up with all my deals. So I'm just gonna do this sequence of nothing because it's gonna save me minutes. But it doesn't say anything, it just says, you any thoughts? Warren Kucker: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Liam Weedon: Like use AI and use your time as rev up from GTF. Like look at context and value and spin that up and use like that's more valuable as a priority, right? Not automation. Like think automation doesn't like, everyone's got automation down across everything, but like there's a point where it's not worth your time anymore. Just focus on other things. Get the, get the, hmm. Warren Kucker: Yeah. Yeah. No. Yeah, that's interesting. Yeah, right, that's an interesting way to put it. That's a good one. I've always had this thing where it's like... People won't have time to get to their deal follow-ups because they were prospecting, believe it or not. I was prospecting, I couldn't get to my deal follow-ups today. $300,000 deal, bit stage of buying cycle, couldn't get to it. What's the point of prospecting? Why did you cold call? Cold call so you could send that email six months from now. Send the email, You end up in a rhythm. Sales is a lot of thinking, doing the right stuff with no sort of validation that is gonna actually close deals, but knowing it's the right stuff. Sometimes the tipping point is you're doing it, Liam Weedon: Hmm. Hmm. Yeah. Warren Kucker: But it's not helping you anymore right the way you're doing it, so we have to kind of peel that onion This is where I think automating a lot of the Revops has been tool based and report based for way too long I actually think we can pull ourselves out of this and have folks like yourself Be the ones that analyze know like how we actually making it so people buy more and people waste less time when they're not gonna buy right? That's a good way to look at it cool Liam Weedon: Yeah. Warren Kucker: Awesome, William. Well, I said last question before last question. Where can people find you? Are you on LinkedIn? Do you go to conferences? Where can people find you to continue the conversation? Liam Weedon: Yep, on the ⁓ web site is gtmle.com Warren Kucker: That's awesome. Yeah, if you need help with the rub-ups, reach out to Liam. He's got a good forward thinking. So I appreciate you taking the time today, ⁓ and best of luck as these things shift. Awesome. Take care. Liam Weedon: Thanks, Ron. You're great.