Why B2B databases are broken

Welcome to The Did You Know Podcast by Varisource, where we interview founders, executives and experts at amazing technology companies that can help your business save a lot of time, money and grow faster. Especially bring awareness to smarter, better, faster solutions that can transform your business and give you a competitive advantage----https://www.varisource.com

Transcript

Welcome to the did you know podcast by varisource where we interview founders and executives at amazing technology companies that can help your business save time and money and grow. Especially bring awareness to smart, smarter, better, faster solutions that can transform your business. 1.1s Hello everyone. This is Victor with Varisource. Welcome to another episode of the digital podcast. You guys know we always try to bring only the most innovative technology solutions that's going to help your business get cheaper, better, faster, easier solutions to help the company succeeded. Today super excited to bring on Edan who is the CEO and founder of exact buyer. Exactbuyer. Essentially makes prospecting as simple as googling. And you guys know we always have these provocative, you know, pitches to get you interested about the podcast today. But welcome to the show. You don't. 1.1s

U2

Thanks, Victor. Thanks for having me, man. 

U1

Yeah, no worries. So why don't you give audience a little bit, get kind of the founder story, little background on you, and then we'll go into what is this amazing thing that you build? 

U2

Yeah, so I guess my journeys kind of started in sales. I was doing b to B sales at a company called Airlift, where I was the first salesperson. There was a tiny company and we were trying to get basically vending machines into different offices. And when I was doing sales back in about 2016, I realized, you know, there has to be a more efficient way than just sort of knocking on doors and doing the old school sales model. And I realized that people were selling these lists of data, and I was looking at them and saying, wow, this is, like, pretty expensive. But it makes me a lot more efficient because now I can just email lots of folks and kind of try to get in front of as many eyeballs at one time as opposed to just kind of calling one at a time. And as I started working on that, I had had an engineering background, having previously worked at Microsoft before that and everything. And I realized there's a lot of things you can do to actually make sure that these email campaigns that you're doing are going to be more successful or even the cold calling campaigns are going to be going to be more successful. And a lot of it starts with making sure that the data accuracy is correct, but also making sure that you're actually targeting the right types of companies that are a good fit for the product that you're selling. And as I sort of went into that more and more, I started to think about, hey, what companies are actually focused on this problem at scale? And after I moved to Portland, I realized one of the biggest companies that does it in the world. It was actually right in the city next to me in Vancouver. At the time, they were called Discover, and now they're called Zoom Info. And so I applied for a job at DiscoverOrg and I went in there as I think my job title was Python Engineer when I first joined. And then they basically were just trying to build out a data engineering function. And so I eventually, in a couple of months, became the first data engineer there and worked on a huge identity resolution project to help them build out their database from 4 million contacts to 150,000,000 contacts in the database. So I led that project, and then after that, I worked on building some of the first classifiers that they had there. So I built the seniority classifiers, department classifiers, and a lot of sort of stood up a lot of the initial identity resolution work for the data science team as well. So that was my time, I discovered.org. And then from there, I really want to start my own company had entrepreneurial ambitions, and I started to think about what was the biggest problem that I was seeing people have fundamentally the hardest challenge with sales and marketing, but also with specifically with using prospecting tools. And what I realized was, 1.1s There's so many different prospecting tools today. There's Apollo, Lushes, Zoom, Info, Seamless, and all these other, all these other folks who are building these prospecting tools. And they're all kind of the same. They all kind of provide you the same types of filters, the same types of ways of identifying your customer, but it's not actually specific and it doesn't allow you to actually get to the heart of who it is that is your exact buyer, right? Who is the person who really is going to buy from you, especially in a large organization, etc. And so what I realized was people who are using these prospecting tools, all these prospecting tools are kind of different 1s and they don't allow you to get specific. So I said, what is the simplest way I thought in my head like what is the simplest way for us to get the most specific types of prospects for folks? And I realized that if we let people say in words what it is that they're looking for, right? So if we let people search just the way that they Google, they're often going to put very specific terms in there that might not fit neatly into these existing industry categories or anything else. So as an example, like if someone's looking for drivetrain experts at enterprise companies, right, because that's the problem they sell, maybe they sell some kind of nut or bolt or something in manufacturing that they only sell to the drivetrain person. There's no way to search for that person. Their title is not going to be called the job title is not drivetrain expert, come look at me, come find me, right? 1.5s They're not going to be really easy to find, but those are the exact people that maybe that company needs to sell to. And so what we allow people to do is just type that in an English text at exactly buyer and then we provide them the specific results. We look inside every part of that person's profile for people who are specifically working on the drive train, 1.2s that helps you get a lot more specific targeted. Now instead of reaching out to maybe 1500 or 5000 people, hoping that one of them works in the drive train, you can actually just reach out to the 100 or 200 people who work on exactly the same that you care about. 1s

U1

Yeah, there's so much, so much to unpack. There. So a lot of follow up questions for you. But first of all, I don't even know you were a sales guy. At first. I thought you were just some juniors engineer, but that is fascinating, man. So you started out as a salesperson. So did you always have these technical chops, like an engineering? Because oftentimes people don't associate engineers with salespeople is, like, two different kinds of skill sets and personality. And so did you start it like just being an engineer first, or was it the sales what got you into sales? Or did you kind of self taught, then become an engineer? How did that happen? Yeah, it's a good question. I studied computer science in college. I went to MIT instead of computer science and finance. And after that, then I went to work at Microsoft as a PM there for a short stint. But I always kind of had an entrepreneurial bent, and I always wanted to just sort of focus on building companies and building things from scratch. That's kind of what I like to do, is just like, I'm very much a zero to one person, and I love to build new things. But as a part of that, you actually have to convince people that the shit you're making is useful. Right. So you got to learn how to sell. Every entrepreneur has to learn how to sell. And 2s I kind of learned selling on the fly. Really? I kind of just, like, dove in with both feet and said, I can pound the pavement and learn how to do this. 

U2

And I've been learning. I'm still learning every single day, but I've been 

U1

learning. Yeah. 1s That is fascinating. Yes. MIT. A quick story is I went to Boston for some meetings, and I have some extra time, and I think somehow I ended up near MIT, just like, wow, this is, like, one of the most prestigious and historic place where there's all geniuses everywhere, right? So the interesting thing is 2.3s open, I guess that's how university starts. You just walk in and then you just walk through these halls, and I was just seeing all these students and like, wow, all these people are geniuses. It's just so fascinating. But anybody can just walk around. 3.7s There were people just, like, sitting in. I remember, like, freshman, sophomore year, people just come in and sit in lectures, and I'm like, I don't even know if this person goes to this school. This could be anyone from anywhere. Yeah, they just 

U2

come in and sit down. 

U1

None of the founder stories are kind of like how you got to where you are. I think, to me, you know, really fascinating because everybody takes a different startup journey and reason why they wanted to build what they do. But I just feel like knowing you have the right skill set, the right mindset, the right experience to solve the right problem. And it's a big problem because I think anybody who has ever used any of the Legion tools or database tools, like a zoom info, like Alucia, like a seamless, all have the same pain, which is you can search and you get a lot of data. But then when you actually start utilizing that email or phone number, like 50% might not be correct, but you just get actually accustomed to it. You're like, well, 50% is actually good. And that just sounds crazy to me, the fact that you're either paying for contacts or number of contacts. And again, I'm sure it's a challenging problem to get exact phone numbers and emails and all of these things, but somehow you have kind of solved that. So can you kind of give us a little glimpse into obviously, you were helping Discover, which at that time was one of the biggest kind of sales database companies. 3s Why is it that these guys have such a different time? The industry in general have such a difficult time getting the right information. I think it's easy, but these companies have a lot of money, right? They have a lot of resource, and they still can't get it right. Why is that, do you think? 1s

U2

Yeah, it's a great question. So I think if you think about the size of these of these databases, right, so let's say you have 300 million people in a database, 400 million people in a database. You can't update that size of a database every quarter. Doesn't matter what anyone is promising you. It doesn't matter what the, the zoom info or lushes or anyone. No one is updating their entire database every quarter. No one's even updating a 10th of their database every quarter. It's just not happening. And the reason to your question of why is it so hard to do? Well, you have to think about where's everyone getting this information from. What is the single source of truth right now for BDB data? It's LinkedIn. LinkedIn is the place where all this data comes from traditionally. And that's what all these platforms have built their built 1.3s their platforms. On top of it's, a bunch of LinkedIn data information. And getting LinkedIn data is hard, and it's getting progressively harder, and it's going to continue to get harder. Now, there's certain ways to get LinkedIn data that is allowable, meaning it's legal, and there are certain things that are illegal. 1.4s The legal way is exactly what Google does. Google is a search engine that indexes all these public pages. And so if you're indexing public LinkedIn pages and LinkedIn makes most of the profiles public, you can actually get that information. Getting it at scale is still tough because LinkedIn puts a lot of things, a lot of measures in place to try to prevent people from scraping that data. But it's still legal. You're allowed to do it. It's just difficult, and it can be expensive. So you need to use kind of fancy proxies and different services to try to get that information. 2.1s And because that's kind of the biggest reason why it's hard to update. That's why oftentimes you'll see in zoom in from other tools, like a lot of people are no longer working at the company, right, who are associated with certain companies. They have incorrect job titles, incorrect work experiences, they haven't been updated in two years. And it's because it's hard to get that person's information at scale. It's hard to sort of get linked to the information scale. That's kind of the fundamental problem there in terms of getting emails and phone numbers. 1.1s Emails you can kind of get, but there's a lot of verification that needs to happen downstream of just like trying to identify the email 1.1s and phone numbers. Phone numbers are typically difficult because of the do not call registries. And there's a lot more people aren't typically sharing their phone numbers as openly publicly as they are their email, right? So oftentimes there's a little bit of a gap. 1.3s When I share my email with you, it's like, yeah, you can email me and I can decide to look or not look at that email right when you're calling me, it's like I'm probably going to pick up the phone, or maybe I just the kind of person who never picks up the phone. But calling just seems a little more obtrusive than email. And I think that's why people are more hesitant to put that information publicly on the web. And that's why it's also harder to get phone number information. 1.2s

U1

Yeah, and again, a lot of follow up questions on that is these guys all use different methods, and I'm sure there's a lot of different methods to get the information, verify the information, but yet there's still such a huge number of you know, I would say sometimes maybe 70% of the data is I wouldn't even say outdated. It's just not accurate. Right. 2.2s So it's not about being updated. But I guess is that just what the industry has to expect? And what has a MIT genius like yourself figured out that these guys haven't figured out? Right. That you obviously been able to verify these data and actually provide your customers and users that they only pay, is that correct? 1.2s If you get them the right data, which is incredible, right? Which is like most other platforms, like, you just pay for it. You're lucky if you get information from me, at least I have something equal. You have nothing yet. You are I wasn't guaranteeing, but you are essentially saying, hey, you shouldn't pay for a bad, potentially unknown data, is that correct? 

U2

That's exactly right. This is fundamentally the biggest difference between exact buyer and the way that we generate data versus the way a static database like Zoom Info or Apollo or Seamless or those sort of have data is 1.1s traditionally databases are static database. So when you build a list and you export a list, you're getting the data that's currently in their database. That's all you're getting. There's no way to update that data in real time. There's no button you can click on to force an update to that contact or force an update to that company to get the most up to date information on it. You're just getting whatever's in that database and it could have been updated three months ago, six months ago, nine months ago, two years ago. You'd it's hard to say, but with us, what we do differently is we say, look, your first job is just to find the group of people that you would want to target. So can you narrow down from 400 million to 1.2s 1000, 2000 people that you want to talk to? 1s And from those, once you found those 2000 people that you want to talk to, what we'll say is our data is also somewhat out of date, right? We have the same guarantee that other people have. We can't update 400 million contacts every month. And we don't claim that we can. But what we can do is for those 2000 contacts that you have, you want to export them. What we'll do is we'll update every single contact in real time. So we'll fetch their updated LinkedIn info, their updated job title, updated company details. 1.7s We'll get the new emails. If they switch to a new company, we'll get the new company email. We will verify that. We'll try to find additional phone numbers, we'll ping data partners. We do all of this huge extensive sort of revenue ops work on the back end. When we process your list and then let's say you set your requirements to say I only want verified contact with verified emails or I only want people who have phone numbers, then we'll take those requirements into account when we're generating that list for you. And then we'll only deliver you the people who we know who 100% meet all of your requirements. So let's say of that 2000 person list, let's say we only have 800 people that we know are 100% slam dunks. We'll give you those 800 people and then we'll credit back the rest of those credits. 1.5s So what you end up with is a perfect list of 800 people, right? And then maybe you want to expand your list and look at a different segment and say, okay, this is amazing. Like, I know this campaign is going to be incredible. It's going to be strictly better than anything I can get with zoom info, seamless clear, but any other our database because no one else takes this approach. 1s

U1

Yeah, I think you and I talked about this, where the other competitors or the companies in this same category have such a low standard 1.4s for everybody in a way of, hey, look, if you get a low percentage of correct information, it's like, this is great, and yet you're setting the bar so high. And I think when people look at your service that's why I was mindblowing and I think they will as well, especially you're. Super cost effective as well. Maybe talk about because in this economy, obviously everybody needs these sales tools. They need it, right? Like Air. But at the same time, what are some different ways or use cases? You can kind of tell the audience. Maybe there are SDRs and VP of Sales and Chief Revenue officers and executives how they can not just obviously, even if you're paying the same, you're getting more accurate data, which is incredible. Right. I feel like sometimes, like buying ads, it's like you can spend this amount of ads, but how do you know where all your ads are going? Like half your ads, nobody's even seen it, right? It's like you wasted. So give me a couple of two or three use cases that you think comes can get value as far as maybe savings or value from your service instead. 1.5s

U2

Yes. So I always break down prospecting into sort of two steps. The first step is how do I find the people who are actually going to buy my product? And this takes some thinking and some knowledge, and oftentimes the senior people who have been selling for a long time will know this better than others. But this is the part that I feel most people always skip or they overlook, right? A lot of people say, like, oh yeah, we sell to the C suite levels at financial services companies. It's like no, you don't. 1.4s That's not specific enough, right? That could be 100,000, 500,000 people. Who are you really selling to? Let's get more specific, because if you export a list of 500,000 people or you just pick 10,000 people from that list at random, that's not going to be a great campaign, right? Because you didn't get specific enough about who those people are. So I always tell people, it's like, spend the extra ten minutes, spend the extra five minutes and just think, just think about specifically, like, who are these people in your CRM? Who are the champions? What do they do? What tools do they use? What functions do they have inside the organization? What do they actually care about, right? Are they typically people who are managing large teams or small teams? Do they raise funding? Did they not raise funding? Are they using tangential tools? Get a little bit more specific about who it is that you want to target, right? Because it's not only about just getting a list of people and then going and blasting them. Because if you go and take a list of 10,000 people and you give that to your reps at random, then they're going to be going through that list and they're going to be wasting precious cycles going after people who may not be a good fit at all, right? So just taking that ten minutes upfront to think a little bit more, a little bit deeper. Get specific keywords about those folks and exact buyer can help recommend those. So we could help recommend different skills that these people have, different interests, different technologies, will recommend all those things to you and say, hey, we really think that you should use these skills to narrow down your search. And that really is the thing that helps people get way more efficient. So the whole first part of this is just to say, 1.4s Spend more time thinking specifically about who it is that you want to target. Because it doesn't matter if you have their emails and phone numbers, if they're not the right person, it just doesn't matter. Right? You can have the perfect emails, the perfect phone numbers for less than 10,000 people. If they're not your buyers, you just wasted all that money and all of your sales reps time. So that is, I think, the most fundamental thing. And that's why we built Exact Buyer's Search to help you get hyper, hyper specific about the segments that you're targeting to and making it. Instead of just downloading a huge list, get more segmented. Instead of sending out to 10,000 people, start with 500 super hyper targeted folks and try that campaign and see the success rate. And then, you'll know, okay, let's expand this, let's add more people. But I see this all the time where people are just like, yeah, we just work at these jobs. We're targeting these job titles in these industries and they think that that's sufficient to launch a good campaign and it never works. I've never seen someone be successful that way. 

U1

Yeah, first of all, I love the name as well, Exact Buyer. It's just so fitting. I mean, I'm big on branding and I feel like when you have like your obviously logo, your name actually matches exactly what you're trying to solve and do. I think that's another kudos to you. That seems like a difficult domain to buy because I don't know if you bought it ten years ago or something, but 1.7s yeah, that's a pretty cool branding match there. And obviously, look, you've been on the sales side, you've done growth hacking yourself. You've seen so many different sides. What is maybe your thought on you help them find better contacts, which we'll come back to, right? That is super critical. But what do you think about the way people prospect today? You mentioned some of that, which is just like spray and pray you got 5000 contacts and just like, oh, I'm going to spray as much as possible and pray that the volume gets me some success. Where do you see kind of the state of outbound cold outreach, this kind of whole sector of how people are doing things? And what do you think about maybe video personalization, like there's so many people trying different growth hacking tactics. What is kind of maybe some of your personal favorites or that you seen has really worked once they actually find the exact fire from your platform? 1.9s You know? 1.1s So I have like an old school answer here and maybe a more new school answer. My old school answer is like, as a founder, I have a lot of problems, right? Every day is like, I have a million things that I can solve. And so for me, the thing is, if you can come to me me with a problem that I actually have and just succinctly state that problem, 1.1s I will probably listen to you. I will probably answer you. But if you come to me with a problem that I don't have, or you come to me pitching something that is you're pitching a specific feature that you have that I can't necessarily relate to one of my issues, it's just not going to work. So I think that my old school answer is kind of like again, and this kind of goes back to what I was just saying about personalizing to a specific person. It's like if you know someone has a specific function, right, they're working on tableau or they're working on a you know, they're working on the drive train of a car or they're doing something like that, you can actually just talk to that thing in one or two sentences. And when you do that, you immediately got that person. Your reply rates are going to be fucking awesome. If you can't do that, then it's going to be bad, right? It doesn't matter if you do video, if you do outreach, all the different things, people might think it's cool, right? They might see the video outreach and be like, damn, that's awesome. I love that approach. But I don't have that problem, so I'm still going to pass. 1.7s And so that, to me, is the most important thing. Now, assuming that you have nailed the problem statement and you actually are solving a problem that someone has, I do like some of the video outreach that's happening. I do think that is really useful. 2s I think the thing that people sleep on the most is actually social selling. 1.6s The thing that I find so useful about things like Twitter Reddit. And obviously you don't want to be overly spammy about it, but people are talking online every single day about your competitors. They're talking about your industry. And you can engage them literally just in time. And people don't do this. I'm on Twitter sometimes. Yesterday I went on Twitter and I searched people who are talking about zoom info, and I saw one person say, hey, does anyone have any alternatives, good alternatives to zoom info? And he asked it that day. So now I can engage with that person who has intent, right? This thing that you're probably going to pay some other company tens of thousands of dollars for, it's like, just it's right there on Twitter. People are already talking about it there's. The intent that happened today. 2.5s It doesn't get any better than that. Just go for it, you know what I mean? 

U2

Go talk to them, just reply. It doesn't cost you anything. So I think a lot of people are really, really sleeping on that type of selling motion because they just want to spray and pray, right? They don't want to personalize the interaction. They don't want to to do that. But that's a big place where people are missing, I think. 

U1

No, 1000% actually sets me up for the one of the last questions for you, which is I think again, one of the things that really caught my eye originally when we spoke is not only do you have execvier and you make it, finding the exact buyers as simple as just like Google. And searching instead of traditional filters, which is limited. But you also provide social profiles. Like that is game changing. I've always thought every tool I use, I'm like man, it would be amazing if somebody could find these people's social profiles because email is so crowded, phone number is so crowded because everybody gets those, everyone's calling. And to find the social, a lot of times it's not even under their name. It might not be under edon. I don't like know you have some username that's not even your regular name. And so it's hard to find these guys'social profile. And I think that as you said, sometimes if you want to do social selling but you can't even find these guys, walk us through talk about that feature real quick as far as finding their socials. And it is hard, right? If you can get 1000 emails, you're going to get a lot less social profiles. And this is a follow up, which is is it me or is it just a lot of these B to B folks don't have social profiles? Some do and some don't. So do you feel like for B to B that's less effective 1s on the social side? What's your thought? 

U2

I think it really depends on what you're selling or sort of what you're doing. 1s We have a lot of people who are recruiters who are using our platform and a lot of them are technical recruiters who are hiring software developers, right? So being able to see someone's GitHub profile is really, really valuable. 1.5s Understanding what programming languages that they're programming in, what level of expertise they have that is super valuable, and that is something that they would want. Also, let's say someone who is selling to developers. If I'm selling a developer focused tool or developer API's, having that information is really, really valuable because these people might be champions for you, right? Maybe they're industry leaders and maybe you want to see how many people start their repos and how popular they are across this specific niche. 1s And the same thing can go for discord or other social URLs or Pinterest and e commerce. It really depends on what you're selling. But having that additional information about someone can be incredibly valuable 1.4s in order to identify more specific folks that you're targeting. So if you're only selling a product to developers that know Go and Ruby, you can now find those people because we have their information we pull that we extracted from their GitHub profile that they program and Go and Ruby. Right. And you would not be 

U1

able to do e mails. Possible. I might have my personal email on Pinterest and then my work email. And this thing is it's all different emails and maybe the same name, but maybe different username. And so how have you been? Not the actual technical part, but it's just like you're correlating so many different identities, like you said. I think you're building like an identity grab, is what you said, which is amazing. It's like there's so many different identities that may or may not be the right person. Meaning, how do you know that that Twitter belongs to this guy? Right. That is really fascinating if you can kind of talk about that for a few 

U2

seconds. Yeah, so, I mean, that is kind of the secret sauce, not so secret sauce. Right. So how do we do the identity resolution across all of these different profiles, digital identities that someone has? So, for companies, for instance, a unique Identifier for a company might be their domain name. 1.1s Two companies don't typically have the same domain name. That's not going to happen. So you might look and say, okay, on Twitter, do they mention that this is their specific domain name 2.5s on their actual web page? Are they listing their Twitter account and their LinkedIn handles and all these other things? Right. For someone's personal page, like, let's say, Victor, you had your own personal 1.5s website. You might put your Twitter and your LinkedIn and your GitHub and your Socials on there, right? So if we go to your personal web page, we can associate all those things together. 3.1s So that's one way that you can do it right? And you can associate all the different information together. But yeah, I mean ultimately look, making sure that you can get to the identity resolution for every person and for every company, it's a huge win. It's a massive differential you from what companies are doing today, which is purely just building on top of LinkedIn, right. If you can get all this additional information, especially what we're doing, which is we build a search engine. Getting back to the original intro that you made, which is exactly bars Google for prospecting. We need all this text information to allow you to search. Right? Just search the way that you want to search. If you want to search for, you could say like show me all the developers who know Go and Ruby in 1.3s Massachusetts that went to Harvard. You can just type that in and we can find you those specific things. And that's how you get hyper specific with messaging segmentation and you're going to have way, way better results in your campaigns. 

U1

Yeah. And again, that's why eversource we're always partnering with innovative companies like yourself that are doing something just different and better and even oftentimes more cost effective at the same time. So yeah, we're excited to partner with you. I have one last question for you as we wrap up here, which we always got to wrap up the show with, which is 1.5s you've seen a lot man, you're a developer, you're a salesperson, you're a founder, you've seen a lot, learned a lot. If you haven't give one advice to whether the whole general audience, whether that's a personal advice or a business advice. What would be that one advice you think that you're really passionate about? 1.1s

U2

Oh man, that's a good question. 3.8s I would say my advice is just, I guess for entrepreneurs or people thinking of starting a business, 1.6s go sell one of the things that you want to sell, right? Often times people are thinking at a really high level about what is this and what is the tam? What is the market and like, how much engineering dollars is it going to take to build a thing? And then X and Y and Z, it's like, just go sell it to one person. Just go find one person. And that's going to help you unlock all the questions, all these sort of McKinsey and BCG style consulting questions that people ask you, which is like, you know what I'm saying? Why would someone want to buy this? What value does it have for them? How would they pay for it? Right? You don't know until you decide to sell it to one person. So that's my thing. I would say just go try to sell whatever it is that you think is useful to one person. Don't think about it. Don't stress about it. Just go sell it. 

U1

Yeah, just do it. Like Nike said, just do it. Actually, one last thing that you brought up, an interesting thing, which is a lot of and again, I think for me, for my team, and then for you, obviously, we're 1.8s naturally sales driven and salespeople, and then there's a certain personality for that, for sure. But it can also be learned, can be taught and be. And that comes with the confidence, right? But for somebody that may not have maybe their engineering background, but they don't know sales, right? Or they don't feel comfortable or they don't have the mindset you did back in the day, what do you think they can do if, like you said, you said, hey, whatever you're building, like, you got to go study the first person, right? How can they best do what you think other than just go do it? 1.7s Because you kind of see it from a couple of different sites. I've done sales 1.1s forever. That's just what I do. But that's not everyone, right? And so for people, people that are maybe just product guys or marketing guys or maybe just engineers, how do you suggest they sell to the first person? 1.9s

U2

Yes, it's a good question. 2.6s I think, look, at the end of the day, it's like you're a salesperson, but what you're trying to do is provide value for someone you're not trying to sell. You're not trying to sell someone snake oil or something that they don't actually need. And people are not people who are smart, especially in B to B, they're not going to buy something that they don't need. 2.5s I would always say just like, try to really get to the value statement, what is this thing going to do? How is it going to affect the top line, bottom line? How is going to affect my revenue or my cost? And just say, like, hey, I think just give me that pitch. I think this will be able to save you X amount of revenue because of this. Get that pitch down to one sentence and just go try it on people. Think of it as market research, right? Don't detach yourself a little bit from the outcome. Just be like, hey, is this a problem for you? Right? Don't try to assume that it's a problem for everyone else. It's a problem for you. Just go and ask them, hey, is this a problem for you? And if you could solve it in X and Y and Z ways, 1.1s what would this be worth for you? And just go do some market research on it. And then over time, you're going to get enough data points where you're going to say, yes, this is a big enough problem for this specific person. And then we go in that direction. Just a quick example, super quick example. We launched a buyer search for salespeople, sales and marketing, folks. First day of launch, we had tons of recruiters flooding in, right? We weren't even pitching it to recruiters, right? So you really don't know, like, don't assume that you're going to know exactly who is going to like this thing, right? But then we realize that, of course it's a slam dunk for recruiters. Like, they can get that. So I don't even know that. After working on 18 months on this project, you're never really going to know the answers. Just go put something out and the answers will come if you spend enough time. 

U1

That's an amazing way to wrap up, man. I appreciate you don't look forward to partnering with you guys and thanks for being on. 

U2

Yeah. Thanks, Victor. Appreciate your time in. 

U1

That was an amazing episode of the did you know podcast with Varisource. Hope you enjoyed it and got some great insights from it. Make sure you follow us on social media for the next episode. And if you want to get the best deals from the guests today, make sure to send us a message at sales@varisource.com