Better Ways To Use Data To Find a True Competitive Edge in Your Selling, with Ben Sardella [Episode 88]

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In this episode, Ben Sardella, co-founder of Datanyze, discusses how outbound sales teams need better data to inspire more and better sales conversations with new prospects. He shares how a new generation of sales tools, like Datanyze, are helping sellers to fill the top of the funnel with the right prospects at the right time. Included among the subjects we discuss in this conversation are:

• The hidden triggers that alert sales reps to specific prospect interest that they can’t find on their own.
• How your sales team could be transformed if it were able to learn that a potential prospect had stopped using a competitor’s product
• How to use firmographic data to provide greater insights into potential buying behaviors.
• How to leverage data about past deals, both won and lost, with your sales engagement platform to drive better sales conversations and increased conversions.

If you’re a sales leader, sales manager, or sales rep, this episode is definitely worth the investment of your time to listen.

Episode Transcript

Andy Paul: Ben, welcome to the show.

Ben Sardella: Andy, I’m honored to be on here. I’ve, I’ve listened to a handful of your podcast and saw the list of guests you’ve had on, and I’m happy to be in that, in that class. So thank you for –

Andy Paul: Oh, thank you. Yeah. you’re good. We’re making the guest list even better as we go on. So you’re part of, you’re part of that improvement.

Ben Sardella: Perfect.

Andy Paul: So tell us a little bit about you.

Ben Sardella: Yeah. So about me. So I started my career back in 2000, right out of college, graduated from Boston University, took the track over to the West coast and was the first sales rep hire at, at NetSuite, at the time it was NetLedger.

We did some name changes across the way, but, became NetSuite and, arguably the first or one of the first SaaS companies that were, were out there. I guess if you talk to Larry Ellison, it was the first one. I’m sure a lot of people disagree, nonetheless, one of the first SaaS companies and one of the first salespeople there.

So certainly had zero experience in technology and got my got my experience there, spent almost six years there had the fortune of, having a really nice run as an individual contributor and then was sent over to the UK to help launch the, the EMEA office in England. Yeah. And then over to Toronto to, to do the same. And, and then once I came back, typical story, not a startup anymore, the company had changed pretty dramatically in my a couple of years away and, wanted my opportunity to go build my own sales teams from there and see what I could do.

A nd then I went to a few different places. had a couple of exits along the way, notably, CastIron, which ended up being acquired by IBM, where we did integration. It was an integration appliance, And so I got a lot of exposure to that world of the Salesforce ecosystem and integrating with the SAP of the world and things like that. So that was really great and really built up my network cause we were helping Salesforce reps close deals. So that was great. And then I went over to a company called Sabrix, which was a really interesting experience. Sabrix was a traditional enterprise sales and use tax technology. And it was perfect timing because the economy had really, dropped and, and like they say, death and taxes are the only things that are a sure thing.

And so I was sitting in that tax world at the time the economy went belly up. And while it did really hurt our pipeline and our ability to sell at the level we wanted to, we were able to maintain and still grow. And, and I had a really unique opportunity, because Sabrix had been a very successful traditional enterprise company, you’d take the software, put it on your servers and things like that.

The company had actually spun out a SaaS version of that and I took a lot of the ownership of that and got to build a sales team and the whole process from the ground up over there. And so that was really exciting and that led to an eventual acquisition by Thomson Reuters. And then my journey took me over to Trustee where we, where we took a nonprofit company to a for profit model. So that was an another interesting experience that I had.

Andy Paul: Was it deliberately nonprofit or they just weren’t performing.

Ben Sardella: It was deliberately nonprofit. Yeah. Okay. Yeah. Yeah, no, yeah. Good question. No, it was deliberately nonprofit, they were based on the trust, so that little trust seal at the bottom of every website or, privacy section and, to change that into a for profit model, certainly, it took a lot of work and effort and a lot of mind shift across the organization.

and then from there I had my first vice president of sales opportunity at Kissmetrics. So it was the first sales hire there very early on, had a really great opportunity to build the team and gain a lot of traction. And, and the folks at KIST did an incredible job of driving in a lot of leads.

I’d never been at a company that had driven in that many leads, through their content marketing, but the challenge

Andy Paul: was just content marketing. Are they doing email marketing? What was the mix of things that they were doing?

Ben Sardella: Mostly content mostly competent. Yeah, they’ve done it. Yeah. They did an incredible job of just finding a way to, in a really low cost way.

develop a, huge readership that would then turn into people, interested in the analytics platform that we had. the challenge though, over time, for us at least, was that. It wasn’t necessarily the right type of leads coming in and I needed to build an outbound team and a team, So we really wanted to target. I started to build that up on team. And the first thing I did was go and purchase, a lot of data from, from a, a data vendor. we’ll keep it at that. and, and then what happened was over the course of three weeks, my team was coming back to me and the complaints had risen so much and they were so frustrated that I ended up negotiating a refund.

On that data set that I had acquired. And, and I was still left without data. either it was, you don’t search Google or call the yellow pages, but what were we going to do with this outbound team that I had now built and, coincidentally that same or a certain impetus Lee that same exact week.

one of my coworkers had introduced me to my cofounder and the data and I CEO, Ilya. Ilya salmon. And, and I had a, I had the concept of data now is at its infancy and wanted to validate his thinking and whether this could be something attractive for sales leaders and was looking to meet some of the folks that were in the sales leadership position.

And I happened to be one of those and knowing that accurate data and data that. Was driven around certain compelling events was very hard to acquire and find and all of that throughout my entire sales career, that I was so excited when he started to tell me some of the things he was thinking.

And of course I had a bunch of ideas. All of a sudden I was just brain dumping on to him and letting him know, look. This isn’t going to work. If it’s not integrated with Salesforce. And, we kept going on and on. And a couple of hours passed, at first it was like a 30 minute meeting and a couple hours passed and I was super passionate about it.

and Ilya came back a week later and he had built most of it, at least version one of, most of what I had asked for. And, and then over the course of three months, I had implemented it with my team. We had gone from zero in pipeline in outbound pipeline to, almost, I think by the end of the quarter, we had gotten close to 50% of our pipeline was driven from outbound.

We closed the largest deal in company history on an outbound deal that just so happened. We had hit them at the right time and we jumped into a buying cycle that we. Would never have gotten into. And, and that deal alone paid for Datanyze for 10 years. so it was just, a perfect fit.

And Ilya asked me to come on as an advisor. And, and I had been looking my whole career to have that opportunity to be a cofounder. I really hard when I can’t build anything. Is that the sales guy? I

Andy Paul: went through the same thing.

Ben Sardella: Yeah, exactly. So the, I saw this as my opportunity to. Know, hitch on with a guy that was extremely intelligent and talented and doing something that I was really passionate about.

And, I continue to work with him, give him advice and things like that. And then, all the, while we were raising money at kiss, so it was hard to leave at that point in time. But certainly we were seeing a lot of growth with other customers jumping on and I was introducing some of my network and Aaliyah was out as a, Russian engineer.

First time doing any of this. As an entrepreneur and he’s outselling it himself too, which is pretty incredible in and of itself. And, and then I eventually came on board, in 2013 as his co founder. And from there, we started 2014 with, with two employees and we just passed the 70 employee Mark, as of December of 2015 here.

Andy Paul: Excellent. Excellent. alright, great background. I was going to give you a little hard time about. That’s funny. My daughter was visiting me last night down. she went to Northeastern. So out of her mouth came a BU in salt. I thought that was so funny when she was talking. And then you said you were went to BU I won’t repeat what it was, but you probably are familiar with it.

And so

Ben Sardella: that’s great. Yeah. So just tell her the be you guys, we don’t focus on Northeastern. We make fun of the Harvard and the MIT guys. Yeah, there you go. There you

Andy Paul: go. So anyway, back on track. So tell people I really want data Datanyze does. Cause that’s why I say it’s such an interesting, unique way that you’re going about also uncovering trigger events.

we talked about this concept of trigger events and sales as way to say, okay, Hey, here’s who I should be pointing some effort on in terms of prospecting because certain things are happening. But the trigger events that are typically talked about are usually fairly broad brush, right? somebody changed jobs.

There was a new marketing campaign. There was an acquisition. But you guys do it at a really I’ll call it the acquisition level, which has really targeted information.

Ben Sardella: Yeah, absolutely. So taking a big step back data, not as is an all in one sales intelligence platform. And what we do is we help you go and target the right prospects at the right time.

So we enable sales and marketing to fill that top of the funnel with the right type of prospects that will hopefully become their next customers. And we’ve gone about that in a number of different ways. We started with the data set that’s at its core. So you’ve mentioned a couple of times here, Things around letting you know what technologies are being used.

That is what we do first and foremost, we crawl approximately 40 million domains every single day. And we have an amazing library of all of the ways that we can look for thousands of different technologies. And we stay on top of those as those things change or as new technologies come about. So we have an amazing dataset around, around those web techs.

At the same time, we are also starting to do that now. For any of the SDKs inside any mobile apps. So we’re really excited about that. There’s a huge market opportunity there for us as well. And so

Andy Paul: your customers are primarily serving the it space right now, right? And people that are selling into, developers, they said you’re crawling the websites.

You’re seeing what technologies are being used.

Ben Sardella: Yeah, we are typically selling to sales and marketing people. The majority of our customer base is in the tech space historically, but we’ve actually added on a number of features throughout 2015. That’s really started to expose us to folks like certain NBA teams using us to go find the right folks to target.

that could be either, procuring, advertisements, opportunities through them or even corporate ticket, opportunities or boxes or things like that. So it’s

Andy Paul: how do you gather that information?

Ben Sardella: Yeah. Yeah. Really great question. So we’ve combined the ability to know the technology.

And then we also have a really cool data set around the firmographic data and we update that data on a weekly basis and we get that data from a casserole of sources that are out there and our algorithms have been optimized to go find the latest and greatest that’s out there on the web. And then that’s.

The final component is finding that right person. So once you’ve identified the right company, you want to go after whether it’s through what technologies they’re using or whether it’s through certain firmographic data points that are meaningful for you, then you want to go find the right people in our prospecting list.

Builder tool that we have is optimized to go out to certain social networks or go do searches on the web, or go to any website and find an individual’s, name. Instantly, you can find their email address, add them to a prospect list and then go take that prospect list and then go target them as you see fit.

So it’s really agnostic to any type of company. As long as that company wants to go find a list of folks that they’re going to target with their service or product, we can probably help you out.

Andy Paul: So if somebody comes to you with a, Yeah, market that you don’t currently serve. Cause I saw, I went through your market share listing on your website.

So if there’s a new market that you don’t currently serve, you could actually entertain

Ben Sardella: doing that. Exactly. Exactly. Yep.

Andy Paul: Not very interesting. It’s very interesting. Okay. We’re going to take a short break, but before we do, I’m going to pose for you a question that I post all my guests. You said you listened to a few podcasts.

You probably know what this is coming up, but You here’s the scenario and I’ll take your answer. After the break you’ve been hired as a new sales manager, new sales VP. If you will, at a company whose sales have stalled out and senior management really wants something to change quickly. So what two things would you do with your first week on the job that would have the biggest impact?

So think about that. And I’ll be back after the break with my guest, Ben Sardella from Datanyze. Hi, this is Andy connect and sell is used by sales reps at nearly a thousand companies, including hundreds of technology, startups, and several fortune 500 companies to overcome the challenges of getting prospects on the phone companies using connect and sell, grow their revenues faster by enabling their sales reps, to have more sales conversations in 90 minutes than they could otherwise achieve in an entire week connect and sell can be deployed directly to your sales reps, or he can take advantage of their outbound on demand service.

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Ben Sardella: today.

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Get your ROI. Try it now@livehive.com. Forward slash R O I that’s live hive. L I V E H I V e.com/r O.

Ben Sardella: I.

Andy Paul: Okay, welcome back today. Ben Sardella from co founder of Datanyze, da T a N Y Z e.com. If you wanna look it up online as we’re talking here. So Ben, before the break, I posed a hypothetical scenario for you.

You’re a new sales manager sales leader, coming into a company, a sales have stalled out. Maybe you’ve been broadened by investors in your case to turn things around. What two things would you do the first week that would have the biggest impact?

Ben Sardella: Yeah. great question. I love this one. I did hear this one on a fury podcast, so I was excited to hear it mainly because I’ve gone through this before.

I’ve actually had the opportunity to, to deal with this. And there’s certainly more than two things I would love to do on that first week, but obviously there’s only so much time in the day and there’s, there’s a lot of. paths, you can go off of the core. Two things that I see that I would want to do if I was given that opportunity again, first and foremost, I’m gonna, I’m gonna talk to the customers.

So there’ll be a handful of customers that I want to engage with. so that takes a little bit of work. First. You got to go see what customers are on board. If there’s usability data, that’s really important. Cause then that can see who’s super active. if it’s a service type of. Company, things like that.

And then I want to dig in with those customers, find a time to talk to them and figure out what do you love about this product that you can’t live without? And what would you like to see as an opportunity for us to improve on the product? And those are two things that I would, target. First and foremost, so that really would say, if these guys love it.

And I see consistencies across a number of customers that are, getting a lot of value out of this, and then I can start to build a perfect, target total addressable market based on the time. The customers that look like this, where I see the consistencies of value being, being shared.

And then we can go target the right people to have the best chance of success at closing those deals. Okay. Same with you opportunity where they’re not seeing value, or they might want to get more value out of something that would. Also lead me to say, there is a possible total addressable market here if we were able to fix or improve on XYZ.

And then that engagement that helps me engage with the product team and, and other, folks as well and see where we’re marketing to these folks. What are we trying to, show us the biggest set of value, et cetera. yeah. That would be the first thing I do is talk to the customer.

The second thing I would do is talk to the salespeople, right? Yeah. And I wanted them to segment on who’s been successful selling and who has not been yet accessible selling. And I got to understand quickly, is this an individual issue when somebody is not being successful or is it systemic? And then when it’s systemic, what can I do?

from a process perspective to help improve in areas where I think we can get some of the low hanging fruit as quickly as possible. Obviously if it’s an individual issue that I’m seeing, then you know, we’re going to have to make a move in and bring in some personnel that I think can do the job.

Andy Paul: So what if it’s both. So stomach that personal.

Ben Sardella: So it’s a good question. so if that’s the case, then I’m going to fix the systemic issues first and foremost, unless there’s something extremely glaring about the individuals that I think, that they may, there may be other problems there as well. if the system, if I feel like the systemic issues could be fixed and we can build better processes, And that individual may be able to improve as a result of those things.

Then certainly I want to give somebody a chance though. The thing I hate to do most in life is to let somebody go. but if I think that somebody, if somebody personally can not do the job successfully, no matter what, and, and they’re also a bad culture fit or they’re a cancer to the team and they’re starting to drag some things down.

Things like that, then you want to make a move pretty quickly. I think it’s in the best interest of both the company and that individual to go get a fresh start somewhere else.

Andy Paul: Okay. Good answer. Great answer. so back to data and eyes. So give me a couple examples of how customers are using it.

Ben Sardella: Yeah, great question.

Andy Paul: So we’ll be or fight for the audience cause I really want people to go hone in and really understand the value of this brings from a sales perspective.

Ben Sardella: Absolutely. so we have this amazing data set that I referenced and then we have some really great tools built around that data set to access those data points in a really creative way and give you those signals.

we’re really focused on. the signals that are going to be meaningful, that will lead you to go and close this customer, or at least have some meaningful discussions and get involved in a buying process. You probably wouldn’t otherwise be in. so for example, we have lots and lots of companies, all across.

the tech sector that love us in the marketing automation space is a really good thing. Example of how some of those folks can get real value out of us. one of the things samples, which I’ll, which I always have a good time talking about is, is when, we actually chose a marketing automation platform, and when we selected that marketing automation, Platform.

I told my director of marketing. You can have whatever platform you want. it’s based on what you need. I’m not gonna pressure you. They’re all our customers. go ahead and pick the one that fits for us. Don’t feel any pressure. Yeah. They’re

Andy Paul: all our biggest customers. But go ahead.

Ben Sardella: Yeah, exactly.

But we’re not going to win. We’re not going to win the discussion across this one way or another somebody who’s going to be a little frustrated with us. as long as it’s in alignment with our perfect use case for right now, we can always make a change later if we need to. So he went on to select a marketing automation vendor.

I’m not going to say it, but if you use data and as you’ll know which one we use. So when, so when, when we made that choice, the following week, I had to buy. three different lunches for three different heads of sales from other marketing automation vendors that are our customer, because what happens is when a company adds or drops a technology that we can track, you’re going to get a daily alert to let you know, Hey, this company just added this technology or this company just dropped that.

So knowing that information just

Andy Paul: to make it clear for people listening is that, so you’re going crawling through these websites. And these domains and yeah, somebody dropped a technology, your case. It could be marketing automation. And your example, that’s why you’re buying the Lynch’s right.

Cause they all got the alerts that you had changed.

Ben Sardella: We were, in this case, we had, we were not using a marketing automation solution. So this was an ad. Yeah. And what’s really interesting about this one is the one that we, it has a free trial. And so all of these guys wanted to go have lunch. partly because they’re like, Hey, why aren’t you trying to in our stuff, why isn’t our sales team engaging with you yet?

And all of those things. And then secondly, because they knew we were still on a trial with that marketing automation vendor and they still had an opportunity to potentially sell to us. And that’s the real value, another company. Adding one of my competitors and there’s a free trial on instantly.

The sales team can go engage right away, with those folks. Reach out to the right people go find their email address and engage from there and push that instantly as a brand new lead right into Salesforce or any of the other CRM teams that they happen to be using. So there’s some real value there in that timely data.

so that’s one of the core examples that we use. Another example,

Andy Paul: the question on that before we move on to, so when these alerts come is the best practice that you know, these are, how are you deciding who gets the alerts? So you’ve got an SDR. You can SDR team. unless you’ve got set up geographically or something like that, but assuming you don’t, how do you, who you’re fumbling those alerts do?

Ben Sardella: Yeah. So with data dies, every individual user can set up their alerts as a custom for them. And. What will happen is you can use all of the firmographic data that we have to filter out those alerts. So you’re only going to get alerts for say the Bay area, if that’s your area that you’re tracking, or if you have New York is your territory.

You’re only going to get those alerts for New York, for instance.

Andy Paul: Okay.

Ben Sardella: and then. Another thing that, really ties to the intelligence aspect of this together is, the ability to do a couple of different things around lead scoring, and then predicting who you should be talking to. So this is really where some of the cool stuff that we’ve built in 2014 comes into, sorry, 2015 comes into play.

So one of those things is first I want to go and look at my current lead so that I have in my TRM. And what Datanyze can do is we can pull in all the customers that you’ve closed and we can take a look at all the deals that you’ve lost or customers that you’ve churned. And then we can run that list of, those two lists against our entire data set of 40 million plus domains that we track every single day.

And from there, based on all the commonalities that we find. and the negative attributes that we see, we can then say, Hey, here are, here’s the score that you, our current list of leads would get based on what we know of, who you’re closing and who you’re losing from there. We can then take that model that we’ve now built in a matter of a day or so, by the way, it gets built very quickly.

We can actually build a model in an hour or two, but then we work with our clients to make sure we’re taking into account some of the really important things about their business, that machine learning isn’t going to pick up on. So we really give you the leverage to help. Refined that model. And from there, we can take that model and then go apply it again, across that 40 million domains that we have, and we can find out which ones are not in your CRM, so we can give you, a heads up that, Hey, you should be talking to this group of 2000 companies that you’re not today.

They’re not your CRM and go engage with them. Okay.

Andy Paul: That’s incredible. I think back right where I started my sales career. So the phone book,

Ben Sardella: mine, too, some of these guys, I see our, our sales development reps. They have these engagement platforms now, which by the way, Datanyze integrates with all the engagement platforms that are out there and they’re putting, they’re out there finding leads and they’re putting them into these automatic sequence processes.

Yeah. And the cadences and it’s man, I wish I had this. Cause you know, I was relying on a calendar invite reminders and, task lists, reminders and things were falling through the cracks left and right. So I wasn’t glad for

Andy Paul: those.

Ben Sardella: Yeah, he’s fine.

Yeah.

Andy Paul: I think that’s why I ultimately gravitated to selling really big stuff because I didn’t have that much to keep in mind at that point. Great. Holy cow. Yeah. That’s just incredible stuff. So who’s that ideal customer profile for you?

Ben Sardella: Yeah, ideal customer profile is split between sales and marketing.

The majority of the tens of thousands of users that we have on our platform today, our sales development people, and in most cases, sales development, people, as we’re seeing are now reporting to sales originally, it was marketing originally. It was sales and it was marketing. Now I’m seeing a lot more.

Yeah,

Andy Paul: they should be by the way.

Ben Sardella: Yeah, I agree as well. but at the same time, marketing is also trying to pull lists, And they’re also in find email addresses of folks to, to market to. so in both cases we have, we have teams across the board and, typically it depends on the size of the company.

A smaller company, we’re going to engage directly with the VP of sales as we get into our enterprise customers that we have, it’s more about the sales and marketing ops people that we’re engaging with.

Andy Paul: But from a pricing standpoint, this is something, a small company with five, 10 salespeople could benefit from

Ben Sardella: absolutely we charge on a per seat basis.

and then based on what modules of ours you happen to be using. So it’s certainly affordable for a very small company. And then we have companies with hundreds and hundreds of users on our platform as well.

Andy Paul: And just. Most of your customers right now, you said are primarily tech, but you said you got the NBA teams, you got other apps or other examples of other non tech companies that announced.

Ben Sardella: Yeah, absolutely. if you’re a sales team is just looking for, the right companies to target based on certain firmographic data points and then want to go find the right people at those companies and their email address, then we could certainly, support a team from any industry as a result.

Very

Andy Paul: interesting. All right. Great. we’re going to, excuse me, move into the last segment of the show. I’ve got some rapid fire questions for you. You can give me one word answers or you can elaborate up to you. so first one, what’s the most powerful sales tool in your arsenal?

Ben Sardella: Outside of the fact that my team uses data, not as a hundred percent every single day.

we also use a number of other tools. whether it’s, outreach IO to send out their sequential emails, that’s certainly a very powerful tool. our company is also integrated with our persist IQ work with sales loft, and. tout and Yesware are friends of ours as well. Yes.

Whereas definitely something the team uses as well. Candidly, I’m a, I’m an advisor there, so I want to caveat that, but the team does use it and they’re not forced to use it.

Andy Paul: I use it as well. So

Ben Sardella: yeah. So there you go. So they’ve done a good job too, but, those tools right there, it’s really about for our team.

Finding the right folks to go and target. And luckily we just own a platform that we’ve built to do those things. And then how do we engage with them in a timely manner? we’re also from a calling perspective, we’re using, ring DNA as another great tool to use. I heard you had Howard on one of your podcasts, so yeah, that’s, he’s built a really great tool as well.

Excellent.

Andy Paul: Yeah. So name one tool you use for managing your sales that you can’t live without

Ben Sardella: one tool for managing my sales. The one I have started to fall madly in love with is insight squared. we of course use Salesforce. have to use that one. it feels like sometimes, but, but we’ve added insight squared, over the last six months.

And outside of the fact I love their team. They just have a phenomenal, group of folks working for them. their tool is really great as well. It really gives you those insights. And for somebody like me, that’s, managing. Tons and tons of people. And at the same time over, across, number of different groups, whether it’s marketing sales development, the sales team, et cetera, inside square really pulls all those things in together nicely.

So I can get the reports I need at my fingertips anytime.

Andy Paul: Yeah. It gives you great visibility. I have a client that we’re working with it. Yeah. Just showed me a report a couple weeks ago with, from insight squared. And it was like, instantly, you could look at it and say, okay, this is what this person’s doing.

And this is what this person is doing wrong. Was just so clear. Yeah. Good tool. All right. So who’s your sales role model?

Ben Sardella: Who is my sales role model cost? That is a really good one. So I started my career, and was given the opportunity, from Jody Maxon. And she is now at bridge group, as a consultant there and she was running a sales and, Sales marketing, business development, all at NetSuite all at the same time.

So she certainly always, has been and will be one of my, one of my sales role models. the other side of that is I look, you get certain entrepreneurs now and you’re always selling and you’re always. out there, whether it’s, you may not be directly selling to an individual client, but you might be selling your company or your brand.

And a, and Mark Cuban is one of the investors at, at Datanyze. And so I’m really excited to, have him as part of the group. And I love some of the things he’s done. He certainly. Some people love him. Some people hate him. Some people don’t care obviously, but, but I certainly have learned a lot just by watching some of the things he’s done and how he’s positioned, some of the things that, he’s invested in and so forth.

Andy Paul: So I don’t recall seeing you guys on shark tank,

Ben Sardella: we were not on shark tank. Weren’t interesting enough. it was a cold email that went out to him that he responded to in a matter of minutes on a Saturday morning. And, and from there we, we engaged in and he was pretty excited to jump on board.

And interestingly enough, I had the chance to meet him. I was going to the gym while I was in Las Vegas on during the week we were closing the round. and, And it was just me and him in the gym at the same time, there was no one else around. And I just started some small chat with him and, and then I said, Hey, by the way, you just invested in my company.

And he goes, what company? And I go data now. And he’s no way. So we got done working at you, came and sat with me. I had about 15 minutes of one on one time with him in the gym, at the wind hotel with, no one else around to distract us. And, Yeah, it was pretty cool experience for

Andy Paul: sure.

Very much Yeah. Very cool. So what’s the one book every sales person should read, whether it’s a sales book or not.

Ben Sardella: Yeah, really good question there. so I, the one now that I really like. is the one that Mark wrote bearish has just written

Andy Paul: sales, acceleration formula.

Ben Sardella: Exactly. Yeah. I really think if you’re, especially if you’re in SAS, I think that is a sport that must be as a must read.

so I certainly liked that we also prescribed to predictable revenue, our in Ross’s book. So that’s certainly, another really good one, that we found, for me there, I like to get. A sales value out of other books as well, that might not be directly related to sales. So Moneyball for me was one of those books that I read and instantly as I’m reading that I’m a sports fanatic, Boston sports fanatic, but, but instantly as I’m, as I was reading that, I started to say, how could I go find.

the right sales talent that might not come traditionally from a SAS sales environment. And what attributes would I look for or what things could we sell and how could we position our product or our service in a way that is unique and no one else is doing that. And so books like that have inspired me to, to look at things.

If I could pull one nugget out of any book at all. then, then it’s worth the price of the,

Andy Paul: yeah. I saw Billy Bean speak at a inside sales user conference a couple years ago. Yeah. Fascinating guy. Great. Lot of good sales lessons there.

Ben Sardella: And of course you need to buy Andy’s books.

Andy Paul: You need to buy both my books. Of course, that goes to that thing. So the question here is what’s your favorite music to listen to get pumped up for an important meeting?

Ben Sardella: Wow. Favorite music. for an important meeting, I am a Pearl jam guy. That’s for sure. if I had to take two bands, it’d be Pearl jam and radio head, but Radiohead’s not really a pump you up type of music.

That’s not to you. Some live Pearl jam. You’ll certainly get pumped up. I was also, raised in the, tougher part of Boston, section called Dorchester. and, and certain rap music that will certainly get me pumped up as well.

Andy Paul: was it all the, Walberg just music you mean?

Ben Sardella: Yeah, not the Walgreens. Okay. But they’re from the neighborhood as well.

Andy Paul: Okay. Okay. So what’s your first sales activity you do every day?

Ben Sardella: My first sales activity I do is I check my calendar to make sure I know exactly what I got to do and where I gotta be. and that everything’s set there.

And then, I check emails. So I try to dedicate about 30 minutes to email first thing in the morning before I do anything. just to make sure if there’s any customers reaching out to me that needs something. I’m able to get to them as quickly as possible. if there’s anything pressing that’s happened to while I was sleeping overnight or something like that, I can get on it before I go and start my day.

So I’d say those are the things I get started on. Alright,

Andy Paul: last question. Yep. One thing you get asked most frequently by salespeople.

Ben Sardella: One thing I get most asked most frequently by sales people. That is an interesting one. So most will say yes. if they’re my sales people or say, how can I close more deals?

Andy Paul: Okay. And what’s the answer?

Ben Sardella: when, when somebody asked me that I start to dig in and I say, what questions are you asking? Cause I really believe that, most. most problems when a sales person is, the sales person is facing when they’re not able to close deals, comes back to qualification.

And the number one problem that I found with our own salespeople over time, and the thing that I feel like I’ve probably been better at, and I didn’t even realize I was better at is, is cutting off. working with opportunities that, probably will not close or that you cannot add a significant amount of value to, and you’re just chasing the money at that point and things go wrong when you’re doing that, whether it’s, whether it’s wrong and that they’re not going to see value, and you’re just holding onto this and you’re stuffing your pipeline with crap and, and then you get to the end of the day.

The month or the quarter, and you’re not able to close those deals cause there’s just not enough value there. Or if the prospect, for whatever reason, I was led to believe or. thought in their head that, Hey, maybe this could add value and you give them a good deal just to come on board. They’re going to turn into an unhappy customer anyways, and they’re not going to renew.

And in this world of subscription businesses, the most important thing is that folks are renewing. And, and so really I go back into the qualification side of things and, start to figure out, Hey, where can we add value in the ones that we can add the most value? I make sure we don’t lose those deals.

Andy Paul: Good answer. Good answer. Yeah. It’s. Yeah. And my latest book, I have a whole section on qualifying with value. Cause it’s really important because yeah, salespeople and often times now more and more SDRs teams, there’s a perverse incentive built in sometimes to, pipeline over quality.

So we’re quantity over quality. All right. great. I want to thank you for joining me. My guest today, Ben Sardella. Co founder of Datanyze. Ben, can you tell folks how they can learn more about Datanyze.

Ben Sardella: Yeah, absolutely. please go to Datanyze.com, Two things I want to reference there.

One, we have an amazing section of content or putting a lot of hard work into that, and you’re going to get some value into reading the blog posts that we put out there. We’re putting out about three a week now. So some incredible content we’re doing webinars. We’re doing a podcast as well and Andy was a guest on ours.

We’ll be releasing that pretty soon. And we’re really excited about all of that. and then the second thing is, as we do offer a free tool, so our browser plugins free, we have, over 20 something thousand. sales folks using our plugin every single day. We just released it this year.

So we’ve had some incredible traction on that. It will allow you to see what technologies are being used on any website. You go to all the firmographic data for that company. You can also leverage that to find people’s email addresses and do your list building. So certainly when you get to Datanyze.com, you’ll see the, the banner for the plugin.

I suggest you download that. Like I said, it’s free. Give it a try and let us know what you think. Excellent.

Andy Paul: Excellent. Thank you Ben.