Sales Influence[r] Podcast: Sales Enablement Obsession Transcript

[MUSIC PLAYING] NARRATOR: Bigtincan is the world's leading sales learning and enablement platform that delivers the onboarding and training, preparation, coaching, customer engagement, and follow up in insights that modern businesses need to win.

Victor Antonio - Welcome to the sales employment podcast where we talk about finding the why and how people buy. I'm your host, Victor Antonio. Thank you for joining me. Thank you for lending me these ears, and if you're watching this on video, appreciate your eyeballs, as well.

Today, I got the chief marketing officer from Bigtincan, Mr.-- or I should say, Dr. Rusty Bishop. Good morning, Rusty. How are you doing, man?

Rusty Bishop - I'm doing wonderful. How are you doing, Victor?

Victor Antonio- I'm doing good. You're giving me that mellow response. I gave you a great intro right there, "Oh, the Bigtincan" guy.

Rusty Bishop - Yeah, I know. I understand.

Victor Antonio - But anyway, Rusty. Hey, Rusty. Let these folks know two things. One, a little bit about yourself, and then a little bit about Bigtincan before we jump into some serious content with regard to marketing and a couple other topics we're going to talk about.

Rusty Bishop - You got it. Yeah. So Bigtincan is a sales enablement platform, one of the biggest players in the space. We're a publicly traded company on the Australian Stock Exchange. 2,000 plus customers, servicing millions of salespeople with our sales tools across the world.

And those tools include things like ways to get your content out to your sales guys out in the field no matter whether they're sitting behind a desktop or a computer or they're out there in the iPad, iPhone meeting with customers out in the field. We also have software for sales coaching, sales training, as well as sales engagement, which is what we're doing right now, meeting online, recording those types of calls, listening to conversational intelligence.

So really, the full gamut of all types of sales tools that a salesperson would need to be successful. So--

Victor Antonio - I'm gonna ask you a tough question.

Rusty Bishop - Yeah.

Victor Antonio - Before you give me your background, I want to ask you a tough question on this because I think it'll be interesting to see how you answer, because you are the chief marketing officer.

Rusty Bishop - I am.

Victor Antonio - I'm sure you have a great answer.

Rusty Bishop - I better.

Victor Antonio - If somebody were-- if someone says to you, Rusty, "Rusty, why is Bigtincan different? Like, why do you guys stand out?" What do you say?

Rusty Bishop - We stand out because we are absolutely obsessed with buying experience. I mean, obsessed. It is literally our vision. It's our mission. And that is actually to create a great buying experience, and not for our buyers, for sales people's buyers, the people that they're out there meeting with every day.

So we're so obsessed with this. And we've figured out different ways to think about sales enablement from your buyer's perspective. And everything that we do, everything that we build, every integration, every tool, every AI that we go out there and pull into our system to help salespeople be better at their jobs, is all thought of from that buyer expective. That's one of the things I love about your podcast, is the why in buying. So I personally believe that buying experience, the experience that you have while buying something, dramatically influences the way that you're going to buy something and whether you're actually going to do it or not.

So as the CMO of a company whose job is to help salespeople be better at their jobs, I'm obsessed with helping salespeople create a great buying experience, the whole company is obsessed with that.

Victor Antonio - I saw it all over your website, let me put you on the spot again--

Rusty Bishop - Yeah, of course, let's go.

Victor Antonio - Let me put you on the spot again. I said, "Give me an example--" I mean, if you go back 10 years ago, you didn't hear the phrase buying experience. We're starting to hear that more obviously, in the last few years more importantly as COVID, and during COVID, and post-COVID.

But I wanted to ask you, do you have an example, like a tangible example so my listeners and viewers can go, oh, I get what this company does. An example of how you win in their, help the company improve, work with their frontline salespeople, improve the buying experiences of their customers, and just give me an example so people can really grab on to what Bigtincan is.

Rusty Bishop - Yes, so let's take a classic example. So one of the largest alcoholic beverage distributors in the world, I can't name their name but you can guess who they are, owned by a company out of Sweden and founded in Saint Louis, Missouri has, imagine this, tens of thousands of people out there selling their products. They don't even work for them most of the time. They work for individual alcohol distributors.

So imagine if you are this mega giant company and you need to figure out how to help all these people who don't actually work for you, sell your products. So what Bigtincan can go in and help that company do is make sure that everybody out there selling those products no matter how they're changing over time, whether they're specialists, whether there's new things, there's new offers, to get that information, access it very easily on any device in the entire world that they use every day so that they don't have to necessarily ever talk to the people at the parent company.

So tens of thousands of salespeople having the content that they need at the point of sale at all times, it's something that's easily searchable. So they don't even know the products that well in many cases. They walk into a grocery store and the guy says, how can you sell me this thing? And he says, I can do it like this, right here. There it is. There's the answer.

So they don't have to go back and send hundreds of emails to their managers, and their managers' managers, and even to another company who they're selling their products through. It's right there on the phone. So that's extremely tangible example.

Victor Antonio - By the way, I feel that one. I feel that one.

Rusty Bishop - And look--

Victor Antonio - You got me excited, bro.

Rusty Bishop - I've carried a bag. I've done sales and I get the frustration. I've been there in that moment where the conversation flips, where you're not audible-ready, a term that I think is very interesting. And you have to go back home, find the information, and then go get the next meeting. I think you know this probably better than anybody, Victor, getting that next meeting, you got about a 50% chance of getting it again. Right?

Victor Antonio - Yeah.

Rusty Bishop - How much time--

Victor Antonio - That's optimistic, by the way that's very optimistic of you, Rusty.

Rusty Bishop - So let's say you had a 5% chance of getting the meeting again. So if you think about, I know something I'm personally obsessed with and is time and using time wisely, and what a tremendous waste of time that you showed up? You maybe flew there, or you spent hours, no telling what that cost you and your company, and spend that time go get that meeting you couldn't pivot because you couldn't find the information that customer needed. To me, that's the moment that's easily fixed with software.

So when we think about sales tools especially sales enablement, if I'm a seller, that's the value of it to me as a seller. It allows me to pivot in the moment, find that thing, that piece of information, that case study, that slide in a deck that you all couldn't find in that moment, in that one moment when you got the meeting. And I think that moment is so critical, and now you would ask me about buying experience. And to me, that's what's changed.

People's expectations now are dramatically different. You can buy a car through a vending machine, so what does that say? So people expect a great experience. I go to Amazon to buy something, it shows up at my door the next day. I want that experience. If I have to come to you as a seller, it means I can't figure something out on the internet. So I'm expecting that same experience that I get from Amazon, I mean, you show up at my door. That's to me, what drives sales enablement and why I think sellers should care about it.

Victor Antonio - I love it. I love it. There was so much, what you just said there, man. My brain exploded because you brought back some very bad memories of you say, carrying the bag and going back and forth. And the buyer experience is all about creating a frictionless experience, right?

Rusty Bishop - You got it.

Victor Antonio - Minimal friction, but I know that you mentioned you're obsessed with time. And I think it's really important what you said. I just want to recap because what you're saying is, look, if you look at the sales cycle and you're trying to close a sales cycle or shorten the sales cycle, all this going back and forth what we used to do, it costs us a lot of time, money, and who knows how many deals because again, maybe we didn't get the second meeting.

Rusty Bishop - Sure

Victor Antonio - Talk to me a little bit about when you're going to a company and they're focused on what the system is going to cost, what the platform is going to-- what's the price, but they don't look at what it's costing them. Talk to me about that and how you try to reframe their brains so they really learn that this is about optimizing time, which translates into lower cost, higher revenue.

Rusty Bishop - Yeah. It's a great question, Victor, and I think it's actually the hardest thing for humans to understand, is the value of their time. I see so many people who don't think about the value of time, I mean, I feel like I meet them every day so that's why I'm so obsessed with it. So come back to your question, it's so important to get that right.

So you have to be thinking, all the time I've got to be optimizing my time to go out there every time I meet with a customer, because how many deals slip? And it comes down to that. So when we go into a customer and we're saying, hey, how are you going to get your ROI out of this tool? The first thing we want to ask them is what do you want to optimize for? Do you want to optimize for sales velocity, or do you want to move your middle, do you want to onboard salespeople faster, or you have a problem with rep attrition?

We just went through this cycle of COVID where salespeople attrition rate was something like 60%, maybe 50% during that time. All employees were leaving their jobs like crazy. So we have companies coming to us with lots of different leaky parts of their sales team, so think about it like that. So what are you looking to optimize for? So that's the easiest way I think about how you're going to build an ROI for these tools.

Let's take a classic example. So let's say you're a company and you've decided you're going to grow through upsell. One of the easiest pathways to growth is to grow your current customers, right? So we go in and we say, look--

Victor Antonio - I agree.

Rusty Bishop - how do you upsell today? What are your metrics? What is your current velocity in upsell? Most of the time they don't really even have an upsell plan which is a little bit scary, but let's say they do have a plan.

So we just show them, hey look, here's how you're going to increase upsell by making sure that every time your sellers are actually meeting with a customer they have the ability to be audible-ready, I can hear that question, go in look through a catalog of products, look through a bunch of offerings and PowerPoints, or PDFs, or videos, or even AR and VR. Something we're very focused on here at Bigtincan is this future of AR and VR.

And now I'm saying, look, I can now upsell you because I listened, I did discovery, you're a customer and here's this other thing that will help you. So very easy to show ROI on this kind of things, because let's say you get a 20% bump in upsell across a large sales team, that translates to millions of dollars.

Victor Antonio - Rusty, I know I like you. I don't know if you knew this, but I just published a book called Mastering the Upsell, in January.

Rusty Bishop - I saw that, yeah.

Victor Antonio - And most people don't focus on upsells, so I love that. One of the things you said, I don't know if the viewers listened or missed this, because I think it's interesting how you reframed it, but I don't know if you meant it on purpose. You didn't use time management, you optimize time. How do you optimize time, optimize time? And I think that's an interesting phrase that you're using, kind of beating-- I don't want to say beating the customer but you know what I mean, getting them to think about time that way.

The other thing I wanted to ask you, just tie-in optimizing time to, let's talk about onboarding.

Rusty Bishop - Sure.

Victor Antonio - It's becoming a big issue, right?

Rusty Bishop - It is.

Victor Antonio - As you mentioned, during COVID, people lost 56% of their sales force. They're trying to bring people back in. I would think that the Bigtincan platform is prime for this type of problem solving in terms of onboarding.

Rusty Bishop - Absolutely. It is one of our biggest selling points. If you think about the compelling moment to buy, as sellers we're all obsessed with that moment of, is this buyer in a compelling moment? Immediately, going back in time like should I waste my time with this seller or spend my time with this buyer? Are they in a compelling moment?

Onboarding right now is massively compelling. So the cost to replace a salesperson is roughly their salary times 1.5, so think about the cost of that to a company. Now think about the time it takes to onboard the seller. So let's say on average it's seven to nine months, whatever data set you believe out there in the internet or the people out there doing this kind of surveys.

If you could shrink that time to five months just by having a standardized onboarding program that people can take on their own time, that you can actually as a manager log in in a dashboard and see, all right, Victor's completely up to speed, he's done all the onboarding things, he's practiced against the AI, the AI says he's ready to go. Now I go listen to Victor and, look, I can certify you to sell in two months faster.

Now scale that across the 1,000-person sales team. Two months is a lot of time. So a seller is pretty valuable, let's say they've got $1,000,000 territory or $1,000,000 quota. Two months, that's roughly a sixth of that.

Victor Antonio - I want to highlight to people because I love what you're doing. You're very good at what you do, I can tell already because it's like you're saying, OK, show them some gain, here's what you could get. But then you hit them in the gut with the pain piece because we know we're more motivated by pain, right? In other words--

Rusty Bishop - Absolutely.

Victor Antonio - here's how much you're losing, how many deals you're leaving on the table, so forth and so on. And do you find that-- you could use this phrase, are they in a compelling moment? I got to be honest, I've never heard that phrase before till today. And so first of all, how do you identify somebody in a compelling moment? And if they're not, how do you use the pain of not changing to move them into that compelling moment?

Rusty Bishop - Well let's take the first part of that first, how do you-- so let's define a compelling moment. So a compelling moment to me, I define that as this particular buyer or this account has had an event that has forced them to just make the decision to change. A seller out there could be selling anything, from candy to the most complex software in the world to financial services.

So if I've had a compelling event, let's take a classic one, M&A. So two companies have joined, now there's things they've got to do. So they've had that compelling event, they've got to figure out how to join up a sales force, they're going to figure out how to mesh two CRM systems together. They might have to figure out who they're going to get rid of, which is kind of scary in M&A event.

So now this company has had a compelling event. So if your account that you're going after has had a compelling event and you've identified that, now you know that that's someone that you should be spending time with. So that's how I define that.

So now the part of your question was I think, well, if I come back to it was how do you know they're in a compelling event and how do you figure that out? Well, I'm in marketing not in sales, which is probably a little counterintuitive considering the way we've been talking right now. But first thing I would do is--

Victor Antonio - By the way, take a small pause there because I almost see them like there's this blend there now, right?

Rusty Bishop - There is.

Victor Antonio - Hey Rusty, I'm going to confess something to you. I rarely do this but I'm going to confess something. I used to laugh at marketing people, used to laugh at them, like they don't have a good job.

Rusty Bishop - Sure you did.

Victor Antonio - But in the last 10 years, 15 years, you realize that marketing has become, I think, and I hate to say it sometimes but I really believe marketing is actually more important than sales. I'm not saying sales is not important. I'm not saying that but I think marketing has moved into the pole position when it comes to forming the customer's preferences on the internet when people try to find you. And so I really think they go hand in hand, would you agree with that if you want to add something to that?

Rusty Bishop - Oh, yeah. Most marketers are now judged on revenue. There's still a handful that are judged on brand. Me personally, I'm judged on how much pipeline and how much revenue I bring into the company. I mean, when we go to board meetings that's what I present.

Victor Antonio - You mean you don't go, here's my pretty logo, here's what I did to my logo, here's my pretty presentation?

Rusty Bishop - There's no more pens and logos in marketing. Well, there might be for some companies but the reality is it's like marketing is now tied to revenue just like sales.

Victor Antonio - That's funny.

Rusty Bishop - And if you're, unfortunately, in one of those companies where marketing and sales are siloed, there's still way too many companies where this is true. First of all, you're a seller. I'm talking to your audience so I think most of them are probably sellers. I think it's probably your job to go figure out what marketing is doing and sell them on your ability to make their number, because marketing has a number now, so I'll come back to that.

So coming back to the compelling identification question, which is something, again, I think is very interesting. How do you identify that your account has had a compelling moment? So let's say you've defined your compelling moments for your products or your services, you ought to do that with your team. I can't do that for you, pretty straightforward.

So go to your marketing team, say, do we have any tools to identify whether my accounts have had a compelling a moment? There's tools out there like account-based marketing tools, like 6sense, or Demandbase where marketers now are pretty savvy. They can easily detect accounts that are in market, they can detect accounts that have had certain events because they know what they're searching for.

They know that your accounts are searching for like, how do I survive an M&A, or how do you merge suit sales team after M&A? People type that into their search bars, that whole sentence, because they speak into their phones. So go to your marketing team first, have any of my target accounts, or if you're an account manager, any of my accounts had any of these compelling events?

And I want you to notify me, that's the key piece. Mr. Marketer or Ms. Marketer, I want you to notify me. Whether it's email, CRM, chat Slack, doesn't matter. If one of my accounts has that event I want to know, because what am I going to do? I'm going to refocus. I'm going to go use my time to go after that account that knows to have that compelling moment. That's the first way.

Second way I would recommend is use great discovery. Part of what we do here at Bigtincan is sales coaching, sales training, helping people build that out. A lot of times what we see going into the software is how to do great discovery. Here's our company's methodology, whether you're using Victor's methodology, Sales Influence, whether you're using Force Management, any of those other type companies, great stuff out there to do discovery, you've got to ask the question.

You've got to ask a great question and that great question might be, hey, has this happened recently, have you had a change of the sea level, have you had an M&A event, are you about to have a-- whatever event that makes your compelling thing happen. So that to me is pretty straightforward, it's talk to marketing, be a great discovery questions. That's it.

Victor Antonio - So part two of the question was, excuse me. So now that we've defined a compelling event, a trigger moment that leads to a compelling event--

Rusty Bishop - Same thing.

Victor Antonio - I go back to the pain and gain question before we get into the M&A because I definitely want to go deep on the M&A with you.

Rusty Bishop - I love that.

Victor Antonio - On the pain and gain it's like, what do you find works more effectively, and you're probably going to say it's a combo but based on your presentations, I can give you a compelling vision of the future of where you want to be or I can tell you how horrible it's going to be if you keep doing what you're doing. Just give me your sense of that, what do you think customers are responding to? I know it's a broad question, kind of unfair but--

Rusty Bishop - Yeah. That's OK. What are customers responding to? We sell complex products so let me be clear with that, so our buyer group might be 12 people. If you're selling to individuals this might be slightly different. I think people are responding to what I call, the one thing.

So everybody in that buyer group has one thing that they're concerned about. And so when we're seeing people do successful presentations, those buyers are out there and they have a fear, they're scared of something, I don't know. Or they want to move up in their career, or they're CFO. I may be a part of everybody's buying group, some sort of procurement, and how are they going to notch their career, they're going to get a great deal.

And so as a seller I think it's incumbent on you to understand or at least try to understand what the one thing is for everybody in that buying group. And then that's how you tailor your presentation when you go in. And so being able to tailor a presentation on the fly is another thing that we do here, help companies with a fear, at Bigtincan.

And that is like literally you're walking to the door and you get the email, sitting in the parking lot and they say, hey, guess what? Procurement is going to join. You grab that one slide out of the Bigtincan library and throw it into your slide, personalize it for the procurement lady who's sitting in there in the meeting with you now. So that gives you the ability to change that presentation on the fly no matter where you are, sitting at the bar, in the airport--

Victor Antonio - By the way, I never thought about that but that is a sweet feature by the way. That's pretty nice.

Rusty Bishop - But we've all been there, right? How many times you've been-- had walked into the room and you're like, I did not know that that person was going to be here. You've got this 'can presentation, you've been working on it for six weeks, guess what? The CTO showed up. What does he care about? He cares about driving efficiency in software. Oh gosh, what do I got to do now?

I flip in a few slides from a platform like Bigtincan, bam, I can answer that guy's concerns or that girl's concerns.

Victor Antonio - I love that. Hey, Russ, I'm putting you on a spot a lot.

Rusty Bishop - That's all good. I love this

Victor Antonio - I feel like you could take it. Tell me what you think about-- you talked about let's say, depending on whose numbers you believe, you got nine buyers involved, 12 buyers now, whatever the number is. How do you-- your perspective on trying to build consensus when you got different people going in there for different reasons, different motivations and agendas. What are some of the things maybe you think about when you go in there, dealing with different buyers?

Rusty Bishop - I would start with force ranking the buyers. So by that I mean, let's say there's five, just for simple math here. There's one person there who has the most influence in that buying group. And let's say you're selling into marketing because I'm a marketer and that's pretty straightforward, great. You're selling into a marketing team, so you're looking at that. Now I force rank that marketing team as follows. The CMO has the budget, so the person I need to convince the most is the CMO.

Now I might not have the ability to get to the CMO, so my next force ranking is who has the CMO's gear, like who can influence the most powerful person in the room, and then on and on and on. Now as I force rank that it would be one, the person who is going to write the check. Two, the person who's going to convince the person to write the check. And three, who is the person who's going to torpedo this? Who's sitting over there on the side-- OK, that's how I force rank.

Victor Antonio - That's such a great little roadmap, but who can write the check, who can talk the guy into writing the check, and who's going to shoot me?

Rusty Bishop - Right, who's going to torpedo this, so who's career is going to be negatively affected? Who's the person who's looking at your competitor on the side to do something else, the slight thing that he's already almost got a deal done with or she's almost got a deal done with? So now buying senior staff, this has been talked about from the sales world now for quite a while, because it's changing and changing.

And that's because of fear, because of this ability to do research and the ability for everyone's getting a little more scared. We're hypothetically entering recession here. I'm not going to say that, it's happened yet. So everyone's starting to say, OK, look, how I'm going to protect my job. So that changes that buyer group once again. So force ranking them every time, to me is really critical.

And that's the scientist in me coming out. You want to force rank things based on the most important to spend your time there. You're not necessarily always going to get to that buyer. You know this, Victor. Sometimes the buyer is only going to see two slides of a PowerPoint deck that the champion brings home.

So knowing that compelling event and, again, is that buyer in a compelling event or is your champion in a compelling event? Force ranking those through, that's the way I think about it

Victor Antonio - Yeah. I love the way you put that. I joke about it but I really do love the way you put that very simple to memorize. Next, well no, at the end of the month I'll be interviewing Matt Dixon. Matt Dixon was the co-author of The Challenger Sale.

Rusty Bishop - Perfect.

Victor Antonio - He also started a company called Tether, which is a conversation intelligence platform, and he wrote a book called The JOLT Effect, which comes out in September and I got a sneak peek at it. And one of the things the data was showing him, and I think I really want your take on this because I'm sure you're probably seeing the same thing or not, is that one of the big things to get a deal unstuck out of the indecision mode was de-risking, was the word he used, is how do you de-risk something for clients?

Talk to me about how do you de-risk? By de-risk I mean, you give them a way out so they can make a buying decision, especially in your business because that's a big platform they're buying from you, right?

Rusty Bishop - That's true

Victor Antonio - It's a big investment. How do you de-risk a buy?

Rusty Bishop - That's a great question, putting me on the spot, I have to think about it for a second. But I don't know what data Matt has but if he has CI then he's listening in on conversations, right?

Victor Antonio - Yeah. So I'll give you some examples. One was--

Rusty Bishop - Yes, give me an example, Victor.

Victor Antonio - limiting the length of the contract was de-risking, putting it in phases, putting or doing a project in phases and just measuring everything at the end of each phase with no commitment to go to the second phase if the first phase didn't work. And just different strategies like-- I just thought I had you on here, I just wanted to get your opinion on-- Yeah, your opinion on if you use any de-risking strategies to make the customer go, all right.

Because his whole thing was they know they have to change. They have a compelling moment and they're urgent about that moment but then something's holding them back. How do you get people to get unstuck? Maybe that's another way of putting it.

Rusty Bishop - I appreciate that. I appreciate the clarification. The way to think about is this, I'm over here and I'm starting to feel this pain, but is it great enough to get me over there to make the decision to purchase six figure software? I think that's what you're asking me, so how I de-risk? How do we de-risk that for them?

Well, exactly what you said. So what we want to do is we want to show them a crawl, walk, run. So when we try to go in to de-risk is we want to say, what is that primary thing that you need to solve from a sales perspective? Are your sales cycles too long, are you not upselling effectively, are you discounting too much, do you have an onboarding problem?

So you de-risk it by saying, OK, let's fix this problem first. Because you've got good-- it's a problem. You've had enough time to measure it or we'll help you measure it. So we'll bring a customer success team in and say, look, let's help you measure the problem because we want to define a baseline. So when I think about de-risking I've got to have a baseline, so I need to know what your current sales cycle is or your sales velocity is.

If I know that then I can say, all right, here's how we're going to deal with this. Phase one, we're going to fix this one problem, here's how we're going to fix it. We're going to bring a team in to help you do it. So one of the things that stops people from buying big software is, how the hell are we going to implement this? How are we going to get this thing out into the field?

So we're going to de-risk that by saying, we're going to provide you with an expert and not only an expert but a vertical expert. So what Bigtincan do is a little different, I think, is we actually hired vertical experts to be customer success. So for telecom we hired a person right out of AT&T and said, you're going to help these telecom companies, the big tel. Get these things implemented, you know their business.

So we de-risk it in those ways. We bring in experts in the vertical, we fix a single problem first. Boiling the ocean is one of the worst things you can possibly do with sales enablement. I do not recommend it. It is not a fix all, it is a tool. Sales enablement software will not fix your problem, implementing it correctly and measuring will fix your problem.

So that's what I think about de-risking. It's saying, look, not only are you going to solve this, it's going to cost you money because not only is it going to cost you money with us, it's going to cost you time and that's money as well. So how are you going to use that to get to a number that you go back and you say, hey, we spent this, here's what we saw. This is the baseline, here's where it is today. In this time frame, we're going to try to get it to here.

And to me that's an easy way to de-risk it. That phase approach is a great idea but bringing that vertical expert, critical, absolutely.

Victor Antonio - I've never heard that by the way. I think that's an exceptional idea and, again, I feel your pain. Back in my other life I was a program manager running a software group and I had nine people on my team. And I remember customers who were always like, Victor, I know your product works, but-- the word that always kills a lot to deal. But, he says, how do we get all of that in there and then how do we know they're going to use what you put it in there, right?

Rusty Bishop - Exactly.

Victor Antonio - It's always that friction.

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NARRATOR: Bigtincan is the world's leading sales learning and enablement platform that delivers the onboarding and training, preparation, coaching, customer engagement, and follow up, and insights that modern businesses need to win.

Victor Antonio - I wanted to ask you about, you mentioned M&As and the bringing together of two companies, Rusty. We're talking, now we're bringing together platforms and we're bringing together people, give me the around the campfire good ways of doing it, bad ways of doing it. And just walk us through an M&A process and what are some of the best practices.

Rusty Bishop - So put this into perspective, how many M&A events have you been involved with personally?

Victor Antonio - Personally, probably--

[INTERPOSING VOICES] guess.

Victor Antonio - 24

Rusty Bishop - OK, so let's say, 24. Let's say that that's at large.

Victor Antonio - By the way, that's over a three- to five-year period, OK?

Rusty Bishop - OK, yeah. So this is reality for all you salespeople out there in the world, you are going to experience M&A events, it is going to happen. The majority of companies do not IPO, the majority of companies get bought or they go out of business. So let's be fair, so very few companies are going to IPO. If you're so lucky to be a part of one, get your options package, you're awesome.

Now let's talk about M&A because to me it's near and dear to my heart, because in the last three years I've been involved in 11 events, I've built a company and sold it to another company-- I was CEO and founder of that company-- and I've been on the other side of purchasing companies here at Bigtincan.

So now if I think about the individual seller, what I've witnessed is a lot of confusion. Most people don't know this is coming, you wake up one morning to an email from your CEO that says, town hall. You pop on to the Zoom meeting nowadays and they're like, guess what, we just got bought. An immediate thing to me that seems to happen is fear, is have I lost my job?

So as being on the other side of this as many times as I have in recent years, I would encourage you to flip that, and I would encourage you to be curious. And be curious and say, how could this be the moment that defines next phase of my career? Because now you have the chance just to wipe the slate clean.

So let's say you're on the other side being acquired, so let's say you're in the middle of your sales team, you're doing great but you're not quite in the top, here's your chance to move to the top. So that's the way I would look at it. So how can I take this event as a way to move to the top of the heap, and what am I going to do?

I'm going to go out there, I'm going to learn about the compelling buying events for this company that I just joined, I'm going to go talk to marketing and say what kind of leads are you guys producing? And I'm going to talk to the sellers and say, how good is marketing? So in it, learn the product. You have a moment here to have that change as an individual.

Now if you're a sales manager-- so be it in there. So if you're an individual seller, what do you think? Look, I'm curious.

Victor Antonio - No, I'm with you. I now know why you're in marketing because you're like, no, no let's not go back and let's go positive. Because I have the same viewpoint, Rusty, which is well, wait a minute, if we're being bought out I'll probably have more resources. They probably have a better infrastructure than we do, some better processes and systems.

And by the way, as a side note to this is that they did a study on top performers. And so in an insurance company if a top performer left and went to another competitor, it took them three years to get back to where they were originally at. And what they realized based on this study-- I thought that was shocking.

What they found is that only 30% of the individual contribution was based on success. In other words, the reason that sales person was successful was, 30% of it was because of their sales skills. The other 70% had to do with systems, processes like marketing, sales process, CRM platform, sales engagement platforms.

When I saw that study I was like, oh, so a lot of success has to do with more of the infrastructure and you would know this best because you've built and sold companies.

Rusty Bishop - Yeah, it totally does. That takes me to the next phase of M&A, which is if you're a manager-- so let's say you're a sales manager and you manage a territory, eight or 10 people. You're going to be compared against the other manager in that territory, unless you're so lucky to be bought in a situation where they're just buying new territories, that's a whole different game.

So let's just take that situation. So now you're in a situation where you're going to go head to head with another sales manager for that territory, they're not keeping both of you. So now, again, how do I spin that back to the positive, how do I be curious? Hey, is the person I'm going up against successful?

I now got to think of a whole new world of sales, which is now I'm in a head to head battle with another sales manager? And again, I think it comes down to those systems and tools. So do you do you have the systems and tools in place at your current company or are you about to get a set of systems and tools that you're going to have to quickly learn and get up to speed on?

So let's say they had Bigtincan sitting there. I'll be a little cheesy here and do a little marketing. Let's say you got bought by a company and they had a sales enablement platform like Bigtincan. If you're a manager, the first thing I would do is learn that platform as fast as I could learn it because what's it going to give you?

It's going to give you analytics and if you can get analytics you've got data, and data doesn't lie, people do. So no matter what they're telling you over there on the other side of M&A, the data will always tell you the truth.

Victor Antonio - You got to get a shirt.

[INTERPOSING VOICES]

Rusty Bishop - You got to get a shirt-- data doesn't lie, people do.

Victor Antonio - Yeah, that's one of my favorite phrases.

[INTERPOSING VOICES]

Rusty Bishop - but it's true of everything. It's true it's true of marketing, it's true of sales, it's true of IT, everything you deal with in business. Data doesn't lie to people, people do. And they're not lying on purpose, they might not know the answer, but the data will always tell you. So get the data from the marketing team, get the data out of the sales enablement platform, get the data out of CRM.

Make that data your friend because it's going to tell you the direction to go and to navigate when you get that M&A done. So it's just something that I'm really obsessed about.

Victor Antonio - Mergers and acquisition, I've never had a negative connotation of viewpoint of them. I'm always like, if we're acquiring somebody it's like, what else can I sell now? What do they bring that I can now sell? I thought about, and then when we got acquired I'm like, OK, what new territories or customers do I now have access to because [INTERPOSING VOICES]

Rusty Bishop - That's the best part of it, right?

Victor Antonio - And so a glass half full, half empty type of thing. But I want to wrap up with this because I know your time is value, I don't want to keep you on here too long. But I need to know, Rusty, it's a compelling question that I personally need to know the answer to. How does a guy with a biochemistry background, a PhD, get into marketing? What the heck happened, dude, what the heck happened? How do you explain this to people?

Rusty Bishop - So people change careers, let's just say it that way. Most people change careers during their life. So actually, I do have a PhD in biochemistry and molecular genetics. I spent about 12 years doing biochemical research, I worked on type 1 diabetes for the majority of that time and I hit a point in academia where I decided I don't really want to be a professor. That's the bottom line.

So I went to the private space, I went to work for a biotech company. As part of that job I was chief scientific officer and what I had to help them do was figure out how to rephrase and reframe their products to scientists. That got me thinking about how scientists, let's say they're medical practitioners or let's say they're people working on diseases and those kind of things, I had the unique perspective of buying millions of dollars of product a year when I was in the laboratory.

What I brought to that was an idea of how do you sell to scientists? So I actually created a blog that was called, How to Sell to Scientists? And I wrote about the things that I had experienced buying millions of dollars worth of science equipment. And to be honest with you, my sales being on the buying-- My buying experience was not that great.

That's what compelled me to go write that blog but at that point, I'll date myself a little bit, people would walk in with a giant catalog literally paper, to my lab and they would say, hey, what are you working on? Hey. And they would literally look it up in a catalog and be like, yeah, we've got that as part number XYZ. 18 years later, I would get it shipped to the lab, so that was selling then.

Now it's really fast. You can look up on the internet, bam, I can order the product. So my experience was not very good. So I said, look, there's a better way to do this. So what I try to do is write and think from a perspective of a scientist buying things, that led me into sales and marketing. And I started a company with Mark Walker who was at a company called Invitrogen called FatStax, and our entire reason to be was to take those giant catalogs and digitize them.

So that was right about the time that this lovely device was released, the iPhone, and what we did was digitize paper catalogs and made them searchable on phones and iPads for salespeople. We grew that company, sold in some of the biggest companies in the world. We had Corning, we had Thermo Fisher sales people using our tool and we eventually sold that product to Bigtincan, about three years ago.

And then when I came over they didn't know what to do with me, and they put me in marketing, and the next thing you know I'm the CMO.

Victor Antonio - Oh, great story, by the way. And by the way, it's worth highlighting that you were a buyer first, and then when you saw the bad sales habits you're like, yeah, we got to change the game a little bit. But I like your phrase here, how to sell through science, man. I don't know, there's a book in there somewhere, Rusty. There's a book in there somewhere, how to sell through science.

Oh, I think--

Rusty Bishop - That's going to be my next thing, right?

Victor Antonio - one more thing. Oh, I didn't touch on this, I'm going to kick myself.

Rusty Bishop - Yeah, go for it.

Victor Antonio - Rusty, talk a little bit about, and this is not self-promotion I just want to give you context in case you don't know. So in 2018--

Rusty Bishop - No problem.

Victor Antonio - I wrote a book called Sales Ex Machina, which is how AI is changing the world of selling, and this is four years ago when I wrote the book. I'm a nerd just like you, man. I came from the engineering side, so I came up that way. And tell me what you're seeing now, because now even things I was saying four years ago I'm like, oh, I think it's even past what I've even stated.

I also know you're connected to a guy named-- I don't know if you know Justin Michael, who wrote Tech-Powered Sales? Fantastic book by the way, also talks about AI in different tech stacks. And I wanted to ask you, just get your opinion on first of all, AI, how Bigtincan is using AI? And then just predict as a good AI algorithm would, where this is going.

Rusty Bishop - OK, so I'll start with the caveat that I do not predict the future any better than anybody else in the world, which is I have zero ability to predict the future. This is something I really love though, I think, let's just break this down one level. So machine learning is the precursor to AI and my personal belief is there is no AI currently on this planet. My guess is we're probably many years out.

Now what we do have is really good machine learning. And what machine learning needs is a giant data set, and you could teach it with a thing called an algorithm, which you just described, how to look through that data and find things that a human couldn't find. To me, that's the easiest way to think about machine learning or AI.

So now if that's what it does, I sit on top of this giant pool of data, crunch, crunch, crunch, crunch numbers based on some mathematical formula, I can now serve up insights to anyone based on a linear path. This is the most important thing that I've grasped lately, is machine learning is linear, so it's not going to branch off and all of a sudden figure out how to do physics if it's learning about how people talk during sales calls. So Gong CI is never going to create physics, but what it can do

[INTERPOSING VOICES]

Victor Antonio - It's very narrow, it's what you're saying, right? Is that the same definition when you talk about--

Rusty Bishop - Narrow band, right.

Victor Antonio - OK.

Rusty Bishop - So it's linear, but it's very fast linear. So once an AI is trained well, let's call it machine learning of AI, just started getting the words mixed up a little bit there. Once it begins to learn and the algorithm gets better and better, it gets faster and faster at extrapolating that information. So now what could an individual seller-- let's go back to the individual. I love talking to the individual sellers cause I think it's the most fun.

Now as an individual seller, how could I utilize machine learning to be better at my job? The example you gave earlier was conversational intelligence, CI. So we actually have our own AI here at Bigtincan, it's called VoiceVibes. It is trained very specifically to understand what vibe you are giving off to another human, that is the only thing that that machine learning is trained on.

So let's think about that for a second. Do you actually know how anybody perceives you?

Victor Antonio - I'm unaware. I don't know.

Rusty Bishop - Yeah, you have no idea. You think you know--

Victor Antonio - Otherwise, there are times you do but in many cases, you don't, really.

Rusty Bishop - Right. Because they could be going, man, this guy is bitsy, this guy is arrogant. And because everyone's perception of other people is different, it's completely set up by our backgrounds instead of by our education. It might be set up by the guy who got mad at me in the coffee stand this morning because I cut him.

So now other people perceive you a certain way. So what this particular machine does is we trained it on thousands and thousands of hours of people speaking with voice coaches who truly understand your vibes. Now all that machine does, it learns how to tell you your vibes so you can actually use it to figure out how other people are perceiving you.

What we learned is that if you are assertive, you're 13%-- sorry, 30% more likely to close a deal than if you're anything else, but you're also more likely to close if you're arrogant, which I think is very interesting. So if you come across as ditzy or shy, if you come across as uninformed, if you come across as confused it's better to be arrogant, which I think is very interesting.

So what we've done is now we're training this thing on massive sales teams, so we've got people in call centers with 50,000 people. This piece of CI is listening in on those calls and it's saying, hey, Victor, right there you sounded a little ditzy. And you go, OK, I need to improve that. So now you go practice against that machine during your practice time, something I know that you're big on. Everybody should shoot layups, just go shoot layups. Use the machine to go shoot layups.

It's learned from thousands and thousands of hours about the way people perceive you, and figure out what vibe you want to give off, and then figure out which vibes help you sell more.

Victor Antonio - That's interesting.

Rusty Bishop - So that's a great use of machine learning, right?

Victor Antonio - Yeah.

Rusty Bishop- So it's a really different way to think about as an individual seller. So your company might have bought this kind of things and maybe your boss is using it to listen in on your calls. So the thing I've heard, pushback from individual people is like, oh, those are people listening in on me. Are they're trying to spy on me? And so maybe now if you were curious and you said, OK, how could I use this to my advantage?

So now we're talking about machine learning, we're talking about AI, you asked me where I think it's going. So now let's say you combine a couple of these things up, you've got something like VoiceVibes, you got something like Gong doing CI, you've got other intelligence working inside your CRM system saying, hey, every time someone shows page three of PowerPoint XYZ, we close the deal five days faster.

So now once those things combine, now you've really got this huge additive power that individual sellers, managers, and even entire companies can now take advantage of to actually predict the outcome. And it'll come back to something we talked about in the very beginning. So where I think AI and machine learning is going to be really interesting over the long haul is creating an amazing buying experience. And I told you I was completely obsessed with this in the beginning, right?

So right now if you don't know how you're perceived, you don't know what kind of buying experience your buyer is having. If you don't know what your buyer wants to see, video PowerPoint, AR, VR doesn't matter, they're not having a great buying experience. But if a machine could predict that for you and let's say you walked in, you're ready to go, you know how they want to be perceived, you knew what materials to bring, how much better would you be at your job?

Victor Antonio - Yeah, much better.

Rusty Bishop - So that's where I think it's going.

Victor Antonio - So, God, I know I said I was going to end this podcast but, dude--

Rusty Bishop - No, keep going. It's fine.

Victor Antonio - you just keep picking things and I'm just like, OK, more about that.

Rusty Bishop - We can do this again.

Victor Antonio - So first of all, I never thought about it. I have to be really honest here, I never thought about-- I knew about sentiment analysis and when I think about your VoiceVibes, I never thought about using it as a mirror of my own voice. I never thought about that. I always thought about analyzing the customer's voice only because different platforms we talk about different things, about combining talk time, interruptions and all that.

But I never thought about just me talking, recording myself and then figuring out what vibe I give off. I think the 30% assertive and arrogant, it makes sense. If you look at the data from The Challenger Sale or again, Matt Dixon's new book, it really lines up. I think maybe arrogance, maybe is perceived as confidence.

Rusty Bishop - Probably, yeah, confidence is actually one of the highest indicators of--

[INTERPOSING VOICES]

Victor Antonio - Arrogance, it's a more pejorative like, oh, that's a little-- So on the buyer experience and, again, you say you'll get to know how they want to be sold to. So give me an example of, hey, Victor, here's a Bigtincan platform. Here's a perfect example of how we had to switch, how he interacted with our customer because he knew he wanted to interact differently. Just some simple examples, I'm sure you have a bunch of those.

Rusty Bishop - The actual switching, what Bigtincan did for a customer?

Victor Antonio - Yeah. In other words, I've identified-- I'm a front line salesperson using the Bigtincan platform. The machine learning is telling me, this person really likes to be dealt this way. They want to be dealt with this way, or you know what I mean? They love that buying experience, they're different. So I'm able as a salesperson to do more task switching or buyer experience switching. That makes any sense?

Rusty Bishop - Yeah. It totally makes sense. So classic example that is part of this-- now this is true for most sales enablement platforms, so I want to be not too pitchy here. So a very good sales enablement platform should have buyer analytics. So it should give you the ability to-- let's take a classic place.

So you're the type of seller who goes out, we have a conversation and I'm going to send you something. I'll send it to you on email, let's say it's a PowerPoint, that copy of my deck, or it's a PDF one-pager. I'm going to send that to you. I might put it in a digital sales room, this new idea that we've got, this collaboration space up here we're going to work in, Mr. Buyer, but I somehow get this to you. This is a classic sales thing we all do, send me something, right?

So how do you know what they want, how they want to be interacted with? Are they opening your email, or do they want to get it by text? Or what page of that PowerPoint did they obsess on? So now the machine will tell you all right, Victor, you sent this PowerPoint to Rusty two weeks ago.

He's looked at page three 52 times, so either it's kids clicking on the button of his iPhone having fun, or there's something going on on page three. And he's doing it on his iPhone because the analytics will tell you the device. You've opted in, I want to be cautious here. Nope, doesn't work in Europe. So now what do I know?

I know, one, you reacted to my email. Two, something on page 3 is extremely compelling. And how do I go back now and use the information, this typing-- this will come up as a notification right on your phone, Victor looked at page three. So what do I need to do? I need to go find out what's on there, what is that behavior he's doing. Oh, what are they doing? Are they just looking at it or are they forwarding it around the company? And now there are multiple people looking at page three.

So it's just all those types of things is what the machine is going to tell you, so you would have no way of knowing that before. So you could absolutely flip things. We saw this during COVID quite a bit because sellers no longer had the ability there for a little while to go meet in-person. So you had to find all these interesting ways to understand how buyers were experiencing your stuff. So without a sales enablement tool you're just firing it blind.

Victor Antonio - Yeah, I agree.

Rusty Bishop - So that's probably the classic thing I can think of off top of my head. Now I think these systems are going to get better and better. This is one of the things we're coming back to, this AI topic for just a second. I know we're probably way over time but doesn't matter. So one of the ways I think about that.

Victor Antonio - Keep going. I'm loving this. Keep going.

Rusty Bishop - So again, we talked about machine learning. In order to make a machine learn you have to have this giant data set. So you might need five years of sales data in order for the machine to begin to extrapolate good information.

So let's say a customer has been on Bigtincan platform for five to six years. They're collecting data on sales coaching, sales onboarding, sales training, they're collecting data on what's being sent out in the field, they're collecting buyer analytics. They marry that up to the data that's in their CRM, what do they have? They have a digital advantage. They have digital advantage because those two data sets can talk to each other with the same machine learning on top of it.

So for any company that is not thinking about this, this is your warning shot. The biggest companies in this world have been collecting this data and understand already how to manipulate it. They are taking off on a linear path with an escape velocity that you can never catch because their machines are going to learn faster than yours.

This is critical, so if you haven't thought about this as a CEO, as a seller, as a VP of sales, you've got to get your head wrapped around this because data is going to eat you alive.

Victor Antonio - And I love what you do because this is what we talk about Amazon, right? They have so much data there as you say, their escape velocity, well they've gone already. They're on their way to Mars already.

Rusty Bishop - Yeah, they've gone. No, they're gone.

Victor Antonio - So that right there is an exceptional point. I have this one, I'd love your opinion on this one is that I don't think enough companies look at the data as an asset, much like I would look at property or building or capital, right? What are your thoughts on that?

Rusty Bishop - Yeah, 100% So the future, if you look at several-- let's just look into the near future a little bit. We've seen meta come out; we've seen AR/VR. We have seen things like Web3, if you're not familiar with it go Google it, get on it right now. It's going to be a huge part of our lives here very soon.

It's all data. Amazon's data is probably more valuable to them than them selling their products to you. Uber's data is way more valuable to them than them driving you around and you're paying them for it because what are they using that for? They're using it for the future. They're taking that data and they're going, how are we going to create better buying experiences, better and better and better and better and better?

That data is the most critical thing in their world. So now if I'm going to say I'm a normal old sales organization and I sell insurance, something you mentioned earlier, and let's say you got 500 sellers and maybe 1,000 distributors-- not distributors, what do we call them?

Agents, the insurance agents, sorry about that. Now you've got a pretty small data set, so it's going to take you a long time to build up enough unique data, but there's plenty of public data out there that you can go buy. Now you ask me why the data is valuable, right? Because I can not sell my data to other vendors who can now marry that up and teach machines on it. So the data becomes the product.

Victor Antonio - Do you ever sell that as a selling point by the way, when you sell the platform, or is that something that you just only touch on that?

Rusty Bishop - I will say this, the way that I think about it is the top 10% of high performing companies that are using sales enablement, sales training, sales coaching, sales readiness to its maximum efficiency, they're obsessed with data. It's part of their company cultures, they talk about it all the time, they dream about it, they think about it, they've hired data scientists already.

Now let's say you're in that next 60% who wants to be in that 10%, so that's where we're highly encouraging them to start programs immediately to train-- just training their employees on data. We just had a pretty, relatively minor shallow conversation about machine learning, but even that amount of knowledge is probably not sitting in the majority of people's heads.

So simply training them about why the data is important, is really important for that next 60% of companies, which I think are on their way to being top performers with sales enablement and using it as the actual way it should be used. And the bottom 40, they're just happy to get PDFs out of SharePoint, let's just be honest. I mean, that's fine too. It's totally fine.

Victor Antonio - I was going to say, so when you look at the Bigtincan platform, there's the-- what is it, the learning module, the engagement module, and the content module. So there's learning, I can train the front line sales people. Engagement, here are the tools I use to connect with clients. The content, here's the assets you're going to need to sell them, presentations, whatever it may be. So you have all this data sitting there, now I want you to tie it to one last point, I swear this will be my last one.

Rusty Bishop - It's all good

Victor Antonio - You said you were doing something with VR, how does this all play together? I'm still having a hard time with the meta thing, I got to be honest. I'm trying to wrap my brain around, how real is it? Look, 20, 30 years ago they talked about expert systems in AI and then it went through 20 years of a nuclear winter before we had enough data processing power, so forth and so on.

So I keep hearing VR and I'm thinking, man, I don't know. I think there's another 20 years off, but then you see Zuckerberg go meta and you're like, well, why would he do that? So what's your perspective on VR and maybe how it ties to your platform? What are you guys doing?

Rusty Bishop - So my personal perspective on it is it's coming faster than you think it is. People as smart as Mark Zuckerberg, and the people that back him and he can surround himself with, would not allow them to make this bet if they did not believe that this was real, so that's my personal take on it.

So what are we doing? Bigtincan is very innovative. So we did buy a company last year who specializes in XR, which is a combination of augmented reality, virtual reality, and-- I'm sorry, one of the reality, doesn't matter. We'll use those two.

Augmented reality is very simple. I want to sell you this coffee cup, I hold up my phone, the phone shoots the coffee cup, recognizes it and tells me the features of it. I can share a video with you right here on my phone because it recognizes that object. It's going to put something there and augment the reality of this cup.

We are selling this quite often. It is in the field right now. You can walk into stores, I can't name their names, and you can see this technology being used today 100%. We are beginning to sell virtual reality. Imagine you sell cranes, how are you going to put a crane in your trunk and drive it over there?

You're not, OK? But I can easily put you a virtual reality headset on and I can show you how that crane works, I can show you how it functions, I can take it apart, I can set you in it, I can show you the height of it, I can show you the width of it. That is happening today, the best companies in the world are already doing it. It is 100% happening.

We are already selling it We actually offer software to not only do this but companies can build it themselves with drag and drop.

Victor Antonio - Wow, that's amazing.

Rusty Bishop - Just like the website.

Victor Antonio - That's amazing.

Rusty Bishop - Just like the website.

Victor Antonio - How would you use it when you're training? Are there any plans to use it training frontline salespeople?

Rusty Bishop - All the time. Absolutely, yeah. That's one of the main things you're going to do. Simplest case, let's say you sell toilets, and your Americans are not a customer. It doesn't matter, I happen to see it over here. And you're bringing in distributors from Lowe's and Home Depot all over the world and they're like, how do I sell this new awesome toilet?

Now the way they're training these people is they're just handing them a device and they're walking over to the machine and it's a person's popping up and they're saying, hey, let's learn about this toilet, how do you sell it, what are the value props? That's already happening.

So now how do you extrapolate that? So the way we're extrapolating that is companies like Matterport, who you may have heard of, a publicly traded company. They're very big in meta and AR and those kind of things. They actually have technology which they can come in with cameras and create that virtual space and recreate it in virtual.

So they can literally walk into a room, shoot, shoot it with cameras, now it's a virtual space, now we won't have to fly people all over the world to my training center. They just put on their headset and they get trained on all their products.

Victor Antonio - That's amazing

Rusty Bishop - And they can do it any time in their own time. We'll go back to dollar save so many times. So first of all, time, not to fly people over here and do stuff. Time and then dollars, it costs a lot of money to fly people to training centers, companies spend millions of dollars on this. So this is all happening right now. We have people doing sales kick offs in virtual space now literally, completely in-person.

Victor Antonio - Oh, trust me I know. Rusty, how do you as a chief marketing officer for this company that keeps acquiring other companies, because I know you also acquired one of my favorite, Brainsharks, I love the brand. I love it, man.

As a chief marketing officer, and it seems like you got to herd the company cats and move them in a certain direction, closes out with how does Rusty do it, man? How does Rusty try to put his arm around all this stuff and then say, all right, here's the go-to market plan?

Rusty Bishop - I'll just come back to what I told you, we're obsessed with the buying experience. So we're going to take that lens and go and look at everything. The reason we buy companies is innovation, so we're trying to get ahead of the market and we're buying things that it's best for us to buy them than code them. That's just the reality.

So that's true of almost all of our companies. Salesforce, I think they average nine companies a year, and they're buying innovation. So that's the lens I as a marketer I'm going to look at that through. So how does this fit with our vision of creating an amazing buying experience for buyers and then how do I take these tools that this company has, let's say it's a product like Brainshark, amazing product, it's been around for 12 years.

What makes it great? Because it's really easy to create sales content, that's it, that's what makes it great. I can upload a PowerPoint, I can talk over it, and I can send it to somebody. It's the simplest tool you could imagine, but that's an amazing thing to create a buying experience, because now everybody in your company is this me, a subject matter expert.

You don't have to go to the awesome sales training center to create your courses, anybody can upload a PowerPoint, talk over it, branch learning, upload it to the system, you're good to go. So now I said, if I put my lens on it what does that do for my customers and my customers' customers? If we can help anybody in your company train you faster to get up to speed, you're going to create a better buying experience for your customer.

So that's my lens. So anything we do I'm looking at their systems, I'm looking at their people, and I'm looking at their marketing, and I'm looking at their products and I'm saying, how is this going to translate to helping our customers create a great buying experience?

Victor Antonio - Holy bucks, you know what I want you to do, Rusty, take the following words and show this to your CEO, you need to pay this man more money. I don't know what he's making but give him more money, because that was a lot. By the way, what you said was an outline of what you do. The execution of that and the completion of that has to be just tough. Rusty--

Rusty Bishop - It's much, I'd say it's much.

Victor Antonio - I think it's a little more. Yeah, much is being very conservative I'm sure. Rusty, where can they find out more about you, my friend.

Rusty Bishop - You can find me on LinkedIn. It's Rusty Bishop, jrustybishop on LinkedIn. I'm also on Twitter @jrustybishop and those are the two best places to get me.

And also go check out the Bigtincan website at bigtincan.com. And that is it for the Sales Influence podcast, leave me some feedback on YouTube, iTunes, Stitcher, Pandora, Spotify, wherever you're hearing or listening. Then check out the Bigtincan website and after you do that go to salesvelocityacademy.com, check out the new courses there

And on that note, this is Victor Antonio always reminding you, a selenide hard when you have Bigtincan and you know how to use it. Bye. And we're done.

NARRATOR: Bigtincan is the world's leading sales learning and enablement platform that delivers the onboarding and training, preparation, coaching, customer engagement, and follow up and insights that modern businesses need to win.