Rinus Strydom, Chief Revenue Officer for Particle.io, has been involved in every aspect of revenue creation for leading software companies like SAP, Commerce One, Perfect Commerce, Ariba, Hubwoo, and Tradeshift. He had a front row seat as the power shifted from the seller/publisher to the buyer. During this episode of The Convenience Economy, Rinus joins Greg Dickinson to discuss The Dark Funnel - the time prospects spend learning about your company while remaining anonymous. Rinus and Greg talk about the challenges The Dark Funnel presents and some approaches to shed light on the darkness.
Chief Revenue Officers and Revenue Operations leaders face a real difficult challenge as their prospects go "dark." Prospects no longer want to engage with the seller. They explore and gain knowledge by every channel possible - websites, analysts, crowd sourced reviews, social networks, peers, and frankly don’t speak to sales until they are ready to buy. In fact, according to Gartner 33% would prefer not to talk to the seller at all. So what is a Chief Revenue Officer to do? For one, start thinking about revenue generation as an integrated process that combines marketing, sales, and customer success. Functional silos just don't work. Buyer's journeys are not linear. Therefore, it is critical to 1. make it as easy and convenient as possible for prospects to find the information they need, 2. influence the influencers - not just analysts, but customers as well, and 3. be prepared to challenge prospects' thinking and opinions when they finally engage (The Challenger Sale.)
Connect:
Connect with Rinus on LinkedIn and learn more about Particle.io by visiting Particle.io.
Connect with Greg on LinkedIn and check out Omedym’s website and their LinkedIn and Twitter
Greg Dickinson: All right. Hello, everyone, and welcome to the next episode of the convenience economy. Before we get into the topics, I'd like to have Rinus introduce himself and tell us a little bit about yourself, your profession, your career, so my audience knows who you are and the information you're about to talk about who you really, really valuable.
Rinus Strydom: Great. And Greg, thank you for having me. So Rinus Strydom, I've been in the b2b SaaS business for about 25 years now pretty much it wasn't called SaaS back then it was called ASP, or hosting and all those names we had, after we moved from on premise, I started my career in software at SAP, great place learning experience in the ropes of going through enterprise selling, back then it was all about solution selling, things have changed a lot in those 25 years. So I spent some time at some startups commerce one, I was what my first big startup was employee number 40, we got to 5000 people in two years. And then I think about two and a half years later, we're back down to 40. Again, those are turbulent times of the dot.com economy, and then a little bit of time at Ariba. And then I spent my last two cents as I was seven years at hubzu, which was a French publicly traded company, cmo there, those kind of interesting, you know, having to do all that the publicly traded aspects over in France. And then the last seven years I spent as chief Commercial Officer at tradeshift, which is where I'm transitioning from now to new adventure starting next week.
Greg Dickinson: Outstanding heck of a career, right. And I think, you know, you and i, you were at commerce, when I was at Ariba, but we both went way up, and then we kind of went back down and way up again and back down again. Right. But always a, you know, going through that good time, great pioneering companies, right, really, you know, kind of automating internet and using the internet. So that's, that's, that's really that's really cool that we kind of get to have that that background. I didn't realize that you were at commerce one. So what we want to talk about today
Rinus Strydom: I was back then. That's right.
Greg Dickinson: Yeah. Well, you know, it's funny because I, I, my dad is very close to my father, and he always wants to know what I'm doing. So I start talking about SaaS one day, he's like, you know, Greg, you keep talking to SaaS? And how fancy it is. It sounds like mainframe to me, right? And no, in essence, it is, right? It's the 1960s 1970 mainframe, everything is centralized. And you have these nodes. It's just now the nodes are smarter, right? It was the, you know, look at client server back when we were doing those days, right. So crazy. We're getting we're talking about our age here without even meaning to Sure. Hey, so listen so 25 years, and I have to believe that you have seen, right, the shift from, you know, the salesperson, the sales leader, you know, being able to dictate the buying the sales cycle. And and what we talked about here on the convenience factor, the convenience economy is the fact that kind of the buyer now does more on their own. And have you seen a shift from, you know, you could dictate as the salesperson, here's our sales methodology and follow every step to today. Right, let's talk first about that about you. Have you seen that that shift? Or, you know, what, what's your thought on that?
Rinus Strydom: Oh, absolutely. Greg. Yeah. I mean, if I go back to, you know, my experience at SAP 25 years ago, yeah, that was all very linear sales approach, right? You do you do the intros. And, you know, the sales rep was that single conduit to the information that the buyer analyzed? But But nowadays, you know, the, the way we look at it is, it's an ecosystem, right? So you've got, when I say ecosystem, you know, each each buyer, each enterprise buyer has probably eight to 10, people that are doing investigations on different providers in the landscape. And then outside of that, they may have SI's or, or other partners that are influencing them. They're looking on the internet or looking on jeetu crowd or looking at Gartner, all kinds of places that that people aren't getting information. So it's probably that last 20%, where they want to validate some things with us so so it's completely changed as to what what what people know and have assessed when when they first come in contact?
Greg Dickinson: Yeah, yeah. You know, it's funny, because I've, for years, I read that all the reports is that all the buyers completed 70% of the journey forth of sales, I used to think so What like I just really, I couldn't connect the dots. Right, and you just did a great job of connecting the dots is saying that that buyer and and I think what you also can on very quickly, but it deserves conversation is the buying teams today are much larger than they were, you know, 10, 15 years ago, right? You could get to the influencer, the decision maker, and he or she would make the decision. He would get input she would get input from the team. But ultimately, they sign up today. It's more consensus buying that, you know, and I think that's a topic to talk about is that consensus buying but also, you know, how that plays into the fact that there's that they're all out finding information, right, and then they're never coming back together again. And you know, sales is getting in there engaging with sales towards the tail end. I would what you're thinking about the fact they've already begun to formulate an opinion Or a requirements of your space your technology before they call and talk to sales? Like you said they used to call day one because you had all the information now you don't. Now you don't?
Rinus Strydom: Absolutely, you know, I affectionately with my sales team call it the dark funnel, right. It's everything that happened above, you know, that qualification process when it when it finally gets to us, right, that there's lots of opinions that have been pre determined already. And, and that that's, that's where I think, you know, solution selling doesn't work anymore, right. And we follow a tradeshift the challenger sales approach it which is rarely you looking at all of the constituents in that buying team, challenge them getting them to change any preconceived notions, but also finding out right, like, I'll give you a few examples. Recently, we found out that, you know, like, let's say you have 10 people in the buying team, or two of them may be naysayers. So what they're doing is they're talking to the competition, trying to find out negative things about us, they might find might find out of context, something on the internet about a lawsuit, right? And then, you know, propagate that and use that right. So. So what we need to do is, you know, know, everything they can possibly find and help steer them to the correct answer and the positive information. Yeah,
Greg Dickinson: Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. You, you, you bring up a couple great points that I think that that the sources of information that people have to turn to, and you know, what we're talking about today is you got to have to the website's not enough, right? You the people are, they want to watch not read, they want to see the profit when they you know, they've been burned and other SaaS buys. So they want to be able to see the product earlier in the sales cycle. And that buying team, you know, all has a different reason to see it. Right? The compliance buyer, the pyramid buyer, the business buyer, the technical buyer, right? They all have a different perspective. So what you're, what you're advocating is, how do you how do you corral them and give them a place to go do that, even though they're in the dark funnel? Right? How do you give a digital way for them to go by?
Rinus Strydom: Yeah, absolutely. And, as you said, you know, you got the technical buyer and in our space, you know, seven out of 10 times, it's an SAP shop, and, you know, they the technical buyer wants to wants to find a reason why not SAP right, which, which, as they should, you know, they're typically trying to get consolidate vendors and go to their ERP vendors. So So, you know, we need to make sure that they're also getting the right information and not getting just the information of the ERP vendor, and sent me a same thing with compliance. Compliance means a lot of different things in our space. Right. There's there's all that, you know, if you're doing and trade ships case, invoicing in 80 countries in the world, each one of them has different e invoicing, legal compliance and archiving requirements. Right. So, so we need to make sure that, you know, it's clearly articulated what those requirements are, how they're supported, because there's lots of gray areas and different perspectives there. Yeah, yeah. Yeah.
Greg Dickinson: Yeah. And I think you know, so that's kind of, that's why we use the word convenience, right. But you could say the word easy in the sense that, you know, at the end of the day, if, if the buyer is going to be doing this work on their own, I don't care if it's 40% 50% 60% 80%, whatever the number is, doesn't matter. They're doing a large part of the buying journey before they talk to sales, because they don't have to call sales day one to get the information they can go elsewhere. Right? It's but you as a selling organization need to find a way to make that easy, simple, right? Because if you don't, and you provide hurdles, and I think that's the part of the economy today is, you know, the marketing teams want MQL. So they Oh, you got to opt in for this white paper, you got to opt in for the webinar, you got to opt in for the demo. Well, people they don't they know the abandoned rate on request a demo for 80% they go someplace else. And then to your point, what are they learning? You know, what, where are they forming that opinion? a competitor will gladly tell you why not your company.
Rinus Strydom: Yeah, exactly. I completely agree with you on that convenience factor, right? I mean, what we find is that most of our buying teams at our prospects are actually doing their research off hours. So you know, they they don't have the time they don't want to wait and click and do a gate and then you know, wait for somebody to call them back. They just want what research can I do in the next hour here very quickly, and if somebody is going to make it harder, forget it. I'll just skip that and I'll go elsewhere from my research. Yeah,
Greg Dickinson: Yeah. Yeah, listen, you know, we you know, we have technology that helps us, you know, a buyer buy writing and they can watch these we call smart, watchable assets off hours, our data across 1000s upon 1000s of interactions is that 44.8 maybe it's 4043. Now maybe it's 49% of all buyers engage with our digital our customers, right digital platforms before nine after six or on weekends. So salmost 50% of all the quote unquote buying journey is done when you weren't even available anyway, even if they wanted to call you. You're not gonna pick the phone up on Sunday morning at 8am
Rinus Strydom: Yeah, that's right. It's you know, it's kind of that that blending of that the consumer and in business world, right, we we all have our smartphones and Oh, I forgot to check something Right, and you just do it right at the moment and want to do it all on your smartphone or while you're waiting this afternoon, I'm gonna go wait at the dentist's office with my daughter, right? So I'm going to be on my phone doing business and personal, right. That's what works. Yeah,
Greg Dickinson: yeah, yeah. And I think what we, what we try to tell, you know, our customers or advocate, as Omedym right, is the fact that the buyer has a journey and the sales cycle is going to start at some point in time, how do you marry those two together? Right, because you, the last thing you want is that buyer has done a lot of research, and then you know Rinus your salesperson comes in. So so good, thank you all very much. Let me start you out with a 50,000 foot view. They're like, Well, we've already on our own got to the 500 foot view, right? So yeah, have you seen in you, as you coach and mentor and work with your sales teams? How are you coaching them and saying, hey, let's not forget they've done some work on their own? You know, are you? Are you looking at data sources? Are you looking at? What what are you doing to arm them to be able to meld those two together? So make them two separate roads? if you will? Let's bring them together.
Rinus Strydom: Yeah, you know, Greg, I think that the paradigm shift you're doing with the buyers journey buyer focus with Omedym is fantastic, right? I mean, I think that's, that's exactly what what companies now need is to help you know channel and then arm those buyers with all the information free for much our time. So we're going to be endorsing our sales force to do that. And one of the other things that we've done in parallel that that has worked out quite well is to use the ecosystem. Right, so so Where else? Can we arm the buyers with the information they need, but then also influence it through third parties? So our mo at tradeshift today is that every opportunity? Let's find out who are the incumbent SIs, income and BPO firms, adjacent software companies, let's go proactively meet them. And you know, worst case, we want them to be neutral, best case, we want them to to influence us. Right. So, so the combination of arming the buyer, but also, you know, influencing around them?
Greg Dickinson: Yeah, yeah, I think I think a lot Listen, you know, regardless, the convenience factor here, I think a lot of, of sales people, customer facing people, let's say that, ignore the fact that today, Every company has a stack of technology. And if you think they're gonna put yours in standalone, it's gonna work and solve all their problems, you know, not going to happen, right? And that's what you're referring to is how we understand who else is in there so that we can A, get them to support but also be able to have a conversation that says, Yeah, we know your SAP account, here's how we work with SAP right at the forefront, right, bring it right up, because it's 800 pound gorilla in the room, someone's gonna ask sooner or later. And if that's a weakness of yours, you might as well get it up on the table. So you don't spend months on a cycle. It's not gonna happen.
Rinus Strydom: Yeah, definitely. And you're parallel to that. One of the things I love about your Omedym approach is actually then being able to see what people are searching for. Right, you know, oh, SAP integration is a big concern, and to be proactively notified about that, as opposed to finding out right before you think you're going to sign a contract. Right.
Greg Dickinson: Exactly. Yeah. I mean, that's what you're kind of sift we're seeing is that today, right? In the websites were kind of designed, I think, my opinion is, as an introduction to the company, they never were meant to be that deep dive, let me learn everything I can about Tradeshift, because people are not going to read 40, 50 you know, the New York Times, you know, documentary of of tradeshift, they're going to want to watch a lot of that. And more importantly, we think that people want to pull the information don't put 80 white papers up there and hope that they you know, they grab the right one, let them write be able to search let them at, you know, look at topics look at you know, recommendation, I use that table, and then they pull that and then you as a buying or selling organization, no, boy, Greg, on this opportunity, boy he was really interested in invoice reconciliation. So I now know what what's driving Greg to the table as opposed to trade shift, you know, supplier network, right. and things of that nature, right. There's different reasons for buying.
Rinus Strydom: And I think that's even been more magnified during the pandemic here. Right. Because of pre pandemic, we used to be able to roam the hallways have those casual conversations, you know, what, what's really of interest? What are the objections and over lunch over beer, that you can't do that over zoom anymore? Right. So really, what you're offering now is the modern hallway chatter.
Greg Dickinson: And I think, you know, I listen, I I always, you know, I kind of when I think about, you know, today sales teams, customer facing teams, right? If you put yourself in your personal position, and you're, you know, I don't know what you're buying, right yet an appliance and vacation furniture, right or seeds for the garden, you don't have all the information you need, you begin to explore that as a person right. And, and, and the firm that answers the questions the most when it comes time to buy that piece of furniture, or that appliance or that car. That's where you're going to go first. Right and what they what they've done is they've replaced that, coming into the shopping center and asked questions with digital trust, right? It's this digital relationship that begins to form by you as a seller providing it formation, they ask you answer. And then when it comes time to buy, they're going to come to tradeshift first Now you may not win, right, but at least they've established who you are the fact that you've been pretty generous with your time, your information, that's what you're talking about. You can't, you know, walk into the, you know, the largest pharmaceutical high rise in New York City anymore and go from 401 to 20. Meeting people that you think are on the buying committee, right? I mean, it's not
Rinus Strydom: Yeah they're gonna find us nowadays. Yeah, somehow. Yeah.
Greg Dickinson: So so let's let's kind of given that real quick, what do you think about remote selling? Do you think that I have an opinion? But do you think that that it's, it's a, it's been a year now almost, and it's kind of what's your pick? Is it working? Is it here to stay?
Rinus Strydom: I think it's here to stay. And I mean, at least in some kind of a hybrid capacity. Right? I'll tell you some, some funny stories. So managing the global sales team, you know, I think the US kind of picked up on it pretty quickly. A lot. A lot of us here, we're used to doing some some virtual meetings, just how spread out companies are across the US. Like, for example, in Japan, my sales team there just said no way I can't sell virtually, it has to be done over a sucky dinner. Right? It's the only way. And, you know, but sure enough, we did some big deals in Japan, and Okay, it can be done. And people started getting used to it. And what we found now is that it's actually so much easier and faster to get on an executives calendar, right? If you've got a compelling reason, say, Hey, can I talk to you for five minutes about x very specific point, or how I can solve that pain point? They'll take the caller there, he will help make make 15 minutes, right where, you know, if they were in their physical office, back to back, you would never be able to do that.
Greg Dickinson: Yeah, listen, we could spend a whole hour talking about you know, pains of a trip all the way to the city on a train their taxi to their office, wait in the lobby, they're late, you find it, you get the you know, then they're rushed, and you get 15 minutes, right. And you've you spent three hours right between time getting there and time getting back. You're trying to organize that. But I think that executive thing is pretty cool. Because I see I see a lot more research and our customers are showing us via the data that executives right that need to sign off. Don't want to they're not going to sit through a 90 minute product demo or a two hour practice or a three hour practice. They're going to sit through, they prefer to come in and get the three or four questions they want answered. Yes. And validate and move on. Right and check the box. Hey, I guess I validated that. And guess what that I showed you the number for people doing the research before nine after six. And our weekends? for executives? It's almost double that. Right?
Rinus Strydom: I can believe it. Right.
Greg Dickinson: Yeah. Cuz that so that you have 15 minutes you get maybe Sunday morning? Sure.
Rinus Strydom: Yeah. Yeah. So um, yeah. I mean, we've, we've been doing that. I don't know how many during this past year, I've probably taken at least a dozen Sunday calls with executives. And yeah, sure it works.
Greg Dickinson: Yeah, things are blurring, things are blurring. Hey, so I'm in kind of a wrap up here. I always like to have my audience hear from an executive like yourself, you know, if they could go back to the office and do one thing today, that would help them improve them, whether it's a mentoring tip or a coaching tip or, you know, just some of your experience, you know, what would that be? I mean, it's it's it, you've got 25 years experience you've seen, you know, gosh, you've been in e commerce with with Ariba, you're, you know, you're back in e commerce with trade shift. And now you're going to go on to internet a thing. So clearly, you've got a breadth of experience and information and you've been successful. So well, that one, one or two things that you Hey, go try this, go do this.
Rinus Strydom: So you know what, to me. I'll put it in a phrase, I'll say sales is a science. Right? You know, it's people think I hear all the time. It's an art, you're born with it. But you know what to scale a sales team is really science, especially in the SAS business, right? You can, if you do your planning well enough, you can predict very accurately 18 months in advance exactly what your bookings and your revenues will be. Right? It's, you've got predictable conversion rates from different sources of tiered customers and industries. You've got, you know, predictable expansion rates. So, so to me, I take that phrase from my good friend Jocko, who's the CEO of winning by design, sales process consultancy, and
Greg Dickinson: Yeah, I know them well.
Rinus Strydom: Good, good. Yeah. And you know, just working through the scientific approach to to selling and my background I didn't grow up being sales, I played a whole bunch of different roles, more more of an operations type, you know, marketing channels alliances, and this this actually was my very first sales management job the past seven years here at a trade shift. And, you know, just treating it method methodology, treating it simply as a science. That's that that's what's worked for us.
Greg Dickinson: Yeah, yeah. No, listen, and and you're not to advertise. I'm an engineer, but our, you know, with with our platform, with the fact that the buyers are doing Google searches in our in our platform, if you will, looking at topics asking questions and finding other colleagues. We're starting to actually see patterns in which one of the people on my team he eats data for breakfast. He calls customer says, Hey, this prospect that you're selling to that's engaged in a digital way they're gonna buy. And like, how do you know, just trust me they're gonna buy because you start to see patterns of what people do, you know, kind of, here's their research phase, here's when they're getting serious, they start asking questions about competitors, they start typing in, and they and then typing in search brings them to the exact moment in a video, how much of that did they watch? How many of those did they watch? While they were watching that, too, they invite somebody else all that data begins to correlate the fact that they're getting ready to make a decision. And you are and the salesperson is like an odd one. What do you mean, you think
Rinus Strydom: Wow, that's amazing that layer AI on top of that, I can only imagine what the world's gonna be like in a couple years
Greg Dickinson: Yeah, right, because, you know, listen, I mean, one of the things that we talked about in the convenience world is the fact that today, there are there are more buyers than ever before. And you got to know which ones are really buying versus ones that are just kind of starting off in that research and want to do it on their own. Because if you consume as a sales manager, if your team is chasing, you know, too many like, like the statistic that says only 20% of all demos given, you know, turn out to be a customer that means 80% of the time you're demoing to a non qualified prospect. That's not a good use of resources. And by the way, that prospect doesn't want you to demo to them. They prefer to go watch it on their own video.
Rinus Strydom: I love the concept, Greg, it's all about focus. Yeah, focus on where you have the highest propensity to win.
Greg Dickinson: Yeah. Because Because that's what when they engage with sales, they want your help, right? So why not let your salesperson have the time, the bandwidth to really help them to your point earlier, right to be able to think about that challenge or sale and be able to help them think about things different than, hey, here's our 14 topics on the RFP. Can you help us with that? No, no. How about some of the things you perhaps didn't think about when you talk about e commerce or trade shift? So I think that's where you're, that's why you're successful, right? You're making your team, you know, thinking focused on those areas.
Rinus Strydom: Yeah absolutely
Greg Dickinson: Good. Hey, I'm gonna say goodbye real quick. And thank you very much for spending time with my audience. I do appreciate it.
Rinus Strydom: Thank you, Greg. Appreciate it.
Transcribed by https://otter.ai