IRL - James Buckley
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Intro: [00:00:00] Welcome to the Innovative Revenue Leader Podcast. I'm your host, Seth Marrs. Join me as we deliver practical insights to help B2B CROs Find new and innovative ways to grow in this fast changing environment. The Innovative Revenue Leader is sponsored by Sandler, a triad company, empowering sales professionals and leaders to master the craft of selling at all levels.
Seth Marrs: Welcome to the Innovative Revenue Leader podcast. Today's guest is someone I'm thrilled to speak to today, his superlatives. He is a leading strategist, standout podcast host and one of the sharpest voices in modern selling. He's a SaaS leader, turn personal brand builder. He is known for building elite teams and driving revenue results.
Uh, he's also grown a loyal following in the sales community, becoming a trusted voice for practical, no nonsense revenue advice. And his current position is the host of the The Sell Better Daily Sales Show. James Buckley. Welcome.
James Buckley: Yes. What's going on? I actually go, I go by say what [00:01:00] sales. Some of you guys know that that hashtag that's my personal brand been around since. 2015. Uh, so just passed. I just, I just had that brand. I just passed the 11 year mark with that personal brand. That's,
that is my jam. It has been since day one.
Great story on how that came about too.
Seth Marrs: That's awesome.
Yeah.
I see you and I met like for the first time last earlier this week,
James Buckley: Yeah, I have this like weird ball of energy that I come to the job with every single day. And what I tell people is that the job that you do every day is supposed to be fun. And if you're not having fun doing it, no one is having fun doing it with you. Like period, the end. If you can't have fun buying it, no one's gonna wanna buy it.
If you can't have fun selling it, no one's having fun buying it from you. So there's this like. Do you give a shit about what you do every day? It better come across when you sit down at the desk. This is my desk, and it comes across.
Seth Marrs: Yeah, the, I mean the energy and like the, it is something to behold and, and also something that makes you very unique in, in like the, the way you talk about the [00:02:00] market, the way you look at the market.
James Buckley: People don't care for the way I talk about the market. I say, I say things that people agree, disagree. Sometimes it can be very polarizing depending on the industry that you work in, the vertical you sell into. Some people feel like I'm personally attacking them when I say things like SDR isn't gonna be the same in the next three years, but we're gonna talk about that.
Seth Marrs: I mean, if you're saying the same thing everyone else is saying, are you really saying anything? You know what I
James Buckley: Uh, You know, I think, I think I say specific things that hurt people's feelings when they have to admit to themselves that they're in that 10% that's gonna fall outta the bottom. Folks that are going through the motions right now are consistently looking for their next opportunity because they can't.
They can't figure out that it's no longer a volume play, but I think we have some really interesting conversation points that are coming up around that.
Seth Marrs: Cool. Yeah. So let's jump in, like what's the most, if I, if I'm a CRO, listen this. What's the most innovative thing you've seen in B2B right now?
James Buckley: Yeah, so my opinion is that this thing is not actually a tool that's changing [00:03:00] B2B right now. It's this idea that buying signal intelligence has to be leading the way. For a successful outbound venture, what does this mean? It means that not only do you need a tool in place that serves up signals, both buying signals and intent signals.
We can talk about the difference if you like. Right, but those signals have to be constantly being put in front of salespeople, and the salespeople have to be message ready to be able to respond in context to those signals, and that is what has become the most successful today. It used to be. Trigger LED sales and this required some research.
Uh, once chat GPT became mainstream and people were using it more than Google, it was like, okay, well tell me the best sales triggers I need for this company. Right? I do this all the time. So helpful for us to be able to get that information served up to us on a silver platter so that that messaging can super-duper bee.
Can be super duper specific [00:04:00] and f and form to the needs of the persona and the company that you're actually reaching out to. Gone are the days of more is the answer. Any leader out there that's listening to this, if you're telling your people to do more shame on you, stop this. The key is to do better.
Seth Marrs: So I'm gonna unpack that. So I'm gonna give you the way that I talk about it. 'cause I think you and I feel the exact same way as in, but we say it maybe a little bit differently. So to me, when I get people that are saying, I, I will tell you, cold calling is dead. And what I mean by cold calling is dead is if you are opening it up and grabbing a list of people and just calling, you can never, the math never works.
Ah. doesn't work anymore to do it. However, using signal based and you're identifying and taking that group and getting it down to a subset of people that you believe are interested in buying that outbound motion is gold. It's a differentiator. You absolutely should be doing it. Are we saying the same thing?
James Buckley: I, You know, I wanna push back on you just a hair because it, nobody likes to listen to podcasts where everybody just agrees with each other, so fuck that. [00:05:00] Uh, what I wanna say is that it's very industry specific. For example, if you are a cold caller that's calling about a revenue. Solution and you're calling a SaaS team or a finance team, whatever your ICP is, you have a very specific feature, set structure in your solution, your platform that you can be very specific with, with your messaging on the calls, you're calling a very specific person.
It's a trigger. You know the trigger, right? But if you're calling and saying that you'll be, you're calling from a local paint company and you're gonna be in the area for the next six months. Just canvassing and dropping off information. You wanna leave something behind in case you want to have your house painted while we're in town here, right?
You can, you can call and set those appointments up, no problem. So I, I don't think that you, it depends on what you sell.
Yeah.
You say cold calling is dead. I think in some industries, cold calling is less accepted, but I also don't think anything truly ever [00:06:00] dies. I believe we live in a cyclical world and my experience in the B2B SaaS and tech audience that I have suggests that cold calling is actually the most effective way to a new conversation right now because leadership, no matter, your industry is having a very difficult time.
Digging through the thousands and thousands of emails and, automated messages and AI written B2B messaging that they get in their inbox on LinkedIn and in their inbox. At this point, it's overwhelming. So pick up the phone and dial somebody is actually, might just be the thing that gets you your meeting.
Seth Marrs: So tell me though, like true, and, and there's a component to that when you talk about B2B and omnichannel and how you set that up, would you recommend in that environment that you dial anybody? Because you talked about signal selling and my understanding of what you said was, Hey, I want you to use the signals to understand who to call and what to say.
So that will narrow your cult. So are we saying the same thing? 'cause my, [00:07:00] my take is cold calling's dead, but outbound is a, is well alive and well. But
James Buckley: Outbound is very alive. It's always gonna have a pulse. I think cold calling will always have a place in outbound regardless. But. The way that it's functioning has changed as well. Great example. We used to send messages. We used to send messages and call, and when we would call, we would say our name and our company, and we would leave our phone number.
I know a lot of reps right now that don't leave their phone number. Instead they say, I shot you an email, and the subject line is X, Y, and z. This points people back to the inbox. Now it's a cold call. They didn't answer. In some cases, I would say in most cases at this point, the little toggle switches on that says silence unknown callers.
So let's be frank, we're probably leaving a lot of voicemails more so than we are getting through unless you're truly calling a decision maker, in which case a lot of strangers call these people. They often can't have that feature on their phone because too many unknown numbers are calling them, and it's very important to them.
It's very important to their business that they're able to [00:08:00] answer those 1-800-NUMBERS about this problem that they had six months ago with this tenant or whatever. You know, like, like this is very real. You have to know your persona and the features that they use. But if you're a VP sales. And you're like, no, I only want to, I only want to engage with salespeople that, that I'm actually hunting in their product.
I'm looking for a solution in that industry right now. Right? This, this feels very different because you probably don't accept numbers. You don't know. So the message points back to the inbox. The inbox is where they go to find the message because they heard it in the voicemail, and the response you get in the inbox is got your voicemail.
Right, and like that, that says to me that cold calling, regardless of industry is not dying or dead ever. It's just about where it fits and where it fits in the vertical that you sell into. And I feel that way about email and social selling as well. I don't know a lot of dentists that spend a lot of time on LinkedIn.
So if, You know, if you're, if you're selling into the dental industry. Chances are really good. You're calling and talking to gatekeepers and trying to get meetings booked [00:09:00] where they have a time at their desk. This is not an easy thing on LinkedIn, but if you're in B2B SaaS, fuck man. You could spend just as much time on LinkedIn as you do in your inbox, and you'd probably be more successful.
Seth Marrs: Yeah. Depending on the audience. I mean, let's, let me put it another way, like and like, because I think this is really important. To a large extent doing the, the hard, the thing that's hard, the right thing that's hard is the differentiator between a great seller and an average or below average seller. I mean, do what's your take on that? Because I think to a large extent, cold calling has been hard. And I would say, I would argue that what you're talking about has always been I have to pick the right person to call and then I cold call because you get the reverse where. I'm a seller. I just, I'm gonna call these eight people because they answer the phone even though they're never gonna buy from me.
But it feels good to not get hung up on versus doing the hard thing of, I'm gonna call these eight people because they're the best position to, for me to sell something to like the, the quest for finding the hard thing that other people [00:10:00] won't do. The separator from a good seller and a bad seller.
James Buckley: I think what really matters when you say what separates a good seller from a bad seller. I say messaging in general, regardless of channel, is probably the factor to, to measure top performers send top rated messaging. What is top rated messaging? I have an example. Can I show you one?
Yeah.
I, I hope I can share here.
So this is real stuff here. Uh, this is a real message I sent out recently. Uh, I, I prepped for this. I wanted everyone to see it, right? I literally mentioned in my opener, the post that they put out an hour ago, I'm listening to this prospect, right? Uh, I, and I agree 100% with what they said. What they said was all about intentionality.
That's what the post was about. So look how I tie that in. Everyone who registers for our show agrees to hear from our sponsors, right? We intentionally put solutions in front of them. That's our function. Intentionality is something [00:11:00] they've come to expect from us, is basically what this says. And I give a little nuance here and point back to his post, right?
And then I use a direct quote from his post. Every element needs to point to pull in the same direction. I loved what he said in that post, and I let him know it. Right. So then this is his response moments later.
Seth Marrs: You got it.
James Buckley: This is the best personalization I've received in some time. And then he legit pivots to say, how about a collaboration with our company?
Right? What does, what does that look like? Which is what I sell. The difference is not did I send a good message, did I send a bad message? The difference is did I send a timely, relevant message that was both personal to this individual and his position, and also relevant to the company's current needs.
What I used was the personalization, [00:12:00] but the relevance to what we serve. That has to happen on the call,
Seth Marrs: Yeah.
James Buckley: and we have to stop selling. We have to stop notice that I'm not selling in these messages.
Seth Marrs: Yeah. That was the thing that stood out to me is you were, you were connecting in that message with the idea that, Hey, then, so then the selling happens on the call.
James Buckley: that's right. We should be, I say this all the time, don't sell in the message, sell at the meeting. All of our messages are geared towards creating the interest, getting enough passion going to be like, yeah, we should talk about this further.
Yeah.
Great. I'm looking forward to it. I don't care if I have to give you three answers to three questions you ask me over the course of three months.
If it's a $25,000 deal. I'll answer as many questions as you want before I'm like, Hey, sounds like we have a lot to talk about.
When are you free? I could do Wednesday two o'clock. Happy to send a quick invite. No pressure, no rush. Looking forward to that.
Yep.
And I use this formula and I've been giving this formula out for years.
I still don't, I still don't know why. It's not mainstream mainstream yet. It's because [00:13:00] I'm not an influencer, I suppose. Right. You have to be an influencer, I guess, You know, I don't have an OnlyFans, You know, I'm not a, I'm not a a a tweaker or a Twitter or a twitcher. That's it. Twitcher, that's like the one, or like a snapchatter, like I just don't, I'm sorry, man.
I'm not, I'm like not that guy. Anyway, I use this formula in all of my outreach. It's C plus P cubed or P to the third power. If you're not a math person, equals S for success or the little dollar sign success money, right? I am always in every touch regardless of channel. I am courteous, I am professional, I am patient, and I am persistent, and that always leads me to success every time.
Sometimes it's 20 touches over the course of six months to earn a meeting, a first meeting with an enterprise account. Sometimes it's two emails.
Seth Marrs: Yep.
James Buckley: I don't care how long it takes, and here's what I've learned over the many years I've done this, and this is such a like recent transition from what we typically know [00:14:00] as working a sales pipeline.
The truth is, is that if they're qualified and you are reaching out and they've never responded to you, it's not a no. The deal isn't dead. You have to change what you're doing and come back to them with value that's relevant and timely and meaningful for the personas that you need to get in front of.
So if you're a person that works at an account level, there's this changeover that happens where you create an opportunity. M. Right. Some people are like, I totally follow what this dude's saying. Other people are like, what the heck is a CRM? Right? It's like a digital Rolodex. For those of you that are old and you're like, you're like me, I'm 44.
So I was like, when I got like, dude, like 15 years ago when I joined this SaaS industry, it was in the Salesforce arena. I didn't know what Salesforce was like. I had no idea. Like a lot of people that come to our show, you say ICP and CRM, and they're like, I don't know what any of those acronyms are.
Sql mql, right? You're like, P&L, like, what is this? I dunno what any of this is. [00:15:00] Yeah, so, so the whole, the whole idea though that I'm trying to get at the thing I'm driving home here is that it's actually less about the channel and more about the quality of the message and the timeliness that you are representing your value in.
This person responded in eight minutes because when they read that very quick email, everything I said was relevant. To him, his persona, the, like, the thing that he's responsible for,
right? And make no mistake, the people you're reaching out to, if you are good at identifying your ideal customer, the persons you're reaching out to, their job is to do what you want to help them to do.
That's their job. If you forget that, then you do things like close out an account before you've ever had a single conversation. And that's, that's a fool's game in my opinion.
Seth Marrs: Take this back to the BDR. What does this mean for the, like, in your view, like you just talked all about a whole bunch of ways to go about
engaging.
What's the role of the BDR today? Like the, the, um, the narrative around the BDR is [00:16:00] dead, all of that type of stuff. What is the role do A BDR today?
James Buckley: five years ago, we saw the rise of a split in the BDR world five years ago in 2021, You know, in the midst of the COVID Pandemic, we watched as SDRs. Were splitting into two factions on one end of the spectrum. We had SDRs that were doing cold outreach. They were identifying companies that were qualified, digging through LinkedIn personas and trying to find those profiles for people, finding, You know, using tools to get their email addresses and starting campaigns.
Right? Cold outreach. Uh, but then we had another BDR that was rising to the top and they didn't sit at the beginning of a sales cycle. They sat at the end of the marketing cycle.
Yep.
So there were all these triggers that they were seeing from people that they could reach out to. With context, these two SDRs are starting to phase out and instead what we're starting to see is a single form of SDR coming in.
That's a rare form of [00:17:00] SDR. Probably the only one that will be relevant in the next three years will be the one that can be clear and not clever. The one that's not trying to find the little hack. And everybody's doing it right. Let's not, let's not pull any punches here. I use automation and AI just like everybody else.
What I'm not doing is I'm not trying to find some special hack that allows me to scale my sales outbound efforts. This is a misnomer in the modern world. What we're doing is exhausting our buyers, our total addressable market, or tam, if you follow that acronym, right? It's, it's a problem that leaders all over the world get to their desk at eight 30 in the morning and log into their inbox and they have inbox 12,000.
11,000 of those are AI written, automatically generated emails, follow ups from marketing campaigns like the, um, like this is why we have such a deliverability issue as well. Right. So you've heard it said like 30% of our emails don't even make it to the intended inbox. Why do you think that's a problem?[00:18:00]
It's a problem because we've made it a problem. The tools aren't the issue, it's the abuse of the tools that are the problem. So where's the BDR today?
Seth Marrs: Is it laziness with that? Because
James Buckley: It's not laziness, it's actually innovation and you can appreciate it as innovation. The problem is that as we innovate with those tools as BDRs that are untrained and don't understand what quality outreach looks like, what we're, and this is, a lot of influencers have said this, and I agree with it. If you do garbage work and then you use the big rocket fuel engine to fuel that work, all you've done is build a bigger rocket, full of garbage work.
Seth Marrs: Yep.
James Buckley: You have to be effective before you can scale it. There's a system that has to exist that you have to know, okay, this is the thing that works. This is the pragmatic approach. That's the thing to scale. Okay, now let's try it this way. Nope, that didn't work. Let's try it this way. AB test everything, right, and then scale the stuff that works.
But no one's doing this. We're just giving sales [00:19:00] reps tools and paying $40,000 a year for them, and we're going, okay, go.
Seth Marrs: which tool do you think works best? Like if I'm a, if I'm a BDR, what is my go-to tool? Like what are the, what is, what are the things that I need to be able to do? The things you're talking about at the best possible level.
James Buckley: Such a good question. And it's actually not a tool, it's a flow. It's a, it's a set of tools that work together. So let's run through a few. Number one. Know your ICP. If you do, you can use Sales Navigator LinkedIn Sales Navigator to use their filters and create a list of your ideal customer profiles.
Second turn on alerts. For your top prospects, your top tier customers, turn those alerts on so that when something happens at the company, LinkedIn sales Navigator will tell you that,
Yep. right? This Gives you hey triggers, right? Step two, uh, some sort of sequencing or cadence software. Think SalesLoft. Think outreach.
Think, I think Apollo has a, a [00:20:00] couple features like that. Hubs. A lot of CRMs have it. Uh, Salesforce used to have Pardot. I think they still do.
Uh, HubSpot has sequences, which I use every day.
Seth Marrs: Yeah.
James Buckley: is something I use for, for years. Outreach is amazing, right? Like find the tool that fits best with your tech stack and design your messaging.
Here's the key. You are never gonna write better than ai. But AI is going to help you write more efficiently, better, more professionally. So don't think you're gonna write a sequence out inside the platform. No. Start a document, write it all out. Go into AI and say, not write this for me. Bad. No salesperson, bad salesperson, right?
Stop that. Write it yourself, and then go in and have it. Improve it, make it better. Give it the context. It really needs. Now you have the list of prospects, the triggers, and the sequence you see
Seth Marrs: Yep.
James Buckley: in all three different tools. Now, what else do we need? We need AI out there. We need [00:21:00] agents. We need projects and chat, GPT, if you will, right, that know that our learned on what I sell.
That way when I see a trigger that puts a new account in front of me, I can, Ooh, cool. That looks good. What do they do? Are they prospect for me? Do they have enough money? For like, are they funded? What's their head count? Do they have a large sales team? How do they help salespeople, right? Like how, what's, what do you need to know about what they do?
Who are they selling to? You can create engines in chat, GPT, agent ai, Claude, there's tons of these. And you can pop in a URL and it'll be like, James, this is a great company for you to go after and here's why. It'll tell you all the amazing reasons why this is a good prospect. These tools are on the cutting edge of how real everyday reps are staying ahead of the game.
Being proactive with their outreach, writing, trigger led messaging, uh, signal led messaging that's landing with their prospects because in real time, they're [00:22:00] able to prove that they're paying attention and they can be relevant to solving the problem that their customer needs.
Seth Marrs: The problem I see with AI today is there's too much. So if you were to go through just that, what you just talked about, that's probably what, five different places where you can auto-create an email for the, for your money.
Where should a BDR that's trying to get help creating the best possible email,
correct that email.
James Buckley: Yeah. So I would say it's a progression. You want to start with chat GPT to, to learn how to manipulate and teach ai. Because you can really be specific with your prompts in chat, GPT and really get like your hands dirty with it, play with it a lot. It's like clay to mold, right? But then you, you want to have a point where you upgrade and change to something like Gemini, especially if you're a person working in Google Docs a lot.
Gemini is excellent for that, right? And it, and it, it all, it all sort of functions a little bit differently and you need to know. Which one has the [00:23:00] strengths and the weaknesses that work best for its purpose? If you're a doc person, Gemini's gonna be really helpful to make sure that your writing is clean and clear.
There's little to no grammar errors And so on And so forth, right? But if you are trying to be really creative, sometimes the way that you prompt and Chad GPT will break away from those rules that Gemini will have. Place for working on documents, right? There is so much value in being able to explore these tools and know which one fits into your flow best.
And as you progress, you learn the tool that fits best for what you're trying to accomplish. Because not all tools are created equal. Not every tool is going to fit into your current tech stack. Sometimes it's a little tedious to have to jump out of something that's that you're in so that you can go to another tool and do this thing and then come back and do it.
There's usually a native solution baked into that product right there that you don't know anything about. Make sure you're checking for those things. Uh, Gemini is probably the best example. First time I opened it, I was like, what the heck is [00:24:00] this?
Seth Marrs: I got another way. I think this is one where you and I may disagree a little bit, so it'd be cool to pick on it. So you talked about Tam and you talked about ICP.
James Buckley: Yeah,
Seth Marrs: Who is responsible for generating the TAM and the ICP that you would give to A BDR to call?
James Buckley: I believe the best teams that we've worked with in the past. Are working both ends of that spectrum. They are prospecting and finding accounts to work based on LinkedIn, creating lists, uh, looking for triggers, AI engines that they've built to give them lists that fit a specific criteria And so on.
But they're also getting. What I would call marketing qualified leads or m qls from their marketing team. Marketing and sales. Historically, the most difficult departments to get to communicate with each other ever. Period. Amen. Since the dawn of time, we have struggled with this problem, but I believe it's changing and I think AI has opened the door to a lot of different things that help create that [00:25:00] conduit.
Where they're communicating with each other frequently. Now, uh, I also have seen the birth of influencer marketing and uh, there was a time, and I'm sure that you recall in 2000, let's say, let's say to be generous, let's say from 2014 to 2019. There was this mentality for marketing leaders that was, I don't want these reps building a brand.
I don't want them posting and representing our company. They don't have control over the messaging. They can't go live on LinkedIn and talk about what we do And so on. I believe that wall is. Breaking down very quickly as we watch influencer marketing become more effective than any paid ad spend ever, period.
The end, right? Because you only need one influencer with a few million followers and a to you pay 'em a couple thousand dollars and say, here's what I'm after. And they're like, yeah, I can do that for six months, no sweat. And you crush it, right? Like this is the name of the game here. So we're starting to see marketers [00:26:00] enable reps to build a brand.
We're starting to see marketing leaders walk into BDR rooms of cold callers and saying, Hey. Which one of you would be interested in hosting a podcast with us? Right? And like these, these are how brands are being born. And let's be honest, in the modern age 2026, beyond individual brands, face brands are selling more efficiently than faceless company brands You don't trust, uh, state Farm because the red collared shirt attracts you.
You trust State Farm because Jake from State Farm has given you a thousand reasons to right. You. You trust the Orkin man because You know that the Orkin man is gonna do the job. That brand is very recognizable, but it's the human that you're after. I know I sold for Orchid. I was in fact the Orkin man, [00:27:00] right?
So like the person is the person we look for the influencer, um, what's his name? Ashton Hall with the water, right? This guy is everywhere running with vests on, You know, but anything he touches makes millions of dollars because he endorsed it. This is the world we live in, so the marketing sales wall is breaking down very quickly.
Seth Marrs: let's, so my take on it is. There are things that a Go-to-market engineer or a marketer is really good at identifying and targeting ICP
James Buckley: Are they Are they good at it? Let's talk about that for just a minute.
Seth Marrs: oh, sorry. Lemme, lemme replace that with someone who is, has an expertise in understanding how to identify the right people in large amounts of data.
That is a different skill than the skill you've been talking about around how do you properly engage with the buyer.
James Buckley: I agree with you and screw off at never talk to me. Dot com is probably not an SQL that needs to be passed down to sales there. I said it.
Seth Marrs: So here's, here's the thing, and [00:28:00] what you brought up is really interesting around the, the person who is like a thought leader that you're bringing in, and they're, they're the brand itself.
Now, here's the question because I, I agree with you. Like if you are that person. Let ask you this though, is that an inbound or an outbound motion? Because I, I would make the argument that if I'm a thought leader and you are, and are, and I'm engaging, I am creating, I am a seller that has an inbound motion.
James Buckley: I would say remove this idea that inbound and outbound is all there is, and consider all bound as an option.
Seth Marrs: So you're saying it's a different, like this,
James Buckley: I'm saying that if your outbound reps are creating content that's pulling in your customers. Call it whatever you need to call it. If they're an outbound rep, check an outbound box.
If they're an inbound marketing rep, check an inbound box. I don't care. The end of the day, no leader is coming to [00:29:00] somebody that's creating meetings and closing deals saying, Hey, we're gonna need you to stop doing what you're doing. That's never gonna happen, Seth, and You know it. Instead, what will happen is they'll say, how do we put some fuel behind this?
So let's, let's really go big, right? Because it's working. Oh my god, right? That's what they should say.
Seth Marrs: I got one more for you around this. Like, so one of the things that I've heard that that is, oh, You know, with the, with all of this stuff, I could just give the, the BDRs role back to the ae and they're gonna do it because they have the tools to do it now.
James Buckley: What a.
Seth Marrs: So that actually brings me back to the eighties.
Like, but so there's a reason this, like, what's your take on that? Is that, so that's my easy, I don't need A BDR anymore. I'm just gonna give the top of funnel work back to the seller and they know what to do. They'll do it
James Buckley: Because, because they, that's exactly what you want them to be doing with their time. Not closing deals, digging through shitty leads. That came from marketing, right? That's exactly [00:30:00] what they should be spending there. What the heck are you talking? No, absolutely not. Two things, one. I agree that AEs should prospect.
Let me get that out of the way.
Seth Marrs: there's a type of prospecting though.
James Buckley: there is a full cycle rep that exists that is easily the hot commodity in the market today. They know how to prospect, they know how to automate the right things. They know how to write effective messaging. They know how to use AI and automation to set up systems that create these things that put new people in front of them consistently.
Kudos to these people. I am supportive. 100% of account executives who prospect, however, most AEs are not excited to get out of selling mode and pipeline management mode and go prospect new accounts from scratch.
If you want them to prospect, they have to understand that. That's gonna take away time.
Leaders have to understand that's gonna take away time [00:31:00] from working existing pipe, which by the way, is what you're gonna hold my toes over the fire for at the end of the month in our one-on-one meeting. So no one is suggesting that account executives shouldn't have to prospect. I think that's false, right?
That's a misnomer. What I am suggesting is it makes zero sense to think to yourself as a leader, I'll just fire the SDRs because the account executives are gonna prospect, know the fuck they won't. In fact, I would wager that they will find a thousand other things to do before they prospect. And this is not a shot at account executives.
It's just the reality of what it takes to manage an effective pipeline today. If you have 15 deals with any kind of momentum behind them, that's your priority every single day of your life to get those deals over the finish line that you have momentum with. That means if it's not marketing, picking up the slack to book new conversations, which by the way is new, where new revenue comes from [00:32:00] 100% of the time, I don't give a fuck what you sell.
That's true. Right. If that's true, and marketing's not picking up that slack, there needs to be an SDR team, A BDR team, even if you're outsourcing it, which is very popular today. You know, and loads of great solutions out there for it. By the way, you can even find AI solutions that you get to train and it will do it for you at scale.
There are too many solutions to book new meetings for us to say that BDR is not necessary. It's just different and, and it's a specialized role and still an entry level role at this point.
Seth Marrs: So that was awesome. Hugely insightful. Now talk a little bit about you. So.
James Buckley: Good luck with that .
Seth Marrs: Growing up, like if, if, if I were to go to, to little James,
James Buckley: Uh,
Seth Marrs: would you have said like, Hey, when I grow up, I wanna be a thought leader in, in, in sales.
James Buckley: and no, but my mom would've said that that's what I would be. [00:33:00] Yeah. She, she used to tell me, my mom, Reba, my mom Reba, she's my hero. Right. Um, and, and we've, we've been through a lot together, but she used to tell me that I would be great in sales and I think a lot of young people are told this. I didn't know what it meant.
And I don't think that a lot of young people, when they hear that, I don't think they know what it means. I will tell you what it means. It means that your personality has a magnetism that people are, it's, You know, it's hard for them to ignore. That is a characteristic that comes with being a salesperson that is very advantageous.
I am difficult to ignore because my energy is such that it pulls a certain individual in my direction. I have a gravitational pull, if you will, that once you're in my orbit, I will have a conversation with you, most likely, whether that conversation amounts to an opportunity remains to be seen. But that's about my discovery skills.
That's about how I build the bridge between [00:34:00] me and Yusef as the prospect, right. Bet that I'm coming back to you to say, I don't know why Sandler Training is not sponsoring our show. Like, we've now built the bridge, Seth. It's it's coming Seth. It's coming. Yeah. So, so rest assured that like everything you do has a purpose.
And as long as you keep that in mind and you're like you, if you've been told, You know, well, you'd be great at sales, use the energy that that person has told you you have. To your advantage because not a lot of people have it. The art of attracting strangers that want to talk to you is dying.
So lean in because you're a rare gem in a field full of coal.
Seth Marrs: That's true. So take me back to, I mean, you, you, you graduate college, you come out and you had to give advice to yourself at that, like you go back in time. What advice would.
James Buckley: Well, first of all, I graduated college [00:35:00] at 32 years old as a non-traditional student, gone through a divorce with four children. So
Seth Marrs: I still wanna hear that advice because I think your perspective there would be different. So
you graduated there.
James Buckley: Uh, so, so let's, let's talk about the different sets of advice through the different stages of James' life that he would've given. In my younger days, I would've said, get off of the dope and sober up because you're better than this. Uh, as I sobered up, I would tell myself to not. Hold it against my ex-wife and move forward only and stop living in the past.
And currently what I wake up and tell myself every day is I'm going to do better than I did yesterday. And that is the, and that's, and I'm going to take people with me when I do it and, and that's probably the advice path. I would go back and give myself in, in those different stages. If, [00:36:00] if I'd have, if I'd have avoided so many different things throughout all of those stages in my life, perhaps things would've been different.
Seth, perhaps they would've been exactly the same.
Seth Marrs: Well, let me ask you this. It's a, it's a really interesting response, especially considering the response you gave last time, right? Because I would say that that advice is pretty sobering. You, the, the, the talk that you gave around the gravitational pull and you have it like, you absolutely have it. Like how do you contrast those two things to be the person you are considering how introspective you seem to be around life and, and how I do things better?
Like how, how how do you contrast those? 'cause I wouldn't have expected. those an, those two answers, first answer, totally expected. Second answer, didn't really expect. How do you contrast those things and keep that gravitational pull going
it
James Buckley: It does take work, but it also takes a community of individuals that you surround yourself with that hold you up and make you better every day. And when you surround yourself with those people and you eliminate [00:37:00] the people in your life that hold you back. Maybe eliminate is a bad word. I explain this all the time.
I ride this fence in my life and on one side of the fence, there's all these people that want to be where I am and they come from other places in their lives and I'm always reaching down to help them up on my fence. And on the other side of my fence, there's all these people that are where I want to be.
So I'm always reaching up and they're always helping me to get up on their fence, but I, as I move from fence to fence, Seth, I never let go of the people that were getting on these, these fences down here. So I'm always moving up and I'm always taking people with me. And when you think about what success is, isn't that it?
Isn't that like what we're after? Uh, like I've been a leader and I, I've been an individual contributor and I've, I've been a, uh, a marketer and I've, I've done sponsorships and partnerships. I host a show, uh, You know, PI used to idolize sales trainers. Now I idolize Pat Sajak and Alex Trebek. Uh. It's the strangest transitions that we go through in life.
And if you'd have told me in [00:38:00] 2015 when I sat down at that desk at a startup in East Tennessee called C Insight and picked up the phone for the first time to cold call somebody instead of walking up to their door and knocking on it, I, and, and if you'd have said in that period that it would lead me to host the longest running daily sales show in the world for one of the best sales training organizations on the planet, I would've said, you're full of shit.
never happen.
But here we are today.
Seth Marrs: So how do people find you? How do people who, who listen to this and wanna, and want to tune in more, like, what are some of what, how should they get in touch with you?
James Buckley: Yeah, so connect with me on LinkedIn, but watch out. I'm quickly approaching the 30,000 person cap that they allow in the network. So just follow, uh, but you can follow me unlimited. You can connect with me as many people can connect with me as they want on Instagram at saywhatsales all one word. Again, that's my.
My personal brand, I'm also on Twitter or X if You know, whatever you call it. Don't skewer me to the wall. Uh, but also check out our website. We have all these upcoming shows. We're live every day, sell better.xyz, [00:39:00] and just look at the upcoming shows. And what I tell people is if you're in prospecting now.
Sure come to the prospecting shows, but also come to the closing shows and start sharpening that knife so that when you finally advance into that closing role and learn the other side of the coin, so to speak, you are armed and dangerous out of the gate and you don't have this wicked ramp that you could have been prepping for the whole time.
Seth Marrs: Awesome. Great to have you. Thanks. Thanks for being on with us.
James Buckley: Yeah. Thanks for having me, Seth. I appreciate it. I have so much stuff to give. I give people free stuff all the time, so don't hesitate to reach out. Uh, I respond. I'm the strangest human in the world.
Seth Marrs: Alright
Outro: And that wraps up another episode. Thank you for joining. For show notes and other episodes, visit us@innovativerevenueleader.ai. The Innovative Revenue Leader is sponsored by Sandler, a Trilia company. Sandler provides top corporate sales and business development training while empowering sales professionals and leaders to master the graph of selling at all [00:40:00] levels.