68: Jamie Shanks Talks About Social Selling

[00:00:43] Greg Mills: Our guest today is the CEO of pipeline signals, a startup SA firm that helps businesses to scale their pipeline through relationship, signal, intelligence monitoring, by addressing the most common yet unanswered challenges that sellers have. It's a pioneer in monitoring and mining your total available market accounts for relationship connections, competitive intelligence and compelling events such as job change.

[00:01:08] Greg Mills: For the past 10 years, he's run sales for life. The world's most extensive social selling training program for mid-market and enterprise companies. Sales for life has trained over 250,000 sales and marketing professionals and dozens of industries. He's delivered workshops across six continents for Microsoft Thompson Reuters, Oracle American airlines and Intel.

[00:01:32] Greg Mills: Without further ado, Jamie shanks.

[00:01:35] Jamie Shanks: Thank you, Greg. Thanks

[00:01:36] Greg Mills: for having me. It was great to have you here now. Can you take a few moments and fill in the gaps from that intro and bring us up to speed with what's going on in your world today?

[00:01:47] Jamie Shanks: Yeah, I've been an entrepreneur for most of my life. I was fortunate enough, 10 plus years ago to see an opportunity in the sales community where social media was just coming of age and business to business sales professionals could use tools like LinkedIn.

[00:02:03] Jamie Shanks: To use it for prospecting. And so I built the world's first training curriculum on this idea called social selling, pioneered the word and the category, and built up quite a strong, a lifestyle multimillion dollar a year, but lifestyle kind of sales training business. And from that, our customers would constantly say to us, it's amazing that you're training my 200, 304,000 sellers on the team.

[00:02:30] Jamie Shanks: But a lot of them wish you could just do this for them. And so during the pandemic, it gave me an opportunity to start a second company called pipeline signals, and it's a do it for you business. So those sales professionals would say, here are all the accounts in the world that matter to me, here's our customers.

[00:02:47] Jamie Shanks: Here's our prospect, our prospects. Here's the white space that we would sell into identify if somebody leaves my happy customers and goes into a prospect, or if there's a new job change of a. Chief human resources officer. If my customer sells to them, moves from one account to another, I want to be alerted immediately.

[00:03:08] Jamie Shanks: And we wrote that intelligence into their contact management software called a CRM, and the seller doesn't change any workflow. They just start prospecting. So we've turned what is a training business into a SAS software.

[00:03:22] Greg Mills: Now you had released, I believe social selling mastery in 2016.

[00:03:27] Jamie Shanks: Yeah, social selling mastery in 2016 and then spear selling in 2019.

[00:03:33] Jamie Shanks: They're both on the topic of social selling. One is teaching more of an inbound brand management of social selling that's social selling mastery, and one is teaching outbound account based sales development. And that's the acronym spear selling. Okay.

[00:03:48] Greg Mills: So you'd heard the people for a while.

[00:03:50] Greg Mills: And did it just sink in during the pandemic or had you planned to do that all along?

[00:03:55] Jamie Shanks: Well, so when you sell a hammer, everything looks like a nail. And so I would hear, we would see it in the support tickets. We would hear it from customers and I could feel that and do it for you business.

[00:04:08] Jamie Shanks: Would work now, whether it's my own ma you know, maturity as a young CEO at that time. But I would have customers that would even, you know, put a blank check in front of our face and say, and then this actually happened where a customer said, I'll pay you to start a monitoring service company for sales, like they're in the cybersecurity monitoring space.

[00:04:28] Jamie Shanks: So they're very used to being a managed service. Why don't you do something like that? And the reality is for five years until the pandemic, I was on 80 flights a year for five years, 42 countries speaking around the world, evangelizing social selling that didn't gimme a lot of opportunity to think outside of the box.

[00:04:49] Jamie Shanks: So to speak when the pandemic hit now, thankfully it was only 10% of our revenue, but it was a huge portion of my day to day. Life was traveling around the world. Pandemic ended that. And so I bought like 50% of my life back and I turned to my business partner and I said, this is this opportunity. There's an opportunity to build a recurring revenue digital business that is paid by credit card, monthly recurring revenue.

[00:05:17] Jamie Shanks: We could stack it and create tremendous enterprise value. The time is in that time is of the essence to start this.

[00:05:25] Greg Mills: I've heard a lot of people say that the pandemic as bad as it was. Has actually introduced some processes, like, more remote meetings and stuff that have actually improved things in their business.

[00:05:38] Greg Mills: Did you find that to be the case? Are you still having to do 80 flights a year?

[00:05:42] Jamie Shanks: Yeah. It was a net positive, both on the business side of my life and on the personal side of my life. And I'll start with the business side on the business. It took away 10% of revenue, but 50% of productivity back.

[00:05:56] Jamie Shanks: So that allowed me to start a second company two. It allowed me to, as an entrepreneur look objectively at am I leaning my ladder on the right wall and sales for life multimillion dollar business a year as a cash flow business, but it's not recurring revenue. It's reoccurring. So you. Customer as training, some will renew lumpy revenue into year two.

[00:06:20] Jamie Shanks: And some will just thing about training is it's consumed and then people wash their hands and walk away. So you're constantly having to win new business and it very much, the sales training world can be a bit of a prisoner's spot where the founders. Who are the ones that are the ones winning the deals or the ones creating the unique intellectual property and delivering the training.

[00:06:45] Jamie Shanks: They get trapped in the business because customers want them. They're buying these rock stars of the sales training space. So no matter how big your business gets you struggle to relieve yourself from the day to day operations. So, the pandemic allowed me to look at am I leaning my ladder on the right wall?

[00:07:05] Jamie Shanks: And what if I transferred that energy into something that's more scalable, something that creates greater enterprise value and could be done in a way that I could by my, by myself, out of the day to day operations of a business at scale.

[00:07:21] Greg Mills: Now just backing up a little bit. You had mentioned that you've been an entrepreneur most of your life.

[00:07:26] Greg Mills: Did you come from an entrepreneurial background? Was anybody in your family? An entrepreneur?

[00:07:31] Jamie Shanks: My grandfather owned a fleet of pharmacies. I'm from The Ontario region of Canada. So, the capital Canada, Ottawa, and then you've got Toronto. So he owned a chain of pharmacies in the Ottawa area. My, my father's geologist worked for both Chevron and then the federal government on off oil projects.

[00:07:50] Jamie Shanks: My mother is a neonatal nurse, so they're not entrepreneurs. But my parents' friends were also entrepreneurs. So in fact, I watched them quite a bit. I was always starstruck with how there was feast in famine of the entrepreneurial life.

[00:08:10] Greg Mills: Yeah. Have to harvest while the harvesting is good. Yes. Okay. Now you're a father, as well as an entrepreneur.

[00:08:18] Greg Mills: I believe your son's a competitive water skier at the national level. How has being a father to your son and your daughter impacted your business?

[00:08:29] Jamie Shanks: It's taught me to be more protective of my time, but I have been at a very early age with them trying to teach them about money and business.

[00:08:40] Jamie Shanks: Money was never a fearful conversation in my house. As a kid, we had open, transparent dialogues about money. My parents always did very well in an upper middle class family that were very transparent about how money is made, how money is lost, how to save. And I want to give that plus some to my kids.

[00:08:59] Jamie Shanks: I want them to To dream big and to not be afraid of taking risk of of becoming an entrepreneur. And we talk in the car on the way to water ski tournaments or the things we talk about business ideas. And I hope for them that they get an opportunity to start a business and they start it young so they can learn and fail and grow from it.

[00:09:21] Greg Mills: Obviously they've impacted you, but especially during the pandemic, didn't you take up a new hobby?

[00:09:27] Jamie Shanks: Yeah. So there's a bit of a backstory here. So my family is a big snow skiing family. So. We're out in British Columbia, Canada on a ski family trip and the pandemic hit in March of 2020.

[00:09:42] Jamie Shanks: And when it hit, basically every ski hill in north America closed almost on the same day, within 48 hours. Every north American ski hill closed. And we were only halfway through our trip. So they kick everybody off. This hill called big white co bridge Columbia. And now we're on a plane, a five hour plane ride home back to Toronto, Canada.

[00:10:03] Jamie Shanks: And on the flight, you know, our cars at the airport and we fully thought we're going back to the house and okay. We'll have to experience this new then called COVID. And I turned to my wife on the flight and I said, why are we going back to Toronto of 7 million people? Why don't we go up to our cottage in cottage and Canadian terms means house on a lake.

[00:10:26] Jamie Shanks: We have a cottage on a lake called lake Simco. So when the plane landed, we took our bags, got in our vehicle and we drove up to the cottage with the intention of staying for a weekend, had to figure this thing out. We lived there almost two years. So now thankfully our cottage was winterized. It has all the amenities to be a home.

[00:10:46] Jamie Shanks: So it has natural gas, furnace and air conditioning. So it, you could live there, but it's pretty. And our kids virtual schooled from there. And so now may March turns to April turns to may the ice breaks and the water's there. And I turned to my son and said, I've got an idea. Do you wanna learn a new sport?

[00:11:07] Jamie Shanks: What if we take up water skiing? I bought a boat and we as a family together, all learned water ski and we water skied so much because we're living on the lake. That my son is now the ranked third in Canada as as the U 10 water skier, because he did it every day, all day for two years. wow. Yeah,

[00:11:30] Greg Mills: That's an incredible story.

[00:11:31] Greg Mills: And what you hear a lot of people talk about roughing it during COVID, you didn't

[00:11:36] Jamie Shanks: rough. It, the greatest investment we ever made, I bought a ski boat and it has become the glue, the most important glue that brought our family together. Our family is, you know, that boat we put on one to two hours.

[00:11:50] Jamie Shanks: Boats are measured in hours, one to two hours per. We all come together and ski and wakeboard or wake surf and all these sort of things. And it is the family glue.

[00:12:03] Greg Mills: Yeah. That's awesome. Most, you know, most people when they buy a boat it's a wasted asset at best.

[00:12:08] Jamie Shanks: Well, I and don't kid yourself.

[00:12:10] Jamie Shanks: It is one of the most expensive depreciating assets you will ever buy

[00:12:15] Greg Mills: now switching gears a little bit, let's talk about your books, social selling mastery and spear selling. And you talked a little bit about this, but I just wanna go back who are the primary targets

[00:12:28] Jamie Shanks: our primary targets have always been. Chief commercial officer, chief revenue, officer, head of marketing, chief marketing officer, and then under them are regional vice presidents of sales, heads of demand, generation heads of sales, enablement, and sales operations.

[00:12:45] Jamie Shanks: It's the entire revenue ecosystem. They were always written at at a management level. At an executive level that runs a go to market. Okay.

[00:12:56] Greg Mills: So what is the difference between social selling and social media marketing?

[00:13:03] Jamie Shanks: I'll use the analogy of fishing. Social media marketing is fishing with a net. So as a organization, you throw a lot of stuff.

[00:13:13] Jamie Shanks: You throw a net out in the ocean, you troll it back in. And you're happy that you caught a few of the tunas that you were expecting, but in, there are a lot of sea urchins and all the kinds of stuff that don't make your ideal customer profile. But as you get going, that's important because you keep throwing out nets and you catch more and more fish.

[00:13:35] Jamie Shanks: And eventually though the cost. Of throwing out those nets and making those nets bigger and bigger start to throw your cost to customer acquisition over the lifetime value known as CTA LTV ratio starts to throw it way off. And at scale, once a company goes from zero to say $10 million, it no longer can feast off inbound off trolling with a net.

[00:13:59] Jamie Shanks: It then needs to convert to an outbound account based sales development organization, where it needs to pin. The very companies it needs to for sustenance to grow. And because it can only grow if it's catching, you know, 500 pound Marlins and larger. And so to do that, you need an outbound strategy. And that's where the second book spear comes in and that's social selling is where you are pinpointing a set of accounts for an objective reason.

[00:14:32] Jamie Shanks: There's a compelling event. That's happened there. You build an account plan, you engage it and you create opportunity out of nothing against those accounts, because those accounts can yield you the type of return you need. Okay.

[00:14:47] Greg Mills: What do you find companies get wrong about social selling?

[00:14:51] Jamie Shanks: They first conflate the idea of social media marketing and social selling.

[00:14:56] Jamie Shanks: And so they take a very generalist approach. They take a. Throw anything at the wall, hope it sticks approach. And some inbound will come at scale. The more sellers you have, the more voices in the market, the more inbound that will come, but it isn't growing at a repeatable process. It's not growing at the rate of return that you want because you are not pinpointing accounts based on an ideal customer profile and then targeting them for objective reasons.

[00:15:26] Jamie Shanks: So, you know, I could target all kinds of large software companies, but if I'm calling them a through Z, I'm wasting a tremendous amount of calories. But what if I focused on people that left my happy customer and went in an employment into one of those software companies that met my ideal customer profile shouldn't I pull them because my past advocate or fan.

[00:15:49] Jamie Shanks: Is in that accountant, it's three to five times more likely to open a door because I'm talking to somebody who's used my solution in the past. So it's, that's what social selling allows you to do. It allows you to use objective data on tools like LinkedIn to make informed decisions around selection and account prioritization.

[00:16:08] Jamie Shanks: And at the same time, it allows you to engage people in a bold, in different way, you know, talk to people on LinkedIn, not just through.

[00:16:17] Greg Mills: How are you finding these people? How are you finding them that they're either unhappy with their current provider that left their current provider?

[00:16:27] Jamie Shanks: There is a category of sales intelligence that helps you understand what's called product usage. , that's not the world that I play in. What I play in and what I focus in on is human capital migration. If you look at when decisions are made to change in a business, okay, it's when a new human goes into a business.

[00:16:48] Jamie Shanks: Of a decision maker. They bring with them people process and technology biases. They get promoted. They are asked in the next 90 days to make change or they leave. And a priority leaves the organization as that person leaves. So if you track the humans going in up and out of a business, you get a sense of a Al shift.

[00:17:10] Jamie Shanks: Then if you figure out, did that person come from a friend. Like a past customer neutral. We have no connection to these people or a foe. You know, they're interconnected to a cus a competitor of ours. That gives me a sense of a bit of a probability that I can shift this into an opportunity or not. That's where we focus.

[00:17:33] Jamie Shanks: Our pipeline signals, monitors, human capital migration at scale.

[00:17:38] Greg Mills: That makes sense. I'm from an it background, when we get somebody in new in, we ask them what they've used before, and sometimes we'll go with that same scenario, I imagine.

[00:17:48] Jamie Shanks: Yeah. We have customers that track CTOs and CIOs around the world for every job, and then they cross reference. Did that new CTO come from one of our happy customers. If they did, we'll lean in there and say, John you used our solution at your past firm. What's your plan now that you're over at XYZ.

[00:18:08] Jamie Shanks: Okay.

[00:18:10] Greg Mills: Now how can you develop better relationships with customers through social selling master?

[00:18:15] Jamie Shanks: First it's about learning how to develop a brand, an online voice. You've heard the term trusted advisor, it's the chicken and the egg. So you could start prospecting and engaging people, but naturally their first instinct is to Google you or to look you up on LinkedIn and say, why should I.

[00:18:36] Jamie Shanks: So the order of operations, as you first should be building a bit of a brand, a voice, a reputation. And as you do that, as you reach out to people, it gives them the trust, the warm and fuzzies to feel comfortable in talking to you because they feel you're a subject matter expert. They feel that you've walked a mile in their shoes.

[00:18:56] Jamie Shanks: That's the first step. You have to build a voice and an opinion about something.

[00:19:03] Greg Mills: What exactly is relationship signal intelligence monitoring? And this may lead back into what we just

[00:19:09] Jamie Shanks: discussed. Yeah. What it really means is it's tracking human capital migration at scale EV the you came from it.

[00:19:17] Jamie Shanks: So let's say every CTO on planet earth of a thousand employees are greater in the manufacturing industry. Then from that, what is our interrelationship to those CTOs? And there's one of three, they're either a friend. They came from a past customer as a advocate or fan to their neutral, but there's a job change there.

[00:19:39] Jamie Shanks: So there is a compelling reason to reach out to them because change. And that first hundred days, that person will deploy up 70% of their remit budget in a hundred days. Number three, did they, are they interconnected to a competitor? So are we spinning our wheels? Are we just going to waste calories, trying to engage a CTO where it's quite obvious through their length and profile, they are definitely going to choose a competitor of ours.

[00:20:05] Greg Mills: This is an industry I'd never heard of or never even considered. Does pipeline signals have any natural competitors?

[00:20:13] Jamie Shanks: Yeah. There are competitors. Think of this as a new emerging subcategory of sales intelligence.

[00:20:20] Jamie Shanks: Stellas have been using tools to give them sales intelligence for years, but this is the new, a very new type of subcategory of sales intelligence called relationship signals. We have a few other competitors who are tracking both at the account level and the contact level. All of those changes that are happening inside any company in the world.

[00:20:45] Greg Mills: On a macro level is LinkedIn one of them?

[00:20:48] Jamie Shanks: No. I mean, LinkedIn is actually the supplier of the data. Now, LinkedIn is a, if you were to look at a business plan, LinkedIn is a form of a competitor because they are. The category of status quo . So sellers have access to this information. It's all on the public web, but harnessing at scale across thousands of companies is a tremendous waste of time asking sellers to do $5 an hour tasks when they should be doing $500 an hour value creation to be asking them to data.

[00:21:20] Jamie Shanks: Mine is a waste of time. So that's why. A platform like ours exists, but the status quo was always there. Right. Somebody could say, wow, I'll just do what we always do. We try to find needles in the haystack on LinkedIn. Okay. How about it?

[00:21:36] Greg Mills: Yeah. See, let us know how that works out for you.

[00:21:39] Greg Mills: Yeah, exactly. Could

[00:21:40] Jamie Shanks: things are working out.

[00:21:41] Jamie Shanks: You wouldn't book this meeting with me if things were going okay.

[00:21:45] Greg Mills: Now how did you discover this?

[00:21:48] Jamie Shanks: My company sales for life trained 250,000 sellers over 10 years.

[00:21:51] Jamie Shanks: , 600 global customers. You name a big enterprise software company in north America and many in Europe, they were a customer. And so it was very fortunate to be in the belly of every major enterprise software company. In the world that mattered. And so I'm in the boardroom with every CRO and every CMO.

[00:22:12] Jamie Shanks: And I'm hearing from sellers every day, what their problem is. And their big problem is Pareto's law will always be there. You can teach people to fish, but only 20% of them will fish and they'll create 80% of the fishing impact. And the other 80% of sellers will haphazardly do it or not do it at. So if I'm the chief revenue officer, I'm really annoyed by this, where you give them all the tools and all the enablement and they still don't do it.

[00:22:42] Jamie Shanks: So chief revenue officers turn to us and say, what if you like, instead of trying to get a hundred people to do a hundred pieces of change management, what if you just gave them the answers to the test? And in fact, don't even have them change their workflow every day they log into Salesforce or they log into HubSpot or whatever CRM they use.

[00:23:03] Jamie Shanks: What if the data just came inside those tools and that's where, okay. Sellers can be lazy. How do we make it as simple as possible for them?

[00:23:14] Greg Mills: Can you kinda walk us through what spear selling is?

[00:23:17] Jamie Shanks: Yeah, spear selling is. Outbound account based sales development model for social selling, but it's an acronym.

[00:23:27] Jamie Shanks: It's an acronym for select plan, engage, activate, and reprioritize. These are the steps that a business development seller who's interested in prospecting goes through. They select accounts and prioritize them. They then choose to go after apple as an example, they then build a. They then engage based on that plan.

[00:23:50] Jamie Shanks: They take action and they try to book a meeting. They activate that account and then they look at all their total adjustable market and they reprioritize where they spend their time. So it's a flywheel that they learn to do through

[00:24:03] Greg Mills: social stock.

[00:24:04] Greg Mills: How has sales for life evolved over the past 10 years?

[00:24:09] Jamie Shanks: It started as a two man band that grew 50% compounded very quickly and grew to a 3 million business within a couple years. And then it kind of plateaued and stayed as a 3 million business. And what. We tried, we deployed way too much capital into it.

[00:24:28] Jamie Shanks: Reinvested capital into trying to get it to become go from subscale to scale. When in fact we should have learned earlier and eventually in this last five years, we re recognized it was a cash count. It was a lifestyle business that paid a. Handsome salary to myself and my business partner and that it could be a lifestyle that if we also had a focused on taking ourselves out of the day to day operations, specifically, the two biggest, heavy lifting parts of a.

[00:25:01] Jamie Shanks: Professional services firm like that are revenue generation and service delivery. And unfortunately, my business partner and I took each of those roles. So while we were making very hefty salaries, we are prisoners to our own business, so to speak. So that's how it evolved and then respond from there. We decided to spin out a second company based on the learnings from sales.

[00:25:27] Jamie Shanks: And recorrect all the mistakes that we made within sales for life and build something for scale that is scalable, that creates enterprise value, and we could easily buy our buy back our time, buy our way out of day to day operations.

[00:25:42] Greg Mills: Let's get ready to wrap this up. What's next for you, Jamie?

[00:25:46] Jamie Shanks: So the purpose of pipeline signals is it's built to scale. It's built to scale. It's built to eventually be acquired. I mean, it has a we have built pipeline signals with a mission to Mars. Right? When I started with sales for life, I didn't have a mission.

[00:26:05] Jamie Shanks: I became, you know, I started as an entrepreneur to help the sales community and see where the wind blew me. And, you know, it started out where I was making three or five, three to $5,000 a month in hodgepodge services. To to helping sales, eco, you know, helping the sales ecosystem, the pipeline signals has been built with a mission.

[00:26:26] Jamie Shanks: It knows where it wants to be at certain dates and times, and it will be built up to create tremendous enterprise value for ourselves and our investors. And eventually find a home as a natural.

[00:26:40] Greg Mills: Have you already started to be being approached about that or no,

[00:26:44] Jamie Shanks: we're in here one right now. And so, you know, our mission was zero to a million dollars.

[00:26:49] Jamie Shanks: We were going to achieve that and then the next triple, and then after that, you know, triple again, and it's just, there's a mission to there's a, you know, mission control has been pre-thought out from day one. Okay.

[00:27:06] Greg Mills: Now, what book do you recommend? And you currently recommend to move somebody to either start their business or move it to the next level specifically around sales.

[00:27:16] Jamie Shanks: Oh, wow. I'll almost need to pause for a second because I, so I'm a listener of books and I listen to a book a week, so my audibles. Is hundreds of books, but I'll try to find one that's that might help recently. Let's see here one, like I'm trying to find one that is so there's a couple that if you wanna become professional CEO, there's a great book, amp it up.

[00:27:48] Jamie Shanks: Let's see. If you want to think about how to scale a business as an entrepreneur, there's a great book called who not how by Dan Sullivan. Let's see. Yeah, so many books on here. I don't even know where to start.

[00:28:07] Greg Mills: What piece of software or app do you find indispensable in your bus, in your business? Easy LinkedIn. Okay. What's the best way for our listeners to get in touch with you, Jamie?

[00:28:18] Jamie Shanks: They can reach me@pipelinesignals.com. They can reach out to me on LinkedIn.

[00:28:22] Jamie Shanks: I should be the main Janie shanks that you see there and happy to help. All right.

[00:28:28] Greg Mills: And lastly, what's the number one piece of advice that you can give for our listeners?

[00:28:34] Jamie Shanks: Number one piece of advice is one that I constantly try to re corrected myself that I am trying to climb a series of mountains that unfortunately the horizon will just keep going and going forever.

[00:28:49] Jamie Shanks: And so to enjoy the fact that this will be a journey forever and take this as a journey, not as a. Burst of energy as an entrepreneur. And as well that I've proven to myself, a lot of people were afraid, oh, you build your business. And if you were to sell it or something to happen to it, this might be your only opportunity in the world.

[00:29:15] Jamie Shanks: What I'm on business, you know, two that the world is seeing, but I've tried many businesses in the past. This won't be my last business, so I'm not afraid to grow one, then two, then three, then. All

[00:29:30] Greg Mills: right. Great advice. That's a wrap. Thank you Jamie, for being a guest on entrepreneurs over 40. Thank you so

[00:29:38] Jamie Shanks: much.