How to Get Skaled – In Just 7 Minutes with Jake Dunlap

Resources/Links:

• Check out Jake’s The Ultimate Guide to Inbound Lead Follow-Up & Conversion: bit.ly/modernplaybook

Summary

Do you want to scale up your business, increase sales, and unleash its full potential but just don’t know how to do it?

Do you know which are the parts of your business that needs changing? Or do you have no idea what needs to be changed at all?

Jake Dunlap is the Founder and CEO of Skaled Consulting that helps executives around the world accelerate business growth with data-backed sales solutions. Before building Skaled, he held the roles of VP of Sales at NoWait (acquired by Yelp), Head of Sales and Customer Success at Chartbeat, and VP of Sales at Glassdoor (acquired by Recruit Holdings for $1.2 billion in 2018).

In this episode, Jake shares his insights on how to scale up your business through, first, knowing the points in your business that needs to be changed, and secondly, by bringing back in our “optimization” mindset in the company. He also shares how engaging in technology can help boost your company.

Check out these episode highlights:

• 01:47 – Jake’s ideal client: “We’re looking for organizations that are in his initial stages of growth that are trying to, you know, they’re at the stage where replicability matters, and there’s that early stage where like, ‘Look, just figure it out, wing it.’”
• 02:31 – Problem Jake helps solve: “I think there are really two problems. I think we solve an expertise problem, you know, from working with hundreds of companies, we just have a vantage point that’s very unique around, you know, modern outbound, which will, you know, obviously, is something we’ll talk about in a second, you know, really cutting edge sales processes and ways that people are adapting the way that buyers, you know, want to adapt, and then you know, how you work with your current customer.”
• 03:43 – Typical symptoms that clients experience before reaching out to Jake: “There are usually a few things that you’re experiencing. One, we’ve been growing, things are going well, the duct tape is starting to come off the plane a little bit. And what I mean by that is, we’re scaling from X to Y in a very short period, our team is understaffed. Our ops team, our enablement team, and maybe our leadership team has a lot on their plate.”
• 05:25 – Common mistakes that people make before they find Jake’s solution: “It’s different at different levels of growth. I think early on, they try to hire full-time people that are 60% role for the job they need today, a 40% role for the day two years from now.”
• 07:08 – Jake’s Valuable Free Action (VFA): “Create a culture of, “always optimizing”. Create a culture, ‘We’re going to be optimizing this process an ongoing basis.’”
• 07:38 – Jake’s Valuable Free Resource (VFR): Check out Jake’s The Ultimate Guide to Inbound Lead Follow-Up & Conversion: bit.ly/modernplaybook
• 08:05 – Q: How is technology going to impact sales over the next 10 years? A: We need to start to not judge the success of our sales organizations and marketing organizations by size. We need to judge our success by output.

Tweetable Takeaways from this Episode:

“Create a culture of 'always optimizing.’ Create a culture, ‘We're going to be optimizing this process in ongoing basis.’” -Jake Dunlap Share on X

Transcript
(Note, this was transcribed using a transcription software and may not reflect the exact words used in the podcast)

Tom Poland 00:09
Hello, everyone, a very warm welcome to another edition of Marketing The Invisible. My name is Tom Poland beaming out to you from Little Castaways beach in Queensland, Australia, joined today by Jake Dunlap. Jake, good day mate, where are you hanging out?

Jake Dunlap 00:21
Awesome. I’m here in Austin, Texas. It’s good to be back.

Tom Poland 00:24
Keep Austin weird. For those of you who have been living under a rock and do not know Jake is the founder and CEO of Skaled, S-K-A-L-E-D, Consulting that helps executives around the world global market accelerate business growth with data-backed sales solutions. So, something that’s actually proven, provable, trackable, traceable, and provable, not just hitting hope. So before creating and building scale, he helped in the roles of Vice President of Sales for NoWait, later acquired by Yelp, everyone said of, Head of Sales and Customer Success at Chartbeat, Vice President of Sales at Glassdoor acquired by Recruit Holdings for $1.2 billion. He helped a little bit in building that.

So along with a list of enterprise clients, Skaled, also, just in a few short years, amassed a whole bunch of clients like New York Jets, LinkedIn, Insightly ADP, a little company, you might have heard of called Microsoft, the majority of his clients, however, mid-level companies looking to get really accelerated scalability. And the thing is around this predictability because you’ve got the metrics, you’ve got the track, you’ve got something to work with. So, our subject is going to be “How to Get Skaled in Just Seven Minutes”. Jake, let’s kick-off! Who’s your ideal client? Seven minutes starts now. Sorry, by the way.

Jake Dunlap 01:47
Nailed it. All right. Well, look, you did such a great job. I feel like I might have my seven minutes I don’t even need; we can dive into the real stuff. So ideal client for us is you nailed it, you know, we’re looking for organizations that are in his initial stages of growth that are trying to, you know, they’re at the stage where replicability matters, and there’s that early stage where like, “Look, just figure it out, wing it.” When it’s time to get serious about growing and scaling, people process technology, that’s fantastic, or, again, we’ve just been getting kind of pulled into bigger companies that are looking to modernize. So, whether you’re an early-stage company, that scaling a large organization that’s really trying to bring in outside customized solutions, that’s where we play.

Tom Poland 02:23
Right. So, tell us- thank you for that. Six and a half minutes left. Question two is, what’s the problem you solve? How do you describe that?

Jake Dunlap 02:31
Well, I think there are really two problems. I think we solve an expertise problem, you know, from working with hundreds of companies, we just have a vantage point that’s very unique around, you know, modern outbound, which will, you know, obviously, is something we’ll talk about in a second, you know, really cutting edge sales processes and ways that people are adapting the way that buyers, you know, want to adapt, and then you know, how you work with your current customer. So usually the problem we’re solving is, how do we get 5, 10, 15, 20% more productivity out of our, you know, lead gen sales, success organization, and this is a big “and”, create an amazing experience for customers because guess what, the two aren’t mutually exclusive. And I think we’ve maybe went too far, and we’re too focused on efficiency. And we’ve forgotten that the customer experience is also very important, and you can have both.

Tom Poland 03:17
Very interesting! Two wings of the same bird we might say, and I think we’ve all made the mistake of doing one or the other separate to each other, and suffering the consequences because of that. So,

Jake Dunlap 03:26
Exactly.

Tom Poland 03:27
Let’s look at- this leads us quite nicely into question number three, and we’ve got five and a half minutes left. What are some of the typical symptoms that people tell you that this is what we were suffering from before we work with scale? How do they know they should be working with you? What’s going on?

Jake Dunlap 03:43
Yeah, I think that there are usually a few different things that happen. And Tom, by the way, I love this format. I love it. It’s like, “Bang, bang, bang”. I love this format. It’s one of my- it’s literally one of my favorites. So, for us, there are usually a few things that you’re experiencing. One, we’ve been growing, things are going well, the duct tape starting to come off the plane a little bit. And what I mean by that is that look, you know, we’re scaling from X to Y in a very short period, our team is understaffed, our ops team, our enablement team, and maybe our leadership team has a lot on their plate.

And so, you need expert arms and legs to come in and help to really move you forward, and while the plane is flying, get you there. The other is, you know, companies now coming out of COVID, you know, now is the time to prepare for 2021. And so, we’re getting tons of organizations, they’re like, “You know what, now’s the time to implement a new sales methodology”. So, I think timing right now, for us is critical because now’s the time to get ready for, you know, growth. So, I think it’s that feeling that there’s an area of opportunity that, you know, we know that we could tackle internally, but it could help to get some outside eyes on. And I think timing. I think timing right now is great to start to look at this stuff.

Tom Poland 04:47
Yeah. Never been better with hopefully coming out of the COVID recession. Well, let’s talk about common mistakes. This is question four, four minutes left, you’ve got these smart people in growing organizations, the duct tape starts to come off the plane as you call it, though, probably feel like the inside the jam, can’t read the label, you know, seeing the wood for the trees sort of thing. But the smart people, they don’t try stuff. I mean, often high paid execs, business owners, entrepreneurs, etc. So, before they find your solution, what are some of the common mistakes that people make to try and get that duck type back on the plane again?

Jake Dunlap 05:25
So, I think it’s different at different levels of growth. I think early on, they try to hire full-time people that are 60% role for the job they need today, a 40% role for the day two years from now. And so, it’s about getting the right people at the right time to get you to that next layer, like layer level of scaling and not having to hire a bunch of full-time people that you may or may not need, or may or may not be the right fit. So, I think it’s more of like right expertise at the right time when you’re kind of growing. When you’re larger organizations, I think it’s usually, you know, companies sometimes get big by accident, or you know, like the product-market fit. So now they’re trying to figure out how do we build out replicability? How do we get people up to speed faster? I think that’s a big one.

Now, the only point of having a playbook, really, is you get people to ramp in two to three months because it’s all documented, they can execute for six to seven to 12. So, I think there are all kinds of different challenges around the right people at the right time if you’re small, and you’re scaling. Or if you’re a bigger organization, it’s about creating those processes that create long term sustainable results. And the last piece I’ll mention, is always optimizing that, you know, maybe you don’t have the time to go back and look at optimizing these things because you’re, you know, you’re busy doing your day job. And I think in sales, we’ve lost this “always optimizing” mindset, you know, we’re only optimizing our outbound process every six to 12 months, our sales process every year. We need to be looking at more real-time because customer behavior is changing, you know, extremely fast.

Tom Poland 06:49
Isn’t that the truth! So, the voice of experience said different mistakes be made at different levels of growth. Question five, we’ve got a whopping one minute, 40 seconds left.

Jake Dunlap 07:00
All right, let’s go!

Tom Poland 07:01
Give me- what is a valuable free action I can take right now that’s going to help, it’s not going to solve the whole problem but it might take them a step in the right direction?

Jake Dunlap 07:08
Yeah, so I’ll do two and I want to keep it concise. One is LinkedIn. I think if you’re in marketing, or if you’re in sales, start to get active on organic LinkedIn. Your buyers are there, start interacting, feeding the sales team insights. Two is create a culture of “always optimizing”. Create a culture, “We’re going to be optimizing this process in ongoing basis”. I think if you can do those two things, how do we get more involved on LinkedIn and get our people out there talking versus marketing? And I think if you create a mindset of, we need to be looking at these things more frequently, you’re going to be successful!

Tom Poland 07:38
Step in the right direction. Thank you, sir. One minute left. I’m going to give folks the answer to question six just for the sake of time. It’s one valuable free resource people can go into like find out more about this. Folks go to Bit.ly, bit.ly/modernplaybook. That’s Bit.ly, B-I-T dot L-Y, modern playbook. Jake, question number seven and a whopping 38 seconds left. What’s the one question I should have asked you, but didn’t?

Jake Dunlap 08:05
How is technology going to impact sales over the next 10 years?

Tom Poland 08:10
And in less than 20 seconds?

Jake Dunlap 08:12
We need to start to not judge the success of our sales organizations and marketing organizations by size. We need to judge our success by output. And therefore, technology is one of the main conduits and ways for us to get there and outcomes are really what matters, not the size of your sales team if you know what I mean.

Tom Poland 08:28
Absolutely scaled efficiency. Perfect! Jake Dunlap, thank you so much for your time.

Jake Dunlap 08:33
Thank you, Tom.

Tom Poland: 08:36
Thanks for checking out our Marketing The Invisible podcast. If you like what we’re doing here please head over to iTunes to subscribe, rate us, and leave us a review. It’s very much appreciated. And if you want to generate five fresh leads in just five hours then check out www.fivehourchallenge.com.