Episode Description:
Join us for an insightful conversation with Jen Allen-Knuth, the visionary behind "DemandJen." This episode takes a deep dive into the transformative landscapes of sales and marketing, uncovering key strategies and innovations that are shaping the future of the industry.
In this episode, we explore:
Redefining Sales Methodologies: Jen shares how the foundations of sales are evolving, with a focus on more personalized and impactful engagements.
Breaking Traditional Stereotypes: A discussion on moving beyond the outdated sales persona and embracing a modern, authentic approach.
Leveraging Technology and Creative Campaigns: Learn how technological advancements and creative strategies are being used to transform sales engagement and drive meaningful results. Tune in for a deep dive into the pivotal shifts and essential strategies that are sculpting the future of sales and marketing!
Summary:
Jen Allen, aka DemandJen, shares insights on the evolving landscape of sales methodologies, particularly the updates to the Challenger Sale. She explains how rapidly shifting buyer behavior is driving the need for these changes and emphasizes the importance of understanding buyer psychology to stay relevant in today’s market.
Jen also touches on the gap in formal sales education and the growing initiatives to better equip future sales professionals with the right tools for success.
[Read the full transcript]
pharosIQ: Welcome, welcome, welcome to this week's episode of pharosIQ's podcast. I most certainly have a guest. That is not boring. And, um, we're recording live from Belfast today on my iPad. So, you know, I'm sure you'll hear a lot of things in the background and, or people wrestling and wrestling around, but that's an optimal experience for podcasts from what I'm told.
So this week we have Jen Allen, AKA demand Jen's first guest I've ever had that has like a moniker, like kind of a superhero name. So I'm pretty pumped about that. She's the founder. Of demand Jen and an evangelist partner for lavender. ai, where I'm sure you guys seen her on LinkedIn. So Jen co host of the podcast, 30 minutes to president's club.
I've been to quite a few of them myself. Well, I'll have questions for you about president's club as we get there, but she was the chief evangelist. Um, at challenger Inc and also previously a host of winning the challenger sale podcast as well, too. So lots of sales talk today on Vita boring. Um, so those of you who are in marketing, you're going to get a great view into the mind of sellers.
And those of you who are in sales, know, you know, buckle up because Jen's going to bring a lot of, a lot of real super power to the mention mansion side. So how are you?
DemandJen: I mean, I'm amazing after that introduction. Thank you. And I have to say, this is probably my favorite podcast name I've ever been on. B to boring.
It's amazing.
pharosIQ: No, it was like one of those where it's like, I don't have many ideas, many ideas that are good. My marketing team, like, like I'm like the old stingy man of the room where they're like, Oh, that's terrible. But this one, I think I kind of nailed it. So I'm pretty. Go, go old guy, old guy for one. I mean, I'm still the person who refers to things as the, like I'm on the tick tock from time to time.
DemandJen: I'll
pharosIQ: peruse the Facebook if you will. No, I think I'm fairly, I think I'm somewhat technology, technologically astute, right? For that. And of course, you know, I can know that I can't do a Snapchat. I have no idea. I think we talked about this in the last podcast either way over my head.
DemandJen: That's okay. I don't think you're missing much there.
pharosIQ: So your challenger, your history is with the challenger organization and obviously the challenger sale, right? I know there's been a lot of recent updates to challenger, you know, spin selling all of those sorts of things. All those methodologies are kind of getting a revamp, right? What are your thoughts on the revamp?
Is it trying to sell more books and services or those those methodologies really needed a revamp? Yeah.
DemandJen: Yeah. I mean, I can't speak as directly for the other methodologies because I've never worked for them. But what I will say is if you look at my career, the reason I stayed at CB challenger for so long was because every year they would take a new look at buyer behavior.
So I think largely the reason behind so many methodologies getting a revamp is because buyers have shifted faster than ever. Like I think if you look at the rate of change, I would argue it's moving way faster than it was when I first started selling. 18, 19 years ago. So if you look at something as simple as how many people get involved in a buying decision, a sales methodology built on selling to one or two or three people is going to have to change when you suddenly have 11, buyers getting involved.
So I think there's a natural need for what we're advising sellers to do to change as buyers change their behavior. That would be my guess.
pharosIQ: And I agree, it's sometimes I think there's over, over correction, right? Cause it's, you know, I've said many times I stopped, I stopped reading sales books a long time, right?
Like early in your career, that could challenge your spin gap. And then it's like, Whoa, everybody's kind of saying the same thing, but they're just giving their own little moniker about it. Right. So I started really focusing a lot of my research on, I started reading a lot of psychology books, actually.
How people think, how people buy. You know, like I went back to some of my psychology classes in college and kind of re dove into some of those, some of those data points. And I think that's that kind of helped me as I, as I worked through my selling and marketing career to kind of think like, okay, what is the customer thinking and how can I speak directly to that?
Versus like, here's some tactics to help you close more deals, you know, like, but it's it and it leads to my next point, right? Selling is the most common, I guess you would say career that doesn't naturally have it. Yeah. any sort of formal education around. There's a few organizations that are starting to dip their toe from a university perspective, but you know, there's, I mean, how many people do you know who have a degree in sales?
DemandJen: And it's, I mean, it's wild, right? Like we, I think, largely look at the profession of sales as, Oh, it's just a figure it out motion. Either you're good at sales or you're not good, which I think. Yeah. Is still a very firmly held belief today. I've done a lot of work. Um, there's a program down at the university of Texas, Dallas led by a gentleman by the name of Dr.
Howard Dover. It is mind blowing to go down there to they, they have summits every year and they bring their students together and you get to meet them. And they, a lot of them do presentations. Many of the students I've seen come out of that program Who have never had a sales job yet are far better than sellers I've met who are five, six, seven years into it.
So as a sales leader, you imagine bringing in some of the organization where you're not having to say like, Hey, here's what B2B means. And here's what a CRM is. And here's what his piece of sales tech is. They come in the door already knowing it. And I think. If we want to see this profession move forward, we have to support and we have to lean into those.
And in many cases, you've got these scrappy professors who are just like pulling from their network being like, well, you come in and talk to my team. So I think for all of us who are really heavily active and believe that the sales profession is a profession and not just this thing we wing, I would love to see more people lean so far forward into that because the interest is there.
The students want it. It's just, I think it's really tough for these professors who are trying to drive that change.
pharosIQ: Years ago, I got a cold call from the University of New Hampshire, right? And they're, they're like, they're, they taught cold calling by cold calling sales executives to try to convince them to speak to the class, you know, great.
I'll totally speak class, you know, like, and so I think there's more of it coming. I hope. And again, I think part of me has that like retirement Bible. I'd love to be a professor of sales, you know, like, and just think, cause most, as you put most people think like, Oh, I mean, sure. You hear it all the time.
You'd be good at sales. You know, like you're a great talker. You be good. Right. And I'm like, my funny thing is I hear the opposite. And most people are like, man, you are a miserable curmudgeon. You'd be terrible. It's like, how have you, how have you been good? Like you're not exactly, you're not exactly warm and fuzzy.
And I'm like, cause it's not about that. Right. Most, most sellers, some of the greatest sellers that I know are huge introverts don't want, I mean,
DemandJen: yes, introverts or ambiverts or whatever. I think this classic notion that that was what. Made me never want to go into sales is thinking, well, I'm not the type of person that's going to kick a door down and never take no for an answer.
It's the antithesis of my personality. And I think when I landed into my first sales job, I worked for someone who didn't represent that either. And so I was very lucky. Had I gone into sales and I was working for like a boiler room, dude, who was just like, it's all about the grind. I think I would have exited sales really quickly.
I worked for someone who was like, Who I admired because she was brilliant. Not because she was like the best closer, the savviest, like smooth talker. She just like her brain worked in a way that I respected. And so I lent, I leaned all the way into sales because of that. Not because I wanted to be the guy or gal with like a Rolex watch making, talking about how I make president's club every five seconds.
Like none of that. I think the coolest part of, of sales and the thing I think great sellers get hooked on is. Is when you realize you can actually have a pretty significant impact on the way someone thinks about their business. It's not about closing your solution. It's about having a conversation of influence.
That is the high I think many of us get when we're selling.
pharosIQ: It's, that's pretty boring for movies though. Boiler Room is way better.
DemandJen: Coffee is for a psychologist. Doesn't have the same rings.
pharosIQ: Coffee is, I used to say, you know, like, you know, ABC, it should be like, always be not, you know, all of the, that's where I see.
I started opposite, right? Like my first gig was, This is 17 years ago where like, it was 250 people in a call center making 175 dials a day, you know, and one call closes of recruitment postings, like 395 bucks a shot. Like, and it was, but it was fun though. You know, like it was, and like, I ended up being okay just because I figured out how to, like, it was very industry focused.
So I would sell one person and I'd be like, okay, like I realized early that like, people in the same industry tend to all speak the same language. So if you like open up a call with vernacular, that's common to an industry that you automatically have an instant amount of like credibility. And then you can kind of have a bigger impact on that.
Whereas instead of just blasting away, I was making a little bit less calls, but I was focused on like, okay. This industry and I can speak to two competitors right away because I know them and I sold them and that. So it was, but those, I mean, that was back in the day where there was no zoom info. There was no contact database.
There was no outreach. There was no, that it was, it was like, how did you get the people? How did you get the phone number? Well, you called and you said, can you forward me over to your HR manager or the CEO or the person who picked up the phone was like, nope. That's not going to happen. You had to like sweet talk that person.
Well, I'd have conversations with the same receptionist, administrative assistant slash office manager every day. And they'd be like, Hey. And I'd be like, hi, can I speak to Bob today? And they're like, nope. And I'm like, well, what can I do? And they're like nothing. And eventually, you know, 272 calls later, you finally catch them on a good day.
And they're like, you know what, we're going to put you through then. But like, that's why I wouldn't want to sell this. They're like, Oh, my date is terrible. Like, how, what am I supposed to do? I mean, like, we didn't actually have that before, you know?
DemandJen: Yeah. And I think, you know, it's really interesting as you're talking about, it was making me think that motion of getting around the gatekeeper, which by the way, you remember that used to be like a topic of webinars all the time.
Like, how do you get around the gatekeeper? We never have to talk about that now because we've got direct access, which is a but I think some of the reasons that We as salespeople probably leaned really far into, Oh, I have to be a great relationship builder is because when you were selling. Through someone who had a gatekeeper, they don't care about what your product or the value of what you were doing was, they don't care at all.
Right there, their care is how do I protect the time of my executive? And so I think it forced us to develop these like really good relationship building skills with a gatekeeper, which we then assumed would transfer over to an executive, but they're two totally different audiences. Right? So it's like, then you move out of that gatekeeper world where we are now.
And we're still using a lot of the same tactics to try to sweet talk someone into taking a meeting. So when you were talking about that, I've never really thought about that way, but it does seem to make a sense, sort of a little bit of a sense of why we've held on to that because it did work for quite some time.
pharosIQ: I wish gatekeepers would come back. I really, I really, it was so fun. It was so fun. And also like calling a company, like it used to be able to call Oracle and somebody picked up and said, hi, this is Oracle. I know crazy, right? Like, like, like it was so like, now everything's so mechanical, right? It's the thing, like, I think like, if people actually called into companies, like I would most certainly invest in a great person to pick up the phone.
This is the first touch that a prospect had, like right now, the How much, like, there's, how much time do people put into their websites and their landing pages and all the demand gen activity focused on like that experience with the site. Right. But, you know, like most, most companies don't even put a phone number on the site.
I know I love to like run, like run the data. I'm like, if I put the, if I put a phone number back on the site and underneath, I put parentheses, there's a human here. I promise how many people would actually call. Versus like that. I think I might do that just because it would be fun just to like try it
DemandJen: out.
Don't be B to be boring. Be B to be different.
pharosIQ: I'm opening up a whole thing. We're going to be like, we had 10 inbound leads via phone. This first company to do it in 22 years. Yes, do it. So your, your, your career is in sales, but your moniker is demand Jen, which is a market, generally a marketing term. How does that happen?
DemandJen: Yes, I'll tell you exactly how it happened. 2020. Obviously, everything was kind of hitting the fan. Not a lot of people were like, let's bring a large population together to get some sales training in 2020, believe it or not. And so I hit an absolute stall point against my quota in 2020. And I remember going to my sales leader.
Who is one of those like amazing, tough love. I'm going to tell you what you need to hear, not what you want to hear people. And I said to him, you know, look at the volume of leads I get. I get maybe three leads a month and that's not even like good leads. That's just total leads and marketing should be doing this and marketing should be doing that.
And he just sat there, he listened to me. And then he, when I was done, he was like, Jen, you're not wrong. Marketing should be giving you more leads, but the reality is they're not. So you can sit here and keep bitching with me. Or you can figure out what can you do to help yourself? And it was not at all what I wanted to hear, right?
I wanted to hear like, yeah, let's go put the pressure on marketing. Like they should be doing better, but he was wise, right? He knew you can bark at someone all day long, like my dog's doing right now, but it doesn't mean that they're going to change at the speed that we want them to. So I sat back, I reflected on it.
At the time I was spending a lot of time on LinkedIn prospecting. And And then I started to notice there were people who were speaking up about problems and just taking a totally different approach to LinkedIn than I ever saw. Josh Braun was one of them for me. And I thought like, Hey, I've been selling for at that point, 16 years.
I have a lot of things that I've learned and I know, and I am really hesitant about sharing those things. Why? When I share them in sales calls, they tend to be pretty like, you know, well received. So I lean more into saying, let me just go out there and see if I talk at, at scale about problems that I'm seeing.
Does that attract customers? Buyers to want to talk to me more and long story long, like it ended up that a lot of CROs and sometimes CEOs would come in my inbox. They never liked or engaged anything, but they would say like, Hey, we were just talking about that very problem in our team meeting. I don't know that we need a sales training program, but can you come in and share some of that perspective?
And so what ended up happening is I started creating way more demand for myself. I also started creating a lot of demand for others, right? It wasn't the, like you, you take what you get. Kind of, we had regional territories and that's what led me into becoming or creating the chief evangelist role at Challenger because they said if sales is out there like capturing demand and marketing is out there talking about what we can do in our solutions, somebody's got to go out there and create an awareness of underappreciated problems.
And to me, that feels like the role of an evangelist. So that's kind of how I got the name because I just started creating demand for myself instead of waiting and expecting someone else to do it.
pharosIQ: The, the evangelist role is, I think underutilized, but especially in Especially in the tough, tough economic time.
It's like, Oh, it's a really, do we really need that one? But I mean, to be candid, I think the pressure is now on the CRO, the CEO, the CMO to be the evangelist, right? Not only do you have to do your day job and all of that. Oh, also you have to have this presence and this brand, you have to be this thought, you know, and it's, I mean, some of us love it.
Some of us don't right. And sometimes it's just almost an unfair model. It's just an unfair expectation because it's not, again, it's. Building a presence to the point where you're having an impact on people that scale is a commitment and it's a full time one, you know, so like. I think that's where a lot of companies may be missing right now is like, Hey, you know, like see CEO, you need to be social.
We're like, he also needs to make sure that the bills get paid for the business to
DemandJen: a lot of
pharosIQ: things that have to happen in that day, you know, versus like being the voice and social presence for your business as a whole.
DemandJen: And sometimes they're just not the best person to do it. They're they're too close and too obsessed with the product or solution that they sell that they have a hard time creating distance between.
And I think when I look at evangelists that I admire, it's people who are able to create distance between problem and solution, meaning. I'm not out there saying, like, let me tell you why this is the best product in the world and better than everybody else. It's totally opposite of that. It's let me tell you why this problem is typically overlooked or misunderstood.
And the belief there is like, if I get people to, to believe in the problem, the way that we do. Many of them will naturally come along with us. So it's a, it's actually a resistance against talking about the solution, which is just something I think marketing and sales is not classically great at doing.
And I think that's one of the reasons why when I was an evangelist, I ended up kind of becoming like the divorce attorney between marketing and sales. Cause they're both like, we want to do this and you need someone who is not, Like on either side of the fence, that's my take on it. I
pharosIQ: saw a post yesterday that was brilliant on LinkedIn.
I wish I, I wish I thought of it where uh, the person said that an MQL, like that basic marketing metric, right, is really just a contract between marketing and sales on what a good lead is. And I was like, well, you just nailed it. Cause every, people are always like, oh, MQL doesn't work. The waterfall is dying and blah, blah, blah.
Right. It really like, it works great. If you do a great job of defining what an MQL is and marketing agrees that they can hit it and sales agrees that they like it, then it's money, right? But almost every company misses that. And then, oh, by the way, their executives set targets on MQLs that overpressures marketing to generate bad ones.
And they set targets on sales and overpressure sales to complain about them. So there's your book, right? So
DemandJen: it's, it's such a divide. And I, like one of the things that we did when I was at Challenger, Because we had that battle all the time was we said, okay, not every MQL is created equal. If I go and download an ebook on how to select a sales methodology, it does not mean that I am ready to buy a sales methodology.
I might just be like, Hey, I'm looking to learn. If I raise my hand, I'm like, I want to see what your training on negotiation looks like. That's a very different, in my mind, MQL. And so one of the things we did is we create a segmentation and said, We have to make some assumptions that if someone is like showing up to a webinar or, you know, coming in through a podcast referral or something like that, they might be more in the learner camp.
We might be wrong, but let's not like jump down their throats asking for a demo. If they are doing actions that appear to be learner actions, we can do that for the hand raisers. And oftentimes like, If you continue helping someone with their learning journey, they will convert to a hand raiser. But I think we have to stop this belief that like every MQL is created equal.
And if someone gives us an email, like that mission to just be like, what time are you free on Friday? And so that's a fault of both sides. That's not marketing. That's not sales. That's both.
pharosIQ: That's really the coolest name ever. Thank you. You know, I can't, I want to be demand, but now I just feel like I'm ripping it off.
Right. Thanks. Bye. So tell us about a campaign that you ran either as an evangelist or on the sales side that, you know, was out there, not boring, creative. Did it work? Did it not work? Give us the scoop.
DemandJen: Yeah. So when we were prepping for this, I was like, you need to know pharosIQ, like I'm not a professional marketer.
And you were like, that's cool. I'm just the guy who loves to talk about sales and marketing. So I'll preface with that. Probably my favorite campaign I ever ran was not a full fledged planned campaign. I woke up one day and said, okay, when I was at Lavender and I was doing the community role and I said, okay, our, my philosophy for community is if you help people, many of them come back around.
So what can I do today to help someone? So I wrote a post probably stupidly. And was like, Hey, um, in this job, we obviously have a tool that assesses and scores your email. I've reviewed myself hundreds of emails. If anybody is on the fence about a cold email, they've been using, send it to me. I'll score it.
I'll review it. I'll give you some feedback. And within minutes, my DMS were like, right? Like they just blew up. And I had over a hundred within, I think like 15 minutes of posting it. So. I stopped right cancel everything I was going to do that day, not realizing I probably should have put like my first 25 and I started scoring them and giving them feedback and what happened was or what I realized was the reason so many of them ultimately ended up saying, Hey, we want to take a demo of this and see how lavender could help is because.
By me doing it with them, it helped expose the gap, right? I think there's a big insecurity on behalf of sellers. I know I would feel this way where I'm like, I don't necessarily want to go to my manager with my cold email. Cause what if they think it's stupid and I'm stupid and I should be fired. I don't want to go to my peers cause I don't even know if I think they're the best at writing cold email.
So I sit here and I second guess myself over and over and over again by having an objective way to measure it. What I was able to do is give them confidence that this is either a badass email or there's something we need to fix. And most of the things they needed to fix were things that they were never taught were important.
So things like their preview text, nobody, like everybody talks about subject lines. Very few people talk about the very first, like 50 characters that come up in your email. And so by the lens of teaching and being like, Hey, here's where this is getting wrong. And these logic clicks starting to happen.
They then said, okay, but I'm not the only one who sends this email. There's lots of other people in our business that do. And that opened the door for me to say, Well, does it make sense to have lavender scoring the team's email? So these kind of emails aren't being put out and it was just like such a natural way to bridge the gap because none of those people were looking to buy sales tech, none of them, but many of them said, I want to sell for this job to be done of like, I've got to improve my emails so I don't miss my meeting quota every month.
pharosIQ: Hope this email finds you well, the greatest preview text ever.
DemandJen: Yeah. Right.
pharosIQ: So
DemandJen: easiest way to spot a cold email. So for me, it was like, like I said, it wasn't this sophisticated thing, but we, I was able to get people who had never expressed interest in lavender to come through the door, actually give me information that helped me assess, is this a good fit or not?
And by the way, some of them weren't right. Like some of them. We're job seekers or people. And what I was able to do there is just link them back to content, like a blog content that said all the things I would have taught them and said, Hey, start here. So it's not to say like, you have to become this absolutely selfless person and help the world and stop all that you're doing.
But I, there were big logos that came in and it was just a really easy way to bridge that gap to say, does it make sense to take a look at this?
pharosIQ: Back in the day. And in my business, we generate a lot of leads for customers, right? On the marketing side. And the biggest complaint is that sales is just not great at following up on our leads.
So, but marketer, like marketer X has no, no, they don't have any gumption to go over there and be like, Hey, this email sucks. Right. So what I started doing years ago and I got out of the practice, you know, but cause it's somewhat time consuming, but just again, asking marketers to send me their, their sequences that they were following up with leads on.
And I would just shred them. Right. And then the market would be like, Hey, I spoke to an independent consultant outside of this. And here's where we're at. And then to be honest, the emails were terrible, right? Like, like, Hey, I saw you engaged with a piece of content. Would you like to like simple stuff, you know, like, but, but there's no way that marketers can win that battle against the VP of sales internally.
Right. But having like ammunition from an external thought, thought leader, anybody just to say like, Hey, maybe you're thinking about this wrong. Right.
DemandJen: And I think there's so many opportunities for us to do that. Like the core takeaway I have from it is like, is what we are doing helping the customer realize their own gap.
When someone sends me an email and they get a score back of 60 out of a hundred, that's a moment of like, Oh my. Like I've got a gap. I don't have to tell them they are coming to terms with it. Right. And I think that's a really, really cool move in sales. Same thing with at challenger. It was like, I could sit there all day long and be like challengers when, and you need to rewrite your messaging.
And people were like, thank you. No, thank you. Or I could say, Hey, send me your pitch deck. And I'm going to show you how most pitch decks look and why that doesn't work. And then I'm going to show you what the best pitch decks do. And when they saw that their flow or their choreographer, their pitch deck looked exactly like the, what not to do again, this moment where they reflect on themselves versus me saying, you suck.
It's not good enough. And so I think whenever we can kind of put like an objective measure in between it, I That's a really effective way for someone to feel like it's their idea to act on it, not them being told by a sales rep or marketer.
pharosIQ: So the best, I mean, and I think another key takeaway here that folks may be missing is sometimes the best campaigns aren't campaigns.
They're just goats, right? So we, I mean, we have so much planning and time and thought connecting the dots that. And social and digital and, and brands and aligning the metrics and all that 17 meetings, sometimes the best campaigns to be like one person post one thing, one time it gets a whole bunch of traction and revenue and pipeline follows, right?
So demand marketers out there, sellers out there, sometimes, sometimes it's just go like, remember I'm old, but remember space ball. Baseball, seeing where we're always preparing, why are we always preparing? Just go, you know, just go. And then it just takes off. Like that, you have to like, sometimes you just have to go like, just do something versus trying to create this perk because I've been part of a lot of campaigns and a lot of teams and a lot of that.
And it's never perfect. It always messes up somewhere. So you might as well just jump in and just go fast and break things and have that. So with that, we have parent teacher conferences that we have to get to. I mean, it's, uh, which is exciting. I mean, I'm, I'm, you're missing out if you're not part of that crew.
So good luck to that. And we will let you go. Thank you so much for joining today. I definitely appreciate it. It was awesome connecting on a little bit of the sales world, right? We're usually so marketing heavy that it's nice to bring, you know, a selling mind, which is where my roots come in as well. You know, when I'm not pretending like I know a little bit about marketing.
It was an honor and a pleasure. You're Chicago based. So like, let's connect quite frequently because we both are, um, wait
DemandJen: in Chicago or outside? I'm outside now.
pharosIQ: I live in St. Charles.
DemandJen: I'm in Arlington height.
pharosIQ: So yes, right over there. Definitely. I pass it on the way to O'Hare quite frequently.
DemandJen: Yeah. We should definitely
pharosIQ: connect on that side.
Um, thank you again for joining. Enjoy the rest of your day, your parent teacher conferences, and it's been a pleasure. All right.
DemandJen: Thank you so much. It's been such fun.
pharosIQ: Take care, boss. Have a good night. I'll send you the edits and everything once we're all set, and you can share it on your socials and stuff.
DemandJen: All right. Awesome. Thank you. This is fun.
pharosIQ: Bye bye.
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