In this episode of AdTech Unfiltered, Beau Davis, seasoned mobile sales leader and co-founder of Futureproofd, shares insights into the challenges sellers face in today’s advertising ecosystem.
Davis explores strategies for overcoming these obstacles, from longer sales cycles and less face time with clients to growing skepticism from buyers. Together with host Noor Naseer, he discusses what sellers need to know before securing meetings and how to better connect with ad agencies, particularly holding companies.
Noor Naseer: Hey, this is Noor Naseer for Adtech Unfiltered. Beau Davis has nearly two decades of experience as a winning sales leader for numerous mobile ad platforms including Greystripe, Verve and Kochava. For the last seven years he's brought those skills to Futureproofd, the consultancy he co-founded to help sales organizations better achieve their sales goals.
Beau talks to me about the challenging climate in today's advertising ecosystem that sellers face when trying to sell something, including dealing with longer sales cycles, less facetime with prospective customers, and buyers questioning seller knowledge.
Beau shares what sellers can be doing better, what they need to be informed about when heading into a meeting, and more. While Beau frames this conversation around approaching ad agencies in particular, especially holding companies, a lot of his reflections can apply to anyone selling something into the advertising world. Let's dive into this episode with Beau right now.
NN: Hey everyone, it's Noor. We're about to get into a great episode but first a quick mention about the sound quality. My guest Beau sounds very good. My file could be better but it's still a great episode and we hope you enjoy it.
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NN: Beau, I figure that there are more people who are in the ad sales business working specifically in adtech now than ever before. And you specifically being in a position where you're out there educating salespeople and sales teams, you've probably seen an evolution. The first question for you is: How has the role of the salary evolved in adtech across, let's say, the past decade?
Beau Davis: Yes. I think it's gotten harder in all honesty, Noor, and we see this quite a bit with a lot of the firms that we're working with. Primarily in the adtech space, we do some things outside of adtech but the vast majority of the problem or the pain that we're working with on sales teams is the head of sales or maybe it's a head of marketing who will come to us and say, “Hey, things have gotten harder.” Deal cycles take a lot longer. The amount of people that we have to talk to—there's a lot more people involved. Procurement gets involved. We used to just take the media supervisor out to lunch and they signed the deal right there. And so, everyone is looking for a way to adjust or honestly what we think they're looking for is to go back to the way things were: “Hey, it used to be a lot easier to do this. Can you help us make it easier?” The short answer is: No, things have gotten significantly more complex and there's a variety of different reasons for that. But I think a lot of it is that the buyers have a lot more information at their fingertips now. So it's not just the internet, there are companies and platforms that have been created so that these buyers now are very educated on your offering and the overall offering and ecosystem that you may be playing in whether you be a CDP or a DSP or just a straight up ad network. They used to have to take your word that you're better than the other one and maybe they like you more. By the way, that's still very important. Buyers come into these meetings now significantly more educated than ever before, and they have already formed opinions about those sellers which again, even 10-15 years ago, wasn't happening. Their first interaction was when you walked in the door with them, other than the emails you sent them relentlessly to get that meeting.
I think that's been really hard for a lot of organizations to wrap their head around—"How do they already know this or how do they already have an opinion about me?” And a lot of times you can't even get that meeting, because the folks have had that opinion. I'd also say that more money is being spent with fewer players and so it used to be like “Well we'll sprinkle the money around to a variety of different partners and we'll compare them against one another and then we're ultimately going to choose the winner and continue to work with one or two of those types of partners.” But the “FAANG” companies (I don't know if that's still an acronym we're using in the investing world these days) but those folks are getting, depending on what you read, like 92 cents of every dollar. So the pool and opportunity for a lot of the folks who are not in the FAANG is significantly smaller and there's a lot more people competing for those eight cents on the dollar so that makes it significantly harder.
I think the other thing that has happened is you do need to be more technical. So, I do believe relationship-based selling works, I'm not saying that it doesn't. It's just that you have to be really good at relationships and know a little bit more or a lot more about the technical side of the business because it has become significantly more technical. It has moved greatly towards software in a lot of ways where the buyer has the control and their hands are on the keyboard. And they do want to know about your algorithm and the queries per second and your first-party data and the data matching process. Whereas before, that was more or less outsourced to the vendor that you chose. Like, “Okay, I'm going to cut you an IO, you go ahead and run it on the back end for us and send me the reporting and I'll feel good about it if the results are good.” Now, the buyer is the one who's managing a lot of that technical execution. And they want to work with partners and people who are technical and understand the nuances of those little things that make a big difference in leveraging that software. I don’t think that was a succinct answer but there's quite a few ways that this has changed.
NN: I heard you mention of course a bunch of things that are visible challenges right now, where you're dealing with the fact that there's a much steeper learning curve. You're never going to know everything. There's always something else you need to learn. You're upvagainst a much more sophisticated buyer. There isn't a single buyer, there's multiple levels of bureaucracy to deal with especially in larger organizations. So just naming a couple of the things that you mentioned a moment ago, where do you primarily see buyers going wrong? You would hope that they have the foresight to appreciate some of what you've mentioned but I imagine that they're challenged by some things. People are making some mistakes out there.
BD: Absolutely. I think this goes across industries, but I think it's particularly bad in the adtech/martech industry, which is that most sellers are extremely feature-focused and not solutions- or storytelling-focused. So, the vast majority of companies that we work with, the vast majority of pitches that we've seen in our life regardless of whether we work with those companies or not, it all leans on like the what and the how of who they are. ‘Oh, our algorithm. We were founded by Sequoia Capital.” And really there's not that much difference to an algorithm unless you can explain the value and translate how that algorithm is going to make a meaningful impact on the buyer's business. The vast majority of sellers lead with stats and facts and figures of their business and why they're so great and so wonderful. And then they have a case study in the back about how they solve some business problems. I do think that's pervasive across industries, but it is particularly bad in the adtech industry.
In the several dozen companies we work with, only one has ever led with compelling insights and data about the business problem up front in their natural sales deck, their core sales deck. Everyone else leads with “Let me tell you all about us and how wonderful we are.” And then they will have some storytelling in the background, but it gets lost because you've already basically killed that buyer with facts and features and they're sitting there going, “Oh wow, your queries per second, okay,” and they've already tuned out. So, I think that's one of the biggest issues we see across the board.
Then, it depends on if you're going client direct or agency, and I think there's a lot of talk on the type of agency you're going to. So, whether it's a holding company or some of the smaller more independent shops and then the clients themselves, people do not customize their approach for the individuals that they're speaking to. Holding companies care about very different things than independent agencies, which care very differently about what the client directs care about. They all ultimately have the same goal: “Oh, I want to be able to buy media more effectively and efficiently and get the best rates and I hope you're not marking things up.” But the general pitch and the lack of customization for understanding who is sitting across from you and what that individual person—not the company—thinks about and cares about and the pain that person is trying to solve; very rarely do we see organizations customize it for that individual. Maybe they throw a logo of like the person they're talking to or the agency but they're not thinking about the problems that a holding company has versus independent versus a marketer direct and so I think that's the other big thing.
Again, you would think that this would be something that everyone's doing because this is not impacted by the changes in the martech ecosystem. These are things that you think we would have been doing for the last 20-30 years, it's just that people forget that and I think because of the commoditization of advertising and the competitiveness, they want to start with themselves and say, “This is how we're different than so and so because we already know you're working with this direct competitor and I want to explain to you how we're different.” You still have to hook them up front on the business problems and challenges that you solve for them and the pain that that individual is facing and buying and selecting media vendors.
NN: I'm surprised that this is still such a big issue. I think back—just to contextualize my own experience—being someone who's sat on the buy side for a decent period of my own career. I remember specifically 2016, ’17, ’18, ’19, ’20, when I was sitting in a lot of those types of meetings, exactly what you described, where somebody is taking up over 50% of the meeting of a lunch and learn and going on and on about the history of their company and not getting to the meat that people are actually concerned about. And they will not derail from their plan of action which is to talk about that. Maybe that comes from their history working in the business. Maybe they've been advised to get into that because there's this lack of commitment to understanding exactly who it is that you're talking to. So that feels crazy, but maybe also shouldn't be surprising because there's so many people in the business and they're being instructed in different ways in how to approach those initial overviews or calls with prospective clients.
BD: Just to add to that, if we wanted to add another problem—and it's a general problem, but not a new problem—people stick to their decks for the most part: “This is the script I've been given. This is where I feel comfortable.” You, Noor, were a great media buyer. You were smart, savvy. You may ask something that is three or four or 30 slides ahead because some people have way too long decks for a 30-minute meeting but they will not deviate. So that's another thing we see over and over again is this inability to pivot and think on your feet, and I think some of that is lack of education. ”Oh they asked me a technical question that I don't know the answer to. I will ignore that and hope that it doesn't come up again” I also think there's just too many people who are not comfortable being able to think on their feet and address things in real time. So, I highly recommend taking an improv class at Second City where it does make you think on your feet, listen in real time, and adjust on the fly versus being so stuck to a script.
NN: Do you think a part of that has to do with the lack of technical knowledge that people can't break away from because they can't think about things? They're not able to zoom out and see the big picture and say you're curious about this thing and that relates to something? Do you think that's what the struggle is?
BD: I think that's a big part of it. I will say I think people who are starting in ad sales and media sales today may have an advantage over the old dogs. They don't have the Rolodex. They don't have relationships; which again are probably the most important part of it because it's your ability to get in the door. However, the old guard didn't have to be technical because things weren't as technical.
Even in today's modern sales environment, if you're working for a company, luckily working for a company that has subject matter experts, sellers rely too heavily on these folks who are the subject matter experts on data, the subject matter experts on the DSP UI. I guarantee you that Basis has those folks in-house. Basis has subject matter experts because I do believe and we at Futureproofd – Carrie, my partner and I – you should have one to two layers of knowledge on the technical side. So, if you're talking about an onion the outside layer maybe one layer deep because it builds credibility you're not going to be like “Oh, let me get back to you. Oh, let me get back to you.” We've all been in those meetings. The deal's done if the buyer can't get the information that they need out of the meeting. They took the time to meet with you and they finally want to be able to say, “I'm going to make notes on whether or not this is an organization I want to be partnering with and consider for my media buys.” And if you can't give them information in that 30-minute meeting it's kind of a waste of their time; however, I don't think you need to know the queries per second and all the integrations and how the technical backend works. But it's one of two things that either don't want to learn like I'm a relationship person, I'm just going to go in there and open doors and bring in my subject matter expert or they rely too heavily on those folks and you can see the confidence and that actually breaks relationships down where the buyer’s going “Why am I even talking to this individual who set the meeting up? I'll just go talk to the subject matter expert because this person is worthless.” They literally don't know any of the questions so they ultimately end up not trusting that individual, they may trust the organization and we've seen it. I've worked at places where the subject matter expert is the reason deals get done because they're so good and they can save it but it's not enough. People need to get a layer or two deep and when it gets so technical just say, “Hey I can't go to this level but I can set up a follow-up meeting.”
The only other thing I will say, Noor, is most sales reps instead of having all of that knowledge because again I don't think they need it they should be able to ask, “Why are you asking these questions?” Most salespeople are trained (and there are rubrics we work with companies that have like objection handling) – if they say this you say that, there's some “if statements” like in Excel, if this then that. It's a Nancy Drew or Hardy Boys book like “Oh, Choose Your Own Adventure: but they've memorized it very much like they've memorized their sales pitches where “Oh, they said CDP. Yes, we have integrations with these four CDPs.” They don't get to the why of it. “Why do you need this CDP?” And if you start peeling that back and that's their real value is getting deeper and getting to that emotional rationale for the buyer why do you need this?’ “Oh it's the only one that we have integration with.” ‘’Oh so you can't work with other CDPs?” “No, we can't work with other CDPs.” So I can't work with you if you don't have this integration. “Okay that's interesting, why did you choose that partner?”
You get into those details as a seller then you're going to be able to move the conversation a lot more and at least go back to your organization and say, “Hey it's make or break for us” versus “Oh yes we have that.” “No, we don't have that.” And then the conversation's over and the seller may not know it but the buyer's like “Oh you don't work with ours. It's over.” But they just take things at face value. They don't do enough empathetic listening. They don't prod a bit more. And whether they want to use Chris Voss's book of Labeling and Mirroring which by the way we highly recommend and train on because it does get to that deeper level – that’s the real value sellers can have in addition to being able to have one to two layers of technical capabilities to build that trust with that buyer.
NN: I was thinking about that kind of rigidity of only knowing frequently asked questions and bringing those up or trying to back into a space around what you know about as opposed to actually answering a question. And going back to your analogy of knowing at least the outer layers of the onion, so that you can build that rapport with somebody. I think that can also become inevitably a challenge when you're trying to build that relationship where the person, especially if they're savvy, they'll say, “Actually I think I kind of don't like you because you're not bringing a lot of value to this meeting” then you're setting the wrong tone for future interactions with that team.
BD: 100%. And I mean it's a million years ago, Noor, that I was a buyer but I had enough of those meetings where what's the point of this. You email me 12 times to get this meeting. I finally relented and said yes because I did see something. “Okay maybe there's something here” and then you waste my time for 30 minutes shoving the history of your company and the algorithms that you built down my throat versus answering the questions I have. And actually helping me understand whether or not you can make a meaningful impact on the client that I represent business. And it happens all the time and I wish it wouldn't but it's just the nature of a lot of the sellers that are out there today – (they’re) very rigid, very focused on if this, then that, and they can't deviate and improv on the fly.
NN: Let's say you're a little bit more of a sophisticated seller, you've been around for a little bit, you're putting in the time and energy to be agile in the presence of these different potential buyers or clients. You're still going to face so many objections. Going back to so many of the points that you made earlier on. What are some of the key obstacles that people are encountering the most regularly in the adtech space?
BD: The number one, in my opinion, is when folks are trying to get in with “hands on keyboard” teams. The number one objection they hear is - because they're used to this old way of like “Well where's the IO? Like let's do an IO. Send me an RFP, we'll get an IO.” And the vast majority, particularly at the holding co, but certainly coming from the independent agencies as well, the vast majority of media buying today is done programmatically where an individual has access and hands on keyboard and they want to do it through a PMP, programmatic guaranteed, you name it. If you do not have those capabilities, that to me, we hear this all time, “How do we get out of this PMP?” Because we have no control over it. People spend a dollar, then they spend $50, then they spend $500. Then they turn us off. How do we get them spending?
The margins a lot of times on those businesses aren't as high. and so that's where a lot of these other adtech companies are now really looking at saying, how do we afford all this because the margins aren't what they used to be when we're getting these PMPs that are not the same spend as a guaranteed IO for $50,000, $500,000 whatever it may be. So that to me is one of the biggest challenges.
The other thing we hear all the time is just we work with three to four vendors. Goes back to the agencies having less time than ever and client directs. A lot of the in-housing with clients they don't have the staff that agencies do. They in-housed to cut costs so they're not going to go replace it with the same number of people that they're outsourcing to. So, they work with FAANG or they work with three to five vendors and those are the ones that perform for them and they don't have the bandwidth to add new partners and test them and see if they work. So that comes up all the time like “They've got their tried and true and they just want to give me a chance.” And so that's a really, really hard thing I think for people to get their heads around. There's not a ton of things you can do to coach other than continuing to show, work with those three to four. If you add us we're additive when you get those responses. It's not you versus them, you're never going to win that game. It's “yes and.” It's absolutely keep working with those three to four, most clients we work with are working with those three to four and they should be. They've added us to the mix and we perform XYZ better or we're driving more registrations or better you know viewability. Whatever the KPIs that you're talking to you have to be able to justify and have proof by the way that you are additive to the mix, and you're not taking away from those core vendors. So those to me are some of the biggest.
Then the last one I'd say, particularly at the holding co, is unique to holding cos and maybe some of the client direct is they're doing deals at a macro level across the holding co and it plays very much into we only work with three to four vendors. But if Publicis or Omnicom or WPP has a holding company agreement with certain partners and a lot of times those are the FAANG companies. There are a ton that are outside of FAANG that they have those relationships with. And it's an apples-to-apples comparison but one has a relationship at the holding co and the other does not – that spends going to the (partner) that they have the relationship. So you need to have sellers that can get in at a certain level at the holding co and do deals that are valuable and the holding cos want to do with you where again you're additive but you're guaranteed a certain amount of money. And then you can break through that barrier of “Oh, we have a holding co relationship.”
NN: I see there being once upon a time it was the challenge of saying, “tell me what campaigns you're working on and make me one of the line items on that plan.” And now it's very much moving so I also need to understand, what is moving you? What is your incentive to work with any partner? And it may not be your personal choice to your point earlier if you're working at a holding company or whatever institution you're working for, there may be these internal deals that are also not being brought up in the meeting. You kind of slowly have to figure that out by talking to the right stakeholders inside of that organization and having that uncovered. There could be plenty of people in the meeting who either don't really think about it, don't really think that that's valuable for you to know and they also don't feel incentivized to share that information with you. So I think that that's another really complex challenge.
So maybe to push harder into that specifically as a follow-up: What do you do when you're in that meeting you're having that conversation but you feel like there is a wall between you and the people that you're talking to? It sounds like they're listening, that they're seeing an advantage, but you sense that there's a lot of information that's being concealed. What does that secondary conversation look like that goes beyond the scope of maybe what intended to present about your offering?
BD: I think you have to be bolder. I think a lot of sellers take things at face value like we discussed and then they go back to their organization like, “Well they're not going to work with us. I don't really know why but it's very clear they don't want to work with us.” You have to, in that meeting, if you sense it say it, or challenge, where it's like “I'm going to challenge you” because it's exactly what you said, Noor. It's not being said it's what's being unsaid but you can sense it you feel it say, “Is there a holding co deal here that I'm not aware of?” Come out with it because you finally got the meeting it took 12 emails to get it which by the way that's the other thing we hear all the time is like “If no one wants to meet anymore I used to send four emails.”
The average by the way to get a meeting at this stage post-Covid is like 12 to 14 touch points. You finally get that meeting and you're not going to ask them whether or not there's a real opportunity here. You're going to present do your whole dog and pony show and feel really good that they're nodding their head but not ask the fact when you sense like there's something that they're not telling me, you need ask it. Literally say, “is there a relationship that you have existing for a partner that's similar to us that we should know about? Because I'm getting the sense that no matter what we say you like the offering but it's not going to happen because it seems like there's something else here.”
I also think you need to start asking—this is another challenge that we're seeing is that the holding co have bought their way into technology. It's less so at the independents but certainly there are some independent companies that maybe outsource their buying. But the holding co have their way into these technology – they’re actually technology companies – now. At Publicis we hear all the time (sorry for all my Publicis friends) but people are like “They only work with Epsilon. I can't work with them because they want to send everything through Epsilon.” Well yeah, it makes a ton of sense they spent billions of dollars on a technology. They want to make sure that their client's media spend is going through that because they make more money when it goes off of their technology. But you have to be able to ask it and just put it out there.
There are going to be times where you are literally going to be stonewalled, and you are not going to be able to work with that individual brand within that company and that's okay. That's another thing I think a lot of sellers do not understand that it is better to hear no in a “hard no” way—not like, oh the thing that you sense but you didn't say and you don't really get the no. Ask and be told no, “We're never going to work with you all because we have to run anything Epsilon or we have a partnership with a direct competitor of yours and we're not going to do additional partnerships. We will never work with you.” Get that, cross them off your list and move to the next one. There are a ton of other companies to go call on. So many sellers, it takes them so long to get to this meeting, they're emotionally invested into it and they have to get the buy and they'll keep chasing a deal that will never happen. So, ask the question, be bold about it and then if you get that hard no, and you got to make sure it's a hard no walk away from it and say, “Okay this is never going to happen” go report it back to your CRO. You know, plenty of fish in the sea go to the next one and there's opportunities there.
NN: It sounds like selling is kind of like dating. To your point you're not just wasting their time trying to make something happen that may not flourish. You're wasting your own time that you could be spending elsewhere. And as we all know, like sellers they're on the clock and there's an expectation that within a very certain time frame that you're turning around dollars and all of your explanations for why those dollars have not come to fruition only lasts so long. You're on kind of a short leash.
BD: 1000%. I'm kind of smiling because we have a whole slide about how sales is like dating and swiping and then you obsessively stalk them, and text them too much and share too much information, then you freak them out and they're like “Whoa, whoa you came on way too strong.” A lot of sellers try to close on the first night and basically get too excited they're and that's really intimidating. But you're 100% right Noor, if you see that the date isn't going well where the person's not interested in you why would you continue to text them after. Just get it over with. Like life is short. Move on with it.
I laughed because it is based regionally like the Midwest. God bless us midwesterners, but we are way too nice and the buyers especially it's like “You know this is really interesting thank you so much for coming in and presenting to us.” Why would you say that if you have no intent? New Yorkers will let you know pretty upfront “Yeah this is never happening bro we've got a relationship with someone else. See you later. Bye.” But even they have gotten a little nicer, believe it or not over the years. So you need to ask those questions and your time as a seller is every bit as valuable as the buyers. Most sellers feel subservient to the buyer and that's just like a weird relationship thing. There could be a really interesting sociological experiment around the way sellers feel indebted for the buyer meeting with them. But your time is super valuable. So if that person isn't going to give you the time or it's a one-and-done date, move on to the next one, tie that bow finish it off and say, “Doesn't seem like this is going to be a fit for us.” If they give you the head. “Yeah we're never going to be able to work.” You: “Cool. Appreciate it.” Literally go down the hall to the next team within that organization because again it's just one team saying that and see if you can get something going with another team within the holding co or within another independent partner of that agency.
NN: There's a ton of EQ work that any seller needs to do and that clearly is such a big part of being successful as a salesperson. I wanted to bring it back to something we lightly talked about earlier. We want you to know about your product, where it is thinking about it at a higher level and somewhat in a more detailed way, but you know you have your limitations. You're not going to be a technical expert, you're not a SME.
What about other things that are happening in the industry? Right now, AI is obviously super hot in ‘23 and ‘24. We've been talking about AI technically in the adtech space because of machine learning, algorithms, and any ways in which we may want to frame AI being relevant for adtech. How important do you think it is to be talking about AI right now if you're an adtech seller?
BD: So I think if you want to be buzzy and sell shiny objects (which I love)—I love the hype and things to come—by all means you should know quite a bit about it and what the potential impact will be. I think that's more on the solution side of what AI will do for automation and machine learning around media and advertising campaigns.
I do believe wholeheartedly that in a very short future (this is not five years away) all those optimizations that take place where a lot of times human beings are logging in and they're dialing the knobs , going to be automated by a machine. You have to program it ahead of time and prompt it to say, “This is the outcome I'm looking for so make sure you're optimizing it.” And that's going to come to any DSP and I think we all can agree to that and that is going to cost jobs. You're not going to need as many analysts on the hands-on-keyboard side logging in and doing that. You could argue that's a good thing because then people can do more strategic work and they don't have to do the minutiae of logging in and doing that.
I think like from a business solution standpoint you should be talking about the ability to leverage AI in the future of advertising to drive outcomes for your business. Sure there's other parts about varying creative, that's another big hype around like “Oh, we can create 1 million versions of the same ad based on human intent whether it's the green dress or the red dress.” That's been around for a while but really that is more automation and I think you want to get clear on that. There's a very big difference between automation and artificial intelligence, and so that applies on understanding it on the business side like well what is automation? What is actual machine learning you're leveraging artificial intelligence to automate or and enhance campaigns? But I also look at it on the tools that sellers can leverage to get smarter about sales. And that's a big focus for what Carrie and I do at Futureproofd is like understanding the technology that's out there today. Can you leverage it from a salesperson? Can it help you enhance your prospecting, your objection handling, your email writing? And there are a lot of tools that exist today that I'd say are more on the automation side than on the true artificial intelligence side; however, you're quickly seeing a lot of artificial intelligence integrate into these automation tools.
Everything, Noor, from understanding people's personalities that you want to email so you literally know how to pitch them and they'll auto-write an email for you based on that—maybe you're a motivator, Noor, you're gonna speak to Noor very differently than you're going to speak to Beau because we care about different things—and it will auto-write an email based on your persona. Those are really interesting things that a lot of adtech sales companies don't know about.
Our theory, (and it's not necessarily a theory anymore because we've seen it) is that adtech companies, in general, not all, but adtech companies are three to five years behind true SAAS software companies in leveraging tools and technology to enable their sales forces to be smarter and automate a lot of the manual tasks of sales. So getting really smart about what tools enhance and make your small teams much more mighty are really important for startups whereas like the bigger companies like on Meta or Amazon, they're already leveraging tools. They understand, they're using artificial intelligence in their core platform. So they probably don't need it as much. But if you're a startup, you have to punch above your weight class. There are tools out there that will help you automate as well as leverage artificial intelligence to make you smarter about it.
I think it's twofold, Noor. It's what's going to do for the industry but then what's it going to do for your sales business.
NN: I see to your point being the two sides to it. There's a ton to know out there and there's a lot of curiosity. But there could be a much bigger world in terms of how much a potential buyer wants to learn about adtech that goes beyond the scope of what it is that you're offering and then pulling it back to what are internal tools you can use that really your client does not care about and you will not talk to them about. And then what actually shows up inside of your technology itself that you could justify as being some derivative of AI which I think is probably the fair way to position it. Most tech companies (and I'm sure some people would disagree) they're purporting that they're offering something that's truly AI and really it isn't. I think slowly but surely we're going to see more organizations come out and say like “Yeah whatever we were talking about back then is not exactly AI.”
We have some AI in the language of some product marketing that we're doing these days. Again, it can be justified, but is it going to be the AI that we're going to see in the next couple of years? It's not. It's just not.
BD: Completely agree, I think that's why sellers again going back to one of the things I said earlier like they need to ask the question, “Well why are you asking this?” There's always going to be that person in a meeting that throws the bomb like “So what do you think of Sora's new large language model?” It's like what, why? Why are you asking? Like what's the relevance to this there's always people who want to throw their grenade into the meeting and walk away but really understand at the core like well why are you asking this are you leveraging AI? Are you curious about AI? Are you trying to automate things or are you actually trying to leverage a large language model to create ad copy? There's so many different use cases. And I highly recommend having a growth mindset and taking some of these free online courses. Google has a really great one which by the way is like super-super hard and I could barely get through it. But if you're nerdy about it and you want to learn things at a surface level to understand the difference between neural networks and large language models and all of these different things, you should at least again have a surface to two layers deep of what is it out there in general, and then how can you apply it to the advertising and media world, and how can you apply it to your sales practice, and what tools exist there.
NN: So final question: We talked about the obstacles that inevitably you face as a salesperson or any salesperson faces but then there are also objections that sometimes are not fair. You're dealing with somebody who believes, “if it ain't broke, don't fix it.” How do you deal with somebody who has misconceptions about what it is that you're bringing to the table? How would you advise a salesperson to overcome those misconceptions from somebody who's really deeply rooted in believing something that isn't true about you and your organization?
BD: It's really hard to change someone's preconceived notion. It happens and you have to be very thoughtful and pragmatic about the way you go about it. And as we talked about earlier, Noor, you as a seller should be walking into every meeting thinking that you're a step behind or you have to dig yourself out of a ditch; I do not think that's the case 10 years ago. I literally think 10 years ago you knew more about the space as a seller than the buyer in front of you. But like we said, the democratization of the internet and data and information is everywhere now.
So those buyers already have a preconceived notion of who you are as an individual but particularly about the company and the offering that you have. It's a lot of reasons by the way why you never get the meeting in the first place because like “Ah I read about this company. I looked them up on seller crowd. I read about them in G2 and they have low-star rating. I'm not going to even take a meeting with them because they can't do the things I need them to do.” And that is a fact.
The reality is like you need to ask them why they think that way. You need to be able to use social proof so case studies but like real world results on how you have overcome those obstacles. Like, “Yeah we totally hear this all the time everyone thinks we're this we're not this but let me explain to you a couple of clients that gave us an opportunity and how things changed.” It's the reason that there are these—everyone's like, “Oh you know it's so hard Facebook, Amazon, Google they get all the money.”
There are competitors that come up every single day that make tens if not hundreds of millions of dollars because they do have something unique to offer or their story is unique enough to offer maybe the same thing in the back end as everyone else. So, you should walk into every meeting thinking that that person knows more or they think something about you that is not necessarily true.
The reality is this though; that individual on the buy side, they are paid to know a lot about a little. None of those buyers know as much about you and your company as you do. So you should always have the confidence and swagger to be like “I don't care what they've read on the internet. No one can know more about my solution than me because I work here and I understand it.” And your job then is to ask them why they think the things that they think, have them give you examples and then it's basically like a fact checking mission. Going back to the internet and social media like you are the fact checker—and don't be rude. I'm awful on the internet by the way on fact checking people on politics. Don't be me in a sales meeting. Try to put yourself in their shoes and why they think that way and be empathetic to that and believe it or not you'll find a middle ground most of the time as long as you are not going to be like “I'm going to win them over. I'm going to prove to them that they're wrong.” You have to understand where they're coming from, why they're thinking that way and then be able to have real life examples of how they are wrong without rubbing it in their face. And that to me goes a really long way and gets people over the hump of like their preconceived notions.
NN: Motivate them to think differently because the change in the way that they think it's up to them to make that change.
BD: You can lead the horse to water, Noor. I mean that's your job, ultimately. The biggest thing I've learned in sales over the last few years (especially now being more of a student) is people buy emotionally and they justify it rationally. So going all the way back to one of your first questions, the biggest mistake we see people make is that they rationally and go “Queries per second. We have more data partners blah-blah-blah-blah.” No one cares, like they emotionally want to know whether or not your product is going to make them look better and make their job easier, and if it does then they have to back it up with all the facts and figures. So, I'm not saying those aren't valuable but especially when someone has a preconceived notion you have to appeal somehow to their emotional mind.
People are biased. People may have had an experience or their boss had a bad experience with you and your company at your last place, and you're never going to get the deal simply because of a mistake that happened years ago. You have to be able to uncover that. Then to your point make them emotionally realize like “Oh well this person isn't so bad. Going to give them an opportunity.” And all you can ask is for an opportunity. If it doesn't deliver, you’re SOL. You're just looking for an opportunity to prove yourself. I don't think enough people think that way. I think they think like it's them against the other, and it's really just like I'm looking for an opportunity, a shot and if it doesn't work it doesn't work, and we can go our separate ways and I appreciate you giving me that opportunity.
NN: Well I love that you made time to talk us through at least a couple of different things for salespeople to be thinking about. Frankly, I think they’re things to think about even if you're on the buy side as far as how you're reflecting on how salespeople are coming and approaching you in the adtech or digital media and advertising space. So, we'll leave it at that for now but thanks for the time Beau.
BD: Thank you, Noor, for having me.
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Thanks to Beau Davis, co-founder of sales consultancy Futureproofd for his perspective on how to better sell into agencies. As market dynamics between the buy and sell side in advertising continue to evolve it's important to have dialogue around the shifts and stay informed on smarter ways to approach asking for the business.
If you want to learn more about Beau’s organization, check him out on LinkedIn or go to his website futureproofd.com. that's the word Futureproofd with the ‘D’ on the end just a ‘D’ futureproofd.com. That's it for this episode. I'm Noor Naseer. We have another really great episode right on the heels of this one coming out in just the next few days.
