Richard Lane   0:23
Welcome to Inside the Funnel by durhamlane, a podcast where we unpack what’s driving pipeline and revenue growth in modern B2B. I’m Richard Lane and I get the chance to speak with brilliant sales and marketing leaders about what’s going on inside their world, what’s working, what’s not, and what they’ve learned along the way. I’ve always believed that better questions lead to better conversations and that’s exactly what this show is about.
Today, I’m joined by Vincent Chapus, veteran sales leader and GTM consultant. I’ll let Vincent introduce himself and tell you about his work. But suffice to say, Vincent is now co-founder at Palladio GTM, and is perfectly placed to help us unpack our theme for today’s episode, scaling hyper-personalization.
without the headcount. So Vincent, very welcome to Inside the Funnel. Perhaps you could just do a quick intro of yourself to the audience and your background and your current business and then we’ll get into what I know is going to be a great discussion.

Vincent   1:15
P.
Yeah, sure, sure. Absolutely. Thank you so much, Richard. Thanks for the invite. Very pleased for being here today. So yeah, about my background, I studied in sales, actually in door to door sales, believe it or not, back in Ireland. Yeah, that was a fun ride, but definitely needed to give me the level of English I have today, to be honest.

Richard Lane   1:31
Ohh, wow.

Vincent   1:40
And then because I was in Ireland, I got lucky to get, I would say, hovered in the tech industry and everything that was going on over there. And because I had sales experience, I got a chance, and the French language, I had a chance to start in PayPal to help them build their inside sales teams.
At the time, they were not really doing much inside sales, so they needed a couple of people to help them build multiple markets at the same time. And so we grew the team over there from like four, five guys to about 25 people, fully focused on the French market, inside sales. So, you know, there was a lead generation side and then of course, a closing negotiation side of it, right?

Richard Lane   2:24
Yeah.

Vincent   2:27
And then from there, I did about 3 1/2 years there, then I moved to Oracle. In Oracle, much, much bigger engine, obviously, very large sales development team. In that role, it was mostly focused on building pipeline for the sales team. And then after that, I moved into TIBCO Software, also
into the data analytics segment. And what was very interesting there is when they recruited me, the team basically started literally from scratch. I had an empty floor. I remember doing interviews, showing this empty floor, and then we built it up to about 20 people as well in Europe.

Richard Lane   3:00
Okay.

Vincent   3:07
doing both inbound and outbound sales development, again, to fit the pipeline to the sales teams. And, you know, over the years, I got out of corporate and started to do some consulting. And more recently, I’ve opened Palagio GTM, which now focuses on
helping those large companies, but also medium size and some startups on really understanding how they can benefit from AI and a good implementation of the tech stack. Because when I was there, and I wish I had those tools when I was there, actually, when I look back,

Richard Lane   3:43
Yes.

Vincent   3:47
You know, still now a lot of companies work in silos, right? Marketing has its own budget, sales has its own budget, and they tend to buy the tools to close certain gaps. But what we noticed and what I noticed with my experience and now using Clay as an orchestration is that
those gaps now can be closed and can actually work together, I guess, for the greater good, right? But it’s definitely challenging for companies and leaders to change their mindset in terms of how to look at it to make sure that the implementation is done not in silos, but more from an end-to-end
workflow efficiency. And there, of course, comes the conversation around improving efficiencies of teams, therefore, do we need as much headcount, or can we do more with less? And this is exactly what we’re going to talk about today. So yeah, very, very exciting changes, but with the tools we have today, there’s a lot.
Of things that is that are possible to achieve.

Richard Lane   4:49
Yeah, amazing. So I think just listening again to your background, I think perfectly placed for today’s discussion. So I’m just going to set it up for listeners in terms of, you know, where we’re going to focus. And whilst most companies are sort of stuck in a more headcount equals more pipeline loop, that’s not working so well in 26.
We’ve seen the first wave of AI sort of silver bullets come and go, as it were. Unfortunately, leaving behind lots of empty wallets, expensive POs that have been paid, and pretty poor results. So again, you mentioned there about the silo nature, and I think that’s part of the challenge. But
But what if the problem isn’t the AI? It’s orchestration. And I think where in the news now, it’s all about AI stealing all the jobs. We know that AI has got a really significant part to play, but how do we make it part of the orchestration and part of the process? So that’s where we’re going to get into today.
So we’re going to stop talking about AI as a replacement for humans and start talking about how tools like Clay and others can turn your B players into A players, putting the right message in front of the right person at the exact right time. So I guess with that context, with your background and my background in building teams,
I think we’ve got a great opportunity now to really help listeners understand. Maybe our goal should be how do we help our listeners understand where we’re at currently, but also how to get started. And that’s a really important way of working. So maybe to get us started in this conversation, Vincent, you’ve seen the
You’ve seen the old way of sort of the heavy manual prospecting at scale. When did you realise that the answer wasn’t necessarily more people, but to solve the pipeline challenge?

Vincent   6:43
Yes, it’s a great question. And you touched on so many important pieces just right there in that 30 seconds that we could honestly have probably a two-hour conversations if we break it down, because there is a lot to unpack. And for me, the real eye-opener was probably about a year ago when I came across Clay.

Richard Lane   6:47
Mm.
Yeah.

Vincent   7:07
And by the way, I’m talking a lot about Clay because we use Clay a lot, but there are other tools that can do similar things, right? But…

Richard Lane   7:14
Is that is that marketplace? So everyone, everyone it seems is talking about clay, but are there lots of other organisations like clay? So is that a sort of marketplace in itself that’s building up?

Vincent   7:26
Yeah, I mean, there’s definitely Clay has opened the space for more for sure. And there’s definitely more tools that are trying to compete with Clay and trying to make it easier. Because Clay requires a certain level of technical understanding. It’s not super technical, so you don’t need like an engineer level to be able to do the implementation.

Richard Lane   7:31
Yeah.

Vincent   7:50
but you still need to have a good understanding of how to connect tools together, leverage APIs and those kind of things, right?

Richard Lane   7:57
And perhaps as a bit of an explainer for listeners that don’t know what we’re talking about when we say clay, could you just explain what it does?

Vincent   8:05
Yes, absolutely. So clay, you can cheque clay.com, C-L-A-Y, like clay, like the clay, is and used to be, by the way, and this is very important for the listeners because right now we still see a lot of people assuming that clay is what it was
when it first came to market 6, seven years ago. And what it was, it used to be just purely a data enrichment tool competing with the likes of ZoomInfo, Cognizant, Lucia, you know, all the typical data tools, basically, right? This is how they came to market. They came competing. They found a way to provide better quality data at scale.

Richard Lane   8:39
Yeah.

Vincent   8:48
right, which is obviously important. And then slowly they move towards connecting with other tools. And this is when this idea of orchestration and GTM engineering came up. By the way, I don’t know if you know, but that’s them who have coined this name of go-to-market engineer that came from play.

Richard Lane   9:06
Yeah.

Vincent   9:10
because they saw themselves as not just a data tool, but more of an interconnection layer that basically helps interconnect the various tools that we have across the revenue engine. And this is very important as well for the listeners, because when I’m speaking to CROs,
or to sales development leaders, and I think this is one of the big problems we still see a lot, is they think about their function as a silo, right? I have a problem in my sales development team, and how do I solve it? Rather than, okay, I have a problem in my sales development team, but why do I have that problem? Because it comes from marketing.

Richard Lane   10:13
Okay.

Vincent   10:14
So it really opens up the opportunities in terms of where you can connect the data in terms of first party signals, your CRM, second parties, right, and even third party signals. And the whole idea and concept behind it is that if you’re able to connect.
the right tools and collect the right data, once you have the data aggregated, right, you can make sense of it and then layer in AI like Cloud Code or ChatGPT or other LLMs to make sure that then that data makes sense and then is used into your messaging or your targeting or whatever.
whatever you want to do with it, right? And the key piece, which also connects to then the headcount, is that we used to do that manually. I used to lead a team of 45 SDRs that, you know, received the lead from marketing and then they were scratching their heads and they were like, oh, we’re missing the phone number. Let’s go into Lucia to find the phone number.

Richard Lane   10:57
Okay.
Yeah.

Vincent   11:18
The e-mail is not right. Let’s go into a different platform, right? But by doing that, and I’ve posted a couple of posts online, which I shared with you, for me, I called it the silent killer because leaders have been used to grow teams this way. They’ve been used to spend money this way.
Right, and it has worked up until now, right? And so…

Richard Lane   11:45
Well, it’s been essential, hasn’t it? I mean, that has been, it’s been the, it’s been the only way, that’s the reality.

Vincent   11:46
Yeah.
Absolutely. And that’s why I think we’re really much at a turning point now for leaders to realise there is actually a different way not to actually leverage AI and other tools to really do things better, faster, do the heavy lifting for the team so they don’t have to.
and you end up paying them for what they’re meant to do, meaning connecting with prospects, connecting with clients, rather than spending 30% of their time into actually searching the data that they need to connect with clients.

Richard Lane   12:13
Yeah.
Yeah, it’s, I mean, and that opens up a whole load of questions, which maybe we’ll come back to. I’ve made a note of a few things there, Vincent, but that’s a great sort of start point as to the paradigm we’re in. I spend a lot of time on this podcast talking about the lack of connexion between sales and marketing, or actually
Yeah, it’s getting better, but it’s still not great. I’m interested, do you, in your GTM work, do you spend more time with sales leaders or marketing leaders?

Vincent   12:47
Yeah.
It’s a very good question, but it actually depends on the companies. Some engagements that we have right now, I can actually give you a specific example. We work for a German company right now, and straight away they understood, so their request came from
RevOps, right? Because you’ve got to think about RevOps organising the data in the back end as well. So they purchased Clay, but their intention originally was already to use Clay across the entire revenue engine, which means with them, we actually have six different workflows we’re working on.

Richard Lane   13:16
Yeah.

Vincent   13:34
one with marketing around scoring leads, scoring accounts. How do we go about that to make sure that then we pass on the right information to the sales development teams? We then have workflows around sales development, around account executive, and we’re going to even have workflows around churn prevention analysis,
for the CSM department, right? So we’re really covering the full spectrum. So with them, we engage primarily with RevOps, but our conversations are with marketing, our conversation are with sales development. Sometimes we have them together to make sure we bridge those gaps and that it actually makes sense in what they create.

Richard Lane   14:08
Yeah.
Okay, so that’s a great example of an organisation that sort of is understood the challenge.

Vincent   14:16
Yeah, 100% those guys are ahead of the curve than not many for sure.

Richard Lane   14:20
Yeah, do you do you think clay is do you think clay is typically bought by marketing rather than sales? Because it doesn’t feel like clay is a frontline SDR tool, for example.

Vincent   14:31
What do you mean by frontline SDR tool?

Richard Lane   14:34
Well, would you you wouldn’t want your SDRs all using clay, would you?

Vincent   14:38
No, so yeah, exactly. So the way it’s typically built is more in the back end to facilitate their work. So they will benefit from workflows, but they wouldn’t themselves go into clay and build the flows themselves.

Richard Lane   14:57
Yeah.

Vincent   14:57
If they do, you fall back into what we talked about before, giving them a tool that, yes, they could benefit from, but when they might end up wasting time. And it’s the same with Cloud Code. Right now, we see some companies going full AI and giving Cloud Code access to all their sales teams.
But what they do is, they’re like, okay, here is a new toy, go play with it, go figure it out. Without giving them the structure, the foundation, the training to how to use it and maximise it.

Richard Lane   15:25
Yeah.
And I think that that comes to our overriding sort of theme for today is hyper personalization at scale. If you let everyone do their own thing, you’re never going to achieve that.
That scale, I think, so, um, so how, how does, how does the…

Vincent   15:42
A 100%.

Richard Lane   15:49
In my head, I’ve got this idea that have we always been really unproductive? I don’t think that’s true. I think when I look back to, I mean, I’m going to age myself now, but I got my first proper job in sales 1996. And I used to have a lot of conversations with the right people every day because I was busy on the phone.

Vincent   16:00
Yeah.
Right.

Richard Lane   16:10
We didn’t, I mean, I hardly had a computer. It was just getting a computer and a database. But people were much more, you were much more able to engage people. And if you thought about what you were doing and if you followed the right values, then you could have great conversation. That seems to have torpedoed in terms of now it’s very challenging to
speak to the right person at the right time because of the amount of noise that’s going around. So how do you see the sort of orchestration of the data to bring those people forward to the SDR at the right time? How do you see that as being able to sort of reduce the size of the team?

Vincent   16:53
So…
That’s a good question. Let me think about my answer there, because there’s multiple things to think about. The first one is…
thinking about how we approach the market, right? Or your time, if you like, right? And when you think about approaching your time, in the past, we used to have a set of accounts given to us and say, hey, these are the priority accounts that we as executive team have decided.

Richard Lane   17:12
Yeah.

Vincent   17:25
for the business to go after for various reasons. Sometimes they had internal signals like renewals or like already existing contracts. And then they had what we call the new logo, right, which was, hey, these are the ideal customers that we would like to sign. And therefore, we would then, marketing would create a message and so on, and we would go after those ones.

Richard Lane   17:33
Yeah.

Vincent   17:46
But in fairness, the level of signals we had from those accounts was limited. And now the big, big difference, and therefore, the way it was calculated, it was like, okay, if we want to go and create that much pipeline, we need that many people to send that many e-mail to do that many actions because everything was broken down, right?
as a reverse engineering mechanism to understand how many headcount did you need to actually achieve that goal. Right? Now the big, big difference is that all the research, both in terms of which account is the best to go after, why is that?

Richard Lane   18:18
Yeah.

Vincent   18:30
now and not tomorrow, which persona is currently the most active, why, you know, all those signals can be aggregated. And so what we do in Clay, for example, on multiple occasions, is that even if the executive team at the beginning have an idea of their
top accounts that they want to go after, we’re able to reprioritize them based on the signal and the information that we collect, and then tier them into different priority lists. And based on that, we can then provide the account executive or the SDR teams to say, hey, actually, these accounts are the priority now because
this information has been found on this account and at this level and at this time. And therefore, if you like, the prioritisation at their level and the time they spend on it is much less because all they have to do is focus on those accounts that have been prioritised for them.

Richard Lane   19:30
Yeah.

Vincent   19:31
Does that make sense? And so…

Richard Lane   19:32
Yeah, it does. So, yeah, so actually through the orchestration of data and using AI to prioritise that data and build out the data, enrich it, and then prioritise based on signals triggers, you’re actually putting that data set in front of the SDR at the right time, which means they should be having more productive calls, which means they’re
probably getting back to what life used to be before it all got really complicated maybe.

Vincent   20:01
Yeah, I mean, I’ll give you an example, right? A very specific example. We published a case study recently, which I could share with you actually, of a company that we work with, a startup, there were, I think, 10 A’s or something like this, so smallish, but you know, it’s replicable at scale.
And all we changed was, first of all, to get them to understand that in their time, once we did the time analysis and the existing data.
They realised 20% of their existing data in their CRM wasn’t part of their ICP.

Richard Lane   20:39
Right.

Vincent   20:39
So what did that mean? That meant that 20% of the marketing budget was going in the bid. 20% of the time their SDRs were spending was on wrong accounts. So we changed that, right? But then what we did is when we started to bring in fresh data, up-to-date data with the right persona,

Richard Lane   20:45
Yep.

Vincent   21:00
and get them to focus on calling, right, with the right phone numbers, in two months, they doubled the number of meetings that they had.

Richard Lane   21:11
Okay, well, that’s a Greg example.

Vincent   21:14
Right? And so this was purely by allowing them to have the right data with the right information at the right time. And this was purely from colleagues. So they spent…

Richard Lane   21:24
Yeah.

Vincent   21:30
I think twice lays the time and they got two more, two more times the results that they used to get.

Richard Lane   21:37
Yeah, wow. OK, so, so that’s cool. So, so that’s a great example of how understanding your data.
enriching and managing your data so that you’ve
you’re focusing on the right people at the right time can help your team be more effective. That’s a great example of where Clay can create a winning formula for it. Let’s switch gear a little bit and talk about personalization if we can, Vincent. So that’s the other element, isn’t it? So we’ve got the one, the one hand you’ve got

Vincent   22:08
Durham.

Richard Lane   22:13
Let’s get the right, let’s get the right data in front of our SDR so they can be as successful as possible, as productively as possible. I suppose the other element is how is AI affecting the ability of the SDR to engage or prior to the SDR?
having that conversation to how do we get to engage with the right people and create that hyper personalised content. So you mentioned Claude, Claude a couple of times, you know, what was your experience in how AI is helping with personalization?

Vincent   22:53
Yeah, it’s a great question. And actually, I did a webinar not so long ago with a guy called Morgan J. Ingram. Don’t know if you heard of him, one of the top sales trainer in US. And what we actually focused on with him, which relates very much to that question,

Richard Lane   23:03
Yeah.

Vincent   23:13
because he’s not a big believer in AI at scale. He’s always been focusing on, you know, hyper-personalization, right? But in that webinar we did with him, we focused on demoing how Clay and AI can collect the information and pre-package it. So do a whole heavy lifting of research and so on.
of the accounts and what’s happening and pre-package it for the account executive that they then receive into a Slack message. We have even a pre-formatted e-mail to say, hey, this is what we suggest you to send. And that e-mail is actually based on past successful emails that have been sent across the company.

Richard Lane   23:55
Okay.

Vincent   23:55
Right? And so you can think about it from an SDR point of view when the SDRs are sometimes struggling with their reply rates and they don’t know what to change. In this instance, you actually use AI to leverage the performance of over team members.
right? What you’re seeing being successful, you give it to the model and the model then automatically spits out an example of what you can send. And then there is a decision to be made because companies go different ways, right? Some want to be fully automated and actually try to remove the SDR team entirely, to be honest.

Richard Lane   24:34
Yeah.

Vincent   24:35
And someone wants to still have that human element, and so what we do a lot ourselves is we don’t really believe in fully AI yet, because there’s still too many gaps for error, especially into your like top priority accounts, but for what is, for example, top of funnel.

Richard Lane   24:37
Yeah.

Vincent   24:54
Right? Why not? Right? Because the message is clean. You can go just do like some driving awareness so you can drive people at the top of your funnel. And once they go lower, or sorry, lower in the funnel, but higher in the priority and they engage with your content, you can then start to mix that with
human touches, right? Does that answer your question?

Richard Lane   25:16
Yeah.
Yeah, yeah, it does. I think of I think of the SDR being essential for the last mile, you know, in terms of the last mile of building the rapport, the meaning, the human connection. But I like to

Vincent   25:27
Yes.
Actually.
Sorry, I don’t mean to cut you off, Richard. Something else pops to my mind is I have another little example for a client. What we’ve done is, if you remember what we just talked about a couple of minutes ago, I was saying once you have the signals and you have the data, you can then tier the account that you thought were the one you should go after, right?
into new buckets based on those signals, right? And what we’ve done for one account is in their top tier accounts, we have then splitted the engagement depending on the seniority level, meaning that
If the account is warm and some of those personas that that company want to go after are engaging with the content and the company and so on, we have said everything that is above direct align is being sent to the AE. Everything with below direct align is being sent to the BDR team. So.
There is also much more, again, a removal of silos here because we help the two teams to go after the account at the same time. They are aware of what’s going on. They’re working as a team, but they’re engaging different people in the account.

Richard Lane   26:45
Yeah, okay. I like to, I like to think of the AI being to augment and expand the capability of my team rather than thinking I don’t need SDRs. So in my head, I think the SDR of the future, probably not quite yet,
will have a number of executive assistants, agents, you know, so actually, could we all, could we afford to go and have an executive assistant for every SCR? I mean, I don’t even have an executive assistant, right? But could we, could we, could we go out and have, well, the answer is no, but actually with AI, we’re now.

Vincent   27:16
Haha.

Richard Lane   27:22
we’re now able to have teams of agents that go out and find the triggers, that build the compelling case, that link, go back into our data sets and instantly come back with the right messaging. So as the SDR, the orchestrator, the conductor of the orchestra,
I’m then able to tweak and to tailor and to change and use my humanness to make sure that all of that work is working appropriately.

Vincent   27:52
So, Richard, you’re 100% right, and you know what? For some companies who are actually deciding to make to to take that direction.
This is available today. Like the, so the German company that I was referring to earlier on, we were speaking to their CEO yesterday, literally. And the reason we spoke to him is said that he showed us what he built in Cloud Code over the last four or five weekends he spent on onto it.

Richard Lane   28:03
Right.
Right.

Vincent   28:21
And he’s like, so he basically has built multiple AI agents that pretty much do exactly what you just said. So I’m going to try to explain. So for example, he has one AI agent that is going to go and search for each account. So it works by account in this approach, right? So

Richard Lane   28:29
Right.

Vincent   28:40
he pushes one of his prospect account, let’s say, or one of his existing customer account. And that first AI agent is going to analyse the entire company based on what do they know already internally for that company. So do they have renewals? Do they have existing contracts? When are they renewing? How much they’re renewing for? How many seats and so on, right? The whole story.
Then he has a second agent that actually looks and searches the web for subsidiaries. So what subsidiaries this specific account has? Interestingly enough, in the conversation then, he said, oh, we came up with an example where we realised that the company had changed name.
three times over the last six years. But so what happened in their CRM? They have three different names. And it’s actually the same company today, right? But the SDR is not able to do that type of work, nor the AE. And so he had multiple, built multiple agents like this.

Richard Lane   29:30
Right, yeah.
Yeah.

Vincent   29:42
Inside of Claude, and at the end, he resulted into a Slack message that was maybe 25 lines long, sending all that information to the AE and the SDR, saying this is what we found, this is the executive report, this is what’s important to us, this is how we position our product, this is a mini introduction.
These are the people that we don’t know in the account, right, yet. And I can remember something else, but anyway, a very long list, super detailed. Oh yeah, the other thing that was super cool is that based on what I said about those three company names, the AI agent was also able to say, hey, we have three different company records.

Richard Lane   30:08
Yeah.

Vincent   30:26
in the CRM, so you need to delete or choose which one you want to keep. Now, this is all great and good and definitely saves time, but again, you can see that then you have the AEs who are going to do it, the AEs who are going to be like, oh, that’s not my job, I don’t even want to go and erase data and so on, right?

Richard Lane   30:44
Yeah.

Vincent   30:45
Honestly, so…

Richard Lane   30:47
Sounds like another agent to be built there, isn’t there?

Vincent   30:50
Exactly, but he’s like, he’s like, if you guys can help me build that and connect it into clay.
My team is going to save close to 50,000 hours this year.
50,000 hours. So he’s like, and this is just a scale up, like they have something like 25 reps. So it’s not even enterprise level. But he’s like, if you’re able to help me, this is priority number one for me because I saved my team 25,000 hours, which obviously costs money, right? And I can have them focus on what they need to do.

Richard Lane   31:04
Yeah, well…
Yeah.
Yeah.

Vincent   31:23
And so we talked about how actually those AI agents which were built in Cloud can then be connected inside of Claythrough API. And so this is where we close the loop to what you talked about in terms of having AI assistance. Very soon, and hopefully we’re going to be able to have that use case because we’re going to work on that on the next couple of weeks.

Richard Lane   31:23
Yeah.

Vincent   31:46
Very soon, if we’re able to do it, he’ll be able to have exactly that, but part of it will be fully automated through Clay. So the automation and the update of data is going to be pushed inside of their CRM without anybody touching it. And then on the other side, the golden nugget, if you like.
will be provided to the AE on a silver platter to say, hey, this is what you need to focus on. This is how you need to attack the account. And these are the new people we’ve added in the CRM for you to do so.

Richard Lane   32:16
Wow, that, yeah, that, I mean, that’s really exciting. And yeah, maybe offline we’ll talk a little bit more about that, because I think that’s just a huge, huge area of opportunity and interest. So thank you, thank you for sharing that story. I’m going to just for our final final bit of conversation, Vincent, I think

Vincent   32:28
A 100%.

Richard Lane   32:35
Let’s talk about the SDR or the, you know, the salespeople, because at the end of the day…
people are still key. There’s been lots of sort of views on this, oh, you know, the bar is raised. Coming out of COVID, particularly, I’ve found the face-to-face meeting, I think, has increased in resonance and importance because it used to be the way that people did business and now it’s become less normal. So therefore it’s become
Heightened in importance, but…
I guess with everything that you’ve been talking about and all of the work you’re doing in terms of getting the right data for the right person, the right company with a need in front of the salesperson at the right time, you could argue you don’t need to be an A player to be successful. So it’d be great to get your view on

Vincent   33:23
True.

Richard Lane   33:26
You know, does everyone need to be the best SDR in the world or can the OK SDRs become really successful and become A players with the right orchestration?

Vincent   33:36
Yeah, that’s a very good question. I guess the question is…
If you go for B players, what will those B players have to do?
Because…
B players could be B players because they had challenges with tools or that they had challenges understanding the product or they had challenges actually even pitching the prospect, right? And so you could argue that, yes, of course, you don’t necessarily have to hire A players anymore because you provide B players.
all the nuggets of information on the silver platter. But then the question is, if this helps you increase your reply rate and therefore gets them in front of people, will the B players still be able to actually have the right conversation with them? Because what we’re talking about here is
more about the nuances in the messaging that is being sent, which a lot of the time we say, and I remember training my team on it, where we were like, our messaging is not good enough, we need to improve our messaging. But actually, maybe the messaging didn’t have to be perfect, it just wasn’t the right timing, right?

Richard Lane   34:46
Yeah.

Vincent   34:47
But then my B players, once they were in front of those customers or over the phone with them, were still B players in terms of how they present the product, how they overcome objections, and things like this, right? So we need to still keep that in mind that B players can become A players for sure if they are trained and elevated properly.
But that would certainly for sure, 100% facilitate their task and their day-to-day activity.

Richard Lane   35:14
So maybe another way of looking at it is that in the modern world, there’ll be no room for the C players.

Vincent   35:22
Oh, for sure, 100%.

Richard Lane   35:22
Because actually, if you think about, I used the story about when I first started in sales, I had lots of conversations and it was very simple. You had to work hard and you create results. But it was much easier to connect with people. In today, 2026, it’s enormously more difficult
to connect with people despite the amount of technology around us, probably because of the amount of technology around us. But when you do connect…
It’s really important that you know the stories, you understand why someone should be interested. You’ve absorbed all of that information that has been delivered to you by the systems, etc. So I think probably over the last maybe 20 years, it’s been easier to hide because

Vincent   35:57
I.
Yes.

Richard Lane   36:12
A lot of a lot of a lot of action has not led to results because it’s been crunching data or trying to make your way around a rubbish CRM system, or you know, show me an organisation that’s got good data in their in their platform, so maybe maybe there’ll be less places to hide.

Vincent   36:27
100%. Yes, absolutely. Because the information that’s then delivered to those team members is actually so good and so precise that quickly you can see who’s going to be able to make the most of it and perform.

Richard Lane   36:34
Yeah.

Vincent   36:46
and who isn’t, right? And then it’s not, it’s not, you can always say, oh, well, it’s a numbers game and then I’m only getting the bad ones, but it’s not possible, right? So therefore, then, and that’s why I was referring to coaching training, because I’ve always believed looking at where I come from, even to be honest.

Richard Lane   36:56
Yeah.

Vincent   37:06
that if you really determine to learn something and grow and listen to feedback, right, and being coached properly, because sometimes you’re willing to do it, but you have the wrong coach, that can happen, right? But for people who are willing to go forward and learn, there will be room for them. But for the ones who are reticent or not comfortable with it,

Richard Lane   37:18
Yeah.

Vincent   37:27
For sure, they’ll be out much, much quicker than it used to be.

Richard Lane   37:30
Yeah, absolutely, because there’ll be so many more, there’ll be so many more trusted data points than than previously, weren’t there? So, yeah, yeah, very good.

Vincent   37:37
One 100%, and even now when we talk to clients and we see that some clients, for example, are giving cloud code access to their entire team, so we have one specifically where we help them to implement Clay, but because they wanted cloud code, they still gave cloud code to their entire sales development team.
To me, it felt like, wow, guys, you’re going to give them a tool and they’re going to waste their time. Of course, it’s important for them to learn, but it’s got to be allocated time or else they might end up spending hours in it. But what you also see suddenly is that the A players that used to be A players anyway,

Richard Lane   38:07
Yeah.

Vincent   38:16
are going to be the ones spending more time in those tools, learning how to use them, learning how to make the most out of them, and therefore continue to stay ahead of the game.

Richard Lane   38:26
Yeah, absolutely. So the…
The endpoint is be an A player.

Vincent   38:36
Don’t stay behind. You can’t stay behind. I think the end point is just, I think the end point for me is really keep learning, right? I mean, the technology is going so fast. And actually, it relates very much to probably a lot of our listeners here and your audience.

Richard Lane   38:38
You have to keep on, keep on learning. That’s keep on learning.

Vincent   38:54
It is also true for leaders, because I can tell you that I’ve had at least 10 conversations in the last month with sales leaders, sales development leaders, or even CROs, and who used to work

Richard Lane   38:57
Yeah, 100%.

Vincent   39:13
like us in the old ways, and they are rebuilding their teams in the same way today. And when I have the time to explain them exactly what it can do for their teams, typically it’s a big eye-opener because ultimately the challenge for them is they have their targets, they have their revenue, they need to move forward fast, right?

Richard Lane   39:19
Yeah.

Vincent   39:35
But this pushes them in the corner of going for the easy path that they know, rather than learning something new. And in this case, what we suggest is use it as a POC. Try with a small, something small, try to make it work first, we’ll help you out, we’ll make it work for you.
and then you grow it slowly. Or else in two years time, you continue to do what you do, you’re going to have 20 people in your team where you could have 5, and you’re not going to produce the output you’re meant to produce.

Richard Lane   39:57
Yeah.
Yeah, absolutely. I mean, always be learning is a good mantra for us to end on. And you’re right, that’s for sales professionals, sales leaders, marketing leaders, business leaders. You know, the world is changing so fast. We’re all sort of at the same point. So sort of it does level the playing field somewhat. So Vincent, look, we’re out of time for this episode. I’ve really

Vincent   40:18
Anyone, right?
Yeah.

Richard Lane   40:29
really enjoyed the conversation and I know our listeners will do too. So from myself and the team, thank you so much for being with us. Really appreciate it.

Vincent   40:38
No, thank you so much for the invite, Richard. I really appreciate it too. And yeah, I look forward for further conversations offline. Thank you so much.

Richard Lane   40:47
Fantastic. And to everyone that’s listening, thank you for tuning into another episode of Inside the Funnel. I’ve been your host, Richard Lane. If you found this episode useful or thought provoking, I think this one’s a must, feel free to share it with someone in your world. And if you’d like to learn more about how we help organisations build pipeline
just head over to durhamlane.com. Until next time, I’ll see you inside the funnel. Thank you.