Hunt with a Pack w/ Jeff Seymour | Ep. 213

In this episode of Biz/Dev, we talk with Jeff Seymour, CEO and Co-Founder of Softsellr, about what it actually takes to close and grow enterprise deals.

Jeff has spent years working inside complex sales environments, from Quantexa and TIBCO to now building Softsellr, and brings a clear perspective on how revenue really gets built.

We get into why most sales strategies break down in practice, how relationships actually drive deals forward, and what it takes to create consistency in long, multi-stakeholder sales cycles.

Along the way, we also talk about partner ecosystems, real account intel, and how buyers actually make decisions.

Softsellr Website

Jeff on LinkedIn

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David Baxter has been designing, building, and advising startups and businesses for over ten years. His passion, knowledge, and brutal honesty have helped dozens of companies get their start.

In Biz/Dev, David and award-winning Creative Director Gary Voigt talk about current events and how they affect the world of startups, entrepreneurship, software development, and culture.

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Transcript

[00:00:00] David: Alright, since we're done talking about Gary's inadequacies. Jeff, tell me about soft sell.

[00:00:06] Jeff: Harsh. Oh goodness. 

[00:00:09] Gary: Coming from a 5'6 guy.

[00:00:11] Jeff: This is great. This is so much fun.

[00:00:17] David: Hi everyone. Welcome to the Biz Dev Podcast, the podcast about developing your business. I'm David Baxter, your host, joined Per Usual by Mr. Gary Voight. What's up, man?

[00:00:25] Gary: Hello.

[00:00:26] David: More importantly, we are joined by Jeff Seymour, who is the CEO of soft seller. I liked your title on the, on your LinkedIn profile, which is recovering account executive, which I appreciate very much. I'm gonna ask you more questions about that later, but we'd like to start off our chat with some get to know you kinds of questions. So these

are not high impact lightning round. Yes. We start with the lightnings.

[00:00:55] Jeff: Okay. 

[00:00:55] David: So are you a coffee or tea person?

[00:01:00] Jeff: Both.

[00:01:01] David: Oh, he's going both ways. All right. All right. He's into

sales. 

[00:01:05] Gary: a wrong answer. I can feel that.

[00:01:06] Jeff: Yeah. 

[00:01:07] David: That's fair.

[00:01:08] Gary: Wait. I 

[00:01:09] David: the window seat or the aisle seat?

[00:01:11] Jeff: Depends on the size of the plane.

[00:01:14] David: Oh, wow. Alright. I'm feeling it. I'm

[00:01:16] Gary: You have a preference based on the plane.

[00:01:19] Jeff: Yeah. I mean if it's a, really depends on the plane, right? Some of the planes that are more modern have lots of leg room legroom is a thing for me.

[00:01:28] David: Are you tall? Does that mean you're tall?

[00:01:30] Jeff: used to be.

[00:01:31] David: You used to be tall. That's fair.

[00:01:34] Jeff: I'm like, I dunno. Six feet tall.

[00:01:36] David: Yeah. I'm five six, so that's tall. To me. That's huge. That's ginormous. Alright.

[00:01:42] Jeff: Leg room is good.

[00:01:43] David: Are you a spontaneous trip or planned trip guy?

[00:01:49] Jeff: Ooh. I think there's a recurring theme here, which is both, and I'll say that I'm meaning general, probably planned. But that being said, there have been two sort of NQA no questions asked. Weekends that were absolutely a blast. So I'm a kind of a fan of someone takes you away, they just show up and they say, get in.

You're like, all right,

[00:02:12] David: Oh yeah.

[00:02:14] Jeff: that's 

[00:02:14] Gary: That actually sounds fun. Yeah.

[00:02:16] Jeff: Yeah,

[00:02:17] David: that's how we do vacations with my wife. She is a huge planner

and so on 

[00:02:22] Gary: I, couldn't do that.

[00:02:23] David: just shows up. I don't let her plan anything, and that's her vacation. It's like just not being responsible for anything. And so I was like, Gomo, we're going here and have a good, and that's how we do it.

[00:02:34] Jeff: Yeah, well done.

[00:02:36] David: Do you like silence or background music while you are working?

[00:02:41] Jeff: You know what, in general, probably quiet, but off and on, I've found that, some instru instrumental music, maybe some jazz in the background. Anything that's got lyrics will distract me.

[00:02:51] David: Yeah.

[00:02:52] Gary: Yeah. 

[00:02:52] Jeff: to listen to jazz in the background. Yeah, instrumental,

[00:02:55] Gary: I got a pro tip for you. Find some movie scores with no lyrics, like top to bottom. 

[00:03:02] Jeff: really. 

[00:03:03] Gary: of movie scores and stuff like that, that like interstellar, things like that. That's 

[00:03:07] David: Yeah, it was someone I was just do a podcast and they said something very similar. They were like, there is, I'm trying to remember the movie. They said it wasn't Jurassic Park, but it was, it might've been Interstellar. It was like everything is more epic with Interstellar in the background. It's just

whatever you're doing is so much better.

[00:03:23] Jeff: Soft seller, probably the thing to start with is why does it exist? I'm like, yeah, why does it exist? And oh, what's that saying? Necessities the mother of invention. Is that

it? Yeah. So for most of the last six or seven years, I've been an enterprise software account exec, and I've worked at two companies.

One was owned by a PE firm, one was owned by owned by, funded by VCs. And what they had in common was the companies. Basically what it comes down, it's both enterprise software and but both of them, I would, I could say they're mid-size companies now. Mid-size is it's not a terribly helpful label or name, but really what it boils down to is, okay, if you're selling enterprise software, is the thing is the company, is it a household name? Oracle, SAP, Microsoft, et cetera, et. There's a dozen, maybe two dozen companies that are like, yeah, everyone knows who that is, right? And it matters because all of the outreach and telling the world that your company exists and that it's better than average and all these sorts of things. And whatever the form of outreach is, it's gonna fall on, it's gonna get lost. It's not gonna get through. And in the odd one, in a million chance that the cold call or the cold email or the whatever gets through to an actual human in middle or upper management, they're gonna be like, who? What? Never heard of you. There's a thousand software companies chasing me. Go away, right? This is the problem. and That's the problem that I had. 'cause most of the, as you guys, if much about enterprise software, it's like there's land and expand, right? So the hunter had to land and then maybe the same person's gonna farm and expand. But it's exceptionally difficult and has only become more difficult over the last. Five or ten years as more marketing automation shows up and makes it easier to send, to blast out a thousand emails or a day or fake a conversation or with ai, right? All of it has become just that much more difficult to get through. So I had that problem in spades. I solved it when I worked at the last company that I worked for Pro.

I solved it programmatically and I thought, and in a previous life, I've been a software engineer and a product manager, and. A whole bunch of other things, and I thought let's build this. Let's productize it. That's the, that's it, that's the story. That's why it exists, is because I had that problem.

I figured there's probably a few thousand or a few tens of thousands of other account execs that have this problem and this needed. This needed to be done. Needed to be built.

[00:05:56] David: So practically speaking, what does Soft seller do? If I sign up for it, what is it doing for me?

[00:06:01] Jeff: If you if you work for a company that's an enterprise software company, and so that means, what does that mean? That means it's a software company and the deals are big, like a hundred thousand dollars plus, right? And the distinction is there because what it means is there's a bunch of people on the buying side that need to be corralled, need to be convinced. And it's a long process. It can be complicated or complex. So that's enterprise software sales. What it, what the platform does is it places account execs, salespeople into private collaboration groups that sell to the same end customer company. So for example, maybe there's a hand and these account execs, they work at different companies. Okay. So maybe it's the three of us. We're all trying to get into Home Depot, and so we're in a, the platform places us into a private collaboration group. On our platform. We get on a call, it looks like this, you see the smiley faces, there's a notes section, and we start building things together.

Like we build the org chart, we build the tech stack. And really what matters it's is like you can get bits of that here and there, and most of the time it's inaccurate. It's sufficiently inaccurate that you can't trust it. If you can't trust it. It's. It's. just useless. Okay. And the reason why things get inaccurate is because there's no motivation for the person that put it into whatever application you're using to keep it up to date. Nobody's more motivated for stuff to be up to date than an account exec's working account. Okay? And so. we put account execs into collaboration groups on our platform. We build relationships that transcend just oh, there's a difference right? Between, Hey David, can you get me into Home Depot, this week?

And you're gonna be like, 'cause you've got a, you've got a relationship there, right? You're gonna do some due diligence about, okay, hang on, I gotta get to know this Jeff Guy, because they've gotta trust him as a guy, as a man, as a person, right? As a fellow sales rep. And the second hurdle is. Jeff, the thing that you're selling, it better be like distinctly average to above average, like pretty good. And I need to be able to demonstrate and articulate that to you. Otherwise, why are you to stick your neck out and take career risk, right? You're not. And these deals, again, they're big. So there's time to, to grow a relationship. David and I are salespeople and we work for software companies and we have an alliances organization.

'cause someone figured out, boy, it sure is great when someone gives you a warm introduction. We have Alliance partners to do that. Yay. In theory, fantastic. In practice, what happens is the two of us get together and the two alliances people, we get on a call and very quickly David figures out there's a party that we're both at and David brought. The beer and the chips and the dip and all the things, and I show up with empty pockets and that gets figured out in about 30 seconds. Okay. So it's very transactional and if there's no immediate and obvious way for David to be made whole, then he is just drops the mic and leaves and, it's useless.

It's a bilateral arrangement. So I lived through that and I've seen it time and time again. So this platform that we've built it's it isn't b it isn't bilateral, it's multilateral. So we can have up to a dozen sales reps that are all selling to say, home Depot trying to get in. And we necessarily do this. Meticulously. So the first two to three people that are in the collaboration group are plugged in there. They know stuff. They know people. They've had the account for a while. Great. Right now we've got a critical mass of a lot of knowledge, a lot of intelligence at that point. Brilliant. We can sprinkle in some hunters in the top that hunters don't know anything.

Despite all the expensive apps that our company paid for or pays for, it's u That's stuff is usually outdated and inaccurate and wrong. So we're flying blind. Now you put account, hunters into that mix. They're gonna be massively grateful. Okay, so the payback is this is enterprise software.

That means sometimes the deals they're complex. What does that mean? That means all the salespeople that are in these they tend to be subject matter experts. 'cause you have to be right. If you're gonna sell this complex thing to healthcare or financial or banks or insurance or whatever, you, you need to come across as credible and you gotta know what you're talking about. So what that means is a lot of the time, Dave and I, if we're selling to Home Depot to fix whatever, part of the organization's, whatever problem, it's, we might bump into each other at low's. And maybe I'm plugged in there and there's my chance to pay him back. Now there's a, there's a. There's way more I can go into and I'm sorry, and I need to not do that. But there's a really important multiplier here, which is we had a chance to help each other out on different accounts, which is obvious, but a lot of the time it's just gonna be, Dave David's got 20 accounts and I got 20 accounts. Ah, and there's we're only in one thing together. It's Home Depot. There's no chance for me to pay him back. That kind of sucks. David says, hang on, Jeff. Here's five or six other accounts that I'd really some help getting in, or any of these yours. And I'll say, oh shit. Sorry. No, but I know that one of my teammates, Bob, he's got that account, and Sally's got that. So now I gotta pay him back. I got, I'm in his debt. I need to have a real relationship. I'm gonna help him out. I'm gonna, so what I've, just by introducing my teammates to him, I've just, what I've just done is I've just leveraged my, I'm gonna make my team. More, not just me, but my team more productive. And now also David and his team. We've just, the mesh, the tentacles are going all over the place with productivity. And that matters because that's making the whole sales organization more productive. Not just the guy. Not just the rep. And that's game changing

[00:11:28] David: This is so interesting in the world of AI and. And automated everything. This is like the antithesis of that.

[00:11:37] Jeff: It absolutely is. And it's funny you say that 'cause I bump into that on a regular basis. And there are, in the last year or so, there are about a hundred new a Ai, SDR. So SDR is sales development rep, junior sales rep. And someone who's doing the smiling and dialing, the cold calling and all the different things to get the, the expensive closer an actual, call the prospect.

So that's a, it's a brutal job. Brutal job. So it's been, it's increasingly being replaced by AI bots. The problem with that. Here's the thing. Think about what is ai? Okay, so it's some data science and some, and that's fantastic but it, but what's it working on? It's working on different data sets, primarily. What? Primarily data that's in the CRM. How'd that get there? Different people put information to the CRM and now here's your problem. Okay. The people that are the closers, the account execs that in relationships, it is absolutely not in our interest. For the information in the CRM that all this AI SDR stuff is built on top of it, is not in our best interest for that information to be up to date accurate, complete any of that.

'cause Why? Because we need to control the information and control the narrative and control everything. 'Cause we need to be able to do our jobs and that's part of it. Okay? So what you're gonna find time and time again is a whole bunch of pretty experienced senior seasoned. Salespeople, account execs we're like, yeah, like I said, we're not gonna put everything in the CRM and we're not gonna trust what's in the CRM. So all these 100 competitors that, that we've got that are A-I-S-D-R platforms, they produce all sorts of Wow. They mine the CRM and they mine this and that. Because in most mid-sized enterprise software companies the expensive closer person that's working on this we're like, we're busy chasing all sorts of different things, and we need to be, focused. We need to be efficient, and we need to have like reliable, accurate data.

And you just don't get it from A-I-S-D-R. You don't.

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[00:14:11] Jeff: So the key. For soft seller is building these account execs, build real relationships that get to help each other out.

And it's whatever happens in Vegas, stays in Vegas, whatever happens on our platform, it stays there and we don't export it to the CRM because if you were to do that, you've, you're no better off. You've just shot yourself in the foot. If you export all that to a CRM, the reason. This is so funny. There's a handful of times in the last two or three months where I've had a phone call or a video call like this with a sales director, sales vp, chief revenue officer, and they're trying to understand what is it and how does it work?

And then a light bulb goes off and then all of a sudden they go, you see the mouse gooping, they click. And I ask em what did you just do? And the guy says I just stopped the recording and followed by, hang on, click. What'd you just do there? I just deleted the file. Why'd you do that? Because this, all of his or her calls are being auto recorded, auto stuffed into the CRM. And he or she didn't want that to happen. He wanted to control, ah, I get this. Now I can see where I can use this. And he need, you need to do that on your own time. Your own. Yeah. Otherwise it goes to the CRM.

And in this case, the person would have the next layer of management going, wait, you're gonna do what? Why? Dude, let me do my job. Okay. My job is deliver revenue. Your job is, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera, right? And that's what always happens. That proves that, that proves the case for why this makes sense and why this works.

[00:15:40] David: So does this only does this. These relationships. I know all sales are relational, but that's always been true. But does this break apart when you are going for smaller fish, like you're mentioning enterprise sales? Specifically? If I was targeting smaller, medium sized businesses, obviously I'm throwing a lot more lines out, right?

Phishing analogy. So I get that the CRM probably becomes more important 'cause now instead of dozens of contacts, I might have hundreds of contacts.

[00:16:10] Jeff: that's where it breaks because you can't, you can only be on, you can only be on so many regularly, like recurring calls on the platform that it's just gonna break. Otherwise, you'd spend your entire day on the platform. And I think that's un unreasonable or unrealistic. I think it's fair to assume that an account exec say that has say 10, 15, 20, 25 accounts, right?

They can whittle that down to their favorite 15, 18, 20. They can be on every day on one, hour long call on the platform. And keep up to speed. Keep up to date.

[00:16:43] David: It reminds me early in my career, I used to build energy trading platforms. I was in Houston, which is like energy capital of the world. And I, we would go out to the trading floor where they were doing natural gas primarily.

And these guys had, this was in early two thousands. This was a long time ago, but they would've eight monitors, right?

And this bag of monitors were like 14 inches, right? So they were everywhere. And it was crazy. 'cause as a developer, me might have two at that time.

But what you'd get to know some of these guys and this, these guys are selling like constantly, right? That's their world.

And they would have a chat client, say you had four monitors, four of them.

One would be weather always, and four of them would just literally be, and this is like a OL chat, like old school, I am messenger kind of stuff. But each monitor would be one dude and they were chatting with one dude, four people a day, all day, every day. 'cause they were just trading with each other

all day. They, that guy worked at another company and he was selling something related, but not the 

[00:17:46] Jeff: they were trading futures contracts.

[00:17:48] David: They would just swap, Hey, I don't need this. You need this? Yeah. I'll take that. And that's how they made their quotas every day. And it reminded me, it's like I'm thinking you're with, your Home Depot crew and he is I got this lead.

I don't need 'em. Do you need 'em? And you guys are just swapping it and stuff like that. And it just has a similar vibe to it. 

[00:18:03] Jeff: Yeah, 

[00:18:03] David: But I could see, do you think though, if you go down market to the smaller ones, that those AI and the CRMs and stuff, those are useful and because you're, you have to, you gotta organize.

You're too busy otherwise, 

[00:18:16] Gary: or at least it provides a decent starting point, right?

[00:18:19] Jeff: I mean there's I don't wanna say there's no utility to the ai SDR it's gonna be case by case, but the problem that they're gonna have, like I keep going back to, is it's gonna be based largely on the information in the CRM. Now, if the company, the nature of the deals is $5,000 deals, okay, then. Let's be honest, you're probably not gonna have a pretty expensive account exec with 10, 15, 20, 25 years experience that can manage cross lines of business, 7, 8, 9 figure deals. You're not, you don't need that for $5,000 deals. They're much smaller then they're much faster and they're, so it's probably not a good match for this platform. It's

also probably become Econo. Uneconomic, right? 'cause the amount of money that we would have to charge would be like,

eh, 

[00:19:09] David: Yeah, I get that.

[00:19:10] Jeff: yeah. There's a, so there's a sweet spot.

[00:19:13] David: So you guys have been around about a year. Where does that put you in startup land? Are you guys bootstrapping it? Did you take money? Are you on a runway? Where are you guys at?

[00:19:21] Jeff: Yeah. We started doing this two or three years ago, and my co-founder and I, and we were doing it in like a stealth mode 'cause we kept our day jobs

and had a small dev team offshore and built it. And, it happened way too slowly. And I think. Most of the mistakes, many, most of the, for atypical. Mistakes. Yep. Made them.

[00:19:45] David: Totally understand.

[00:19:46] Jeff: Yep. And yeah, every, it's just whatever they are, I've, made them and we took it increasingly seriously. The more time that went by and the more checks, the more money. So about a year ago, yeah, we both quit our day jobs and and jumped in with both feet, and I put on my product manager hat and finished the rest of, driving this thing to development.

So I would say late last year. Late summer to early fall we reached a point that it's okay, this is built enough. Let's go find some customers. And and that's when the fun really begins, right?

[00:20:19] David: Sure, yeah. You're in the middle of what we call the slog, which we define as from the moment you launch to the time anyone cares, and so that can be weeks to years depending on who you are. So how is your slog going?

[00:20:33] Jeff: It is it is definitely a slog. What we've, we were given two objections. Two, like the general sort of reception is, Hey, this is cool. We're happy to try this out and let's you know, who are we gonna put on it? And, but there were almost always two objections and it took a while to figure out how to solve them. One was, wait a minute. We, one of the things you're asking us to disclose is we need to identify whether this account is a customer or prospect. And if it's a prospect, not a problem. If it's a customer account yeah, we've got an NDA that says we're not supposed to say anything or talk about anything about that.

So yeah, that's a problem. Figured out how to solve that and how to solve that is basically implement a proxy. So now we no longer ask well. We do, but we don't display it on the platform. So it's plausible deniability, which is important.

[00:21:25] David: So if you had five years of smooth sailing. Nothing major comes up. Where is soft seller?

[00:21:33] Jeff: Oh boy, what a great question. Okay. Massively scaling. Okay. And the reason why that is because, sorry, I mentioned there was two reasons. One was the, we overcome the privacy and the second one was, we have to fix the, overcome the chicken and egg problem. Like everyone that gets going is okay, how do you go from zero to one and one to two and to 10? And so the thing that we've built, what is it? It's basically an ecosystem. It's a bunch of collaboration networks, so it's an eco ecosystem. So we have the chicken egg problem on steroids. It's not just, it's the utility of our platform is zero until it reach a critical mass, right? And all these different pods and these different collaboration groups or packs. And then once, once it's of a, any kind of size or utility, it is necessarily in the interest of the people that are already there to invite others and thus the utility grows to, and then it grows and feeds on itself, right? So there's alignment of interest. Getting it off the ground. And so there's a handful, a couple of handfuls I suppose at this point.

Yeah. Of a prospect counselor give us a call back when you've got, this. I'm like, okay, so we're tracking all that and Yep. And so to solve that problem, other than slowly slogging it out, which is slog is such a great term is it occurred to me I need to find a way to solve this problem more elegantly, like more efficiently. So it occurred to me well. From my background, PE companies, some private equity companies, own portfolios of enterprise software companies, and they all have this problem. So if I could figure out if I could approach some of these PE firms, which is what I've been doing recently okay, why don't we explain I'll explain to them the geometric effect, the geometric network effect. Of, okay, you've got 20, 30 enterprise software companies, right? And they're all trying to just show them the grass, show 'em the data, show 'em how it works. And it's yeah, this, the utility is massive. So now all I have to do is get one private equity company with a vertical market focus and get a couple of handfuls of companies, and then this thing just catches fire.

So nevermind having, several private equity companies. So five years from now. This. I really hope this is game changing because, not just for personal reasons for me, but it's also the, all the account execs that are slogging away, pounding away, trying to figure out how do I solve this and being. Increasingly run into AI bots, right? So you guys probably, you've had this on LinkedIn. Do you ever get like a LinkedIn connection request that it's clear they did some homework and they researched it, but you're a little bit creeped out by it

And you're like, did you really do this? Is this real?

Or did a bot go do that? And it's just the right amount of stuff they put in it. It backfires 

like, I'm not gonna 

it's the opposite. 

[00:24:26] David: lot of the ones where, and what's interesting, I get enough of them now 'cause my, I have, we, I own two companies and so I'm, and a podcast, which is hilarious. Now the podcast is getting cold called email as though it's its own company, which is hilarious 'cause there's not, there's no revenue here.

But anyway, I get, so I get a lot of these. And what's interesting, when you get enough of them, you start to see the similarities and you start to see. Like they're grabbing a sentence from your latest episode on biz dev

And it's from five different people, but they all start to sound very similar.

And you're like, at first I was impressed. It was like, wow, someone listened to my podcast. Look at me.

Yeah. They didn't, they don't 

[00:25:07] Jeff: No, they don't. And so what that is from a sales perspective, it's a first impression, right? And the first impression, if it's inauthentic, oh boy, does that feel fast?

[00:25:19] David: Yeah. is a bit 

[00:25:20] Jeff: we are. 

[00:25:20] Gary: that when AI is built to try to help in as many, I guess you could say, tech industries as possible, but in the sales. I guess you could call it an industry or the field of sales. The more personal it is, it seems like the better it is where AI actually hurts that relationship building, because it does come off as creepy, like you said, unless it's just like data analysis and stuff like that, but the actual reaching out to people is, it's a bit jarring.

[00:25:48] David: I could see it being useful in a scenario where, like you were saying before, I am pitching a company like my little company, Teela. No one has a clue who that is. And if I'm just doing this as almost as a an awareness situation where it's just spray and pray, you don't know who I am. I'm not doing, trying to build some relationship.

I'm just trying to let you know this exists and maybe if you click on my website, maybe that would work in mass.

I could see that theoretically working there. But if you, once you get to the point where I need to know who you are, AI is done.

[00:26:19] Jeff: so 

[00:26:20] Gary: I think that speaks to the difference also between marketing and sales. Like marketing is still letting people know, but then the actual closing of the deal is the sales.

[00:26:29] David: Yeah.

[00:26:30] Jeff: Well done. You've actually, I wish we had two

[00:26:33] Gary: Every now and then 

[00:26:34] Jeff: there's so much to talk about. You've,

you guys are really. 

[00:26:38] David: for a month.

[00:26:39] Jeff: What you've zeroed in on there is the joining point between marketing and sales, right? The job of marketing is to what? To tell the world that your company exists, hopefully is better than average and maybe even relevant. And make it easier for someone to get, a salesperson, a connection, a phone call, right? Something going. That's how these things work. Unfortunately, most of the most enterprise software companies that I've known and worked for. These are two separate organizations and there's not a lot of, it's us and them, and marketing is what marketing gets rewarded or tracked for how much of, how much something did you do.

And it, it'll, and then it'll get thrown over the fence and sales will look at it and this is crap. And so it's really unfortunate that a lot of organizations are designed or built that way. But, you mentioned David a really good point, which is okay, maybe I makes a lot of sense for the analysis.

Yes. And maybe it can also be spooled up for automation of all that outreach to tell the world that we exist. 

[00:27:34] David: Yeah. 

[00:27:35] Jeff: And that's how it's been used. And that is a big problem because if something can be automated, then the cost for whatever goes down and that's great. Everyone's done that.

Everyone has done that. So we're 

[00:27:46] David: LinkedIn boxes are full.

[00:27:48] Jeff: yeah.

[00:27:49] David: Yeah.

I think I had five just today

just.

[00:27:52] Jeff: It's just so broken. The whole thing is just broken. I don't know how you cut through all of that. And it's also more and more expensive to get software that'll do that, do it effectively. It's a bit of an arms race, right?

[00:28:06] David: Sure.

[00:28:07] Jeff: And so the customer AC or cac, customer acquisition cost is going up, like for most companies faster than their revenue is so 

boo. 

[00:28:16] David: Vicious.

[00:28:17] Gary: Jeff, since you've just started, you said over the last couple of years, and then you've also had a long history with sales and working with enterprise companies,

what would your perspective be with giving three pieces of advice to a new entrepreneur starting their own company?

[00:28:34] Jeff: So the, your producer or your. Helper. One of your helpers earlier sent me this and I thought thank goodness she sent me this. 'cause this is such a

[00:28:42] Gary: That's our marketing director, Christie.

[00:28:44] Jeff: she's fantastic. And and so I replied back. I got, this is a great question and I started writing down a whole bunch of answers and a bunch more questions. I, I'll talk fast 'cause we're probably gonna run out of time, but boy oh boy I have a lot. Let's See things that like an entrepreneur should know and ask and get comfortable with. One how exactly are you gonna get your firsthand customers?

How exactly are you gonna do that? It's oh, okay, we're gonna do that. How exactly? Because going from zero to one, brutal, right? Going from one to two less brutal. And it gets easier, but it's, you have to think about that. And, test it and be ready for it. How, unrelated question is, how are you gonna overcome the chicken and egg problem? I have that, I have it as I say, on, on steroids, and I think I figured out a way, which is, okay, this is an ecosystem.

How do I rather than go hunting for one company? How about I go hunting for a leg? An instant ecosystem of a hundred like a be a big PE firm. God, how can you solve whatever your problem is? And this is another really important one, know how or why your product or service is better than your competitors.

And know this on a persona basis for all of the stakeholders. Everyone that has a say, what's their angle, what's their fear? Everything comes down to, everything comes down to a person. Where are they in the organization and what do they need to hear and see and what do they really want to make sure it isn't that what is it not? Okay? You have to understand that really well because buying decisions are made by people. They made by committees, and committees are made up of people, and people have their own agendas. It's usually to get to the next layer, right? So in enterprise sales,

there's a right, there's a whole bunch of people that had to be involved in a decision. And depending on the, so the size or the organization, the customer organization you're talking about, the buyer had to do battle for months and months, if not years, against the phalanx of other directors and VPs that also need or want their problem solved. And that person is gonna what? They're gonna stick their neck out and say, yeah, this is the company that we're gonna go with. So they need to be able to reach out and just hold the salesperson and say, this is gonna work. Anyway God, there's so many more questions that I've got here, but

[00:31:03] Gary: Maybe we'll save that for an extended interview. But for now, Jeff, if anybody wants to learn more about you or about Soft Seller, where's the best place to find you? 

[00:31:14] Jeff: I'm not that interesting. And I hope Soft seller is interesting, so I hope people go there. It's soft Seller, S-O-F-T-S-E-L-L r.com.

[00:31:23] Gary: We'll make sure the link gets into the show notes.

[00:31:26] Jeff: Yay. Thank you. This has been fun.

[00:31:30] David: I'm glad you have

[00:31:31] Gary: Thank

you for joining 

[00:31:31] David: just about the same. Say the same thing. Thank you so much for joining us.

[00:31:35] Jeff: It's been a lot of fun. You guys have a great banter. Just you work really well together, so that's pretty cool.

[00:31:41] Gary: Yeah. Like David said, we've known each other for over 20 years and it's like a.

[00:31:47] David: keeps getting uglier and uglier.

[00:31:48] Gary: and you keep getting taller. So with that long hair of yours,

[00:31:53] David: That's all he is got.

[00:31:54] Jeff: Oh, a double whammy.

[00:31:56] David: Nice. Nice. On that fabulous note, we are gonna sign off. Thank you guys very much. Not Gary. No, you I don't. Thank you. Thank you, Jeff, for joining and we will be back next week. Have a good one, everybody.

[00:32:08] OUTRO: That wraps up this episode of the Biz Dev Podcast, and this time you get me, Jen Baxter, co-owner of Big Pixel and David's Wife. Yep. I finally took the mic or rusted it away from David. Biz Dev is a production of Big Pixel, a US-based provider of UX design strategy, and custom software. This podcast is edited by Audio Wiz Matt McCracken and Christie Pronto marketing guru for Big Pixel.

Want to connect, shoot us an email at hello@thebigpixel.net. Or find us on Instagram, Facebook, YouTube, X and LinkedIn.