Kushal: Hi there. Welcome to “On the Flip Side”, a podcast for anyone who wants to live their best sales life. We're going to be talking to buyers, sales managers, SDRs and AEs about things like, what does it take to be a great sales manager? Or how can you go home happy month after month? So let's dive right in. 

Welcome back to “On the Flip Side” with Wingman. I'm Kushal, and today’s show is going to be all about sales prospecting and growth done right. Our guest today is Tito Bohrt, the sales mad scientist as he describes himself on LinkedIn. Tito is the CEO of AltiSales, which offers world class training to budding SDRs and helps companies ramp up their business. Tito, great to have you on the show. 

Tito Bohrt: Thank you. Pleasure to be here.

Kushal: To get started, Tito, could you tell us about AltiSales, about your journey, and you know how everything came together?

Tito Bohrt: Yeah, I'll make this short for the audience. So not to bore you with too many details. But AltiSales started in 2011 as an outsourced sales development company, initially with the idea to set up an operation that will be fun and cost effective for US businesses to run sales development. So our first office was in La Paz, Bolivia. And then we built offices in Costa Rica and Mexico. Differently from most outsourcing companies, we weren't necessarily only there for cost cutting, but we were there to make it fun and a great adventure. So most of the employees we hired were actually hired in the US. And they were flown down to Costa Rica, Mexico, and Bolivia. They were given apartment space, they were given office space, and we would start training from scratch. And we would try to ramp up these employees from being most of them recent college grads or career switchers into world class performing SDRs within three to six months. 

I consider that to be kind of like an exchange program type idea or an internship type idea. And then everybody who succeeded would come back to the states and work out of our clients offices. So it’s a lot of fun. In today's day and age the company has pivoted, it has changed how we operate. Now we have close to 40 employees across the world. And we continue to be dedicated to figuring out the outbound motion for companies. Our services now range from doing a lot of data research, figuring out your target buyer personas, writing all the sequences, building all the cold calling scripts, iterating on messaging via LinkedIn, direct mail, SMS, we go across the board. And what most clients are hoping to get from us is revamping the way that they're doing sales development. A lot of our clients either don't have a team and they're starting from scratch, they are a series ‘A’ or even a seed stage company that needs to build a team. Or other clients include companies like IBM, they're way more advanced, but what they're lacking is a data driven method to drive meetings in a predictable and scalable way. So a lot of fun, lots of managers, distributed team, the majority of not all of our SDRS nowadays are in the States. But we do have support team CSMs, data research, SalesOps, RevOps, and many of those roles that are completely international. So despite just having, you know, close to 40 employees at this point, we are I believe in 11 countries so, so it’s quite fun.

Kushal: Flying everyone down to Costa Rica, besides the fact that it's a lot, it sounds like a lot of fun.

Tito Bohrt: It was the combination of it being fun and being cost effective, right. If you look at the salaries of recent college grads in Costa Rica on the comparable cost of living, right sometimes like explaining like, this is like the cost of living between San Francisco and call it Boise, Idaho is the same cost of living, like difference between Boise Idaho and Costa Rica, like Costa Rica is so much less expensive. Now, if you're a graduate in college, and I say what do you rather live like San Francisco, Boise or Costa Rica? Like a lot of people are gonna be like, oh my God, Costa Rica. We ended up doing is we paid them really good salaries for the comparable economy, right. At the same time, it's very cost effective for the business. So it's a win-win for them. The employee gets to travel, everything's planned for them and so on, while at the same time the business doesn't need to be paying you know, San Francisco salaries you can pay, not even Boise salaries but even lower than Boise, Idaho or whatever. You can look at other states like Iowa, Arkansas, like you can, you can make it a little fun and cost effective. And nowadays, we don't do that, we don't hire SDRs and allow them to relocate or pay their staff or whatever. We don't have offices. We're 100% remote. Every one of our employees works either out of co-work or from home. That's that has made it really, really awesome. Because now we just hire the best SDRs out there that we can find doesn't matter no matter where they are, or we pay top dollar. So I've been, I'm a big advocate of SDRs, making over $100,000 a year. And I even say if you're San Francisco based, and you're the top performing SDRs, and you're producing three times more than your peers, there should be no reason for you not to be making $200,000.

Kushal: Just going back a little bit to when you're actually recruiting these reps, right, straight out of college, what traits are you really looking for? And that could maybe help a lot of the sales managers who see this kind of look out for that as well?

Tito Bohrt: Yeah, it's interesting, because nowadays, we don't hire SDRs out of college. Unfortunately, you know, we need SDRs that can hit the ground running and be productive very, very quickly. Because we are outsourcing slash consulting slash Venture Capital Company, I didn’t get into that part. But sometimes we even invest in the companies that want to get some of our services. There are plenty of opportunities out there for SDRs. I believe that the best way to learn is to start listening to podcasts or following the right people. There's excellent content, and if you just put… consider it to be like a college course, like go online, follow Kevin Dorsey, follow Josh Braun, go follow me. Go follow Ethan Parker. Go follow Jason Bay. Go follow Collin Cadmus, there's so many people out there putting excellent content. And if you just do that, and start executing and learn some of the tools, you can go from, you know, starting a company with like, zero experience to being a top performer SDR in three or four months. It is really not crazy to ramp up and become really good at what you do. And what's happening in the market too, is people are stopping to see the sales development role as just entry level. Like a very high producing SDR is worth more than a medium producing account executive. So that's why I'm seeing now 2021 salaries for SDRs are skyrocketing. I remember the days where base salaries for the SDRs would start at 30k. Even if you're in a major city, it was like 36k to like 40k and that was tops, right. Nowadays, if you're in a major city, like I'm seeing salaries start, like 48k, 50k, 52k to 55k. If you're in places like San Francisco, New York, 57k, 59k, 62k. Like it's getting crazy. And you know, after the pandemic, a lot of companies have like changed the way that they structure salaries or hiring remote or whatever else. We kind of do the same, but we pay over 60k, if you're in New York, or San Francisco, if you're in most other places are our starting salaries is at 50k. And then with earnings, you get to do 72k, 74k. So it's good, I think there's very many different ways to learn. And then once you've learned the craft, go find a company like us that is looking for an experienced SDR with good skills with, you know, willingness to learn and adapt and get better every day. We got an incredible setup internally, like we measure, obsess about data and metrics and just trying to get better every day.

Kushal: Just for reps to really ramp up over time and really get the skills that they need as well. So what are really, maybe say the top three skills that you think are the most important things for reps to focus on, those could be technical, non-technical people skills and put them as people say out of those be?

Tito Bohrt: Yeah, that's a common question and a really hard one to answer. Because a lot of people ask me, what are the top three things? What are the top seven things? And I say, you know, sales development is like a sport. Like think about it like soccer or basketball. And if you go ask LeBron James or you go and ask like Cristiano Ronaldo or Messi like, what are the top three skills to be a great soccer player? They're gonna tell you like, Come on, dude. Like, are you joking? There's no top three skills. Like there's 100 things you got to learn how to do like, you got to know how to position but also how to pass, how to shoot., two pointers, three pointers, free throws, like dribbling, passing, like, ball handling, but there's a million things and like, if any of those you are terrible at that's gonna hurt you, right. But it's not like, okay, if you're just good at shooting, you're gonna play. Nope, that's not true. Like, if you don't know how to pass well, like, you're gonna play your weaknesses, right. 

So I think about that when I think of top performing SDRs I don't know top three skills. But like, if I had to put it like what are some things you need to do to be successful? When I started my career, and I started as an SDR too, I was literally working like seven in the morning to like midnight, like non-stop, like crazy. For a couple of years when I was starting my career, I slept in the office because it was just too late. It was 2, 3 in the morning. I wanted to be back on the phone at seven. I was like it's a 25 minute ride home, 25 minute ride back, not worth it. You know, get on the couch and sleep in the office and maybe that's like a little bit extreme, but that also helped me develop like, be really good. And here's what I would do. I would be like on the phone and, and sending emails like back to back to back to back using my sequences between, you know, 7am pacific time all the way to like 5pm pacific time, or 5pm. I was like, okay, I'm done for the day, I'll go eat something, take a quick like rest and build more lists, like I had to get on Google and start figuring out who are the new accounts I'm gonna go after, the new target personas, how am I going to refine messaging? And then I would go look at my inbox and look at every email response that I got, and see what email template drove that response, or the response, like a positive response, like was somebody excited to talk to me because of a certain email. I started like tallying up and marking, like, what's working, what's not, right. 

Same on the phone, like I would try different scripts, and I would mark every time somebody connected. And then I would mark every time somebody like accepted my conversation, every time somebody booked a meeting, that helped me refine, like, what is the messaging. So again, you introduce me like I do on LinkedIn, I'm a mad scientist, unless you're measuring things, you're not going to be able to succeed. And so the ability to like, measure and understand a little bit about statistics and probabilities, and understanding, like at what point is something statistically significant, like understanding what a ‘P’ value is, and how you derive it, and, you know, understanding confidence intervals, things like that, that can be very useful. But that's only useful if you're gonna hustle. And if you're gonna hustle, you'll be able to make 50, 80, 100 $150 a day and you know, send the other 50, 70, 80, 100 and 150 emails a day and do LinkedIn and do video and do direct mail and do the whole thing, you can get really good really, if you think as an SDR, they're gonna make 20 phone calls a day, which probably takes half an hour, and then use like three hours of your day or five hours of your day to just look up information and phone numbers and emails, and then you're gonna blast 100 emails with the same template, and that's your workday and then you're done, you're never going to be good on your jobs getting out. If you're on the opposite side. If you're strategic, or you're in here for the long term.

Kushal: We've talked about how things have changed right, a little bit from maybe when you started out? What do you think has really changed when it comes to sales prospecting besides the technology of course? 

Tito Bohrt: Yeah, technology has influenced a lot. But I think that the adoption of sales engagement has made it so that everybody can email blast like crazy. And now there's auto dialers that work really well. I mean, I'm an investor in Orem, do I use it? Not right now, because I think there's gonna be a strategic way to use it later on, on enterprise accounts. I think the biggest thing is that a lot of techniques and methods that worked in 2009, 2010, 2011, 2012 no longer work. Like, I shocking as it sounds, people are still reading like Predictable Revenue, and be like, Oh, my God, this is genius. Like, what a great book, I'm going to start email blasting and asking like, who's a person that's responsible for ‘X’, I'm just gonna get 100 meetings a day. And then they try that and they get zero. And they're like, what's happening? And it's like, yeah, man, like, you are way too late for that. In today's day and age, we all get hundreds of emails, like, obviously, I'm a CEO, right. But ask any director level plus or VP level plus, how many prospecting emails they get a day, they'll tell you, they delete about 200 400 emails a day, right that they don't even read. Like in any given hour, I get 30 emails, so you need to catch my eye for me to open that email. And for that, you need to personalize it. And if I open it, and I'm start reading and either, it doesn't resonate with the exact problem I'm trying to solve, which on any given date is two or three very specific things, so your chances of getting it right are like minimal to zero, or it doesn't look personalized, I will stop reading after the first or second sentence, right. 

Now imagine you tell me like I get an email that says, Hi, Tito, I might have the wrong number. I tried calling you at 65028 blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. By the way, congrats on leading AltiSales. I see you've been investing in companies for about 11 years, and your team has grown over 60% over the past 24 months according to LinkedIn. A lot of companies that are growing that fast tend to need a better integration with their tools and blah, blah, blah, like, oh my God, like, I read that first sentence. And you're like, telling me about the companies I've invested in, my company growth and like my situation. And I'm immediately like, excited to like, talk to you. I'm like, wow, like if you've spent this much effort into getting to know me, and now you're sending me a message where I'm feeling warm and fuzzy because you're not a machine, you're a human and you're messaging me human to human then I do want to interact with you. 

So relevancy is very important, but also knowing how to craft a message that makes an executive feel like warm and fuzzy like you know them and you're not spraying and praying. Those executives will respond to those emails. Thank you for your outreach. And even sometimes ask you like, how are you doing this? Like, can I hire you? Like we get our SDRs get offered jobs like one of my SDRs this past week, he was cold calling. And then he booked a meeting of the person on the other line of the phone. He sells to sales and marketing. But it was a head of sales and the head of sales said, Wait a second, this call was way too good. Who taught you like, do you run trainings? Can you teach my team, right? And funny to have like this, yeah, part of a great organization. You know, like, I work for X, Y, Z company that he was prospecting for, but I've received all my training for a company called AltiSales. If you ever want to talk to them, I think they're cool. You should reach out it's just AltiSales.com. And then we got an inbound lead. Like, it's nuts right. And like we would never gonna like pitch our services as we were pitching, like, you know, our clients products, but you will find a few people were stoked. And if he wasn't working for AltiSales, like he didn't love it, and he's gonna love this setup, and the management, everything like that. He might have been like, hey, yeah, you know, like, I'm open to new ideas and new opportunities. Like if you're an SDR, you're underpaid but you're really good at what you do, opportunities will come your way so quick.

Kushal: Personalization is so key. And we know it is right from like you said, from our own experiences, we all get so many emails on a daily basis that we either don't open or we delete or remark spam is probably the worst. Given that we understand its importance. Why do you think teams are still not doing enough of it? What's the barrier?

Tito Bohrt: I mean, I think SDRs are overwhelmed. Like, here's what it and it's not their fault. I think that too many leaders, you know, you're a series A company, have 25 employees, you say I need to build SDRs, what do you do? You hire one or two SDRs. And you like, give him a computer and a phone, you're like, okay, go get us meetings. And then like, they don't even have Outreach because you need a minimum of ‘X’ licenses, and it's expensive. So they go with a cheap solution. You don't have Zoominfo, or using some other tool that has only a 30% or 40% accuracy on email. They don't have the ability to do videos, they don't even have the time, they don't even know how to write the right content. It's 22 year old kids that just graduated college. Come on, in today's day and age that people who were born in, you know, year 2000 are graduating college today. They don't even like make phone calls. You think they call their friends, they don't call their friends. I mean, when I was like 12 years old, and I wanted to talk to the cute girl that you know, I liked at school, I had to call her house. Like, there was no iPhone. What do you mean, SMS, WhatsApp text messaging, no, I would call and her dad would pick up and sometimes I get nervous. I'm like, hang up because it was a strong male voice on the phone. And I didn't want to say it was going to talk it through his daughter, right.

Kushal: And that was your first experience with a gatekeeper.

Tito Bohrt: Yeah, correct. Like, we were trained by like experiences. But if you're born after 1995, or 1998, your experience is different. You have not called people a lot. You're very used to text messaging, you are not good at writing, like, impactful, like five sentence emails, like you've been trained if you've gone to college to write either three page essays, right with hypothesis and a big entry paragraph and blah, blah, blah, or like text messages that are like, yo what you doing, like, you know. 

So like, this idea of writing emails that are like personalized and four sentences long and like, your messaging is stranger. They also don't message strangers, like younger people, just they meet people through like, already a pre agreement that you're gonna meet. Look at dating app today. Like, it's all like, oh, swipe right swipe left, like do this, like, I'm gonna like this. I'm gonna heart this and it's all inbound. Like, it's let me create my dating profile, or let me create my social proof, let people come to me and follow me on Instagram there. They never have to do outbound. There's no such thing as like, you being by yourself at some plays and going and approaching somebody and being like, Hey, I like your haircut. I'm new in town. I'm trying to look for a barber, would you mind you know, sharing where you actually go to get a haircut, you know, or whatever it might be. They're not used to that. So I don't know. 

For me. I'm an incredible like, SDR because I've lived in Bolivia, Costa Rica, Mexico, San Francisco, Miami, Florida, Raleigh, North Carolina, in Berlin, Germany, and in Germany. I mean, I've moved places, I lived in 10 cities and everywhere I go, I gotta go meet people. So I'm used to the idea of go approaching somebody. And sometimes they're like, no, sorry. Like, oh, that's awkward. Like, I'm not going to tell you who my you know, barber is like, oh, no big deal man. Have a good one. Cheers. Like, I don't mind the rejection. But I don't think our younger generation is used to it. And they're thrown in a role where they're overwhelmed with so many things they get to do that they haven't built any of the skills. And when you're doing too many things that you don't know how to do, you're just immediately overwhelmed. So they spraying and praying and email blasting all that becomes a commodity. 

So I think the future sales development is what AltiSales does, dedicated team today to research so that the person who's making the phone call doesn't need to do the data research. Dedicated team to email personalization. So the person making the phone calls, doesn't need to be inputting data to personalize the emails, you have somebody else who's helping you out. Dedicated sales ops team who's building your dashboards, helping you understand how you recall calls and how the emails are performing, dedicated VP of sales development, who is like writing all the content, all the emails, understanding best practices, analyzing the data, running pivotal pivot tables, and understanding the P values and r squared and all the statistical significance. And then once you start splitting the role, you realize that like, we're back to the same idea. At the beginning, everybody was a full cycle ‘AE’, now it's SDRs, and AEs. And I think the future is going to be data researchers like a phone SDRs, email SDRs, content writers like analytics people, sales ops, unlike the role is going to get split. And that's the only way that we're going to get SDRs to be more productive. Because right now, if your enterprise outbound, you're averaging two to three meetings a month, that's it, it's crazy, right. This is cold outbound only, it is not counting any inbound requests or whatever. But it used to be when I started my career. If you're calling SMB, like, you can get 40 to 50 meetings a month. And if you're calling enterprise, you'd get 15 to 20. Those days are long gone, and we need to just get so much better. I also think regulation is gonna call, like the number of like robot calls I got, like even this past week, it's like 20, 30, 40, like screw that nobody wants to pick up the phone anymore. Right? And then the same idea with emails like, if I opened my inbox right now, just in the course of this interview, I can guarantee you got 20 to 30 emails. So waste of time.

Kushal: Revenue leaders can really do to support their prospects, their sales, but their SDRS right. I feel like you've already answered some of that. But what do you think really, you know, sales leaders should be doing, they're not doing enough of to really support their SDR teams?

Tito Bohrt: I'll tell you the most toxic thing that sales development leaders are doing, they're treating the SDR role as a temporary role, and they're telling their SDRs that you're gonna come in here for this role. And in six months to a year, you're gonna get promoted to Account Executive. And, you know, couple years ago the salaries for account executives were so above and beyond sales development and sales development was so poorly paid at 30k base, but like, another 10k on variable that that sounded appealing. Like, okay, I'm gonna come in, pay my dues like and then get the actual role that I want. 

Nowadays, the SDR salaries are much better, their role is much more valued. And we are creating a toxic relationship where like, people are seeing sales development as a as a bad job as something that sucks. Unsure, if they give you a phone or computer, they asked you to do a million things, it sucks. But I have SDRs that have been with me for six years, and they don't want to leave. And the reason they love their job, and they don't want to quit is because they don't need to do the data research and all that because somebody else is taking care of that. They got good training, they got good management. There's beautiful things about being an SDR, we have a couple of like employees that are recent months, right. Like they were in their sales career. They did sales development, maybe customer success, they did account executive roles. And now they're like, Tito, I can't do account executive anymore. I can't have somebody else put a time on my calendar on Tuesday at 10am. That is like Jenny's naptime. Like, I gotta feed my daughter, I gotta like, take care of her, I got to pick people up from school, I gotta like, I got stuff to do, hey, I can put my eight hours a day worth of work. But here's what I need. I can work from 7am to 8:30, and then from 9:30 to 11:00 and then from like 11:45 to 12:15. And then I'm gonna do lunch, and then I'm gonna, you know, and it's crazy. And like, you can be an account executive, but you can be a great SDR. And if you're good at your job, you can get paid very, very well for those skills, and very, very well for those instances. So when we hire SDRs, we don't tell them six months and you're out or a year in, year out we say, are there career paths? Yes, if you hustle, you work hard, you start putting 12 hour days, you learn all the skills, you become a good trainer, a good manager, you're gonna become a manager. If you want to be an account executive developing that function you can do X, Y, Z, we have online courses. It takes a lot of work. If you just want to cozy SDR job that pays well, we got that too. I'm gonna let you pick your path and I got these. These are kind of like frameworks ideas from a book called “Radical Candor” from Kim Malone Scott, the main topic of that book is about communication. But one of the things that she talks about is rock stars and superstars and he says there are people who are rock solid and their job and they just want to do their job well. And then there's people who are really looking for the career progression. Too many leaders are only hiring superstars and when they get is they hired 10 SDRs everyone wants to be a manager and they're only going to promote one or two so as soon as one is promoted the other eight say, fuck this, I'm not gonna get the job I'm out and it sucks is destructive the culture of the company, right, or find two or three maybe become Account Executives but the other seven are frustrated. They don't like the experience. So the thing we're going to do is we're going to be more sincere, we're going to start changing the salary structure, we need to pay commissions that are ridiculous. In my commission structure if you're in the US, and because of the setup of the company and how we manage things, but if you're a top performer SDR, you usually would get about $300 a meeting or so. But once you hit accelerators, there's pathways where according to the work you're doing, and how you're supporting outs of the company, there are places where if you get a meeting, you will get $1,000 of meeting after you hit a quota. Like, that's where you should be, I've paid $8,000 checks to SDRs on a monthly basis on commission, like holy cow that in and of itself would be $100,000. Do we get people constantly hitting 8k? Now they're usually the two three range for like my top, you know, 20% earners, and then there's people we're hitting four or five, six on a monthly basis, and that's awesome. That's where we need to be we need to comp the role better, we need to allow people to have that role, because it's a role that is beautiful. Like, if you want to take off between Christmas and New Year's, you cannot do that as an account executive. Come on, as the end of the quarter is the end of the year. Like you got to be closing deals on December 31. Screw your, you know, forget about like New Year's Eve, like, if you're gonna be on the phone at you know, 9pm Eastern because a client on the Pacific has said that the only time they can talk and they want to finalize the contract, you freaking get on the phone and close that deal. If you're an SDR, you hit quota by December 17st so you January 2^nd like take off. Forget about it. Go enjoy the family, right. So same thing we could Thanksgiving, if you didn't how to get in November, take the whole week off. Who cares? If you're an AE, No way, like somebody's gonna put a meeting on your calendar. Somebody wants to talk on Wednesday at 7pm. And you're like, I want it to take Wednesday off. Come on! Thursday is Thanksgiving, they're like, Nope, that's the time the prospect wants to talk to you. And they are in New Zealand. So it's, you know, 11pm your time on Wednesday, I think the SDR role is awesome. If you know how to build it on your, if you're a great leader, you're gonna find incredible people.

Kushal: How they structure their teams and their roles, and really giving SDRs really the space and the freedom, like you said, when it comes to compliance as well, right, to really what works for them as well. You know, this was an amazing conversation. I know, we're running out of time. So I've got one last question for you, which is really about, you know, what's number one impact that you want to drive on the world?

Tito Bohrt: Wow, this, this could be a very long answer. One of the things that we talked about one of our core values in the company is a company or a team are very individual. And that is derived from my personal beliefs, where it says community over team or over family over individual and what I mean by that is, you get to put world and society first. So I got very lucky the way I started the company was by a kind of like a gift/loan from an alum from Duke University, I went there and to column really liked the idea of building these teams, and they gave me $50,000 to get the company started. They said the company fails, forget about it, that was a gift. If the company succeeds, just pay me back at 50k, no interest, nothing, just let's get it started. And I've done a lot of those things. So I end up traveling a lot. Usually home base is Miami, Florida. But I ended up being a going to Turkey on Friday, I spent a month in Mexico this year, I spent a month in Colombia this year, and then I'm going to do a world tour or while initially a US tour. I'm gonna be in 11 cities this end of the year, but I really tried to find people who are entrepreneurs who are hustling who are working really, really hard on trying to help him out. So I think we really gotta take care of that, oh, this society. And you know, some people think that unless you're a billionaire, the impact you can have is low. But that's not true. Like, you can do so much with very little or you can influence a couple of lives and make people better. So I like people. I like finding people who are hustling. I like finding entrepreneurs, it doesn't matter if you're, you know, a 14 year old kid in Mexico that's shoe shining, or somebody who's selling candy on the street. So you move travel abroad, you'll see them go help them out, like give them an extra $10 and say we appreciate your hustle things like that, buy somebody lunch or dinner tomorrow, like pay it forward, do things like that. Those are the small ways where like privileged people like me and like many of us in tech, where our compensation is generous, we can go and give 1%, 2%, 3% of your income on help somebody else out. So that's what I do. And that's what I hope that other people join me on as well.

Kushal: And really help out others and make sure everyone gets this together. Thanks so much. I think this has been an amazing chat. Thanks for being “On the Flip Side”.

Tito Bohrt: Yeah, my pleasure. Thank you for having me.