TRANSCRIPTION OF EPISODE
Chris Battis: Today on in Intent Topics, we’re talking about building a business development team internally versus hiring an external lead generation company. All right, Logan, what’s going on, buddy?
Logan Kelly: Not much man, you?
Chris Battis: Not a lot. Just jamming away here.
Logan Kelly: Yeah, yeah. Busy day.
Chris Battis: Yes. Crushing. I’m stoked. Pumping out a lot of content here at my end. Your YouTube channels looking good. I’m happy about that. Things are coming along. But today, we’ve been getting asked a lot in the sales process by prospects about how Union or lead generation companies for that matter compare to hiring BDRs in-house.
Chris Battis: I was chatting with someone last week. This company’s on a hyper growth trajectory, that’s not uncommon. We’re hearing that a lot. And they’re like, “Yeah, we’re building out a business development team, blah blah, blah, blah. But I’ve been checking out what you guys are talking about, and sounds really cool. I need to figure out if this is something we do in-house, or we hire a lead generation company like Union. How do I approach that?”
Chris Battis: So you field that question a lot more than I do. But I want to talk about that today, and I want to provide listeners of this a takeaway on how it compares, and effectively, how one would decide to hire an agency like this, or do it in house, right? It sounds like you have a little bit of a framework to assess that, and some categories to talk through of things to consider when making this decision. Cool?
Logan Kelly: Yeah, sure.
Chris Battis: All right. So why don’t you kick off the six categories that you think should be examined when trying to make this decision? Cool?
Logan Kelly: Yeah. So I want to qualify all this, and we can kind of slant this towards Union. I don’t know internally how the sausage is made at a lot of lead generation companies, right?
Chris Battis: And they’re not all doing the same thing.
Logan Kelly: Right. So, I think like, this is a podcast, we want to be valuable. I want to be valuable to the listeners and whatnot. But I don’t want to come even close to… I am different than the competitors. My team and I expect a certain level of data-driven and quality excellence that I don’t necessarily think happens at every single lead generation company. So when we talk about this, I’m unashamedly talking specifically about Union. Because it’s a process that we built, and I want this podcast to be valuable as people are thinking about building high quality data-driven outreach programs, whether that’s in-house, or using somebody like Union. If there is somebody that is similar to Union, email me. I want to talk to you because we’ll probably be friends, right?
Chris Battis: On that vein, just real quick. So we’ve had other episodes we were talking about creating a category. I want to piggyback on your point before you dive into it is that we are doing lead generation a different way. And a lot of times people are asking the question that we’re about to talk about BDR, in-house versus outsourced. It’s not just that it’s that we’re doing something very new. We’re doing something that the internet, the evolution of data, is allowing us to do, and we’re coupling that with the good old fashioned humans doing work.
Logan Kelly: Right. Exactly. Exactly.
Chris Battis: You may proceed sir.
Logan Kelly: Okay, cool. Good way to link that. Okay. So when we’re looking at should I hire the person in-house, or should I outsource it, or is there a hybrid. And I’m a big fan of the hybrid sort of thought process as you figuring out your business. I don’t think it’s a build it or a buy it kind of thing. I think that’s a little bit of an antiquated, or it’s maybe irrelevant for this situation.
Logan Kelly: So we look at a few categories here, right? So what’s the cost of training. And I think that when we talk about the cost of training, we’ll go into that in a second, we’re looking at do you have the competency internally, or are you going to need to train that? Right?
Logan Kelly: The next is data. So every piece of data, whether it’s a contact, or it’s firmographic data, or it’s technographic data, is coming from somewhere. It is not free. And so there’s going to be a cost around data. What’s the true cost of success? So commission, bonuses, whatever that looks like. What’s the upside that the people who are going to be executing these campaigns are going to be expecting? Technology, if you’re going to use data, there’s got to be a tech stack. And if you’re taking data from multiple sources, you’re likely going to need to smush together a few pieces of tech to make it work.
Logan Kelly: Then there’s the cost of losing a person, or a company, right? So turnover, whether that’s a turnover on you’re ending a contract with a company, a provider, or losing a rep. And then, I think this is the big one, which is opportunity costs. I spend 40 hours a week at least just on client delivery, and then all the other stuff, the figuring out the tech stack. That’s happening when we’re not working on client stuff. So there’s a lot of time involved in figuring this out.
Logan Kelly: There’s a lot of time in, if there’s a person under your roof, you’re managing them. If there’s a person under your roof, there’s health insurance. There’s just a bunch of different things that the more people, the less flexibility you might have to really move nimbly.
Logan Kelly: On the other side, I guess, going down each one of these, if you’re training somebody, then you own that, right? That’s yours. If you’re buying the data, that’s yours. If you’re paying commission, it’s your success. Technology, you own it. Turnover, okay great, you’re controlling the hiring process. Resource allocation, they’re your resources that you’re allocating. You get to own that. So I think it’s definitely how much you want to own. So yeah. So I think those are where we’re looking, and then we’re kind of going into each one of those and saying, how does this shake out?
Chris Battis: Let’s do that. Because I think for each of these, at a high level, that makes sense. But for each of these, there’s some things there’s more than meets the eye, I guess I’d say.
Logan Kelly: Yeah. Absolutely.
Chris Battis: [crosstalk 00:07:39]. So let’s talk about training, right? So the first thing that comes to mind for me is, yeah, there’s onboarding, here’s your computer, here’s how you log into our systems, blah, blah, blah. But what about process changes? What about upkeeping the training materials themselves. Who’s doing this training? That’s a whole nother person.
Logan Kelly: Sure. Sure.
Chris Battis: There’s training teams at larger companies.
Logan Kelly: Larger companies, yeah.
Chris Battis: The manager is that… Regardless, someone is doing the training, and that effort is coming off of something else.
Logan Kelly: Yeah. So let’s keep it specifically to lead gen, sales development, that kind of thing. Right? I think one of the most difficult places where the ramp, we all talk about ramp, where the ramp comes is the understanding of a value proposition. Right? So how quickly, and this isn’t just the person who, is it the SDR, or is it your company doing the outreach? It’s the person who is, and this is like the most forgotten about person, right?
Logan Kelly: I get real frustrated when people are like, “Oh, I don’t care how the sausage is made.” Right? Well the sausage is what we’re fricking talking about. Right? So what data are you pulling together? How are you pulling that together? There’s training involved in that, and everybody in the organization needs to care. So I think when we talk about training, everybody focuses on training the rep, training the rep, training the rep, training with rep. What about the training of how are you stitching together the technology? How are you building lists? How are you targeting? How are you looking at data? Right? So that’s the thing that I think training is much more all encompassing than just I’m onboarding SDRs.
Chris Battis: I couldn’t agree more. Yeah.
Logan Kelly: It was a rant.
Chris Battis: It was a good rant. I love that. I love it. No, no, no, I was just sitting here pausing because I wasn’t sure if you were done. But I think you’re totally accurate. And this is the one thing I would add is there’s bandwidth associated with that training.
Logan Kelly: Exactly.
Chris Battis: And oftentimes, there’s costs, there’s content, there’s material, there’s testing, there’s updating. As the sausage gets made differently, there’s updating. We’ve seen it firsthand. Right? And then there’s a whole other thing with actually entering a damn order, right? Who knows what the system is, right? For example, anything from entering an order at HubSpot, I’ve heard it takes 45 minutes, or 20 whatever, 14, 15, it took a while. For somebody like a label manufacturer, what are the substrates, what are the colors, what’s the sizing, what’s the bleed? All that stuff, right? That’s all training too. It’s got to come from somewhere.
Logan Kelly: So yeah, exactly. Exactly. There’s systems. And yeah, I agree. I agree. You bring up a good point, right? Because the point I was making is, and this is a common problem for companies, right, so it’s like I was making a point like let’s keep it specifically to lead generation and sales development. But here’s the thing, right? So it’s like the SDR, right? All of a sudden they’re sitting there just making phone calls and sending emails all day. So couldn’t it be easy for them to assist the sales person in taking an order? Yeah. Okay. Now what’s your opportunity cost? Right?
Chris Battis: Or let’s plug in, how about I not say place the order, but post-phone call, or post-activity actions. Is that entering the CRM? Are there specific items that need to be noted?
Logan Kelly: Process, yep.
Chris Battis: Right. How many times, I mean I heard it today, “Hey, what do we have for notes on this?” Right? Well, it’s supposed to be in the CRM, right? So there’s always process stuff. So not necessarily order management, but it’s not just the call, the conversation, or the email, or the voicemail. It’s the post as much as the pre and the during.
Logan Kelly: Yes. So it’s soup to nuts, right? It’s the primordial soup of data, right? All the companies in the world that you could literally get a contact for just spend any company you want. You could select them in any way. You can reach out to them in any way. You can build your stack, et cetera. And then all the way to what happens after that outreach. That’s a [crosstalk 00:12:31].
Chris Battis: Well, good segue into [inaudible 00:12:31]. Let’s talk about the cost of building a list. Right? And the research and the database.
Logan Kelly: Yeah. So with data, there’s two costs, right? There’s the cost of the data, right? So I’m going to get a license to ZoomInfo. I’m going to buy 100,000 credits in NeverBounce, right? I’m going to get Seamless.ai, right? All awesome stuff.
Logan Kelly: Then there’s the cost of getting it wrong, right? So you upgrade your subscription to BuiltWith, right? And they get a piece of tech wrong. And then you reach out to a company, and you say the wrong thing. What happens, right? That’s like your cost of the subscription, the cost of the time. But also if you’re using data incorrectly, it’s like pointing a gun at somebody, right? You’re killing your opportunity.
Logan Kelly: But if you have a really smart person internally who can think about data sort of theoretically, and then implement that, that’s great. And keep it simple. But this idea that you can just buy data, and it works. I mean, I talk to a lot of data providers, and I can tell you that they don’t believe that that’s true. So yeah, that’s interesting. So those are the costs.
Chris Battis: Yeah. And there’s also just know how, right? Somebody like yourself and your team, you know what you’re looking at, there’s muscle memory. You understand how each of the pieces of data are different, how the different providers are different. And I don’t care who you are, there’s a learning curve there. And if somebody wants to figure out the way that these kind of data providers kind of exist together, and overlap, and differ, that’s going to take some time. And that’s always changing. And that’s part of what you do is stay up with that, right? And test new things. Just watch the market as new… I mean, there’s new data providers all the time. So that’s tangible. That’s real. That’s a real part of the data piece.
Logan Kelly: Right.
Chris Battis: So cool. Well you want to move on to commission? Do you want to talk about the true cost of success?
Logan Kelly: Yeah. Yeah. So internal teams, like I think sales teams, incentivizing. I went to Jack Welch Management Institute, and he used to say, “If you show me the pay plans, I will tell you how the company runs.” I think that’s really powerful.
Chris Battis: Okay. What’s that mean?
Logan Kelly: Well, if you understand what the incentives are, then you can drive the outcomes that you’re looking for in your business, or you can do the opposite, right? And I think that companies do both, right? So if you’re incentivizing people to set appointments, they’re going to stuff appointments. If you’re incentivizing people on closed-won, then they’re going to start to over qualify leads.
Chris Battis: Of course. Oh yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, yeah.
Logan Kelly: So you see on the commission side, there’s a opportunity cost that we have to think about. Right? So it’s like when you’re dealing with a lead generation company, like when you’re dealing with Union, we are very flexible with the way we set that up. Because we are conscious that we want not just the economics to work, but we want our client to understand that the alignment of the incentive is in the right place. And we do that in a few different ways.
Logan Kelly: If you are a savvy sort of manager, then you’re good at setting pay plans, and you will have a great control. Because with a lead generation company, I’m not going to agree to a 10 point commission structure. But there’s plenty of commission plans that are very intricate because they want to drive the right… There’s coefficients and all this kind of stuff. I’m not a proponent of them. So I think there’s commission where it’s like who are you going to pay more? But then it’s also what’s the impact to the operation of your sales organization around incentive alignment. You know what I mean?
Chris Battis: Yeah. Yeah. And I know this isn’t necessarily business development specific, but it just came to mind. A friend of mine was visiting, he’s into medical sales. He’s selling to doctors offices and clinics. It’s the end of year. End of year is pretty quiet. But he was telling me that he’s trying to decide if he should be advising his doctors to be placing order now, or wait till the first of the year.
Logan Kelly: Yeah. That’s called sandbagging. And that is a…
Chris Battis: Call it what you want, but what it isn’t is solving for the enterprise value of the business. So right. And so I would go back to the commission structure, or the incentive structure, which is the problem. Because the behavior of the person making that decision, I mean, unless they’re volunteer sales reps, why are they doing this but to hit numbers, right? So my point is alignment’s critical, and it has to be somewhere between getting the human to do the right thing and adding enterprise value to the business. Right? That’s the-
Logan Kelly: Exactly. Exactly. And so that is a trade off in in this, right? If your sales development organization is so sort of undercooked that this is not an issue, then I would say that I would weight this at zero for the cost of of analysis. Right? It doesn’t matter. You don’t know. You can’t use that in your analysis. But if you have a very tight organization, a lead generation company might not be the right answer if you are driving exactly the right activity with the way you have your incentive alignment.
Chris Battis: Yeah, I totally agree. And it can be different between parts of the sales org. Right?
Logan Kelly: Exactly.
Chris Battis: The partner, the channel part of the business, it’s like adding a third, I don’t know, player into the equation. Maybe it doesn’t make sense, right? Maybe it’s more feasible with direct. Who knows? Maybe it’s the opposite. I don’t know. But yeah, the point here is it’s a piece to be looking at and analyzing.
Logan Kelly: Exactly. Exactly.
Chris Battis: And the more structure you have around your commission, and the understanding of why it is the way it is, and the well oiled it is, it’s something to consider in this assessment.
Logan Kelly: Right. Exactly.
Chris Battis: How about technology? So if you’re going to implement, to circle back to very early on this podcast, if you’re going to implement a very data-driven intent-based sales process like this, there is a inevitable technology stack that needs to be implemented, right? And we’ve dealt with this with a client that was very interested in using this data. They wanted to do it internally. They say, “Great, we’re going to have you do it, and we’re going to do it. You’ll augment our sales. We’ll kind of do this together.” But the two of us, both parties, went and connected the technology required to do this. Right. Let’s talk about that a little bit.
Logan Kelly: Yeah. This is one of the things where there’s the hard costs of the tech, which I don’t need to belabor the point, right? Everybody knows you need a CRM, or a CDP, or sales engagement tools and all this kind of stuff.
Chris Battis: The 29.99, or $99 a month adds up, right?
Logan Kelly: Yeah. Adds up.
Chris Battis: Anytime you have six or 10 of those, real dollars. Real dollars. We talked about it a lot, right?
Logan Kelly: Right, right. It’s like how many softwares and how many licenses per that’s the equation, easy.
Chris Battis: That’s it.
Logan Kelly: But it’s like screwing that up, that’s hard. That’s hard. It’s easy to screw up data integrity in 2019.
Chris Battis: Because it’s just all just Lego blocks, right? We’re just connecting Lego blocks. We’re trying to make this thing look like whatever we’re trying to build, and it’s hard to get right. Things change. And every single one of those pieces of technology is changing, and all their APIs, and everything that they do is constantly improving, or having a problem, or whatever. Right?
Logan Kelly: That’s why I like, shameless plug to SalesLoft, right? These guys are legit. And what they’ve done is they’ve done a really good job at building… They don’t connect to Zapier, right? SalesLoft doesn’t, which maybe that’s a little bit frustrating to those of us who like to connect things that maybe aren’t used to being connected. The thing there is for every SalesLoft that cares deeply about their stability and what applications are sort of piping into them and what they’re piping out of them, there’s 10 applications that just don’t care that much about it. Right. And they’re connecting with everything.
Logan Kelly: And those are really tempting because they’re usually not as expensive, or they seem more flexible. And flexibility has trade offs. And usually those trade offs are you’re going to end up paying either in bad data, or you’re going to end up paying in developers to do stuff. So the real costs of technology is not the cost of the applications and whatnot. That’s there, but that’s easy to see. It’s the unknown that I think can really bite people.
Logan Kelly: And like a house, I grew up in Alaska. Tyvek is the most common siding of a house in Alaska. And it’s like, because it works, right? You just don’t put siding on the house because you know your neighbor’s has got Tyvek siding too, right?
Chris Battis: I always thought that was just the Alaskan aesthetic. It turns out it’s a function. A function [crosstalk 00:23:55].
Logan Kelly: Well, I mean if you got Tyvek, why do you need boards?
Chris Battis: [inaudible 00:24:00]. Yeah, yeah.
Logan Kelly: Right. Right. But I think a lot of tech stacks that I’ve seen where people are trying to implement this, they don’t even put the Tyvek on, and they leave the roof off, right?. And it’s like, wow, that’s going to suck. Right?
Chris Battis: Well, it’s for a different chat altogether, and I kind of brought this up earlier, but we’re having a fair amount of people in our sales conversations for our own business, not our clients, be like, “Yeah, yeah. Cool. This intent data, we’re hot on it too. We want to start using this data.” The question is how do you compare to us just using the data? And the point here is there’s a lot more than just the data, or in this case, there’s a bunch of technology that needs to go with just the data. So that conversation is simply, you’re just buying the data. That’s like, I’m just going to buy some tires, or I’m just going to buy an engine.
Logan Kelly: Right, right. Which-
Chris Battis: Cool.
Logan Kelly: Yeah.
Chris Battis: [crosstalk 00:24:59] engine you could possibly buy, we know a lot about that engine. Good luck getting it on the road, right? Or perhaps you have a body shop and mechanics and all that crap, and you’re great. You’re psyched. And that’s a good fit for you [crosstalk 00:25:12].
Logan Kelly: Exactly.
Chris Battis: Right. And we’ll talk about that another time because that’s a whole other area.
Logan Kelly: So I think that’s the piece. If you’re going to build it, understand that there’s real money involved. We’ve spent real money. We’re not the only ones doing it well. I want to make that clear, right? There’s a lot of people who are doing it well. There’s a lot of companies who do have very sophisticated setups. This is very sophisticated. The table stakes, like the price of poker, this is not a small buy-in. And so I think-
Chris Battis: Hold up.
Logan Kelly: Go ahead.
Chris Battis: Yeah. Hold on. I got to tag in here as the marketing guy. Again, this could be a whole different topic. But one of my fundamental problems here, so as the marketing person, we’re trying to create something very different than lead generation.
Logan Kelly: Exactly.
Chris Battis: But I’ll tell you no one’s searching intent based sales. All right. I’m not going to say no one’s searching intent data, but two things. The search volume’s low and the search volume is a lot broader than just needing lead generation services. So the things that we have to hone in on is lead generation, appointment setting, lead generation agencies, stuff like that.
Chris Battis: And I never wanted to admit that that’s what we are, but in the eyes of the searcher, or the getting found, to play that game well, that’s what I have to be saying we are, right? And it bugs me because back to… I do have a point here, I promise. But you were talking about how there’s more sophistication here. And you started the podcast off with it, and you brought it up again. We’re not just a lead gen company. We’re using sophisticated data and a sophisticated Lego block structure of technology, and we’re using a sophisticated process to ensure that humans do exactly what they need to do for our client.
Chris Battis: That alone is a tech stack. So in other words, I’m very passionate about the tech. I’m a tech guy, you’re a tech guy. I always wanted to build a tech company. But as soon as that, we were like, we’ve built a tech services company. And to do it all sophisticated. And that’s just the point that we’ve seen get more complicated every day as we scale. And there’s a lot here. And I just want to drive that point home. And it’s just not basically leads. It’s not an Excel sheet of a bunch of contacts and a phone, right? Some days we wish it was, right, but it’s not. So anyways, let’s move on to the next point, and get into turnover. And I’m pretty sure I interrupted you. Did you want to wrap up your last point on technology, or are we good?
Logan Kelly: No, I think it’s good. I forgot what I said. And we’re doing this live so let’s keep going. So let’s talk about turnover. Yeah. So I think it’s really easy to say there’s no risk of turnover if you’re hiring a lead generation company or something like that. I don’t think that’s true. Because you’re spending a lot of time, we’re spending time, you’re spending cycles teaching and this kind of stuff.I think the offset to the risk of turnover with a rep is you own that rep. You don’t own him. There’s not slavery. But that competency, as long as it’s under your roof, will only ever be benefiting you.
Chris Battis: Or hurting you. It’s only ever as good or as bad as you let it be. Right?
Logan Kelly: Exactly. Exactly.
Chris Battis: And it can be turnover, or it could be underperformance that should be turned over.
Logan Kelly: Right. Exactly, exactly. And I think it’s the same thing with, it’s not so much the cost of losing, it’s the cost of starting over. I think that is the important thing. So if you’re constantly turning over your contractors, the vendors that you’re working with for lead generation, then you’re losing money. If you’re constantly turning over your rep, then you’re losing money.
Logan Kelly: So what is going to be the most stable? How can you offset that? Is the cost of turnover of a lead generation company less than… But I think what’s interesting about us, here’s the plug for Union, is before our clients realize there’s a problem, right, underperformance, our cycles are so short. They’re like a week, right? We’re killing bad and bringing in good so much quicker than a manager who’s managing 20 reps, or 10 reps, or five reps.
Logan Kelly: There’s no emotional connection to a piece of content. There’s no emotional connection. We are data-driven and success driven. We love our people. I’m not saying that we’re ruthless. But our people are trained in a different way. Our people are trained to think in terms that a normal SDR is not required to. So I think that that’s where we offset the risk of turnover. Because we kill bad, bring in good, and we take a lot of the expense of we’re sort of bringing in the next good thing. Whether it’s a person, a piece of tech, or whatever, before our clients even realize that that’s what they need.
Chris Battis: Yeah. So to say that a different way, there’s kind of like two things, right? So it’s like no risk of turnover, but it’s a reduction. It’s a padding of you’re going to have to keep starting over and getting onboarded with a new agency. That’s not that feasible. And the layer below that is, as a client, it’s not your responsibility to ensure that the agency has the staff at a competency you need.
Chris Battis: On the internal side, it is common, and almost inevitable, that you are going to have employee turnover. Because people are going to either underperform, they’re going to overperform and get promoted in other roles. Because let’s face it, a lot of BDRs in the enterprise environment I’d say are kind of seeking other sales roles, and kind of earning their stripes in that way.
Chris Battis: And the other thing is just there’s an inevitable pipeline of hiring you need to do. So it’s kind of more of an HR thing internally than it is with an agency, right? Because you need a constant pipeline. You need to attract aspiring BDRs. You’re going to need to hire, you’re going to have to interview. You’re going to have to ramp. You’re going to have to put people on performance plans. You actually have to help people grow their career. There’s none of that with this. It’s like we’re going to hire an agency, and you’re bring us conversations based on-
Logan Kelly: Our criteria.
Chris Battis: … what’s good for our business.
Logan Kelly: Get it done, or you’re fired.
Chris Battis: So it’s hard to quantify it, but there’s a lot going on there. And I would be very, very firm that we’ve padded that amount of effort outside of generating business from the equation.
Logan Kelly: Yeah. And our ramp is shorter. Our ramp is shorter than a rep typically.
Chris Battis: Yeah, true.
Logan Kelly: Because we think about each industry proactively. Where when you onboard, you need to teach somebody. We’re asking proactive questions, what about this, that we recognize. And it’s a different way of thinking. Does that make sense?
Chris Battis: That totally make sense. And I’m thinking we’re totally killing it with the transitions here because this actually goes into resource allocation, right? What’s the best use of the current management to run the sales development team, right? How do you handle vacations? I mean, people need vacations, or they’re going to burn out. Right? And it’s not uncommon these days to have these companies where it’s unlimited vacation. It’s relatively predictable, but still there’s going to be vacation time. So there’s downtime, right?
Chris Battis: So you actually have to staff, like when we were doing staffing, I would budget a shockingly low amount of hours per week and month to compensate for all the vacation. Right? So just the model’s different. The way we staff is different because we’re a contractor to the client.
Chris Battis: The whole other thing, and it’s not necessarily resource allocation, actually it is resource allocation, but it’s more on the managers. But HR, oh my. People do the craziest shit. Right? And you have to deal with that as a manager. You’re not going to have any of that with an agency. If somebody decides to get hammered at lunch, you’re never going to think of it. That’s never your problem if you’ve hired an agency. Right? There’s just so much HR stuff that just blew my mind when I got into those roles. But it’s real.
Logan Kelly: Yeah. Yeah. And then when you’re in a performance environment, like dude, if a marketing person, not to be disparaging, but have a marketing person checks out for three days, whatever, creative process, right? Let him go do their thing, right? If a sales person checks out for three days, that’s disaster. Right?
Chris Battis: So what you’re saying is it’s tangibly measurable when a salesperson is performing versus some other roles where it’s not necessarily as metric driven. Absolutely. And I’ve had situations where I literally, even then, right, even with that performance data, it’s still hard to manage people out. Right? And it’s emotional. I don’t know. Maybe it’s my personality. But firing people, the fucking, excuse my French, but you lose sleep over it. It’s hard. I don’t know. Hire an agency, you don’t deal with any of that, is my punchline there. Right. Yeah. So that’s all I have on that. I think I’ve put the nail in the coffin with that one.
Logan Kelly: God, I get-
Chris Battis: Do you… Yeah.
Logan Kelly: This is good.
Chris Battis: So kind of to put a bow on it, or tie it all together, what do you think the key takeaways are here? Why don’t you riff on that, and we’ll wind this thing down?
Logan Kelly: Yeah. I think the piece that I really want anybody thinking about data, or tech, or building a really modern, sophisticated sales development strategy is it’s totally worth it. I think it’s the only way that you can operate. There’s costs that, if you think, oh, this is going to be easy, or why don’t I just do that, or something along those lines, why don’t I just do it myself or these kinds of things, you’re missing something. You’re going to walk around a corner, you’re going to get punched in the face.
Logan Kelly: Some people are comfortable doing it. I’m completely comfortable. And there’s a lot of people like me, right? Where it’s like, listen, let’s do this, let’s build this. I’m going to build this for this business, and we’re going to do it. And there’s going to be days that suck, but there’s going to be days that I can do stuff that other people just cannot do, right, or do not know.
Logan Kelly: And I think if you’re somebody who’s comfortable iterating and testing, great. But understand what the true cost is. If you’re not comfortable, think about putting your foot or your leg in with it with an agency and test out. And understand kind of how this translates in success for your business. And I think that’s really what Union is great for them because we think about things in both the theory, we translate it into tactics, and then we execute against them. And we’re very transparent around how we do that. So that’s my shameless plug to end this-
Chris Battis: I love it.
Logan Kelly: But also there’s probably some other companies that do a good job here. So if you’re looking at an agency, we’re not the only answer, but we’re a damn good one.
Chris Battis: Yeah, that’s great. Shameless plug. Just call it a discussion. I think that was a great chat. Logan, I appreciate it. So we’ll wrap this up. Thanks for tuning in to Intent Topics. I’m Chris Battis.
Logan Kelly: And I’m Logan Kelly. Thank you for tuning in. Please give us a five star review on whatever podcast app you listen on. And we will see you next time.
Chris Battis: Take care.
