The Antidote Ep 8 - Building Trust: The Key To Saving Outbound

📝 Episode Summary

On the eighth episode of The Antidote, Chris Ritson, a sales leader and entrepreneur shares his mission to help salespeople reach their full potential, particularly through outbound sales. How can SDR teams reach buyers, resonate with them, and close more deals? For Chris, it’s all about building trust and learning with the process. Chris reflects on the importance of spending time each day learning and preparing to exceed in the day after, by executing the right actions. As Chris reflects on his journey as an SDR and SDR leader, he reinforces the importance of having a clear vision of your goals and working hard every day to achieve them.

🤓 What will I learn

✅ How to build trust within outbound sales
✅ Why a "not right now" answer from prospects is as relevant as a "yes" answer
✅ How to build resilience and manage rejection as an SDR
✅ The importance of knowing your buyers as well (if not better than!) your product

👀 Key Insights

1. The gold is in the "not right now"

“Too many SDRs are focused on immediate responses. The reality is that many prospects are ‘not right now’ rather than ‘no’. It’s crucial to nurture these relationships over time. (...) Most SDRs would say to you at the end of the day, I got one yes and two nos. The best ones will say I got two yeses, one's for tomorrow, one's for three months time, and I got one no that I'm not gonna spend any more time on.”

When cold calling or emailing target buyers, there are three potential answers SDR teams can get: “no”, “yes” and “not right now”. Some buyers will not be interested in your product, some buyers will be in the market for a product like yours, and some buyers will be slightly interested but they might not have the budget or resources to pursue the sales process right now. 

It’s incredibly important to nurture these “not right now” buyers. With long-term education about their specific problems and consistent trust building, reps can transform a “not right now” into an easy “yes”.

2. Rejection can be joyful!

SDRs get rejected daily, making resilience one of the key skills of any successful SDR. Though no one enjoys being rejected over and over again, Chris has a framework to turn it around.

“I used to give people some of the frameworks that I come up with. One of those frameworks was specifically for this. (...) It was how they were able to process it and enjoy that process. And I know that sounds ridiculous. How can you enjoy that process? But this kind of comes back to this philosophy for me of high performance and how can you achieve high performance? Well, in order to achieve high performance, you're probably gonna lose a lot of games. You're probably gonna win quite a few games as well. But you can't just enjoy the winning and just ignore the losing piece.”

For Chris, it all comes down to three essential steps:

• Writing a vision of one’s self for the next 10 years and how today’s reality will help achieve such vision and goals
• Committing to the defined vision and how each step of the way helps with achieving the end goal
• Obsessing about learning from one’s mistakes and test doing things differently, constantly measuring problems and progress
  
  

3. Stop obsessing over the "what" and start obsessing over the "who"

For Chris, not having a full understanding of who their buyers are and the problems that keep them up at night, is a big problem for SDR teams. This lack of knowledge makes building trust - a key part of any successful outbound motion - more challenging.

“They're so obsessed with teaching the reps the product that they forget to teach the reps who they're speaking to and what the people care about in front of them. And fundamentally you're trying to push people through a cold prospect funnel in terms of outbound. And that starts with the conversation, trust, deeper relationship, book the meeting and then onwards. You should be optimizing everything you do as an SDR leader for yes, starting as many conversations as possible. But then when they're in those convos, how are they building as much trust with that person as humanly possible?”

Focus on deeply understanding who they’re reaching out to, what their buyers care about, and what their problems are. By knowing buyers profoundly, reps can have more relevant and compelling conversations and transform cold buyers into customers.

▶️ Watch the full episode on Youtube:

📖 Transcript

Alex Olley (00:01.54)
Chris, man, nice to see you. Welcome to the Antidote. What's been keeping you busy?

Chris Ritson (0:05.35)
Alex, really happy to be here. What has been keeping me busy? Well, three main things. So family, I've got a young son. Family always comes first for me, but I've got a young son, he's 18 months, terrible sleeper. So we've been navigating that over the last year and a half, still a terrible sleeper. I've got another kid on the way. So I'm preparing for more rough nights, basically, in six weeks time.

Other thing is trying to build two businesses at the same time. One is my primary business and then I have a side hustle as well that I run with a friend. So that keeps me pretty busy like nine to five, I guess. And then the other thing really is I'm obsessed with self-development. So I've been doing a lot of work on myself recently as well. Doing a lot of like introspection on how I manage my emotions, how I deal with certain situations and just overall like trying to be a better person than I think I've historically been. So yeah, that kind of sums me up in terms of what I'm up to, what's keeping my mind busy.

Alex Olley (1:23.63)
Well, to say you've got your hands full is probably the biggest understatement ever, but congrats on the second one coming along. Two under two, is that right?

Chris Ritson (1:29.99)
Thank you. Yeah, 2 under 2, yeah terrifying but exciting at the same time.

Alex Olley (1:38.382)
I think having two is great. When my second arrived, you feel like you're actually building a proper family. Whereas with one, it was just like, pass the ball. 

Well, I'd love to tap into the self-development bit a bit later, but let's kick off with the first bit. So I always like to ask, everyone's got a big challenge they're trying to solve, right? And we call this the poison. What we want to do is give listeners an antidote. What's the big thing that you want a mission to solve?

Chris Ritson (1:47.75)
Big thing that I'm on a mission to solve in terms of what my business is all about, and something that I care very, very deeply about is helping salespeople reach their full potential. I feel like a lot of people get hired still, and into sales roles, and they're not coached, they're not trained or they are and it's not very effective, right? Their managers have never been teachers or coaches before as an example. 

So how can we expect them to teach and coach people to a high performance level if the manager or the coach in the first place has never actually led a team or worked with people or coached them or enabled them in any sort of professional capacity. And that also goes to the managers as well, that's also a problem for them that I feel very passionately about. So I think that's my main mission really is to help especially junior salespeople reach their full potential if sales is something that they actually really want. And that's the mission that I would go on with people to find that out.

Alex Olley (3:24.622)
Okay, interesting. Now you're very well known for helping a specific function, which is more like the SDR function, right? Helping people go outbound. And I'm gonna tell you what I see. If you look on LinkedIn, you go to an event, everyone's saying like cold, like outbound is broken and SDRs don't work anymore. 

What we see at Reachdesk is like, at least half of our revenue comes from that function. Partly because that's who we sell to. But why do you think people are saying this? Is it true? And if it's not, what should people be thinking about to rectify this?

Chris Ritson (4:00.14)
Yeah, I think it's a good question. I think historically, if I look at sales, I look at outbound specifically, and you've probably got this at Reachdesk, right? If you look at your data, when you actually initially speak to someone and then they close from an outbound perspective, there's longer sales cycles typically than there are from an inbound perspective, right? And this sounds very simple, but why is that?

If you look at your data, when you actually initially speak to someone and then they close from an outbound perspective, there's longer sales cycles typically than there are from an inbound perspective, right? And this sounds very simple, but why is that? It's because that person that you're speaking to has never come across you. So their level of trust needs to be built over a period of time. And a lot of outbound going on right here right now is getting on the phone, dropping an email and trying to go from the top of that email to the bottom of it, selling someone on why they should move forwards pretty much now. And that's actually quite a rare occurrence, right? There's no educational process in there. There's no drip feeding someone or nurturing them over a long period of time. It's either now or never.

And that binary motion, I think, is something that actually most sales development functions are now starting to suffer a lot from running. Because my view is actually a huge amount of the people that we speak to, especially in an innovative tech environment or SaaS environment where you're building innovative technology, they haven't ever heard of anything that you're doing, right? 

So why would you buy something you've never heard of or you've never even had a thought about. So why would it ever be on your budget lines? It wouldn't. So like a modern day SDR, the first thing that I think they need to be taught and to understand is there's three answers that you're going to get on any of the channels that you are prospecting people on. You're always going to get some no's and people are just like, I signed a five year contract with someone else. You're going to get yeses, right? People who you just got lucky with in the market right here, right now. And then actually probably about 30%, 35% of the people you speak to, they're going to be your not right nows and they're going to be your people who you should be stacking up for the future, who will either come in inbound to you and say, “Hey you've done a really good job of educating me over this period of time, I'm now ready to have this conversation”. Or when it comes to the three months time and you've done a good job again of nurturing them and educating them, that's when they turn around and say, “Yeah, do you know what? I'm in the market now. I'm going to take this conversation”.

But we're so determined as salespeople to get a yes or a no and live in this binary world, because that's what our dashboards say we have to sort of live by. We are commissioned only on yeses right now within this month that we force our lists on our market to either give us a yes or a no. And actually most of the people in the market, or not most, but a good portion - one in three of the people that we're speaking to on average - they're just a not right now because they don't know enough about what you do and how you do it and how that can help them with a specific problem that they might be facing today. But that problem is probably going to build up over a long period of time. And that's where I think a lot of the coaching element comes in and a lot of the leadership piece is so important because if we're coaching reps to just live in a binary world, we're not maximizing the potential that we can get out of them because they're not maximizing the lists because they're treating them the wrong way in the first place. 

So that's one of the biggest problems I see. And it's kind of epidemic, right? Because most sales teams, most SDR teams are targeted on monthly quotas, weekly activity quotas or meetings quotas. And you stand there at the end of the week saying, how many meetings you've got? Oh, I've got five. Okay. How many people said no? 25. My question always used to be with the team “of those 25, how many are no's, how many are not right now's?” And I used to teach them relentlessly. I know they could find the yeses for me. That was the easy bit. The harder bit was getting them to decide and figure out with context who was the no's and who were the not right now's because when they were able to do that, they used to just stack them up for the future and they would get to the harder months like August and December in the SDR world, and they would have so many conversations that they'd started in April, May, June, July, or September, October, November. And the people that they were then speaking to in December, they started that conversation three, four months ago when that person might have had a bit of a twinge of a problem, but it wasn't big enough for them to be top of their priority list yet and really explore. And that's one of the biggest training gaps I see in SDR team, but also in AE teams when they're going outbound as well. 

And fundamentally, I totally stole this from when I was in AE, when I used to speak to people and they'd be closed lost and my job, in my mind, was to figure out, is this a close lost forever or is this a close lost for not right now? Because if you're a deal for me in six months time, then that's just money for me in six months time towards my quota. Like that's a great win for me in six months. My job is just to make sure you remember me and you still like me when it gets to six months time. So I took that philosophy and applied it to SDRs and then just train them relentlessly on “you're not in a binary world”.

And your job is very much like running a business. You're going to be obsessed with these short-term goals and controlling today, but how are you making sure what you're doing today is looking after the long-term and longevity of your individual one-person SDR business? And only by teaching them that, I kind of gave them the foresight to think, “oh, maybe I don't need to live in this consistently hyper emotional world of it's either a yes or a no. It's either glory or pain. There's some middle ground there.” And being a Geordie myself, like black and white, I struggle with that historically as a concept, but teaching people there is that middle ground in sales is honestly one of the secret sources that helped build successful SDR teams. 

And I use a lot of it in my coaching programs now, but it's also one of the differences I see that people do, you know, people say, oh, they just naturally get it. And you dig into what are you doing? And there's two things I look for. I'm like, what are you doing now that's booking you more meetings today? But also one thing I've always found is most of that with successful people is when you dig into it, I say, when did you start that conversation with Reachdesk? And they're like, four months ago? Like, okay, what did you do in between now and four months? And they're like, well, I spoke to Alex, you know he never messaged me back, but I spoke to him every maybe three or four weeks. Every single message I sent him was bang on the problem we originally spoke about. Then I dropped him, you know, a webinar invite because the webinar was about that problem. And that was why they, Alex, then decided to turn up to the meeting four months later. Cause I was just consistently relevant with him. You know, Alex told me he had a bad back. So I kept just mentioning his bad back and then giving him some value on the back of the bad back sort of philosophy. 

I feel there's such a wastage in every single SDRs day-to-day when you do a hundred calls, maybe get three pickups, one's a yes, one's a no, one's a not right now. Most SDRs would say to you at the end of the day, I got one yes and two nos. The best ones will say I got two yeses, one's for tomorrow, one's for three months time, and I got one no that I'm not gonna spend any more time on.

Alex Olley (12:46.41)
It's so funny you say that because I was in our office last week and one of our best SDRa said I actually had like three conversations today. I remember him saying I had three. One was like a massive no. The other two were like not right now. So I was like, that sounds like a no to me to be honest with you. But actually, it sounds like he's right. He's thinking about how do I get it for the future. Interesting. 

So like rejection is the thing that I've seen that pertains to out sales, whether you're an SDR and even a leader. Rejection is the really hard bit. And SDRs, they get the most, I think. How do you help SDRs specifically overcome that? Is that something that you try and assist with?

Chris Ritson (13:25.34)
Yeah, I think it's the leader's job to do that, right? I have quite a process and I’m a frameworks driven person. I used to give people some of the frameworks that I come up with. One of those frameworks was specifically for this. And it wasn't just about dealing with the rejection. It was how they were able to process it and enjoy that process. And I know that sounds ridiculous. How can you enjoy that process? But this kind of comes back to this philosophy for me of high performance and how can you achieve high performance? Well, in order to achieve high performance, you're probably gonna lose a lot of games. You're probably gonna win quite a few games as well. But you can't just enjoy the winning and just ignore the losing piece. 

So what I used to do with every single one of my SDRs back in the day was a three step process. Firstly, I got them to actually write out what their vision for themselves was in 10 years time. I know that sounds ridiculous. It's like, oh, well, the average SDR is only in seat for 14, 15 months. But for me, it was, I want you to understand why this 14, 15 months, 18 months, two years, whatever they're gonna be in seat for, is actually gonna help you achieve your vision in 10 years time. Very much like a founder would think about, okay, where are you taking Reachdesk in 10 years time? Visualize that, what does that look like? For me, at an individual level with the team, it was doing the same thing. And it gave me a couple of things. It gave me an idea of where they wanted to go, but most importantly, it gave them a very clear idea of why what they were doing today was really, really important at a micro level to make better decisions to affect this bigger, grander vision that they had further down the chain. We worked really hard on that vision with them.

The second part of it was then once you've got a vision where you want to go, you need to commit to that because ultimately that's what's going to keep you in the game. If you feel like this SDR job is going to help you move towards your longer term ambition today when it's hard and you've had five rejections, you know that you're one step closer to a yes. But if you can't see this helping you get to where you wanna go, you're not gonna do it. You're gonna quit and you're gonna stop. And that compounds over time. Those bad decisions compound over time, I would say. All those good decisions at that micro level.

And the third part was, okay, get obsessed with learning and because it's all well and good having a vision and then committing to it and working really, really hard. But then if you learn nothing from it, what's the point? So it was this like obsessive learning that I wanted them to also be thinking about with regards to how they did it. And operationally, the way that I instilled that was, you give me your vision when you start, so I know where you're going, but most importantly, you do, then you commit and you understand and you apply the hard work. That's where the KPIs piece came in. As like a tool to help guide that. How we operationalize that was I banned SDRs from doing any activity for one hour a week, every week. And instead, they looked at their performance from the previous week and they had to bring in their analysis of their performance into one-to-ones and say, here's where I went wrong. Here's what I did well. Here's why. And most importantly, on the back of that, here's what I'm trying in A/B testing this week. Cause everyone bangs on about A/B testing and being data driven, but salespeople, they don't know that unless you create an environment that almost forces them to learn the skill and understand the importance of it in relation to their bigger and greater goals and objectives. 

So that's how I got them to actually enjoy the rejection piece a little bit more and enjoy the process and the ride. And sometimes, you know what, we used to just sit at the end of the week and laugh about some of the conversations. And just say, look, here's what happened. And honestly, I don't know what happened. And I used to be super vulnerable with them about some of the mistakes I made and the mess ups that I had, because I used to go on the phones and emails and all that sort of stuff loads as well. And we'd just laugh about it and we'd walk it through. And it was, right, well that week's done, we'll move on and we'll get going again.

Alex Olley (18:27.02)
I love it. I love just laughing. I don't think we spend enough time laughing at the mistakes or the cock-ups. We should do that more. We should do that more, right?

Chris Ritson (18:32.38)
Yeah, especially not in this environment. We're all so panicked about number constantly that we forget some of the just, the little things that make the world go around that make it a little bit better for salespeople, right?

Alex Olley (18:41.03)
Okay, well on that note, that's probably a perfect transition. I'm not gonna ask you to list all the mistakes you've made, Chris, but let's go. So you've run successful SDR teams, you've been part of some incredible companies, you're now running your own business. What have you had to go through to get to where you are today?

Chris Ritson (18:57.44)
That would be a really, really long list mate.

I think that leads back to my like the first question and the third point. I failed loads. I've messed up loads. I've received a lot of pretty damning feedback over the years. And, you know, I would say that when I started my career, I came from a sport environment where I typically done very well and whatever I'd picked up or whatever I tried my hand at, I'd often just been able to do it at a reasonably high level quite quickly. I think with that in my younger years came a level of arrogance, to be honest with you. And I think as soon as I brought that into maybe sales and then sales leadership, I think again, my career trajectory went quite steeply quite high, quite quickly. And I think like I was also, I also lacked a lot of self-awareness, especially in my younger years. And I let that ego side of me get the better of me relatively consistently, I'd say from when I was 10 to 25, for sure. But it's only when I wasn't in a job that I was like, Chris, how has it got to this point? And you sit down and you ask yourselves these really hard questions about how has it got to this point? And actually, I could have sat there, and I absolutely did, for about six weeks saying, oh, my boss was this or that or whatever. And actually, none of it was about my boss. It was all about me. 

But it took me that period of like introspection, to think about it and process it and actually look in the mirror and kind of drink my own Kool-Aid and admit where I'd done things incorrectly and hadn't behaved in the right way or hadn't processed something emotionally right and then dealt with it in a really, really bad way at the time or my version of a really bad way. Maybe I'm holding myself too high a standards again, but that was a big, big moment for me and I've continued to do that, I'd say, over the next four, five, six, seven years where actually I put checkpoints in where I will reflect. I actually reflect every day now, which sounds extreme, but at the end of each day I'll have a look and think about just for five minutes, how did the day go? How were the conversations that I had you know, if I'm in SDR mode, I'm like, how many conversations did I have? How did they go? Where could I have done better? Why did I snap at my mum when we were on the phone there? 

And I was starting to become considerate, force myself to become more self-aware of how I'm handling all of these micro things on a day-to-day basis. And that's taken me many years to get to that point. I think it starts with just writing something down and taking responsibility for some of the things that you've done.

Alex Olley (22:33.51)
I love that. I got into a similar habit like three months ago. I have an app on my phone now that prompts me and it's almost like a journaling app and it's very cathartic, but it gives you that five, 10 minutes just to reflect on a daily basis. I can't remember if you said it was extreme or not, but I'm trying to do it twice a day now because it's a really wonderful thing to do and to give yourself and it doesn't take a lot of time either.

Chris Ritson (22:40.89)
Yeah, nice. 

Alex Olley (23:04.21)
Nice man. Well, look, you mentioned self-development as well. Obviously, that's part of it. What else are you doing to keep yourself in a good state, both body and mind? And what are you doing that you think others might want to think about doing to help them get through the hard times of being a leader or building a business?

Chris Ritson (23:23.87)
Yeah, how can you get through the hard times? I'm a real big believer in this, but it's like, I didn't admit this to my dad until maybe like a year ago, but when I was younger, he used to say, Chris, life is a pyramid. There's three parts to it. Start with what you enjoy. Then when you find what you enjoy, you'll work harder. When you work harder, you'll go and achieve the extrinsic things that you're constantly chasing.

When I started my sales career I took the job because it paid more than my uni housemates. And I was like, yeah, I'm competitive. I want more money than you guys. That immediately shows I've obviously been more successful in life so far. And then I look back now and I'm like, that was so naive, but thank God I took it because it opened all this new world of sales to me. Everything happens for a reason sort of thing. But the point was I actually took my dad's pyramid and apply, and every single time I'd had a different job, I thought about that job in terms of what did I actually really truly enjoy about it and what did I not? And the next job that I went into, I deliberately tried to delete the things I didn't enjoy or remove them from that opportunity and keep the things I loved. And sometimes that meant that I took pay cuts, right? And sometimes that meant that I took you know, at face value at a step down. 

So my first sales role, I was full cycle. Then I went into an SDR role, but it was this commitment to figuring out in my twenties what I really enjoyed that led me to the SDR world where, you know, I made a decision six, seven years ago that I used to run teams originally. And that sort of was back in the day, but I got a taste of running an SDR team and just really enjoyed it. So when they wouldn't let me run it internally, because they wanted to just outsource SDR, I was like, well, actually I want to go and pursue that. And I made the decision essentially on, you know, based on the fact that I just wanted, I enjoyed it and it paid less. And, you know, people will say, yeah, but SDR is more stressful in some ways. You have all these people challenges and blah, blah, blah. Right, you have the chance to show someone who has no idea how much sales can change their life, just how impactful it can be for them and their family moving into the future. And that's what I care about. That's where I get my like internal, selfish kicks, so to speak, is like, I enjoy seeing that and getting those messages five years down the chain where it's like, Chris, I'm so glad you taught me outbound man, because we just went like full outbound as an AE team and I'm like the only one on the team that can do it. I'm like, well, I told you, I told you. At the time they were hating me sometimes where I was just like, you know, the job here as the leader is, I'm not your friend., I'm here to get the best out of you. Sometimes you're going to not like some of the things that I have to say. But I promise you, if we work on them together, always together, then we'll get there in the end. 

And they're the sort of moments that I take a huge amount from in terms of the journey. And it keeps me in the game because I'm passionate about it. And because I'm passionate and I enjoy it, when it's really crap and some days it is, right? Running a business is some days where you're like, what just happened? And then you wake up the next day and you're like, okay, today's probably gonna be better than yesterday. And then sometimes it's not, it's worse. And then you're like, okay, well, tomorrow. Or like this afternoon or whatever. For me, it always just goes back to this bigger vision piece and this bigger mission piece that I always used to try and draw out of my SDRs.

And I was always really upfront with them as well about this. And here's a short story, one of my best ever SDRs called Cleo, she left, she ended up leaving. But one day she turned around to me and said, Chris, I wanna be a doctor. And I said, okay, well, your vision's changed, right? You originally wanted to be a sales director, right? And we're working towards getting you to AE, you want to be a doctor now. So take the weekend, come back to me and tell me how's this SDR role going to help you become a doctor? I knew what the answer was. But I wanted her to work that out and I wanted her to fully own it. So she took the weekend, went and spoke to her parents, her sisters, came back and said, look, Chris, I feel really bad. I'm going to let the team down. And I said, look, Cleo, well, the biggest thing that you'll let the team down on is by letting yourself down first, because you're not doing something you love and you see in your future. So you're going to stop working as hard as you set yourself as the standards in the first place, which means, you know, your confidence will drop because you won't perform as well. And it will become a spiral. So go and apply to medical school. I think she's in her final year now or something like that. And you know, she messaged me sometimes and says, Chris, you know what, it was a dream working as an SDR because being a junior doctor is an absolute nightmare. But I love it. And I want to be a consultant in 10 to 15 years time. And you got me to think about this vision piece for where I really want to be, what the impact I want to have and what I'm going to enjoy. And you know, I was like, and even when you're on your sixth night shift in a row, what do you think? And she's like, well, I think I need to stay in the game because that's where I want to go in the long term with this. And I actually do enjoy it, even though I'm exhausted and I'm seven coffees in at 4 a.m. But the point is, I'm like, OK, they're serious sacrifices, but you're staying in the game for the vision and that's it.

Alex Olley (29:52.33)
Love that man. That's a very powerful story. Absolutely love that.

All right, dude, well, look, we're pretty much up for time. So I'm going to go through the quick fires real quick. If you could have a drink with anyone in the world who you perhaps admire, who would it be?

Chris Ritson (29:59.584)
So many people, but Clive Woodward would be mine. 

Alex Olley (30:13.39)
Okay. Oh, I could have a drink with Clive.

Chris Ritson (30:34.592)
So reason why is I'm obsessed with leadership. I became a leader when I was about 24, completely unqualified and had no idea what I was doing. But I read quite a lot of Clive Woodward's work, because he has a learning and development business. And I was obsessed with England rugby. And I just was reading about some of the work that he was doing outside of rugby and how he built a life outside of rugby. And it allowed me to stumble across what he built for the England rugby team before they won the world cup in 2003. And he built this concept of teamship, and I thought it was really, really, really interesting because it was about how can we build a team that has the behaviors that support us becoming world number one in the world. And I took that in all of my roles and rather than building a hard skills playbook saying follow this sequence, I built a teamship playbook - well I say I built it, the team built it, each one of the businesses that I worked at - and then they followed their own rules because they built it. And there was this ultimate accountability with them. And I didn't have to deal with as many people problems as other SDR leaders because they were following their own rules that they'd built, not what I'd built. So I totally stole that from Clive. But then that's why I'd love to have a drink with him because from a leadership perspective, taking an amateur sport, and players and going and becoming the best team in the world within a five-year period, you have to have some serious leadership capabilities in order to do that. And yeah, that would be my thing. And I'm also, he's a very committed bloke. And that's what I would say, if I have to define myself in one word, it would be like commitment. If whatever I'm doing, I'll give it everything sometimes too much and I need to manage myself better. But I think we'd get on, because I think we're both a bit intense basically.

Alex Olley (33:14.79)
Mate, I absolutely love that. I'm a big, big, Clive Woodward fan boy myself. I've read a lot of his stuff. It sounds like I need to try and figure out a way for us both to get a drink with him. Let's see if we can do that. All right. 

Next question would be, what's the dumbest thing that SDRs or SDR leaders, the biggest mistake they're making right now and what should they be doing differently?

Chris Ritson (33:50.72)
Yeah, I think the biggest thing, at leadership level that I see most companies doing when I'm working with them is they're so - and this is quite topical at the moment -  but they're so obsessed with teaching the reps the product that they forget to teach the reps who they're speaking to and what the people care about in front of them. And fundamentally you're trying to push people through a cold prospect funnel in terms of outbound. And that starts with the conversation, trust, deeper relationship, book the meeting and then onwards. Like you should be optimizing everything you do as an SDR leader for yes, starting as many conversations as possible. But then when they're in those convos, how are they building as much trust with that person as humanly possible? And that's where like this, this whole philosophy around problem enablement comes in. And that's not just a cold first conversation level. That's also all the stuff we're talking about with regards to nurturing people effectively over long periods of time who just are you're not right now. If SDRs don't know what the person in front of them cares about, it's very difficult for them to send a message to them that's gonna be relevant or in any way compelling. And that's where the messaging bit all starts. Once you've sorted out having a good list, it's can they message them effectively enough to get their attention and build a tiny little brick of trust in the wall that you need to build in order to get them from cold to customer.

Alex Olley (35:34.54)
Hmm, nice. Oh, I love that. That certainly resonates with me. I think I made that mistake a long, long time ago where we weren't teaching them the problems or what personas care about. And yeah, you can make it very product related. So I've seen it done before. I think it's spot on. Is there a particular business that you're watching right now that could be like a future game changer that you think, wow, this one really excites me?

Chris Ritson (35:58.30)
So I've been dabbling in angel investment. I've got absolutely no idea what I'm doing obviously, but I'm determined to try and learn it a little bit more. So I should probably say one of those, but then I wouldn't want to pick one out and get make the others feel bad. So I'm going to say a company called Hyperbound. You might have come across it. I think there's quite a lot of good movement coming from that company, but also most importantly, not just in terms of their product, I think the people there that are building it are really good eggs as well, and I think that's really important. Part of this, like, yeah, if I had to invest in in a company that was relatively new, sort of a year or two old sort of thing. I could invest in anyone, I'd probably invest there.

Alex Olley (37:10.19)
Love that, yeah, I know Hyperbound, for those listening and watching, it's essentially like a cold calling bot. So you cold call it and you practice cold calling and objection handling your bot. And it essentially helps you because we don't get as many connects these days. So it allows you to build the reps in advance, which is awesome. Nice one, well, Chris, I didn't tell you this one in advance, by the way, but I allways finish on the same question, which is if you were to tell people to do one thing to help them break through the noise right now, what would you tell them to be doing?

Chris Ritson (37:45.88)
Spend 30 minutes at the end of every single day, prepping your list for tomorrow, because if you have a clear view every morning of who you're gonna be focused on, you can focus on the message that you need to deliver as opposed to start, stop, start, stop, research, look at another account, maybe do a call here. And that's the world most SDRs live in, it's this very chaotic sort of ad hoc world. Whereas actually one of the things I used to do in my teams was 30 to 60 minutes, depending on how long you needed, phones down, activity away, you've done enough for the day. How are you setting tomorrow up for success? And I'm a big subscriber to that where I'm like, planning is a waste of time without execution, but your planning and your preparation is designed to help the chances of you winning increase. So spend some time doing it, majority of your time executing, but if you're just executing blindly, then you're probably executing on the wrong things a lot of the time as well. So yeah, that's what I would recommend everyone does.

Alex Olley (39:09.39)
Sage advice. I try and give the same advice to myself. So I'm glad you said that. Mate, we're up for time. I suspect you and I could talk for hours and hours. But sadly, we do have to end it there. But I mean, thank you so much for giving up your time and your wisdom. For people listening and watching, how can they find you?

Chris Ritson (39:28.51)
Just go to my website, so chrisritson.xyz or ping me on LinkedIn. Either one of those two things or places, you'll be able to get in contact with me.

Alex Olley (39:42.09)
Everyone needs to follow Chris on LinkedIn. The content is gold. I love what you're putting out there, man. I love what you're doing. Thank you for joining us. This has been another episode of the Antidote.

Chris Ritson (39:52.32)
Yeah, thanks. Thanks for having me, mate.