Ep. 119 - Sales Has Changed: Why Most Outbound Is Broken and What Actually Works Now, with Pareto Law

Mesha Wright (0:00)

I can guarantee that if your reps are churning out Slop utilising AI, they were churning out Slop before that. There's a huge gap between AI aspiration versus operational reality. You need to have a multi-channel approach. You can't just rely on picking up the phone anymore and booking a meeting. You can't just send an email and book a meeting. Reply rates are lower than ever. Your buyers are researching you, they're more informed than ever, but they've pretty much made a decision as to whether they want to work with you. Before they've even said, yep, let's send an inbound inquiry, you need to make sure that when you are reaching out, you are sharing something that can't just be found on your LinkedIn page or on your website. One of our newest SDRs, she had an inbound inquiry, which she passed over to me, so I'm very grateful, which generated a 100K plus deal, all from just posting on LinkedIn. I would like to banish sales leaders that don't take cold calls.

Justin Hanna (0:49)

Welcome back to The Payments Shed Podcast, here in New York City.

Today we have Mesha Wright, Sales Director at Pareto. Mesha, thank you so much for joining us. Tell them all about yourself and Pareto.

Mesha Wright (1:00)

Sure, so thank you for having me. Very excited to be here. So yeah, Sales Director, Pareto Law, or Pareto as we are now known, been in the US for just over a year. So moved from London, been with Pareto for five and a half years. Good to hear some familiar voices and accents. Pareto, we are a go-to-market, global go-to-market specialist. So focusing on recruitment and training for your sales and commercial business. So anywhere from SDR through to CRO, and then also on the flip side, enabling those that you've already got in seat to be more productive and help you to see more revenue in turn.

Grant Evans (1:42)

I'd like to ask both on a personal and a professional side, like how different is the US to the UK?

Mesha Wright (1:49)

So different. I think from a, let's speak from a personal perspective, I think, I always say New York is like London on steroids.

I love London. I love the UK. It's home. It's always going to be home. But there's just so much to do and see and eat, which has been a problem because I've gained a lot of weight. So it's good actually. We're enjoying the food. The food is good. The drinks are stronger. So yeah, it's just everything is, yeah, it's just hyped up and on a bigger level. From a, I guess, from a business perspective, part of the reason I moved out here was because I'm really financially motivated and ambitious and I wanted to earn as much money as I could and there's so much opportunity. And we've got a real untapped market, I think, at the moment at Pareto. So I saw lots of opportunity and continue to do so and see so.

Grant Evans (2:36)

So it's like that kind of thing, isn't it? Where like, you know, in the UK, they're like capped commissions has always been a thing in a lot of industries. Like here, it's like you're our best sales person. You can earn as much as you possibly can. Like it's the reward for being good at your job, right?

Justin Hanna (2:51)

I think it's a mindset piece, right? For sure.

Mesha Wright (2:54)

Also, like take it with a pinch of salt, right? When you look at social media, because, you know, you don't know what's true all of the time. But I saw that somebody from Gong posted the other week, there were like X amount of reps in their team that had taken home a million dollars that year. And I'm like, that's like, what industry can you, can you dream of making that much money? And I know we'll come onto this, but with potentially very little skill to begin with or experience and not having studied for five years plus to, to know your craft, you know, step into that particular industry or that particular field.

Grant Evans (3:24)

Gong's like one of my favorite things ever. Every salesperson is terrible at using CRM.

So my team, we have Gong and it, it not only tells me in the morning, like all the calls they're having with like the background of the call, who they're speaking to, they have their call and it feeds the show notes directly into the CRM. Like there's no excuse for not having the update on that account because Gong just does it. I think that's like being revolutionary for me.