Pipeline Signals = Prospecting Intelligence - with Jamie Shanks, Founder and CEO Sales for Life

**Ray Rike** (0:00)
Hello, I'm Ray Reich, Founder and CEO of RevOp Squared, and your host of the Metrics that Measure Up podcast. We talked to a wide variety of B2B, SaaS and Cloud thought leaders, executives, investors, and people just like you to discuss the metrics and benchmarks they use to make metrics informed decisions. Now on to today's show.
Welcome to today's episode of the Metrics Measure Up Podcast. Today, we are joined by Jamie Shanks, founder and CEO of Sales for Life and co-founder of Pipeline Signals. Today, we will be covering three main topic areas. First, pipeline growth, the ultimate B2B revenue leaders challenge. Second, the core signals to increase pipeline health and accelerate growth. And third, revenue intelligence. Is this the ultimate destiny for pipeline signals? Jamie, take a moment to give a brief background overview of your journey to becoming a guest on the Metrics That Measure Up podcast.

**Jamie Shanks** (1:12)
Ray, thanks for having me. I am a teacher, consultant, owner of professional services firms. And essentially, Sales for Life is a global sales training company that has been enabling the global enterprise in the global mid market for eight to nine years. And along our journey, every seller to become certified in our program, which is a think of them as 90 day blitz of time, every seller has to select an account, plan it, engage it and create a real life sales outcome. And that could be into a net new account or an existing account. And they're documenting that journey in a video case study and a documented one page kind of results readout, which their manager reviews. So along that journey, we certified a quarter million sellers thus far in our lifetime and something started to arise. And these patterns arose in which we could see how pipeline was being created. And it was being created primarily using signal intelligence or signals. And they come in various flavors. And for years, companies would reach out and sellers would put in support tickets and say, hey, you're teaching us to mine the signal intelligence out of tools like LinkedIn and creating advanced searches. But can you do this on our behalf? And I would blow these off and say, no, no, no, we're a teaching business. We're a teaching business. And then COVID hit. And I had a dream with my business partner, Amar, of owning multiple businesses. And it gave us the opportunity to create a second company, which is a managed service version of Sales for Life, in which we actually mine signal intelligence on behalf of a sales organization of their entire total addressable market and all their accounts and serve that intelligence back to them to make informed decisions.

**Ray Rike** (2:56)
Well, Jamie, before we talk about this pipeline signals and that intelligence that you're going to be serving up, I'd like to go back a little bit more to your own kind of heritage. And that's, you're a pioneer in social selling. As you said, you've trained over 250,000 B2B sales professionals on social selling. Can you share with our audience a little bit about how social selling has changed, especially over the last 12 to 24 months, with the onset of COVID, virtual selling environments, et cetera. How has social selling changed?

**Jamie Shanks** (3:28)
When I started this social selling journey, first I had to spend years defining what is social selling. And most sales leaders at the time thought it was a magic trick, essentially. They were so accustomed to the phone, email, rinse, repeat as its core medium of communication. And we were introducing this third layer, which you could leverage tools like LinkedIn and Twitter, as a means of both research and engagement to the sales community. And then around 2017, 2018, the word social selling hockey sticked on Google, and everybody wanted a piece, and we took off. But at the same time, the average chief revenue officer just still didn't understand it. They thought again, it was a party trick. Now, COVID hits, and no longer are your field sellers, field sellers anymore. They're not doing million dollar deals by pressing moms and eating baseball stakes. What they're doing is they're become very expensive inside sellers. And the whole world reverted to a virtual sales model, and the medium of communication changed. Getting a hold of people on cell phones or email became increasingly difficult.
And so the skill set of both mining intelligence and researching inside tools like LinkedIn, and then engaging using those same tools, it became front and center of an important go-to-market strategy. And so with the way that social selling has evolved, is it's no longer a what is this and why should we do it. This shouldn't even be called social selling anymore. I used to preach this for years. This is truly just selling, and you've just digitized the sales process and the way you collect information and engage customers.