EPISODE 701: Mastering Digital Sales Rooms with Allego President Mark Magnacca & The Hillman Group’s Mark Lonzo

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Today’s show featured an interview with Mark Magnacca, President and Co-Founder, Allego, Inc. and Mark Lonzo, Director of Sales Development at The Hillman Group.

Find Mark Magnacca on LinkedIn. Find Mark Lonzo on LinkedIn.

MARK MAGNACCA’S TIP:  “To take your sales career to the next level, pick a philosophy. In the same way that there’s lots of great philosophies out there in terms of how to grow your business, how to be consultative, the key is to try to find one that you can actually follow. Trying to mix and match or mix religions, so to speak, is a lot harder than to pick one approach that you believe in and that you can hold onto and stay with over the long term.”

MARK LONZO’S TIP: ” I have a sign in my office that says, “If we’re not changing, we’re dying.” Always look for ways that you’re always changing and evolving as a person. Don’t become stagnant in your career. Always look for ways to improve. It’s a constant self-improvement process that you need to engage in.”

THE PODCAST BEGINS HERE

Fred Diamond: I’m very excited. For the first time ever, we have two guests with the same first name. We have Mark Magnacca, who’s the President and Cofounder of Allego, and we’re going to introduce him in a second. I always ask our guests, if they’re working with a vendor or if they’re an author, to bring on a sales leader who can give us some perspective on how they’ve implemented some of the best practices and ideas and solutions. Mark, it was great to bring on Mark Lonzo with The Hillman Group. These are the fun shows that I like to do. We have someone who’s offering a solution, some great ideas, and then we have someone who’s implemented it as a customer. I’m looking forward to this conversation.

Mark M., you wrote the book Digital Sales Revolution. A lot of people listening to the show are probably familiar with Allego, but why don’t you give us an introduction to the company and what it does? Tell us a little bit about the book as well, and let’s get into it.

Mark Magnacca: I’m Mark Magnacca, and the company’s called Allego. We are a leader in the modern revenue enablement space. When you think about that term, it’s really the evolution of what was just sales enablement, but now it’s about the coming together of sales and marketing. Allego is all about everything to do with getting salespeople ready to sell, making sure they have access to the right content when they need it, and being able to then interact with customers by using a tool like the DSR or the digital sales room that we’re going to talk about. The book, Digital Sales Revolution, is really a way to help introduce the broader market to this topic.

As a point of reference, Gartner has said that by 2026, 30% of all B2B sales interactions will flow through some kind of digital sales room. It’s a topic that even if you’re not familiar with it or you’re not using this right now, it’s probably worth you knowing about because it’s coming. One of the reasons it’s coming, and it has arrived for many people like Mark Lonzo, is that it’s just a better way to sell. If you think about a classic stereotype of sales pushing, the DSR transforms that whole dynamic so that literally you are seen as a trusted expert who can curate the right content and help people go through the buyer’s journey at their own pace and be able to interact with them, giving them what they want when they want it, and be able to scale it to a larger number of people rather than just in the one-to-one era. That’s a brief overview of what is it and why should you care.

Fred Diamond: I want to talk to Mark Lonzo first, get his introduction, and then we’ll go deep into digital sales rooms and how they’re being used and how you visualize them being used. We got Mark Lonzo, you are with The Hillman Group, Mark. Give us an introduction to yourself. Tell us a little bit about The Hillman Group as well. Then tell us what you’ve been doing with Allego. Why did Mark Magnacca invite you to be on the show with him?

Mark Lonzo: First of all, thanks for letting me be on the show and glad to see Mark again. We work very closely with the Allego team. My role is I’m the Director of Sales Development for The Hillman Group. My role is primarily responsible for training, working on sales initiatives with our leadership team, and also on continuous improvement projects. Now, if you haven’t heard of The Hillman Group, The Hillman Group is a leading distributor of hardware solutions, consumer personal protective gear, and also in robotic kiosk technology. We have leading partners like Lowe’s, Home Depot, Walmart, Ace Hardware, Tractor Supply, and other leading hardware retailers. If you go into a store and you see the key cutting equipment, or you see the nuts and bolts display, that’s us.

Really, our involvement with Allego is several years ago we were looking for a solution for sales enablement, and we partnered with Allego. Since then, Allego has been a big part of our business and really helps our sales force be much more organized, find the information, but it’s really changed that selling environment completely. Again, as we get into the DSRs and we talk a little bit about them, we can talk about some of the benefits and the great value we see in digital sales rooms.

Fred Diamond: Before we get to that, Mark Lonzo, give us a little more insights into selling your type of solutions and products into the Lowe’s and the Home Depots as well. Do you have a team of people who are there all the time? Give us some insights.

Mark Lonzo: To segment our business, we have our national accounts group, which would be your Lowe’s, Home Depot, Tractor Supply. We have about 500 service people that go into those stores. They down stock product, they take orders, they clean up the display. We also have around 275 sales reps. Those sales reps go into your Ace Hardwares, True Values, Do It Best, and they go in and they actually do the same type of work, but they also sell to that customer. They build that one-on-one relationship with the store owner. We have account managers at the high level. Then we’ve got our sales reps that go into the individual mom and pop hardware stores and sell them. Most of their job is related in sales and service of those stores.

Fred Diamond: Has that world changed? Obviously, every selling world has changed, hence why we’re having today’s conversation. How has the large hardware suppliers, the Home Depots, the Lowe’s, give us a little bit of an insight into how their world of selling has changed over the last two to five years?

Mark Lonzo: You’ve seen the dynamic of that business is that really, they’ve all fell in place where of course you’ve got your Lowe’s, Home Depot, your bigger box stores that cater to that particular customer. If somebody’s coming in to redo their entire kitchen, if they’re coming in to do a major project, that’s where they tend to go. Whereas the Ace Hardwares, the True Values, the Do It Best, those are more of your, “I’m trying to fix something and I need to go and talk to somebody to walk me through, how do I do that?” It’s almost like they found their niche within their marketplace. But it seems to be working very well over the years. I’ve been in this business for a long time, and really, I think the industry is strong. We have great customers, both national accounts and our independently-owned hardware stores. It’s really, I think, still a very, very thriving business.

Fred Diamond: Mark Magnacca, let’s get deep into the concept of the DSR, of the digital sales room. Most of our listeners of the Sales Game Changers Podcast are in enterprise or complex sales. The Institute for Excellence in Sales, a lot of our partners are companies like Amazon Web Services, Oracle, Microsoft, Dell Technologies, et cetera. Give us some more of a deeper insight into where we’re moving with DSRs, digital sales rooms. What do the people listening need to know? We like to use the word transform a lot. I know you use that word often. How are DSRs transforming the world of modern selling?

Mark Magnacca: Well, that is the subtitle of the book, How Digital Sales Rooms Can Transform the Buying and Selling Journey. Fred, there’s a couple of different things here. First and foremost, at the highest level, one of the biggest challenges that exists, and Mark Lonzo can talk about this afterwards, is that for so many companies, their website is so large, there’s so much information, that for you to say to a prospective buyer, “Go to our website and have a look,” it can take them a fair amount of time just to try to navigate to find what they’re looking for. For a long time, there was this creative tension where the marketing team wanted people to go to the website because there was a way to measure it. On the other side of the coin, you had sales reps, even enterprise sales reps who had downloaded certain content to their desktop, and they would just send it out directly in an email.

The DSR really evolved into a way to take what is in effect a personalized microsite. When you really think about it, the analogy I like to give people is, when you go to a wedding today, most people have been to a wedding in the last couple years, there was some kind of a wedding website. That doesn’t mean that the bride and groom are web developers. It means that they were able to use a template, they were able to put all the relevant information into that wedding website, and if you were attending as a guest, you had what you needed when you needed it. They also knew if you had clicked on it, they had some data and analytics on how many people will be coming to the dinner and the reception, et cetera.

If you port that concept over to the world of B2B sales, the first problem that DSRs solve is sending an email that has multiple hyperlinks and multiple attachments. If you think about the idea of packaging a diamond ring from Tiffany’s in a cardboard box versus in a Tiffany’s box, the packaging really does make a difference. One of the things that strikes most people when you first see a DSR is it’s a beautiful presentation of information. We’ve really spent a lot of time on that topic at Allego, but as important, there is rich data and analytics so that you know what you have shared with your prospective customer, they actually care about. In addition, there’s a virtuous circle to this where the marketing organization then begins to learn what content that they are creating is actually resonating.

In the enterprise world, Fred, the way that it’s being used most often is there’s a template, in the same way you use a PowerPoint template, there’s a DSR template that gets you, say, 95% of the way there that has approved content. Then depending upon your company, sometimes you omit certain things that aren’t relevant. You have the ability to personalize with a quick video welcoming someone, kind of like welcoming them at the front door of your house, and then walking them around a little bit. You get this high level of personalization that is really a completely different way of aligning to the way people want to buy. Because so often, particularly in buying committees, there’s lots of different people involved in the process. This is a way to be able to share in a centralized location what people care about and be able to track who’s watching it, who’s interested in it, etc.

The official definition that I typically use is it’s a personalized and autogenerated client site that combines self-service convenience with a seller’s touch, and it streamlines that whole content sharing and collaboration process to expedite deal cycles.

Fred Diamond: Typical enterprise sales, we’re talking 6 to 10 people may be involved, possibly even more, and companies change. People come, people go, new people are assigned to the team, and always one of the biggest challenges is getting that new person up to speed. Maybe if somebody comes in on the finance side, Mark Lonzo, you must be dealing with this not infrequently, over the last couple years, people have made decisions to move on with their lives in different places. We’re doing today’s interview in the middle of the summer of 2024. Mark Magnacca, are these also being used internally, kind of like what a historic intranet might be? I’ll tell you why.

I was talking to a relatively new enterprise sales professional at a company last week, and she told me that they’re connecting her to a lot of senior salespeople who have been at the company that she now works at for 5, 10, 15 years. She says it’s been great, but she says she would rather be talking to people who’ve been at the job for two, three years, because they know exactly what’s happening today. They’re also relatively new to sales, and they said she hasn’t been connected right there. I could see in a digital sales room internally, she could be connected to people with those types of more valuable experiences or observations.

Mark Magnacca: It’s a great point, and the answer is you could. We are focused more on the external use case. Mark can talk a little bit more about this, but in the example you just gave, I can tell you, if you’re in the med device business, for example, and you’re calling on a specific individual practice, or you’re calling on a hospital group, and in the example you just gave, there’s 8 to 10 people involved. The ability to know that all those people have access to it, to be able to see when people are accessing the content, which content they want. Then to your point, when somebody new joins, there’s even a messaging component that can be activated so that it’s a way for someone new to be able to get up to speed very quickly on what’s already been happening with this particular buying group.

This is one of those things, Fred, that Mary Shea, the Forrester analyst, what she said about it that we quote in the book, she said that in the same way that when the iPod was first introduced, most of us who had a library full of CDs, we couldn’t imagine, “Why do I need another gadget to be able to listen to music?” But then once you had the iPod in your hand, and of course, later it became part of the iPhone, you recognized that it was just a better way to carry around a thousand songs in your pocket than the CD player. In the same way, DSR is one of those things. Once you see it, it becomes very intuitive. I will tell you that in addition to the kind of pure sales use case, there’s also the educational use case, which would probably be a great pivot over to Mark and some of the ways that he’s using it.

Fred Diamond: Mark Lonzo with The Hillman Group, you are a user of Allego DSRs. First of all, what got you interested? You gave us a little bit of the intro about why you connected with Allego back in the day, but what got you specifically interested in the concepts of the DSRs? What was your goals? Tell us what kind of results you had.

Mark Lonzo: Really, my introduction started off when I was looking for a sales enablement platform. I was interviewing different companies, Allego was one of them. At the time, Brendan Sweeney, who’s now the vice president of sales for Allego, he was our sales rep. He was going through his presentation, he went through his demonstration, we’re like, “This looks really great.” At the end of it, he said, “I’m going to send you a link to a page. When you go into that page, you’ll have the videos of what we talked about and then some other resources.”

I click on the link, open the page, and it’s Allego, the Hillman logo, and had a video by Brendan, and Brendan’s like, “Hey, Mark, thanks for taking the time. Here’s all the resources we talked about. Talk to you soon.” I was like, “Wow,” I was blown away by this. The next call I had with Brendan, I said, “Is this part of the package?” He goes, “Absolutely.” I was blown away by that because I saw the value immediately. Actually, there’s one other sales enablement platform that kind of had it, but you had to pay for it. Then secondly, it wasn’t everybody could use it. It was just a one-and-done microsite for selected customers. To me that was tons of value.

It was interesting. I think about last year, I think Mark invited me on one of his round table discussions with some of his customers, and we’re talking about digital sales rooms. As I’m listening to the stories, I’m thinking to myself, really the buyer-seller relationship has changed. Really Amazon has changed that. Our buyers that we deal with, they also buy from companies like Amazon. It literally just happened the other day. I placed an order in the morning and I got home in the afternoon, it was there. Their expectations have changed. If you go and do a search on Google and you say, “What’s a good follow up? How should I follow up after the sales conversation,” it’ll say, send an email with information and a thank you. Nothing says, send a digital sales room. That to me is completely a game-changing technology.

If you think about that, I look at the vision of our Salesforce is, we’re great at service, we’re great at sales, but what we need to do is now become great at being consultants. A better way to be a consultant is when I send them a digital sales room after I’m done with my presentation or after I’m done. That actually pulls it all together and changes that buyer-seller interaction. I think that’s really what’s exciting about it, and we’ve really expanded with it. If we come out with a new product launch, and we give our people basically a playbook, but in that playbook, we have links to digital sales rooms that are external-facing so as we’re talking to the customer, say, “Hey, by the way, I’m going to send you this link and it’ll bring you more information,” like Mark had said earlier. Instead of the carpet-bomb approach, now it’s more of a strategic approach on curated content that I can see exactly what they’re looking at, and I have a more educated response to that customer because I know what they’re interested in. I think that’s been what’s game-changing for us.

Fred Diamond: You mentioned in the beginning that you have customers like Lowe’s, Home Depot. Did you create specific digital sales rooms for Lowe’s, one for Home Depot, one for Ace? Tell us a little bit about how you customize it. Then the follow up question is, do you also put private information like price quotes and proposals? Do you use that for those types of things as well, or is that a whole separate function?

Mark Lonzo: First of all, from our Lowe’s and Home Depot model, I would say we typically don’t use them so much for them as much as we do for our sales group, the ones that call the independently-owned-and-operated hardware stores. That’s our primary use case for them. The thing is, is the content is, we are very careful not to put any pricing content. Everything that’s on there is pretty much what you would find on social media. We’re not giving them anything. Maybe it would get into a program breakdown, which we wouldn’t put on social media, but it’s nothing that’s anything we have to worry about, it’s protected or anything. You got to have that type of security, I guess you would say, or practices when you’re using it.

Mark Magnacca: What Mark’s talking about is it comes in two flavors, if you will. One is what we’ll call an open link that basically anyone can click on, or they have to just add in their email address so you know who they are. That’s one approach. The other one is a closed link that only somebody who has been authenticated through email can access. I will tell you that we have customers that do put price quotes, that do put other information on it because they’re only sharing it either directly with this buying group or with an individual person. When you think about the DSR, it’s really important to understand that there’s two sides of the coin. One is much more open and one is much more private.

Fred Diamond: Mark Magnacca, where do you see this going? Do you see a company like The Hillman Group or your other customers having many different DSRs per customer to get as specific as possible? Or do you see maybe them having one where they use it as maybe a central place for specific information that might be available to everybody?

Mark Magnacca: It’s not designed to replace the website at all. If you think about the website, it’s really generally the one-to-many. Where we see this going is, for the reasons that Mark Lonzo just described, is that AI is going to make it much easier, it’s already happening right now, to be able to spin up a personalized one for you as an individual, for you as a company, for you as a division of a company. But the key is, it’s relevant to you, and it’s providing that data and analytics that are so critical. What it’s really allowing you to do is scale. Because if you can spin up five of these things in a matter of minutes, then what ends up happening is you can be managing a wider number of people.

I liken it to the old way of selling. It’s like having one fishing pole in the back of the boat. This is like having 5 or 10. The beauty of it is you’re only interacting when there’s a little tug on the line, when someone’s actually interested in something, versus the push method of checking in and seeing how they’re doing and are they ready.

Fred Diamond: Mark Lonzo, is there anything that we didn’t ask you that you would like our listeners to know about the adoption of digital sales rooms, or anything that we might not have discussed at this point?

Mark Lonzo: Actually, to Mark’s point, yeah, I should have been more clear on that, that’s a good point, is that we do have the digital sales rooms that are more personalized to a specific customer. We do a lot of the broader ones for product launches, but I think the biggest thing with a digital sales room is that it enhances the buyer-seller relationship. I think the biggest thing is, is that having that ability to look at the statistics, to see who’s looking at content, to know what content they’re looking at, it just makes you a much more educated seller. Then actually it helps the buyer too, because really the buyer, you don’t get a lot of time with your buyer. By giving them that access to that digital sales room, now they have the ability to look at the content that you’ve curated for them, and then you can go back and have those conversations. Really it shortens that selling process also.

Fred Diamond: The great sales professionals that we work with, they’re the ones who know what their customers need. When you’re at dinner or something, you’re in a meeting, if you have that opportunity to ask, “Is there something that we don’t know about your business or what might be things that we’re not aware of?” But the great salespeople are the ones who are using AI or they’re using research, whatever tools necessary, to be able to present something specific to the customer. Customers don’t want to work with people who don’t understand their challenges anymore. It’s not even the shortness of the engagement. It’s, “If you ain’t providing value to me, that’s going to help me beat my competitors or go into new markets, then you’re toast.” There’s no reason for customers to speak to them.

Mark Magnacca, congratulations on publishing the book, Digital Sales Revolution. As I’m asking you guys questions, I have like 50 more questions I could ask you. I know we’re just basically scratching the surface of this, and we’ve even just clarified how it could be used or other ways it might not be best suited to be used. Is there anything else you want to tell us that we might have not covered that will be critical for the sales leaders who are listening to the Sales Game Changers Podcast to understand about where this is going?

Mark Magnacca: I think the easiest way to think about where this is going is this. Mark just said it with respect to Amazon, that the B2B world is learning from the B2C world. The reality is, as expectations change in the B2C world, they change in the B2B world. Because remember, B2B is made up of consumers as well. What I absolutely believe is that if you’re interacting with two people, in the example you just gave, and someone presents something to you in the form of a link that opens up a personalized page, and then their competitor sends you an email with a hyperlink, right off the bat, there’s this separation that someone’s approaching the game in a different way. At a minimum, I think understanding what this is and how it’s going to start to change things is critical for those people who want to be at the top of their game in selling.

Fred Diamond: I want to thank Mark Magnacca with Allego and Mark Lonzo with The Hillman Group for just giving us a taste of this. I think it’s going to be the standard in, I don’t know, what do you think, Mark Magnacca? I think it’s going to be the standard in a year, 18 months, 2 years?

Mark Magnacca: The business of predictions is hard, even Gartner’s predictions, but I would say that over the next couple years, particularly with the infusion of AI, that this is going to become a much bigger part of the sales process, and it’s worth understanding more about what it can do for your business.

Fred Diamond: Mark Lonzo, I know you said you’re using these primarily for smaller companies, but give us some of your insights when you’re dealing with the Lowe’s and the Home Depots of the world. These are multi-billion-dollar companies that everybody’s familiar with, that is under extreme pressure for profits and sales and all those kinds of things. The interactions that you have with customers at those types of companies, is what we’re talking about correct here? Are we missing something, or do they expect more from you? Not asking questions like, “Gee, tell me your pain,” or, “What keeps you up at night?” Are they expecting real hard, “Gee, these guys have done their research” type things before they waste my time?

Mark Lonzo: We’re at the beginning of this, the whole DSR revolution, but we started off with our sales force, as I said, our independently-owned hardware stores. But that vision for the future is you need to use all the tools in your arsenal. Again, DSRs for our account managers that go to Home Depot and Lowe’s on all that. My vision is, is that they would use that as part of their standard operating procedures. We’re building that culture, we’re building in that direction. The same for our Salesforce. We have a majority of our sales force that use them, but we have that segment that doesn’t. It’s trying to make that part of the process that it’s like putting on your socks in the morning, I automatically do this. We’re not there yet, and that’s how we’re evolving as we progress in this.

It’s like AI. That’s another thing. Honestly, I was scared of AI. I went to Mark’s Allego S3 conference and learned about AI. Again, it’s game-changing, revolutionary type things. It’s not to be scared of, it’s to embrace it and use it. I think that really we’re just scratching the surface on DSRs. I can see in the future that it’s just going to grow. My advice to you is, look at the future, have a vision, and see what you can use today that’s going to help benefit you in the future.

Fred Diamond: We’re doing these shows, Sales Game Changers Podcasts, every day, and the Institute for Excellence in Sales, we talk to leading implementers. We have our Premier Sales Employer and Premier Women in Sales Employer, and some of the criteria for companies to achieve those designations is by implementing solutions and technologies like these to be ahead of the game. Maybe we’re getting a little bit ahead of ourselves as well.

I want to thank Mark Magnacca with Allego for being on today’s show. Congratulations on the book. Mark Lonzo from The Hillman Group, thank you so much for the great insights. Mark Magnacca, why don’t you give us a final thought. We like to end every show with a final specific action step people should take right now after reading the transcript or listening to the show to take their sales career to the next level.

Mark Magnacca: Well, to take your sales career to the next level, I think you have to pick a philosophy. In the same way that there’s lots of great philosophies out there in terms of how to grow your business, how to be consultative, I think that the key is to try to find one that you can actually follow. Trying to mix and match or mix religions, so to speak, is a lot harder than to pick one approach that you believe in and that you can hold onto and stay with over the long term.

Fred Diamond: Mark Lonzo, bring us home.

Mark Lonzo: I agree with Mark. I have a sign in my office, it says, “If we’re not changing, we’re dying.” Always look for ways that you’re always changing and evolving as a person. Don’t become stagnant in your career. Always look for ways to improve. It’s a constant self-improvement process that you need to engage in.

Transcribed by Mariana Badillo