The Sales Game Changers Podcast was recognized by YesWare as the top sales podcast. Read the announcement here.
This is a Sales Story and a Tip episode! Watch the video of the interview here.
Subscribe to the Sales Game Changers Podcast now on Apple Podcasts!
Read more about the Institute for Excellence in Sales Premier Women in Sales Employer (PWISE) designation and program here.
Purchase Fred Diamond’s best-sellers Love, Hope, Lyme: What Family Members, Partners, and Friends Who Love a Chronic Lyme Survivor Need to Know and Insights for Sales Game Changers now!
Today’s show featured an interview with fractional executive leader Mike Malloy.
Find Mike on LinkedIn.
MIKE’S TIP: “Be relentlessly generous. Be a giver and to find ways to add value and add value and add value and add value, and not keep score and be like, “Hey, I’ve helped you three times. You should buy this thing from me now,” but just keep helping them.”
THE PODCAST BEGINS HERE
Mike Malloy: Hi, I’m Mike. I have previous experience as a Deloitte consultant, a traveling sunglasses salesman and CEO, incubator program director at Halcyon, and an adjunct professor at Georgetown. I’m passionate about being a relentlessly generous and enthusiastically fun force for good in the world through helping entrepreneurs buy back their freedom and time to focus on what matters most, both professionally and personally. I started Malloy Industries a little over three years ago coming out of COVID and The Great Resignation era. I’m now the CEO here at Malloy Industries, which creates more time and freedom for CEOs by helping them take off their undesirable hats and give them to vetted fractional executives. CEOs who want to scale their B2B sales from 1 or 2 million to 10 to 20 million in annual revenue benefit the most from the Malloy match with a trustworthy fractional sales executive.
Fred Diamond: The Great Resignation, that’s oldie but goldie. It was only two years ago. We’re doing today’s interview in the summer of 2024. Mike Malloy, tell us a great sales story.
Mike Malloy: We are in the summer of 2024, and this story goes back to the very first sales meeting I had of the year on January 3rd. I met with a CEO named Catherine, and she had reached out to me over the holidays saying, “Hey, Mike, I need some help. Can we meet as soon as possible?” I was like, “Well, New Year’s Eve, all right, first meeting of the year, let’s get it on the calendar.”
We went into that meeting for a sales scalability assessment. I could dive into her business, understand where she was, where she needed to go, and her goal was to 3X her revenue this year. She knew what got her here wasn’t going to get her there, and that her marketing materials were a mess. Her sales decks needed to be tightened up, and she honestly wasn’t sure what to say when in sales meetings. She didn’t have a sales background at all. She was a product person, very passionate about the B2B solution she’d built, but she really needed a wingman or a co-pilot to build out the sales strategy systems and processes and put some more arrows in her quiver to go out and market and ultimately sell her solution in the K to 12 education space.
She was self-aware enough to identify that marketing was the piece of the business she hated. She doesn’t know what to write in Drip email campaigns. She’s not into fluffy content creation, and when she stares at a blank Google Doc trying to write them, was hitting a wall. She self-described it as a unicorn would be somebody who has both sales and marketing expertise and can be in the trenches with me. She recognized that there’s a big difference between, “Hey, let me call Mike Malloy for 30 minutes of advice once a month,” versus a fractional executive coworking on Zoom, building out these things, ripping them apart, rebuilding them together so that they’re much better.
When we went into that first call at the beginning of January, I asked her to reflect on it. Later, she was very impressed with how attentive I was to her needs both professionally and personally. She also didn’t go all in and saying, “Hey, I definitely want Malloy Industries.” She also did her own research, posted on LinkedIn to see if she could find somebody else, and she’s like, “I got 30 candidates, but most of them were trash and nobody compared to the caliber of the three vetted fractional sales executives from Malloy Industries.”
Coming out of that initial assessment, I introduced her to Michael, William, and Keith so that she could then schedule interviews with them, get to understand their personality a little bit more, because what we found in fractional sales matchmaking, is that they’re going to have the skills. I’m not going to bring trash candidates to you, but so much depends on interpersonal communication and the culture of how does the CEO like to communicate? How do the actual sales executives show up, both when they’re interacting and working one-on-one with the CEO, as well as externally-facing when they’re talking to future customers and existing customers out in the marketplace?
We knew after that assessment that she needed to formalize the sales process to have higher win rates, to have more future customers in the top of the pipeline. She really needed this fractional senior level Chief Revenue Officer as the next addition to our team in Q1 to Q2 with hopes of building out a larger sales team in 2025.
As she interviewed with those three fractional executives, I didn’t just sit back on the sidelines and be like, “I’ll talk to you in a couple weeks,” I continued to help and add value. I shared some resources about, what is a fractional executive, how to work with a fractional sales executive. We have a treasure trove of, we call them valuable trust building gifts. Somebody else might call them a lead magnet, but they’re things that can help you build out the pieces of your sales funnel, the activities, some Mad Libs to fill in some scripts.
I sprinkled those in, and even before that first sales meeting of the year, I had helped Catherine over the past two years at various times reviewing her pitch deck, making introductions to potential investors, recommending her for Camelback, a fellowship for entrepreneurs. We had an existing relationship there, where we knew each other, she liked me, trusted me, and was able to benefit from that generosity, where I wasn’t selling anything on the front end. One of our core values is to be relentlessly generous and to figure out, “Hey, how can we help these entrepreneurs in as many ways possible so it becomes a no-brainer to work with us when the time is right?”
After a couple of weeks, she was able to interview these three. She ultimately picked Michael at the end of January. They started in February. She has reflected back saying, “Michael was the exact person that I needed, because he is both a strategist who knew what he is doing, and could say, ‘Hey, we should be doing X, Y, and Z.’ He’s also a doer. He’s not just sitting up in his ivory tower spewing strategy, but actually rolling up his sleeves, writing the scripts.” At the point now, there isn’t a single marketing or sales piece of collateral in the company that he hasn’t touched and iterated and improved on. He also helped coach her on some of the things that she could delegate to other team members so that she could focus more on being the CEO leading the company.
What’s amazing that’s come out of this is I’ve now been to a few in-person events with Catherine. There’s an Agora Initiative event in DC. We just went to a DC Startup Week Happy Hour a couple weeks ago. At all of those events, we’re both referring things to each other. She’s one of our biggest advocates and promoters and identifies other CEOs at B2B SaaS companies saying, “You need help with sales? Talk to Malloy. He’s over there. Let me introduce you. He’s that guy in the Hawaiian shirt,” or he’s got crabs on, I’ll try to wear a little something to stand out there.
I’ve been able to help connect her with potential customers as well as investors, and do some back-channel communications to help her raise some money and really be successful. It has been a lot of fun seeing her business grow while also benefiting from the goodwill that she has towards us and wanting to make connections and even connecting us with other fractional executives to add to our roster as a result of the relentless generosity we’ve shown to her.
Fred Diamond: Give us a tip that you learn from that story.
Mike Malloy: My tip is to be relentlessly generous, is to be a giver and to find ways to add value and add value and add value and add value, and not keep score and be like, “Hey, I’ve helped you three times. You should buy this thing from me now,” but just keep helping them. I love asking people, “What’s the most expensive problem you’re trying to solve right now?” Then, “Hey, do I have a resource, or a person, or something else that I can do to help you solve it? Great. Let me help you. When the time is right, we have fractional executives,” but not approaching every relationship as a transactional sales relationship, but as a, how can I add value, make deposits in the relationship bank, by being relentlessly generous? Because, I want to quote Zig Ziglar here, you help enough other people get whatever they want in life, you can have anything you want in life.
Fred Diamond: I have two quick thoughts on that. One is, I had a woman who was a training sales professional. Her company did IT related training and we did some networking together. We got along really well, but she never gave me a lead. For people who may not know this, at one time I was a fractional CMO, and you help people find fractional Chief Revenue Officers and Chief Sales Officers, VPs of Sales. I was a fractional CMO before the word fractional was a cool word, as you and I have talked about before. But I had this person and we did networking together, and I know she came across technology companies that might need a temporary or outsourced CMO, and never gave me a lead.
I did a lot of things for her, and she did things for me. Seven years into the relationship, I said, “You know what? We’re friends. We’re friends, she’s never going to bring me a lead. I brought her a couple, but things appear under my radar screen.” 10 years into the relationship, she called me one day and said, “Do you do this as an outsourced CMO or as a fractional CMO?” Basically, she had come across a company that was looking to do some market sizing about looking into various places they wanted to move into, and they needed a competitive analysis, competitive review. I said, “Yeah, I’ve done that before.” She goes, “Well, let me introduce you to this company,” which she did, and it led to a six-figure deal. It was great. It was my big deal of the year.
At one point, to be honest with you, I discarded her. I was like, “You know what? She’s in this group. I’m nice to her. She hasn’t brought me anything.” One day I just said, “I’m just going to drop it. This is a friend.” But then it led, three years later, to one of my biggest deals at the time.
Mike Malloy: What I heard from that too is you have to plant seeds in the spring to harvest in the fall, and sometimes the fall is like 10 years later. You never know which of all of those seeds… I’ll throw a bonus tip here of like, go to one networking event a week, get three new business cards, that’s 150 people in a year. 10% of them are going to have a massive impact in your career, you just don’t know which 10% it is. If you approach each relationship with relentless generosity, put deposits in the relationship bank, find ways to help and add value, good things happen. You just can’t predict exactly where they’re going to come from.
Fred Diamond: Not every company is sitting around looking for an outsourced Chief Sales Officer, and not every company was looking for an outsourced Chief Marketing Officer. What you offer is something that’s very helpful, very specific. It’ll help a company get to a certain place. It may last for years if it’s the right person and the right fit. Same thing with me, as a Chief Marketing Officer, not everybody was ready or understood or was looking. But like you were just saying, sowing the seeds eventually led to something.
Mike, thank you so much. Thank you for the great sales story. My name is Fred Diamond.
Transcribed by Mariana Badillo