Growth through Differentiation, Velocity, Connection | Daniel Metcalf on BeyondSaaS Ep 011

Jason Niedle Today we’re talking with Daniel Metcalf, sales manager of ClockShark, about how differentiation in a competitive landscape is the key as well as your sales funnel.

Welcome to Beyond SaaS Daniel. Before we jump in, have you got a golden nugget for today?

Daniel Metcalf Yeah, something that’s been on the top of mind is that people nowadays have access to more information than they’ve ever had. You know, they can go across the internet and scour which software or which product is best for them and being able to differentiate what makes us different and or better and why they should go with us is something that I’ve been really coaching to my reps on how they have these conversations and how they approach that with

intentional ways so that they’re bringing up the prospect through the process.

Jason Niedle Is there a tip? Like how do we distill all that information down?

Daniel Metcalf a book that we read last year in book club called The Jolt Method. The Jolt Method, it’s helping essentially jolt customers out of indecision. And we’ve noticed that with a lot of different competitors out there and a lot of access to information, prospects tend to…

Jason Niedle the Jolt method.

Mm.

Daniel Metcalf almost freeze up for lack of a better term at some point that they’re finding trouble getting away from the status quo. So it’s really about guiding them, helping take the risk off the table and allowing them to see that your solution is the right solution for them so that it kind of limits the exploration for them. So I would say it’s a little bit more pointed.

Jason Niedle Years and years one of our US warships was in unfriendly waters. And a missile came from another country and it has this gun, the CIWS (Sea-Whiz), it’s designed to shoot down missiles, but there were actually two missiles. And so it looked one and then it said, there’s another one. And then it looked at the other one and looked at the other one. It was looking back and forth. It didn’t shoot at either one of them because it couldn’t decide on which one to shoot down.

And of use that as a metaphor for myself because I’ve been in that spot many times where there’s two decisions that are probably almost equally as good or maybe not, but I make no decision instead. So when I think of that, I just think about like, am I going to be the ship that just sits here and gets hit? Or at least am I going to take out one of these things? So I think that’s really important. Like how do you get people to actually move instead of just get stuck in indecision paralysis?

Daniel Metcalf Yeah.

Absolutely, and I think that what comes with that as well is realizing the why?. We’re doing this to help benefit our customers and their business and really show them that the grass can be greener. And if they believe you believe it, it’s a lot easier to make a decision rather than no decision, I would say.

Jason Niedle For sure.

So I’m Jason Niedle, founder of Tethos. Tethos is a growth agency and for the last 20 plus years, we’ve been accelerating tech company growth through strategy and branding and lead gen and conversion. And today I’m excited to be joined by Daniel Metcalf. Daniel has been responsible for many millions in sales, is an expert in enterprise B2B. Daniel, you, from what I’ve read, are a strategic thinker.

collaborate cross-functionally with marketing and the other teams. And it seems like you’re really focused on people overall. You’re currently at ClockShark, which offers field service or construction time tracking through an app. And you guys seem to have 100,000 plus personnel using your app, which is amazing in 25 countries, and to finish jobs more quickly and more accurately. Is that about right?

Daniel Metcalf Yeah, that’s a really good summary, Jason. It’s like you work for us.

Jason Niedle So now that I did a little summary,

really tell me about ClockShark and how you see your role and what’s your growth focus.

Daniel Metcalf Yeah, as you mentioned, ClockShark is a field service and construction management app. We’re focused primarily on the scheduling and time tracking portion of that. We are actually part of a larger software group called the SimPro group. So we’re attached with about four other job management type softwares that are specifically targeting all the same ICP. So we play really nicely with each other and some things we do really well and some things a different company does well and we’re able to kind of integrate

and match our products together to give our customers the best experience for their business. I was doing a lot of sales for the company as an account executive for a few years and found my way back into management as I had done that before. I was really eager to help drive growth for this and

kind of see what the next steps and where the next place ClockShark could actually go. It felt like we were on a slow trajectory up and I want to see if we can we can really dial that up and go go a little higher to the right this year.

Jason Niedle Yeah, it makes sense. Would you consider

ClockShark startup, mid-stage? What stage of growth are you guys at?

Daniel Metcalf I would say we’re mid-stage in growth.

Jason Niedle Okay, cool. And so what’s your big growth goal this year? What would you aim for in the next 12 months?

Daniel Metcalf Our big growth this year is we want to produce around three and a half million ARR this year. So that’s our big growth target, kind of our big hairy goal, if you will. We grew it a little bit slower pace last year, about 1.7 million ARR. So we’re trying to double that this year. So we’re trying to 2x our growth compared to last year.

Jason Niedle What would you say your biggest obstacle to that growth is?

Daniel Metcalf I would say there’s a couple of different obstacles. As I mentioned earlier with the golden nuggets, the competitive landscape is becoming much more saturated. There are a lot of people trying to help this industry. And I think it’s an industry that’s overlooked sometimes. The construction and field service industry, the roads, your house, plumbing, everything that we have that we take for granted is built by these folks. So helping this industry has a really soft spot in my heart.

But there’s a lot of people who also see that this is, there’s an opportunity for them to slot their way in and bring a software to these folks that can benefit their life. So differentiation between our software, how we work with folks at ClockShark, we are a full sale cycle, which is very rare nowadays. We do everything besides.

bringing leads into the funnel, which our marketing does. We qualify them, we demo for them, and we configure and set up for the client as well. So I think that’s one of the main differentiators that we have that we can really guide prospects through the process and make the buying journey really easy for them.

I did mention earlier as well, customer indecision, is always going to be, that comes directly with a very competitive landscape that they’re not sure which to choose. I think they’re afraid of choosing the wrong software as well because that can be just as detrimental to a business by choosing the wrong platform. So really making sure that they have all their needs met or at least get to that point where it’s like, Hey, we’ve, we’ve got you at 85, 90 % of the way there.

Is this enough to move forward? And at least getting that agreement from the client. And something that I think will forever be an issue for SaaS companies or companies in general is just making sure we have high quality leads top of funnel that are coming in. That’s what really drives the growth. So when us and marketing can partner together and be best friends, things seem to go really well.

Jason Niedle 100%. In that customer indecision, I guess from my marketing background, sometimes I think about that as like proving value, which gets back to differentiation, right? At least in my business, if I can’t prove massive value, then I tend to get that hesitation and that indecision. And so see that perhaps those are related, right? The differentiation and the customer indecision may or may not, I don’t know your whole situation, but those might be linked.

Daniel Metcalf I would agree with you, yeah. It all comes down to value at end of the day.

Jason Niedle So what do you see blocking you

from differentiating yourself and more top of funnel leads? Like what’s stopping you from getting those things?

Daniel Metcalf You know, I would say that on our side, we do a really good job of differentiating. Overall, I think that we’ve been trained well and we’re all rowing in the same direction in this boat, which is really good to see. I don’t know if you see that in every organization, so it’s a really powerful thing kind of, we win as one is something that we’ve coined on our side. So we make sure to really follow that. I would say maybe

bottlenecks that can come with that is, pricing sometimes. I would say we’re competitively priced, but sometimes when you offer the same solution or very similar solutions and it starts to get into pricing conversations and negotiation skills can be a bit of a bottleneck sometimes for us as well. Making sure that they have the correct skills in order to negotiate and remind the client

that you had challenges A, B, and C, this is how we solve them. Here’s the value that we bring to you and this is why a software is priced accordingly because it solves these types of problems. And as far as top of funnel, inbound marketing can be a tricky thing. So we’ve relied mostly for many, many years at ClockShark, which has been pretty amazing that we’ve driven growth specifically

with all inbound marketing, which is rare for a business to grow to where we’ve grown without any outbound prospecting at all. And with inbound marketing, it comes with different types of quality of leads. Organic paid search and direct traffic are always gonna be our big winners. Those are people who really want to see our software, but it does come with

social media that comes with a plethora of different type of leads that don’t always match with your ICP even though you’re trying to push that type of content out to social media, it doesn’t seem to always come back into the funnel the same way as you thought it would when you pushed it out.

Jason Niedle So you mentioned organic, paid, social. What would you say has really been working well for growth for you

Daniel Metcalf I can’t state it enough, but the way we take people through the sales process, our referral business has been sky high throughout the years. The way that

customers talk about us to other folks and the way that we position ourselves in that conversation seems to really work well for us and bring in leads without marketing have to. And they’re still an inbound lead, but it’s, you hey, I’m working with the plumbing company who’s doing all the Walmarts in the Northwest.

Hey, can you make an introduction to the person who does the electrical, the person who’s doing the framing, different things of that nature. And, you know, when they have a good experience, they’re more than happy to bring our software to help other people that they see struggling with the same things that we solve. That has been what’s working really, really well for us. would say referral marketing closes at a high rate, usually has a lot of velocity as well.

Jason Niedle So I was just talking with a client the other day and they were struggling how to facilitate or make word of mouth referrals happen. Do you guys have a system or a process or mechanisms? You some people offer referral bonuses and referral leads. Some people write it into their marketing scripts. Like how do you actually get to those referrals?

Daniel Metcalf Yeah, for a long time it was really, really sales specific. So sales reps were very responsible for driving referrals and asking directly, hey, if you’ve had a good experience, would you mind introducing me to anybody else that you work with that could benefit? We have moved to a program that is more of a paid program. Hey, if you bring us a customer, they onboard with us for six months, we’ll send you a gift card to help out.

Show the benefit and how grateful we are for you.

Jason Niedle Do you find that one of those works better than the other or they just work well in conjunction?

Daniel Metcalf I think they work well in conjunction, but my experience is if we provided the value and we gave the customer a good experience, that word of mouth goes further than a little bit of cash in their pocket. They get to tell the story for us, and there’s nothing more powerful than some other customer telling the story of how much you helped them.

Jason Niedle 100%. So what top of funnel things are working then? Because it sounds like you guys have a really good through line in your system, right? And those referrals come from the fact that you’re there from the beginning through past installation, right? The fact that you’re there the whole time means you can ask for those referrals. But How do you fill that top of funnel?

Daniel Metcalf Yeah, so marketing is filling that top of funnel with a few different things. One thing that’s actually came up that I didn’t mention that was a bottleneck is that there’s this AI overview on Google that I know we’re all getting more and more familiar with that’s very new. It definitely changed the algorithm for how people search for things. And I know when it first came out, we didn’t adjust well enough to the algorithm. So we saw top of funnel come in with a lot of different.

weird strange things that weren’t

in our ideal customer profile for a little while. And we noticed that a lot of our competitors were doing a lot of different blogs comparing software A versus software B, whether it was us versus them or them versus someone else. And the more type of content that you drove like that, it seemed to raise your results on Google more and more. So there was a different way of raising them compared to like the paid search. You know, you used to pay for keywords and I think those still work well when you pay for keywords.

Jason Niedle Mm-hmm.

Daniel Metcalf But really diving into that AI overview has been something that I think we finally got buttoned up. So we saw kind of a dip at top of funnel when we didn’t have it well. And now we’ve seen it drive right back up to kind of our normal rates where we have a high level of MQLs and qualified leads.

Jason Niedle Yeah, this is a huge discussion point in my industry, right? Because traditional SEO doesn’t work the same anymore because AI is summarizing it. And then not just Google, but how do I end up getting myself in, my clients are asking, how do we get ourselves in the chat GPT windows, right? And it’s data is older oftentimes, but it now has the abilities to do searches. And so, you it’s like you’re gaming it because you want to game it so that the AI picks you up and decides that you’re important, not just the user. So it’s quite an interesting.

Daniel Metcalf Huh.

Jason Niedle challenge and it’s great that you guys have figured that out to some degree.

Daniel Metcalf again, I think we’re still figuring out AI is one of those things that I think every business is trying to utilize and kind of gamify it or hack it for lack of a better term and understand how to best yield the results that they’re looking for. And I think as AI grows and develops, we’ll have to all iterate on that as well and kind of figure out what changes we need to make and levers we need to pull.

Jason Niedle Funny because on this podcast, I don’t have a question about AI, but there’s never a podcast that we don’t talk about AI. Like it’s ubiquitous. You cannot avoid it. I think you’ve mentioned some already, but I’ll ask the question anyways. What good marketing or sales hacks or tips do you have for audience, our audience here?

Daniel Metcalf Yeah

would say there’s a lot of people in sales going by a script and I think having pointed intentional conversations is very good but I think sometimes in sales there’s a bit of a lack of a human effort or human connection and one of the things that I pride myself on I like to teach my reps or coach them or

try to kind of keep a top of mind is the psychology of sales and what that means, you know, because people don’t just buy on logical reasons, they buy on emotional reasons. I think we’ve all heard that in the sales industry, but it’s a really powerful tool to be able to get someone emotionally invested in the tool that you’re helping sell them.

And I think that that’s one of the biggest hacks that I’ve learned in my career is the ability to connect with people. And I think will always work. of that, know, Daniel Pink, he has a great book, “To Sell Is Human.”

I really recommend that book for anybody who’s in sales, new to sales, been in sales for a long time is just kind of remember that, on the other side of that line is another person that we’re just trying to help. And if you can make that connection, it’s a real difference maker.

Jason Niedle Which is a counterpoint to our AI conversation a second ago.

Daniel Metcalf It is.

Jason Niedle So in Episode 009, Sunil, one of our other guests mentioned that he does not use a PowerPoint when he comes to his sales presentations. They ask their people one question. They say, “What would be the best use of this time for you?” I’m like, that’s such an interesting way to approach it. And maybe I would ask two or three more questions.

But I love the idea of finding out, you get the connection, you get the human connection, but then you find out, why are you even on this call? What do you want out of this half hour that we’re gonna talk about? And I thought that was such an interesting way to look at it in a what’s in it for you perspective instead of just blabbing for me about my product and what I do.

Daniel Metcalf Yeah.

Yeah, absolutely. And we’re the same way on our side. It’s not about blabbing about the product or feature selling. It’s about learning about them and just being ultimately curious as to what their life and their business looks like. Those two are one and the same for a lot of these folks running their businesses. So it bleeds into their life.

Jason Niedle That

word is so important, curiosity, right? Because if you’re truly curious, you’re not prejudging, you’re not already 10 steps ahead of them thinking you know, you’re just literally being curious and then that’s where the solutions come up. I love that. So good people are important for your sales team and making these relationships are important. How do you find those people? How do you select great people?

Daniel Metcalf Yeah, I think that we’ve been lucky in a way that here in Chico, this is actually where ClockShark is based. We happen to be based in this small college town in Northern California. And our college has a really unique sales program called the Seufferlein Sales Program.

And the program is based around a methodology called SPIN selling. For those that aren’t familiar, I’ll just give a high level overview. The S in SPIN is for their situation. The P is for their problem. The I is for the implication. What would happen if this problem isn’t solved? And the N is the need for payoff, which is essentially your solution. And they run them through that sales gauntlet. And they have them do outbound cold calls.

run demos for different companies and do small internships. So they’re really ready for software sales when they get out of that program. And I didn’t personally go to the program, but I knew a lot of people in it. So when I got into sales, I had some friends and colleagues who had been through the program that I was able to say, there’s this great opportunity over here. Let’s check out this young budding software company and see where it goes.

Jason Niedle I love that. And so when you do find these people, they’re already kind of pre-qualified in a way. They’ve gone through all this. Is there a way that you further vet them?

Daniel Metcalf We have a pretty stringent interview process over here, at least this became that way where it’s, you you kind of start with me. I go through my specific questions and I’m trying to kind of understand them as a person, why they’d want to work in this industry. That seems to be important to me is understanding why someone would want to work in this industry, specifically helping the folks that we help. And then they go through an interview with the VP, the director. So you got to go through a three-part interview

And most the time by the by all three of them we kind of do a strategy call where hey I want you to focus on You know portion A maybe their personality culture fit. I want you to focus on area B their resume their background And then person C might put them in more of a scenario type based interview and and get them ready to really hit the funnel and what it would be like to have conversations so I think when we’re done with that kind of three-part interview that

we’re fairly confident that this person can contribute fairly quickly.

Jason Niedle You know they came from a good training background, you check their cultural fit, you check their experience and then you literally test it.

Daniel Metcalf Exactly. And I’m not sure, there’s probably better interview process, but that’s the one we’ve came up with. And I know some of the folks, we’re a global company now in Australia, are utilizing the heck out of Gemini and ChatGPT to help with interviews as well now.

Jason Niedle Interesting. So the world is

obviously radically changing. What do you see as trends in the future? in the near future? What’s coming up at least in terms of marketing and sales?

Daniel Metcalf We can continue to go back to that AI is the biggest trend that I think we’re trying to figure out but the trend for us at least the the verbiage we’ve been using around our business has been deal velocity and it’s

creating momentum and guiding the prospect through. So making it really easy for them from beginning discovery all the way through implementation is really mapping that out for them and connecting the dots. We’ve seen that other companies maybe are struggling to really pass that through and get it from point A to point C. So we’ve been really focused on how do we make this easy from point A to point C and map it out and make sure that it’s clear and

concise. So that’s been something for us and then the newest trend for our business that we want to unlock is an outbound motion. So we’re on the path to hiring an outbound BDR and learning how that motion works for our business and when things work well we’ll continue to drill down on those. When they don’t we’ll iterate and see what changes need to be made based on what data we can gather.

Jason Niedle Super cool.

This has been super informative. Where can our audience find you and ClockShark?

Daniel Metcalf I would say the best place to find me is via LinkedIn. I welcome emails, daniel.metcalf@clockshark.com. And you folks can always come to clockshark.com and explore our software and see what our software group is all about.

Jason Niedle If you guys are just

listening out there, clock shark is exactly how it sounds, a clock and a swimming animal, C-L-O-C-K-S-H-A-R-K.com, ClockShark. Daniel, thank you so much for being on Beyond SaaS For leaders out there, if you are in a mid-stage tech company looking to grow, please drop any questions or comments below, or you can find me at tethos.com, T-E-T-H-O-S.com, or reach out for no obligation consultation on how to grow your company. Until next time, this is Beyond SaaS.

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