Henry Evans is an entrepreneur, author and VP at PhoneBurner. Working both alongside his team and directly with clients, Henry Evans helps ensure the success of thousands of active PhoneBurner clients. His passion is to deliver measurable sales growth to teams of all sizes, by helping them implement a more efficient and more effective sales process.
Podcast Highlights:
- Cold calling works. DO it!
- Use measurements and transparency to grow your sales teams performance and trust
- Remote sales teams should meet at least weekly over video conferencing
Contact Henry:
[Podcast Transcript Using Artificial Intelligence]
Umar Hameed 0:06
Are you ready to become awesomer? Hello everyone, this is Umar Hameed, your host and welcome to the no limit selling Podcast, where industry leaders share their tips, strategies and advice on how to make you better, stronger, faster, get ready for another episode.
Umar Hameed 0:35
Today, I have the honor of having Henry Evans, the VP of channel sales, the phone burner on the program, Henry, welcome to the program.
Henry Evans 0:43
Thanks for having me, Mark. Great to be here.
Umar Hameed 0:45
So Henry, 90 seconds, can you tell us who you are and what you do?
Henry Evans 0:49
Sure, I do a couple different things. I'm a father and a husband, first and foremost entrepreneur and then have run channel sales for phone burner and also doing a lot on the customer success side of phone burner as well now and so my background very briefly is I was a corporate schmuck for many years, I worked in commercial real estate, then I flipped over to high tech, right around 2000, and was able to make a successful transition and worked my way up, setting up sales teams working with SAS companies, and then have owned my own company the last 10 years, where we do a lot of marketing and sales training. So in what's the name of that company, a company is called Get clear marketing. And we really focus on helping small business owners get clear about marketing, but marketing sales really are part and parcel of the same thing. Marketing just typically provides the leads, and then sales takes it from there. And and you know, brings it to a close.
Umar Hameed 1:48
So from your point of view, which is the subset is marketing the subset or is sales, the subset like which is the overarching?
Henry Evans 1:56
That's a great, great question. And I think you can really look at it either way. If you if you look at sales as a subset of marketing, really, you're marketing all the time, even after somebody has become a customer. And if you look at it from the sales standpoint, before somebody become a customer, you want to be selling to them. So I think it just depends on your point of view. If we have more sales people on the call and lean towards sales is the overarching thing. Glengarry Glen Ross always be closing. And so you know that, at the end of the day sales is so critically important. And we're all selling, whether it's just ourselves for an interview, or we're selling our business or our idea or the product or service, we happen to be marketing,
Umar Hameed 2:37
the product you guys are promoting phone burner is a spectacular tool for people to get through a lot of cold calls without a lot of heartache. Tell us about the tool, and then we'll kind of take a step back and talk about the relevance of cold calling in this highly technological age. Sure,
Henry Evans 2:57
and and that's exactly right to Omar is that a lot of people use phone burner for cold calling. It's fundamentally a power dialer. And so it is not a multi line system, which actually is not legal. It dials one line at a time, but does it very, very quickly. So imagine a typical dial session, you want to sit down and call 30 people you met at a trade show with phone burner will automate the list management. So we got a CRM built in the phone burner, it'll automate the dialing, it'll automate any voicemail drops. So if you don't get somebody live, you don't have to listen to their greeting, you hit one button and it drops a voicemail automatically sends them an email automatically moves them into a different folder automatically tags them adds notes. It's really an automation tool for sales, we really plan the Sales Automation space. And most of our users are using it for outbound sales calls that can be a warm list can be a cold list, it can be a purchase list. But we also have people use it for just kind of general keeping in touch. We have a lot of real estate mortgage people that actually use it to reach out to their customers, they have dialing Mondays, or dialing Tuesdays where they reach out and call 50 old customers and in the span of, you know, an hour and with foam burner, you really are looking at anywhere from three to four times as many calls in a given amount of time. So if you typically do 100 calls a day phone burner, you could do three or 400 a day.
Umar Hameed 4:27
See, I think one of the problems with cold calling is a hard to get ahold of someone in the monotony of waiting for the message and then leaving the message hopefully appropriately and not stumbling over it adds to the heartache of it. And I think your technology makes all that stuff disappear. So you leave a pristine message without wasting any time.
Henry Evans 4:49
That's such a great point. And you can tell that obviously you've done sales too, because that is one of I mean, you just hit the two biggest things is very hard to get in touch with people so you can use the system to automate a lot A lot of that grunt work. And then when you're leaving voicemails I actually did a webinar. Last night, I was listening to it and it was all about all were you on offense. It was absolutely all about voicemail strategy. And and it's so important and people try to make it too complicated. And you don't want to have the absolute perfect voicemail that just sounds like it was just, you know, just recorded by a Hollywood actor, you really want something that sounds normal, but it gets to the point quickly. And and you're right, it gets very old and new leaving voicemails for you know, three or four hours, the same exact one over and over, people get burned out. And then they don't make any calls at all.
Umar Hameed 5:37
See, I don't do brilliant things. often it happens once in a blue moon. But I was coaching this gentleman about, you know, using the phone and getting customers. And as he's talking on the phone doing some live calls, I record him doing that, what I want you to Who's your best friend, and he goes, it's bill, where is he now he's probably just waking up must be a lazy sob. But anyway, he was waking up late morning. I said call him up and invite him to the movies this weekend. And so the guy calls him up invites him to the movie. And we record that call to and then I get him to listen to the both of the calls. And one is this a tightness in his voice. There is a mechanical nature. And when he's talking to his friend, there's this open, warm, casual conversation. And sometimes people don't realize how they sound till you give them both recordings. And then it was like, Oh, Okay, I get it. Now, one, two, people don't want to talk to me.
Henry Evans 6:34
You know that that is such an amazing example. I'm gonna I'm gonna completely swipe that to Omar, just so you know, because I think that's, that's a great way to explain it that people get. And I always say that you genuinely want to smile while you're talking. And it feels kind of weird if you haven't done it. But people can tell if you are happy and enjoy what you're doing. Like you're calling your friend for the movies, or if you're doing something you'd rather be doing anything else.
Umar Hameed 6:56
So here's an interesting assembly whole background is very much I used to be in high tech sales in Silicon Valley. But I left to kind of follow brain tech instead of high tech. And they've done some really interesting research where they have people that are actually kind of depressives, and they, they measure their level of happiness, and they're not very happy. But they get a group and they tell them to hold a pencil in their mouth for two minutes, every morning. So they're not smiling. They're not even happy. But they causing their physical math to take that shape. And after two weeks, the people that have that pencil in their mouth are actually much happier than their counterparts. So that physiology of smiling, it sounds like you're faking it. But as soon as you take on that physiology, it forces your body to release those hormones. And it gets you into the exact mood. So physiology fastest way to change how you feel.
Henry Evans 7:51
Absolutely. And you know, we read that same exact study actually study that in college, I remember that exact one. And I always say if you're not up for making calls, do some jumping jacks, go for a walk brilliant, drink some water, and it just you get that blood flow going. And if you don't have a stand up desk, one of the biggest tips I can give anybody who's listening, get a stand up desk, I have an uplift desk, I'm standing right now. And it just, you're just more productive. You're more awake and alert, and people pick up on that.
Umar Hameed 8:19
So we have one of your customers. His name is Doug Miller. He's the CEO of sales search International. And he's been using phone burner for a gazillion years. And he says when he uses his because there's so many times he's getting a voicemail. And when somebody's life comes on board, you know, how do you be awake to do that? So he's got a treadmill. So he gets his steps. And what he's doing is cold calling, which is like totally brilliant.
Henry Evans 8:45
Yeah, and they and they actually make desk standing desks, you can put a treadmill underneath and then I've seen them where they have little, little pedal bikes. Also as you can literally be pedaling while you're while you're on the call while
Umar Hameed 8:56
you're pedaling.
Henry Evans 8:57
Yes, exactly. While you're pedaling while you can pedal.
Umar Hameed 9:01
Exactly. So tell me about your company phone burner in terms of how many people? How do you grow your sales? More importantly, how do you grow your people, your sales people to be more effective?
Henry Evans 9:14
That's just a great question. So So foam burner has been around for about 10 years now the company itself was formed about 15 years ago. And we really grew out of early on serving the MLM industry where people wanted to call more consumers and now we're firmly a business tool. And we've we've definitely transitioned over firmly to that, but still have plenty of people who are in the MLM space. So multi level marketing, multi level marketing. That's exactly right. thousands of customers, literally millions upon millions of calls. And the best thing about foam burners is it just works. And I like to say that we we treat our customers like family because we actually really do. And you know, it's just the system works. You get somebody on the phone when you need help and we don't try to do anything. Everything, we're actually in the process of adding SMS text messaging, we've had so much demand for that. So we are going to do that. But really, it's like we are not Salesforce, if you need to have a million different features, we're not the best fit for you. But if you're a sales team, we have sales teams, you know, in the hundreds, but a lot of them are 510 15 2050 people, you have a sales team that genuinely needs to make more calls. And more importantly than that Omar have more quality conversations. Yes. Because that's really what we're all about. And it's not about just Hey, I you know, I dialed 800 people today great, how many conversations Did you have, and a lot of these multi line dialers they call five lines at the same time. And, you know, I'm sure you've done the same thing I have when you're, you know, in the middle of dinner, and you pick up the phone, and Hello, hello, and you hear Click, click, and then they say hello, and everybody's hangs up. So so that's really what we've been about from the beginning is, you know, treat our customers like family have a product that really works, is very reliable, and then actually listened to customers. And we aren't venture backed, we, you know, we aren't, you know, you know, some huge company, we've got, you know, less than 100 employees, and we really focus on, you know, making sure we take great care of our clients.
Umar Hameed 11:12
So tell me, how do you grow your sales team? How do you make sure they're, you know, executing at the level they should? So what does that look like, within your company?
Henry Evans 11:21
Great, great question. We definitely do eat our own dog food, we actually use the phone burner CRM, we actually did look very hard at going to Salesforce, I managed a Salesforce org, where we had 26 people in it. And so I was a big Salesforce fan. And we looked at it and just kind of decided, you know, our own products going to be better if we use it. Plus, it can do everything that we needed to do. So we actually have all of our sales team uses phone burner to make their own outbound calls. On that customer success side, we use phone burner, make our own outbound calls. And we're continually looking for new salespeople. And a lot of the people we have, in all seriousness have come from they're already phone burner customers, and they like it and they reach out when they hear that we're hiring. And we are a virtual company, primarily, we do have an office in Orange County, California, I but I'm down here in San Diego, I have an office down here we have an office in Northern California, we have people in Pennsylvania, and Ohio, and Texas, and literally all across the country. And so we have a sales team members that are all over the place. So we're always looking to find, you know, great talent to bring on board. That is brilliant.
Umar Hameed 12:30
How do you keep everybody because they're remotely located, inspired? Because sometimes it's a lonely venture out there on your own. So how do you keep the team together and keep them motivated to
Henry Evans 12:42
succeed? That is the number one issue you deal with when you have a virtual team like that. So I can give two answers to that. The first one being great product we use called zoom, which I know most people are pretty familiar with now, we actually hopped into zoom right before we hopped on here to do this call. But zoom is a great tool, web and video conferencing, audio conferencing and love it. So that's how we do all of our meetings, and we do regular meetings to, if not a daily huddle, we're meeting pretty much three times a week. But a lot of the times it's a daily huddle. And then the other thing that we do is we're very transparent with what's going on in our companies, we have a lot of internal dashboards, we use a program called clip folio with a K, which allows us to see exactly what's going on with the sales team, you know, how many, you know, calls are we making? How many dials are we making and how many people we missed or are reached and you know, what the status is of the pipeline and close deals and, you know, all that data all is very easy to see. And I find that with measurement and transparency, you know, the truth always comes out. And so we we really measure everything very carefully on that front.
Umar Hameed 13:53
So you had written a book, it was about being more productive, more effective. I remind me the title again.
Henry Evans 14:00
So I wrote that book. It's called the hour a day entrepreneur. And it was the true story of how I left the corporate world to actually start up my own company, and kind of go into the more of the small business side of things, which I just love. And yeah, I literally would go to work all day would come home, spend time with my wife and two daughters and then would work for an hour a day on my side business. And nowadays, I guess it's called a side hustle is like the official term for it. Yeah. Yeah, it was like nine to 10 every night, I was working on the side business and somebody actually coined that name for me and they said, you're getting more done in an hour than most people do all day. You're like the hour a day entrepreneur and I'm like, Oh, that's good. It just kind of stopped right. And actually, I wrote that down and, and you know, and, and of course too. It's like we don't realize when we're so close to it, especially when you're doing sales. You know, all good salespeople really all good business people that I've seen have, have coaches and are always working on sharpening the saws do When covey would say so it was actually a mentor of mine who said, Well, why don't you name your book that you're going to do a book anyway? I said, Well, that's that's a darn good idea. I don't know why didn't think of that myself. So. So the
Umar Hameed 15:09
difference between you and I'm the name of my book is unleash your Crazy Sexy brain.
Henry Evans 15:14
Love it. Love it. And I love that quote, you said to you said brain tech instead of high tech. I've never heard that. That's fantastic. If you were
Umar Hameed 15:23
employee number two in a company, and you had to build a Salesforce, how do you do that from the ground up? So recently, I asked this question is this I was reading a book by Andy Grove from Intel fame Sure, is talking about apart a point in the history where they're trying to figure out whether to invest heavily in microprocessors, it was a new thing, or invest heavily in memory chips, where they were the dominant player. And they struggled with that decision. For six, eight months to one day, they had this epiphany and the Epiphany was, if we got fired today, and we were the new team coming in, what would we do? instantly, both of them said microprocessors, it's a no brainer thing to do. But when you have that legacy, a part of it, sometimes it's harder to make those decisions. So with that frame in place, if you were setting up a sales team for, let's say, a tech company, a phone burner, or another one, how would you build that team from the ground up? Like what does the first 90 days look like to get a team with zero sales people 2345 and being effective?
Henry Evans 16:31
And, you know, that's, that's a wonderful question. And I love the frame you set up also, because that's a great McKinsey quote, that they always say is, you know, if you had to focus on one thing, what would it be, which is another way to say exactly what you just said, So, I've helped a lot of people start up sales teams, and I've done it myself as well. And what's worked for me, and again, I think there's a lot of ways to skin this cat. But one of the ways it's worked really well for me is to whoever is going to be that initial sales person, so the person is building up the team, in my mind, they have to be able to sell this thing themselves, it's very difficult to teach somebody else how to sell something if you haven't been able to do it yourself. So I think that's a critical component that a lot of entrepreneurs, especially if they're more on the engineering, technical side, forget is that you might have the best idea in the world. But if you can't get somebody to buy it, then you're gonna have a tough time. And there's a great way to do that. There's a very specific strategy that I've kind of taught, which is put together just a one pager explaining what it is that your product or service does. And then go sit down with a friend of yours, and give them the pitch. Hopefully, he's like a potential prospect and and say, you just want their feedback on it. And if at the end of that, they don't say, Hey, are you really going to do this? Or is this going to be a product because I'd be interested, then you might need to go back to the drawing board. Because we always think that our own ideas are fantastic. And a lot of the times until they're proven and vetted in the real marketplace. You just don't know. And so I like to start myself. Once I've got some traction, I've got some sales. And then I like to bring on salespeople from that point forward. And you can argue, do you want to do business developments, reps and account executives, you have more cold call people? And then account executives who actually do the, you know, do the appointments and do the closings and the demos? Or do you want to have just account executives only I kind of like breaking it up. Phone burner is ideal for business development reps, you need to you know, burn through three 400 calls in a day. Perfect. Then you pass it over to the account execs once you get an appointment made, that's how I typically have done it. But I've seen it done a number of different ways. But that's that's kind of my personal strategy. And what I like on that great question.
Umar Hameed 18:46
I want people to give this product a test drive. And we're gonna put a link in with the show notes that can actually go get a trial. So tell them what the trial looks like. Because I think until you use it, you don't fully understand the the impact that this can have on your sales career. Because if you can get more conversations, you're going to get more appointments, more sales, and everyone's going to be happy, including your spouse.
Henry Evans 19:10
Exactly, exactly. And if the spouse is happy, everybody's happy as the saying goes. So what we've done is we actually have a free trial available, which is for up to 60 minutes, just if anybody goes online on our website and signs up. You can do a 60 minute trial now that for some people is enough. If you're a solo, you know kind of a solopreneur or have your own company that might be enough for you. But what we recommend is to do what we call a team trial. So you can reach out to our sales team. We got the number at the top of the homepage there if you want to reach out to me personally, you can do that too. I'm happy to connect you with somebody and get you set up but our team trial is unlimited dials, unlimited number of people on your team. The only limit we put on is we give you a is we give you a full week of dialing. So we give you Do a full seven days to do it. And for most people who are serious, that's more than enough time, the core issue we have with foam burner and it's the core challenge that we're dealing with really is, you don't realize how amazing it is until you try it out. I don't know if you've ever driven or if you've seen seen the Tesla cars that Elon Musk is doing. I'm a huge fan of his and I still remember I took my first test drive was about six years ago. I'm like, this car is gonna change everything. And it's the same feeling you get when you do your first dial session with a real contacts inside a phone burner. It's just incredible. You're like, this thing is gonna save me three hours a day. And so that's what we're trying to do. And everything that we do from a marketing and sales standpoint is is get people trying it. So love for people to do a test drive and see how it works for him. Well, that is brilliant.
Umar Hameed 20:47
How can people get ahold of you?
Henry Evans 20:49
easiest way. I'm on LinkedIn, obviously. So you can hit me up on LinkedIn. It's Henry J. Evans. And then my phone burner email is just Henry ajnr y at phone burner.com.
Umar Hameed 21:01
Henry, this was educational, inspirational. Thanks so much for sitting down with me.
Henry Evans 21:06
Absolutely. So appreciate what you're doing and thanks for having me.
Umar Hameed 21:14
If you enjoyed this episode, please go to iTunes and leave a five star rating. And if you're looking for more tools, go to my website at no limit selling.com I've got a free mind training course there that's going to teach you some insights from the world of neuro linguistic programming and that is the fastest way to get better results.