On her guest appearance on The Selling Podcast, Dylann Ceriani, co-founder of Protoshop, chats with hosts Scott Schlofman and Mike Williams, providing a unique sales perspective from the standpoint of an engineer.
Though Dylann loves technical work, she has stepped into sales out of necessity and devotion to her position as a new business co-founder. She discusses her lead generation tactics, leveraging LinkedIn and her website to find customers without a sales team. Dylann also clarifies her consultative approach, where she guides potential clients on the best part design for efficient manufacturing.
Throughout the episode, Dylann gives an inside look into Protoshop’s iterative prototyping process, collaborating closely with clients through multiple cycles to refine products to perfection. As she explains, Protoshop differentiates itself by swiftly producing prototype parts with unparalleled accuracy, allowing clients to test and refine designs rapidly.
Read on to learn valuable insights for engineers seeking to improve sales skills and sales professionals selling technical products or services. Dylann will show how domain expertise can be a real advantage in sales when combined with a genuine interest in helping the customer.
Full Transcript
Scott Schlofman:
What are you up to these days? I’m sure Mike’s already run through that, but prototype-
Dylann Ceriani:
So, because we had that, it gave us a real competitive advantage to other product development companies that just would do the design and then you’d have to outsource that plastic injection molding to get those parts. And we saw that the company was turning away a lot of business that just wanted the fabrication side to have in-house engineering and then needed somebody to do kind of the backend of what our company did.
So, the machinist, who has always kind of wanted to start his own business approached me about joining with him to start our own company where we do that kind of backend prototyping. So we’re just a plastic injection molder, but we are not a development house. It’s all their designs. We’re not a licensing thing. We are not trying to be a production molder and do their parts for them. We’re just trying to help them in the design part of their development to get them parts that they need to continue and figure out what that production part needs to look like.
Mike Williams:
Oh, that’s fantastic.
Scott Schlofman:
In this week’s episode of the selling podcast, we are joined by one of our friends. You’ve just heard a little bit about what she does but let me tell you about our guest. She is a co-founder at Protoshop. She’s a spectacular engineer. She is smart. She knows what she’s doing, and she’s been doing it for a very long time. One of the main reasons we wanted to have her on is because she’s so good at sales, whether she claims to or not. Well, we’re going to talk all about that. We welcome our friend to the show Dylann Ceriani.
Mike Williams:
All right. We’re recording
Scott Schlofman:
With over 50 years and millions of worldwide traveled miles between the two of us, we have tasted feet and relished in sweet, sweet victory, looking for inspirational entertainment, motivation, and practical insights to drive your business? Welcome to the Selling podcast!
Mike Williams:
How’s it going?
Dylann Ceriani:
Yeah, it’s funny because I love doing the engineering part of it. I could sit behind a computer and just work on the CAD, the 3D models all day long. I love that stuff and now I’m out of my comfort zone trying to convince people that they need to use us for what we’re doing.
Mike Williams:
Well, how do you find your customers? I mean, you don’t have a Salesforce.
Dylann Ceriani:
I don’t have a Salesforce. So
Mike Williams:
You’re doing it all?
Dylann Ceriani:
I am doing it all. So the customers that come in, I will work with them to get their plastic parts ready to injection mold, because a lot of people, they know how to design, but they don’t know how to design for plastic injection molding.
So I’ll help them tweak it a little bit, and then I’ll design the molds and then I manage the priorities in the shop. I do the shipping and all that kind of stuff, and I just let the guys in the back do their magic artwork of making the molds and molding the parts. So, I’m doing everything, but I’m doing everything else. So, a lot of what we’ve got has, well, very little of what we’ve got has been from my contacts in the medical device industry.
It’s funny, I think I got Jerry Wright from DJ Orthopedics to reach out to me and I quoted a job for him. I reached out to a bunch of the engineers from Breg. I am trying to get them to use us. Some of ’em are in positions where they probably need our business. And then some of the contacts that I’ve had while I was at the other company, I think one of our clients is them, but mostly it’s kind of been LinkedIn and website.
Mike Williams:
Really.
Scott Schlofman:
I would love to dive in to figure out how you use LinkedIn effectively for sales-
Mike Williams:
For something this technical especially.
Dylann Ceriani:
Yeah, yeah, correct. It’s pretty easy to explain in a little blurb what we do. And we’ve actually hired a company, their name, I don’t know if I should say their name, their names Get Visible, but they hired this company and they take over your LinkedIn and pretend that they pretend it’s me, and they just put all these personal emails out to people in specific groups like the plastic injection molding group, or they look for people with the job title of product development engineer, and they just send out a bunch of emails saying, “Hey, this is kind of what we do. I’d love to tell you how we’re solving headaches.” And then half of them say, “I’m not interested”, and half of ’em say, “I’d like to learn more”. And then you start reaching out to those, and I think we’ve gotten probably maybe a quarter of our leads that way.
Mike Williams:
Really
Scott Schlofman:
What point do they come to you? At what point do they are in the sales process? Are they coming to you and now you’re responding? How far does Get Visible take it?
Dylann Ceriani:
Usually after a couple of emails or a couple of communications. So, one of them will say, I’d love to show you how we’re solving some of the headaches in this industry. And then someone will say, okay, I’m interested, and then we’ll send another one that kind of says, okay, this is kind of what we do, and this is how we’re solving it. And then they’ll say, can I arrange a meeting and then I’ll get involved.
Mike Williams:
That’s interesting. Do they pursue it with your avatar, your persona, so that when you pick up the conversation on the third email, it doesn’t all of a sudden change voice or
Dylann Ceriani:
No? Well, probably,
In fact, one of the conversations I had with a company that’s making a door lock for our garage door, I asked him what the material was and he said, oh, I sent you a drawing on that. And I’m like, oh, you want me to do the work and find out what the material is? I want you to just tell me. And he just started laughing and now we have the greatest relationship ever and we just joke around, and he wants to give me more business of that one comment. So that’s the way I work and that’s the way it works better for people that I want to work with.
Scott Schlofman:
It’s interesting when you’re looking at your sales and to be able to drive it, I feel like you’re so unique because most people in production, most people in manufacturing, most people with that type of knowledge and background, really, it seems like they wouldn’t make the best salespeople. However, from what you’re explaining is your technical expertise allows you to talk very direct to customers and prospects in a very unique way.
Dylann Ceriani:
Yeah, my brother early on in life said, you don’t talk to people like most engineers that I know you’d be great in sales, but I just said, I don’t want to do sales. I love the engineering part of it. So, I don’t know if I’m unique about that. I can tell you that I couldn’t find anybody dateable in my engineering classes, so I might be unique, although it was electrical engineering. I think if I had gone mechanical engineering, it would’ve been a little bit different. They seem a little bit more relatable. I don’t know.
Scott Schlofman:
Have you found anybody else like you?
Dylann Ceriani:
Yeah, there are a lot of really fun engineers out there. Seriously, not in any of my classes at BYU in the electrical engineering department. There was one and we would go out and have fun and then we’d start our homework at midnight, and he was perfect for me. But yeah, everybody else was, oh my gosh. There was one guy that we were going into a test, and he goes, I’m going to do something really crazy. I’m going to take two aspirin before I go in. Really? That’s wild. You’re crazy. Living
Mike Williams:
On the edge,
Dylann Ceriani:
I don’t like it. I don’t like meetings. I don’t necessarily like talking to people, but once I start, I do enjoy it, but I dread meetings. I’d rather be doing the engineering part of it, but it’s great because it’s helping me get out of my comfort zone. And I love coaching as well.
I’ve been a volleyball coach for a good number of years, fifth and sixth graders. I love them young when they don’t talk back to you and I’m enormous and I scare them to death, so they do exactly what I say. And when your kids don’t, then that’s a lot of power that you want to get back. So, I love taking these young engineers and I love teaching them how to design the part. I’m like, this is why you need to do this, and this is how the mold opens and this is what you have to think about, and the plastic hair is a little bit thin, it’s not going to fill. And they’re like, thank you so much for teaching me this. And I said, well, this just means when you come back to me, I have less work to do. So, it’s all to my benefit, but I really enjoy that part of it.
Mike Williams:
So, Dylann, it sounds a lot like this is the same process in sales where you kind of analyze, okay, this worked, this didn’t work, and maybe this approach is going to be better. So, it’s really just kind of taking it apart and looking at the best way to reassemble it again in kind of a different package. Maybe that’s why they call it sales engineering. I don’t know.
Dylann Ceriani:
In my previous jobs in engineering, they would pull the engineer into the call with the client as well, just so that the doctor felt heard, or the customer felt heard. I have access to somebody that is actually going to be able to make design decisions or change the design. So that worked really well at companies I’ve been at to help pull business in.
Mike Williams:
Have you ever run into a situation where just out of the clear blue someone has an idea that the engineering staff hasn’t even thought of and you go, well, that might work and just take a random right hand turn on a project?
Dylann Ceriani:
Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. I’m a believer that the best ideas come from all over the place. You don’t have to have training in a specific area to get the best ideas. There’s a company in Northern California called IDO and I saw an NPR thing on them or something, and that really just kind of from the beginning of my career opened up my idea that you need to just accept ideas from all over the place and you never know where your best one’s going to come from. And sometimes even as an engineer going out to the manufacturing floor and talking to the people that are building the product, you’re going to learn a lot more than you are from somebody who is a really highly skilled engineer. They know exactly how to fix things.
Scott Schlofman:
Dylann, what is your sales process?
Dylann Ceriani:
Well, it’s been reaching out to personal contacts that I’ve had in the past, sending them emails, just letting ’em know we’re out there trying to just connect again with sticking your nose to the grindstone and working really hard. Sometimes you lose relationships.
So in my new capacity now, my time’s opened up a little bit and when there’s not as much business here, so I’ve been reaching out to lots of people from Breg, lots of people from my past, just trying to reestablish those relationships without even trying to sell. Just going to lunch, talking about what you’re doing, trying to plant a seed, but being really sincere about that as well. So, I do that.
I also do the LinkedIn where we make direct contacts trying to reach out to people in certain groups or with certain job titles, sending personal connection requests. Also, we’re doing a lot of work with our website where we do search engine optimization. A lot of times the business will just come to us. People are looking for somebody to make a prototype mold of a hundred parts and writing content for that website so that we pop up when they look. I’d say that probably 50% of our business is going to be from that eventually.
Scott Schlofman:
So, when somebody comes in and they’re interested, then what’s the next step? Let’s say I come to you and say, hey, I’m super interested. Where do we go for that?
Dylann Ceriani:
Well, usually that person will already have an idea or have a part that’s designed, and I will then ask them to send me those parts and I’ll start taking a look at them and analyzing ’em and seeing if they’re ready to be injection molded. And if they’re not, I’ll set up a meeting with them and say, let’s talk about it. In fact, I like to set up that meeting even if I don’t have any questions, just to make sure that I have a personal connection, I have a chance to sell a little bit of Protoshop and talk about their expectations.
How many parts are you going to want? How much are you willing to spend? Are we even in your range? Before I give ’em a quote, if it is just some nameless quote that you get, then you’re just a churn and burn prototype house, and I want there to be that more personal connection.
Scott Schlofman:
How do you set yourself up differently from all the other shops that are out there? Is there something that you do? I imagine you’re not sending them samples. I would assume that once you start the design that you’re in.
Dylann Ceriani:
Yeah, exactly. So, what makes us different is a few things. So, there’s the design assistance. A lot of the prototypes houses, you upload the file and then you pay and then you get your parts back or you get the refusal saying, I’m not going to make your part.
So, I’ll work through it with them, try to understand their design, and then I’ve even offered design advice. Hey, if you do it this way, you’d still accomplish your goal. Or if you do it this way, your part’s going to be a lot cheaper in the long run or your tool’s going to be a lot cheaper. So I try to help them maximize their profit and help them get the best possible design for the future. Another thing that we do is a lot of those prototype houses don’t have very accurate parts. They’re just supposed to be quick, get ’em in your hands so you can do some testing, and it’s not good enough for a lot of people.
So we’ve had my guy, James Isaacs has a lot of experience doing some crazy things with injection molds, stuff that you’re not supposed to do, and we can make the more difficult parts for them and will kind of guarantee that the parts are going to be within spec are almost right at nominal and not too far out. If it’s not right, we will also change the mold.
So what makes us special I think is that we can be a development partner for a cartridge that has mating parts. A lot of times you guess at what the fit is, you have to design it so that if it’s on the big side of the tolerance, it’ll still work. And even if it’s on the small side of the tolerance, it’ll still work. Well. Once you make a mold and you mold parts, then the fit is consistent.
So, we’ll make them and then adjust the mold so that parts fit together really, really nicely and perform really well. We have one customer that we didn’t know how it was going to work, and so we made the parts and then I helped them tweak the design to make things work so we can be sort of an iterative development partner with the customer as well,
Mike Williams:
And that’s a good selling point. You can help them get to a final product.
Dylann Ceriani:
Some companies, you make a mold, you mold parts, you hand it to ’em. If you want to change the design, you have to make a new mold.
Mike Williams:
And that’s not cheap.
Dylann Ceriani:
No, no. These prototype molds, they’re, it’s a different design philosophy to use prototype molding in your development and it’s a chunk of cash, but by the time you get to a production mold, you already, you know exactly what your design’s going to be, so you don’t have to make changes in a hardened steel tool with multiple cavities, so
Mike Williams:
Got It.
Scott Schlofman:
Dylann, if we eliminated your expertise, then what would you sell on? It sounds like your expertise is what drives and the people on the backend. It sounds like you’re just surrounded with these experts in the field, which is awesome and it’s the way it should be. Is there anything else outside of the expertise that you just like, hey, this drives what we do?
Dylann Ceriani:
Well, it’s the ability to iterate the molds is one of them. The fact that we take materials that the customer wants, a lot of prototype houses don’t do that. They’ll say, “this is our list of materials that we’ll mold from, and if you want something special, we’re not going to do that.” So, we’ll take molds in that way. The fact that they’re really accurate, our molds are really accurate I think is what of the big things as well. And speed, of course, we are making molds in a week and molding parts in days, a lot of the production molds could be eight to 12, and with the supply chains as they are now can be 16, 18, 20 weeks. So, you just get information quickly. I had a customer that I had a meeting with on Friday and they said, when can we have parts? They paid me Friday. We’ll probably give them parts Tuesday or Wednesday.
Scott Schlofman:
Really? That’s impressive.
Mike Williams:
That’s impressive.
Dylann Ceriani:
Yeah, they said, I’ll believe that when I see it. So now of course I’m challenged, so I’m going to make it happen, push all those other customers to the side happen.
Mike Williams:
So I want to go back to the Get Visible for a second. This fascinates me. They’ll reach out on your behalf as you, right, they reach out just to random people on the internet that match the same, the criteria that you set. And you said about 50% of your business comes from that source versus-
Dylann Ceriani:
Right now, it’s about 25%.
Mike Williams:
Oh, is it? Okay. Yeah. So, what is the most effective sales process or sales tool that you have? Is it Get Visible? Is it organic?
Dylann Ceriani:
I think right now it is LinkedIn. All the people that we’re reaching through LinkedIn and the people that are advising us are saying your company has to have at least 300 followers to get to the next tier of popping up in people’s feeds. So, I spent a good portion of the first few months trying to get friends to follow our company just so that we could get that visibility. And then I think it’s personal connections as well, reaching out and trying to foster those relationships and get them to consider you if they’re at that point. I think our website is a big deal just optimizing the search engine to have Protoshop pop up in the feed because a lot of people need what we have. We just need to let people know that we’re here. We have a company here in San Diego that was using a company up in the Bay area of California, and they were just, besides themselves, they couldn’t even get them to respond, and they’re just so ecstatic to have us as a development partner that we’re responsive that we get the molds, they say this isn’t working. We change the mold in a day and then get them parts a couple days later. So, I think that then also we ask those customers to put reviews online for us so that we get That also drives your search engine as well.
Mike Williams:
I’d imagine that the prototype development is not a huge community. Is it relatively small? Am I-
Dylann Ceriani:
There’s quite a bit out there. There’s a big company that is kind of the standard that I say, we’re like them, but these are the things that we’re better than them at. And when I say I heard one customer, which I use the line all the time, they’re a one size fits most, and that makes people laugh and they’re like, oh, I’m so glad you said that, because they’re great for some things, but they’re just not good enough for what we need. So, we’re selling ourselves as sort of a premium service that’s the same price and the same convenience.
Scott Schlofman:
Dylann, when you have something so technical, have you had to fire a client? What happened and what’s that process? Does it happen often?
Dylann Ceriani:
I haven’t had it in this current business, but I have in my past life, and mostly it’s for not treating my engineers very well, so it’s badgering the people that are working on the projects and not being respectful.
Other times it’s because of unrealistic expectations where it’s just clearly not a fit. So, they’re expecting a little bit more than what we signed up for and they’re not willing to pay for the extra things that they want.
I had one client that we started to do our initial development generation of concept ideas, and they said, don’t you already just know how to do this? Can’t you just kind of put the Lego pieces together and make my product? He said, I don’t want to spend a lot of money on developing something new. We came to you because you said you knew how to do this.
So, it was the sales guy kind of overselling a little bit, and then the engineer having to bring them back down to reality and they were mad. So, you just have to walk away from something like that. Otherwise, he’s just going to be unhappy the whole time.
Scott Schlofman:
Mike, that kind of sounds exactly like our backpack situation.
Mike Williams:
No, I think she’s describing our backpack situation. Not exactly like
Scott Schlofman:
That is
Mike Williams:
Our backpack situation where we go
Scott Schlofman:
And we say, hey, would you put this together?
Dylann Ceriani:
Yeah,
Mike Williams:
You remember Jeff?
Okay, so Jeff, Scott and I have a company we put together and we’ve designed and patented a compression system in the belt of a backpack, and we’ve spent a lot of money. And Scott was just saying is like, we say, no, don’t you know how to do this? Just put it together. Here’s our idea. We don’t want to go through the iterations and the challenges of making it work the same way, but we’ve gotten through the exact same process and we’re still not to market. It’s taken us, well, we only do it a couple hours a week, maybe on Saturday, but it’s taken us way too long to get there.
Dylann Ceriani:
Yeah, a lot of times the sales guys need to help the customer understand how long it’s going to take and if they don’t do a good job of helping them understand what the development process needs, like it’s not design, it’s development. So, you’re going to get something maybe quickly and then you’re going to have to make changes and concessions and negotiations about
Mike Williams:
Scott, that could be our problem, but we’ve got sales guys doing development
Dylann Ceriani:
And that would be you guys, right? That
Mike Williams:
Would be us.
Scott Schlofman:
That could be a hundred percent correct. So how is it dial in with your expertise, with your knowledge, how is it you being the salesperson, having all that background and expertise in engineering, does it make it easier or does it make it more challenging?
Dylann Ceriani:
I see the, I see the temptation of the engineer, or sorry, the salesperson to not oversell, but maybe over promise a little bit because you want to bring that business in. And I’m a new business, I’m a struggling business, and I need people to come in so that I can meet my payroll and pay for all these machines that we just bought. So, I am myself making promises of, oh yeah, we can get that done. We can get that done. We got that. So it’s real. The struggle is real, and I’ve always thought, I’m just going to be really honest and upfront because that’s the kind of business I’m going to run, but I also want to stay open. So I see that struggle, but I also
Scott Schlofman:
See that struggle. You just promised development in two days.
Dylann Ceriani:
I did. And we’re
Scott Schlofman:
Going to do it too. Just promised that you’d have it.
Dylann Ceriani:
I did. I did. But at the same time, I do have the expertise to say that’s contingent on when if you get back to me in time, and I will be super honest when we screw up and I will tell people that there are delays and I’ll be very upfront about it and just be very transparent about stuff that happens.
Mike Williams:
There’re some things that are out of your control that you can’t promise on, so making sure that that’s clear up at the front end, that’s a good sales process.
Dylann Ceriani:
Well, and I just had a sales call on Friday where they told me all along, they wanted a hundred parts, but I only quoted 25, and I just said, yeah, I screwed up. I screwed up the communication. I can see where you got confused as to what my quote was. I’ll just give you a hundred parts for free. And it’s so nice to be able to do that, just to be able to make those decisions. And I’m not a very good business person. I just want people to be happy and I’ll do whatever it takes and even if it means I don’t make money on it, so I don’t know how long I’ll be in business, honestly.
Scott Schlofman:
How do you keep yourself from getting too technical in the sales process?
Dylann Ceriani:
Well, usually I’m working with engineers, so they want to get technical, but yeah, you just got to know your audience. I’ve spent a lifetime of seeing people’s eyes glaze over when I start getting too technical, so I can read that pretty well.
Yeah, I think you just got to be able to read your audience and you got to know kind of the background of the people that you’re talking to, and you’ve also got to know how much time they have. And people are pretty easy to read. They’ll tell you, they’ll what they’re thinking about what you’re saying. And I’ve been on calls with sales guys where they’re not answering the question that the person asks, and it’s just so frustrating and No, no, this is what I think they really want to know and kind of get to the crux of it.
Scott Schlofman:
I love that you think that it’s easy to read people that, oh, really, you’re unique in a sense where I don’t think many people with such a technical focus are able to read people the way you’re able to read. And I think that’s really, really cool and I think that’s why you’re awesome.
Oh, thank you. I have had personality tests that all agree that I’m a counselor personality type, meaning people come to me with problems. So, I think I’ve just, and I love it. I love, maybe it’s the chick in me, I love hearing all the gossip that’s going on, but I also kind of really care about people. And so I think that that’s why people open up to me. And I have great relationships with people because I think people are amazing, and if you treat people like they’re amazing and you really genuinely care about the people, then you’ll have those great relationships to be able to read them open up to you
Mike Williams:
Genuine. I can fake that. And if someone had to reach out and get ahold of you, how would they do that? What’s the best way?
Dylann Ceriani:
Well, Protoshop Inc. Is the website
Mike Williams:
Protoshop, not Photoshop, right?
Dylann Ceriani:
I know. Oh gosh. It’s so funny. In my LinkedIn workings, there’s so many Protoshop, Photoshop, promoshop. It’s crazy. In fact, I reached out to a company just to introduce ourself because our names were similar, and I said we have to talk of the shop class. But yeah, so Protoshop Inc. is the website that’s got all my contact information there. So there’s a phone number and a website. My cell phone number I probably shouldn’t give out on this podcast. Once people reach out via the website, then we exchange emails and cell phone numbers. All my clients have my personal cell phone number,
Mike Williams:
And you can make anything in two days
Dylann Ceriani:
Usually.
Obviously, it depends on the part, the more complicated part, it’s just machine runtime. We’ve got one that we promised to make in a week, but it’s really small features in stainless steel, and that machine’s been running for two weeks straight, so they’re being very understanding. It breaks tools, it takes a lot longer. We’ve had to slow things down so we’re not breaking tools and it is just about communication and making sure they understand. But most parts, if they’re simple, a cartridge that has a little bit more detail on it might take three or four days just of machine time. So it depends. And if you get a whole bunch from the same customer at once, then maybe it’s two or three weeks to get all of them done, but-
Go check her out. Yeah,
Dylann Ceriani:
Thanks
Scott Schlofman:
Protoshop Inc.com. That’s it. Dylann Ceriani, thanks so much for making time for us today. All right. I really appreciate it.
Dylann Ceriani:
Great talking to you guys.
It’s been fun. We’ll be in touch.
