Ever wondered how an ex-cop turned sales leader navigates the world of startups and tech? Meet Taft Love, who transitioned from law enforcement to sales and now uses his unique skill set to lead sales development teams and consult for businesses. He shares his incredible journey from being a small-town police officer to an investigator, and then finally finding his niche in sales. Taft's story is a testament to the many paths one can take to find success, and his unconventional career shift offers valuable insights for those looking to reinvent their careers.
This is one of our first long-form podcasts that took place live in Austin, Texas. Enjoy!
Ever wondered how an ex-cop turned sales leader navigates the world of startups and tech? Meet Taft Love, who transitioned from law enforcement to sales and now uses his unique skill set to lead sales development teams and consult for businesses. He shares his incredible journey from being a small-town police officer to an investigator, and then finally finding his niche in sales. Taft's story is a testament to the many paths one can take to find success, and his unconventional career shift offers valuable insights for those looking to reinvent their careers.
This is one of our first long-form podcasts that took place live in Austin, Texas. Enjoy!
Welcome to the sales management podcast, your source for actionable sales management strategies and tactics. I'm your host, coach CRM co-founder, corey Gray. No long intros, no long ads, let's go. I'm back in the podcast studio in Austin, texas with my guest today, officer Taft.
Speaker 2:Hey man.
Speaker 1:Why is that funny? Because we're going to talk about a lot of things. We've actually got a plan today. We'll see if we can stick to it. We're going to go an hour and a half, maybe a little bit longer. You ready for this?
Speaker 2:Dude, I'm ready, I'm pumped for this. You're ready, you're pumped.
Speaker 1:It's funny. Somebody told me one time they said, hey, podcasts should be short and simple and concise. Well, the most popular one in the world releases three, three hour episodes every single week, so let's see what we can do today. Taft has a really interesting background. He's done a lot of fascinating things, from being a police officer to being in sales, leading sales development teams, leading sales teams, being a consultant, a founder of a revenue operations organization, and so we're going to dig into a lot of that today and really navigate through a lot of those different topics. Hitting on the current state of sales operations, we're going to talk about the path from sales development leader to VP of sales, from sales operations to VP of sales. I'm going to ask you some questions about the exit that you're recently part of. Don't know how many details we can get into there, but there's a lot going on. I want to start off with. You were a cop. How the hell did you get into sales?
Speaker 2:Yeah, you know what? My mom was a VP of sales for almost my whole life she did. This is going to sound weird, but I guess she was hot when we were younger, and so she was a pharmaceutical sales rep.
Speaker 1:We're one minute in and we've established that taps him on the top.
Speaker 2:And it turned out she was really good at sales, so she transitioned into other sales. She's still a CEO of a furniture company now. She got into furniture sales forever and so I watched my mom. She was the breadwinner, she was a really talented sales rep and sales leader, and I was making less than $30,000 a year, risking my life with like the only path to promotion being if one of the older guys retires or dies. Wow, and I had no control over my financial destiny, and so I spent years trying to break into sales.
Speaker 1:Where were you? Where were you?
Speaker 2:Hickory, north Carolina. It was in the foothills of the Appalachians. It's a town, specifically the town where I worked. People have more tattoos than teeth, so it was like true Appalachian, like rough small town.
Speaker 1:What type of crimes did you get into?
Speaker 2:Man, lots of stuff. So when I was a detective I was a general detective for a year and then did white collar crime but before that like everything from a car break into murders, like we worked at all because small town but like violent, low income, heavy drug use, small town. So we yeah, we saw we didn't see a lot of meth while I was there, that somehow, even though we were close to it, we didn't see a lot of it. But heroin and crack were just epidemics when I was there. So lots of, lots of drug stuff and all of the related, all the related crimes.
Speaker 1:Wow, okay, so then you saw this path you wanted to get into sales.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I remember. So my path was was weird. I knew I wanted to be in sales. I applied several times to jobs my mom's network in the furniture industry. My dad's a furniture designer his network they introduced me to people but nobody wanted to take a chance on me Reasonably so. Like small town cop, how do you, how do you trust this person's going to be able to figure out sales? And so eventually I became a detective, then became a federal investigator with a task force and then got a job with Secret Service. And when, when the Secret Service job was supposed to start, the Congress didn't pass a budget that year, everything got frozen.
Speaker 1:Was that the sequester? I don't know. 2010, 2011.
Speaker 2:Yeah, yeah, I guess it would have been yeah.
Speaker 1:My friend was a recruiter for the National Guard, yeah. And he said, yeah, they're just not going to pay me. So they figured, of all the federal employees, the people that hires other federal employees would probably be the first one to get kind.
Speaker 2:Yeah, exactly, he threw great parties that year.
Speaker 2:My yeah, I got a call from my recruiter who was Secret Service. It was like you get washed from your process and it's like hey, feel free to apply again, oh geez. And then, like a year of of driving to Charlotte doing you know all of the. I had gone through the polygraph and a psych evaluation and several interviews and and and and. So I just said like fuck it, I'm done. And within a month I had left my job and was living in Korea teaching for the next few years and sort of rode out the very end of the recession. And when I came back my whole family had moved to California. Okay, so I moved to Sausalito. I remember I was. I was on the plane coming home after getting a check from the Korean government because after two and a half years of putting into the retirement system, if you leave before you vest, you get all that money back.
Speaker 1:Oh, wow.
Speaker 2:I had like seven grand and for somebody who had never made my paychecks after taxes at the police department, I think the most I ever made was like nine or 1100 bucks in two weeks.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:And so this was. I was like I'm going to buy another seat just to put my fucking money in. I got so much cash and got home and my parents were like we'll let you rent our inlaw. We just moved into this house and you can rent the inlaw suite if you want. I was like fuck you, I'm not renting.
Speaker 1:Like, if I'm going to rent I'm going to go in the city and get a sick place, yeah.
Speaker 2:And then, like one day later, I was like I'll take your inlaw, like I'll pay you $1,000 a month for that, yeah, and it was a great deal, but I just didn't know it. And I got a Craigslist job taking pictures for Google photos. Wow Door to door, knocking on doors, and that lasted like a month, I don't think I sold a single one, had no idea about sales, got no training. But that led to another Craigslist job at a startup as an SDR and then, like I was in, tack.
Speaker 1:And how old were you at this point? 29, 30, 29.
Speaker 2:So you're, you're just hustling Really hard. Yeah, I had. I was hired alongside two SDRs who were like young Ivy League. You know I call them like the anointed the. You know, my dad was a director.
Speaker 1:Do you know who my father is?
Speaker 2:Yeah, Exactly, it's those guys and they were nice guys but they they were entitled to this life and I was not and was an outsider, just like trying to work my way in. So of course I like out, worked them and made a just in time for the company to shut down, because I'm pretty sure our founder was was skimming money. Yeah, I won't go into more detail there because I don't actually know if that's true with that. That was our theory, yeah, and then went to a company called lead genius and that was my first like legit, serious company tech job that that then led to Panda doc and smart recruiters and these like soon to be unicorn companies.
Speaker 1:Right, got it? So, coming in from just having other jobs the rest of your 20s? Yeah, how fast did you ramp up? Because I think there's two things that you need to do when you when you get into sales, if you're doing this earlier in your career, you need to get good at being an employee, yeah, and you have to be good at the specific job. How much of the other stuff got you good at just being an employee so you could cut some corners there and just crush it on the sales front?
Speaker 2:It's a good question. I think I was very good at one piece, and that was talking to people, putting people at ease. That was the police, the detective thing. I spent so much time in high stress, uncomfortable situations talking to people that that piece of it I was just totally fine.
Speaker 1:You're not going to cry if someone hangs up on you. Yeah, yeah it was.
Speaker 2:It's fine and it still feels uncomfortable, but I was so used to that feeling like it doesn't matter.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I got shot out last week. If he tells, me to go f myself because I called him out of the blue. Then you know what? That's probably okay. Yeah, maybe I will. I don't know.
Speaker 2:It was another thing that actually got me in trouble as a detective and and or and as a police officer generally, but was a turned out to be a strength once I got into sales, was I was really creative in ways that other people didn't approve of, and so when as a police officer, you know, I was constantly questioning everything around why do we do this? And the answer was always well, it's, it's just how we do it, it's the way it's always been done, and once I became a sales rep, I did the same thing, but this was early enough that outreach didn't exist yet, or it was probably still like a recruiting tool that nobody had ever heard of. Yeah, and there was. I'm struggling to remember the name of it. A quick mail was. Was it still exists? Still a great tool, but it was one I like found when I was wondering if you can automate this email thing, why am I sending one off emails like can can this be done? Has somebody done something like we have Marquette? Oh, sending all these emails does? Can sales have that?
Speaker 1:Yeah, the marketing people get to do this. Yeah, but they won't let me use their system. I send them my to do list and they say you know what salesperson. Why don't you just go ahead back to your corner.
Speaker 2:Yeah, yeah, exactly, we had. We didn't have any of these tools at this small startup and I like paid 15 bucks a month out of pocket for quick mail got to know Jeremy, the founder, and he like helped me learn the basics of outbound that nobody around me knew and so I was automating things that other people were doing manually and got ahead pretty, pretty quickly. So the creativity I like I said I got in trouble for as a cop helped here, yeah, and so I was, in a weird way, kind of set up for success early.
Speaker 1:Well, I think that's it. That's an interesting observation. If folks that are listening are in sales management roles, hiring people. Maybe one of the questions for folks that had different careers that were more structured, especially if they're government oriented, is asking a question around what did you get in trouble for, yeah, your prior job, and see if that aligns with something that might be boundary pushing and positive inside of a sales role.
Speaker 2:Yeah, 100%. No, I actually haven't thought about that as a when I talked to like guys in the military who whom I've hired a lot over the years. It's a great question I asked that.
Speaker 1:I'm going to add to my list because that's one of the concerns about the military. I just had Jair Butler on here from shift group the other day talking about athletes and veterans. Yeah, one of the concerns about hiring military veterans is that they're too regimented and they need things done for them. But if you can find those people inside the military that maybe they were annoying to their commanding officers yeah they tried to push some boundaries, breaks and limits.
Speaker 1:You get the discipline and all the other positive benefits, but you also get the folks that are going to think outside the box and push things a little bit.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I think that's 100% true.
Speaker 1:Yeah, that's really good. Okay, so then you go from sales development into sales and then you end up in this world of leadership and operations, which is weird. Yeah, every, every step has been weird because starting with your mom being hot, so we started there and we never got off of it we?
Speaker 2:Yeah, I think there are two things that have been true through my career and these are things I I struggled to articulate when, when I get the weekly message from somebody on LinkedIn saying like hey, how did you become axe? And it's like, well, first of all, there's not a playbook for this and how I got there will not be how you got there, and, like people who asked that question, I worry. Like, to some extent, don't get it like you got to find your path there, but mine was a combination of being at a lot of small startups at the right time I mean just luck and it's luck and it's risk taking.
Speaker 1:Yeah, yeah, absolutely. Because if you join a small startup. Nobody's. Nobody's doing it for you.
Speaker 2:No, exactly it was that, and I don't think until a few years into it I realized even what I was doing, but I think I have. While I might not have been a very good engineer, I have the engineering mindset. That is like fine problems, solving them as fun and then move on to the next one and and for a period of my career that benefited me and and I became a pretty strong generalist in like sales, sales, development operations. I just like fixed problems and figured it out and didn't ask permission and, funny enough, even at Dropbox today People don't stop me from solving problems like nobody gets in my way, even at a multi thousand person public company.
Speaker 2:Yeah the skill set serves me well. Now you have to do it a little differently at a Dropbox than at a panda doc, where I went from sales into operations but it all came from just like hey, this is broken, I guess I'll fix it.
Speaker 1:So you're the guy that sees a problem, comes up with solutions and then you can go implement that solution. Yeah, how do you get the blessing to go do that? Or how do you feel comfortable pushing some boundaries, at least taking on a project, if there's, if there's someone listening that feels like they might be in their lane and they've been constrained, but they see so many more opportunities they want to step on people's toes. How do you break that barrier?
Speaker 2:I think step one is demonstrate that you can do the job you were hired for. Okay I? I have personally found it annoying when I hire people who then immediately are pointing out problems before they've demonstrated that, like, you can do the thing you signed up for.
Speaker 1:Yeah, you don't work for McKinsey and companies. Stop trying to just tell me everything's wrong.
Speaker 2:Yeah exactly so. Step one is is demonstrate competency in the, in the thing you signed up to do. Step two is I was never in search of problems. I think I was just kind of good at spotting them and in the way that that a lot of entrepreneurs over the years are good at recognizing in something everyone else sees but doesn't notice a problem. Yep, just like with all you know, the TK, with ToutApp I mean, that was probably like that. And yes, where were the first ones that really started automating email? Like I don't think many people thought of sending manual emails as a problem, but those guys did and and figured out like there's an opportunity to do it.
Speaker 1:It was the job. It was how it's always been done, yeah yeah, exactly, and so I've a Pandadoc.
Speaker 2:for example, I was I was the third account executive they hired and senior a, which is a total, totally meaningless qualification.
Speaker 1:Senior, a means that you have the confidence to do the job yeah. Junior is acknowledged imposter syndrome. Senior, you believe that you should be here?
Speaker 2:Yeah, yeah, they put me alongside the other two and I remember my first I don't know week or two. I got my very first tee up from the SDR team and I called and I'll never forget getting on the phone with a child like 15 years old or something and they had downloaded from Pandadoccom a like parent child chores agreement and you have to put in all your information. And they did and they didn't lie about anything. But we had an SDR core that was in in South Carolina. That's a crazy story in and of itself, but people in South Carolina who had no training or enablement or anything, who were given Skype and Gmail and Salesforce to like, deal with 1000 leads a day.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:And so they were like seven people in an office who are comped only on meeting set. So they will set you a meeting with anyone who will take it. And so I talked to this kid and I was immediately like okay, I'm a sales guy, we're selling a thing.
Speaker 1:Did you? Did you look around the room for Ashton Kutcher to see?
Speaker 2:if you'd be a fun, yeah, exactly.
Speaker 1:So, like you're, you're initiating me where, where's, where's the anti hazing policy? I'm going to go reference that. That's what this feels like.
Speaker 2:It did feel like that and I talked to the other AEs who were like, yeah, you got to. You got to sort through some trash to get to the good ones. I was like this is a really stupid use of my time. They pay me almost six figures here. Like the fuck are you doing?
Speaker 1:in the 15 year old kid wants to have a chores agreement with his parents.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I had another one, what a smart ass kid, by the way that's where you imagine trying to enter into an agreement with your parents. It's like my friends grown up who got allowances. I remember like broaching that subject with my dad and he was like you already got your allowance. It was your fucking dinner last night.
Speaker 1:Yeah, there you go.
Speaker 2:Okay, yeah, that's funny. And yeah, I had another one a week or two later with a lady who had downloaded, like we had. We had templates from lawyers, we it was like a deal where lawyers would give us free templates and then they would be featured on the show. I was good for SEO, for their firm, I'm sure.
Speaker 1:Yeah, and the Dewey Cheatham and how template. Yeah, exactly, that's my favorite law firm. If you don't know Dewey Cheatham and how, say it out loud, you'll like it.
Speaker 2:We had one that was. That was actually like a pretty upsetting call. But it was a lady who was doing a custody agreement and she was like in a custody argument with her with her ex and was trying to work it out without lawyers and, you know, was upset because she was trying to use the template which can only be used in Panda Doc. There was a bit of a bait and switch sort of element to it and she was trying to figure out, like how the heck do I use this? And and so I had to like talk her through the idea that well, you got to buy it by using the template that you downloaded, otherwise it's a PDF and it's static and you can't really do much with it.
Speaker 2:And that was when I was like this is a problem. I got to fix this thing, and so that was that was sort of the start of fixing ops there. I spent the next month talking to our CEO about like this has to be fixed, you're wasting so much money, this is so inefficient and finally got out of and like leave me alone and go fix it. Got it, okay, great, fixing it.
Speaker 1:So you got the sales people talking to children and divorcee.
Speaker 2:Yes, yeah, fun conversations.
Speaker 1:And so then you start thinking about ops. Well, ops can go in a lot of different directions. How did you make sure the project was manageable enough that you could still do your job but also have an impact on the ops side?
Speaker 2:I didn't think about any of that. I was not thoughtful about anything that was going on in that sense, in a way that I might be today, I just started fixing things and used every minute that wasn't going to my handful of deals to do all this other stuff. And step one was like they bought me a plane ticket to go to South Carolina and sit down at Myrtle Beach, which we had a founder who wasn't American, who thought like beaches in the name. There have to be lots of kids there who want to do cool tech things and it's Myrtle Beach. So that's funny Southern retirement community and yeah, Not.
Speaker 1:What nationality were the founders? Belarusian, belarusian. I don't know any beaches in Belarus, but it's probably not that.
Speaker 2:It is not. We had an office in a strip mall Like the founders knew some guy, I think they like literally contracted him off of like Upwork or something as a sales guy who ended up being a talented sales guy who went on to found his own company. But he was at Myrtle Beach and he was like I'll open an office here and the founder was like great beach, let's do it.
Speaker 1:Cool kids Next door to the Lubies yeah.
Speaker 2:That's right, 430,. Dinner starts. Let's go. Oh, man, I got there and literally Skype, gmail, salesforce, that was their tool stack. Okay, 1,000 leads a day, seven people. So imagine like, and I look, I sit down with them and start going over their process and I'm like okay, what did this person download? And they're like oh, we don't know that. I'm like what do you mean? You don't know that? How'd they get into the system? They're like website.
Speaker 2:That's the tag I'm like that's it, that's all the attribution we've got. And so then it's like, okay, well, this was long before PLG was something everybody was talking about and so I would have known the playbook today if I went back in time. But I was like I think maybe we need to at least know what template they downloaded, right? And so convinced the engineering founder to get his team to write with leads, the template they downloaded and the source and one or two things. And I was like learning attribution the hard way and then got some help from my network, from people who actually knew what the hell they were doing, to help me understand how attribution works and what it is, and ETL the whole concept of like pushing stuff in to a system.
Speaker 1:and well, because at that point, panda doc was something that you guys were selling for tens of dollars a month per user, right, yeah, and so and so all these things that you're talking about. Ibm figured them out. They knew what they were, but they knew what they were at scale. It wasn't something. You were kind of on the cutting edge of bringing that down into the micro tech market, right yeah, because that's that's probably the smallest. Panda doc is probably one of the smallest deal sizes that has salespeople.
Speaker 2:Yeah, and so that's, it's down there. And yeah, between funny you say that between Panda doc and Doc's end and Dropbox, like I've been living in that world for a while now. And yeah my career has kind of become about perfecting that motion.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:But yeah, it was. That's exactly right. We were, you know, our average deal size might have been a thousand dollars, you know, annually. And so I pretty quickly figured out like this whole SDR thing maybe doesn't make sense. We're throwing humans at a problem that can pretty easily be not automated but like filtered away by having just some basic info about let's. Let's create a binary like two lists things we don't call people for downloading and things we do. That was my first idea.
Speaker 1:What was your hypothesis around what that? So you get a thousand leads a day. What did? What did you think would happen in terms of how many go in each bucket? Good, and don't want to talk to them.
Speaker 2:You know, I don't know what I thought at the time. I don't think I was surprised by what we learned, so I probably would have been somewhat close to the pin. But I think we ended up talking to like eight or 9% of these people like, yeah, 50 to 100 leads a day we actually talked to. And suddenly we have, we have this small set of leads that are now converting at a much, much higher rate, and of course, we're still doing all of these conversion rate things in spreadsheets where we don't even have dashboards to answer this. So it's there's a lot of manual work and figuring it out, but became clear pretty quickly like we don't need seven SDRs for a handful of leads and we got outreach. And so now we have outreach, sort of sending automated emails to maybe 90% of those people as soon as they come in as a lead, and so that led to creating a full cycle sales rep.
Speaker 2:I ended up sort of building our full cycle team because before we had SDRs and AEs for a you know, even the, even the AE deals I think maybe the biggest deal I sold was like 15 grand or something and so the whole model just didn't make sense. But we didn't know that we had never we hadn't started solving some of these problems Like how do you deal with 1000 leads a day? Yeah, and then fast forward two years. That was my program, the sort of full cycle sales rep motion and we had doing air quotes, enterprise sales reps. But you know, all these small startups call things enterprise that are very, very much not enterprise.
Speaker 1:No, if there's three people involved, it's an enterprise deal, exactly that's crazy. Okay, so then you were there for a while.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I was there for I don't remember now two and a half years, three years, something like that, Exactly, but a while.
Speaker 1:And so in this, in this first operations so you're doing sales, you're doing operations how do you feel that your, your operations skill set matured by the time you left that two and a half years after putting your arms around it for the first time?
Speaker 2:In a couple of ways. One was the obvious like I knew the answers to the test when I run into the same exact problems again. But another was I also screwed up a lot of things and learned what not to do and and could, by the end of my time, be thoughtful about and answer questions like how much can I take on before I'm doing a bad job at all of the things I'm doing? How should I, how do you project manage these things when I'm not? Early on? It was just me doing it all and in some ways that's easier than involving other people and and coordinating projects. So actually the, the, the coordination involved in ops and learning how to tap a network for answers versus just trying to figure everything out on your own and brute forcing it, we're probably the two things that that I learned that were the most valuable and and sort of helped me mature that skill set.
Speaker 1:Got it. So if there's someone out there today and they're thinking about well, my company's got things that are broken, they need to get fixed, I'm not getting the resources I need. Maybe they have an ops team, maybe they don't. Maybe they have a consultant, maybe they don't, but whoever it is, just isn't fast enough, isn't good enough or isn't dedicated enough. What resources exist today that didn't exist back then, where a manager or VP can just quickly get up to speed on? Hey, here's how I can get pretty good at this pretty fast.
Speaker 2:You know communities. It's funny. A few years ago Pete Kazanji set up MSP and I mean I think a lot of people listening probably know MSP. It's a listserv that was modern sales pros which became sort of a I think he called it a salon for sales and sales operations and now we've sort of morphed into this slack based community era and that's probably where I would focus If I were a VP of sales.
Speaker 2:New to operations and as happened so many times with, like icebergs grants, you show up and go. I can't be successful with this rats nest I've just inherited. What do I do If you're in a position where, like it's up to you to fix it, you don't have the resources to put somebody else on it? I think Wizard of ops is a place I would go that is full of more strategic, thoughtful people who have the ability to explain to you the why and help you understand how to match a business case to a project versus the the how. The why is so much more important than the how with with operations and I'm struggling to think of of other ones I would go to, but that and Pavilion are probably the two that I would start with to just get a basic understanding of like. How do we even start thinking about how to approach this?
Speaker 1:Yeah, so there's resources now.
Speaker 2:So many resources, and I think those are better than the individuals I. I get a lot of people reaching out to me about problems, and every once in a while it's one I like have the answer for.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:So many of them I like have to provide a framework, and which is powerful in and of itself, but it's better if somebody has done this exact thing and knows the answer, and so, yeah, go to a community where you got a chance of that person seeing your, your question.
Speaker 1:Yes, the community. They'll have the right permutation or combination of the exact situation.
Speaker 2:Yeah, exactly.
Speaker 1:Yeah, especially when you're talking about the world now, because you guys had Skype and a cell phone, yeah, and you had 10, 20, 30 tools that are strung together. If somebody else has a different combination of of a software stack, then the the solution to the problem might be completely different.
Speaker 2:Yeah, yeah, and this actually, you're sort of sparking something for me which is also this is a hard thing to understand if you haven't sort of been down this path and gotten your ass kicked by operations before, but it is so, so tempting to start with tools. Everybody, you know what tool do I need for X and the tool solves the problem.
Speaker 2:Yeah, and of course like the startup world thinks that because it's full of people who are trying to convince the world that their tool solves the problem. So of course, you're going to hear other people saying they have a tool that solves the problem and you're going to believe it or or get mired in the which tool is better for my situation, without thinking about what the situation is and what are the requirements. Yeah, I want to jump off a building every time somebody's like sales after outreach what do you think?
Speaker 1:Nike, nike or Reebok, yeah, Because it's a lot of, it's a fashion show.
Speaker 2:It is If you're outside. I think it's a good way to put it. It's not a fashion show.
Speaker 1:If you're at a true enterprise company with true either security or localization needs, if only one of them operates in Korean and you have a bunch of Korean people, you should probably get that one. Yeah, so only if you need FedRAMP or one of these fancy Dancy Security things that you only know about. If you've ever had to sell it before, then you should only get that one, but the rest of it it's, it's purely a fashion show in many cases. That's so true.
Speaker 2:I, I struggle with this, with this question and and to like keep explaining it over and over, and not because people don't listen, but because there are just so many people who have the same question and it's hard to answer them all at once. But, yeah, yeah, you're right. That's such a good way to put it. Fashion show. I, yeah, I the way I've explained it in different terms, but it's like every option on the market has the horsepower you need.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:All of them do so, like, in some cases it's okay to shop on price, but, like, before we even get there, what do you need it to do? Yes, and I like to. I've started framing, thanks in large part to Errol Toker, started framing everything for clients of iceberg as well. What do you want the? What do you want your customer to experience? We'll start with that. What do you want the experience to be? Or what do you want your rep to be doing? Did they know? Sometimes they do. It often takes some guidance, but I can get them there pretty easily with one or two questions like how many emails should they be getting in X period of time? And are you okay with them getting an email that's not really personal but like has their company name in it?
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:And you know sort of start from there and once you ask a couple of teaser questions and people understand what you're trying to get at, I'm working with a lot of really smart people. Even if they like don't understand ops well, like they're really smart people. It doesn't take much.
Speaker 1:Well, it doesn't take much, but it takes something. Yeah, I think that's the important thing here is that to get something going, you need a prompt. One of the things that I always say is that people, really even really smart people, struggle with iterating on a blank piece of paper. Yeah, you can. Blank piece of paper. You give somebody something that is documented. They can find the holes, the gaps, why it won't work why it will work.
Speaker 1:They can go, they can run with that.
Speaker 1:So I think that this is something that's that I learned early on in operations was, if you actually document your process and people say they do this, but then when I ask and I say, can I see it? There's always a oh well, we're working on it or this is that Whatever. But do you truly have everything you do written down? And if you have everything that you do written down, all the different steps of the process, all the different forks and branches that it can take, how that process interacts with documents and technology and different people and everything like that, then the organization, software vendors, consultants, everybody can look at it and react and say, well, that's the current state, how do we move to the future state? And I've done this before and it was such a great exercise of create a complete current state process diagram and a complete future state process diagram and show how you move from one to the other. And if you've never done this before, if you're not good at it, it's really hard and it takes a heck of a lot of time.
Speaker 2:Yeah, yeah, and even if you are good at it, it's hard and it takes a lot of time. It is worth it.
Speaker 1:It's totally worth. So why is it worth it? Give me a couple of specific examples of what what that could do to both. I think there's a there's a risk mitigation factor, but there's also a time to value and adoption driver. There's a lot of different positive benefits that really understanding the process could have.
Speaker 2:Let's, let's use like a specific example here yeah, one of my, one of the things that is hard for people to even really smart people to wrap their heads around and think about from a zoomed out perspective is attribution. That is a thing that, like, is just so hard to to keep all of the pieces of in your head while you're talking about it.
Speaker 1:And if I ask multiple people at a company what is attribution here? Would I ever get the same answer from two people?
Speaker 2:No, I mean even the high level definition of what is attribution. You might not get the Okay.
Speaker 1:So hit on how mind boggling it could be for people. Okay, so keep, keep going.
Speaker 2:So I'm talking here very specifically about marketing attribution flowing from your marketing software into sales software, so so you can report on and sales can understand what the hell people have done before they talk to you Like that sort of narrow slice of people Meaning prospects Correct.
Speaker 1:Yeah, that's exactly right.
Speaker 2:So two, two things are actually three things. I use three prompts that really help this conversation. One is a, an attribution definition spreadsheet, and it's one we reuse over and over and over with prospects and you plug in all of the places your I'm going to use leads generically, your or your prospects can come from. How can prospects get into your system? And, like, just making them write those down is such a clarifying exercise. People don't think about all of the ways names get into their system, but it is a finite list, so write it down and then, like, what are the things they can do? And so now we're talking about lead source and campaigns what are, what are the ways into the system and what are the things they can do along the way and after they're in the system. It's a finite list and so once you make these lists, suddenly you can start having conversations about attribution and you can.
Speaker 2:You know we have concept of like lead source, lead source detail and campaigns. I like keeping it simple. Those are like the three things we care about, and these three things can be combined all throughout the funnel. And so then, what we do? We fill that out. What are, what are those three things? What are all the options? And then I have a visual that I show people that is like hey, here is how the two systems interact and somebody does anything that is meaningful and that that is anything that's on your list of campaigns on the marketing side. Here is literally what the systems do to talk to each other and what happens. And then the the last one is like a definition sheet and it's a. It's pretty much the same for everybody. I send it to and we sit down and we tweak it. Like you said, if it's not a blank sheet of paper, they can tell you what doesn't work for them. Yeah and uh.
Speaker 1:Emotionally Cool.
Speaker 2:Let's fix it. Yeah, and these three things turn attribution from this like big, scary thing that has been just messing up their marketing and sales conversations for years into like not a simple, not an easy, but a a finite sort of fenced in conversation that has structure.
Speaker 1:Got it Okay. So that exercise. How long does that usually take, both in terms of man hours, but also, you know, you've got to have different meetings with different people from start to finish, in terms of days or weeks.
Speaker 2:We work mostly with early stage, so thanks seed a, sometimes B, companies.
Speaker 2:So, this can range anywhere from two days to two weeks, depending on like. If it's a company with a mature marketing organization that has hundreds of campaigns, it can take a while Got it, and the more complex their CRM setup is, the longer, the more work we have to do to make it work. The way the visual we show them says it should work, but yeah, it's normally like within a week we've got it set up the way in a way that totally makes sense and data flows properly and and win a sales rep like. The outcome is a sales rep gets a new lead and it at a glance understands what they've got.
Speaker 1:Yeah Well, I think that's a good takeaway here. So for folks in management or sales, and a little bit, if there's something going on in the business and that's something has some kind of negative outcome, it's either causing bottlenecks and efficiencies debate, it's blocking you from being able to do something that you want to do Just write it down, get it documented, yeah, absolutely.
Speaker 2:And and like, define it carefully, thoughtfully, like, yeah, by by writing it down. There's another one that I run into and you just sparked this. It's tangentially related. My experience at Smart Recruiters was we had a couple years where I think I went through what everybody else in the business world has gone through if you've been in or near ops which is like we don't have clean data. Yeah, and that's one where we yeah, we have to. Actually, when people are bitching and moaning about the data, it's like you know, tell me what, what problem is it causing? And like, define unclean data for me, right, what about this? Nobody has clean data. I haven't met anybody.
Speaker 1:Well, those guys that haven't launched yet, they have clean data but. But I don't think 0.0 is helpful. So everyone else has unclean data.
Speaker 2:So I here's how, here's where I've landed. On data, I would argue that and this is semantics, but I think it's important you can have clean data, but you have to define clean data, and so there are three steps to getting clean data. Yeah, First is define what subset of your data actually needs to be clean, Because do you need that lead that came in four years ago and has never interacted with anything again? Do you need it to be clean? Probably not. Then define clean and then build a mechanism in your CRM to surface data that doesn't match those two definitions and your definition of clean. I think of clean is a combination of completeness and accuracy, and if it's not filterable in your system, if you can't surface it in a report, it cannot be in your definition of clean. Otherwise it's subjective.
Speaker 1:Got it so we could look at things like closed date and amount, yeah, and type and things like those. And if we, if we've got 10,000 deals that are in our CRM and 9,800 of them have an amount, then we could surface those other 200 and say, do these have an amount or is it zero? And it's basically having the computer tell us what to pay attention to 100%.
Speaker 2:You should use this. The end of this exercise should be a data cleanliness dashboard that someone owns. You have to have an owner if you don't have. If everybody owns it, nobody owns it. Someone owns data cleanliness. Somebody has to own this dashboard and keeping it essentially empty who owns safety on a police call who owns safety on a police car.
Speaker 1:So there's four of you out there. You got your guns drawn. Who owns safety? The supervisor on safety. So there's one person. There's one person. Okay, I just wanted to point that out because that's pretty, that's pretty serious situation, yeah, and so there's one person that owns safety.
Speaker 2:So if they say something, yeah, you guys take that seriously and and fall in line and make sure that that there is, unless you're being told to break the law or do something that is definitely going to cause you harm. You follow the instruction without asking questions, because this is too fucking serious for us to have a debate.
Speaker 1:Got it. Okay, I just wanted to tie it back to something a little more serious and sales operations. So there we go. But yeah, you don't have an owner. You've got two people that say that they own it. Nobody owns it by that, yeah.
Speaker 2:Okay, at iceberg, we created this concept of. Actually we stole a concept of a DRI directly responsible individual. It's a Dropbox concept, but and I don't know if it originated with Dropbox, but it's where I learned- it probably originated with Peter Drucker W Edwards as most things do.
Speaker 1:This guy showed me this diagram. The other is hey, I've got this really good idea. He shows me a diagram. I say yeah, isn't that just planned to check? Act from Deming with different words. He says I don't know I was like. Google it. Answer was yes, okay, so directly responsible individuals. He got one person that owns it. What's what's ownership? So, when we're talking about data cleanliness, what does ownership look like on a frequency perspective? How often do you inspect that?
Speaker 2:So I would have a two stage process in a perfect world and you have to make this fit your resources and and your. You know how important cleanliness cleanliness is to you. But I would have an initial cleanup and I would set the cadence probably based on I would have like a weekly cadence that is every Friday at 8am, everyone who should be upset if the data is unclean gets an email with that dashboard, with your data cleanliness dashboard, and it should be blank, and so your job as the DRI over data cleanliness is during the week. Make sure, like I would, every Thursday have a final check and make damn sure that Friday they get a blank dashboard. It's probably how I would do it, or twice a week, and it depends on your, your sort of operating cadence and your lead volume. You know, if you're at a PLG company that has that's getting 1000 leads a week, like maybe this is a daily check, you're doing this constantly. If, if you're enterprise, like maybe you want some month, is fine, I don't know.
Speaker 1:So if it's clean, okay. So we're in a world where it's clean. Ideally, they're getting those emails on Thursdays and they don't have to do anything, so it's not work. Yeah, I think this is one of the things that I run into with sales management coaching specifically, is people say, hey, we don't have time for that. Well, dig in and say, well, what are you doing that you don't have time for? Well, I'm helping reps close deals, cool. Why are you doing that? Oh, because they can't. Well, so you hired people to do a job that they can't do. Got it Fascinating?
Speaker 1:Yeah just add coaching If your company doesn't have a coaching framework. Email free stuff at coach CRMcom. Free stuff at coach CRMcom and I'll email you our coaching course for free. What's?
Speaker 2:what do you? Can you give me a high level understanding of like the kinds of things you learn on that Like? I don't. I don't know what I would get if I went and did that Like. What does it teach you?
Speaker 1:It teaches you how to diagnose and prioritize coaching challenges. It teaches you how to have live coaching conversations, teaches you how to hold folks accountable in a way that they want to be held accountable, and it works on creating a culture where you're here to help them build themselves up by leveraging what you know about where they've been in the past and what they want to do in the future, professionally and personally.
Speaker 2:It feels like this somehow, and maybe this is like a weird connection I'm sensing here but yeah, you're you're doing for coaching, what like we're doing for for attribution or data cleanliness cleanliness, taking this thing that like feels really hard and chopping it up into templates.
Speaker 1:Yes, coaching is not hard if you do it right. Yeah, I think attribution is a little harder. All right, so you've got, you've got a directly responsible individual who's sitting here. They're doing all these things. What happens as a result of the data being clean? Because I think this, this could be a place where people say that's a nice to have.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I think. I think for some companies it is nice to have. Oh, there we go. I think you can get away with some pretty unclean data. I think there are a lot of things that people, people, feel the need to have because you're just supposed to have it, that just don't matter that much. There are a lot of companies Every company is a dumpster fire. Every single one, everywhere in some way, is a dumpster fire, and probably in just about every way. I've that's my, that's my hot take after having been at small and large companies. They all suffer some version of the same problems, and so I actually. I think it's probably fine in most cases if your data is not that clean. I think there are pockets of your data that should be clean because somebody else suffers if cleanliness becomes an issue.
Speaker 1:Suffers as in. They can't do their job.
Speaker 2:Yeah, yeah, I think I think your ops team, your, your data team on ops can't, can't surface an accurate pipeline number to save their life, because you're not focused on on doing something in the opportunity record that that is tied to the concept of cleanliness. You know, by the time it interstage three, it must have an amount, and you know that's one tiny example of like something that downstream of you is really messing with another person's job, yep. And so what might feel like a nice to have for you, because you're not the one who suffers if it's wrong, is actually not a nice to have for the business, because a dropbox or a public company like that is really, really important to get right, because it guides lots of big decisions that affect our share price in meaningful ways.
Speaker 1:Right. One of the fears that I hear expressed is that there's a lot of these things, especially operationally related, management related, that it seems redundant and people might feel like, oh, they can move on to the next thing, they can cut corners, they can do things that might not be in a way that are that are optimal. I want to dig into one of your other activities that you do in life. You fly airplanes. Yeah, you fly airplanes. Talk to me about the importance of a preflight checklist and how that evolves as a pilot becomes more tenured in their career.
Speaker 2:Pilots and cops have something in common Sweet glasses.
Speaker 1:Other than that.
Speaker 2:The ones most likely to die are young and old, the new ones and the complacent ones. And so if you go fly, if you go fly with me, I've got a. I've got about 500 hours of flight time. I am a not quite junior pilot, but certainly not a seasoned pilot. I'm right, I'm in between where hobbyists and professionals usually are, and I will run every checklist I have, because I fly just infrequently enough that I'm worried I'm going to do something wrong if I don't use the checklist.
Speaker 1:Little elevated heart rate when you sit in the cockpit.
Speaker 2:Yeah, yeah, and so we have checklists for everything, by the way. So you, everybody knows there's like a preflight checklist, there is a startup checklist, there's a shutdown checklist, there's a taxi checklist, there's a takeoff checklist, there's a cruise climb, climb, descent and landing checklist. Wow, so you are living through checklists. Everything you do should be on a checklist, essentially, and it's really helpful. And even I have chosen some pieces of this that I don't look at sometimes for safety's sake. I don't look at my takeoff checklist. If you're going through a checklist while you're going from zero to 90 miles an hour on a runway, like that's a problem. It's three steps. You just you remember.
Speaker 1:You're going through them in your head, yeah, yeah.
Speaker 2:But some of these checklists I absolutely go through every single time. My cruise climb and my cruise checklist I'm very careful about because there are things that if you miss like can kill you.
Speaker 1:What does cruise climb mean?
Speaker 2:It is between takeoff and reaching your cruising altitude. It's that slow climb up to cruise. That is, you're not all. You're not doing a ton of things, but you're doing a couple of high stakes. Things like, if you fly a piston airplane, you're changing the amount of fuel per air going into the engine. Okay, Because, the air is thinning as you go up and you got to change. You have to manually do that. Yeah, you manually do that in airplanes.
Speaker 2:Thanks FAA. There's technology that allows us to do it just like in a car. Cars have been doing this for decades and really effectively. Aviation has has great technology that that automatically does this and does it much better than a human can. But the FAA hasn't allowed it for general aviation. So you have to do a knob and and this is a crazy tangent, but you're when you're when you're thinning out the, the fuel to air mixture, when you're when you're doing your mixture, you actually have to watch engine temperatures and watch them peak. And if you're flying rich meaning you're using fuel to cool the engine you find your peak and then you add a little fuel until the temperatures come down. If you're flying lean, so you're using air to cool the engine instead of fuel you peak and then keep pulling the fuel back until it comes down 75 degrees and continental engines. Wow. So there's all this stuff you got to got to remember and so you've got these checklists that, like, you got to pay close attention to and I lost the thread of the original.
Speaker 1:Well, you were going to make one. I typically don't make political commentary, but yeah, this one's way too easy. Yeah, did you watch the congressional testimony of the guy that was nominated to be FAA chairman? No, oh, it's the most disgusting thing I've ever seen in my life, was it? I mean, probably not the most disgusting thing I've ever seen in my life. I saw some weird stuff on the internet once, but this guy goes up there. I think, if I'm remembering properly, he was the CEO of Denver International Airport, okay, and they nominated him to be FAA chairman, okay. So he obviously has dirt on somebody.
Speaker 1:Yeah, so they're sitting, they're asking him all of these questions. And I've done consulting projects with some aircraft maintenance companies, yeah. And so they start asking him questions. They're like what's the difference between part 135 and part 121? The guy didn't know no way. And they start asking these. Just, they ask him two questions. I knew the answer to yeah, just because I've done sales consulting projects with aviation companies. This guy didn't know anything. That's crazy. And they had nominated him to be FAA director, chairman, whatever the job title is. And that just shows you that. I mean, you're sitting here telling me that you're manually adjusting the fuel because the government tells you that you have to, but the technology exists to do it.
Speaker 2:There are. So there for general aviation pilots like me. There you basically have a choice, when you get an airplane, between general aviation certified.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:And experimental.
Speaker 1:Okay, and so one sounds dangerous.
Speaker 2:It sounds like it and by the stats it is a little more dangerous.
Speaker 1:My uncle actually died, but he was a maniac, and thanks to my father for not letting me ever fly with him. Okay, oh, this is the kind of guy that he would go. He would just go straight up, cut the engine, do twirls, oh yeah, yeah, I mean he, he would. He was a trickster, oh geez.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:So that's not something I want to ever do, yeah.
Speaker 2:If you go experimental, you're exempted from a lot of these rules. Okay, now if, as is the case with a lot of pilots, like if you're a maniac and you go experimental, you they give you enough rope to hang yourself, they're harder to get insured. There are there are a lot of downsides to going experimental. Sure, but yeah, mixture adjustment you can buy the computer and the the equipment to like do fuel injected engines like cars do, and it's it just like has never been certified. So these Cessna's you see flying around, or like I have a I had, I just sold like a six seater, pressurized, pretty big airplane and I'm up there like adjusting the fuel to cruise a lot of time and it's insane.
Speaker 1:That's nuts, okay. So that sounds kind of like some of the regulations that other groups impose upon people.
Speaker 2:I don't want to go down that rabbit hole. Let's, let's go back to talking about checklist.
Speaker 1:I love checklist. I think that pre meeting prep is the most underrated, most valuable thing in the world of sales. If anybody listening does not have a good pre meeting checklist email, free stuff at coach CRMcom. I'll flip one over to you. Well, that's in the sales methodology, the conversation on the ops side. What do you see in terms of checklists on a weekly, monthly basis, quarterly basis? How does that drive both the ownership to be able to truly own something and keep their eyes on it, but also the people doing the work to make sure everybody's doing their thing? It?
Speaker 2:is essentially non existent in a lot of especially earlier stage startups, but it's it just hasn't. It just hasn't caught on generally an ops so far as I've seen, and we have checklists we create for a handful of scenarios that are, especially from a data perspective, kind of high stakes. So we'll we build checklists for people that are like your event checklist. Once you have all the data from an event and you're giving it to Jimmy to upload into the system like he needs a checklist, you cannot assume that this intern or new guy or even a talented guy who's been here a couple years understands all the downstream effects of every checkbox in your CRM as you're uploading.
Speaker 1:Yeah, because we just spent 100 grand on that booth and if that lead that the VP remember talking to doesn't show up in the CRM two months later, you find out that's not going to be a fun conversation.
Speaker 2:No, exactly, and I actually think some of this just absolute fuckery has. We've become numb to it. I think there are a lot of startups where it's just like, well, that's the cost of doing business, not a. I don't think enough people get mad enough about situations exactly like that. I've seen a lot of places where it just like that's, I don't know, that's, that's how it works. You, you don't. You know you don't get all the data and you really got to chase. You got to chase whoever owns the list to make sure your stuff gets in the system and then you got to go find it and negotiate with the rep who was assigned to incorrectly to get it back. And I think this. I live in small company world so I don't see this quite as much in bigger companies, but I think it's pretty normal and a lot of that is lack of checklists or their functional equivalent throughout the funnel lack of rigor and discipline.
Speaker 1:Yeah, exactly. Which I equate with true operations, because when you think of operations, what's the most? Maybe it's not the most popular framework, but one of the most popular frameworks and operations is six Sigma, which says what that you have. Is it something like eight defects per million?
Speaker 2:Yeah, I, that's the Toyota supply chain. Yeah, yeah, I don't. I've never been through anything six Sigma, but I believe you.
Speaker 1:It's very few. So yeah, I think that's that's a big issue is that if it has sales in front of it, the operations piece isn't treated the same as it would be in a manufacturing facility. Or even if you look at medicine law accounting, what happens if you mess up somebody's audit? Cfo and the CEO sign under penalty of law that the audit was done properly and completely and thoroughly.
Speaker 2:There's something I have a theory here that ties to this and let me tell you what I see a lot so, especially in in, I see it in startup land. I think this probably happens everywhere. I don't think this is unique to us. I think a difference in McKinsey doing an audit for a big company and new sales ops higher at a startup is at McKinsey you have six levels of people who have all done your job above you, who know what good looks like and understand what you should be doing.
Speaker 1:Yep.
Speaker 2:Your average startup. You have this combination of lack of experience and really smart people who, who I think, sometimes aren't always aware of their blind spots. I have yet to meet a VP of sales who hired iceberg, who didn't have like a real background and ops. All of them have quote unquote a background and ops. I understand ops. I know sales force really well. Very rarely do any of them know their ass from a hole in the ground when it comes to like how option be run.
Speaker 1:I've seen this on fishing stores yeah, I caught a lunker. Yeah, Exactly. Yeah, sure you did.
Speaker 2:And so you have the stories played out a million times. They go hire somebody who is a Salesforce admin or helps about admin or whatever, but Salesforce admin is most common. This person immediately solves a few problems that that are highly tactical. You know we can't save our opportunities. We keep getting this red banner. What the hell do we do? And they understand validation rules well enough to go fix it quickly quickly.
Speaker 2:Yes, quickly is very important here, and so pretty soon, this person effectively owns operations. They, they're, they're tasked with more stuff, and often it's a young person who works for the VP of sales, who doesn't actually understand what, how to get from zero to one operationally. So often they're they were the VP of sales at some big company. They were three levels away from where the sausage was made. Yep, they know, they know how to drive a truck, but now you're asking them to to build one, got it, and so you have this junior resource rolling up into this person who and the junior resource has done this zero or one times yeah.
Speaker 2:Yeah, they know, they've been through you, know they're, they're a trailblazer on Salesforce and they know the. They know the how for a lot of these things, but they don't know the what or the why. They don't know what should be done or why you should do it Right. They don't understand the impact just like I didn't early in my career of the importance of understanding the business case and what, starting with the end in mind and and working backwards to the to get to the tactical, and all of these principles are just like lost in a, in a startup and probably a lot of other business and since.
Speaker 1:One thing I've been talking about recently is that Silicon Valley has an anti NBA culture. Yeah, they don't like NBA's make fun of people that was went to business school because back in the 90s and the 2000s, the NBA's come in and they say here's our PowerPoints and here's our spreadsheets and we're going to run the business like that. Well, these people get ostracized and banished and then, all of a sudden, you end up in a world in 2023 where folks don't have basic business sense because nobody ever learned the stuff. Yeah, and there's. No, the diversity of education does not include the educated business leader who has that just catalog of frameworks. Yeah, they're there, sometimes later stage. They're there, for sure, but they're in finance. There's COO, there's things like that. Yeah, they're not sitting there in the sales organization. Yeah, so that's my, that's my tangent on that.
Speaker 2:I think you're right. The pendulum is just swung all the way the other direction and I got a taste of this and I thought a year or two ago I thought I might sell iceberg. It was at a place where I was sort of tired of running it. I'd been doing it for five years and on the side on top of a full time job, and it was in icebergs is his revenue operations consulting firm.
Speaker 2:Thank you. And I ended up meeting a guy who wanted to get a new CEO role. He had been the CEO of a company, had an exit, was working for the parent company and decided he wanted to go build again. And we talked for months before I finally decided like, ok, I'm going to do this thing. That a lot of people tell me is just blanket a mistake bringing a CEO in to run your company. But it took like a week for me to figure out what a shitty CEO I am and what good looks like. Yeah, when you have somebody who has this background he's a, he's a finance guy, he was in operations at Uber when they were scaling and bigger and has has that skill set and I do not I'm really good at a lot of other things but that sort of financial rigor and discipline, that, that understanding of business at a deeper level, that I just don't have it. It was never apparent to me until I work next to somebody who actually is good at it. Right, it's huge.
Speaker 1:Well, you never needed to learn it. You're a detective? Yeah, you're an SDR. You're doing operations. You're a Myrtle Beach with SDRs. You're getting 15 year old kids and divorcee's on the line. Yeah, there is. There is no room to go. Take a two year break to go learn all the the fundamental business frameworks that exist out there.
Speaker 2:You know, and and funny enough, I got my MBA. I dropped out of college to become a cop and then put myself back through undergrad and an MBA program, but I never used it and I might as well not have gotten it. I remember nothing of it. If you don't exercise it, it's gone.
Speaker 1:You don't use it, you lose it. Yeah, yeah, 100% interesting. Ok, so we're. We're at the point where we've got to have some business sense, yeah, to get these, these things going on. You've got a VP of sales that has a junior operations person, maybe the Salesforce admin. How do you, if you have a junior Salesforce admin that comes in and they have a big impact, they're going to want more. Now, how do you get that person either in a spot where they can contribute more to the company, or how do you just manage them out and say, look, we're going to help you. Go find a great job somewhere else that can give you what you need.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I think the latter never happens, because if you had somebody who, the only way you're going to recognize what's coming, if you keep them around, is by having somebody who's already been down that road and, by definition, in this scenario you don't. So I never see companies willing to part with this person for their, for the sake of their career because they were good at what they did.
Speaker 1:Yeah, yeah.
Speaker 2:Exactly, and you end up in the spin cycle, and what I mean is you build unsustainable solutions to current problems, things break. You're you get really, really positive feedback for quick fixes and you get negative feedback for slowing down, asking why you, the sales program you're working for, even though you now run rev ops, you are essentially an extension of sales and if you have extra time you help marketing customer success, and you're you end up in this sort of this negative cycle of things break. I I get a pat on the back for firefighting, I fix it, and my fix is definitely not sustainable and might break other things elsewhere, but I can't see that, and so and no one else sees it because they either don't know or they don't care, because they think it's in the weeds.
Speaker 2:No and and eventually, eventually, you, the, the junior ops person who's now running rev ops at your start up, every once in a while there's somebody who sort of makes it and and is both smart and properly positioned to like figure it out and and become good at saying no and slowing down and building process and doing all the things required to be good at ops in this, in this paradigm. But most of them just end up getting fired and everyone's frustrated and nobody really knows what's going wrong, other than that, like Jimmy socks, Yep, and how many months after Jimmy should have left, does Jimmy actually leave?
Speaker 2:I've seen times when it's like two years after Wow.
Speaker 1:I mean not usually, but Jimmy comes in, makes an impact and then sticks around for two years underperforming but it's not recognized because folks don't know what good looks like.
Speaker 2:Jimmy. Jimmy's a rockstar because he quickly handles whatever problem is on my plate right this minute, right. And he's a decent firefighter because he understands the systems and he's built them and it's a rat snas but he like knows most where most of the stuff is. And we had a client. I'm definitely not going to name clients in this scenario, but we had a client recently who brought us in and and we talked to them at one point and they were like, hey, we're thinking of bringing somebody into help. Things are running like pretty well, but we're we're trying to figure out what's wrong. And then they went away. They, you know how how these deals go.
Speaker 1:They, they go away, and then that sounds like someone coming to marriage counseling that says my wife might be cheating on me.
Speaker 2:Yeah, that's all I could think of there, exactly.
Speaker 1:I was like dude, you just don't know it yet. Yeah, exactly, go on.
Speaker 2:And then a couple months later, after you know we don't talk, they they come back and they're like, ok, we've decided we're, we're letting this person go, this, just like we think we're going to get this person to do a transition. But I think this person felt burned. They felt burned, sure, and the person essentially like rage, quit when the conversation came up and they were left with this big rat snast, and we looked at the person and it took us a couple months just to understand what had been built, because this person knew Apex, the Salesforce proprietary code, oh gosh. And so, yeah, we're like where, where does this automation live? And we go look in flows, one of the one of the others, that most things in Salesforce for your day to day automation should be built in, and flows is empty.
Speaker 1:Don't tell me, little Jimmy just wrote a bunch of Apex code then better.
Speaker 2:Yet there is one class, oh gosh. It can be triggered by a bunch of different things, a handful of triggers, one class, and so a class is like the thing is is the piece of code that does the thing, yeah, and triggers are pieces of code that that decide when the thing should happen, and so it should be a small of triggers and classes for things that, like, can't be elegantly solved with the, with the, the basically settings in Salesforce.
Speaker 1:Right, good way to put it out of the box tools, the graphical user interface where you can point, click.
Speaker 2:that's where you should do and Salesforce has actually, I think, done an amazing job in the last decade in working toward a no code world and and there are a lot of really smart people out there who disagree with their goal of no code but for your average Joe, like it's pretty powerful what you can do without a line of code.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:And yeah, so there's one class and it's like thousands of lines at this point and no one. This person didn't know they were messing up. They thought they were building an elegant solution.
Speaker 1:Yeah, they're killing it. Was it documented?
Speaker 2:Shit, no, no, there's. There's nothing. We we actually pulled our best developer and she spent like a few weeks just like slowly documenting it and figuring out what is where. And the worst part is, cpq is tied into this code. Oh geez, and that's a mess. It's CPQ on its best days is a mess, and this is an opportunity to plug. There's a company called new. Have you you familiar with these guys?
Speaker 1:No, they don't sponsor me yet, nor does anybody else, nor do I really want anybody to. I always make that as a funny remark.
Speaker 2:These guys have. I think one of the biggest issues that we see for small companies is Salesforce is really good at selling CPQ to people who don't need it yet Got it. If you're under 1015 million, like it.
Speaker 1:There are situations where it makes sense to have CPQ but, like you, better really need it because it is a massive undertaking and and unless you have lots of products and lots of contract updates and things like that, if it's just one product that you're selling annual deals for, you don't need.
Speaker 2:CPQ no, and we get everyone. So I will have a client show up in a CRO or VP of sales will say, like we're doing CPQ, and you know, they just got off the phone with their Salesforce rep who gave him a deal and has been pushing it for a year and we now will quit a client before we'll do CPQ. Oh, that's funny.
Speaker 1:Well, it's also good job insurance for folks. I know there's a lot of. There's a lot of people out there. If you're VP of sales, you're 1215 months in Feeling a little shaky like, oh, let's rip a CPQ project that'll keep me around for another six months.
Speaker 2:Yeah, no, I know one person did that.
Speaker 1:I'll tell you it's, it's hilarious. Just the hiring vendors. Well, there's there's two things on hiring vendors. And vendors could be software companies, they could be consultants. There's there's two different.
Speaker 1:There's three different angles here that I've been thinking about. One is they're the folks that hire the vendors just to ensure their own viability. It's hey, you know, this is broken, someone else broke it. I'm going to be the hero and hire the vendor. Yeah, so that's, that's one thing. The other, the other one, is they truly believe that they need help with something specific and then they consider hiring a vendor, they consider hiring an employee. They're a little wishy washy about it. They don't know, they don't, they don't try to make a decision.
Speaker 1:And then there's a third group and it's funny because people talk about ROI a lot yeah, every single thing that you do, and I, if someone has an example that counters this, I'll send you a hundred dollar gift card. Amazon dot com. Send me an email at free stuff at coach serum dot com. Applicable to the first three people that send me an email was something that actually fits this category. Show me a software product or show me a consulting engagement where people actually use it. That doesn't have a positive ROI? Yeah, doesn't exist. If you actually use it it has a positive ROI.
Speaker 1:So then that goes through this third group of people, which is they go by as much stuff as they possibly can and get it working. And if you do that, that means the R is huge, the return on the investment. So who cares what the investment is? There's cash there, your company has a credit line, they've got money in the bank. There's lots of ways you can finance it. You can do multi your deals, whatever.
Speaker 1:So there's there is. As long as you can sell it internally, you can get that money to invest. Because all of the stuff in in business schools because business school we learn that if a project has a positive net present value, you do it. Yeah, and now, yeah, if you do lots and lots of projects, then it becomes complicated to manage, but that that's a cost that negatively impacts the net present value. Not going to get into all of that, but the point being is that buying stuff gives you a massive return. So I just laugh when some of these people are scared of vendors or don't wanna do consulting projects. Spend the fricking money if it's going to be used and you're gonna see a big return.
Speaker 2:Yeah, that's Brad, our CEO. He came in and he started spending more money on more things and we use all of them and some of them, like, don't end up being things we wanna invest in long term and but we learn so much so quickly.
Speaker 1:Big R.
Speaker 2:Yeah, big R by getting out there and spending and thoughtfully and carefully, but often in a lot.
Speaker 1:Yeah, yeah, and I think that often in a lot, yeah, that's huge. So if someone realizes that they've gone down a path that's just a mess, what do they do right now? And you can promote yourself if you want to.
Speaker 2:If you're a small business and so I'm thinking below 10 million ARR or 10 million in revenue generally it doesn't have to be recurring revenue you're probably a prime candidate for some version of outsourcing some of the cleanup. Yeah, you probably. The level, the number of skill sets you need to do the initial cleanup is much bigger than what you need to maintain it once it's cleaned up.
Speaker 1:Got it so. Big task upfront. Smaller task is the long tail.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:So if you go hire some baller, that's just the best ever. They're not gonna have anything to do six months from now.
Speaker 2:No, you run the risk of them being bored and that's a thing people every once in a while have somebody do the math for me on a call and say you know, you guys, you charge us a couple hundred bucks an hour. You know, a $200,000 head of ops only really cost me a hundred an hour. And you know, even if you factor in go into the kombucha tap and play in ping pong and stuff this baller is like 170 an hour. You know, worst case.
Speaker 1:Unless they're really good at gambling, that can cost you a lot more. Oh man, I lost a thousand dollar game at ping pong one time. Oh geez, I was playing $5 a game and we doubled, or nothing up to I guess it's like 1024 or 1068. And then I won the next one. Yeah, Because we just kept the train going. Oh man yeah but anyways ping pong can be very expensive. Sorry, keep going.
Speaker 2:And it's like, yeah, great, and for the first four months it's gonna be an amazing investment. And then, a year from now, you're gonna be wondering what the hell you do with this single resource. Who is gonna have to hire other people to help them do other things, because no one person can do it all, and you're also gonna be using 15 hours a week of their time because you're just not big enough to need a qualified in-house team.
Speaker 1:Right.
Speaker 2:And so I like outsourcing. We're not the only game in town. There are individual consultants who are amazing. There are also a lot of individual consultants and agencies who are scary. It's hard to tell from the outside.
Speaker 1:How do you reference check? What do you suggest people do?
Speaker 2:This is a really tough one, I think, funny enough. One thing Iceberg now does is for our clients. We help them hire our replacement because they don't know how, they don't know what to do. So I wrote an e-book about this and I'm happy to send it to you if people wanna write into your email address.
Speaker 1:That's free stuff at coachcrmcom.
Speaker 2:I wrote an e-book recently about how to make your first stops hire and it actually goes into. It starts with strategy and then descends into the tactical of like what do you ask this person? And so it even has an example, a practical exercise, and what a good answer looks like and what a bad answer looks like. And so it takes them through like a specific scenario, and this isn't enough to make the perfect hire, but it's a really good. It's a big step in the right direction. Being able to do a practical exercise. Even if you're not an expert. It'll give you those tools.
Speaker 1:Got it how to hire your first, stops first and free stuff at coachcrmcom. All right, I wanna transition to something else. So I had known you as an ops guy and then I saw that you got hired as VP of sales at Docksend Not the normal career path that we see out there.
Speaker 1:So were you looking for the role? Did it fall in your lap? Cause I know Russ too and I talked to him about the prior guy that he hired and then I saw you show up. How do you end up going from ops to sales leadership and let's dig into it and see if it's something that you could position as the pros and the cons of that transition for other folks that might be thinking about it.
Speaker 2:I think most people now know me as an ops guy, with the exception and, frankly, at iceberg I was both Well, there's some guys in North Carolina that know you as the cop, Mostly as the ops guy.
Speaker 1:Yeah, yeah exactly so.
Speaker 2:At PandaDoc I still ran sales teams. I was a sales leader and ran ops. When I went to smart recruiters, this guy named Brett Queener from Salesforce called me and basically poached me from PandaDoc and pulled me over to smart recruiters and he said hey, you seem to get ops. I want you to run that on top of sales development. And so I ended up straddling and somewhere along the line it occurred to me that these are complimentary skill sets in a lot of ways. My experience in ops helps me be a better sales person. I tell all of my sales reps now a good discovery call ends with you being able to walk to a whiteboard and draw me what's going on in their company.
Speaker 1:That's so great. Please, if you're listening to have your team do that, the whiteboard is one of the best tools, and if they can do it there, that means that they're an inch or two away from being able to do it collaboratively with a prospect in the room, in the conference room, and that's your win rate goes way up if you can do that.
Speaker 2:Yeah, no, it's so true. And having the best sales guy who works for me right now ran operations for a small public company in Boston for a decade and wanted to get into sales and his company wouldn't move him into it. And I hired him and he is smoking everyone. Wow, yeah, I hit like 220% of his quota last quarter. The guy's an animal and it's because you can feel there is something about talking to someone who comes across as an expert. That's just different than talking to your average sales guy or gal, Somebody who asks questions that demonstrate a deep knowledge of whatever you're dealing with, and he's one of those people. So this complimentary skill set has been helpful and over the years I've decided I think tomorrow's CRO is today's director of ops and I'm rare in that I've truly straddled both of these worlds. But I don't think I'm the only one like me and I think there are a lot of people who will be tomorrow's CROs who have these two skill sets.
Speaker 1:So people that go from SDR to AE, to director, to VP what are they missing out on?
Speaker 2:These are the people who hire us at Iceburg all the time, and what they're missing out on is an understanding of how the sausage is made when they look at a dashboard. They're missing out on the ability to spot upstream issues that will result in data problems or performance problems. They just this is gonna sound arrogant and I don't mean it the way I'm gonna say it but sometimes I sit down with a really sharp, really talented VP of sales and sometimes I feel like I see the matrix and they are just completely lost when we get into like how tools work together and the ability to combine what I want a reps day to look like and how to actually build the infrastructure in which they work. If you can do both of those and you are on another level than the guy or gal who is really really good at selling but has no idea how to build the infrastructure in which you sell.
Speaker 1:You're just missing the details. In that case, yeah, 100%. And so if you understand the details, you can go bottoms up. Yeah, that's yeah if you, because if you don't understand the details, it's hard to make a tweak without breaking things, because you can only tweak at the detail level.
Speaker 2:Yeah, and keep in mind my point of view is almost always small business. I think you can get away with running an org from a spreadsheet or a dashboard when you're at a giant company where 100 million.
Speaker 1:Yeah, all of this is 500 million.
Speaker 2:Even down to like 50 million. I think there are orgs where you can go from VP of Sales at Oracle or RVP at Oracle to we have a. We call it the Adrian it's this profile at Iceberg that we use to describe some of the sales leaders who hire us and the Adrian is the middle-aged, really smart Oracle, cisco, whatever RVP, vp Sales who, like, comes down to startup land to teach these kids how to business and then is completely out of her depth when you know once she gets in the hot seat and has to build the truck she's been driving for two decades at a big company Right, and so I think you're probably totally fine at a really big business. But in the small business, cro, the small business, like revenue leader, is gonna be somebody who has to have the ability to build and manage that org.
Speaker 1:So the actionable takeaway for folks is that if they don't understand what's happening behind the scenes inside the tools, or even how the databases are working together, how the API is hooked up to get you what you need, and then also maybe understand what else exists this is one of the fun things with building Coach Sierra and people ask me questions. They say, well, can I see this and see that and see the other? I'm in all the meetings with the engineer so I know how the database works and I said, well, it's in the database. Of course we can show it to you. And it's fascinating when I see some of these SaaS products that don't have good analytics screens. It's because they chose not to yeah. It's all there. They just chose not to yeah, which is an interesting decision. That's so true.
Speaker 1:Just like when they choose to not have a good admin. Yeah, oh yeah, you can't do that. Well, why? Because you chose not to, and that's a trick. And so if you know that and you're inside of one of these tools, well, the first question is I can't get at it through the user interface. Can I get at it through the API? And if the answer is no, well I know I can ask my CSM for data dump and they might be annoyed by that, but that's not my problem. Yeah, so we can do all of these things. Ok, so then you're at Docs and VP of Sales, you guys get acquired. Yes, tell us about that story.
Speaker 2:It was interesting. I'm going to actually I'm not going to be careful here, I'll be honest, because I think it ends in a good place but it was a hard adjustment for me, going from big fish in a little pond, even though VP of Sales is a vanity title in a small business. I was doing some VP things, doing some director things, doing a lot of manager things, but we got pulled into Dropbox and I think it was a hard transition to being just part of a really big sales org that was run completely differently than we had run, and when you're the one that's acquired, like they bought your stuff, like they can, you have to start working the way they work. All of Dropbox is not going to bend to our system, and so I had a long time when I was struggling to just get on board with how bigger companies work.
Speaker 2:The operational cadence, the things that it Docsend I could do via one email in the morning and it's done that afternoon was now a month-long process of getting stakeholder buy-in from all sorts of different places. So I did not like that. I think it was a really good thing because I mean, it's almost always the case that things that you hate doing are things you need to learn, especially in a business sense. So it armed me over the first year, year and a half, with a whole new skill set. The last year has felt pretty smooth.
Speaker 1:Now you're a big company guy.
Speaker 2:I feel somewhat like a big company guy Where's your suit.
Speaker 1:You're wearing shorts today. I'm wearing shorts today too. It's because it's 105 degrees outside, oh my gosh. It was funny two days ago, though. I was sitting upstairs and one of the guys on the investment team grabs me. He says hey, are you free at 3.30? I got a couple guys that want to meet with you. I said who he told me I go. Oh, more flip flops. He said that's OK. I said no, it's not. So I ran home. I've got this rule If I haven't met you twice in person, I'm not going to wear flip flops to a meeting with you.
Speaker 2:That's a good rule.
Speaker 1:I met Taft before several times, so I was like I'm wearing shorts and flip flops today because it's 105 degrees outside, All right, so you're in this big company. Now. Going back to the acquisition, I think these are some good juicy details. You guys published the acquisition price too. It wasn't a big secret. Yeah, 165. 165 million. And you raised how much.
Speaker 2:Maybe 12 million.
Speaker 1:Raised 12 million, sold for 165 million. That's a good outcome. That's a good outcome. That's a good outcome. So tell us about the minute that you found out that you're going to be acquired. Where were you? Is that the scene?
Speaker 2:So I was walking. It feels like I'm always walking, but I was out walking my kid at the time, basically newborn and dog and Russ called me and I knew there was a potential acquisition. There was another suitor and they were competing.
Speaker 2:That's always a good thing, yeah it was great, and the other one dropped out, and so Russ called me and he said hey, we're signing, we're doing the LOI today, and it took me a little time for that to really sink in and realize, oh, I'm for the first time in my life getting a really big check. That's interesting and there were. I also am not like a. That was interesting, lights went out.
Speaker 1:Lights just went out in the podcast room. It's OK, we're still live.
Speaker 2:Yeah, so that was.
Speaker 1:He said big check, somebody's breaking down the door to come take his big check from him. I was like no, that was a while ago guys.
Speaker 2:And then pretty soon after that though it was a reality sort of set in pretty quickly that this is going to be A it's not a sure thing yet. And B it's going to be a real bitch getting from signing the LOI to we're actually part of Dropbox. We went through leveling exercises and started meeting people from Dropbox and I don't think Dropbox is unique in this way. But the big companies are dysfunctional in different ways than small companies. So learning the big company siloed dysfunctions that were different than our small company, constantly pivoting, making dumb decisions dysfunctions were different, but that scared me a little. And a couple months later we were officially part of Dropbox and Dropbox treated us really, really well. So they agreed not to let anybody go, even though I'm sure there were people they didn't actually need. They preserved all of our pay and I was getting SaaS VP sales pay, even though my new role was definitely not a VP and I was paid too much. They didn't cut my pay. They did a lot of things to just help us feel like part of the team really quickly. And then you have to sort of deal with silos. At bigger at least a Dropbox, silos are more of a thing than they had ever been before. There were my counterparts in marketing. I didn't meet for months, even though I sat next to the VP of marketing for two and a half years. Ogs, there were things like that that were really different. But ultimately I figured out I like it there. I thought I was going to hate it.
Speaker 2:My first six months I talked to my wife constantly about like, maybe I'll quit, maybe I'll quit. I got half the money, maybe I'll quit. A couple of people did quit pretty quickly and went back to building roles at smaller companies. I'm really glad I stuck it out. I made a promise. I talked to my boss. I always have open conversations about what's going on. I filed a with our conflicts department. I filed a report saying, hey, I'm doing this other thing called Iceberg and they gave me the thumbs up on it and told my boss. I was like, hey, I might quit, but I'll let you know in June and until then I will not go anywhere. And he was like OK, thanks. And June came and went and I decided OK, I guess I'll stay, I'll commit to another six months. And now I'm sort of past that. It's like OK, I feel pretty good here.
Speaker 1:There's a lot of people scared to have that conversation. How do you get past that?
Speaker 2:You got to have some level of trust in your boss. I have a boss who was my colleague and she's actually like a little less experienced than me but has turned out to be a pretty spectacular leader, and I trust her. I know that when we have conversations about what's going on with work, that if I asked her to keep it between us, she will, and so I just don't want to surprise her. Also, when you have a great boss, you want them to like you. You don't want to risk that relationship, and so the best way to risk it is to just hold things back and surprise her. When I want to make a change, which I don't, but anytime anything comes up or I'm thinking about it, I talk to her, and we've had a really good relationship based on trust because of that, I love it.
Speaker 1:I love it. And then, in terms of the iceberg, along with the core job, dropbox. Now how do you manage that? A lot of people talk about side hustles. I think that some of it is well-intentioned. Some of it's very misguided, because they saw some guy selling a course about side hustles on the internet and most people can't make any money at their side hustle. A lot of folks I know that wanted to do side hustles, to start a side hustle. They'd make more money doing Uber and they would have more fulfillment and enjoyment if they did something else that wasn't a for-profit side hustle. So what's your advice to people that are considering it?
Speaker 2:Don't let it turn into a business. I think I'm glad I have iceberg now, but I think for a long time I felt like it was a huge mistake hiring my first employee. Instead of just letting it be me and having it be easy to wind down when I got tired of it. I hit serious burnout during and for a year after the acquisition. I was really struggling because I work pretty steadily 9 to 5 for Dropbox and then do iceberg stuff outside of that, and so it was really kicking my ass and that's part of the reason I wanted to sell a while ago. And when Brad came along, I've shifted to almost an advisor in my own company. I am not spending time day to day on iceberg outside of giving Brad whatever guidance he needs and but yeah, be ready to really really work if you want it to be a real thing.
Speaker 2:I'm at a place now where we invest pretty much all the money back in the business because it's growing at a pretty good clip and it's bootstrapped. It started with $1,500 out of pocket to have a designer help me build a website, and that was it. That's awesome, and we're now doing a couple million and we're still small, but it pays me but I don't keep that money. All of the money it pays me now goes toward volunteer work. It pays for flying sick people to get care. So it is a significant amount of money at this point but I don't know if I were doing it for the money. I don't know if the juice would be worth the squeeze. It's really hard.
Speaker 1:Wow, that's fascinating. Yeah, it must feel good.
Speaker 2:It does. I really like it. It's paid for now probably 100 flights for people who can't get to the treatment they need, almost always like cancer treatment or serious surgeries.
Speaker 1:That's incredible. So people that live in rural places and you're bringing them to the best medical care.
Speaker 2:Yeah, yeah, that's right, the first woman I ever flew. She was telling me that she has to go twice a month to get chemo at MD Anderson and she said the last couple times she had to buy a bus ticket like 16 hours home, oh jeez, after getting serious, rigorous chemo treatment. And so I spent months flying her back and forth whenever I was able to with my schedule and, yeah, I'm proud to be using the money for that instead of buying more shit that I don't need.
Speaker 1:If anybody wants to contribute to this cause, is that something they can pitch in on?
Speaker 2:Yeah, funny enough, I need to go finish officially setting it up, but I started charity and actually need to get at a bank account and stuff. But it's called Love Flying and my last name's Love, so that's the name. But yeah, I'll send some info and figure out a way to, if somebody wants to help out, have a place to put some cash that can go toward these flights because they're unfortunately they're expensive, but it's the best way for these people to get there in some situations.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I haven't heard about that before and I never would have even imagined that was an issue, but it sounds like it really is.
Speaker 2:And also, if you don't want to give the money to me which is not particularly important to me go look up Angel Flight. That's the organization that does all the coordination, so the pilots pay for everything themselves. But this organization is a bunch of volunteers who do the coordinating, which is also like its own difficult thing to do, and so Angel Flight matches volunteer pilots with people who need rides to treatment, and there are, every single day, multiple flights going.
Speaker 1:That's awesome, All right. Well, we've got to get out of here Anything else before we hop.
Speaker 2:Not a thing, man, I think. If it's all right, I'll just end on. If you're looking for help with ops, I hope you'll give us a call, give us a look. If you're a founder, vp of Sales, early mid-stage startup, we're probably a good solution if you're not ready to hire an in-house qualified team, so remember iceberg and otherwise, no, I got nothing.
Speaker 1:All right, everybody that was Taft Love. Thank you so much for joining me today. Yeah, thank you. I'm Corey Bray, host of the Sales Management Podcast, founder of CoachCRM. If you want to check out the free version of CoachCRM, head over to coachcrmcom. We've also got some really great product releases coming out in the paid version. If you're concerned about your team hitting their revenue goals this quarter, if you're worried about your manager stepping up their coaching game, we had that one offer free stuff at coachCRMcom for our coaching course Got a lot more we can talk to you about. And join us next time on the Sales Management Podcast. Thanks, so take care.