I'm asked all the time about how to break into tech sales and tech sales management. In this episode, we talk with Brennen about his career that has multiple stops outside and then inside tech sales and leadership.
I'm asked all the time about how to break into tech sales and tech sales management. In this episode, we talk with Brennen about his career that has multiple stops outside and then inside tech sales and leadership.
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 Completely different topic today. This one's going to be really interesting. I've got Brennan grown with me here and we're going to talk about his career path as he transitioned from selling insurance into insurance tech, where he's now leading a team of sales and account managers. He's also got a couple other interesting experiences from his work at Enterprise Rental car, which we've all seen those ads as we graduated from college. He's one of the ones that took the job, so I want to learn a little bit more about that. And he started his own business in between. Lots of things to pull on here. Specifically, I'm going to dig into this idea of now he's in tech. So we've got this culture where sometimes people say, well, if they don't have tech experience, they're not qualified. Well, what does that actually mean? He went from selling insurance to selling tech, so we're going to find out today. Brennan, welcome.
Speaker 2:Yeah, Corey, thanks for having me excited to be here. Well, let's start with that.
Speaker 1:That's the big thing, because I always hear teams talk about this like, oh, I like this person, but they don't have tech experience.
Speaker 2:What does that even?
Speaker 1:mean.
Speaker 2:And frankly it's a great question and for me, I think this boils down to when you think about tech or really let's focus on SaaS what we're really selling is an intangible product. You don't pick anything up after the sale. You're not buying a product necessarily. You're buying a platform. Oftentimes you're going to have subscription fees or some kind of level of business you've got to maintain to keep access, and for me, that's very much my past background when I say I sold insurance, really selling PDFs and a promise. Here's some paperwork and if something goes wrong we're going to pay for it later. So for me it was pretty easy. Now in insure tech, we're just a platform to distribute insurance, so it wasn't too different. But quite frankly, when I came in and started working for this company, I found that the focus on bringing in tech people and people with tech sales experience was actually the wrong play.
Speaker 1:Oh, this is going to be good. All right, tell us why.
Speaker 2:Yeah, so this will be fun. And specifically with insure, tech insurance is an extremely regulated industry. You have to maintain licenses, you have to pass state exams, you have to be very particular, not just about what you say but the promises that you make people with all the regulation, because if you misstate something or say something that isn't backed up on paper, you're going to get sued. Don't worry, there's insurance for that too. It's called errors and omissions. So you know my team carries insurance if we mess up, but you never want to use it.
Speaker 2:So back to the question at hand. You know I came into this company and a lot of the people that were within the departments I was managing had strong tech backgrounds and now have a lot of insurance and we found some struggles there. You know when you're dealing with I would say you know our independent insurance agent customers, our regional or market specific experts and what they do, and when you stick, like a in my world, like a non-technical insurance person on the phone with somebody who's an expert in insurance, there's going to be a disconnect here. You might not speak the same language. There's a lot of industry specific terminology and verbiage that you have to use just to like talk the talk and walk the lock and see it. Take people from the tech background and you put them in the insurance world and there's going to be some conflict.
Speaker 1:Yeah, so it sounds like it's a loss of credibility.
Speaker 2:Absolutely, and you know you hit the nail on the head. You have to be credible, you have to at least sound like you know what you're talking about and in insurance, like anything else right, it's very much a kind of a fake it till. You make an industry. You know, if you come into this with some integrity, you look things up, you make sure that if you don't know the answer, you verify it. You're going to do just fine. But oftentimes I found that the people with great tech sales backgrounds that didn't want to learn and adopt insurance oftentimes found themselves underwater very quickly and really struggling with getting credibility and buy in from their clients Got it.
Speaker 1:So, for the folks that came from the insurance background, what are some of the things that they had to learn that were specific to tech? Was it around demos and subscriptions and the lingo and things like that, and what depth did they need to go into be proficient with their prospect?
Speaker 2:conversations? Yeah, it's a great question. So thankfully we haven't had to lean too much into tech training. Now there's definitely some work that we have to do with. You know talking about things like API integrations and there's this big concept in insurance right now with embedded insurance, where a lot of our agents instead of you know running actual quotes want some kind of API integration with our company where we can actually embed our tech into their agency's website so that customers can just come in and quote themselves.
Speaker 2:So there are some technical components to what we're doing, but by and large, the big hurdle for them to overcome is how do I work internally with, like, sales engineers, our engineering teams? How do I communicate with these people properly to help them understand what problem my customer is facing and how to go handle that then with the customer without necessarily putting some of our engineers in a customer-facing role? Got it, man? I love my engineers. They're awesome. Some of them are really comfortable coming in and talking to a client. Some of them are like, can I give you some notes and you have the con, but I really don't like talking to people. Yeah, so I have to be ready for both.
Speaker 1:Yeah, exactly, and they might go a little too deep or a little too wide and the customer only needs a very specific dose. I think I figured out something here A lot of times, when the culture is we want someone with tech sales experience, they're comparing that to somebody that would be a subject matter expert. But what I'm hearing here is that you're bringing in folks that are subject matter experts and really good at sales, and so it's the combination of those two that's really unlocking the ability to hit the ground running and go, because without that subject matter expertise you don't have the credibility with prospects. But if you brought somebody in that only had the subject matter expertise so let's say that they were on the administration side or something like that inside the insurance industry then they'd have to develop their sales skills too. That might be a bit too much.
Speaker 2:Nail on the head and you're really reading into this. Well, I've done a lot of trying to be a great podcast toast Brandon, I appreciate you giving me the opportunity to go out there.
Speaker 1:If you have any feedback on how to make this podcast better, I'll send you a free coaching course. Coaching salespeople should be. Note free stuff at coach serum dot com. Free stuff at coach serum dot com. Any note you have on the podcast. Thanks for your feedback.
Speaker 2:Nice. Yeah, well, you know, crushing, crushing tea in the up here. I've done a lot of hiring in the past 18 months and I think the initial misses I had or learnings that I've had, we're just having the insurance background lesson and not and in insurance there's really two sides of the really three sides of the house, right, there's the service side, there's the underwriting side and then there's the sales side. And initially I tried pulling from both the underwriting and sales side and, quite frankly, I found that pulling folks from that underwriting side.
Speaker 2:And you'll see that in many industries not just insurance, like banking loans or things that initially come to mind where you get so technical on the qualifications side, you get into the weeds and you end up not being able to close deals because you're so concerned about the details and that great sales person can zero in on enough qualification that they know something fits and then get right back into trying to close the deal. And what do we need to do to help you win this business? Whether it's sweeten the deal with some commission points, maybe look around for some. We'd call them premium credits, but like pricing credits, to make sure that you know, once we've qualified the risk well enough. We just get this thing locked in and we can move on to the next one.
Speaker 1:Got it, yeah. So they're not trying to make the perfect deal. They're trying to make a deal that's good enough and get it done Absolutely. So the other issue that you have with somebody that's from an insurance background any type of business where somebody has a book of business of insurance, financial advisor or something like that the better you are, the more customers you have. The more time you spend on managing customers, the less time you spend on new business hunting. Have you observed that as a challenge as you try to bring people in that have some experience and success?
Speaker 2:Yes and no and that I think really you know, when I talk about the different teams I manage, we've actually made a really tactical choice to split those two sides of the house. So right now I'm our head of account management, but I really lead both the territory account management side and then our new business sales department too. So we have our business development guys that are driving leads in through the door. My sales team is really zeroed in and focused on bringing these customers in, engaging them in our portal and our technology and getting them through their first policy sold. That's all these these folks do every day, day in and day out. As soon as that first policy gets sold, we hand it off geographically over to my account management team and they're my long term relationship managers. So these folks are more geared towards relationship management, helping with both new business and renewals and really looking holistically at that. That whole business pipeline, yep.
Speaker 2:And so I have my. I have my BD hunters right. They're awesome. They're like out in the field, they travel all the time. It's like their jam. We have our sales reps that just love like smile and dial demos. Get you in our portal, touch the tech, try it out. What quotes you have on your desk, that this that we can go for in your state and then once we have a little bit of momentum and the muscle memory down with the agent, they get handed off to our relationship folks who have a little more experience. In that. I almost equate it to like an inside sales role or, once the customer is established, it's like cross sell additional products, expanding revenue and new opportunities.
Speaker 1:Man, you've got some good teamwork going on over there. How do you keep everybody in their lane and keep them from drifting into other people's lanes?
Speaker 2:It's a great question and, frankly, it's not too much of a battle anymore. I think the big learning for me and I think I've brought him up, but I'd be remiss if I didn't bring him up again. Actually, I keep this book on my desk every day. It's Sales Management Simplified from Mike Weinberg. He's a killer guy. Yeah, he's a friend of mine. He's an old insurance client. Actually. He's here in St Louis, mo, so I had the benefit of meeting him through a cold call.
Speaker 2:And you have to make the role fit for the right person. So one of my mantras about sales management and it makes some of my people uncomfortable sometimes is I'm really flexible Once I have the right person. I know that this person's a good fit for my sales culture, they're a good fit for my company and that I know that I can trust them. I'm comfortable moving people's roles around a little bit, based on what they're interested in doing and learning about and playing to their specific skill set. So over time, if I see that one of my sales reps continues to come to me and say, hey, I worked with this client on the front end and I'm really disappointed I don't get to work with them anymore, if that's a recurring theme. Like, shoot, you probably shouldn't be a sales rep, you should be an account manager. Like, maybe we work on making that transition over. I'm always happy to backfill or swap a role around. If somebody's moving, there's probably a state territory that's a better fit for you. So your boots on the ground in your hometown. I think flexibility is key. And that really gets back to.
Speaker 2:I vividly remember the first month I was at Enterprise. Renna Carr, my manager that branch, took me out to lunch and took some time to get to know me and she told me that there's no one size fits all approach to management and you have to meet people where they are. And I'll never forget that she's a great person, cass, and that really stuck with me. And so I always try to take a little bit of time to get to know folks. I try to do quarterly check-ins. I'm just like how's the role? Are you happy? Is there anything you'd rather be doing? Because if people are happy in their role, they're engaged in the process and then their comp plan is tied to the company's success. We're always gonna find a way to do it. Love that? Yeah, they have to want to do the job that they're in.
Speaker 1:I see that managers come to me we're doing calls with our coach CRM customers and they'll say this person won't do that or they don't wanna do this. The common ones are prospectors don't wanna make cold calls, or customer success managers don't wanna drive upsells, or account executives don't wanna do that, account executives don't wanna forecast. Okay, well, how big of a deal is it? Is it something that's a complete deal breaker and they just don't wanna be in the job, which might be the cold call or the upsell or is it something where they just need to do it, which is the forecasting thing, because that's fairly mechanical and it's not gonna ruin your life if that's what you do?
Speaker 2:Right, that's like updating your pipeline.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:Sometimes you just have to go do it.
Speaker 1:Yeah, exactly, you have to brush your teeth every day. I don't know if anybody who loves brushing their teeth, but you kind of have to do it, absolutely Should. Yeah, I wanna dig in one thing. I kind of touched on it a second ago.
Speaker 1:When you've got account managers, a risk is that they see themselves as relationship managers, and whenever I've got a customer that calls them relationship managers, I nudge them a little bit. I say so is it just the relationship or are there some other bigger things that we wanna do? And maybe we rebrand this a little bit? Because if you're just managing a relationship, that's very steady state to me and what it does is it deprioritizes things like additional discovery over time, looking for opportunities, farming success stories when maybe they're not the happiest customer in the world. They might've just filed a support ticket two weeks ago, but you need a customer success story for the sales team in this category. Can we get something from them? Can we give them something else, better service, whatever it is? That's the harder part when you think of yourself as just a relationship manager, but you've gotta drive to get other things that might be a little more uncomfortable for you. How do you manage that?
Speaker 2:Yeah, that's a great question. So I've always looked at relationship management as another lever or leverage point. Right, you know we've all been through that basic sales training where they talk about rapport building and you know account management and relationship management it's just long-term rapport building so that you can leverage that to really get what you need out of the client. And for our account managers, building that relationship is so important because there are times, like you said, when things go wrong and we need to be able to pull that lever and say, hey, I know that this interaction with customer service didn't go well, or I know that you thought that that policy was totally fine to bind. A couple of weeks later our underwriters came in and pulled the rug out from under you and said, nope, we gotta cancel it. And having that strong foundational relationship allows us to come in and solve problems that we wouldn't be able to without the relationship. And then ultimately sometimes we just have to say no, and without that relationship there you could actually kill a really productive account.
Speaker 1:Yeah, if you say no to a stranger, if the only interaction someone's had with you in the last six months is a no, how's that feel Pretty bad yeah, what do you do for me?
Speaker 2:Yeah, so I've actually found and really tried to empower our people to get somewhat involved in the service process. Right, we don't want to be heavily involved we have teams for that but we really try to be there. For escalations right, we don't want to be your first point of contact for servicing interactions, but hey, if something's not going right, it's not sitting with ya. That's when we want to get tagged in so we can go solve internally escalate things, make them a priority and make sure that this ugly problem goes away one way or another so that our partners can go back to what they do best, which is selling. Yeah, that's great.
Speaker 1:So, yeah, I think what you're doing is building business acumen across the team.
Speaker 2:Absolutely, and that, quite frankly, has been a battle. We've gone through two acquisitions in the past two years.
Speaker 1:Oh, this is gonna be a fun topic to dig into Stand by folks when CB goes into acquisition mode. We're gonna get into some good stuff. Love it.
Speaker 2:So, yeah, I mean, between some acquisitions, some changes we had to make internally with how we distribute our products, with some underwriting changes we've made which, if you're in insurance at all, for your listeners out here, it's tried to say that there's a hard market out here, which just means that weather's hitting us so hard, the prices go up, the markets change. So we had to dramatically change our distribution model last year and, quite frankly, what that means is we pissed off a bunch of really reliable clients. Okay. So with that, a lot of the people that I had that I kind of inherited when I came over, they left when things get hard, when they were easy and good, and then they get difficult.
Speaker 2:Sometimes your top performers and top producers say I'm just gonna go where the grass is greener, oh yeah, and there's no harm, no foul, that's how the market works. But I took a lot of, I'd say, maybe more junior people and placed them in a more senior role and have really worked through my managers just to make sure that we get them on track. And I think with that, the big focus was we had to balance insurance, product knowledge, technical capability and not lose sight of constantly working on that, that sales mentorship side and in a remote company that can be tough, right, like I remember in B2B or even at that time at Enterprise, like there's the ride-along or the manager comes out and runs the sales call with you. That can be a little tougher to do in a remote environment.
Speaker 1:Yeah, super tough, and so you get less of a touch. So there's, I think, the way I describe it physical analysis. It just doesn't rub off on you. As much you can't rub off on someone over a video conference.
Speaker 2:Or at least it's harder to do. Yeah, and you know my first job as an insurance producer. So I was working for a state farm agent out in Colorado I won't use his name because this is like a glowing story but he had some kind of phone software where basically anytime I was on a call with no announcement, he could just be talking in the other earphone on my headset and he'd be like no, say this, no, say this. And we never want to do that with our reps.
Speaker 1:He's like your news producer. That's what my favorite TV show is. The newsroom is, I think, the news producer in there. Yeah, the guy rips his earphones out. I'm just gonna say whatever I want, get out of my ear. Producer.
Speaker 2:Yeah, seriously, you just can't do that.
Speaker 1:on a future, if it's your headphone on a conference call.
Speaker 2:Right, and so you know, I'm like trying to figure out what the heck I'm doing as a kid new in insurance, and I've got this guy talking to one ear and a customer asking me questions and frankly, I didn't know any of them were talking about yeah, and it was just chaos, and so we never want to create an environment like that.
Speaker 1:Well, so the challenge there is that there's two things there's training and there's coaching. Training is equipping people with the skills necessary to do the job. Coaching is helping people apply those skills to do the job better. In this case, what I see the most companies doing nowadays is not zapping into somebody's ears. A making sure they're trained up and so they come into fewer and fewer situations where they don't know what to do. And, b if they're struggling, get comfortable, being uncomfortable, know how to say I don't know. Be good at kicking the can down the road.
Speaker 1:When somebody asks you a tough question, especially if you're selling a technical product, or even if your product's not that technical, they just ask some ridiculous questions. If the salespeople on your teams can't dodge a question, then that's a skill that should be developed, and it's much more important than knowing the thousand different technical specifications that they could answer, because if they're really good at positioning an answer, we could call it a dodge, but it's something that sounds good, sounds professional, and it lets them get back to the prospect later on. That's all you need and then you're good. You don't have to know everything. Nobody out there needs to know everything. It's not possible, except for Wikipedia. Wikipedia does everything. Everyone else no. That's what I've said. I like that a lot.
Speaker 1:I wanted to go okay, so we're gonna go to Merge's Nacquisitions here in a second. The thing I wanted to look at right before that I forget. So we're gonna go to Merge's Nacquisitions. See, this is why I don't have a producer in my year. If I had a producer in my year, they'd be telling me all right, so you acquire two companies. Who comes with the companies? Do the salespeople come, or is it more just the product team?
Speaker 2:So we were actually acquired. So you're gobbled up, had a big fish. Yeah, so we got acquired by a big unicorn startup. We rented them for 14 months and then got acquired by actually the polar opposite, a really established like a legacy insurance carrier. So it was interesting to go from one side. I'm purposely not using names here.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I know I should, but don't worry about it.
Speaker 2:We got acquired by one. It's like unicorn rocket ship on their way up, didn't really have a great understanding of who we were, what our markets were, how our industry operated, and probably six months and you could feel the friction right.
Speaker 1:It's just not as you were feeling the friction. What did your team that you were managing look like?
Speaker 2:Very similar. Well it was. The team was arguably too big. I think we had too many people to manage the amount of clients. We had Got it, so do you have like?
Speaker 1:five people, 10 people? I'm trying to understand what your magazine like. Five people?
Speaker 2:10 people 20 people. Yeah, at that time I think I had 26.
Speaker 1:You had okay so you had 26 people across sales and account management. Correct, you get gobbled up by this unicorn. So let's step through this briefly, because I think this is interesting. When did you find out that you're going to get acquired? And then how did you communicate that to your team? Or did it come from someone else?
Speaker 2:No, yeah, no, that's a great question. These are the juicy details. Yeah, the juicy parts, right? So I guess we found out about the acquisition. I found out like right around Thanksgiving last year and I had to sit on it. I wasn't allowed to say anything because we weren't sure the deal was gonna close and we ended up telling the whole company. I guess our leadership team announced it like the day the deal closed. Okay, so it was a little cloak and dagger, but ultimately it was a great time to hold down the reset button, right, like I had found myself battling with. I had too many managers, corey, you know, I think my manager to rep ratio, regardless of team, was like four to one, ooh, which doesn't make a lot of sense, right? You know, if you're a manager and you can really only manage three or four people, like hot take, you probably shouldn't be a sales manager. I agree with that.
Speaker 1:So the only thing that should happen is if you're about to hire a ton of people, that's fair.
Speaker 2:Other than that, yeah, but on the opposite end, right, I did. I also had so many reps that you know they're managing like maybe 75 to 100 clients each and, depending on the industry, that could be the right fit. But for us with insurance, right Like, once we get these people engaged with our platform, they're users longterm. And so you imagine, right Like we're looking at this quarter over quarter, you represent, say, 75 independent insurance agents and there's 63 days in the quarter. What the hell are you doing every day, man? I guess you're just calling the same people over and over.
Speaker 1:You're not flying out and spending a whole day with every single person. Yeah, Because it's inside so right. You're not, these are not your field folks. Okay, so they don't have enough to do. Okay, so the managers don't have enough to do, the reps don't have enough to do, and you just got bought up by somebody who's probably got a CFO, who's probably looking at some numbers and math.
Speaker 2:Yeah, same what the heck's going on? Yeah, so it was a good time for us to reset. We had some folks that probably just had been here too long. They were a little probably a little burned out. You know when you're in the startup world, because my company's only six years old, right, and so in these startup right, the years are like dog years. They kind of you get run ragged a little bit and you still didn't feel your hair too long.
Speaker 2:Yeah, thank goodness. I don't know how Three kids year and a half in I'm doing all right, but yeah, so it was a good time to hit reset. I wouldn't say that we had any major layoffs, but we had a lot of repurposing amongst the team. With changes, some people chose to leave, which was a blessing, and it gave us really the ability to reset. From, specifically my account management team, we went from that average of like a hundred clients per rep portfolio to about 700. And that's been a huge value add. The reps are really, I'd say, more engaged, they're more active. The job is more rewarding.
Speaker 1:They can work on bigger things Cause of the 700, there's probably a few things every day that are interesting and exciting. Not hunting to try to find something to do.
Speaker 2:Absolutely and ultimately, a salesperson's worst nightmare is like not having enough leads to touch, or customers to touch, to the point where you feel like you're pestering the same people over and over, and that's not a fun situation to begin.
Speaker 1:No, not at all. So with the acquisition, were you guys in a spot where people had equity and people made money, or was it something that was more of a wash?
Speaker 2:Yeah, that's an interesting question, Cause you know, equity it's like a lottery ticket, right Like sometimes you win, sometimes you don't, sometimes it's worth nothing.
Speaker 1:Sometimes it's worth a little bit, sometimes it's worth a lot. So I'm curious if there was a big party in celebration, you'd be like oh yeah, everybody got a big bonus now. Or if it was more like, okay, cool, we graduated to the next level, now we've got to go back and really push ourselves and get that master's degree.
Speaker 2:Sure, no, I like the way you put that. So we were sold by a startup to a traditional long-term operating legacy company. So folks that basically had been at our company for a year or more had enough vested that they could buy their equity out at strike prices. But some folks unfortunately kind of just washed out if they weren't that 25% vested. So that was an interesting thing. Quite frankly, I think our leadership team handled it really well and we were able to take some people that maybe felt like they would have gotten a raw deal and in some way she performed, make it Right, whether that was a little you don't want to call it an equity conversion because we didn't really convert anything, but we found a way to make everybody whole, so it was an exciting event for everybody.
Speaker 2:Yeah, a little increase, a little bump on your comp plan never hurts, and when you talk about like rebuilding or revigorating your culture, it was definitely the right play.
Speaker 1:And then how did you handle the integration with the new team? I'm sure they had their own way of doing things and how that fit with your work that you'd built.
Speaker 2:You know it's gone really well, but I think the best part about it was the new parent company lets us operate independently. We're very much like our own entity. They're not overbearing, they understand our business well enough that they know they should let us do our own thing. And you know, I've seen enough M&A and I know that's not always the case and I think it was the right message to send. They saw us as an asset. They came in with the acquisition and they said, hey, like you're doing some things right, Keep doing that. Like here's the little guidance and that's been incredible for our culture and just really getting us on the right track. I love it.
Speaker 1:That's fun. Yeah, it's not always smooth, but when I think, the thing that I see is the less they meddle with the business post acquisition, the better it is. At least let y'all operate, get a feel for what's going on, understand what people want to do, because it's scary for folks. You got change, people have house payments to make, car payments to make kids in school and all of those things and all of a sudden the company got bought and we've all got those friends that have gone through M&A. So how do you manage that on a personal level with folks on your team? I'm sure people came to you and had concerns.
Speaker 2:Sure, you know, I really think the big concern that folks had and by and large, my team is like it's Gen Z, so they're younger, relatively inexperienced, and a lot of the questions I got were like, hey, dude, is this a good thing or a bad thing? And I think that's, you know, when we talk about sales management, if you can build enough trust with your people that they'll come and ask a vulnerable question like that, like dude, I don't even know what M&A is like. Is this good or bad? We're in a great spot and I was genuinely excited. I legitimately thought it was the best thing that could have happened and I told them that and the candor, the transparency, I think was all healthy and good. And you know, six months later, I'm happy to say that everything I told them was true. You know the good feelings and excitement about it were very valid.
Speaker 1:And, as you were working with them, getting that messaging out, they're helping to develop some comfort. What did you do to lean on your boss and other executives in the company?
Speaker 2:Yeah, a lot. You know. I think our leadership team was really transparent about what was going on at the time, at least with, you know, the folks that were privy to the information. And I think the one thing I did I don't know if it was good or bad, but I just asked a lot of questions. You know, I felt like I had a big enough team and enough people relying on me that I wanted to ask the uncomfortable questions, even if I ruffled feathers. So, you know, I picked at some things, thankfully. No, maybe at times.
Speaker 1:I like the confidence. You gotta go in there and you gotta ask the questions. People are scared, especially people are scared to ask these questions and job interviews and events and executive leadership changes because they're like how is it gonna be perceived? But the big question is, what if you don't ask?
Speaker 2:Right, well, and how are you gonna? You know and I mentioned earlier, you know I'm married, I have three kids, but I also have, you know, a team of you know 20 or 30 people who rely on me to make the decisions, and you gotta just stick your neck out there, risk pissing somebody off and say, hey, you know, that doesn't make sense to me. Can you explain that a little more? Or hey, I think you might have dodged that question. Can we go back and talk about it a little bit?
Speaker 1:more. Nobody's gonna fire you for saying that something doesn't make sense.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:That's great. That's great. Well, brennan, this has been awesome. Anything else that you wanna let us know about the transition from insurance to tech? I think we went down the M&A rabble. I wasn't expecting that, but that was awesome, anything else or anything that you wanna plug.
Speaker 2:You know. I think the only other thing I'd wanna plug is you know, when I think back, I've been in sales for about 10 years and for anybody that's thinking about making a change, I think about how we kicked off before we started recording. Like sales is sales is sales. Whether I was walking somebody out to a rental car to try to sell them insurance, whether I was, you know, ripping cold calls selling auto insurance at State Farm or calling executives to sell big middle market insurance policies, at the end of the day, sales is a fun game. Skills are really translatable and I think there's such a huge opportunity in tech whether it's insured tech, saas, different tech sales roles people shouldn't be scared of it. There's always time to learn and develop and you know those skills are so translatable. If you wanna scale up and earn more money, tech sales is a great place to be.
Speaker 1:It's arguably the fastest way to make a lot of money. If you don't have a specialized degree, such as medicine or law, you could make a lot of money very fast and for a very long time. Yeah, there's some risk, but anything that's worth having requires some level of risk. If you wanna mitigate that risk, you're in management. You wanna be in management? Email free stuff at coachcierhamcom. Free stuff at coachcierhamcom. I'll send you a course on coaching salespeople. Brent and Gro. Thank you so much for joining us today. Thanks, corey. I'm Corey Bray, host of the Sales Management Podcast. If you wanna check out what we're doing over at Coachcierham, check out coachcierhamcom. We've got a free version on the site and we've got some really great stuff that we've been releasing lately A lot of work with Salesforcecom API, where we can tie coaching activities to performance outcomes. How do you do that? Today? You probably don't Hit us up or just subscribe to Sales Management Podcast. I won't charge anything for that. See you next time, favorite.