Brendan joins me live in the studio for a 90-min episode where we dig into Product-Led Sales. We also talk about his experience moving from a founder to a VP inside of the acquirer.
Brendan joins me live in the studio for a 90-min episode where we dig into Product-Led Sales. We also talk about his experience moving from a founder to a VP inside of the acquirer.
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 here, live in Austin, texas, in the Capital Factory podcast studio with Brendan Short. Brendan, we're going to talk about some exciting topics today. How are you?
Speaker 2:I'm good.
Speaker 1:Thanks for having me excited to jam with you Good Well the first thing that we want to talk about is product led sales, and then, towards the end, we're going to talk about your experience going from a co-founder to a VP inside of the acquired company. But this product led sales thing, it's a hot topic. What is product led sales?
Speaker 2:Yeah, so product led sales in my mind, is when you have a company that has a bottom up motion and a top down motion at the same time, bottom up motion being a product led growth motion, which is to define that it's basically a company that is going to market. The primary way they're going to market is via their product, so you can go to their website, sign up and start using their product without talking to anyone.
Speaker 1:And these are users. These are people that actually would put hands on keyboard and use the product day to day.
Speaker 2:That's right. Yeah, typically they're end users. So if you think about like Slack or Notion or Zoom, there's end users that are using the product. They may not necessarily be the buyer, so that's where the sales people come in. There still should be sales people at all these PLG companies. There's still massive sales organizations, because eventually you're going to want to go talk to the VP or the buyer and actually sell and go through procurement.
Speaker 1:So an example of bottom up would be if I went to Grammarly and spent $10 a month. So my English got better. Yep, okay, that's good.
Speaker 2:And then top down is your classic like Salesforce, where they're just calling and selling. You can't actually start using the product before talking to a salesperson.
Speaker 1:You've got to go through the process. That's right, okay, so product blood growth is when you combine the two Product blood sales.
Speaker 2:Yeah, product blood. When you combine the two, okay yeah, product blood growth plus sales equals product blood sales.
Speaker 1:Got it?
Speaker 2:Yeah, okay, so we're combining two and by the way, the way that, like I think the simplest way that I think about this is you know, 10 years ago marketing kind of had this inbound movement that HubSpot helped build. It was basically, like, you know, white paper downloads and all this stuff people going on and trying to educate themselves on what you're actually doing as a business or kind of areas that you work in, and those are good signals for a salesperson to be like ah, somebody from IBM just downloaded the white paper. Maybe I should go reach out to that person or other people at IBM. Yeah, that's the same thing with PLG, is?
Speaker 2:It's a bunch of people that sign up for Grammarly and then I see okay, this person signed up at Grammarly. Are they in my ICP? Should I go reach out to them? Should I go reach out to other people at the company or their boss, things like that? Or you can just do the fully self-serve version, which a lot of companies also do, where you're just going to self-serve into revenue, where you can swipe a credit card, but oftentimes, once you get over to over a six-figure deal, you're not going to swipe a credit card for a six-figure deal.
Speaker 1:Yeah, because if it doesn't work, are you going to go tell your boss? Yeah, I just swiped a credit card, without talking to anybody, to spend this money Exactly. That's not going to work. So what's driving more companies doing product blood sales these days?
Speaker 2:Yeah, it's a great question. So I think there's three things. So number one product has gotten cheaper to build, so it's actually technically been more possible to build in a product-led way that it wasn't five or 10 years ago, yeah. Number two I think behaviors of buyers has changed significantly, maybe due to COVID, I don't know, but buyers want to try something before they buy it and that's just a behavioral thing. So I think companies are starting to build products in that way for that purpose, yeah. And then I'd say the third reason is just unit economics. So there's a lot of data out there that shows that you can acquire customers for much cheaper if you have a PLG motion Got it.
Speaker 1:So I think, yeah go, those three things. The first, let's look at an example of each one of those. So the first example cheaper to build a product. You don't have to build your own servers, your own payment structure. There's a lot of things that engineers used to manually have to do that, frankly, guys like me can piece together now and go get somebody to write some code where code needs to be written, but not necessarily do everything from the ground up.
Speaker 2:Exactly so then that means you can go build a good onboarding flow. You can go build because you still have to build more products to build your company into a PLG product, and so I think that's the other thing is you have to think about. You know you can build faster, but you can also build a lot more with these no code tools.
Speaker 1:Yeah, yeah, so you can build a lot more, okay. And then the second thing is people want to try it before they buy it. Yeah, and that's interesting because I think that's partly cultural, totally, because if I can go try product X before I buy it and you sell product Y and you won't let me, that's weird Yep. But in a world where nobody was letting me try it, that was normal Yep. And so it's just, it's a slippery slope argument to some extent.
Speaker 2:Yeah for sure. When I go to buy a new mattress, for instance, and there's no 100 day return policy on it, I'm like, I'm a little skeptical here. Why is there not a return policy here? Because, casper, let me send anything back, exactly. And so now this became the norm. And it's becoming the norm in software, like you see it in the sales tech space, you know there's certain companies that are the exact same company and one has a PLG motion and one doesn't. Yeah, and they're acquiring a lot more customers, especially small customers, and so in three to five years those small customers are going to be having been used that same company for the last three years, and they're going to be the 100K deal.
Speaker 1:Yeah Well, this goes back to Clayton Christensen's Innovator's Delimit, where you're competing in a commoditized market, mm-hmm, and the new entrants have an advantage to gobble up and compete on business model as opposed to product.
Speaker 2:Yes, 100%. And, frankly, like I think, what is the famous phrase first time founders care about products, second time founders care about distribution? Yeah, I think that's right. I mean, I think distribution is PLG. Distribution is, it's a go-to market, for sure, but it's also distributing your product into the market via your product, via signing up and just using your product for free.
Speaker 1:And sometimes people take distribution and limit its definition to sales. Yes, and I think what I'm hearing from you is you're broadening that definition, yeah, and you're also not creating these silos where this thing over here is marketing and this thing over here is sales. It's all about the idea of distribution.
Speaker 2:Yeah, and there is also just a riff on that for a second. There's an interesting trend that I'm seeing where kind of the last five or 10 years has been the classic clashing of sales and marketing and the friction. I think in the next five to 10 years there's going to be a lot more friction between sales and product. Oh yeah.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I've done two episodes of touch on that. One was around aligning product and sales, and then I did one where this woman, adriana Romero, had moved from sales enablement to product and engineering enablement, which was a fascinating move, and she goes over there and she says look, I'm able to get these folks in a position to help the sales team way upstream.
Speaker 2:That's amazing.
Speaker 1:And I've also seen a customer that built a product that nobody actually needed yet, and I know there's lots of those out there, but these folks were a little later stage, which was an interesting situation to be in.
Speaker 2:Yeah, we're seeing a lot of that right now. I think there was a lot of money sloshing around a couple of years ago, and so people just built a lot of stuff that probably was not necessary.
Speaker 1:Step one get money. Step two write code. Yeah, that's the way some people think about it. That's not necessarily correct.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:Okay, and then, since we're in the studio and I don't want to make a bunch of noise, I'm not taking notes. What was your third point? I just pulled a cost of acquisition. I just pulled a Rick Perry. You don't know what I'm talking about. Google, rick Perry, debate three things. It's hilarious. Okay. So the cost acquisitions gone down, yeah.
Speaker 2:Where has it gone?
Speaker 1:up. We're both Tell us about. Let's explore the cost of acquisition and how that's changing, because I think that that's a complicated topic.
Speaker 2:So, yeah. So cost of acquisition like traditional digital ads has skyrocketed. Yeah, that's gone up significantly. So then by having a PLG motion, you're decreasing that cost of acquisition, got it? Because you're actually acquiring a bunch of free users who are just signing up for the product. You don't have to have sales people educating them, they're doing all of that education themselves in that self sign up motion.
Speaker 2:So again, like with the Grammarly example, you signed up for Grammarly, you paid 10 bucks a month. That's fine. Probably a salesperson never reached out to you, correct? So in six months, if you go to buy a big deal for 100 employees at your company, where you go to a new company and you're like oh, I'm at a 2000 person company now and I want to buy Grammarly because I've been using it for the past six months and it's amazing, you're going to be able to like that's the first call, right, you're not going to look for a competitor and that's going to be a really quick sale cycle. Yeah, so that cost to that new company that acquired you as a customer is super low because you had been previously using it for the past six months, right?
Speaker 1:So you got familiarity with it. I've eliminated a lot of my skepticism, exactly, and it's just an easier decision for me to make at that point. Okay, yeah, got it. So what are companies getting right with PLG?
Speaker 2:What are they getting wrong? Yeah, I think that the first thing that people say is like oh, plg replaces salespeople. That's like the most common kind of first version is like oh, this sounds like it's going to replace salespeople. Yeah, that's not true. The simple data here is like just go look at any PLG company Zoom has 2000 salespeople, slack Notion Docs and Film.
Speaker 1:Zoom has 2000 salespeople and they do product-led. Yeah, that's fascinating. Well, it's funny. I think the fun analogy here is if anybody's read Dan Lyons. If you've read Dan Lyons book, I think it was called, oh, disrupted. So he was the guy. He was in his fifties and he left Newsweek and worked at HubSpot on the content marketing team. Oh yeah, yeah, that guy.
Speaker 1:And that was one of the things that he said in his book. He said look this company. All they do is preach the gospel of inbound marketing, but they have a huge outbound sales team.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:And I think that's similar thing here too. Right, it doesn't have to be just product-led. Inbound sales works, but it works also augmented without bound sales. Product-led works, but it also works augmented with an actual sales team.
Speaker 2:That's right. It's just another arrow and a quiver of your go-to market motion. So it's not replacing salespeople, it's just adding to your go-to market motion. It's giving buyers more optionality to be able to try the product in a way that they might want to try it. And then, by the way, when I buy products, oftentimes I still actually go and hit demo request to three competitors because I don't really know anything about the category. Right, I actually want to be educated by a salesperson. Hopefully they're a good salesperson, they don't drown me in discovery as an SDR and then pass me off in that whole nonsense. But I think a good sales process is actually very helpful. And then there's other times where I actually just want to try the product immediately. I just want to sign up and start tinkering with it. Yeah, I think giving the buyer both of those paths and both those options is great.
Speaker 2:And then again, eventually you're going to want to layer on enterprise sales, and this is where it gets very difficult to orchestrate.
Speaker 2:There's two components.
Speaker 2:One you need to orchestrate the technology, so equipping sellers with who's signing up for the product in their territory, what's their role, how many people have signed up, what are they doing in the product, who's actually engaged in the product, who's declining that they should go try to save? And then the second piece is enabling them to actually sell in a product led world, which is pretty different, right? You don't want to actually just approach one person who signed up at one of your target accounts and try to go sell them Like they're an end user.
Speaker 2:You want to actually understand what drove them to sign up for Grammarly today, right? Talk to a couple of the other end users that have signed up, understand why they're doing this, package that up and then go present that information to the decision maker, who maybe has never even used Grammarly, right? So I think that that's the second piece that I see people fail on, as they try to layer on enterprise sales or top-down sales on top of a PLG motion is not actually giving them the data and operationalizing that data in the tech stack and the processes. And then number two is the enablement and training around how to actually sell in this new environment.
Speaker 1:Got it, and so you've decided to build a product in this space to help support this type of motion. Tell us a little bit about it. Sounds like what you just described is probably some of what you observed, what got you over the hump and said I'm going to go do this, yeah.
Speaker 2:So I was at Zoom before starting Groundswell, so I was helping build out basically the playbook for the BDR team. There's 150 BDRs in that organization and they did upsells, cross-sells and then also net new sales. So I kind of ran into this problem firsthand, where I was struggling to figure out how to actually enable sales reps with the right data so that they can prioritize their accounts, and so that was kind of the thing that we started with in the last 18 months or 24 months with Groundswell how do we actually just put this data in front of salespeople? Step two, then, is like how do we actually automate some of these workflows? So if you think about a small company, maybe I don't want a salesperson reaching out to the one user. At a tiny company. It's probably the deal size doesn't justify a really expensive salesperson spending a ton of time on that deal. But I still want to interact with them in a personalized way, and so how do I kick off a personalized, automated marketing email to them, an onboarding email?
Speaker 1:Something that would be more like a traditional sales or customer success email as opposed to a marketing touch. Yeah, exactly.
Speaker 2:And then the last thing I mentioned is we're starting to expand beyond just the product usage data. So if you think about people signing up for the product, using the product, how many people have signed up? All that sort of stuff? That's signal to figure out who I should prioritize in my target accounts in any given day or quarter. There's a lot of other signals out there, and so we're starting to ingest a lot of other data from other data providers job change data, technographic, pharmacographic, more of that top down sales, traditional sales signals so we can start building models on top of all the data, not just the product data so you can see something.
Speaker 1:For example, heavy user left job, went somewhere else, Exactly. So, what were people doing before with this data?
Speaker 2:Yeah, the main way that people are solving this today without something like Groundswell is and what we did at Zoom is you use a BI tool, so something like a Tableau or a Looker.
Speaker 2:And you're visualizing this data which lives in this magical place called the data warehouse which go to market people typically don't have access to or know about Something like Snowflake. That's where all this data lives. It's not all going to go into Salesforce or HubSpot. This is one of the problems with PLG is there's just too much data and metadata. It'll just break the architecture of Salesforce. Yeah, so it should be in Snowflake, but you need a way to visualize it. So that's the main way. But then you're kind of working out of this clunky BI dashboard which is not built for, you know, sdrs and AEs to work out of.
Speaker 1:Right, and if it's in the data warehouse, it might not be where you need it. It might be multiple places and then boom, your company does an acquisition tomorrow. Yeah, it's probably not going to be there for a long time. It's probably not top of list In my experience. The engineering team and the data team the sales team isn't their top internal customer, usually for things like this. That's correct. Yeah, we've got to ignore the CFO this week. The prospectors need some help organizing their usage data for the customers.
Speaker 2:That's not always top priority for engineering. Yeah, so our goal is like let's make a product that non-technical people can use, right, a tool that plugs into the data source but then, as an ops person, for instance, which is oftentimes who we're working with they can actually build dashboards, workflows, you know things that are kicking off automations, all sorts of kind of create basically a no-code tool that sits on top of this data.
Speaker 1:That's great. And then in terms of the number of PLG accounts or leads or users that one person should monitor, what's that ratio? Look like broad strokes.
Speaker 2:Yeah, that's something that we talk about a lot. I think early stage founders talk with me and they're like what is the point at which you'll need something like Groundswell, which is kind of another way of asking that question. Yeah, I think for us, what we see is, in as simplest form, what Groundswell does a really good job of is finding the needle in a haystack, right? So if 100 people sign up for the product today, what are the nine that I should care about and really spend time on and make sure those nine don't slip through the cracks?
Speaker 1:And that can be based on, if they're in the target market, if they're using it, what their title potentially is. Things like that Exactly, exactly.
Speaker 2:Yeah, so the way you want to think about it is basically, if you have few enough signups that you can reach out to all of them manually, you're fine. Just keep doing that. And, frankly, in the early days, like you want to reach out to all of these manually because you're going to learn a lot about who's signing up, why they're signing up, you might not want to ignore some small company that at scale you would ignore, but right now and in the early stage, like a small company, you might actually find a new industry to go into because of that.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:So that's actually interesting to see. To touch all of the leads that come in.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I mean at this point I'll talk to anybody. Yeah, by the way, if you want to talk to me about Coach CRM, if you're curious what this is all about, go to coachcrmcom. And if you're not ready to look at the product, send me an email. Free stuff at coachcrmcom. Free stuff at coachcrmcom and I'll send you our how to Coach Sales People course. Back to the show.
Speaker 2:Nice, cool, yeah. So I think that the other thing is, like you know, with PLG, you also want to think about, like, what are the other signals that matter? So you touched on this a little bit, right, which is when somebody signs up and maybe multiple people sign up for the product, it doesn't actually mean that that's a company you want to invest your time going after, and so that's where we also are enriching with third party data through Apollo and Clearbit and other data providers, to be able to layer on this other firmographic and demographic data, yep, so that you can say, okay, I only want to be focused on my ICP, right, and if it's someone outside of that, we still want that automated email to go out to them, but we're not going to actually spend a ton of our resources and salespeople to actually go after them manually.
Speaker 1:Yeah Well, it seems like this also gives you the opportunity to give the best leads to the best salespeople, which is a show I did recently with Brian. Elcesser, and his point was if you give the best leads to the best salespeople, it's going to be best for your business, and if you've got people that aren't that good yet, either fix your hiring process, develop them or move on. I don't know why I take these leads and evenly distribute them. These seem like gold, yeah.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I've seen there's an interesting model that someone is stalling about, which is basically the number of leads that an AE self-sourced in the last 90 days. That's the number of leads that they'll get.
Speaker 1:Oh, that's interesting.
Speaker 2:So basically, if somebody over the last three months on average has gotten self-prospected four demos a month on average, they're going to get the equivalent of four demos, so rewards them for prospecting Exactly.
Speaker 1:That's a really interesting management tactic.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I like that Fascinating.
Speaker 1:Yeah, so then you don't have the person who's buried with the inbound leads and isn't going out and generating pipeline, because I think, as we record this, it's summer of 2023. Right now, things are tough for a lot of businesses and you need the folks that have gaps in their calendars to be doing their own prospecting. So, augmenting what they're doing with quality, really high quality inbound leads that are product-bled, that seems like a good reward.
Speaker 2:Yeah, exactly. I mean, if I was a rep, then it's like, okay, I'm going to actually go hustle and get one or two extra. You know demos this year, you know demos this month, because I know next month I'm going to get, you know, basically a kicker on that. I'm going to get one or two bonus next month.
Speaker 1:It's like when you go to the Cassini and you get your free play, exactly, you put down your $25 bet and your $25 free play coupon. That's right. Did you see the news that came out today that Phil Mickelson has bet $1.2 billion in his life?
Speaker 2:What he is a maniac when it comes to gambling.
Speaker 1:Jeez, yeah, it was one night. He, according to the stuff I have in my head, I think one night he had something like 41 bets on Major League Baseball in one day.
Speaker 2:Oh gosh, what is his like? Do they have his record? How much has he lost versus one? He's down.
Speaker 1:He's down, sean Daly's down $51 million. I don't know if Phil's down that much, but anyways, this is the news I follow. I try to stay out of politics.
Speaker 2:This is the fun stuff, not sports news, but sports betting Athletes betting.
Speaker 1:That's it. That's it, okay. Product lead what can the sales team do if they're in a world where they're not getting? So let's say you're sales manager, sales VP, the product could be generating product lead leads, but either the product team or the marketing team doesn't quite have it set up in a way that's benefiting the sales team. How does the sales team work with marketing and product to make some tweaks to help get sales and better leads in that case?
Speaker 2:Yeah, I mean that's a tough one. I think that's really like the. You know MQL is marketing. Qualified leads are the thing you know the last decade. I think the new kind of term here is PQL is product qualified leads or PQA is product qualified accounts.
Speaker 2:I've you know I haven't really seen it where product teams are gold on driving PQLs. I do think that will happen, in the same way that marketing teams are gold on a certain amount of MQLs. It's a harder thing to forecast, I think, but you know it's. There's basically nothing the sales team can do to go out and find more PQLs.
Speaker 1:Well, I'm talking about internal communication. One of the things I try to do with the podcast is give sales leaders some ammunition to go up. So, let's say, the head of sales reports is CEO. What type of conversation should the, could the head of sales, have with the CEO you just mentioned? The product leaders aren't gold on PQLs. What are some things that they could at least talk about to broach the subject?
Speaker 2:Yeah. So I think the first thing is you know, what is it? What isn't measured can't improve. So I think, step one, if I were a head of sales, I would go to the CEO and say we have to measure our PQL output. Yeah, let's do a look back of the last quarter or two quarters or some sort of chart to show what is the month over month. Pql is driven by the product team.
Speaker 1:Right.
Speaker 2:Right. So step one is just measure what your PQL output is Really quickly. You're going to realize, okay, what is our definition of a PQL Right.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:It's the same thing of what's our definition of an MQL. You have to define that with the marketing leader. You have to. You know, maybe there's some little negotiation there, sure, but then eventually you're going to agree on the definition and you're both going to rally around that definition. So I think you know you need to measure it. So that means you have to have a definition for it and then, I think, going forward, you can start actually doing levers, and I think this is where I'm seeing more and more growth teams. I think the smartest companies, like Rippling, for instance, has focused a lot on growth teams. This is a term that's been around for many, many years Growth hacker.
Speaker 1:Yeah, exactly, but now they're less hacker, now they're not as much of a hacker, now they're more industrialized or for professionalized whatever you'd want to say.
Speaker 2:I mean, I think they should still be hacking at stuff, I think they should be experimenting and I would say that, like the growth team kind of blurs outbound prospecting even so, but it's pipeline generation, yep Right. And so oftentimes you'll see a growth team that sits under product where they're actually working together to drive more PQLs and then to convert those PQL. So in the same way you want to track your MQL conversion to SQL sales qualified lead you should be doing that same thing from PQL to SQL. Got it? And when sales people reach out to those PQLs, you should be converting those at a certain clip and we should know what that clip is.
Speaker 1:I think that's your point. So, going back to my original question, one of the things that I've seen a lot is sales leaders get frustrated that the product team is building certain things and they don't see how that fits into their ability to sell more stuff.
Speaker 1:Yep, they're doing things. They might be shipping features or they're just doing a bunch of rewrites or refactoring or whatever it is. It's not helping the sales team sell more. If we move to a model where the CEO, the executive team, are looking at on a weekly, monthly, quarterly basis what are the number of product qualified leads that are coming in, how's that changing? What was our goal and what are we working on within the product team to build new features that can potentially drive some shifts that get the sales team at a better position in the future? 100%, yeah, that's really good.
Speaker 1:Yeah, the sales and product alignment I laugh because people talk about sales and marketing alignment and it's one of those things that's kind of duh Right, and I think that sales and product alignment and sales and finance alignment are both so much more important than sales and marketing alignment, because you're going to have conflict with sales and marketing. It's just going to exist, it's healthy, and I don't want to go deep into that topic right now. I think that product and finance I mean finance and sales are going to have conflict because sales wants to hire more people. They want to hire more expensive people, sure, whatever. But if they can get super aligned, and if product and sales can get super aligned, the marketing piece becomes less important, because the best products are going to drive the best sales teams, a heck of a lot more than the best marketing team driving the best sales team.
Speaker 2:Yeah, totally.
Speaker 1:And then retention too?
Speaker 2:right Then the best product is going to drive retention.
Speaker 1:So on a customer success, it's even more important Because marketing is not really going to help customer success, maybe a little bit. And if you've got customer marketing somewhere, yeah, exactly Product is going to help customer success more than anything. Yeah, yeah.
Speaker 2:Yeah. I mean honestly, it's just kind of weird to me that sales and marketing like that should just be under the same organization at this point, like it should just be your go-to-market organization or something Right. And then there's like a leader.
Speaker 1:Well, Ryan Reiser always says the list is the strategy. Yeah, especially if you're doing enterprise sales, you know who you're selling to. Yeah, I think that's right. You've got things that attract them and you've got folks that close them. Yep, that's definitely, as you say, under one umbrella. Yeah, whereas product. You've done this before. We'll talk about this a little bit as well. I'm in my I guess this is the second time I'm managing an engineering team. It's really hard to go from managing salespeople to managing engineers. What do you find different?
Speaker 1:There's the biggest difference is the curiosity about everything outside of the scope of their job, and I don't know if that's just the folks that I'm working with.
Speaker 1:I think it's great, I love it, I think it's a phenomenal trait.
Speaker 1:I get substantially more questions about every other aspect of the business from the engineers that I've ever gotten from sales or customer success or sales development folks that I've managed in the past.
Speaker 1:They might ask questions like oh, what's coming up new on the product roadmap? But I've got engineers that want to listen to call, listen to call recordings. They want to look at customer engagement stats. They want to go all over and really understand the business because their goal is to build a product that people use and ensure that they've got that scoped and then get some insight into what the roadmap's going to look like and so they can make really good architecture decisions. So I think that's that's something that's really interesting. I think the other piece is that a lot of times the engineering folks are more systems oriented and they're less concerned about randomness in the world and they just want to figure out what's the plan. Let's execute on the plan, and there's fewer scary variables, I think, than things like end of quarter and people quitting their jobs at the customer and things like that. What's your experience been?
Speaker 2:That's in line as well. Yeah, I think that the first point you mentioned is definitely true. With the folks that I've worked with, they're just, I feel like engineers are interesting people. They're just tinkerers, they're builders, and so they're, like you know, roasting their own coffee on the weekend or building a bike or you know just doing interesting things outside of work. They won't buy.
Speaker 1:They want to build versus buy right, Bias towards build yeah.
Speaker 2:That part is frustrating to me and confusing to me, where I'm like we can go buy a solution, it's very cheap, it can be ready, you know, in a week. And I think I've come to realize like, okay, there is, it's just pros and cons and you have to make those tradeoffs and so at a certain point, yeah, the decision is better to buy, you know, a tool that helps you integrate, versus natively building the integration. I think there's, but you're right, like, I think the natural tendency of an engineer is oh, I can build that. Even when I show a product to an engineer, they're like even with Groundswell, it happens where I show Groundswell to a company and the engine, an engineer, gets involved and it's like okay, we got to pull data out of snowflake or we're going to put this on top of snowflake or segment or whatever, right. And they're like oh, you want those three metrics? Okay, I can, I can just go build that for us, correct. And it's like well, you can, but there's an opportunity cost there.
Speaker 1:Yeah, huge opportunity cost and then and then they could probably build a decent minimum viable product. This weekend they're going to get five feature requests. There's going to be something break because the architecture was hacked together and then they're going to get distracted with something else and not maintain it and it's just going to completely fall apart. I think that's going back to what you were talking about earlier with. It's easier to build software now it's easier than ever to build software, but it's still really hard to maintain it and make it work longer term in a production environment.
Speaker 2:Yeah, exactly, I think it's something about like our I don't know attention spans or something. There's some analogy there of like we just build something really quickly, the lindy effect, like it's not around very long and then it's just out, yeah yeah, which is obviously not good business practice. Yeah, I think engineers though I've enjoyed working more closely with engineers I also relate with in my experience with engineers wanting to know more about the business. I think it's a very good sign of a good engineer is somebody that is curious about a sales call or customer call, Because like the more context for them, the better they're going to be able to make these decisions about trade offs or whatever, how to prioritize the roadmap. That, like I, as a non technical person, I actually can't make a very informed decision in many instances because I don't understand the implications of some of these decisions. So I think it's a very good thing.
Speaker 2:I think, again, actually rippling is a good example of this Parker Conrad talks about. He'll actually have engineers be customer service, be kind of the customer support. Reps Love that. So it's just there's no middleman, there's no CSM, especially in the early days. There's no CSM, that's playing middleman, something's lost in translation and then also, the engineer feels the pain of a customer, is frustrated because this new feature broke on day one and so they're like all right, I got to build a better product so that that doesn't happen again, because I have to face that person directly instead of hearing it in some ticket middleman.
Speaker 1:I want to dig into this topic and I think this is applicable to both sales and founders. There's a temptation sometimes to say my prospect or my customer is dumb Because they don't understand it, or we talked about it last meeting and they don't remember us talking about it, or they've already bought or they're using in a product led motion and they're doing it wrong. It's tempting to just say they're dumb, we can't do that. How do you approach it? Yeah, I think that he's laughing as if he's seen this before.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I'd like to think that I wouldn't say they're dumb, but I'm sure I have at times.
Speaker 1:Why would you do that? Why would you click there Of all the places you could click? Why did you choose there to click?
Speaker 2:I mean, for me it's like as a founder, I'm just kind of constantly focused on the problems, and so when I see someone with a glazed over eyes, when I'm mentioning something off-handed that we talked about a week ago, and I'm like it feels like they don't remember what we talked about literally a week ago, to me it's like okay, how did I?
Speaker 1:miss that.
Speaker 2:Boom Like opportunity. That's it, so I think that's probably very common, though, yeah, I think for founders and for salespeople, honestly, it's a good reminder. Again, going back to attention, I think there's just so much stuff out there that people just need to be told something over and over and over again. I do this as a founder, sending out a recap to investors, or when I message an investor, it's like as a reminder. Here's what groundswell does, right, yeah? And they cut in some cases a big check into my company. In my mind I'm like well, of course they know who I am and what we do, but actually even somebody that has given you money may not exactly remember what you do.
Speaker 1:Right, you probably have some folks who have given a lot of people early stage money. Yeah, exactly In the early stage.
Speaker 2:They're doing 50 checks a year or whatever, and so it's like they may not necessarily remember Right, and it's the same thing in selling right or marketing for that matter. I find myself I'm doing less outbound sales and more what I would call marketing, which is for me, because we sell to RevOps and heads of sales and marketing. I focus on LinkedIn and I find myself just constantly saying, okay, I'm going to mention what groundswell does, or just the same lessons over and over and over again, and to me it's kind of redundant and boring at times, but I think people need to hear the same message 10 times, they do In different ways, until they actually grasp it.
Speaker 1:Yeah, if you look at I'm not going to mention I don't like talking about politics, but the analogies are so good there's some candidates in the past that wanted to sound really smart and say new things every time in front of every crowd, where there were some that just beat the same drum and just said the same exact thing over and over and over again, and those folks won. Because it's that simple, because these people are distracted, yep.
Speaker 2:I think, if you can like, put your message in a meme. I think memes are like so powerful. Oh wow, have you done that. I've tried to. Yeah, I think memes are like a very interesting way. I mean, there's like a funny societal cultural thing happening with memes right now or in the last few years.
Speaker 1:They're amazing. I love memes. Yeah, they're great. I look at memes every day. It's just to me, it's so much more fun than videos, because videos take forever.
Speaker 2:Yep.
Speaker 1:And you get on, you get into Instagram videos. I try not to open Instagram until about nine o'clock at night because I'm real into pool and poker and chess, and so my Instagram is just full of great chess moves, great pool shots, great poker hands, and so I can sit there. It's an hour later, but I can look at four or five memes and then it's a minute later and I'm good, so I get my dope from that.
Speaker 2:Exactly yeah, I had to delete Instagram a few years ago. I was just looking at how much time I spent on it and it was just easy for me not to just have it at all. Yeah, I would set, you know 20 minutes a day on my iPhone and then I just type in the password and ignore that and eventually I was like, all right, I'm out, that's funny, yeah, so using memes to catch people's attention, so you're using LinkedIn to get just in front of folks that care about this type of thing.
Speaker 2:Yeah, exactly so, educating them on what is product-led sales at the simplest form, yeah, you know, brand awareness, I think, also with customers continuing to help, kind of educate them on how to better use our product, because there's a bunch of different workflows that we can help. And, yeah, I found that again. For me, like, my market is on LinkedIn, so it's different if you're a sales leader or salesperson and you're selling to whatever your key personas are, not on LinkedIn very much Farmers.
Speaker 1:Yeah exactly.
Speaker 2:I wouldn't suggest spending time on LinkedIn, but ideally they're spending time hanging out somewhere digitally when they're at Exactly.
Speaker 2:Yeah, those are the conferences, yeah exactly Go to the farmer conference that happens every year. Go to wherever the place is that they hang out, because you're going to do two things. One, you're going to be able to obviously tell them about what you're up to, but two and I think this is equally important you're going to learn from them. You're going to learn what are they talking about, what are the pain points, the recent pain points, and so when I'm actually spending time on LinkedIn whether I'm posting or I'm commenting or I'm consuming I'm actually trying to learn, like, what is basically get a pulse on the market?
Speaker 2:What do sales leaders care about right now? Right now, it's pipeline. That's what a lot of people are talking about, and our product does a great job of helping you generate more pipeline in this really noisy world. So I'm now tailoring my messaging on LinkedIn more around pipeline. I was focused on AI for a little bit because people were talking about that. They seemed to actually genuinely curious to like tinker with these AI tools, and our product integrates into some of these tools. So I would talk about that stuff. So I think that's the other thing is, when you show up in the place where your market is, you're going to get a really good pulse and that's going to translate to a talk track in a cold call or positioning the value profit of what you do, or literally a subject line of a cold email.
Speaker 1:So, let's say you get somebody responding to you, what do you do in terms of put them into a sales cycle or let them try the product first and I'm talking to not your company, necessarily, but somebody's got a product led company. Yep, somebody wants to learn more. What are the pros and cons of letting them, pushing them to try, versus pushing them into a sales cycle?
Speaker 2:Yeah, there's definitely a lot of nuance depending on the company and even within a company, depending on the segment of the business. I think the goal is like put your buyer first. I think that's like a cliche that we've heard for many years, but actually, like in a product led world, again, it's like it's optionality, right. So what do they want? Do they want to try the product or do they want to talk to me, a salesperson? Yeah, and being able to give both those options. I think, even if they are trying the product, a salesperson should be involved.
Speaker 2:The analogy I use is in a PLG sales process. You're like a Sherpa, you're a guide, you're just guiding them where they should be going. They probably can get there without your help. Maybe they'll fail, maybe they won't right, they'll get off the happy path in your product, yeah, but you want to get them to that destination as soon as possible, right. And so, going back when I was at Zoom, as an example, everybody knows about video conferencing, but there's a lot of other products that Zoom offers that I didn't even know about until I joined full time, right, yeah, so, and not just webinars, but like chat and phone, like they have a bunch of other stuff.
Speaker 1:Full rooms.
Speaker 2:Exactly Physical stuff, right, and so I think that's the other job of a salesperson is, even if they're trying to bring quote unquote the product, there's probably other product skews that your company offers that you want to educate them on when it's relevant, and so this is again like, as a good salesperson, you should be doing research. You should be pulling information out of the people using the product or not and then packaging that up, right. So you mentioned Zoom rooms, for instance, like physical Zoom products and hardware. But you can just look at a company that's using Zoom and see if they have offices or not. Yeah, If they have a bunch of offices, you should probably go talk about that product, right. If they don't, you shouldn't position that product in your sales process, right, and so I think that's. The other thing is being again going back to that Sherpa idea. You want to be a Sherpa to help them get onto the happy path and make them as successful as you can, and hopefully that's with your product.
Speaker 1:I love it. Yeah, one of the things I've seen work really well is you could start it off and say look, there's two paths that people typically go down. Yeah, path one you're going to invest probably one to two hours going in playing around with the product, seeing what you're thinking. Come back to me with some questions. Or path two we can talk for 30 minutes. I can learn a little bit more about your business.
Speaker 1:Come back to you with the tailored custom demo and at that point you can have a good idea whether or not it makes sense to move forward.
Speaker 2:I love it. You're giving them options. I think that's the right way to do it. I need to do that. I'm like taking mental notes here because I need to do that in my sales process. I mean, that's also just kind of sales one on one. At the end of the first call, it's like here's where we typically go from here. Here's what I typically do. We want to loop in the CRO and we also want to have a separate call with your RevOps leader. People haven't bought something like Groundswell before. I imagine that's the same with you. Oftentimes you're talking to people. You're not ripping them out and replacing a solution. Yeah, exactly, and so you actually need to educate them on here's the stakeholders In our world. You're stakeholders, and so I think just saying this is the next step and being prescriptive is super important.
Speaker 1:Yeah, because at Coach CRM we're not competing directly with a rip and replace. There's obviously substitutes. You can do what we do in Coach CRM in Google Sheets, but we worked with hundreds of companies that did it. It didn't work very well, so we decided to start a company around it. But at the end of the day people I was having a conversation with the guy the other day.
Speaker 1:He said I need to know what metric this impacts. I was like, okay, here we go. And it was funny because I was brought into this conversation. He's a first time sales leader. It's been in the role for like two months. Good question for him to ask, because he knows he's going to be asked that question by somebody else.
Speaker 1:Right, and I'm sitting there and there's lots of things I could say. I could say it's going to make your deal size go up, it's going to shorten your sales cycle, it's going to increase your win rate, all of those things. But those aren't the most credible things. And so what I said is have you rolled out any formal training to your team? He said, yeah, lots of training.
Speaker 1:I said, all right, scale a one to 10, with one being they haven't adopted it at all to 10 being they've fully adopted it. Where are they at? And he just laughed, shook his head and he said we're at about a three. I said the only metric I'd be looking at hitting was taking you from a three to an eight, because you obviously believe that that works, because you invested in it, you rolled it out, you want him to use it. That's what I'd focus on.
Speaker 1:And the dude's face are just kind of shocked because he didn't think that's where I was going to go with that, but that's the metric that I want to impact for him. I don't all the other stuff will happen, yeah, but they've already invested in this and I think that you're. I don't want to put words in your mouth, but it seems like you're in a similar position because these folks have already invested in a type of product that can be used, product led, and they've already invested in a sales team. You're just helping them bring those two things together and get more out of it. Exactly.
Speaker 2:There's all this magical data that's just sitting there, ready to be activated, ready for salespeople to look at, ready to kick off workflows off the back of this data, and it just takes a little bit of work to put a tool in place and then you're gonna see a lot more increase in pipeline.
Speaker 1:And then, in summer 2023, you and I both get the objection well, no more software, we don't need any more software. And I would say well, if your managers keep doing what they're doing for the next six months, how do you think your team's gonna perform? And you might say well, if you keep converting your inbound leads and your product led leads at the same rate you are, how's that gonna impact your ability to hit your goal? Yep, Well, look, sometimes people need to buy freaking software and not get emotional about it because it's popular to not buy software right now. It's fascinating. I always say that return on investment for anything that's used is always positive. I've never seen a product that people actually consistently use that does not have a positive return on investment. Is that fair? You got a counterpoint. No, I think that's fair.
Speaker 2:I mean, I think there's definitely redundancies, but I think that's a different thing. Like I've seen, especially for big companies, there's redundancies in text back, well, there's, yeah, waste, exactly. So if there's waste, cut it out, but for something that's not redundant if you're using it, it's gonna work.
Speaker 1:So, therefore, if we're doing a proof, trigonometry is not my best subject. In school. I thought calculus was easier than trigonometry, which is hilarious. If we're doing a proof, I would probably say I don't even know if this is right terminology. Somebody's gonna be laughing at me, like this CB doesn't know math. Cool, so I would probably say that. Therefore, as an executive, I wanna buy the most stuff possible that people are going to use.
Speaker 2:I think that's fair.
Speaker 1:yeah, so then that ties into RevOps. How's RevOps play in all of this?
Speaker 2:Yeah, I mean I generally think that RevOps is, at most organizations not leveraged to their full capacity and I think specifically that means not being part of strategic conversations and strategic planning in the way that they should. I think that RevOps is probably the best positioned department to help drive efficiencies within an organization without having to buy any more tools or anything else. They can just overnight effectively increase efficiency in significant ways Because they're sitting at this interesting place that sits somewhere between all of the other departments If you've built RevOps in the right way which is sitting between SDRs, aes, customer success, account management and marketing and maybe product and growth, and so they're kind of this cog in a wheel where everything there's spokes out to all of these different departments and they're kind of the central hub to it, and so they have insight into what should happen and then they also can orchestrate and kind of operationalize systems to make all of those different departments function better.
Speaker 1:It's the analogy I like to use here is it's like someone that's pretty good at spreadsheets and then they look at someone that was an investment banker and had to get really good at spreadsheets and they say, oh wow, you can use the same tool and do it much better. And then obviously, my pool analogy is abound Well, you can shoot that shot, or you can shoot the Efren Reyes shot, and it's gonna be substantially better. So in this case, you're taking what you have and you're just using it better by unlocking either features or functionalities or combinations that aren't currently used by leveraging the revenue operations team that knows how to do that.
Speaker 2:Yeah, do you guys sell some revenue operations?
Speaker 1:Not a lot sometimes. I'd say that they touch it in cases where you've got a revenue operations leader that really cares about performance. So if you've got someone that's really tight with CFO and they're knee deep in the reporting and they're trying to figure out how to coach sales leadership from the side, that's where it comes in.
Speaker 1:They're a stakeholder, but not necessarily the buyer, got it. Yeah, which I think is good, because they're the ones that are kind of the CFO's right-hand man when it comes to sales. Yes, going back to my sales and finance alignment.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I wanna poke that bear if you don't have to.
Speaker 1:Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Speaker 2:Because REVOps are similar to, I'd say, engineers, where they're risk averse when it comes to adding new systems, because they've patched together a bunch of systems and so one more tool means more risk introduced into their world and they're trying to reduce risk.
Speaker 1:Yeah, and so I just need to highlight the risk that exists in the system. Today. I say look, you promoted five people into their first management role ever. Four of them aren't hitting their goals. If nothing changes, where does that put you six months from now? And if that doesn't outweigh, if the return on that doesn't outweigh the risk of having another tool in the tech stack, then I don't have a deal. If it does, then I've got a deal. That's fairly straightforward.
Speaker 2:Yeah, and it's very clear. I'm curious actually what you think, but it's very clear at this point that a lot of REVOps are not hitting quota Correct, so there's a huge opportunity for you, I think. I would imagine that's a big tailwind for your business. What do you think is like the root cause of this kind of seemingly massive decline in quota?
Speaker 1:attainment? Oh, fun question. The root cause is that, in my opinion, generally speaking, is that a rising tide floats all boats and for the last several years the tide was rising, so you had people in sales roles and in sales leadership roles that were not fundamentally sound.
Speaker 1:It was like playing from the forward tease in a golf match and being all proud of yourself that you shot par, and then all of a sudden, you get moved to the back tease the tips and you're shooting over 100. All of a sudden, things get harder. If you're in a world where people are going to buy more often than not, or people are gonna buy even despite the salesperson or the salesperson's performance, it's gonna give this. I forget the statistics term. Is it a type two error, when you get a positive result, that it should have been a negative result? Maybe One of this, one of this?
Speaker 1:And it creates this cognitive dissonance where the sales team says oh, we're doing a great job, they are hitting their goals, they're hitting their sales goals, so that is good. However, the way they got there wasn't fundamentally sound. And if you end up in a world where you're hitting your goals but your fundamentals aren't there, when that tide stops rising and it starts going down, things get really hard, really fast, and you can't make quick adjustments on the fundamentals because, a you've got people that in their mind, were killing it and, b, you've got leadership that's made commitments that it's going to keep getting better and better and better. I think that's the root cause in my mind. What are your thoughts on that? I think that's right.
Speaker 2:I think that a lot of reps, there was just a lot of salespeople and there was a lot of marketing being done and a lot of just buying. There's a lot of budget the last few years and so it makes sense that salespeople I think that analogy is perfect Like I think salespeople were succeeding, they were hitting quota, but it was just objectively easier to hit quota two or three years ago and now that rug has been pulled down, it's like, oh man, I actually have to work really hard. I have to actually figure out how to sell and how to position and how to negotiate and how to get to the next step and how to get in. Other stakeholders Like you kind of could just get by with being a B player or C player for the last few years and still hit 100% quota.
Speaker 1:Yeah, you could show a product If it was a novel product, if it was a better product, if it was a better price product. Hey, here's what we've got. The prospect says, well, we need it, let's go. Yeah, those were easier times. I mean, we had deals. I had one deal with our consulting business this was in 2021 where they sent me an email. They said can you talk tomorrow? I said yes, and it was. I think it was like November 29th or something like that, and they said we can't sign the contract till December 1st. And I was like, oh wow, three day sales cycle. And then they said but we need to send the money this month. Can we just wire, say, wired me $40,000 without a signed contract because they had to get the money out of their bank account. That was hilarious, that's amazing. And at that point I should have realized that things were a little too hot and backed off a little bit. But of course, me and me I'm not quite Phil Mickelson, but I doubled down a little bit.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I think we all did. That's all right. Next cycle we'll know.
Speaker 1:Yeah, that's the thing. So I've also been doing a lot of work on competency management.
Speaker 1:If you go back, there's a sales management podcast on competencies where I dig into this a little bit. The thing I've been thinking about is how to rate people and prioritize development objectives, and this ties directly to what I was just talking about with the fundamentals. And I've been thinking about it a lot because people don't like being rated on a scale of 1 to 10, primarily because anybody that's doing anything and this could be their job it could be pretty much anything in life everyone thinks they're at least a six, so that whole zero to five is just irrelevant. Yeah, and you can say the same thing if you cut the scale in half to 1 to 5, which I think. It's hilarious that the call recording tools default have 1 to 5 on their scorecard. So if you're struggling to get your managers and your reps to take your call recording software seriously with scorecards, send me an email at freestuffatcoachcrmcom. I've got some ideas for you. Freestuffatcoachcrmcom will talk call recordings, scorecards. But the topic here is crazy because then I've got. So I've got two ways I'm thinking about it right now.
Speaker 1:One is you've got a zero to five scale, but it's not necessarily. I think it's 1 to 5. So the lowest one is not trained, so that's one. Two is ramping, so you're in the process of getting trained. Three is below expectations. Four is meets expectations, five is exceeds expectations and six is best in class. Best in class meaning you are just out of this world. If there was any way we could promote you two levels tomorrow, we would, but we're going to pay you more and keep you on this job today. So in this scale you've got two the not trained and ramping that acknowledge that we haven't enabled you to do the job yet. There's only one level in that whole thing that's below expectations, and everything else meets expectations, exceeds expectations and best in class. That way there's less of this pushback around. I'm not a four, I'm a six, because that doesn't matter. It creates a better accepted, a more acceptable rating system for the person. Curious, your thoughts on that.
Speaker 2:Yeah, that's cool. I think what I like about that is you're basically saying, ok, this bucket, here's the action associated with it, and you basically can't be in a bucket where there's not an obvious action. So one and two, ramping the bucket is, oh, we got to ramp them.
Speaker 1:You got to train them.
Speaker 2:Three is they're on a pip or they need to be trained better? Sure, and I think that's a good way to look at it. Yeah, when I was managing a sales team, I had a spreadsheet that ranked people on a scale. I forget what it was, but I think it was a scale of 1 to 5 or 1 to 10, across maybe a dozen different categories. One of the categories, though, was also what do they care about? What are they trying to achieve? And I think that's like I often come back to that, because, even with employees whether you're managing a sales team or not, if you're managing any type of employee I think it's a really important question that not many people actually ask, which is what are you trying to get out of this job? And I was very surprised when I first started asking this question, because some people literally would just say trying to make as much money as possible in the next two years. That's totally cool.
Speaker 1:Let's make that happen, and maybe for a reason.
Speaker 2:Yeah, oftentimes it was. Oftentimes it was I have a bunch of student debt and I want to buy my mom a car and it's like great, now I should really have something interesting that we can drive towards together.
Speaker 1:Right, mama needs that Jaguar.
Speaker 2:Exactly. And then the other common one was I want to be an AE and so I'm managing an SDR. It's like OK, let's get you to an AE. Or it's an AE and they're like I want to manage a team. It's like OK, let's figure out how to get you to manage part of the AE team.
Speaker 2:Or if it doesn't work out, in a couple of years I hope you find a role at another company to manage. And so I think that's a super important question that I don't see enough people asking that in one-on-ones and driving towards that outcome. And then the second piece. The other columns are like how are they doing on discovery One to 10. And then tracking that over time? I think that's the other important thing. Is that increasing or decreasing? It's OK if it's a 4 out of 10 right now, as long as it's increasing over time. I think if it's a foreign staying stagnant, that's not good. And then I'm able to then see, as a manager of 15 people, what are my metrics for my team, because ultimately the buck stops at me and I need to be seeing the trends across the team whether people are trending up or trending down across the categories that I care about.
Speaker 2:So that's how I did it. I don't know. I'm sure you have much better ways of doing this.
Speaker 1:Well, the hard part is, you've got to make it simple and robust. So, then, the thing with discovery is, for it to actually work, you have to break it down and do more detail. So discovery could be asking pain questions, or it could be getting to the executive decision makers or it could be managing resistance, all of these different types of things. So what happens in your company's discovery? It's got to be tailored to the business too.
Speaker 1:What are all the things that are going to happen which could depend on is it small business or is it enterprise? Is it sales development or customer success? What does great discovery look like? What's that big category that would be on your executive level scorecard but then decoupled down into the granular pieces, which are what we can actually coach on, because I can't coach somebody on discovery, I can coach them on the components of discovery, which now leads me into the second.
Speaker 1:So I said I was thinking about a lot of things. So we went through the first one. The second one's lining up with what you said to some extent, which is, I went, the manager and the rep and everybody in their orbit who cares about that person. Everybody cares about you. You're special, johnny, but I mean the person that, in a work sense, has some kind of real stake in the ground.
Speaker 1:I want them to highlight priorities and I'm playing with this. We're going to build this in the product in the next couple months and it's about what are the five high priorities for this person, what are the five medium priorities, and we can list all the rest of them, because the other thing with coaching is you really only want to coach somebody on one thing at a time. You can do two, especially if you've got a short-term thing and a long-term thing. That's fine If they're staying on top of it and they're accountable. Multiple items is fine. But you want to identify what all the things you could coach them are on R, because that can help you prioritize, combine. We often see folks that are struggling with pain, questions, customer stories, setting next steps, maybe three things, in a discovery call. Well, the root cause of that could be bad pre-meeting prep, and so don't go in and think, oh, I've got three things to coach them on over the course of the next month. No, you've got one thing to coach them on over the course of the next week.
Speaker 1:And that's where the really strong managers are getting leverage, especially if they're listening to some of the things that we say on this podcast.
Speaker 2:Agreed.
Speaker 1:Yeah, so the prioritization? Because then the prioritization has nothing to do with ranking. It's just forcing you to think through what are the either biggest impact or low-hanging fruit that you can attack.
Speaker 2:Yeah, it makes total sense. How do you then think about if you have a team of 10 reps and there's six or eight different priorities for six or eight different people? Are you just coaching very directly one-on-one, or how are you doing batch coachings or ongoing coaching? How do you think about that?
Speaker 1:If it's common across the team. Then there's two things I do A short-term thing which is let's work with them together. It might be training, it might be coaching, with the definition of training being equipping people with the skills to do the job and the definition of coaching helping them apply the skills they've already learned to do the job better. So that's the first piece is we need to identify which one of those issues it is. And then, if we go down the rabbit hole of coaching, you can coach mindset activity or skill set. So if it's a skill set thing, that's something you can absolutely do as a group. If it's a mindset thing, that's something that goes more one-on-one. But Brendan brought up a great idea which is one of the best ways to coach mindset is to really understand the person when do they want to go and why, and if you get into that, that can help drive some mindset changes.
Speaker 2:Interesting, yeah, that makes complete sense.
Speaker 1:Yeah, but then you've got lots of different things that you want to coach different people on. So if I'm a senior executive, one of the things I want to know is do my frontline managers for each individual on the team have they diagnosed and prioritized all of the coaching opportunities that they could have and what are they doing about them and when? And how are they tracking that and how can I look backwards and see the frequency with which they've solved these challenges? Because it's so easy for a frontline manager to get caught up in meetings and deals and all this other stuff, but if you're not coaching the player, diagnose and prioritize, have that coaching, conversation, drive, accountability then you're going to end up with these underdeveloped people that could lead to a lack of fundamental foundation when they get ready for their next role or when they get hit by a industry-specific or broader economic event.
Speaker 2:Yeah, makes total sense. I have one more question for you.
Speaker 1:No, this is good, let's go. I love talking about this stuff.
Speaker 2:How do you think about having reps come to you, as a manager, with what they want to work on, versus you diagnosing on them what you think they should work?
Speaker 1:on. Both should happen. We want the reps to come to you, but you also don't want the self-diagnosing patient. You don't want them to come to you and say, hey boss, I need help with objection handling. You say, oh OK, I can help you with that, let's go. Because what you want to understand is well, why do they need help with objection handling? A lot of times, when that's the ask which it's often the ask it's because they dug themselves a hole that they shouldn't be in in the first place. It's because they didn't tee up the meeting with agenda. They didn't preview what next steps could be coming out of the meeting, so the prospect had no idea why they were there. Their target market isn't followed, so they're talking to somebody. That's not an ideal prospect. They're doing lots of things before what's happening in the event. So listen to what they're telling you, dig into it, Treat it as a potential symptom of the root cause that you'd actually want to coach. That's how we deal with that.
Speaker 2:Got it. Yeah, that makes sense. So basically, you say you come to me with some things that you want to be coached on or that you feel like you should be coached on right now. I'm going to still do the work of saying yes, in fact, you do need that specific coaching.
Speaker 1:Yeah, well, you dig into it a little bit more, I might come to you and say, hey, I need more customer stories. You might ask me well, how many customer stories do you know today? Send me two recordings of you telling a customer story. Do you need more customer stories, or do you need to be able to tell the customer stories better, or do you need to learn the customer stories we have better? This is why management's hard. This is why Harvard doesn't have a four-day MBA. It really does get hard and it goes back to this whole idea of the rising tide floats all boats. Folks have been able to be successful in front-line management roles who didn't learn all of this stuff because people were just buying the product. It was flying off the shelf and you could go into a pipeline review, ask the rep when the deal is going to close, show up to the call, super close it for him and win. Well, that world does not exist anymore. Will we ever be back to that world? Yes, absolutely. We will be back to that world. And here's why Because Alan Greenspan gave his famous irrational exuberance speech.
Speaker 1:I don't remember the year, it was late 90s. I believe Alan Greenspan said this is irrational exuberance. The stock market is overheated. It's so high. This is ridiculous. Everything's going to crash. If you were to put all your money into the stock market on that day, you'd be way up right now.
Speaker 1:Yeah things are up, things are down. It's a business cycle, that's the other thing is that man? I was talking to somebody the other day and they said, oh, everything's changed since COVID. Not really it's called the business cycle. It happens all the time and I guess, since we have a little gray hair now, we recognize this right.
Speaker 2:Yeah, yeah, I think it's we also. I mean, we did have whatever 12-year bull run. Yeah, it was a bit of a crazier cycle, so maybe a crazier fall. But yeah, as they say, bull markets take a lot of time, bear markets just crash overnight.
Speaker 1:Yeah, you take the stairs up and the elevator down.
Speaker 1:That's right and the other thing that happened is that the broader business landscape got completely changed. If you look at what are the biggest companies today, the sectors are completely different than they were before. All throughout, from the Great Depression up until the mid-90s, for sure, it was industrial companies, it was auto manufacturers, it was telecoms, it was companies like this. That's why the Dow Jones Industrial Average is one of the benchmarks for the stock market. Then you had a bunch of tech companies build up that didn't really have a lot of them didn't have real businesses. Those flamed out in the early 2000s.
Speaker 1:But now you've got these tech companies that have massive profit margins Google and Apple and Facebook, and all of these companies are highly profitable. And then you've got companies in the private sector that haven't IPO'd yet. They could be profitable real fast. Look what Uber did. Uber was unprofitable. Darry raised prices a little bit, trim, some fat Boom. They're profitable. So and this is another piece where you hear all these people say, oh, these venture-backed companies aren't profitable, they're bad, they're burning money. Ok, well, here's what they're doing they're building the foundation from which they can be profitable.
Speaker 2:Yeah, that's always been the promises. Eventually, if the day comes, we can cut a bunch of the fat and then we're going to be profitable. But we're trying to grow. We're not trying to be profitable this year by design. We're trying to be profitable in 10 years when we go public. Add a big number, exactly Right.
Speaker 2:So you're losing some short-term profitability for that long-term larger profitability. Yeah, it's interesting you mentioned that. I mean the broad strokes. There then are the big companies used to be hardware and now the big companies are software. Oil and gas were the big companies manufacturing big companies. These are all hardware companies and now FANG, they're all software.
Speaker 1:Well, in oil and gas, if you look at the things that Haller-Burton and Schlumberger do, they're still more hardware, but they're technology companies. In 2006, the world was screaming peak oil, meaning that we would never have as much production of oil ever again as we had in 2006. And then what happened? We invented fracking and our offshore drilling technology became better.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:Boom. No longer the case. Now we have more oil reserves proven reserves than we've ever had in the history of the world and my guess is that's just going to get bigger and bigger and bigger, which is why I think that we're not anywhere near top. Exuberant times shower turn. And the other call that I'm making is that we're not going to see fewer technology companies, we're going to see many more, and I got inspired by this.
Speaker 1:I was listening to this week in startups and they had the Qualtrics founder on there who had founded a company with his dad and his brother. And I'm not saying you're going to have families start companies to turn it into $12 billion behemoths. But instead of owning a laundry mat or a restaurant or a store in a strip mall, why wouldn't the family put their resources into building a verticalized software product that solves a very specific niche? Average family in the US right now makes about $55,000, I think Can you not make $55,000 from a software product that a whole family puts their resources behind? Given what Brendan was talking about earlier, where it's easier than ever to build software, if you really know the problem, you can go in and attack it.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I think we went back and forth on LinkedIn about this. I saw you post about this. Maybe you commented about it something. I think that the thing that I struggle to understand then is I don't disagree with you and I think software is eating the world. I think we're still very early there. Then the question is that that will inevitably mean, I think, well, maybe it's just net sum, but I think it will mean that the large companies will not be as large Like they'll chip into some of the market share elsewhere. Maybe that premise is not true altogether, but if that is true, then I think it does mean there will be. If there's 100 of these small companies, then there's going to be one less unicorn.
Speaker 1:I don't think it's a zero sum game. I think that if everybody goes to work every day, GDP grows.
Speaker 2:Real GDP grows.
Speaker 1:So maybe, if there's a shift and potentially it doesn't chip into, well, ok, let's use food. For example, do we need 35 Chinese restaurants, or do we need 20 Chinese restaurants and a couple kitchens? What do they call them? Air kitchens?
Speaker 2:or cloud kitchens.
Speaker 1:Do we need 20 Chinese restaurants and a couple cloud kitchens? I don't know. Yeah, true, and maybe what happens is it's not a pure software play, it's a hybrid software plus services, because you can do a lot there that don't have venture scale returns, that don't need a bunch of investment.
Speaker 1:Grandparents aunts and uncles can seed 25k, 100k to get the thing off the ground. You get it going and all of a sudden you create a cloud. Imagine if there were cloud kitchens for all your favorite foods in a rural area. Imagine there's a cloud kitchen in a rural area that had every type of food, and so you wouldn't have to have different physical structures, different tax entities, different administrators, different supply chains for the Chinese, the Thai, the Vietnamese and the sushi. You could consolidate that all into one. That's interesting.
Speaker 2:Yeah, yeah, I think that option will exist.
Speaker 1:Mean. How many razor companies are there now? There used to be chic and Gillette. Now there's now there's all kinds. There's the guy with the funny commercial, and then the guy that ripped off the funny commercial, and then the guy that got politically mad at the guy that ripped off the funny commercial and started his own.
Speaker 2:It's impressive. Yeah, I Do think. By the way, do you guys do services? How do you think about that? If you're willing to share, VCs.
Speaker 1:Close your ears. I love services.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I think services are Actually super interesting and I wouldn't have said that three years ago, I think services, even for VCs. I think that there's something really interesting there Obviously to drive adoption within your software, but an expansion. But I think that there's Like a stickiness and a product feedback loop that people underestimate about services stickiness is the word.
Speaker 1:I think product feedback too, but stickiness for sure. Because if you have something off the shelf, here's the traditional model you have a customer success team. You start with full cycle customer success. They do implementations, they work with customers over the long term, they do upsells, they do renewals, they do everything. Then that person starts getting behind on their upsells and renewals and their QBRs and so you hire an implementation team. Implementation teams the most junior folks on the customer success team. They're not business experts, they're just like oh, I'll follow this checklist that I have internally and get me implemented. And once they get the minimally implemented, they've hit their mark of 30 days or 60 days or whatever it was.
Speaker 1:Now, what I just said doesn't apply if it's some big enterprise BI or ERP thing. You've got ridiculous smart engineers that are doing that. I'm talking more transactional SaaS products, which I think is where we're, brendan and I, are focused right now. Well, now, imagine that that doesn't exist. You've also not got a self-serve product where a lot of folks it's off the shelf Call us if you need us. Implementations fail. That's why a lot of the talk around tech consolidations happening right now, because people weren't set up properly. Well, now imagine you've got something like coach CRM, where we build a coaching playbook for you in the product, where we train your managers on a coaching framework in the product and where you've got a hotline To guys that have coached tens of thousands of sales people to ask them any question about coaching possible. And that's all part of the customer success program. And I'm not gonna give away my secret sauce. But that is scalable. I've got a plan to scale it and if you want to learn more, shoot me in a free stuff at coach CRM comm. I.
Speaker 2:Love it. Yeah, I think that that's. That's super interesting. I think that there's a lot of founders that have raised VC venture capital or want to raise venture capital that are very allergic to services Because they've been told to be allergic to them. Yeah, so, and there's some truth to it. But I think that we're actually at a place where We've got we've over rotated. Yeah, we're building software and selling a 50k deal, and then they're not adopting it because I don't want to sell, you know, another 20k on top of that for services Right, because that's gonna look bad for my margins. But what looks bad is when they don't renew next year, right, and you go from 50k in revenue from that customer to zero, and you can't upsell them.
Speaker 1:You can't upsell somebody that didn't launch, yeah, and then you've got risk where people are changing jobs. How often are people changing jobs? People change jobs a lot, yeah. So you got these people changing jobs and if you didn't have a really strong implementation that can be supported by Services, so let's. Let's pick a product space that neither one of us working. So CRM, for example. Yeah, well, if I sell CRM to a marketing agency, I should implement that CRM in a way that I know marketing agencies use it. Yeah, yeah, that's pretty straightforward, yep.
Speaker 2:By the way just one more thing a little off-script here, I know, but so we roll I think that there is Something interesting with what you're doing, probably, but just a general observation as well, with fractional Sales people and sales management, yeah, I think that's like a trend, especially in this now remote world, and I think there's. You know, many companies will go back to the office and that's great. Many people will still remain remote. And so I think, especially in a remote world, I Think we're just gonna continue to see more and more consultants, contractors, fractional people going out on their own.
Speaker 2:Really, I'm seeing, like highly qualified people They've been in the space for five, eight, twelve years, yeah, and they're saying I don't want to, I don't want to do another, you know, two to four year shift at a software company and grind right for maybe no equity, right, I'm gonna go build on my own, I'm gonna go take down 500 K or a million dollars and that's all going in my pocket, right, right, as a contractor or consultant, fractional head of sales or whatever, I think you can do it as a salesperson as well, or an SDR, and I I'm. My prediction is that, like in a few years, it's gonna be very common for one person to work for three or four companies at any one given point of time.
Speaker 2:Oh yeah and I think that that's actually gonna be a better thing for companies as well. And an example for me at zoom, you know there was a project that I did to buy a data provider in Europe, and so I ran this process To figure out what are the best data providers specifically in Europe. Yeah, and you know phone numbers, email, other data that you know. I had this, built out, this spreadsheet, the factors that I was using Just to get to the answer. I was doing tests and then after I got my conclusion, you know when God pricing and then bought and then literally just went and worked on a completely different project next.
Speaker 2:Yeah, it's like I should just go do that same exact project using that same exact spreadsheet For three other companies and instead of spending three months doing it, I can now do it in one month correct one month with fewer hours Over the course of one month, because, as you were doing that, there are probably 500 other people doing the exact same thing, who'd never done it before. Yep exactly.
Speaker 1:Yeah, specialists, specialization.
Speaker 2:This is yeah.
Speaker 1:I mean, it's what we've done with the other business. I close loop where we built 300 sales playbooks for folks, yeah, and build sales playbook in my sleep, yep, and it's funny because I talked.
Speaker 2:I was on it.
Speaker 1:It wasn't a debate, it was on. I was on Justin Michaels hype cycle the other day. Yeah, and I said something that really offended this dude, and we were talking about getting your messaging together.
Speaker 1:Mm-hmm and I said something along the lines of you do this exercise and then, yeah, flip it over to your person in Asia and he'll make it into some cutesy, fancy slide deck and then you'll have it ready for you in the morning and he goes that's hard like, or something about how is? He was a head of marketing background and he thought I was diminishing the rule. It's not hard to make a freaking slide deck. People, every great slide deck you've made there. If you think you're really good at making slide Decks, there's probably a million people that also say that they are. And now you've got canva and all these other things that are amazing.
Speaker 1:Yeah just that's not hard work anymore. The hard work is making things that are very hard and complex as simple as possible. That's the hard work. Everything else it's not hard. And yeah, okay, maybe the person's not as good as slides to. You have a make 20 options and then pick one. It's like you're doing laminate flooring.
Speaker 2:I don't know yeah.
Speaker 1:Specialization is definitely the move. Yeah, and so what are your thoughts on specialist, verticalized, specialized software versus things, or just general broad platforms?
Speaker 2:I Don't have a strong opinion there. I mean, I think right now probably there's arguments for both sides for both to exist. I Think they're Vertical. I mean, I think it's probably like kind of common to say vertical solutions are very interesting and VCs like verticalized Solutions. I, I get it. I think that makes sense. Yeah, I'm also. I'm like equally bullish on horizontal solutions. I think it just depends on the space that you're building in. I Do think that bundling is like the best business strategy. Bundling is the best business strategy there's nothing better.
Speaker 1:So I'm. Microsoft is crushing it. All they do is bundle and then just squash everybody else.
Speaker 2:Yeah, yeah, for sure, we saw it all the time. Is you like that's the biggest competitor? It's Microsoft. They just bundle Teams, give it away for free. Everybody knows it's not as good, but it's free. Yeah, I'm just gonna use it. I'm already deployed right across my organization.
Speaker 1:Well, that's. That's one of the reasons why I bundle Training on coaching. Yeah, with the software. Yes, because the software companies won't do it, because their venture capitalist board member told them they're not allowed to sell services. I like cool, I'll smoke you in deals, let's go.
Speaker 2:Yeah, exactly, all right. Have you guys raised venture capital? No, do you want to Do you want to do, to be determined.
Speaker 1:No comment, got it sec roll 506d yeah.
Speaker 2:I think that's the right way to do it. For sure, if especially if you don't want to raise venture capital right now or in the next Short amount of time, there's basically no downside in doing that. Yeah, and again I think, like a lot of companies right now, did make a bunch of cuts. They cut their sales manager for their four salespeople or their well that was the dumbest move ever.
Speaker 1:Oh, I managed four people. Cool, what are you? What are you doing the afternoon?
Speaker 2:Yeah, you must be really good at golf.
Speaker 1:How nice is your boat.
Speaker 2:This is not a full-time job.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:I just pick up a second one, and many people did. Well, it's very feasible. Yeah, yeah, over employed.
Speaker 1:Yeah, it's harder to be over employed as a sales manager than it is as an engineer, though that's true. I know one story where a guy he he faked having a kid, no, and so he could use as an excuse anytime he got double booked. Not a friend of mine, just a person I heard of.
Speaker 2:On Reddit.
Speaker 1:No, this is firsthand man. Read it. I'll tell you I'll use Instagram every now and then I will not go on Reddit. That's the armpit of the internet. Yeah, it's a bit of a cesspool.
Speaker 1:It's an interesting place, though Interesting place, all right. So we've oh we got to get out of here in 15 minutes. I want to touch on this other piece around, sure, going from VP, or going from founder to a VP in a company that acquired. You walk us through that journey of what you guys were building, what you scaled up to, why you chose the acquisition route, and then what that life was like after acquisition.
Speaker 2:Sure, yeah. So we, we worked on. My first company that I was at was email. Person is a software company, sass company, doing email Personalization.
Speaker 2:I would say it's like kind of at this point it was ahead of its time. There were not the generative AI tools that exist now. That probably would have made it a lot more successful. We're building everything in-house and we somebody approached us to acquire us when we are going out to raise a seed round and that was really like a bet on Owning. You know, the bet was like let's own a small piece of something big versus a big piece of something small. That that was kind of, at the end of the day, the decision that we made. We really liked the team, we really liked their vision and we felt like we could execute better within that kind of broader vision.
Speaker 2:I Would say the and we're a small you know we're just a handful of people Relatively small deal. But even at a small deal and the company that bought us was a relatively small company, maybe 20 or 30 employees it was still very difficult to integrate our technology into Not only just their tech stack but also like into their product strategy, and I Think I probably should have done a. In hindsight, I probably should have done a better job, maybe voicing my Opinion about what should happen and what shouldn't happen, and you know, hindsight is 20 20 of course, but I think that was probably one of the things there was.
Speaker 2:There was three to six months where Post acquisition that we weren't really using our technology that we had built and that they acquired us to buy.
Speaker 1:Yeah. To a spool capacity, and we should have done that were you able to just bolt it on with some apis, or did you have to fully integrate the codebase?
Speaker 2:We did fully integrate the codebase. So it was like it. You know technically complex situation. But I think even more, just beyond the technical side of things it was like is I think it was product kind of a cultural thing from the product team. Yeah, I did like it. I mean, after grinding for years, it's great to have a fat paycheck and have stability and not lose sleepover. You know little things. How long did you work on it before?
Speaker 1:the acquisition.
Speaker 2:It wasn't that long. I think it was just under two years, so it's not like I was working on it for 10 years or anything. But as you know, founder, life is tiring.
Speaker 1:Yeah, it's tiring for you and the people around you.
Speaker 2:Yes, exactly as my wife knows. Yeah, so I think that that was like you know, as anything in life, like there's pros and cons and I think losing kind of the vision it's kind of your baby or handing it over to somebody. That's kind of sad. It's also exciting because you're part of something bigger now and you get to be part of that bigger vision. Yeah, there's more resources and we did. I mean, in the first month when I joined, the first full month I was there we did a million dollars of revenue at the new company, so the product market fit like the, or at least from a marketing perspective, people wanted to buy.
Speaker 1:So you sold a million dollars in incremental revenue.
Speaker 2:Yeah, between me and Ben Sardella, who is the co-founder of. Outbound Works, which is the company that acquired ours? Yeah, which is a company called HEXA.
Speaker 1:In a month.
Speaker 2:Yeah, a million dollars in a month, it's a big month, it's wild. Yeah, between just me and.
Speaker 1:Ben yeah.
Speaker 2:So that was very interesting. I mean that was more of revenue than we had altogether at HEXA.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:I think then it was like okay, we have to deliver on this. We were still closing deals, you know, months after that. But you know, in the end we just like weren't able to fully deliver on the software that we were building. But I do think that it was like a good acquisition on both ends and I'm definitely like glad that we sold when we did you know? I think there could have been a bigger outcome, but I think it was still the right decision.
Speaker 1:Yeah, nice. What are your thoughts on email?
Speaker 2:personalization. I don't think it's nearly as effective as what I would call relevance. I think if you write a perfect email, spend 20 minutes researching and writing some email referencing mutual connections or where they went to college or whatever their hometown and the spot that you know in their hometown to eat a burger at like it's just not nearly as impactful as sending a relevant message that has actual business impact. So and again, like that's after building an email personalization tool for many years and we saw data like it could. It would increase reply rates for sure.
Speaker 2:I think that's probably the wrong metric to look at. I think you need you know pipeline and closed one deals and so not to say you shouldn't. You know personalize you can, you should as much as you can, but I would. The kick I'm on right now is what I call signal based selling, so reaching out to people based on signals, and I think these are typically business signals. So because you went to college with the same person went to the same college with the prospect, it doesn't really matter. That's not going to. If I'm selling a CRM like they don't care, that doesn't help them do their job better.
Speaker 2:But if they just bought, you know Marquetto and my CRM integrates with Marquetto now is a great time to go reach out to them, and so there's hundreds of these signals that are relevant for any business. I think that that is, to me, the most interesting opportunity in go to market right now is figuring out what are the signals that matter for your business, capturing those signals at scale with all these awesome tools that a lot of them are free, with AI, to be able to capture those signals and use these kind of autonomous agents and then generate an email.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I love it. Yeah, I'm seeing that a lot too. I think our big signals are somebody's just got promoted. In their first management role there was an acquisition. Now they're smashing two teams together or they're adding a layer of management, and where it was just VP and rep, now there's a director, somebody, somebody that's in the middle, and I can tell that story real well based on the signal, and I don't really care about the personal details of the individual because they don't care about that either. They're not thinking about oh wow, homecoming is coming up. They're like oh wow, we just acquired this company. I need to figure out how the sales team works. Exactly, exactly.
Speaker 2:Yeah, the example I give is like you know, a VC will reach out to me with a template and email, and I know it's a template, but the reality is like if I'm raising money right now, I'm going to take that conversation Right, and the inverse is also true.
Speaker 1:No, mark Andreessen, I will not respond to you because you didn't mention my favorite color, right yeah?
Speaker 2:And the inverse is true, right? So like somebody could write a personalized amazing email If I'm not in market for capital right now, like I just don't care.
Speaker 1:Yeah, you know, like maybe.
Speaker 2:I'll reply, but I'm not going to go take their money or have a start to kick off a sale.
Speaker 1:You know a fundraising fund, I'm not going to fly to San Francisco and meet with them, for yeah, I mean, I've got an attitude in life that I'll talk with anybody once.
Speaker 2:That's good. I think it's a good attitude to have and it's probably because I'm single.
Speaker 1:You have a one year old, so you might have a different attitude right now.
Speaker 2:Trying to cut meetings out of my life, not add meetings. I'm like I'll talk to anybody.
Speaker 1:There's people that I put in buckets. I'm like, if you're free after five on Friday, I'll talk to you for sure.
Speaker 2:Or.
Speaker 1:I'll look at their, at their personal life, and say it because there's there's a couple of people. They play chess. It was like play a game at chess. I'll talk to you about anything that's cool. Let's go. It's a good way to do it.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:I love it.
Speaker 2:Nice.
Speaker 1:I just love chess and pool and ping pong and the sales management podcast and startups. Brendan, we're out of time. This has been awesome, man. Anything that you want to plug, how can they reach out to you in groundswell?
Speaker 2:Yeah, follow us on LinkedIn, check us out Trygroundswellcom. Yeah, connect with me on LinkedIn, say what's up. Thanks for having me on the podcast. Man, enjoy jamming with you.
Speaker 1:Thanks for stopping by. If you want to see what we're working on at Coach CRM, check out coachcrmcom. We've got a free version, not just a free trial free version of coachcrmcom. I'm going to have to get groundswell integrated in there to check out who all of you are that I should be talking to first, but I won't bug you too fast. Check it out If you're concerned about your manager's ability to get the most out of their teams, or if you're a manager and you just want to upload all of your coaching skills. Also have that offer for the free coaching course freestuffatcoachcrmcom. I'm Corey Bray. This is the Sales Management Podcast. Like us, subscribe Apple Spotify. See you next time.