SPEAKER_00 0:19

Hey everybody, welcome to another episode of Your Intention Matters the Podcast. Thank you very much for being here. My name is Palmad. Today we have Brent Haldeman, owner operator of GTM Dart Velocity Sales coming to us from the Mile High, Denver. Brand, go Broncos, right?

SPEAKER_01 0:35

Heck yeah. Let's go, Broncos. Um, we are a team sport uh state here in Colorado. Everything from the Avalanche, which I know that you're in Canada, so you might not like us so much.

SPEAKER_00 0:47

No, I love the Aves. McKinnon. I love McKinnon.

SPEAKER_01 0:51

Yeah, we're going on a nice run this year. So we just swept. Um, we also have the nuggets. So yeah, we're a little bit of a sports area of expertise here.

SPEAKER_00 1:01

Nice. Well, nice to have you on the podcast. Thanks for making the time. Uh, provide a quick intro, if you would.

SPEAKER_01 1:06

Yeah, absolutely. Appreciate that, Paul. Um, my name's Brent. Um, I like to say I've been uh in sales my entire career. I've been uh competing against one thing the entire time I've been in sales. I like to call that status quo, traditional ways of doing things. Um, and what we do here um as far as GTM Dart, and and what I do is I'm the head and owner operator of GTM Dart, as you mentioned. We focus on one core problem predictable pipeline. Um, we realize that most teams kind of chase activity and not outcomes. Um, that's why I built GTM Dart to bring precision and then um conversions, quality, and and real revenue discipline into outbound, using that kind of experience from competing against status quo my entire career to execute that.

SPEAKER_00 2:01

So, Brent, how did you get into sales from ASU? Because I'm sure that's not what you went into school for.

SPEAKER_01 2:08

No, I actually played soccer um for ASU and a little bit in in high school, I was really good at my extracurrent activities versus what was going on at school. Um, if you've ever been to uh Scottsdale, Arizona or Tempe, you kind of know what I'm talking about. It's a lot of fun, sometimes too much fun. Um, so I was always kind of good with the gift of gab. My first real sales job was actually selling coupon books door to door from my soccer team to raise money. And uh yeah, I remember that pitch to this day, funny enough. But we were very successful. Um, and I just had a knack for kind of finding the pitch. From there, I just fell in love with sales. I moved to Colorado and started with a marketing company and building um teams and actually was a junior partner at a marketing company. There you go. That's how I got started.

SPEAKER_00 3:06

Gotcha. You know, I appreciate your comment regarding the coupon sales because I'm old enough to remember them as well. So yeah, exactly. That was everybody's thing. Some of the audience is not, I might have to Google what we're talking about here, but that's all right. Yeah, and so you know, Brent, again, thanks for being here. You know, as we were talking about uh the podcast and uh getting grounded before I hit record, and we're talking about sales and sales training and so on. And so I have a belief when it comes to overachieving in the world of sales, it takes a strong mindset. Like it just does, in that uh an organization can provide their salespeople with every tool and the toolkit to go dominate. They can give them product training and systems training and competitive intel and marketing collaterals, and they can give them inbound leads, but if they don't have the right mindset going into it, in my opinion, they're not likely to get the results they're looking for because it can't just be the tactics. And I'd love your thoughts on that as well.

SPEAKER_01 4:05

Yeah, I love that take on it. If you for me, mindset's about control. I don't know if you take that at all. Um, controlling the inputs, controlling the standards, controlling yourself, not letting short-term kind of noise dictate things. Um, so when I talk about mindset, I I talk about it like a motivation um in this sense, right? It's your ability to operate with clarity when revolt results aren't always there. That's kind of the mindset you have to have. So I have the mindset of just really the authority in the room, is kind of the way I look at it in the sense. I'm doing them a favor because I've done the research. I know that this is important. That's my mindset. Uh, I'm I know I'm gonna get rejection, I know I'm gonna get ambiguity, um, delayed feedback, but my mindset is anchored around control, knowing things. I know that there's a law of average I must maintain. I know that I have to have that positive mental attitude, but that really lies in my motivation. My motivation is solving problems for people and connecting. So that's how I really try and operate. Uh, my mindset is just showing up with purpose. And especially with outbound, you're dealing with some pretty tough things, right? Yeah. And, you know, hopefully you get to have some confidence when you get to understand the science of things, like the law of average and how to overcome some of these things.

SPEAKER_00 5:43

Brad, how long has it been since you've been working since college? When did you graduate? Ooh, 2001.

SPEAKER_01 5:50

So I cut all the gray hair off so you can't see it.

SPEAKER_00 5:54

So 20, 25 years now, we've kind of been in this uh this work mode, so to speak, post-college, post-education, and so on. Yeah. And so if you think if you think about your various careers over the past 25 years, anything pop out in terms of a situation that required you to dig in mentally from that perspective?

SPEAKER_01 6:14

All the time, right? There's failures around every corner. So, you know, I think it's I can use even an organization based in Canada that I recently worked with, um, where I came in, they're a traditional Rolodex company. They didn't really have any automation, they didn't have any outbound process, they didn't have it, and they were slowing down all over the place. And it was really just um starting to understand back in the day what really got things across the finish line. And that was a lot of hard work, right? Not waiting for things to come to me. Um, so understanding the outcomes first. How do we get to an outcome? We execute. So let's just take an even further step back. Creating um really scalable team with a repeatable process. That is something that they just didn't have. So took a step back, sat in the sales seat as a player coach with the entire team. Starting with picking up the phone, making calls with the team, building out new value propositions that are pain-led with the challenger-led approach, doing reframing, using chat to help us speed up some of these processes, relearning and rewiring some of these SDRs and mid-market reps' brains. So, really, what I did is become a student again. Um, and let everybody follow along with me as I was learning my process. Sitting in that seat and doing it with discipline and not over-reaction and understanding. Guess what? A few months later, everybody hit their quota. We actually doubled in pipeline. We hired two new AEs and we actually started selling to our ICP. We slowed down our discovery process, asked better questions. Right now, um, that organization is on pace to have their best year since the last 10 years.

SPEAKER_00 8:12

Congratulations. Yeah. Brent, I'm curious about your your decision to start uh GTM as an example. So, you know, my background in sales is uh I gained my pedigree at Xerox.

SPEAKER_01 8:30

Yeah, I loved it.

SPEAKER_00 8:31

And and I worked for Xerox for about 10 years, and I was in kind of sales across the board sales rep, product specialist, sales manager, production specialist, and so on. I was in sales training as well there for about a three-year stint and so on. And when I left Xerox, nobody was kicking, nobody was kicking me out the door. But I just kind of I kind of had an itch for enablement and training and coaching and learning and development. And even though I had done that job internally, I didn't want to keep doing that. I wanted to kind of push myself and get out there on my own. So when I left, that's what I decided to do. But at the time, I was in my mid-30s, single, no relationship, no kids. Not to say that it was easy, but compared to where I am today, married, two kids, uh like a different responsibility. It was an easier choice for me, but it was one that took me a while to kind of get to. It took me almost a year before I let go of that kind of corporate America brand, so to speak. And I'm curious about your decision to kind of start your own business as well. What prompted that? What was the driver?

SPEAKER_01 9:33

Yeah, I love that story. Um, and your you know, fearlessness to go get it. So nice work.

SPEAKER_00 9:40

Thank you.

SPEAKER_01 9:40

Mine was not that in any way. Mine was actually, I got my dream job about five years ago. My dream job was a company called We Love No Code, it's a low-code no code technology company that builds applications inside a bubble. That's a lot of words. Um, but most importantly, it was a marketplace to build and scale applications that sat inside of a small country we all definitely have heard of now, which is called Ukraine. Unfortunately, there was a war that started, and I actually brought in all of my favorite people from my career, my best account executives, my best marketing people to join me out. We love no code. Well, that all literally and figuratively blew up in my face. I was lucky that um Toppdol bought that company, but I had a bunch of things in my hands, in a sense. Um, and those things that I had in my hands were my people. And um, I just took them from organizations and promised them, you know, um, the moon at my new place. So I felt really obligated to my people. So I started GTM Dart so I can give them a place to go. Um, I started working with some of the partners that we created, uh, We Love No Code. I started giving my account executives roles and opportunities inside of that. And then I started to reflect on the first time I really failed at something at a job, and that was at a company called Full Contact. I had a big marine as my boss. And uh the day I started, he handed me a black baseball bat and he said, Here's your first 90 days. I need you to go break down the door of a bunch of companies and close $100,000 in business. Here you go. Here's your bat in your your uh computer. He didn't give me any direction, he didn't give me any training, he didn't give me any wherewithal, didn't tell me where to go, who to call, or tell me about the product that I was about to go sell. And I never wanted to be in that position again. So I created GTM Dart to do enablement, to do training, to do Outbound the right way with pain-led statements, to help my people, and to really cut through the noise of these agencies that are out there that talk about delivering top funnel revenue, that they really just deliver noise.

SPEAKER_00 12:08

How long did that take, if you recall, from your from your from your mental decision of I gotta do something different to it actually happening?

SPEAKER_01 12:16

A lot of iterations, lots. I would say like two years worth of hard work, understanding what the market really wanted to, but also trying to get um the repeatable process in place for what works. Because if you talk about embedding or outsourcing or you know bringing in a consultant, immediately your cackles kind of go up, right? If you're a business owner, because you feel like you're giving something away, and then you don't want to be a disruptor inside of that organization either. So there's all these misnotions, and then every story I have is a CEO, a founder, a sales leader being burned by the last person. So, how do I overcome all of this negativity and then build this? So there's lots to do, and took about two years to get it right. Luckily for me, I was successful in the first few, but um, I can confidently say now that we have one of the best solutions in this market.

SPEAKER_00 13:20

Well, congrats on sticking it through because uh I'm not putting words in your mouth, I hope, here, but I gotta believe at some point along the way there might have been some doubts during those two years where it was not such a yellow brick road the entire way, right?

SPEAKER_01 13:33

Yeah, I think we've all been in those places where doubts creep in. Um, and I had to go back to my mentality, which is what are my law of averages? What am I missing? Am I working hard enough? Because honestly, I think we can all ask ourselves or tell ourselves that we're working hard, but we can always work a little bit harder. We can always do a little bit more, and that's really where I found the fun at pushing myself, solving a bit harder problems, getting really bigger logos, um, and creating some really fun partnerships with some of the biggest B2B organizations and G2 members on the planet. So it's been really fun.

SPEAKER_00 14:16

Well, you know, congrats on all your success to this point. Uh, as we as we are getting to learn here, is obviously was not just the easiest road of no hiccups or or pivots along the way. And so congrats on all your success. You know, Brent, I always like to close the podcast giving you an opportunity as you think about your your career and your life over the past 25 years in in business post-college and so on. You know, anything come to mind regarding a best practice or a thought or an approach that has served you well over the years?

SPEAKER_01 14:47

Yeah, I was great question. Um I think the biggest thing for me that served me is separating effort from outcomes in the hard stuff. Building systems around inputs. So, you know, understanding what your goals are from the start, and then understanding how we're gonna get clarity to get to that goal, and also knowing that we need to take it one step at a time, precision and then consistency always followed by execution. So keeping my routine tight, early mornings, focus work, less noise, and just being really disciplined. I think that's gonna be the biggest differentiator for anybody. If you're not disciplined in this, it's gonna be tough.

SPEAKER_00 15:45

I love it. Productive, not just busy.

SPEAKER_01 15:48

Always, right? I actually say that almost daily, right? Like, what can I do today to be productive? Because everybody with all the tools that are out there right now, all the AI, everything is noise until you understand it better. So that's where we're at.

SPEAKER_00 16:05

Well said, Brett, thanks so much for being here.

SPEAKER_01 16:08

Yeah, absolutely, Paul. I really appreciate it, and thanks for taking the time and giving me the opportunity.

SPEAKER_00 16:13

Absolutely. Thanks again for being here. All right, everybody, we're gonna wrap up this episode right now. Remember, your intention matters. Why? Because that's the result you'll tend to get. We'll see you on the next episode.