Chris Wallace, President of InnerView | Turning Employees Into Evangelists

The only podcast you need for your business, let's do this. Welcome to the sales versus marketing podcast, I'm your host Scott. Join me as we explore and demystify the latest trends, technologies and strategies used to achieve massive growth in 10X businesses. I'll be sitting down with sales, marketing and business leaders, dissect what's worked for them, dispel myths and deliver actionable insights that you can use to ensure repeatable, sustainable and predictable revenue in your business. Thank you for joining me on the sales versus marketing podcast, I'm your host Scott and today we are sitting down with the co-founder and president of interview group Christopher Wallace. Now Chris has a significant experience as an entrepreneur in the sales consulting and coaching space. He has more than 15 years of sales, marketing and corporate leadership. His primary focus right now is to help companies align order and strategies with daily execution. So they really want the alignment across the entire org. Chris applies his passions as a teacher and an author. He's taught as an adjunct MBA professor at Temple's Fox School of Business and he's been published in a variety of outlets, notably HBR Harvard Business Review Chief Marketer. He contributes to ink, he contributes to Forbes and he's just been like a powerhouse in the marketing and marketing and sales alignment in the B2C arena which I'm actually, I like that perspective a lot and I'm going to let Chris extrapolate on that because I think unfortunately a lot of the leaders that come on here speak just about B2B. So I think that the B2C perspective will be really good to add into like the whole gamut of marketing activities and sort of understanding and insight. So Chris, they can give us your 360, where you come from and what you're doing now. Yeah, I appreciate the opportunity to be on Scott. So you mentioned the B2C piece and why don't I kind of frame my background and experience kind of around that, essentially how I got started doing the consulting is I was doing work with a large telecommunications provider here in the States and they were launching a lot of new products and services through their call center channels, their direct sales channels through really all the front line customer facing employees that they had and what they found was they had all these great products and services and great potential for growth with these new revenue streams, but they just couldn't get the people out there who interacted with the customers every day to embrace any of them. They would launch these things, they'd invest a ton of money, they'd advertise a ton, and the successor failure of those products really was going to hinge upon whether or not their own people would gravitate toward the products and services and be willing to talk about them proactively. And when I started in that role that was kind of my first foray in the consulting, when I first started helping them out there, what I realized was the difference between B2C and B2B is the stakes are really high, the expenditures on the B2C side are enormous, right? Consumer brands are spending a fortune in marketing and advertising and if what they're saying through the marketing advertising isn't what's reflected when somebody calls in or walks into a retail store, you really have a problem with your brand. So when we think about interview, it's really the culmination of many years of experience where I've looked at these major consumer brands that I've worked with in the past and that's really my whole background is working with large consumer brands and now we find ourselves in a spot where these bets that they're making an advertising marketing just aren't being pulled through on the back end with their customer facing employees. I can think of like, I don't even know how many examples of the times that you've walked into the store in a shopping center for example and you know how much money that company's pumped into training and branding and just even like a look and feel to store like it's like millions, millions if not, but like the employees aren't evangelists, they don't care, they really just don't give a shit to be quite honest. Nine times out of 10, they just want to get out of there as quick as possible. So this is essentially the premise of interview. It's like that alignment between like the millions, the multi-million dollars marketing spend on the corporate end and then getting the buy-in from the actual employees. Yeah, you used the word evangelism and we look at it and say, you know, it's funny that it's really the consumer brands that have customers who are evangelists, right? You have, you know, customers who are passionate about the brands that they buy and very loyal to them and you see a couple of examples of consumer companies that have that down through their employee, you know, their employee basis, but not many, right? You always hear about the same ones, you hear about the Southwest, you hear about Subaru, you hear about, we just, we have our own podcast. We just recorded first episode of our second season with somebody from TD Bank, a Toronto-based, you know, company that does an excellent job with this, but you can really count them on one or two hands to consumer brands into a good job with this, but that idea of driving evangelism down at the front lines with the employees, you know, you've probably experienced people who really believe in the brand that they represent and believe in what they do each day. And companies just do a bad job of marketing to their own people to be honest with you. That's how we talk about it. They market to the customer and they try to change customer behavior, but the ways that they equip their employees really stops at just spreading information or providing them training. It doesn't go to that next level of really trying to drive the passion and the evangelism that you talked about. I love that. So companies don't do a good, I'm just taking notes as we chat because there's some good, there's some good one line I shall use for the social copy when we promote this later, but the marketing to your own employees, that's incredibly powerful and, you know, I could even go into details and I don't want to, I don't want to go into tangents, but about how companies don't even do that well in a B2B, so I have to be quite honest, but how do you, okay, so that's a huge question, but how do you do that? How do you, because there's probably a ton of steps and a ton of touch points and a ton of ways to do it effectively, but what is like starting very high level, then maybe you can go a little bit more granular about tactics? Yeah, yeah, so it's not that hard, right? We're very used to, when we have conversations with people, and again, the companies we do business with are major consumer brands, right? These are these are big companies, big publicly traded companies for the most part, and what happens is you start having a conversation with a marketing leader, and they start to get this look on their face, and we know the look, we sort of know the, we start to see the, okay, you're telling me something different, it sounds like I might need it, but it sounds hard and expensive, right? That's sort of the look we get, we get sort of that glazed over look of, you know, I've actually said to people, you've got the hard and expensive look on your face, and like, talk to me, like, help me through this, help me concept through this, and I'll start by saying that most organizations struggle with this because they look at the levers that they've had in place for years, probably for decades, right? We've got training, we've got, we've got our online portal, we've got our, you know, we've got our internet, right? We've got all these things that we use to try to keep our employees connected, but if you look at the common thread amongst all of those, it really is all about information, these are information vehicles, they, we've actually done research and found that companies, the way the companies are trying to drive alignment of their marketing message, really comes down to two things, product training and email, those are the two primary vehicles that they use to get information out to their people, and let's be honest, who's inspired by who was the last time you were inspired by product training or an email? And that's not that those things aren't exactly right? And it's especially in the B2B side, like that rarely happens, but when you think about what that creates is you've got a whole set of, you've got whole construct that companies use to try to drive this message down to their people and this, this concept down to their people, if who the brand is, but it really, it's not adequate to get people to the level of evangelism that the brands really need nowadays. So what we do is we come in and we give them a different construct, and what I'll do is I'll start by giving you the starting point of the way we do it. How do you run any good marketing campaign? You start by doing research, right? You do research, you find out what your customer wants, and what we've done at interview is we've developed a tool called the brand transfer study and the brand transfer score. And what we've been able to do is we've taken a market research vehicle and we've sort of repurposed it and re-engineered it for internal audiences. So think of it as every big company's got their employee engagement surveys and all that kind of stuff. This is not whether or not you like your workstation or you like your break room or anything like that. This is, do you believe in the products and services you represent? Where do you think your company excels? Where do you think it struggles? How do you compare to the competition? We are using market research. The differences we're asking the people talking to the customers, what they think rather than just asking the customer. And when you do that market research, is that because like one thing that a CMO would do, you said you're speaking to all these marketing leaders, like when they're reaching out to the customer, they're doing the research, you're developing a brand story and narrative is going to go to the customers. Is the narrative for the employees something that is slightly different than what goes out to the customers? Maybe just walk me through after all this research is done, what do they do next? Great question. Yeah, so to quote one of my clients, he told us one time, he pointed out of his office window, he goes, we do a great job of putting the marketing message on a billboard, but taking the story that's on that billboard and translating it for the people that are in a call center is something that we struggle with and most big brands do. So when you talk about what happens next, it really is a translation process. Most big, most consumer organizations take their, at best, they take their consumer marketing messages, their commercials, their POP displays, all that kind of stuff, and they make that available for their employees. So at best, you're seeing what the customer sees, but the thought process of what you want a customer to do and the thought process around what you want an employee to do are different, right? You know, I always talk, we always talk about an interview that marketing is trying to drive behavior change on a mass scale. That's what it is. It's trying to compel people to act in a new way in a different way. And what organizations need to do when they look at their own people is, well, you want to drive behavior change there too. You need to reach those audiences with messages that are relevant to them, that they care about, that are going to energize them. The research kind of points us in the right direction of, you know, give you an example. Well, this company's talking all about their warranty and how their warranty is something that it sets them apart in the marketplace. But the feedback from the employees is no, no, it's our styling or it's our color palette or whatever those features or benefits of the product might be. If the marketing team is telling one story to the customers and the people who represent the product internalize it a different way, you've got a real challenge. Yeah, no, agreed. So what are what are the ways that because usually, like HR is leading employee engagement and HR is responsible for managing, I guess, I don't know, the enthusiasm of the employees and whatnot. So I know that, you know, we're speaking before and one of the things that is really important is that marketing has to lead that. A traditional marketing leader probably has no idea what that means, how to do it. So how do you help them sort of understand that it's like you said, it's hard and expensive. How do you remove the hard and potentially be expensive? I don't know if you can remove that. But yeah, you certainly can't. I mean, the reality is you can. I mean, the way that they're doing it now is hard and expensive and it doesn't get results. I mean, it doesn't get the results that they want. So how do you prepare them? So to be honest with you, so I'll give you a little context. We've done, we're about to publish our second research study with a market research and technology from called focus vision. And in the work that we've done with focus vision, my co-authors, Zoe Dowling and I have really tried to understand the perspective in the corporate marketing suite and also the perspective of the frontline employees. And what we found through that research is the marketing teams believe that these people out talking to customers every day are critical to the success of their marketing plan. They believe they're critical. Yet the people down at the end of the line, the people talking to the customers, don't see marketing as an influencer of their day, their day-to-day at all. Marketing is way down the list of people within their organization that they see as impacting their execution on a day-to-day basis. And that's a challenge. That's a challenge. Marketing needs to step out from behind all these other business partners that they've been relying on that frankly are letting them down. Marketing's the group that has all the money. Marketing's the one that's spending, you know from your background and medium things like that. The investments are huge that these brands are making to try to reach their audiences yet to leave the moment of truth that customer interaction, that point of customer contact to an HR department or to their training team. Nobody believes those things are delivering the results that they want. Yet they just sort of continue to rely on it and do the handoff to these other departments. You know what we're encouraging marketers to do is step up and say listen. You know how to do this better than anybody. We talk about marketing your employees. The fact is, not only is it not hard, it's the skill set that they have, right? Understand your audience, listen to your audience, develop messaging that's going to reach them. And oh, by the way, use some creativity. Organizations lack creativity when it comes to getting messages and directives and trying to drive behavior change in their own people. I'll give you an example. We work with a major manufacturing brand in the home goods space and we shifted them from doing product webinars that took their 500 person sales force and chained them to their desks where they don't want to be. And we created a podcast series whereby now they're delivering messages to their sales reps as they drive from appointment to appointment and they're delivering content almost in an on-demand way. They're gathering feedback on what people want to hear about and then the executives are responding to their teams. That's what marketing does. You listen to your audience and you respond and you give them the messages that they want and they're going to resonate. Again, it's not that hard. It just requires a different way of looking at it. And when you're selling the concept to the heads of marketing, do you have like tangible, I guess, KPIs that you see customer sentiment changing, ROI on initiatives campaigns, whatever that is? Yeah. Everything we do, so when you talk about the expensive part, that's where you get into the expensive part. Again, it's not more expensive than what they're doing because we work with a retail bank and when people don't understand or aren't properly trained on a new product, what do they do? They pull people off of the branch floors. They put them through all sorts of training, which costs a tremendous amount of money in lost time. What we do is we look at every single engagement that we do, we are maniacal about focusing on what their KPIs are. We want to know their KPIs up front. We learn it in the sales and discovery process because we want to be focused on driving KPIs, not soft metrics. The reason why we typically don't work with an HR department, actually, almost never work with an HR department, because we're not the traditional employee engagement where it's going to come through in things like employee satisfaction scores and things like that. We want to measure close rates, we want to measure attach rates, we want to measure average revenue per sale, average revenue per order, whatever those tangible metrics are, we are telling marketers. If you spend all this money to reach your audience and they show up, we're going to make sure we call marketing insurance. We're insurance on the backend that somebody is going to convert to a sale at a much higher clip if you back up your bet by investing in your people who talk to them. Pretty much any metric that you can throw out, every organization has their own set. We just sent a CMO yesterday, a data analysis from a pilot that we did. They're in the pest control space, major pest control brand. We looked at metrics and recurring revenue growth, cancel rates, customer satisfaction, and employee retention rates. Those are the things that we see. They happen to be up in all four of those categories over their control group. We really do see a big tangible payoff for businesses. I was going to say one thing that I could see being a huge benefit of this kind of internal marketing would be that employee retention, because I don't know if you have any thoughts on that, but I can assume that I've worked as an individual contributor before and feeling like you're out on your own is the reason why you start making up these pitches that may not align with marketing. It's a great point. When you feel like you're out on your own, you start making things up. When you were talking about the initial conversations we have with marketers, the question that we always ask is our straight to the heart question is, how confident are you that the people who represent your brand can tell your brand story consistently? How confident are you? How confident are you that the people out there who wear your logo on their chest or on their hat are telling the story the way that you built it? When you ask them that they start to get a little uneasy, we typically get some combination of laughter or cringes, one of the two, but to your point, people start making up their own stories and they're trying to tread water out there. I really want to demystify this. It's really not that hard. What we do is we make it fun to represent the brand. We remind them of what makes the brand great. We remind them of what sets the brand apart and it's the difference between telling them what to say and selling the story back to them. We sell the story back to the employees and that's what we promised that CMO we would do. I'm going to take your brand, I'm going to find out what your people love about it and I'm going to build, we're going to build a campaign and sell it back to them. If they believe in what they represent, the way that they deliver for their customers, it's just going to come through so naturally, but it's not through things like workplace satisfaction. That sort of comes through this whole process. We look at it as a top down, not a bottom up. We look at it as help them serve their customers better and give them more satisfaction serving their customers and the satisfaction with their job is going to come. Well, I think that everything you're saying makes sense and I would take it a step further. The biggest issue, and this is doubling down on what you just mentioned, so bear with me. But the CEO is the largest evangelist for the brand and the biggest issue that that CEO has is a company grows. Obviously, if you're public, you're enormous is taking that enthusiasm and the passion that you have and then keeping that going throughout the evangelistic piece. I think that this is almost like a process, a codified way of taking that passion and energizing or reigniting the workforce, but not just at-haw. Not just through the once-a-year sales rally that gets everybody all psyched up and then they go home, fly home, and then nobody cares anymore. It's like a constant touch point, which is again, it's like that. It's how would you market to a customer? Well, you're not just going to have a once-a-year rally and then not talk to them for the next 11 months, you're going to have all these touch points constantly reinforcing the messaging and whatnot, so that makes perfect sense to me. Scott, we're always amazed when we talk to marketing leaders that when we start describing the philosophy behind what we do, that they're surprised. They see it as novel and they see it as a breath of fresh air across all the industries that we work and they see it as a breath of fresh air, but we scratch our head sometimes and say, why haven't you thought of this? You know how to reach customers. You know how to compel people to act. You have all of this know how radiate your fingertips. It's just this idea that people never thought to apply it to this audience, but I'm going to give you a great, we get asked all the time, who's the best example you've seen? And I'm going to give you an example that is quite literally very close to home for you. The folks at Rogers Cable up in Toronto, okay? They have a program that they a team inside Rogers inside the marketing department called Voice of the Frontlines, and they have a team that essentially has institutionalized feedback from their frontline teams. They are gathering, they have a KPI dashboard that they gather weekly. They measure what their employees across all their customer facing roles, think of their products and services, the challenges they're having, the successes they're having, and they provide that dashboard to each one of the channel leaders inside the organization. They have a pulse check of what their people think of their brand and their products pretty much at all times. They have institutionalized this idea of frontline feedback is business intelligence, and for big organizations, they're so used to mining data, and they've got data coming out their ears, but nobody has really stopped and measured that frontline feedback the way that we're seeing the folks at Rogers do it. And like to your point, they've institutionalized it, and it becomes an ongoing thing. It's not a one in done campaign or an event. This becomes something that they're committed to. They have a team that commits to it, and not only does it give you that great bond with their people, but they unearth all sorts of great ideas, right? The thought that the best ideas reside at corporate is completely flawed, especially in B2C, and really in most businesses. But we look at what they're doing at Rogers, and we salute them, and we wrote an article for HBR and Harvard Business Reviews blog recently where we featured the work that Rogers is doing, and it's just a great example of somebody who's thinking ahead. So let me ask you this, because this all makes sense. Like you said, I'm sure when you go to CMOS, they have this a-ha moment. Why the hell am I not doing this myself? But why do you think that you named a couple, you named TD, you named Rogers? There's a couple large companies in the States, but it doesn't seem like this is a very common concept. And I don't know if you have other competition in your space. I don't know if you have other competitors. There must be some- I've never heard of a firm that does this. It makes sense, but I never heard of a firm that does this type of like internal employee marketing. So why? Why is this not a thing? Do you have any idea as to why? It's not a focus. So, you know, typically the question I get asked is why do companies struggle with this or why haven't they sort of caught on? Listen, I think that, you know, in big organizations, a lot of times people get forced to sort of work with the construct that they have, right? It's, well, I got a training department. What am I going to do? Not use my training department, right? And I'm not going to, you know, do a handoff to them and expect them to, you know, to do the job that they do. But, you know, let's be honest, the typical corporate training organization is not equipped to engage employees in the dynamic way that marketing departments engage their consumers, okay? I want to, I want to, I want to repeat that point because I think that really cuts the harder your question. Yeah. Internal mechanisms are not designed to support their people in the same dynamic way that marketers are engaging their customers. You think about how quickly the marketing story is changing. Again, we have research on this. How quickly you're introducing new campaigns, new brand positioning, new products and services that the companies, the marketers we talk to are introducing new products and services, at least half of them are introducing new products and services on a quarterly basis, okay? So think about that. 75% are introducing new packaging and pricing options on a quarterly basis. The go-to-market strategies changing constantly. But the mechanisms that organizations have to to equip their people to get aligned to that, to those shifts, it's just not there. So ultimately it comes down to, if you want breakthrough results, you can't do things the same way that you always have. And the idea of, well, I've got my, you know, I've got my hand off. I'm going to do my hand off to marketing, from marketing to training. I'm going to do my throw it over the wall. You talk about sales versus marketing. Marketing's going to take it and throw it over the wall to sales and it becomes their problem. We just look at as marketers need to accept that with how much they spend to build their brands up, that they need to reach down closer to that customer conversation and just exert more influence. I love it. I really do love the concept. And I'm learning a lot of insights as to what the reality is. And I'm not so surprised to be quite honest, but it is kind of upsetting that more companies don't take this closer to heart. And I think that, you know, this is a great niche to double down on. And this is how you're setting it up and how you're codifying it and building up their process for CMOs. I think that you're doing, of course, it's nice to run a successful business, but you're doing a lot of good for a lot of employees by allowing them to have access to the information to just to have the comfort of knowing that they have that support system in place. And I think that, you know, let's face it like, well, before this entire pandemic that we're sort of living through right now, the whole, the job market was that it's, you know, there was no unemployment, virtually no unemployment, lowest unemployment levels in years and people were jumping jobs back and forth, especially sales. If you look at the average 10 year of a sales rep, it's like a year at most. So all these things sort of, not just the customer, not just the customer experience, not just like the product, knowledge, and evangelism, like even like you mentioned, employee retention, there's so many things that companies are missing by not focusing on their own, which I think is you're highlighting and that's, that's really, really important. So I mean, back to your question about, you know, competition, why it's taking companies, you know, longer to catch on, you know, 20, 25 years ago, somebody who was in a public relations department went to their boss and said, I think we should have an internal communications department. And somebody in the boss said, what are you talking about? You mean like PR for our employees? And they said, yeah, yeah, yeah, like keep them informed, let them know everything that's going on. And somehow internal comms became, became a thing. You know, we really look at it as what what internal comms sort of was to the PR function. We think that, you know, what we're doing can be to the marketing function. And again, we keep hearing about it. Brands need to differentiate themselves in different, you know, in new ways and compelling ways. And you know, we talk about, you know, this idea of internal marketing and sort of marketing to your employees as sort of that next frontier for marketers, just like it was for, you know, PR and communications folks 20 years ago. Very good. Now what I do want to do, I want to ask a couple questions because obviously you built this company out and even successful. So I don't want to pivot off of what interview is doing until I just want to give you the floor and say, is there anything that you wanted to cover that we didn't like touch on for interview? No, no, I've enjoyed the discussion and being able to share kind of how, you know, how what we do relates in this idea of the sales versus marketing. I think it's worth noting that every single, this might surprise you, okay? But every single person that works for my company has been in sales probably for the majority of their career. We're all sales people at heart. We all, we've all carried a bag from, from media and telecommunications to, to consumer flooring to a variety of other, a variety of other products and services. We all come from the sales background and, you know, we jokingly say we're like the sales whispers for the marketers because we really understand what it's like out there. We understand what it's like to go call on, you know, small independent businesses. We know what it's like to call on major corporations and we know what it's like to, like you said, the, you know, feeling like you're on an island and making the story up yourself and we just think that there's a way to build that connection. But that's just one tidbit about us as an organization that we really do bring, you know, sort of a marketing understanding and a marketing sensibility, but with a true sales background. I like the sales whisper analogy that's, it makes a lot of sense. Market sales people, they don't, they don't get sales people. Well, that's why I think, you know, the whole premise of this podcast is to bring on leaders from both sides of the fence and hopefully it will help provide some insight as to the struggles at each one faces because, you know, like you said, companies have to modernize and in 2020, if you don't have sales and marketing alignment or at least communication, I think, you know, you're dead in the water. And yeah, so, so, you know, this is, this is, this is obviously like a, this is what you do now as like an entrepreneur, I guess, that's the best way to put it. So how did you find like pivoting and building out your own, your own company? Was that difficult for you transitioning from like working or like, how was that? Just walk us through like, what led you here? Like the sum of the struggles that you came along the way, because I like to hear your story too. Yeah, sure. You know, it's people that have successful businesses, it's not every day, right? It takes a lot of effort and struggle and stress and gray hairs to get here. So, well, I mean, I always jokingly say that I'm sort of an accidental entrepreneur in the sense that, you know, I took, you know, I kind of went through an uncertain period in my career where organization that I worked for was going through a major merger and that was going to cause, you know, my family and I had to have to move if I wanted to stay in my role and, you know, we weren't in a spot where we wanted to move. We live in the greater Philadelphia area. We love it here. We just had our first child and we wanted to stick it out in Philadelphia. And I ended up leaving a full-time role, you know, by choice and took a contract role, took a 10, 99 sort of, you know, individual contractor role with, you know, large organization here in Philadelphia. And ended up in a spot where I got in, you know, kind of going back to the original, you know, original premise of how the business started, which is looking, you know, going out and talking to people in front-line channels, right? Call centers and retail stores and people that believe it or not door to door is still a thing. There's still a lot of people in this country, you know, in North America that are out knocking on doors for telecom, wireless energy, a lot of different products and services. That was one of my first jobs was the door-to-door lawneration. Yeah, yeah, exactly. Yeah, lawn home improvement, all those businesses. So we, you know, we were out, you know, working with people in those channels and what we found was this is so key. When we talk about, it sounds expensive and hard. It's not that hard if you're willing to do one thing first and that's ask before you tell. If you're willing to ask these employees what their perspective is and what they think before you start telling them what to do, it's no different than a customer. You don't train a customer to love your brand. You don't train a customer to love your products. You don't just dump information on them. You find that emotional connection and a big way to do that is to find out what they think first. And that's a lot of what we started doing was asking people what they thought and in gathering their insights and their opinions and spreading those throughout the organization, we were able to get traction really quickly. But kind of as that leads back to me as an entrepreneur, I just became enamored with this idea. You talked about the fact that we get to help a lot of employees. I'm going to be honest and say that's why we do this, right? We see people who are making $14 an hour that learn how this new product or service that they have to offer really benefits the customer and they get behind it. The next thing they know, they've got an extra $250 under paycheck at the end of the month, which is meaningful for them. We've seen that happen. We have all the emails collected of these stories we get from frontline employees talking about the personal breakthroughs that they've had. And that's a big reason why we do it. But in terms of my journey as an entrepreneur, early on when you're starting out, you're just learning as you go, right? You're filing that for the LLC paperwork, you're setting up bank accounts, you're just figuring out all this stuff. But we had the opportunity a few years ago to sell the original business that we built and merge that with another company and go through the ups and downs of that process. My partner and I stayed for a period of time and decided that was not the long-term place for us. We left and branched out and took everything we had learned over the seven years that we had been doing this together. We just come back to this idea of marketers spend so much money. And the old adage is everyone is in sales, but we always talk what everyone is in marketing. For these consumer brands, you are the face of your brand every single touch point with that customer. And that idea of bringing the marketers and those frontline teams closer together, we just thought was too big of a gap in the marketplace not to go after. I love it. Would you do it again? Would you go through all of this again? I mean, I chose to go through it again, not that long ago. It's over two years. We had a choice. My partner and I sat there in a couple of weeks where we looked at each other with some blank stairs and whiteboard markers in our hands and trying to figure out what to do next. And there was the talk over do we go get jobs? Do we start again? But really what it came down to was our clients came back to us and said, we don't get this from anybody else. You are niche. And they were very transparent and said, we're big companies with a lot of options, but we don't get quite the same service from anybody else that we get from you. We want to keep working with you and they really motivated us to start again. And I'm never going back. If that answers your question, I'm never going back. It does. It does. Because I always get mixed answers to that question. Never go back. Yes, I'm very successful people that would say, no, never again. But then I think that that's good. No, I appreciate that. One lesson that you've learned over the course of your career that you would tell you if you're 20-year-old self in terms of business, professional development, what would that be? I could tell my 20-year-old self. I get asked some variations on that question fairly often. I love that question. That's why. It's a great question. I think really what I would say is you have to decide, always be evaluating what offer you bring and the difference between, when you ask if I would do the entrepreneurial thing again, the first thing I learned as an entrepreneur is that you have to demonstrate your value every day. The stakes are high every day. There's no guaranteed paycheck. You have to constantly be showing the value that you deliver. Being honest with yourself about the, I talk a lot about understanding what the thing is that you would do for free. What would you do for free? What superpower would you give to the world? If you weren't doing it, you'd be robbing the world of asking yourself that in an earlier age. It's going to evolve and it's going to change. It's keeping yourself grounded in that idea of I love to do this and as long as I love it and I would be willing to do it for free. I'm going to be able to find ways to deliver value to whether it's an employer or as an entrepreneur. You talk about a lot of tech CEOs, young people, and startup spaces that they don't make money for years but they would continue to do it because they truly believe in what they're doing. It doesn't matter whether you're an entrepreneur or not really being grounded in what it is that you truly love to do and where you bring value. Whether it's as a business or an individual is just so key and you constantly have to be looking at that nurturing and re-examining them. I love that. I've never heard that answer before but that's a really good answer. It's a really, really good answer. One, okay, so not one but a source that you have learned from, it could be a mentor, a book, a podcast, an audible. It could be a few but I try and sort of like keeping this top of mind that somebody who's listening right now can go out and consume some of that. What would be your go-to? Man, so I'm going to say that I'm going to give you a little bit of an unconventional answer. I don't have a guru, so to speak. I love Seth Goden, Seth Goden is the closest thing to a guru that I have and he always seems to have his blog post, so he seemed to speak to me in the moment. I'm still trying to get him on. He's the best, but I love his stuff. It's so good. It always speaks right to me but I would say I've been very fortunate that over the years I have had the opportunity to from a leadership perspective. I'm going to talk specifically from a leadership perspective. I've worked for, I've worked in environments where I've had the opportunity to see both sides of the coin. Examples of what to do and examples of what not to do. I think over the years I've done a really good job of understanding at a young age the not to do. Seeing people and it's just not feeling right. It's just not feeling right to see the vibe of an office or the morale or that you'll say something and be like, I don't think you can say that. It just never felt right in having that compass. I've been very fortunate and blessed to work in some organizations that gave me a lot of opportunity and a lot of responsibility to very young age. In doing so, I really got to see the good in the bad and I got to file the good away and I got to file the bad away and those two things really shaped me. I think it's really just a heads up. I've always been a sponge for what I see happening around me and having my head up and finding those inflection points and saying that's a moment that if I were in that situation I would have done it the exact same way or I would have done it differently and sort of cataloging those over the years. That's really helped shape me a lot. I read a lot obviously and things like that but I can't trace it back to one book that really changed my life. That's also the answer. You're unconventional and some of the answers but that's very very valuable because being able to have be that sponge in an environment and understanding and taking that well that's experience right that's truly being able to understand your environment and take that and really just map out your own professional self from the experiences and the insights and I think that I always speak about like if you make a mistake and you don't learn from it but it's also learning from mistakes of others. That's always been my path personally and professionally but giving an example last night no it's been challenging week for all of us I think with everything that's going on and my wife and I after a long week we flipped on the TV and office space was on the movie office space. I laughed just as hard today at that movie as I did you know 20 years ago when it came out but you know we've all had the Bill Lumbergs right in our career the people who the boss is who you know did things you know a different way but to really recognize it and internalize it and say when it's my when I have the shot when it's my opportunity I'm going to do it a little bit differently I think is you know something that everybody should should take advantage of not just be frustrated but really find the the good they can take away from it I love it that's all I got is there anything else that you wanted to bring up but that was that was really good I enjoyed the chat thank you so much I did as well Scott it's been a good discussion how do we how do we get in touch with you LinkedIn email website where do they go yeah so a company website is interviewgroup.com I want to be clear it's inner as an i-n-n-e-r-v-i-e-w group.com as far as LinkedIn very active on LinkedIn you can find a Chris Wallace in the Philadelphia area now I want to I want to warn you there are a lot of Chris Wallace's okay I do not you know I had some unconventional answers but I do not have an unconventional name so so just searching Chris Wallace is going to come up with a lot of different Google's Google results including the notorious BIG whom I share a name with but I'm not a bad person to share a name with Chris Wallace in Philadelphia with interview group and again it's i-n-e-r-v-i-e-w an email is cwallis at interviewgroup.com perfect thank you so much man so this has been another episode of the sales versus marketing podcast as always if you haven't already please like subscribe and share with any friends family peers colleagues that could benefit from sales or marketing advice if you haven't already please leave a rating any rating is fine as long as it is a five-star rating and you can catch this podcast wherever you can download podcasts stream podcasts and you can also view it on youtube as always have a great week have a productive week and we'll speak again soon bye now thanks for listening to the sales versus marketing podcast brought to you by ROI overload delivering strategy technology and insights to both sales and marketing leaders and teams cool oh boy