Jake Dunlap, CEO & Founder of Skaled | Cold Calling, Side Hustles & Terrible Marketing

Welcome to Success Story, the most useful podcast in the world. I'm your host, Scott DeClery. The Success Story podcast is part of the HubSpot podcast network. The HubSpot podcast network has incredible podcasts like the Salesman podcast hosted by Will Barron. Now, if you work in sales, you want to learn how to sell or you want to peek at some of the latest sales news and insights, you need to listen to the Salesman podcast. The host Will Barron helps sales professionals learn how to find buyers and win big business in effective and ethical ways. If you think any of the following topics resonate with you, you're going to love the show. How to find and close your dream job in sales, 12 essential principles of selling, digital body language, how to have better zoom sales meetings or how to tell a remarkable sales story. If these are topics that would interest you, go check out the Salesman podcast wherever you get your podcasts or at HubSpot.com slash podcast network. Today, my guest is Jake Dunlap. Jake is the CEO and founder of Scaled. They work with some of the largest organizations in the world by optimizing their sales processes, people technology with customized repeatable and sustainable strategies that can help them drive revenue. Prior to Scaled, Jake headed sales and customer success for chartbeat in the first nine months of his tenure at chartbeat, he grew annual bookings by more than 300% year over year and doubled monthly recurring revenue. Before that, he was VP of sales at Glassdoor where he expanded the department from one to 40 employees and grew direct revenue from $0 to nearly $1 million in monthly recurring revenue. Since launching Scaled in 2013, he's been a sought after industry thought leader. He's been quoted by Forbes, Inc. and Huffington Post on all things sales and revenue. We spoke about sales. We spoke about his background, how sales has changed from when he first started in sales to a modern selling environment. We spoke about sales tech. We spoke about the modern sales organization. We spoke about why sales is no longer about relationship building. We spoke about activity tracking and performance optimization for sales teams. We spoke about whether or not cold calling is still effective in 2022. We spoke about building a brand. We spoke about side hustles. We spoke about the difference between inbound and outbound sales and just general advice for people that are either at an executive level in sales all the way through to somebody who's starting in their first sales gate. Jake has basically worked with sales organizations of all size. He knows the tools, the strategies, the tech to take an organization to the next level. Regardless of what they're selling, he's an incredible sales mind and we go into pretty much everything and anything sales, which is obviously something that I have a passion for since I've done it most of my career. So let's jump it into it. I'm not going to ruin the show. Let's let Jake give you the run down on everything you have to know about sales in 2022. This is Jake Dunlap Founder CEO of Scale. So I mean, what a lot of people don't know is my origin story starts in the Midwest. So I was born in a like 800 person town in the middle of nowhere Iowa and then lived in Nebraska, Iowa and then really grew up in Kansas City though. So spent most of my years in the Midwest and when I kind of reflect back, I think that there's, you know, I think about like why I didn't get active, you know, more out in the public sooner. It's that, you know, when you grow up in the Midwest, I think you get this idea of you just put your head down and work. You know, I started working. I think when did I get my workers permit 14? I really don't know why. I mean, maybe I wanted to buy some extra tennis shoes or something, but I think I've always had like a very strong, you know, sense of like work ethic. And, you know, I think that comes from where you where you grow up. And so, you know, this fortunate that as I went through high school and then in college, I got into telemarketing. And why? Because it paid the best. And I found I had some like natural skill there. And so, you know, my origin story is very much just one of working hard, having a lot of fun along the way. I took five and a half years to graduate college, which we would have been friends and if you would have been friends, we can get into some at some point. And, you know, just really trying to perfect the craft, meaning I am one of those people that is a lifelong learner. I hire lifelong learners. I struggle with people who are complacent or just want to collect the paycheck. And for me, my journey is always about am I getting better to prepare myself for whatever the next next thing is versus a paycheck or, you know, immediate, immediate gains or rewards. Okay. That makes sense. And that's something that you sort of taken with you. You've had like a very impressive career. And I want to dive into some of the roles that you've had and some things that you've learned over your career. But that's that's what pushed you into telemarketing. That sort of something. That was money. I mean, that's beyond it. That was money. But I mean, but I mean, yeah, yeah, fair. But I mean, like you're still living that today, even like, you know, we're talking with your shooting the shit before about like what you're working on now. Yes. And you're still pushing yourself outside your comfort zone. Yeah, that's all it's all like I feel like there's two types of people. There's a people that run into the to the shit and there's people that don't. And I'm definitely one of those, you know, I remember when I first started my company, the amount of people that I met with that said Jake do not start a services business. And trust me, there's times when I'm like, you were 100% right. But, you know, look, we're 40, 45 people now. And I didn't want to start a lifestyle business, you know, making half million, million dollars a year, just doing my own thing. I don't think would have been that rewarding. And I, you know, I made more money in 2012 than I'd have in any year as being, you know, running my own company. But I'm building, you know, and we'll get there. Just, you know, if I wish we'd get there faster, sure, but, you know, we'll figure it out. And so I think I've always kind of chosen the path of to push myself to be better in whatever it is that I'm doing. So you, you got in the sales, you know, you, you were got, you got in the sales for, for money. It was a good option at the time. But, um, you were at some point successful because you made a career out of it. Yeah, I was almost successful immediately. But, um, like I, you know, when I did the telemarketing in college, I, um, I, when I found that the skill that I had that most of the people didn't, is I didn't take it personally. And I had fun with it. Like, I think I've told this before. Like, I created alter egos. Like, there was Dennis and Dennis, Dennis, Dennis, Dennis, Dennis, Hannah retainer. And he would cold call you and hi, Dennis. And like, I knew that this is a numbers game and that I could have fun. And I didn't, you know, and people got upset. I'm like the next one, the next one. I think whether it was through training that they had, I just realized that this very formulaic. If I just do enough of these things and I continue to get better, I will hit the results that I want and not dwelling on what happened before. So I think that's what gave me this kind of natural propensity to be good, good at sales. And then, you know, coming out of college, it was, I wanted to work in sports, right? Probably like a lot of people. I wanted to work in sports. And the first, you know, I'd applied to a bunch of jobs and the Tampa Bay rays were hiring for a group sales team. And so I applied to some roles. I flew down to Tampa. I've told the story before I've had my business plan. One of the smartest things that cannot remember this professor's name. I wish I could give them credit. They're like, bring a business plan to your interview. And I'm like, you know, how would you actually do the job? And so I brought a business plan with me that said how I'm going to sell group tickets in Tampa. And I went online, probably to Google or web crawler or whatever it was back then. And I looked at trends in like demographics in Tampa and St. Pete and put together this thing is probably horrible. But I got the job. And what happened is I used to love to read, you know, kind of in college, I think you can get away with that because you're like always reading or you kind of get away. And there's a guy who's a little bit older and he got me back into reading kind of sales and professional books and marketing books. And I just gobbled it up. I sales for me satisfied a lot about curiosity, problem solving that it just doesn't get that much credit for. That, you know, great, really great people, I think professionals, true professionals are very curious people and genuinely focused on providing the right outcome. And they're an expert in their world. And all of that was very appealing to me early on. Yeah. Yeah. Um, you were, so those are all great traits you hire for now. But you didn't, I don't, did you know, like you, you weren't self-aware enough back then when you were, when you were applying for like you probably have a bay raise or you got that job. No, then you were Arizona coyotes, which is, yeah, it's an old throwing it back a little bit too. Isn't that Phoenix? Is it, Arizona coyotes? What is that? That's the Phoenix? Oh, I thought it was like, oh, okay, go ahead. I think it's going to change it to me broader. That's growing with me now. You're like, you know, from Tucson is going to drive to go watch the coyotes. Um, no, it was my first job. I mean, honestly, that job with a raise, I, I mean, not to kind of sound like I'm brave. I destroyed everybody really quickly, meaning like I had already done, like, just imagine these kids, a lot of people come out of college. One, I already had that experience. I already worked. I already done, I already have learned techniques. And, and so I went from group sales to season ticket sales to senior account executive me and just one other guy to me and him running the inside sales team in 16 months. I, I knew really early that that scale of not caring, putting in the work, treating it like a profession was, I saw results quickly, you know, that was like 2000, that was like early 2000s, 2003, yeah, but even the stuff that you talk about now, so let's, let's talk about like what sales was back then. Is that like darling for dollars? Like, is there a process or you just throw on a phone book and say, go sell? Yeah, that's excellent. Well, I'll tell you actually, so yeah, 2006, after I got out of sports, so I put it on my LinkedIn profile, I, I thought that being the best meant that you were untouchable, it does not. And so I got into it with my boss. I told him to f off, he fired me for even I was the number one premium seat seller at the, at the coyotes at the time. Um, that was really eye opening. Um, and, you know, it wasn't sure what I was going to do. Jumped in with this company called career builder with at the time. It's the largest job site. They had just opened an office in Phoenix. Um, and it was career builder where I found the process of sales. I had a lot of natural ability and like intuition, but career builder, there's, there's a really kind of like very pivotal moment in my career where I was a training class of eight. I took a step back, I can't executive role. Um, didn't have the, I didn't know that I wanted to work in tech or in like, you know, online, you know, services, but, um, I was a second last person to sell anything. It's like, I've been there for like a month or something, a month and a half. I hadn't sold anything. And I'm like, what is going on? And my boss's boss listened into a call. And he's like, dude, why aren't you following the script? And I'm like, dude, the script man, come on. I'm not following a script. I'm Jake Dunlap, you know, I'm not doing that. And, uh, and he goes, dude, do you think we train a thousand people on this because we're stupid? He's like, do you think we train people on a process that doesn't work? And I was like, probably not. And so, uh, I did it. And I followed, I literally was, I remember reading, I remember this. And I'm like, this feels really awkward. But then all of a sudden, I hear the responding. They're just like opening up. I'm like, hmm, I'd start following it. And then the next month said, my first month after doing it, I close $60,000 in new business. And that was for me when I was like, holy shit, sales is a science. It is a process. There's actually right and a wrong buyer journey and a way to move customers through the process. And before I kind of always thought it's very happenstance and everyone's different. And so it was actually that experience that I think solidified like, this is like, this literally checks all the boxes of like something that I want to go deep on and really be an expert at. I just want to take a second and thank the sponsor of today's episode feedback loop. Now, if you're a product person entrepreneur startup guy like me, you have at some point in your career try to take a product to market. You've tried to come up with a new idea and it's fell flat. It's ultimately failed. 85 to 90% of all new products of all new startup ideas fail. Why is this? 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They set up a special link for everybody who's a success story podcast listener to test it out to try it. Go to go.feedbackloop.com slash success. You get three free tests. That's go.feedbackloop.com slash success. You can try it out for free. You get three free tests. So if you want your next product idea or feature to be a hit, test before you invest, build based on data, not opinion, and launch with confidence with feedback loop. Check it out right now. So that was your first sales leadership role that you moved into at CareerBuilder, correct? I got my leadership two months later. What is sales process in 2010 compared to what it is now? The same. You think? I'm asking. I don't know. I'm asking. It really is. And I'll tell you what I think because I'll tell you what's kind of interesting. It's like what happened is in the mid 2010s, we started to get all the sales tech, right? You got different sales engagement platforms. There's a whole bunch of other things that kind of popped up during this like genre. And what actually started to happen is I think sales started to get worse. We digress. We started the we started to simplify sales into like qualification criteria. Are they qualified and removing them through the funnel? And now we're kind of coming back to this idea of like the customer experience and like what do they feel like? So you know, I think the things that are different are things like access to information. That to me is a big one. You know, it used to be you don't talk about price or you know, you don't, you know, you wait for them to get other people involved. Whereas now people spend a time for that. You know, it's like I think removing friction. I think there's maybe a little too much friction back then and there still is today. That I think is certainly one. I think customers are much more educated. Whereas they were relying on a salesperson to kind of educate them on a space, et cetera. Then ever before, I think that that's a big trend that I see now. And then just the rise of sales tech. There's I think there's almost 2000 sales technologies now. So your ability to do more with less and automate things that you couldn't even imagine that were automatable 10 years ago. I think those are probably the big trends, but I think the concept of like what is great sales? It's having a, it's being educated on somebody's space to where you can actually provide real value. It's knowing how to dig deep and understand what the true priorities are and then walking them through how you might be able to help them. That, my friends, that has not changed since forever. But I do think we've tried to dumb it down too much and we've kind of automated the wrong things. And we're doing manual things that we shouldn't be doing at this time. I was, I was going to ask like later on, but I was just curious if you think sales reps have, have, have almost become like complacent and just dependent on technology to the, to a fault now without reach and gong. And all, all the automation tools that you can now use. And I think that now that's actually, in my opinion, it's turning customers off because they, they get so used to being highly targeted and with specific automated sequences to the point where now somebody who is more, I, I hate the user at old school, like just like is a little bit more like less regimented in their process, the customer will feel that they're, they're actually not part of a sequence or something like that. Yeah, I mean, I think a lot of it is, do people feel, um, it is, how about this? I'll maybe start here. I don't think it has ever been easier to stand out. Like God forbid you spent five minutes personalizing. That's relevant. I feel like the, and but I blame lead. I mean, to, to go back to your point, but that, that's like one point. The second is this is a leadership problem. Leaders are the ones doing this. Leaders right now are two short term focused. They can only think about this month or this quarter. I very specifically remember when I first moved into leadership, I said, Jake, you got eight months to turn this, this team around, right? I said, okay, we're here. Here's about, we're about middle of the pack, got eight months. Why? Had to get the right people on the bus, wrong people off the bus, up level, up skill. And I don't think we think enough about the personal, the development of our people as leaders and that it's our job as leaders to stay up to speed on what these tools can do. I think, I think what you're actually seeing is that too many, too many executive teams, CEOs too, don't even know what's possible. So they can't build sales machines differently because they don't even know it's possible. They're outsourced that knowledge to like operations people. And I think that that you're going to, if you're going to be a senior leader in marketing your sales in the future, you have to know the art of possible. You have to stay up to speed on the latest technology, what people are doing. You don't have to know it intimately, but you have to understand how it fits in the ecosystem and what it's capable of. And then you have to refresh that knowledge every nine to 12 months because those tools are evolving so quickly as well. We had a couple of new executive hires joined, and they're like, Jake, why do you take so many of these partner calls? I probably meet at least two to five new technologies every week. Half of them, like most of them, we're not going to do anything with. I'm like, oh, that's interesting. Oh, that's interesting. Why? That's my job. My job is to stay ahead of where it's going. So if we're building a modern sales org, I have an idea of what's possible and what's not. And so I think a lot of sales leaders right now and CEOs are not doing a good enough job of thinking about how to build tomorrow's team first recreating the team that I was successful, you know, 10 years ago or 12 years ago. So when you I want to I want to touch on that, but I want to I want to first keep going through your career because I want to talk about. So it's up to you whatever you want to focus on either either chartbeat or glass door, whichever one was the most impressive. Actually chartbeat glass door or no way, which one is the most impressive? Because then you hit you hit after this, you hit multiple like VP sales rules, right? Or ahead of sales or sales executive rules. Then I was done. I mean, yeah, I was like, well, what happened after chartbeat after I got fired because I hit the numbers. I sucked at politics. Okay. So this is what happened for me as a VP. Glass door, I think, is the most impressive. Just because, you know, we exited for 1.2 billion. Right? That's pretty damn impressive. Not bad. Not bad. Right. And I built the team from nothing from zero to I took the team from zero to 40 people in about a year and from zero to a million and an MRR in a year. We closed 20. What was it? We closed 25 of the Fortune 100 in the first in the first year. And that for me was just like, Oh, I'm good at this. Like I can build replicas. Again, I like what happened? I learned this repeatable process. At the previous company, I was able to transport over, make some changes. But what I sucked at was politics. You know, I was like, I'm like 30 years old, 31. Like I'm like running. I don't know how to forge or I didn't do a good enough job getting mentors, etc. So I didn't know how to forge relationships with my CFO or CTO. And I did a really bad job of that. And so it's really easy to kind of layer me, which is what happened at Glass door. And, you know, even though I'd done the job successfully. And then the same thing happened at chartbeat. Like we had crushed our numbers, went from 1 to 4 million in less than a year. And I couldn't get along well with others. Like my kind of like some of these people weren't my peers, but counterparts. And I just realized like, what? What? What's my real path? I love doing the work. I love building the teams. I love building out the sales processes and tackling these problems. But you know, what's my next thing? I'm like, I'm just going to go to another startup. And like it'll the same thing will happen in three years. And then I just realized that's what just what happens in tech. And so I said, well, forget that. I'm just going to do it myself. And no way it was one of my first clients actually. And we helped to talk them to close a quarter, about a $4 million deal with them that helped them to exit to Yelp about a year and a half later, two years later. And you know, it was kind of after that experience where I really started to scale the consulting company. You know, I technically no way slash Yelp was a part of scaled. But I was spending a lot of my time there not in building the company as much. But we had employees from all this day one. You know, I think we had five, at least four to five people from all the stay one. When you when you started scaled, you what was the goal of scale? Like did you have an idea of what you wanted to build up? What was the problem that you're trying to solve in sale? You had no idea. You're just, I'm good at sales. So that's an entrepreneur lesson. That's an entrepreneur lesson. So what did you do? Yeah, I'm good. It's it's probably the biggest mistake was I didn't have a clear vision. What I knew is that I like to solve sales challenges, right? And then I thought that I had a unique skill set and I'd proven it, right? Everywhere I'd ever went that I could build repeatable scalable sales processes and develop people to generate repeatable results. That was a skill set that I had. But what I didn't know is like, what did I want to do with it? You know, what do I want the company to be? You know, any of that. And so I think we kind of meandered for a few years of just like, oh, is it sales-related? Like we'll do it. Didn't matter if it was a project base or, you know, whatever it was. And so it caused a lot of schizophrenia, I think in the company of people like, we're doing this now and that now. And I think it wasn't until probably 2017-18 where we started to kind of focus on, okay, who do we want to be? And I think we're, you know, we're kind of going through that exercise right now too of what does the future look like? How do we do? How do we need to evolve the business, et cetera? What was that? What was that somewhat sense? The evolution of that company? What was the final decision? What did you finally double down on as a company that you thought you could really solve for? It was eliminating stuff, right? It was saying, like we had scaled an outsourced lead gen arm that was doing like a million a year and like five months, but it was the, I hated the business. I hated it. Like I was having these conversations with CEOs about, well, we thought we were getting 20 qualified meetings. We got 16 and it's like, we're building outbound from scratch. You just met with Capital One in Delta and you're sitting here complaining to me at like, and I'm like, yuck, this is not why I got into this. So we asked it. We asked it. We sold off some of our competitors, converted some of them to consulting clients and just let the other ones go. A funny story, man, we had some baller clients like Discover org, which became Zoom info was one of our most clients for that. They had eight salespeople. And we were doing outsourced lead gen for Discover org back in like 2015 or something like that. I guess what I'm trying to figure out is like, what does, what does a modern sales org lack where they need to actually go out? When's the point when a modern sales organization, VP Sales CRO was like, I'm not figuring this out in house. I need to go to scaled or otherwise. What's that? What's that need the you feel? So here's what I'd say. I think the way that you phrase the question is a part of the problem. And what I mean by that is in every other part of your organization, okay, let's take marketing. Marketing hires a performance agency, marketing hires a PR agency, marketing hires a web agency, marketing hires a digital agency, marketing hires a brand agency, you hire experts, right? Finance, they hire audit experts, they hire tax experts. Sales is the only organization that has a notion that that instead of hiring experts at sales tech, at this part of unclogging our funnel that instead we're just going to do it in house. And I think that we're seeing this ship that it's certainly changing, right? Like we're seeing like people get it now. I think more and more of like, well, you're not going to find some sales ops person who's done 300 outreach instances, like overhalls like we have. Like why are you trying to hire that person when, you know, we're not that different in cost and we've done it hundreds of times. And so I just think it's a sales mindset. And part of it is self-imposed by leadership. Sales leaders make more than anyone in the company usually CEO sometimes not in the like obviously fortune 500s. But and so there's almost this like backlash, right? Of like, well, why would a sales leader need help? It's like, well, because things are shifting really quickly and like it's hard to stay at the speed on what's happening. So I think it's actually, you know, like we've got to change this this stigma almost of like sales leaders aren't can't be experts on everything either. And you know, that's really where we come in is that tactical support, you know, strategic support as well too. But there's just corners you haven't seen around or things that you haven't done that you should really bring in experts for and stop trying to hire a jack of all trades in house. And you'll get the same jack of all trades results. Let's um, I want to I want to drill down into some of the like some of the topics you speak about online things. I, you know, there's so many things that you've done in your career and all honestly, I didn't really know what to to talk to you about because there's so many different avenues to take. But um, I think like, you know, the general, the general umbrella of future of sales, there's just there's just some topics that keep coming up. And I think it's I think it's good to just get your opinion on that because you've lived, you you know, you've grown and exited high tech high, you know, fast growing tech companies. And now you work with a whole bunch under scale. So uh, one thing that I saw you mentioned, which I thought was interesting. I'm going to try and like, I'm going to try and pick out points that are going to like, um, basically maybe be unpopular opinions for some people, but I want to I want them to see it through your lens. So sales is no longer relationship building in 2021. What does that mean? Because that's something that if you haven't, you know, if you've been in sales, you keep hearing about building relationships, relationship building, depending on what industry you're in, maybe more in some industries, more than others. So what does that mean? Yeah, actually posted a second spin on that today. And yes, there's similar, but most people kind of got it. Um, I don't think buyers today. Um, and let's just think about our speed of our world and how much we have on our plates today with emails and slacks and response, parental response. We have so much going on in our life today. Do you think that that person in Seattle wants another friend? Oh, I can't wait to be friends with Johnny random vendor number seven. Now over time, we might build a real relationship. The reality is people want people who can help them solve problems and that they can trust. That to me is foundationally different than people that you like and want to spend time with. And I think that is where sometimes old school, or not old school, just people who grew up in a different era, get it get missed. They focused on like being likable and oh, yeah, we have got a great rapport. I've never been like that. I've always been, let me understand what you're trying to accomplish. Let me tell you what I think could be a good option for you. Let's work through it together. And let's see if we can really make an impact on your business. And that is the difference between focusing on how strong or do you like? Did you, you know, did I send you a gift when your kid was born or did I help you to get a promotion in three months? And I have consistently found that the latter actually drives more business and actually better real air quote relationships. So it's are you focusing on the personal relationship? And it's all personal, right? We're all humans. But or are you focused on helping individuals achieve their outcomes? And so when I say that, that's what I mean by it. Because you even mentioned something interesting before we started recording and you said you're focusing on, on, on, on framing things differently. So when you look at a B2B relationship, it's still dealing with a person. That's what you're, that's what you're speaking about with that, correct? Well, yeah. And like a B2B, it's, if you define relationship, right? Most people think of a relationship as like Johnny's likable, right? Relationship building. I think, you know, if you categorize relationship building is like building a business outcomes based relationship, then I can get down with that. I think it's when people define it as you know, people do business with people they like. I think that's bullshit. I think people do business to people that can help them. And if those people are, then, then they'll like them, then they will like them. They will probably end up liking you, but they might not invite to their daughter's wedding. You know what I'm saying? Like that, that's, that's what I mean when I say that. Now, I just want to take a second and thank the sponsor of today's episode, Grin. 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That's g-r-i-n dot c-o. Gotcha. Okay. Other things that I think you could really provide some value or insight on building out sales teams. I saw actually this is one other one. Lower daily minimums for your sales rep and I know that activity-based management is important and you know understanding those KPIs of the activities that lead to the results. What do you mean by lowering the minimums instead of tracking 100 activities obviously going for much less? Yeah. Many times we're too focused. I'm a big fan of the concept of leads and lags right and if you're not familiar with this it means when you focus on the leading indicator, the lagging indicators should become an outcome. The issue is today. Let's rewind back. So you ask me a question about what's the difference between sales today and before. So this is actually this is actually a difference. Every activity you did in sales a call or an email was to generate a meeting. So every activity had one specific purpose and so tracking activities as a leading indicator to setting meetings etc made sense. Now interlinked in. Now I want you to go like and comment on somebody's posts. I want you to go interact with someone. I want you to go do this, this, this or this. What's the value of that activity? It's not one to one anymore. And so what I want people to do is now that we're asking sales teams to not do one to one correlated, one action over and over like that telemarketing example right. I knew if I made x number of calls right it would get to here make sense in a highly transactional world. But as we're asking reps to do more rapport building other things. I like the idea moving to meaningful conversations which is you know we're working on setting up time to meet the connected me to the right person and focusing on outcomes and if Susan can get there in 40 touch points but it takes Jake 70 to get there. Well why are we talking about activities? Why aren't we talking about out the first outcome from these this this pot of things we're asking people to do. So that's where that comes from is that we need to if you are asking your sales team to do things that are not one to one correlated. You I don't think you can track activities the way that you did. Now I can see you have like a minimum of 40 a day or 20 calls fine but you should be managing to how good is my team at getting conversations that lead to meetings and that might mean activities that aren't one to one correlated to an activity to generating that meeting. So on that thought where should your sales team spend time? Where are your customers are? You know like the customers let's go granular on this so like say you're running an outbound campaign like are you are you still cold calling are you still emailing are you still on LinkedIn are you yes yes yes but so is it just a mix of everything and then some is there something that worked better than others or don't take here's here's right out here's how I tell people you can listen to what my answer is going to be but it might be different for your your industry the key to to lead Jed and to outbound I'll just focus on outbound for a second is outbound is just like cracking that you know performance marketing Google AdWords campaign there's no difference you set up systems and hypotheses you track results and you optimize your face off and to opt in without bound we have this very set it and forget it you set up our sequence we do we just run it we don't think go back and run back the game film what worked what didn't work tweak here most of our client we just ran a campaign I'll tell you this is very recent it's literally like last two weeks most but a lot of people don't know this on your LinkedIn on your phone on your phone if you go to the mobile app on LinkedIn and you're a one-to-one connection you can drop a voicemail to someone or you can get the plus button and send a one-to-one video we just had an 18% reply rate from the one-to-one video 18% wow that's pretty so yeah that's pretty so you get someone to connect with you what do you do just send to a personalized video how long does that take you know what I mean like 20 seconds do that so I'll link to the video you know what I mean so long story short you know I think I think it's all of the above and a lot of people who who rip on calls right now I don't think they get it the funny part is so anyone who shits on calls right now here's here's what I want to challenge you what is your email hit rate out of the emails that you send how many of those reply to you few few out of a hundred and people say well calls I only get a hold of you know a few people like what's the difference like what's the difference like and then guess what you optimize over time it could be maybe you should be only doing calls maybe you should only be doing emails maybe you should only do videos but the fact that one more and more teams aren't just optimizing around general best practices to me it's just insane and two the fact that companies think that they know and they're not tracking and optimizing it's just crazy you know I'll tell you a story about again this is back this is my first year at the rate this is 2004 okay 2004 this will help you to understand like how I think 2004 after the first season the we had an inbound phone loop so basically what happened is a phone it would kind of like it kind of jumps around like a round robin almost right but if you're on the phone it skips you and goes the next person right so you know the person calling in goes the next person and and what I did after the first years I did a scatter plot and I plotted every single inbound sale in that year and what I found is there were gaps of times when nobody called in it's like 11 a.m. like 2 p.m. and like 4 or 10 or something there's like half hour gaps and so I just did this scatter plot and then I and then and so what I did is I just sat there and I did all my administrative stuff until those and so it would just keep they were making calls and then I'm like Tampa Bay Rays this is Jake Tampa Bay Rays this is Jake and then people started to get pissed my teammates they started to get pissed I said I showed them the scatter plot I showed them the data I say guys look at this that this is why I'm not doing it you know what they kept doing they kept calling I'm like I'm showing you the data and this goes back to like I started to run my own career very early and I think a lot of reps need to listen to this I'm trying to optimize my own outcomes my boss doesn't need to tell me I need to know my own numbers so I can get better and they eventually like broke the system and like three weeks later but you know I just I we've got to start to think of this as processes with constraints that we're trying to optimize for a very specific outcome it's not about opinions and so I think we sales we have to take a more scientific method post your side scientific method approach to how we think about sales so you know it still blows my mind that everything everything you said resonates but so many people still will not take it upon themselves will listen to the activities or the KPIs that are just given to them and they don't they don't think outside of this little box that they're they're placed in as a sales rep and it seems like it seems like every other department doesn't have this issue it doesn't seem like other departments have this issue because I think other departments are probably I have no idea why actually I really don't know why but marketers don't seem to have this issue like they'll suggest new things will be creative have their job is to be creative and to come up with creative solutions but I don't see sales reps challenging their VP saying hey I don't think this is working so great can I try xyz that's all you have to do you say hey I'm gonna do it your way if for anyone out there who's like yeah Jake this sounds great and what you said just sounds great too here's what you do you go to your boss and you say look I know these are metrics I'm gonna hit those metrics but I want leeway to do 15% additionally my way for the next two weeks and if I prove that you're gonna let me spend 55% 50% of my time doing it that way only if I prove my outcome what do you think right what do you think I think we should do that I think most leaders are not stupid most like I back to my point most leaders are not done all right he's still gonna there she's still gonna do the things that we asked and wants to try something but again it's like people don't want to put in the work you know like this want people to change you know like no like you need to do the work you need to do like sitting here asking everyone to bend around you or change well I have got an idea well test the idea sitting here waiting for sitting here waiting for permission I was talking to like especially in the pandemic first hit if you're an SDR now and you're like but I really want to get in sales why aren't you just taking your own first call just take the call nobody'll know you're sitting at home like what are you waiting it's true what are you waiting for you want to get more sales at bats or run a discovery like to start to do it you know and and I think too many people are looking for someone to walk them through their career and the reality is no one's gonna care more about your career than you not your mom not your boss not anybody and you have to take that learning and growth mindset with you throughout that if you just sit around and wait for your company to develop you and I'm doing my own cycles listening to my own calls getting better man that interest compounds and that's again that's why I was a VP by you know technically I think 31 but I just turned 31 is because of that mindset you also talk about you know you you posted about everybody when their young should have a side hustle is that also to do with taking your career in your own hands I post I said you said you said you said you said close you said focus on work life balance now this is sorry it was a message that will be wildly wildly unpopular for 95% of my friends 25 to 35 anyways you said focus on work life balance now 98% of people peddling this wouldn't be where they are they didn't work 50 to 60 hour weeks for years everyone should start a side hustle when they're young sure I'm all four but most people are knocking out to work 40 hours side hustle for 20 and then be successful at both so I I didn't really get the the final takeaway but I was saying most of you don't have it in you to start a side hustle I was thinking I was thinking the opposite I was thinking you were saying if you are going to side hustle do it when you don't have kids and when you don't have to that's what I was that's what I was thinking that's true and that's yeah some saying both I'm saying okay that if you are but hustle it's not like the thing is this there's a lot of people on LinkedIn a lot of people you know who are my age roughly or maybe a little younger a little older who grinded their asses off and now now they're now they want to sit back and tell people back when they were 25 like you should think about work life balance oh I get what you're doing okay it's like pro you never would be where you are if you did any of this shit that you are peddling to people and you know you're trying to make mailbox money off of people now because you want it easy and you've already been there and done it and I think it's not that someone who's 25 or 26 or whatever shouldn't start a side hustle but you know you got to you got to really go deep on something and really like develop a skill set first you know as opposed to but you know good you want to start a side hustle great just be prepared to spend 20 extra hours or you could spend that same 20 extra hours on your own craft on your own job not because your boss told you to work 60 hours because you want to get better at it and so I think you just can't have your cake you needed to if you're like yeah you know you can have a side hustle and you can have a full-time job I'm not saying it's not possible to be great at both and there's certainly people who have done it but I guarantee those people will work in 80 hour weeks and just I think you got to you just got to know what you're signing up for more than anything um last thing I wanted to ask you about uh sales is inbound versus outbound because you have opinions on that too so we're talking about going outbound so early stage company let's say early stage company where the where the CEO founder is not so experienced um where should they focus their time initially whoa man yeah well it's like I know these are not listen I don't I don't bring you on to ask easy questions if you put Google Rob here's what I would say um everybody wants to do outbound because it feels good you're doing you're doing activities yeah inbound takes time sometimes you can't track it right so like me posting on LinkedIn one to two times every day what's the ROI put up a post 49 minutes ago what's the ROI of that post no idea no but I know that you should be no idea what I do know is that LinkedIn is our number one traffic source and we'll probably generate a few million dollars this year from business where the lead source is Jake's LinkedIn but I don't know it's a one to one connection um so outbound feels good it is one because back remember it's kind of coming full circle with this right a lot of that outbound activity can be one to one I did an activity this number of activities equals this it feels very formula like even though the formula breaks now um so I think the answer is probably both for most people but start doing that brand the experience stuff now even if it's little little little because building inbound takes time you know building inbound takes takes you know it just doesn't happen overnight so you know too many companies I think wait to think about inbound they start outbound they start doing all this stuff and then they're not thinking about well am I building the reputation and SEO and those things to make my life easier in two or three years because when I just focus on outbound I can see the fruits of my labor immediately and so my answer for most of you is both is start to think about where your audience lives and are you establishing a brand and a reputation within that group where they live digitally coupled with are you starting to figure out how to generate interest from people who don't know about you um so I think the answer is both and and I think most people wait too long to start inbound and therefore over focus on outbound and because here's the thing if you only learn outbound how does that scale you just got to keep throwing more bodies at it more bodies more bodies whereas brand starts to snowball you know brand and reputation snowball and so I think you know that's that's how you've got to think about this that you're doing it you might not see the results for six months nine months 12 months but if you're putting out interesting content to your target audience um and you're not always pitching the the the people will come that we will happen for you so then so then just to follow up to close that thought up if somebody does want to to do a side hustle is building a personal brand a good use of their time I don't even think that's a side hustle I think that's a requirement for being in marketing and sales I think good if yeah yeah it's a requirement I don't think I don't think I would ever view it I never viewed it as building a brand for a side hustle I viewed it as I'm good for the taste of time right and I'm just trying to clarify for the CEOs or executives that are like why are you spending time on LinkedIn why are you posting my job and I think that I think it's skewing I think it's skewing more towards the norm now but there's there's still outliers there's still company I know companies that I was speaking to speaking to a girl the other day and I won't name the company she works for or she did used to work because it's enormous but in her contract they made her sign an agreement that she would not have social media of any sort wouldn't post that all stupid right I'll give you one of my favorite stats is SAP I think yeah SAP SAP's corporate page post on LinkedIn about 40 times a month 11,000 SAP employees posted in the last 30 days imagine if instead of doing what you just mentioned you even harnessed a fraction of that how much more of an impact that make on your business and I think too many people we still have a very archaic view of organic social because again we can't track that one-to-one so yeah that's that just let that let that sink in for a little bit and almost every company's got like a similar ratio you know I mean not big company I should say where your people if enabled correctly can make or break you know they can gong I mean like look at gong gong as you show I was thinking about gong's killing it with this guy's all they're doing is posting text only posts on LinkedIn guys they are not doing anything it is so repeatable for any company out there and and you've seen what it's like their valuation is silly fuck silly they I think they have like the if not the if not the one of the highest valuations to revenue I've ever seen and I had promised you that their brand has a big reason to do with that and so you know and all it is is posting text only posts on LinkedIn do you think I do it every day because I'm stupid do you think they do it every day because they're stupid no we do it because it drives revenue and and because I enjoy it I genuinely enjoy like helping people and giving advice so like I think you can say more more companies are going to have to we're in a golden era right now and I don't think most people quite realize it where we've got at least another few years on LinkedIn where there's still so much open space so much so much open space I just want to take a second and thank the sponsor of today's episode HubSpot now the new year might have you thinking ahead to what you want out of your career so when you think about your success story what do you actually picture is it retiring early with a beautiful view of the skyline is it leaving a legacy with your name on it or maybe it's helping influence and change some of the world's most pressing issues whatever it is writing your success story starts by working smart because when you work smart your success story writes itself a HubSpot CRM platform helps your marketing campaigns work harder and smarter with intuitive visual workflows and bot builders you can create scalable automated campaigns across email social media web and chat so your customers hear your messages loud and clear are you tired of your content not adapting to mobile making it difficult for your customers to absorb your message a HubSpot CRM platform optimizes your content for multiple devices so that you can reach your customers wherever they are which is just smart learn more about how you can transform your customer experience with a HubSpot CRM at HubSpot.com okay I want to I want to do some rapid fire to close this up but closing thoughts from you what do you want people to take away when they consume your content on the future sales any sort of just last last things to give the audience well look I hope people come and when they come to check me out there go oh I could just go try that today you know oh you know again I challenge CEOs go listen to 10 sales calls yeah do you even know what's happening that was your last post I saw that yeah yeah you even know what's happening right the one this morning here two myths you need to think about like so if you're looking for yeah I talk about the future of sales and flawed and you know philosophically where I think but I love the tactical stuff I love the nuances that make that are actually really easy to execute so if you want tactical advice and you know mixed in with a little philosophy I think you know check out my LinkedIn I've got now almost 450 videos on YouTube as well so that's been a big push so you can just Google Jake down that YouTube and you know find those videos as well so yeah that's that's me if you if this is your first time listening I really enjoy the tactical side of it the game the the the game as you call it of what goes into actually getting things done we'll verse what sounds good and that's you know that I think that that's me and I just launched the podcast to so the Jake Dunlap show if you go to Jake Dunlap.com you know definitely take a listen that's a little bit different side of me where you get to hear me not talking as much and talking to some pretty amazing people CEO of Hintwater Neil Patel is coming up and so that's kind of a fun outlet for me now. Awesome man do you have any socials you want to drop? I know I think it's simple for slash Jake Dunlap and then I think yeah go check out YouTube I'm really proud of like the new stuff that we're doing out on YouTube so definitely go check out YouTube and and check out the website Jake Dunlap.com and you know you can you know get a lot of the stuff from that. Awesome okay uh so let's do some rapid fire so biggest challenge that you've overcome in your career what was it and how'd you overcome it? I think I'm in the middle of it meaning it's the transition from being a depart excellent at a discipline to becoming a CEO and how that changes what it meets what success looks like so I think I'm actually in one of my most difficult pieces I've you know hiring in an exact team and scaling my own company and what it takes to be a CEO is a different set of skills than what it takes to be a successful head of sales or head of marketing. How do you how do you reckon because you've done a couple pivots right you've done you've done pivot into sales leadership then you've pivoted into like running the agency now you're pivoting into probably taking a step back in the agency and making yourself a little bit redundant so that other people step in so what's your what's your strategy for actually tackling this because I think a lot of people try this and fail miserably how many people start agencies after they've been an executive for how many years and just totally screw it up right so what do you do? You don't step one don't put people in positions that they're not ready for you might think you want to give people and not bad but you know you also want to set people up for success I think that's a mistake that I've made quite a few times is you know meeting people with where they're at and giving them you know giving them a lot of opportunity but also not putting them in over their head and I think you know I've done that quite a bit and so I think my big learning has been you know higher for experience at times you know I think it's just like the that running head first I want to develop people and I want to be grow and I think what I'm realizing now it's that you know hiring for experience oh man you don't have to explain it's like no no no I've done this eight times you're like oh so I think hiring for experience has been one of my biggest recent learnings not that I still don't have people that are in leadership roles that you know kind of grew into them but I think as you scale you need people and I made this mistake it's actually interesting man I've never thought about this I did this exact same I made the exact same mistake at Glassdoor where my first five managers I hired hired from within one of them I they're a couple of them I'd like bin managers but then they didn't have any like experienced other leaders other than me and so you know they leaned on me and I couldn't give them as much coaching whereas if I hired some more experienced leaders early on maybe they could help them so I think the concept of like you know hiring for you know potential is okay but there's a time when you need to hire for experience too and and that's okay too if you had to choose one person there's probably been many who was incredibly impactful in your life who is that person and what did they teach you I'm gonna pick Gary V and I remember when I first heard him talk it was in 2018 it's actually right when I started and I didn't like you know I listened to back in like 2012 or something I wasn't a big fan but just positivity positivity always wins and you know don't be afraid to put yourself out there and tune out the haters you know I had a lot of people come up to me I remember in 2019 really 2019 you know after I had been kind of at doing my own thing for you know and LinkedIn and other social for a bit and like Jake when you started doing that like I was kind of like who's Jake done that why are you trying to do this and like you know I could feel it I could feel that hate you know like but I think Gary's outlook when you really follow him I feel like it's truly a very I don't know man like very not normal outlook on life and positivity and it gave I think it gave me a lot of courage candidly to start to do something my on my own in terms of my building my own brand but and knowing that I was doing it from a place of ultra with like altruistically and not from a place of bragging because going back pulling this whole questions full circle a whole interview full circle growing up in the Midwest you know you're told don't brag about yourself you don't talk about yourself and I think he really gave me the courage say well I'm not talking about myself I'm just sharing my experiences and so I'll give Gary via shout out good um I like that okay so a book or podcast or audible or some resource that you'd recommend people go check out that you've liked um well there's a there's actually a really good book that I've read I've literally just finished it for the second time called five dysfunctions of a team and I think one of the biggest issues that we have is organizations actually same guy wrote a book I'm or his other book I think it's that the meetings or meetings the camera board of this is right now we are we are having more meetings than ever before do you feel that way do you feel it's like you and I think I actually have that I think I actually have that books five dysfunctions and I actually think I have it somewhere but I can't find it now I'm just looking at Patrick Patrick Lincolnies his name yeah no I that's a good book yeah no I do we're having more meetings than ever Matt it is it is but are the next level how many meetings I have any good the answer no they suck they suck and so for me what I'm really interested with my company right now how do how do we become world class at writing meetings how do we make sure our agenda's we're not wasting time people are prepared how do we let people create space to become prepared to come prepared this is at all levels so five dysfunctions and his other book I think it's called that to meetings just let's Patrick Lincolnie I've just been kind of absorbing these books because I'm really focused on how do we get better at meetings and do meetings the right way I think that's probably that's probably been the biggest the biggest issue with working remotely it's that a conversation that would normally happen in the hall or in an office a quick five minute conversation turns into a 45 minute catch up on everything it's happening in your life that's and man it's just it is a time suck and a productivity killer and that stuff in the in the short term in the micro doesn't actually it doesn't feel like it's a kind of annoying but you think about how many hours you lose and then you're burnt out and you're working on weekends or you're working after five or you're taking time away from your family or your things are falling through the cracks like it's a big deal it's a huge deal I think that's actually that's a smart recommendation because I think that impacts people more than they realize it impacts people for sure okay if you could tell your 20 year old self one thing what would it be just thinking of myself at 20 you know have a little bit more vision on where you're trying to go and again at 20 I was not a great student in undergrad I stepped it up at the very end and it might got my MBA but I think at 20 I didn't have a lot of role models and I think that's something I could have maybe focused and spent more time on I was working a lot but you know just having a little bit more foresight into what I wanted to do to make smarter choices about school and like as opposed to just going down a path that you know I think a lot of people at 20 think they're supposed to go down smart and last question what is success mean to you success for me right now is defined on by how repeatable am I making things in my life and building routine throughout my life personal and professional so to me success is like if I've got a routine where my companies in a solid operating rhythm my families in a solid operating rhythm I've been one of those guys who fights routine I like spontaneity and I just realized that that actually causes a lot more heartburn and so I think I'm trying to live a more disciplined life and to me I think the more disciplined that I become the more successful I'll be both professionally and personally