Samantha Mckenna & Amy Volas | A Masterclass In Modern Sales

Welcome to the success story podcast, I'm your host, Scott Clary. On this podcast, I have candid interviews with execs, celebrities, politicians, and other notable figures, all who have achieved success through both wins and losses, to learn more about their life, their ideas, and their insights. I sit down with leaders and mentors and unpack their story to help pass those lessons onto others through both experiences and tactical strategy for business professionals, entrepreneurs, and everyone in between. Without further ado, another episode of the success story podcast. Thanks again for joining me today. I am sitting down with two individuals. You're going to get a master class in sales. I'm very excited to be sitting down with Amy Volis and Samantha McKenna. Now Amy is a founder and CEO of Avenue Talent Partners, more than 100 million in revenue sold and named sales hackers, most dynamic women in sales. Amy is a fanatic turned entrepreneur sales fanatic turned entrepreneurs. Sorry Amy. We're a fanatic. You didn't see me open, it's just me. So she worked in various sales roles, she was bitten by the startup bug many moons ago, and couldn't imagine spending her time anywhere else, she created Avenue Talent Partners to help with the tremendous task of growing startups through some of their most valuable assets, executive sales leaders, sales leaders, and enterprise sales people. And then we also have on the call Samantha McKenna and Samantha is the CEO of Sam Sales. So Samantha McKenna has been an enterprise executive for over a decade for companies like on 24 and most recently, LinkedIn and is the founder of, is it hashtag Sam Sales or is it Sam Sales? The hashtag Sam Sales Consulting, which helps organizations, operationalize sales, and also allows companies to outsource their BDR efforts using the approved hashtag Sam Sales methodology. And I just keep dropping the hashtag Sam Sales because I think if you go and look it up, you're going to have to use that. Is that the actual name, Sam, tell me more about what you've done and what you're doing now? Yeah, I know that that is the actual name and people miss it all the time or they capitalize the S's everywhere and they have no idea how to do it, but it's all good. The hashtag where that came into play was to the sales hacker point for Amy, then voting her such a phenomenal female. About five years ago, I decided that I was going to share my sales tips on LinkedIn. And every single time I would talk to my colleagues and peers and reports about my sales tips, they would think, oh, I never thought to do it that way. Like, that's a great idea. I'm going to go do it. Successful. So I said, I'm just going to share it with the world. I'm going to post on LinkedIn. I'm going to see what happens. And a wise friend said, you should attach a hashtag to it if you're going to post a lot. So I did. And I just thought, Sam sales sounds cute. I'm going to use that. And that's where that was born. Actually, the very first post I made, sales hacker reached out and said, hey, we love this piece. Would you write for us? And I said, yeah, sure. And so then they came and said, here are six bullets we'd love for you to write on pick one. I'll write on six. And they were like easy, easy tiger. Like, let's see how you do it with the first spot. And I was like, alright, but that's where that was born. So over the years, I've posted almost daily content with on hashtag. And if you are looking for truly tangible things that you can use to execute your sales game better, hopefully you'll find some value in there. And you can, you can look up five or so years of work so far. So, so tell me because I want to get just a breakdown of each of your careers and why you've moved into, you know, for, I guess, for lack of a better term, just sales consulting. And if that's not the way you want to classify yourself or if you have a certain niche that you drill into, let me, let me know. But Sam, for you, you had great roles at on 24. And like, I think your role at LinkedIn, if I saw it before, you were like head of enterprise for, I think, New York or some regional, some very high up position at LinkedIn. Those are great positions. What made you want to move into your own thing? Yeah, I think after, after getting to spend some time at LinkedIn, what was wonderful is that I got to now move into an ambassador role for LinkedIn. So I'm one of their brand ambassadors to talk about Navigator and what the company does in general. But I think starting my own consultancy was just something, probably just like Amy, you know, wanting to own your own thing, be able to impact more businesses than just one that you, you supported and worked under. It was really born through wanting to take one a little bit of time off, but then a bunch of my old clients saying, we always get these predicaments and we think, what would Sam do? Which is so humbling and wonderful to hear and just getting to go down that path and being able to operationalize sales, marketing, demand, and their finances was incredible. And then I think what, what was really born out of this full initiative after that was the idea of how do we get more pipeline, how do we get more meetings, how do we get more outreach and our word about us? And instead of just doing marketing or hiring a salesperson, we said, let's look at your business development representatives. Let's plug these sales messaging methodology and cadences and what we do in the process of when we get, you know, objection or when we get a, I'd love to meet, but not for three months. Let's put that in a play with our team. And so this was built in December. We officially launched it in March of this year. And as a Monday this week, we got a hundred and twelve hundred and thirteen days. We signed our 18th client for it. So yeah. And it's one, thanks, I think it just sounds a good gap. You know, a lot of organizations know they want more pipeline, but they don't know how to do it. They don't know how to write their messaging. They, you know, they need some guidance. So we're here for you. Yeah. I feel that. Okay. So there's a lot of, there's a lot of points that we can speak about, you know, what's broken in sales. Why, why people are, or why organizations are having such a hard time, but let's get over to Amy. Amy, I want to hear your story because I think that after we see up your story, then a lot of the stuff that we can talk about is, you know, we'll just have a conversation with everybody. But I don't want to, I don't want to leave you out and go too far without getting, you know, your background and why again, you also had a similar career path, not identical, but you came from large enterprise as well as some variety of different sales leadership roles over your career and then you move into your own thing. And, you know, when we spoke before, I love the way you put it because it's something that I felt in like my own career when you're just, I'll let you phrase it your own way. But when you just, you just want to do your own thing. But it speaks to me about why you became, you know, a sales consultant and what you're doing now with, like with your company. Yeah. So I should probably clarify. I'm not, I'm multiple things. Consulting is one of those things, but I own a sales recruiting firm. So it's like one part recruiting, one part HR, one part consulting, one part selling, one part therapy, one part coach, one part lawyer, like, and the list goes on and on and on. And so depending on like what's happening that day, I am wearing all those hats daily, but it just depends on what goes on. But, you know, for I think anybody listening to this, for me, I was thrown into enterprise sales back in the day, back in 2001, I was doing something very different. The market had fallen apart after 9-11. I loved this company. I loved the CEO. Some of my dearest friends came from that experience and we would have taken a bullet for the company for the CEO and I learned a really valuable lesson early on that you don't put all of your eggs in one basket and that's exactly what we had done and the company was hemorrhaging. And I remember a sit down with the CEO that again, like we just adored and admired and respected and genuinely really liked and he was like, guess what? There's really nothing for you to work on and if you want to stay here, the only thing that you have room to do is to get in and to start selling. I'm like, what? I'm sorry. What was that? And so, I mean, it was like big stuff. It was going after, at the time, MCI and Walgreens and McDonald's, I'm a Chicago girl by trade and all those big brands and here I am a puppy not having any idea what I'm doing, no training, no resources and I fell in love in the rest of history. So throughout my career, I've worked for big companies like Yahoo and always in enterprise sales, always in and around the HR tech recruiting landscape and both in sales leadership and enterprise sales individual contribution. Here's the thing though, you start a company for one of two reasons. So I come from like a long lineage of sales folk as well as entrepreneurs and I think it's just in my DNA and I knew that I always wanted to do something on my own terms and the way that I saw fit that would be really productive and helpful and I think people start companies for one of two reasons or either like Steve Jobs and I'm not that smart. I will never be that smart where it's like, oh, well, we're going to change the way something is done and the way people use these things or they're going to be using something brand new that they never even imagined that would change the face of the world. Yeah, so that's not me and I apologize there's a sea plane taking off as we're talking. There's like, it's my sea plane. No worries. Just a disclaimer. We were trying to do this last week, but Amy's at a beautiful cottage that she showed me the view and I don't feel bad for her at all because it is 100% or I would rather be right. If you're going to be locked down, you've got to be by water. 100% agree. Yeah. So, so I think them the other side to why people start companies is they've been around the block for a long time and they care deeply about their marketplace, about the ecosystem that they're part of and they want to make it better or they've identified bits and pieces of something to make better or to solve real problems. That's totally me. And so for me, I identify I think less with sales recruiting from owner and more like my enterprise sales chops come through where I've identified problems that I want to solve and they need to be solved and in my world, the status quo is not okay. It's begging for an overhaul and I feel like, thanks, see plan for flying, doing a drive by. See plan's like, go, Amy, go. But I really feel like I was put on this planet to do this because recruiting, especially for startups, which is my second business love. If you don't get it right, it's really, really painful and I'm proud to say I've cracked the code of how to do that well to reduce that margin for error. So that's me and that's why I think I wear all those hats. So I know how to sell, I care about the buyer journey, I care about fixing the broken bits and pieces of sales recruiting, I care about startups and then just by the way of the work that I do, all those things come through and then some. I think that that's, that's where you and I are also so like cut from the same cloth, right? Like the impact that we want to make to the sales profession in general, however way we get there. And I think that that's that's really what is missing, right? We know that the sales profession is broken, we know that there's so much that needs to be done. I also identify with your therapist line there, right? I just got off the phone today with a CEO, we lost a pretty massive deal yesterday for a client and he was like, say, love you, onto the next and I'm like, I was like, we don't want to, fun, we don't want your team to think that. And then two, you know, here's why here's what we really need to do in terms of emotions and leadership and things like that. So sometimes it's just therapy and running through what they're thinking and kind of guiding them in a different way. Well, we're in the people business, right? So like we are an I am as well. And I think anytime you're dealing with people, no one person and no one business is created equally. And I think that's part of the problem is, especially with sales, it's like, well, let me jam you into my 89 point cadence of outreach that has nothing to do with anything and it has everything to do with me and let me get grab 15 minutes of your time. Here's my calendar link. Here's why I'm awesome. Don't you want to talk? And the answer is no. I don't. So, you know, I think for both of us, the common ground and like seriously, Scott, you're a gem for being open to having both of us talk because like you get us together and we just geek out on this stuff, but I can see that I love it though, it shows the passion. Well, I think for both of us, we want to leave the community better than when we came into it. At least for me, I can say that Sam, I know you well and I think that you would agree with that, but that's that's the jam here. All right. Can I tee up? I want to tee up something because there's a common thread in this and I understand like, you know, you're both, you're both very highly ambitious, like you're, you're really motivated individuals and when you work in a business unit sales within a company that you find is very latent and they're thinking in a lot of, in a lot of ways, a lot of sales leaders don't think the way you do. I think the whole business unit is evolving, but it hasn't gotten to where it should be in terms of other, other, you know, you look at marketing, you look at finance, you've got HR, there's a lot of processes, a lot of education in place. If you look at sales, a lot of that stuff is evolving now, but hasn't been for the longest time and I think that there's people like yourself are sort of like leading the way in terms of making sales better and you know, even like you look at people like Mark Rober's and whatnot who have really redefined what sales is. And I guess my, my question or my comment and just, what is, why is sales still broken? Because if you're, if you're a highly entrepreneurial individual in an organization like both of you are and you're trying to make a difference and your, your traditional sales manager is not going to hear it, they're not, they're going to be very old school and they're thinking. So why is sales like that? And how do we fix it? I think this is what we can talk about for the next like 90 minutes. Yeah, I know, I know we can. That's what I wanted to see it out. So a couple, a couple of thoughts I mean, past you, I think one of the things, you know, I realized this in my line of the game as of late that when I talk about sales and kind of my, my, I mean, I'm the least defensible person on the planet, but I do get a time of it offended when somebody says like, it's sales, how hard can it be? And for those of us, you know, who have been in it, who have been in enterprise sales, who've just been in sales in general and done it really well. Holy moly is a complex, right? And there are a thousand different decisions that you make every day. The impact you make or break, right? How you write an email, how you structure something, how you actually sell when you're presenting a proposal, all that goes into it. I think one of the reasons that sales is broken is because people think I can do it. Anyone can do it. And to be fair, anyone can do it. You can learn how to do sales. There's not a whole certification. You don't have to go to a med school for it. You can fall into it and take your innate qualities. But I think that we also think that anybody can do it. So then we don't know how to do it correctly. We learn from, you know, plenty of leaders who've been promoted incorrectly. And gosh, Amy, you can probably talk about that forever, a little Peter principle there. But we follow leaders that also don't know how to do it. And so we've got that first starter. I think the other thing where things are really broken and where I love to focus a lot of my time is the foundations of selling. We don't really think about let's make sure we've got our organizational house in order before we start to think about, you know, we're going to bring in 17 different technologies and build this incredible tech stack and, you know, do all the latest hacks and tricks and things like that and go into enterprise selling for the first time. So your role and really think about, do you have your foundations in place? Do you have a sales process identified? Do you know what the script is, so to speak, on your very first call? Do we know what happens after you send out a proposal? Do you have these things identified first and foremost? And are you coaching your reps to really be human, to be authentic salespeople? Do they know how to write a great email? Do they know what to say correctly in an objection? Make sure that at the most basic level you've got this and then you build. And I think that the best analogy I can give to this is that sales leaders are like, we're going to renovate our master bath on the second floor and you're like, that's amazing. Your foundation is cracked and your home is sinking and they're like, that's okay. We'll renovate anyway. And you're like, okay. So I think fix the foundation. Let's make sure that the house is standing and it's in good shape and then let's build upon that. Go ahead, Amy. I wanted to get your opinion on this as well because I think it's a huge, huge pain point in the industry. I would agree. And I think as with anything, so we're talking about the foundation, but then I think bigger than that, it starts from the top down in expectations and leadership. And what I notice is, so I'll give you a perfect example. Not all businesses, not all people are credit equal, yet we're treating it as such and sales and recruiting, I believe it, I firmly believe it starts always with the people that you bring on and the expectations and how you enable them and support them. But beyond that, it's like in my mind, when I think about this, it's, it's not a one-size-fits-all, it's not one-dimensional, but yet we treat it this way. In so many people, so like for me, for years, people, I've been in sales leadership and I've been an individual contribution. I made the conscious decision. And more than one occasion, I did not want to be a leader for that company. I just didn't. And it was like, well, what do we do with you? Because when you're really good at what you do, it's like, well, what's next? And I think that people are just thrown into sales leadership that have no business being in leadership, that don't really want to be a leader. They like the ego, they like the accolades, they like the title, but the fundamental piece about leadership in my mind is all about your people. And those are the folks that tend to just regurgitate crap. Or what worked for me as a seller should automatically work for everybody else. And I'm going to disrupt the entire team to put together some sort of expectation or this is how it needs to be done because it's my way. These are the broken bits and pieces. And so I think it comes down to leadership. I think that there is this world that we're living in, where, and I don't have any beef with them whatsoever, but when predictable revenue was written, people have taken that model and they've totally bastardized it. The fundamentals of what predictable revenue was all about, I totally get that. I'm down with it. I support it. But now you've got this ripped off plug-and-play over segmentation of sales and it has nothing to do with the buyer journey or the customer. And I like to remind people of this all the time, the customer holds the keys always. They're the ones that write the checks and they're the ones that fuel everything else that happens. But yet we put together this thing that's all about awesome what we want in our process in our motion and has very little to do with them. And especially when you're going after money, it's like now you're in some multiplier of some expectation of someone else's dime and it's promoting all the wrong behavior. And so I think all of those things in combination coupled with everything that Sam just said and I agree, it is foundational. If you don't have that, nothing else really sticks for the long haul. So it's expectation. Let's stop it with the hacking, the shortcuts, the one size fits all mentality, especially for my folks that are like, we crushed it with this high velocity SMB sales model. That's awesome. That's how you entered the market. But just because you did that and just because your product was ready for that and Sam and I were on a different conversation, doesn't mean that you're enterprise ready. Just because you had one inbound lead from an enterprise customer, how do you know that that's not one of their franchise owners that has nothing to do with the big decisions made at corporate? There is so much misconception and especially from a sales leadership perspective, people are hired for the shiny objects like, oh, your team, more than 70% of your team hit. You went to president's club eight times in a row. You grew the business 200% year over year for four years. You're the sales leader that I want. Well, if I'm running enterprise sales and you did that and it was highly transactional SMB, that sales leader is going to have no idea how to lead what I need to do. The wrong expectations are going to happen and they're in line with the problems. Read, rinse, repeat, and the minute that we stop reading, rinsing, and repeating, the minute that we start seeing some of these problems get fixed. That's one of the big things that I encourage my clients when we're going through kickoff and discovery and I'm talking to them about what they need and why they need it. I am amazed at how many people aren't thinking through these things and that's the work that I crave to do. It's like, wait, let me get, let me help you get out of your own way. I can see this disaster coming from a mile away. Let me help you. So that's a lot that I just unloaded but all of that plus Sam plus so much more that's going to come up, I'm sure here. Hey, well, and I think you bring up two good points to you, right? And I think Amy, you're in the same boat from a recruitment perspective of how hard can I be? I've interviewed people before. I've hired people before. I know what I'm looking for. Why is it that I need an expert? Why is it that I need to outsource this and pay a fee to find somebody? But I think it's again just taking that shift and thinking that there are experts out there who have this figured out down to a science because this is their core competency and this is what they do day in and day out. So before you think about hiring somebody on your own, looking maybe for completely misalignment in terms of qualifications during that point there, think about how do you bring in an expert to help you and make sure that you don't make the terribly extensive mistake of hiring the wrong talent, disrupting your team, costing yourself revenue, et cetera. I think the other thing, and this was an expensive mistake that I learned by myself, exactly your point of hiring the wrong caliber person for what you're doing. So when I'm researching for one of my enterprise leaders at one point, I ended up hiring an individual who was a kind of VP of sales for a ton of startups and just incredibly well-known in the space of New York, like very big brand. And so I hired her and what was so shocking to me and such a great learning experience was that I was taking somebody who was accustomed to having the world as their territory and saying, here 40 accounts go make it happen. And there was no, maybe a little bit nicer, more nicer than that. But there's no idea of like how do I nurture leads, how do I map out an account, how do I build an account plan, how do I start at the top and weave my way in and multi-thread because before it's just like, hey, everybody we're new and we can do something. And now it's everybody knows our brand, but you need to figure it out with these 40 accounts and make a break. So I think expensive lesson for me to learn as a sales leader and for the organization and what we could have avoided with having proper talent. So again, just a good thing for our sales leaders to consider. When it goes back to that one size fits all, I enact a pick on your alma mater and I don't know where it was that this was, but I know that you worked at LinkedIn. And I have this conversation a lot. I go back to HR tech as well where it'll be an HR tech startup and they're like, we want somebody from LinkedIn because look at their culture and look at their playbooks. And I'm like, do you realize that their playbooks have been set in stone for a really long time in the person that you're going to take out of that? If they've never created that playbook before, they know how to manage to that playbook. They don't know how to create it. So the work that needs to be done at different stages of companies, different kinds of companies, different sizes of teams, right? So you could be in a small company, but the team's really big or the reverse of that or you could be at a LinkedIn or a Yahoo or whatever it might be, the work is different. And so there's this lack of understanding of the nuances and the complexities of sales. It isn't just this plug-and-play thing of, here's your patch. Here's, I mean, I remember when I first started, I was like, here's the yellow pages. I'm like, okay, you know, and yes, I go that far back, but it's like, just go up and do it. And it's like, and luckily I did and I stumbled a lot, but I learned it doesn't have to be that difficult. And what I find is people aren't listening for the differences. And so it's like, well, this is our way of doing it. This is what we know and what people aren't understanding is, well, you're treating your prospects horribly. Yes, you're force-feeding business in. What does your churn look like? What does that look like? And by the way, how many lost opportunities do you have throughout the process? People just want to look at the new low goes in, but there's a whole ecosystem of stuff that's happening that's hurting your business that people aren't thinking of. And the right leaders for your business are thinking about all of that. Not just a little bit of, well, we got funding and now we have to throw up 50 new low goes, but we'll treat them horribly, shove them in. We're going to turn them in less than 12 months because we don't know what we're doing. We don't have a customer success motion. It is an ecosystem and all these things are part of it. And sales isn't something that you just do. It affects your buyer and it sets the stage and tone for what happens next. So sorry, Scott. Can I ask you a question? No, it's good. It's very good. So I was actually original. I was going to ask a sales question for the whole thing, but I want to actually ask a people question because I think as we're unpacking this a lot of this is not surprisingly driven by the people that you hire, the people that you bring in. So when you are everything you're saying makes sense about how it's not a one size fits all. It's not just the right type of leader, how the leader has not just maybe the operational experience, but actually conceptualizing and ideating and building out that playbook and then maybe running with it depending on what their background is like and there's all these different nuances. So is it finding the right person with the right experience or is it finding the right person with the right personality traits because not everything can always be found in experience because well, or it's very difficult to find somebody who's scaled to start up from 10 to 50 million and then build up that playbook successfully and then that's the perfect time for that person to pivot into a new role and the company is doing the exact same thing. Is that an easy person to find or can it be substitute with some level of competency plus some personality traits that can allow them to understand and build that out even if they haven't done it before to the same level or the exact same nuance is what you're hiring in. Yeah, so for me, it goes back to that it's not a one size fits all and so that's where my enterprise selling shops come through of discovery and I think both of those things are important. So like what are the DNA traits that this person inherently needs to bring to the table? You can't teach somebody to care, right, like either they do or they don't. What do they care about though? It's what they care about and why they care about it that I'm especially interested in and I need to listen to my clients of have we taken the intentional approach to understand why are we hiring, right, why, why is it time now and if it's and one of the things that I do the most of is is cleaning up, right, they've gotten it wrong, they're feeling the pain, their recruiting process isn't working, they're suffering from all the horrible effects of mishiring, there are lots of lessons to learn there. Let's not repeat those. Let's take a moment and figure that out and connect some of those dots. So a lot of that is going to be, well, why do you think that this is a good time to hire why this role? Sometimes I have to tell people like you want a VP, you're so early stage, don't do that, right, that's going to hurt you. So it's understanding the why and then the why and really diagnosing, there's two different buckets there. What are the things that the person absolutely has to be, has to embody, has to believe in and then on the flip side, what are the things that characteristics of the work that they need to do, the work that they've done, how that translates. So I had this conversation with early stage companies all the time where they're like, I want a sales leader that has taken a company from 0 to 50 million 10 times and I'm like, that person doesn't exist and if they did, they're working for themselves now consulting making a boatload of cash, they don't have to take this role. The work is a grind and they don't want to go through that. So let's talk about your stage, right, what's the work at your stage, because chances are the person that can get you from 0 to perhaps 5 to 10 million, it's a very, very different leader than the leader that's at 100 million and it's okay to hire over them if they can't rise to the occasion, but give them an opportunity. These are the things to think about, people aren't thinking like that. So I always tie it back, Scott, to what is the actual work and then all the other things that you're talking about, sort of shake out, I'm a huge fan of the scorecard and using all of that to map it out as to all of this carries weight. Let's think about what weight it carries and let's use this as our guiding force so that we do get it right together, so that it's not just making assumptions or not knowing you've got this heavy hair in front of you, you don't know how to talk to them, you don't know how to ask some questions and you read some stupid thing online about these are the top 10 questions to ask a sales leader, you have no idea why you're asking it, you have no idea what they're answering, but it sounds good, so I'm going to hire them, stop, stop it right now. And if you are doing that with Pete's in love, please call me because I will help you. I think you talked about a good word earlier ecosystem and I want to say something and using your terminology also, Scott, that I think tends to be a shocker for a lot of business owners and even senior leaders, you, one size fits all doesn't exist, you also have two types of sales leaders, you have true sales leaders who have been individual contributors, they're the, they amian, sands of the world who have been there and done that, been in the trenches and grinded it out and can actually tell you how to do it. And then you've got operational leaders who probably have sold maybe for a year or two, weren't super successful but knew all the mechanics and the math of it and could map out a process for how you should look at your top low reports and your Microsoft VIs and all of that and figure out exactly what you need in order to be successful. You need both kinds of leaders in your organization, right? Because you're going to need someone who's going to be able to go to the table with your clients, build rapport, know how to start the call, know how to work the room, know what actually sell what it is that you're doing and then you're going to need your operational leaders, right? You can get that in sales operations but you can also just get that in operational leadership by having that at a different level of the organization too. I think people focus, one, don't have a viewpoint for that and then two, a lot of people get really excited about the operational people because they're like, oh, data, data, big data. That's exciting and that is exciting and that's wonderful. But you also need, especially as frontline managers, the people who are working and coaching your reps, you need leaders who are going to be able to say, this is how you do it, restructure the same on this way, restructure this proposal this way. Let's do a prep call and a dry run before you go and possibly botch it in front of one of our biggest opportunities ever. So you've got to look for that across the board. I think that the focus on data and operations is great and is important but again, making sure that you have a balance between your leaders who can fill the certain gaps for you. It's like building a baseball team. You're not going to, everybody's the baseball player, everybody who said VP of sales or whatever but you've got, you know, your empires, your batters, your third basement, et cetera. Everybody has a little bit of a role and a strength that they bring. If you only brought one of those and built your entire team based on that, you wouldn't be successful, right? I hate sports analogies and great that I just gave you one but that's how I do it. It's a good analogy. I like it. I never knew that. It's a good one. Yeah. It's very good. Everyone's a baseball player, but you got to find the right position. Right. What do you think Scott? What's your take? I think that the biggest issue that I've seen like over my career is that you have individuals like yourself that are very forward thinking in the way that they want to do things and they go into a consultancy agreement with an organization. But then the CEO has always done sales one way and the sales leader has always done sales one way. And then the efficacy of the consultant is now diminished because they're paying somebody to figure out how to get a decision maker on the phone and like it's a very like tactical consultancy. You're almost like revamping the entire commercial organization. That's a lot to ask from somebody who's just looking to hit their Q2 number. Right. And I think that that's, so I don't, I guess that's what I've seen and when I've managed sales teams in my past, I've hired consultants, so I've been told to go hire this consultant from the CEO and then I've looked to people that I sort of want to emulate and consultants that have sort of modern sales methodologies and just basically everything that you're saying, other sort of consultants like that. But then it always goes back to the CEO or the executive who doesn't really know much about sales or the decision maker within the company who just wants to buy the thing that's going to get more deals or close more deals or the very transactional sales. So how do you find, either how do you find the right company as a consultant to work with as obviously you want to audit your customers or, or how do you, how do you sell your services because I know that you're thinking the right way, but I know that your customers are not most likely. Well, and I think, you know, again, Amy, you're, you're going to have a good perspective on this since this is your, your bread and butter. One of the things that I was going to say to you is an earlier point, real quick, but think about to, oh my gosh, you're completely lost my train of thought. The things that kind of cannot be taught, right? So to the point of we cannot teach somebody to care, right? Like Amy said, we cannot teach somebody how to, we can, but not in the same way to authentically build rapport. Also look for those things like what does your organization truly need in leadership right now? Is it, you know, do you have more leads than you can manage and you need somebody really strong in front of your customers or do you have absolutely no idea how to bring any of that on the door? You need a little bit of operational first and then layer on a sales leader who can truly sell. And I think for us as consultants, it's also really important for us to know exactly what our core competency is what we bring to the table and to like anything, disqualify opportunities. So our Amy and I are two people who are incredibly protective of our brand. And the last thing we ever want to do is to engage with the client and have them say that was not at all what I expect it right. I would rather disqualify an opportunity and say, hey, it sounds like you need somebody that can help you with Power BI, not really my strength. Here's somebody who would be awesome for you. Hey, it sounds like you need help with recruiting. I could do it, but Amy can do it better. Here's this person that I can refer to you, right? And to disqualify those opportunities for yourself so that you don't do what every other consultant does, which is sign an agreement with the client, not be effective for them and continue to loop our value as consultants. I think the other thing is just again, understanding where they are, possibly even giving them a little bit of advice and again, saying, you know, I'd be a great fit for you because here are the core competencies where I can focus for you or I can help you here, but you're going to need 90% more than I can give you, and here's the direction that you should go in. I don't know, Amy, what do you think? So I'm super grateful back from my startup days of being an enterprise sales. I was hired at a company that thought that this is just what you would do. And you know, sometimes with private companies, you don't, even though you're peeling back the layers and you're asking the questions, you don't, they don't tell you what sometimes they don't want to tell you. And this wasn't an enterprise-ready solution. And I remember the CMO that I was really good friends with, or he became a big ally of mine and helped me. He helped me to read this book called Crossing the Casm. And I have talked about this book a ton. You have different kinds of people in their evolution of buying. And what Sam and I are trying to do is really taking an old methodology and flipping the script on it and modernizing it because of what works, right, and what the market place is truly demanding and fixing problems for that. And so to your point, Sam, I agree. I say no. And I'm not trying to sound like a jerk at all. I wish I was saying yes more than I was saying no. I say no more to opportunities that come my way than I say yes because I know who my ideal customer is. I know the work that we do and I know it's not for everyone. And so if somebody comes to my, comes to my, comes my way, comes to my way. That's nice. That's for these lovely gems that come my way that need help and they really want help. But it is that mentality that you're talking about stop where it's like I've always done it this way. And they approach me like I'm just taking an order and this is a button of seat. I can't help. And it's going to be a disaster. I'm talking about people's lives and their livelihood and not that I'm, you know, mother Teresa over here. But I know the brand that I want to create. I know the work that I'm trying to do and I'm a huge time in a fan of why I have all of that why I can't in good faith just do something for the sake of turning a buck. It'll blow up. I hear about the nightmare stories every day. So I think I'm in the early adoption realm of crossing the chasm, right? And I'm going to read you a text I just got it yesterday from a client. So I've spoken with a couple of recruiters lately and none of them remotely compared to your process professionalism or awesomeness. FYI, not for people we're hiring, but them reaching out to me because she knew I'd probably be like, what? Um, seriously, you should be absolutely dominating this market. Why aren't you the first person that everybody works with? I've been thinking about it for two days and I just don't get why you're not running the world. Um, I love her, right? I was like, that goes on a website, by the way. You take it. I was like, I'm LinkedIn. Like, can you just talk about that? But I responded back to her and said because I'm asking people to think differently because I'm challenging the status quo. And that's not for everybody and Scott, to your point, when it's the, we've always done what we needed to do. There's another book that I read that was like, what got you here doesn't get you there. Um, and I'm probably, I, I mix up titles, especially like on the spot, it's kind of that book. Um, but, you know, that had an indelible impression on me just because I've always done something like the way that I sold back in the day is not what I'm doing today. I've had to adjust. There are certain things that I will never not do, but I've had to twist and turn them a little bit because of the buyer journey, because of the ecosystem that I'm a part of, because of what needs to happen, because the marketplace speaks louder than I ever could. And I just have to listen to it. And so that's the whole thing with this. I am not going to be for the company that comes my way that says, we're working with 50 recruiters, we have horrible retention rates. We just need butts and seats. I've got to fill a class. I'm not really going to communicate with you. I don't really care about candidate experience like I can't do that in good faith. I also talk about it all the time to fix it. How hypocritical could I be if I started doing that business just to turn a quick buck? So I think it's like understanding that book crossing the chasm should be required reading for everyone because it saves you so much angst of trying to put square pegs and round holes. It's okay that not everybody wants to work with me. I'm okay with that. What I'm not okay with is people that think that it's one way and trying to work in another way. Like self-awareness is really big. So when I do talk to clients and they're like, yes, we are ready for your therapy session. We are ready for your consulting. We are ready for your recruiting methodology. We do know that it works. You've got refer does on a silver platter by this other company that we trust and old habits die hard. I can't. It's that whole adage scot back to your point and Sam your point to I can lead the horse to water, but I can't make them drink and the only time anything changes is when you make it change and you want it to. And so back to sales because sales recruiting, not dissimilar. I'm not in the business of convincing anybody to do anything. I never will. I didn't in my sales career and I'm not about to do it here. If I have to convince you that you should hire this person, if I have to convince you that you should work with me, if I have to convince you to sign my deal, that's a big problem stop convincing. Either the value is there or it's not and maybe there's some work that still needs to be done to determine that, but I can't make you change your mind if you don't want to change it. It's like every relationship in the world. I can't make you do something unless you're ready, willing and able and wanting to do that. So I want to point out something because you just spoke about something you spoke about how you sell yourself to customers and I want to highlight that because your sales consultants and I think the way that you sell is the way that a lot of people should be selling, but they don't and let me explain by let me explain what I mean. So when you say that you sell and you disqualify certain customers and you can't force something on somebody if they're not ready and you say no to a lot of customers, these are things. This is a good sales strategy, but it's not taught enough to sales reps because if I'm a sales rep and every job I've ever worked in, the general consensus is if it breathes, go sell to it. And I think that that mentality of literally close everything, close it as quick as possible. These nuances depending on whether or not you're like B2C, SMB all the way through to enterprise, but the general mantra is you need to go sell and I think that if you focus on retention, if you focus on churn, if you focus on disqualifying customers, you will find that the end result is actually not less sales, maybe in the short term, but not less sales long term, long term vision, you are going to have reps that are focusing on the right thing. They're focusing on the right customer that are focusing on the right, you know, buyer persona, target customer profile, these things that kind of go out the window. The second you are forced or you know, there's a lot of pressure to sell at the close and to disqualify a customer to say no to keep them out of the pipeline is something that I don't think is paying over enough, but I think it's one of the most useful strategies to not only keep your sanity, but also to sell effectively to the right person, deliver the right products at the right expectations so the customers happy, you're happy, everyone's happy. You're not wasting your time with customers, it shouldn't be buying from you. And at the end of the day, it's just a more positive and healthy sales culture. Well, I was going to say to you, I think one of the unseen values here is the trust that it builds, builds with those prospective customers, right? So a really short story, there's, I live just outside DC and there's a mechanic here called Auto Scandia, sorry, anybody else who lives in DC. And I took my car there for the first time forever ago and one of the things that they came back to me and said, they said, okay, where do we even begin with the work that your car needs? Oh, good. Let me pour myself a verb and it's 9 a.m. And what was great about them though is that they went through the list and then they said, there's also all this other stuff that we can fix. But FYI, there's some actually callbacks and lawsuits going on with BMW right now that if you take it to the dealership, I bet you can convince them to fix it for free. Oh my God. And that was $3600 of work in the end, which most of it I did end up getting for free just by saying, like, I know about your lawsuits, think about this too, right? I talk about this in just in the sales process, whether you're selling or whether you're a consultant outside. But if you can disqualify an opportunity and say, I probably could do this for you, but we're not the right fit or we, our platform sort of does not and it can do it in a bandated way. But if you actually go to this place while, you know, I'm not a fan of recommending a competitor, they'll do this for your specific purpose. Just think about somebody basically gave you advice that hurt them financially, right? But they did it because it was the right thing to do and because they had integrity and because they assessed your problem correctly. And now you, that's trust built in them, right? And to go back and say, okay, now we need this, like, can you, can you do this for us or now I can recommend somebody for you because I really trust you and I trust your opinion. Now, I think the other thing to think about is one of the most beautiful parts about Amy and I being consultants is we get to choose what we work on, right? Like there's all kinds of lows with being a consultant too, right? They come with it, but we get to choose the work that we work on. And the reason that we're consultants is because we want to do the work that we're most passionate about. So, for instance, somebody well known in the text base recommended a client to me the other day. And the client said, we'd love to talk about messaging with you and we need help with messaging and it was like, oh, my God, I cannot wait. I'm salivating. Let's rewrite all of the things and get excited. And when they came up for the meeting, they said, well, we really need as a Marquetto expert. So we need somebody that can write all of our marketing campaigns in Marquetto, tell us about our performance. I don't do that. I can sort of spell Marquetto. I know Marquetto, but I don't know a well and I'm certainly not the right person. But if I was in a desperate situation, I could be like, yeah, sure, I'll do it. And then I would theorize that Google how to do this and then kind of do it. I would also hate the work. I would hate the work. It would take me away from doing all the other work and I wouldn't build a good brand with this client because they would see that basically I'm a fraud and I kind of condemned to doing this. The other thing is I want to do work that I'm really talented at that's going to get people to say, this rocks my world and I'm going to refer you to somebody else. Same thing in sales, right? You want to do the work that's really meaningful. You want to do the work that builds a better brand for you that will get referrals for you to keep doing that work. I want to write messaging all day long. I want to empower your BDRs and you to get pipeline all day long. I want to help you get your company off the ground all day long. I don't want to do Marquetto campaigns for anyone that's listening that does that. I have a lead for you. It's important to disqualify that because it's just not the work that I want to do. Again, Grin and Amy and I are in good situations where we build our businesses and maybe don't have to be desperate for the work. But if you kind of forward to it, I would really advocate that you do that. Well, to that point, you bring up an excellent point of that is one of the reasons why I'm self-employed, right? I wanted to do it my way because I knew that I had tapped into something. One of the biggest fights I had of working for others was fighting for my customer, right? And being like, no, we can act and taking financial hits for it, by the way. In my customer, it wasn't like I called them and we were like, yeah, so this is the pain that I felt but it was right. And I knew, especially in enterprise sales, these were relationships that I'd have that were repeated. This was my brand. This was my integrity. And so I tell people, especially in enterprise sales in any world, you never know where the paths cross again. If it feels icky, you probably shouldn't do it. If you have to think twice, you probably shouldn't do it. But what happens to those people that are working for that tyrannical boss that's just like a version of the boiler room that's like, I don't care how you feel, I don't care how the customer feels. Here's your number. You have this incredible pressure over you and the fix for that is your pipeline trumps all, right? When you do the right work with the right people consistently, you can have more powerful conversations to say no versus jamming things through. But most importantly, it ties back to the hiring process. I'm doing this thing called Thursday Night Sales where we have hundreds of people join us. And the conversation that we have has been so enlightening for me and for many others, people are afraid to ask questions in the interview process. It goes back to that hiring motion of, this is your career, this is the job that you have to do every day. If you don't understand what the day-to-day really looks like, right, like what is expected of me? Do I have the threshold of if it doesn't make sense who are the partners that you refer business to, right? Or what does that look like? And if they're like, hell no, we don't do that. We win, like maybe you want to know that that's not good for you. And so this goes back to that fundamental piece of intentionality on both sides. I have this manifesto that I live by. I can't care more about you're growing your business thing you do and I can't care more about your career than you do. And if I do, we have a real big problem. You can't backseat approach your business, your people, your career, et cetera, et cetera. And so when I think about that, just pause for a second. And again, there's a scorecard methodology in place for people looking for jobs. The things that are really important to you and if this is really important to you and I sure hope it is different sales and you want a long-term career, it is incredibly scary the first time you do it, the first many times that you do it, but it is incredibly powerful and I can't tell you some of the biggest knows that I've had to say that are painful. That suck, right? Like even though I do it, I still want, you know, it still would be great to do that. And it's hard to say no, have come back tenfold. Whether it's referrals, whether it's coming back to me with the right opportunity because they heard me. And I can't tell you how many times I've talked to somebody and I'm like, I'm not the right person. I've heard what you said. These are the things that I've heard. Did I get that right? Yes, you got that right. Here's why I'm not the right person for you. Here are the things that you need to think about. Here's some of the work that you might want to do before you engage with someone and pay a lot of money. And I can't tell you how many people are like, they're like stunned. That's just how they're like, wait, what? Thank you. Thank you. I mean, honest. Thank you. Wait, you could have just taken my money. Like, thank. I get a lot of gratitude and say I'm one of the things that you say all the time and I love you for this and this needs to be your next hashtag is being a gracious loser. I say no or it said to me how I act in that moment determines what happens in the future. And I think you said it earlier, we're so short-sighted or I think all of us have said it in one degree or the other, but I think you said it as well. Think about the big picture, right? Just because it's a no today doesn't mean that it's a no forever and somebody recently challenged me and they're like, how dare you say, because I said on the LinkedIn post, it's disgusting when you try to force feed a no into a yes. And I got a lot of flack from this particular individual and this particular individual is like, it's disgusting if you don't seek to understand to turn the no around into a yes. And I'm like, no, no. I'm not seeking to try to turn anything into anything besides having business conversations and connecting the dots, confirming denying that I can do that. And if I can't, I'm not here to convince you. And that is the problem. And that person that chimed in is a very big voice on LinkedIn that has a lot of advice that a lot of people follow. So that's the other thing to this. So many people were in this cluttered space. Everyone's talking about content. I'm on it myself, but the way that I use my voice, I genuinely try to help people through the things that I know to be true with the results that I've seen. You've got a lot of people that are jumping into the content plan because that's what you do. And that's what you should be doing. Well, not everybody should be. I hate to say that out loud. I'm going to be the unpopular opinion here to say this, but not everybody should be. And if you're following advice from big influencers and that term makes me kind of cringed, consider the source. And look at the influencers. What do they talk about through the collective course of time? Is it out every side of their mouth just to get engagement or is it that they're the expert in that? And they talk about that because they care deeply because they have the results and body of work and experience to back it up. So much bad advice that people are following, glad that you brought up Mark Robers. He is like the OG of really thinking about sales in such a different way and anybody, me included, that have read his book, they were like, hell, yeah, like this, yes, all of this. And there's a reason why we all reference that. Those that aren't. And not that Mark is like the beyond end all, but like those that are just putting their spin to something and there's no basis for it. That's a problem. But if you've got a big following, they're influencing our craft, the things that we're talking about today to care about and influencing it in a really icky way. It just that's why I use my voice every single day is to try to settle the score a little bit and to say slow down to go fast. Think about these things. So sorry. I'm on a tangent. I'm going to pop myself off and like the blood pressure is up on a Friday. I don't even know what's happening here. So that's why we only get you at the cottage. I don't want to see you in the city. Why do you think I moved away from Chicago? Let's be real. And one thing I want to do is, you know, we went through a ton of really, really good stuff. One thing I wanted to pull out and just ask both of you, would we be able to just do like a rapid fire list of like the worst practices, the worst things you see in sales or sales leadership? Because as people are listening to this, do they're going to say, oh, shit, I do that or, oh, I do that. And I just want it from both of you. It could be something that you do as an individual, as an individual contributor or like a sales leadership, like worst practices in the industry. I'd love to sort of just run through a run through a list rapid fire. I wrote notes. So I will not give any examples. I'll just do rapid fire. Sam, you first. Okay. I'm going to give you some one lineers to what I see that is just icky. So here's my first one. Hey, it's the first email I've ever sent you. Here's my calendar link so you can schedule time with me. No, don't do it. What's yours? You go next. We'll ping-pong. There are no hacks. There are no hacks. Discounting is our strategy. Oh my gosh. I've got another one. Do you have 15 to 20 minutes for me to tell you about my solution today? Hey, Sam. I wanted to connect with you on LinkedIn. Our product is the leading SaaS platform for IT cloud solutions, which you as a three and a half person sized company definitely need. Are you open to connecting? No, dude. How about this? I just want to talk to you. I just want to you. I just. I just. By the way, there is a Chrome extension, a fix for this that's called just not sorry. Anytime you use any one of those words, it takes it out. It's awesome. So that the one size fits all. We said that. Stop treating it as such. Use a scorecard. Train an onboard and enable that there's a big lack for that of that, I should say. Remember that the customer holds the keys always. Not all sales leaders are created equal. Expectations from the top down starts in the interview, understand what you're really stepping into, not just what people are telling you, don't get caught up in the shiny objects. Those are some of the things on my list. Thanks for getting on this discovery call. First, I've ever spoken to you. I'm going to tell you about me for 28 minutes and then you tell me if you want to buy me, not being a gracious loser, so losing a deal and it never responding or being a source for it about it, urgency, lack of urgency, really quick story there once handed a lead to a wrap and a BPS sales, I think I told you the story and it took them 11 days, 11 days to respond. Oh, that's a good. No personalization and your outreach, yes, we want to scale and yes, we want to do that and yes, there are platforms to do that. You have to personalize your content, the higher you go, the more important it is. And if you don't think it's important and you just want to spray, spray and pray, which is my least favorite term, then you're just never going to be predictably successful. What else is really bad? Just including that we went to the same college together. Part of the pipeline is fierce, so thinking about that pipeline for the short term, near term and long term, right work with the right people consistently, that's when you can say no. So that was the other thing is the power of no is fierce. And just because it's a no today doesn't mean that it's a no forever. Think about the big picture. The other thing is your customer trumps all and I know I said this before, but I saw this newsletter that came my way that was like retention is the new growth. No, no, retention has always been important. So it's not just what you're getting in for the new logo. It's everything that happens up to that point and after that point. Well, I think also for the for reps, broken in sales is not putting, not keeping our foot in the gap on the gas and we have decent pipeline. So I think this is really what separates the grades from the the average performers is that the way that I'd always talk about it is once you have pipeline, you need to constantly keep the lens on the fact that operate as if you have zero pipeline. Keep going, keep going, keep going, keep your foot on the gas, right? And what will happen is you're still attacking your territory with the same amount of aggressiveness that you would if you have not none of your deals and that pipeline will continue to grow. I think it's so easy to see reps that do a roller coaster. They have a ton of pipeline so they don't focus on building it and then they close those deals and then they have no pipeline. So the next quarter is terrible, next quarter is great, next quarter is terrible. So keep your keep your foot on the gas. I think the other thing is not knowing how to nurture your leads properly is is a huge broken thing in sales, right? We send a proposal out and then we don't keep in touch. We just wait and hope for the best or we get a not now, but in 90 days and we say, sounds good. And we put a task and sales force and for 89 days and then we're like, there's no good time to chat and they're like, where are you again? And not using technology to help scale. And I don't mean by sending out thousands of emails. I mean, thinking of technologies like LinkedIn Sales Navigator that you can use that will just turn leads to you on a daily basis and just pump them out or you can use meaningful leads, meaningful insights and actually keep in touch in a meaningful way or go after new leads and close those deals in less time. I think also just the act of not digitally selling is hugely broken, right? Now that we're in a pandemic, I don't know if any of you noticed, but the amount of outreach that I get from organizations, I just signed an enormous financial organization that I'm training on their entire sales force on how to digitally sell. It's a thousand sales reps and sales leaders who have virtually no presence on LinkedIn. They have no idea how to replace a handshake with a Zoom. They don't know. Do I post content? Do I talk people? They have no idea. This isn't social selling. It's not modern selling. It's selling today. It's an expectation. These are table stakes right now. So if you don't already have a strategy for that and implementation for it, make sure you know how to digitally sell, how to connect, right? How to actually leverage content on LinkedIn. Well, that's what we're missing. Scott, it's on your list. Yeah, so I'd say there's two things and you have a great list and we went through a whole bunch of them, but I'm going to highlight two more that I think are super important and I really sort of I really try and evangelize these as much as possible. So the first one is sales and marketing alignment. So messaging across both of your commercial organizations, essentially, we're all aware the buyer's journey is no longer linear. It's changed a lot since what we knew sales to be in the past and the history, the buyer just doesn't, you know, it's not just they submit a lead or they submit their name and they become a lead and then it goes through that buyer's journey to get contacted by an inside sales rep who gets and they get passed over to an account executive. They do a demo call and then eventually they go all the way through to the closing that deal and the company wins the business. The buyer's journey is not that simple anymore. So now the buyer goes on social media and they go on a website and then they contact the company and they contact somebody who they know use the company. They check it out on LinkedIn, who are their peers who are following the company. They contact the SDR, the sales, the inside sales rep, they book a call. They get on that call now that SDR moves that customer over to an account executive for a demo call after the discovery. And now the customer has looked on social, looked on the website, spoken to one person, spoken to a friend, spoken to the account executive, they're going to go back on social, they're going to go on the website and they're doing this constantly and they're constantly going through all these different outlets and they're checking all these different resources and all the different mediums where the company puts out their marketing material, wherever the company puts out a marketing campaign, whatever it may be. And as they go through all these different all these different avenues and all these different mediums of and all these different ways to interact with the company, they're getting messaging, they're getting messaging from the marketing campaigns, they're getting messaging from the sales reps. And the issue that comes with not aligning that commercial like the marketing and the sales messaging and having that sales and marketing alignment is that when they go on social media or when they get an email or when they go on the website, it's a different message than when they speak to a sales rep. And when you have that misalignment, it's harder to build products. So the first one, yeah, for sure, is sales and marketing alignment, I think needs a lot of work across a lot of different organizations. And the second one has more to do with startups. So one thing that I try and preach a little bit is for founders to not hire sales or VP sales until they've sold their own product. How do you bring a product market at an early stage and what's the mistake? Well, I think the mistake that's made is that a founder hires a VP sales pursuant to go sell the product before the founder when the founder can't sell the product himself or they don't have the confidence to go sell it. What I think they should do, and I've heard this, this is sort of an idea that I've internalized myself, but I did hear it from someone else originally, was that how you take a product market is the founder goes sells 50 of the widget or the product. Once you've sold those 50 of that widget, now you've understood who your buyer is, you can develop a buyer persona, you can develop an ideal customer profile and ICP, and then once you have that, then you give that to somebody to develop the man. So you can give it to somebody who can create more demand because now you have a model to emulate who that target customer is. And once you have so much demand coming in that the CEO can't handle all the leads, that's when you go and build out your sales organization, you can hire that head of sales or whatever, but just just to go higher ahead of sales if you never sold your product or you're expecting them to sell the product, that's not the best way to do it. And also, a VP sales is not going to be, like you mentioned before, fitting people into certain slots of VP sales, who's going to be able to win business over at an early stage if you really want to do an outbound focused approach. It's going to be much different in somebody who is very exceptional at building out, in most cases, very exceptional at building out a large commercial organization, understanding the right talent to hire, because those are two different types of people, a person who's just a glorified inside sales rep who's hitting the pavement, dialing for dollars, and that's what they're really good at, and that's what they want to do day in, day out. Maybe some VP sales probably came from that, but if you have a really good tactical VP sales that can build out a strong commercial organization, they probably left that role a long time ago and they don't feel the need to go back. Those are my two points that outside all the other really good ones that you might have. Couldn't agree with you more, and I think that that's also where the aspect of SAM sales BDR came into play, because I was working with so many early stage companies that said, okay, we want to hire a sales rep now, or we want to hire ahead of sales, and we don't know how to do that, how do we rent the job rack, how do we do all that? And it was great. Why do you want to do that? And we're like, well, we need leads. We need to be able to bring in business, and it's to your point exactly, Scott, you need somebody that is less expensive, that can also help bring in the leads and drive demand. And so then you get to a point where you're like, I can't do this anymore, I need to hire a sales rep that can actually effectively close, take these over for us. So I think it's great if you have somebody like from a BDR perspective that knows how to do the messaging that can do all the things that can start to reach out, right, versus a sales rep, or a sales leader that's going to be two or three times the cost and go after it. I think you're your other point too, just in terms of bringing that team on early stage and not knowing how to sell the product is also something I see working with how to marketing, working with the CEO, and like, what's your value proposition? Why do people buy you? And they're like, well, and I'm like, oh, and then I'm like, who's your buyer? What's your key buyer persona? What's your drool worthy buyer is what I always say, right? Where lead comes in from this person, and you're like, oh my god, what is that? And they're like, well, I mean, a lot of people buy us, and I'm like, okay, so there's a lot of discovery work that needs to be done to make sure that you know why, why your product is better, why your company is better than somebody else, and you know who it is that would buy it in an ultimate form. So love, love your points. Yeah, those were the two that I wanted to drive home. I really think you nailed the rest of them. I don't have anything else. I think we covered a ton of stuff. I have some life lesson, insight questions I want to ask, rapid fire, but before I go into that, is there anything that we didn't cover that you wanted to bring out? I just would say there's two things that I want to add to that list that I think both of you will agree with. And I loved the last point that all the points, but really the last point that you made of founder lead selling and perception versus reality. And I think sometimes when you're so close to it, and that's your baby, and you think it's great, and your wicked smart, and everybody's telling you how great it is, doesn't mean that your client is. And if you don't know who your client is, that's a problem. So I love that. But here's the here are the last two things that I would say. In the world that we live in, even with SMB, the buyer journey is multithreaded. It's not just singular with one person. So embracing that and understanding that and figuring out what that looks like and staying close to all the people involved, especially inside of a pandemic right now, where maybe the buyer team, maybe it was cut by half, maybe a quarter of that team is gone. That makes you start the work all over again. And so the more that you understand and you're rooted in lots of different people that are part of that buying motion, the better it is. And the other thing is, and I live and die by this and every part of my life, what you put into something is what you get out of it in your sales career and your business. And if you're a founder, I don't care what it is, what you put in is what you get out. And if you take a backseat approach to it, or you just go plug and play because you read some article online that you think is cool, and it has nothing to do with your business, it's going to hurt you. I think to that, yeah, to that point with Amy. And something Amy touched on earlier that I think was important is what do you do when you're working for that that boss that doesn't care about disqualifying opportunities and just wants you to bring everything? What you put into your career is what you get out. And if you work for an organization that's like that, that says just go and make it happen no matter what, you've got to think about your own personal brand and how that's going to take you long throughout your career. Especially if you're working, you know that you want to work in the same space, right? If you're in pharmaceuticals and you know you want to get just SaaS, like, okay, maybe a little bit less because you're probably going to get to different buyers in the end. But if you're in SaaS, like Amy and I have been basically for our entire careers and you know you're going to keep building this or you're in a particular vertical and you know this is probably going to be your career forever because you've already invested a decade. You need to think about what your brand is every day, not only from the product that you sell, but how you guys sell it to what you put into it in order to get the right things out of it. And I'll share just a quick story. I was really young in my career just a few years after infecting and net and new enterprise sales. My company was a champ, was resold another product so we were a channel partner to a larger organization and we terminated that relationship with that that channel partner because they were expensive. We went with a far less expensive product and we had to turn that over and all of the things that were built on that product in about 10 days. And after that started, it was one thing that failed after another and our clients were getting so upset. And I said, I don't have another job lined up, but I cannot connect myself with this product because I will lose all the relationships that I just spent the last four or five years of my life building. So just think about that too, right? If you're in that boat, is this impacting your own personal brand and when you eventually move? Well, well, this will be an issue for you. Well, people then want to still work with you. And if not, if you continue supporting this too long. All right, I'm going to feel like an asshole asking this question. It's a tough question, but I'm going to ask it anyways. People have bills, people have homes, people have you know, kids, people have all these things that they have to pay for. So if somebody stuck in a situation where they are in less than ideal circumstances with their work, perhaps like you mentioned, like they're they feel like they're hurting their own professional profile or their own professional persona. What would you recommend they do when times are tough like this right now when unemployment is at an all time high? It may not be that easy to just get another job. I'm curious to know what you what you would recommend. I guess my my feedback would be one, make sure that you're doing the foundational and again, things that you need to do to set yourself up for a better job. So if you're thinking, I've got to separate myself. What do I do now in order to make that happen? And 90 days think about the basics, right? LinkedIn profile. We know that that's where we go first and foremost to check people out. Make sure that is checked out through and through. There's hundreds of resources to help you know. You can also pop over to my LinkedIn profile and there's an article that I wrote all about recommendations. It's called recommendations who do I have to, which is something pretty much how we all feel about it. But yeah, you have to. If you want to get out here, you have to. So there's a whole script and all that stuff go feel feel free to grab it. So make sure you're doing those things first and foremost to get set up to be in a good shape when people look at you. I think the other thing and this will probably be really unpopular advice that I'm going to get a lot of eyebrow raises. I say yes to my leader and then I do my own thing. So I one of my former companies, I had a leader who was like, just go, just go, just go. And I was like, right on top of that rose and we never did. And we just didn't because it wasn't the right thing to do for our reps. It hurt their quotas personally. It slashed our value with our customers. No, no way in hell. I'm not attaching my brand to it. So I managed that correctly and I was like and then I did our own thing and we were unbelievably successful as a team. Why? Because I probably conceitedly knew that I knew better and I did my own thing. So figure out how you can balance, right? Especially if you're starting to look for another job. How can you balance that, right? Giving the right right perspective to your customers while managing up and kind of keeping those things at that. I think it goes back to like control what you can control, right? And if it ever is felt icky or if it ever has, if you have to second guess it, I just, I'm one of those people that's like to your points, I'm like, sure. And then doing what I feel is right. Unless you're being micromanaged where your leader is involved in every single call and I've had that before, I find that buyers are hit to that anyway and they're going to know that it's not you and that it's them. And if you're talking about not wanting to be aligned with a brand, it's okay to temper your voice on LinkedIn to talk about things that you want to talk about, right? That are still germane to your buyer that still speak to the things that you find are important for them. And it's not going against your company and it's still relevant to your company. It just changes the tone. You know, so it's like if you want to change what's being discussed, change the conversation. And I'm a real big fan of that. The other thing that I would say is get yourself a scorecard, understand why the thing is broken and use that as your guiding force to make sure that you don't make the same mistakes when you get the next job. Very good advice. Very good advice. Okay, to wrap up some rapid fire, one life lesson that you would tell your younger self. Amy, you go first. You're welcome. Yeah, thanks. It's still a lesson that I struggle with to this day. But embrace the shades of gray. Not everything is black and white. I'm very much sort of a black and white person. And I like to know and understand and if I don't, then I understand that too. And there's a lot of gray area and it's uncomfortable. That's usually where it's the most uncomfortable learning how to celebrate the shades of gray. I do a better job now as a younger person. I did not do a great job of that. I think my, I love that. I think mine is probably going as a shock to you guys, but invest in your, invest in your brand, right? For your brand is who you are consistently for better or worse. And I think that you think about that both externally to what the world can see and internally to how you engage with your cross functional partners and with your teams. I think one of the lessons I love about that too in terms of the brand is to always do the right thing. And I know that's like, oh, wow, riveting. But I think this was a good leadership lesson for me as well. One of my leaders said, you know, sometimes I'm going to be in top positions. And I want to, I want to do the good thing for the right for both people. But doing what's right, like what's black and white right is not something you can argue with. So if you know, a lead comes in and I had just transferred the account to somebody else and that person comes, the old person comes back and says, oh, hey, wait, that was my lead. Never done it for so long. Like black and white that account is in somebody else's name. And yeah, I really sucks. But the right thing to do is to lead it with the new owner, which can stay, but I think it was good perspective. Again, the brand piece is so, so important. And I think about it for me, like, I invest in my brand of people knowing that I was learning that I was a sales expert, right? By going out on LinkedIn, I invested in my brand. I always doing the right thing by what I knew was going to be consistent in my life, which was my clients, not always my, my company, right? To the point of saying we're discounting and then not discounting. I invest in my brand of doing right by the people, the cross-functional partners that I worked with so that when they moved, they might want to recruit me or when they moved, they might want to hire me and can recommend me as well. So that would be the biggest thing. If you were not doing that and thinking, how do I want to be perceived? What's being said about me when I'm not in the room, again, hopefully in a positive way, that is a lesson. I wish I had known more younger when I was younger in my life. Very good advice. Very good. And then the last question is one resource. It could be a podcast. It could be an audible. It could be a person. It could be a book. What's one thing that you would recommend somebody go check out to go learn? That would be for me. You go. It always goes back to the why Simon Sinek. The minute that I stumbled upon him and I've read all of his books and I pay close attention to what he's saying, I just, I can't disagree with any of it and it really, like it's nothing that you didn't realize before, it's just how you realize it and when you realize it and how you apply it that matters. Totally. I think the, for just a couple of different resources quickly, so I love Margaret Bearish's sales acceleration formula. I just love the math behind it. So if you're a rapper leader, I think it's great. If you're a leader, super recommend HBR's Women at Work. Even if you're a guy, I think it's great to listen to and get perspective on the women's experience, women's experience from a leadership end. I would also recommend Adam Grant and basically everything that he's written, but he's got great behavioral psychology in his podcast. And then final one, I would recommend his radical pander, if you're a leader, or aspiring leader. Learn how to do it right before you mess it all up. And obviously, most important, where do people go to find out more about you? I'm on LinkedIn, as always. So find me there working on my website, but in the meantime, pop over to LinkedIn and find me. You'll find I'm super responsive as well. I get a lot of requests, but feel free to hit me out if I can be a help too. For me, I like to live out loud, as I like to say. And you can find all the things that we've talked about, plus so much more, LinkedIn, Amy Volas. I think I'm the only Amy Volas on LinkedIn. But also for my company, Avenue Talent Partners, it's Avenue Talent Partners dot com. That's all for today. Thanks again for joining me on another episode of the Success Story podcast. You can download or stream this podcast, wherever podcasts are available, including iTunes, Spotify, Google, Stitcher, iHeartRadio, and many others. You can also watch this podcast on YouTube. If you haven't already, please subscribe and share this podcast with your friends, family, co-workers, and peers. Please leave us a rating on iTunes. It takes about 30 seconds, as it allows other people to find our podcast, and lets our amazing guests reach even more people with their message. And remember, any rating is fine, as long as it contains five stars. I'm Scott Clary from the Success Story podcast, signing off.