Jen Allen-Knuth: The Power of Human Connection In Community Building and Sales 💰 | #211

Hello, hello everyone.

This is your host, Akhil Jabbar, and welcome back to another episode of SaaS District. In today's episode, we'll be talking about the power of human connection in community building and sales. Today we have our guest, Jen Allen-Knooth, Joining us, she is the head of community growth at Lavender.

If you guys don't know Lavender, Lavender.ai is an AI email assistant that helps you write better emails faster, double your replies, and help save you time. Together, they are providing comprehensive tools and guidance for crafting compelling sales emails. So welcome, Jen.

Glad to have you on the show today.

Thank you so much for having me. I'm excited to be here.

Thank you.

Thank you. So we're in a state, you know, in the economy of 2023, Founders listening in, marketers are always looking for a way on how to generate more sales, right? One of those ways is through email, which we'll get to, and the other one is about community, which we'll talk about. But before we talk about one part of that, that maybe a lot— there's a topic that's not maybe spoken about as often is around embracing vulnerability, right? So I would love to maybe start off with that. How does embracing vulnerability create a— unique superpower in any field, including sales, and help people stand out? What would you, what would you suggest to them?

Sure. So before I came to Lavender in January, I spent 18 years with a few different companies, but they were all kind of like through mergers and acquisitions. So essentially the same organization. And in 2020, I remember having a significant shift To how I thought about content and community and the role that vulnerability plays. So essentially, if we think about most jobs, but particularly sales, there is just this notion that we have to act as if we have complete confidence, right? And if you scroll through LinkedIn or Twitter or anywhere where people are posting content, Mm-hmm. I think one of the things that gets old really, really quickly is just this sense of, I never make a mistake. Everything I do is perfect. All of our customers are perfect. Everything's amazing. And it's this, you know, I think we, we see it a lot in our own, you know, personal social media where it just gets tired. You get tired of hearing people claim to be experts. You get tired of people saying like there's one way to do something and things are dead. And so in 2020, it really sort of hit me and I realized as someone that was a little bit unique in the sense that I stayed in a frontline sales role for 18 years, I had a real opportunity to take my experience and instead of talking about all the things that I now know as a result of that experience, rather to back up and say, gosh, if I could go talk to Jen 10 years ago, here's all the stuff I would've told her she was doing wrong and here's what— how I would've helped her think differently about it. And so in order to do that, it required that my content everything I was doing, embrace vulnerability. Because you can't say that you got better at something if you never admit that you were bad at it to begin with. And so it became something I was really, really comfortable doing. And then once I became comfortable doing it, I just found myself really gravitating towards company and creator content who led with this imperfect picture. And I think in a sea of content and in a sea of noise where it's like, you know, everything we do has an ROI of 1,000x, like everything's amazing—

Mm-hmm.

It's really kind of like a, a noisebreaker to see someone acknowledge, I didn't always have something figured out, or we as a business didn't always have something figured out. I saw a post actually a couple weeks ago from a founder who talked about something they got wrong in their product launch strategy, and I read the thing top to finish.

Mm-hmm.

I never would've read that post if it was all about everything they did right, because again, there's so much of that. So in my mind, to kind of sum it up, What it is, is it's a differentiator. It's a completely different emotion that many people are too afraid to embrace because they think it portrays weakness, when in reality, I think it portrays authenticity. And I think that's what connects us as humans.

So, I mean, it seems like what you're saying, so embracing vulnerability, but also embracing and sharing your failures, right? And then how do you say that translates to— so, you know, you kind of have some kind of emotional connection. Now, because you're seeing that vulnerability from another and authenticity, how do you see that translating into sales? So, if I'm a salesperson, let's say, in an organization or a founder, I want to start sharing some of my content that talks about, hey, I've tried this, this, and this. I've sent X amount of emails and I've got zero replies, right? Let's say I post content around that. How would that, you think, help me generate a sale?

Yeah, because I think as a reader of that— so let's take that scenario and play it out. As a reader of that, if I'm just seeing you're doing something wrong, you need to do this instead, what it creates is this offense-defense dynamic where I as a human being start to protect and defend why I do what I do. Because to do anything else means I'm admitting I'm wrong. And we as human beings rarely say when someone points the finger at us and says you're wrong, who doesn't know us, we're rarely like, you know what, you're right, complete stranger, I am wrong. completely right. And what was I thinking? However, if you contrast that with thinking it from the perspective of, if I take that piece of content, right, let's say I'm a founder and I say, you know, one of the mistakes that I made back when I first started selling was I used to send really long emails all about what my service did. And the reason I did that is because I felt like my job was to compel someone to see how great we were as a potential partner. But what I learned is that people need you to be interested in them before they're interested in you. And as a result, the way I shifted my strategy is to stop talking so much about me and start getting sharper at observation hunting. If we take that kind of choreography—

Mm-hmm.

That is very, very different and effective because what you're doing is you're taking the reader on a journey of the beliefs and assumptions that sit under why they do what they do, and you're allowing them to play into that, right? So it's like, if I'm reading and I'm saying, okay, I'm also one of those people that sends 300-word emails.

Mm-hmm.

And I'm seeing, okay, I also think I do it because I believe my job is to impress someone with who we are. And now if I look at their new belief and assumption, it gives me an opportunity to reflect. And so what we're essentially doing is we're, instead of telling someone like, go from A to B, Where like, A is here, but you've got all these mini steps in between it. People don't tend to change unless they agree with the beliefs and assumptions underneath it. We just rarely see content that speaks to that. We see much more content that's like, I do this now because it works.

So just by kind of relating, right? So now you're attracting folks who probably can relate to you. I was like, hey, I also do that. That's, you know, instead of saying, hey, there's all the success, you know, internally you're probably saying, I don't have all that success as well as But now when you're saying, hey, I've done similarly where I used to send long emails too, now I can probably say, hey, maybe I've got to switch it up because it may be a mistake here.

Exactly right. You're relating to the learning journey as opposed to just showing a destination. And that was something I learned in the years I spent at the Challenger Sale organization, the authors of the Challenger Sale book, was people rarely do something because there's a benefit. People do something because they believe that the risk outweighs their comfort with current state. So we have to keep that in mind as we're, we're thinking about sales, 'cause sales is behavior change, right?

Mm-hmm.

I'm not gonna change my behavior if my beliefs and assumptions tell me what I'm doing is okay. And so that's something I think is often overlooked in how we message, whether it's content, you know, collateral pitches, whatever to our customers.

Right. Yeah, that makes sense. Now, moving towards kind of the, you know, one part is kind of embracing the vulnerability and the other side that a lot of folks are trying to use is to leverage their sales is utilizing AI in their sales process, particularly now, I guess, in email, email marketing, email communication. How do you—

how have—

what have you seen? I mean, obviously you guys use that as part of your technology. How have you seen that impact the effectiveness and efficiency of the entire sales process?

I mean, yeah, so this is a fascinating thing to watch. And if we look back in history, what we see is that sales has this tendency to slam their hand down on the easy button. So the easy button is anything that prioritizes efficiency over effectiveness. So examples of that are like, you know, when sales engagement platforms hit the scene and suddenly we went from being able to send, you know, 20 emails a day to now we could send 1,000 emails a day. So what do we do? We're like, let's send 1,000 cuz more is better.

Mm-hmm.

And I think with any new introduction that, that shakes, you know, shakes status quo the way that AI or sales engagement platforms has, I think we see this curve where people immediately jump on board thinking, wow, this is gonna be so much easier and therefore it's going to be better. And then they start to have this like realization where it's like, ooh gosh, maybe more is not better. And I think that's what we're seeing in AI. So if you look at like a lot of the AI companies that are in the, the cold email space, most of them are in the camp of, hey, make the job of cold email easier for you by using AI to generate it for you, right? Like that's the, the, The general stake on that.

Good.

Where we kind of fit in is like, we shouldn't be optimizing around making things easier for us. What we should be optimizing is make things easier for the reader. And as it relates to cold email, we make things easier by understanding what makes buyers out of their minds angry that they receive in their inbox and guiding sellers to remove that stuff from their, from their sales emails. So like, I mean, people laugh about it all the time, but one of the reasons I hope you're well is like such a trigger for so many buyers is if you look in a buyer's inbox and there's 30 cold emails today, 29 of them start with that, right?

Yeah.

So it's, it's not about the fact that like, I hope you're well is bad, but it's the fact that there are recognizable patterns that frustrate buyers. If you go to ChatGPT today and you ask it, write a cold email for so-and-so at X company, the very first line it's gonna write is, I hope you're well. And so I think there's this intersection where we tend to get like illusioned by this notion of like, oh, this is gonna be so much easier when in reality, like we're playing this more game and there's gonna come a point where we're trying like triggering spam filters and we're being shut off from deliverability because we're just totally abusing the privilege of email. So the last thing I'll say about it is like, One of the most eye-opening stats, and Salesloft came out with this data actually, is if you looked last year versus this year, this year only 4% of cold emails are actually personalized. And I'm not talking about like, hey, I saw you went to Penn State, like go Lions. I'm talking about like real personalization.

Mm-hmm.

Of the 4% that are, they have a 1,200% increase in reply rate over the 96% that are not. That is up from 100% increase last year. So what that tells me is actually this amount of noise that's happening isn't making email an irrelevant channel, but it is making the stuff that stands out because it's personalized really stand out and really get a high—

Yeah.

I think that start— really starts to get interesting when you start to look at data like that and say, Gosh, maybe the way isn't just to blast everybody because it's easy for us.

I mean, I can say that even from personal experience. I mean, those I hope you are well emails, I mean, I get those all the time, and I don't know how much they actually mean that I hope I'm well. So I don't know how authentic that statement is ever. I don't know what the right wording is, but it's interesting.

Yeah.

I mean, now that you can see, right? I mean, you receive all these cold emails. I can clearly tell that This is generated from an AI script. And yeah, and I'm getting more and more of these by the day, but I'm also ignoring most of those because I know they're not personal. So yeah, I can agree with that, I guess, on a personal level as well. Beyond Lavender.ai, I guess, like you said, these are tools to help you become more effective, right? I mean, that's the idea versus also what people are saying to be more efficient. But You know, beyond Lavender, do you have any favorite AI tools that you like to use, you know, whether it's sales or other, other related tools that you'd love to share with our listeners?

Yeah. So like at Lavender, we use Clari's Wingman. I love a tool like that where it's, it's, you know, a call recorder and it's giving you a summary of what you're, you know, what, what happened during the call and who said what, like, That's a, that is a play that I really enjoy because it takes what is a task that is riddled with human error. Like you've either gotta be great at multitasking or you've gotta sacrifice great listening so that you can take notes while you're on a call because you don't wanna miss anything. Like that's a technology, an AI technology where I'm like, that is for the betterment of a salesperson because now they can completely focus on the conversation. They can be 100% tuned in, active listening. because they have confidence that AI is helping them in the background.

Mm-hmm.

But it doesn't like negate the need for them to do something with that content on the other end of the side. So like I keep coming back to this idea that sales is innately human. And as much as we wanna just throw it to the bots, like being a human in sales is always gonna be a differentiator. So Clary by Wingman is one example. And then there are other places. So I think the, the tool is called FinChat AI came out, or at least I saw it a couple months ago. Where I think we all know with ChatGPT, it goes up until September 21st. So if you said like, hey, how was Marriott's last quarter performance? It would be like, I don't know. This company has a ton of public companies, 10-Ks, investor presentations in there. And what it's doing is when you type in the company is it's giving you a summary of it. Like, that's another place where I think that is lifting sellers up because it's removing an excuse of like, I don't have time to read 50 pages of an event. an investor presentation. Well, you don't have to anymore, right? So there are plays for efficiency that make a ton of sense with AI. I just don't get as excited about them when the efficiency plays come down to communication. They're great for research, they're great for summarizing, but to me, like, human-to-human communication is still a very human thing.

Right. I completely agree with that. Yeah. This is a great tool I haven't heard about, finchat.io. And I guess Clary Wingman is now Clary Copilot, just for people listening. But we'll add those links to the show notes.

So great recommendation.

Thank you. So on the one side, we're talking about communication. So you said you don't recommend it as much when it comes to being authentic in your communication. What do you see in terms of potential challenges of using AI-generated content For, you know, communicating with others and, and trying to be more authentic?

Yeah, I mean, I think one of the big things is you're, when you're using AI for communication, it's always gonna favor scale, right? So I'm sure you've received these emails. A lot of people that I talk to have where you get an email or you get a DM and it's like, hey, I saw you posted the other day, really impressed with your work. Now, here's what I sell, right? Like, it's, it's taking the most basic of triggers and trying to pass them off as personalization plays. I think, who knows where time will take us, right? Like, I fully expect that ChatGPT will get way more sophisticated and AI will get way more sophisticated. And who knows, who's to say, like, what it can do? But right now, the human element is being able to take information and piece it together to tell a story. AI is still terrible at that, right? It's like, I can see if a company, let's say if a company is hiring for a bunch of AEs in an enterprise segment, but I look at their website and I'm like, hmm, that's weird. They only have mid-market size logos. It is a very human thing for me to say, it's interesting you're hiring for enterprise AEs, but I don't see enterprise logos.

Mm-hmm.

Looks like you might be moving upmarket, right? And that's a hypothesis. I might be wrong, which is why we have to lead with unsure tonality. But it's the piecing together of it. It's not just the blatant statement of, I see you're hiring for an enterprise AE. Those 2 things are dramatically different. So I think that's where we get into the human differentiator is our ability to be able to piece together different things to tell a story that might make someone say, Hey, they're paying attention to me. This is more than just a mass outreach because I popped up on a list of having posted in the last 30 days.

Yeah, I mean, I would agree with that statement. I guess I saw a post recently from a video on LinkedIn where I think it was a— I don't know if you've seen this video where there was a sales call being led by an AI voice for a Tesla order. Yeah. So, I mean, I think we're getting close. I mean, that was pretty Effective. I mean, the way he responded, the way he had— he, you know, he walked him through that, that conversation. I mean, it's almost as good as having a real person on that call, right? So I think we're getting there, but maybe— I don't know what your thoughts are on that.

I don't know. I like— I'm super skeptical, right? Like, that felt to me like you could— like, one thing that was so irritating listening to that was like the 3 to 5 second pause.

Yes.

I'm like, yes, for sure. I would have hung up and been like, I don't know what's going on, but like, I have no time for this. It's also very different, I think, when you've got someone who sounded very brand obsessed. Like, that man was like, my friends drive Teslas. Like, I just want a Tesla. Like, he was so gung-ho for Tesla. Like, I think that's a little bit different. And I think the thing I worry about is companies say, hey, that worked. They got the call booked. We can do it. But I would really question if you're selling like Compliance software, if you can make a call like that.

Yeah, yeah.

Compliance officer and have them hooking up on you. So I think, you know, like most things, it's like, sure, could it work in some use cases? Absolutely.

Yeah, yeah, that's true. I mean, yeah, I mean, the guy was pretty much already sold. He just needed a little bit of information to get us on. Yeah, there was no selling needed.

Yeah, he was like, Tesla called me. Amazing.

So cute. I think it's a good start anyways.

Yeah.

So I understand on kind of the sales component of— I think we're on the same page of humans still needed as part of that process. And the other side that we see that is effective and what you want to talk about is around the community building. And I think that's a huge play that maybe I think AI still hasn't touched. And there's a lot of effectiveness there. What do you see as kind of a strong way of implementing a program through a community that we can learn from, maybe other companies are doing, and that you can share with our listeners?

Yeah, so I will say what I appreciate is there's lots of different forms of community. So community became a bit of a go-to-market buzzword like a year or 2 ago, right? And so all these communities pop up, all Slack communities, and then all these community roles, and then When things kind of turned down, I don't know about you, but I saw a ton of community roles out of work, right? So I think the initial motion was like, hey, we'll build it and they will come, not recognizing that community takes a ton of work. You need to have an actual purpose for community.

Mm-hmm.

So when Lavender approached me about this job after I left Challenger in December, My initial response was like, hey, if you're looking for someone to build community, I can give you 5 names of people that have actually built communities and have done a great job and are gonna be way better at this than me. And what the founder said to me was, we don't wanna build community like everybody else. Like the— and I said, well, what's everybody else's, like, motion in your mind? They said, you put someone in charge, you build a Slack community, you ask a bunch of annoying questions in there, you try to beg and pull people to come in. And then, you know, you try to tie some ROI back to the investment. I said, what we wanna do is we wanna like think of community as being in the places where our customers are already learning. So for us, we have it nice, right? We're selling to salespeople, commercial roles, GTM roles.

Mm-hmm.

We live on LinkedIn. Not everybody does. So I'm not saying this approach works for everybody, but I could either go and try to build a community on my own and try to pull people into our place. Or I could spend my time saying, if salespeople are already there, how do we just create things, do things that make them want to spend more time learning with us? And that's been the motion. It's not to say it's always gonna be our approach to community. I could totally see us building a community in the future with a distinct purpose. But for right now, I think our philosophy as a business is the way you build community is by helping people. And when you help people, they refer you. When they refer you, you get rapid-fire awareness. Like, I was dumbfounded when I joined this company that there were 6 employees when I joined. Like, they seemed huge because they just did a really good job of helping people. And in turn, those people talked about Lavender. In turn, the people that saw that started to use Lavender. And so I would just encourage people who think about community and say, hey, too big of an expense. An alternative way to think about it might be Do we actually know where our customers are going to learn right now? Is it events? Is it social media? Is it, you know, Discord channels? Like, where is it? And then what do we have to say that's helpful to their problems? Not helpful to pitching our solution, but like, for us, you know, we, we, I have random people that email me and will be like, can you take a look at this email and let me know if it makes sense? And I'll—

Mm-hmm.

Draft it, right? And it's like lots of little moments like that that seem insignificant create this really large burn. And so if you know where your customers go to learn, great. If you don't, figure it out. You should know that already. If you, if you do, then you can start mining where they're learning and saying, what are these common questions that we keep seeing come up? And then we can start to create content points of view, things that are helpful. Based on that. So community becomes as much about us learning about our customer as our customer learning about them.

So, so in your case, um, you, you mentioned LinkedIn as one. So there's all these groups where people are posting on LinkedIn, and then there's also, let's say, these, these Facebook groups, or, uh, let's use Facebook groups. There's a lot of Facebook groups who talk about, you know, outreach, email marketing, et cetera. Are you like, what would be a strategy? You would, you know, look at comments or, or posts that people are talking about their email, their marketing strategy and then maybe you would comment, or would you, you know, same with the groups, or would you be posting regularly in those Facebook groups and sharing maybe results of some of your customers? And then my follow-up question on that is, okay, you mentioned all these folks who are now hiring, they want to, you know, allocate budget to community, you know, who's the right person to kind of create that content or engage and help build that within other communities?

Yeah, so great questions there. Keep me honest to make sure I answer all them.

Sure.

Let's take that, let's lay out that example of Facebook communities and let's talk about a non-sales customer environment, cuz I know, you know, LinkedIn is an easy case when you're selling to sales. So I worked with a company who was selling garage doors and like security cameras for lots of different use cases for like an individual homeowner, for homeowner associations, et cetera. And one of the things that they were struggling with is they were still super reliant on their channel partners, which was like, you know, Bob's Garage Door Shop down the road. And Bob's Garage Door Shop was run by some like 80-year-old dude who hated technology and was totally uninterested in any of their really new cool tech products and services.

Mm-hmm.

So the business was like, we're never gonna hit our new product growth targets. if we don't get people to buy this, but our channel partners don't wanna sell it.

Mm-hmm.

And so what they realized is a big, big segment for them was actually homeowner associations.

Mm-hmm.

Because homeowner associations, particularly in like cities, are super worried about package theft, crime, you know, unwanted entrance into the building. And so they said, instead of showing up like, and they almost always have Facebook groups. What they did is say, instead of showing up and trying to be like, look at how much our solution helped fight crime, which is an ad.

Yeah.

Where people are looking to learn and share, not buy. They said, what if we create content that is helpful to homeowner associations because they don't have to create it on their own? So like, here's a list of the top 10 reasons for package theft and alternative things you can do as a homeowner association and tenants instead. And so what they did is they said, we recognize that in these communities, security is a common theme. Let's create content that helps them understand how to keep their business more secure. And let's not lead with our product, but we'll put our name at the bottom, right? And so people know the source is reliable because they have a brand name that's associated with security, but instead of selling, they're looking to help. And that's going to lead to more conversations in communities than the completely solutions-oriented stuff where people are tuning it out because they're like, that's not what I'm here for.

And what are you sharing? Is this a blog article or just a little post of what you see that could be helpful?

The format doesn't really matter. The format matters to what are you seeing in the community. So if the community shares lots of articles, great, put in an article. If the community is like, hey, we do a, you know, a homeowner association meeting once a quarter, like, okay, if you're doing a, you know, a focus on security next quarter, we can give you a framework. Like, it really, like, there's no easy answer. It's another place where I think, like, we have to stay away from scale. You've gotta understand what are the communication preferences, how are they showing up in the community? Is it just text Q&A? Okay, great. Don't even create an asset 'cause it's gonna look weird if we throw it in there. put it in a text. So, I think this is where it comes down to being a student of how your customers learn. And the last thing was, I think the last part of your question around who does it.

Yes.

The person who does it is the person who will have the most credibility. It is not always the most senior person. So, like at my company, when I was at Challenger, my last company, I was an AE. There were way more senior people in the business than me. Mm-hmm. But what I had was an ability to speak to other AEs, going back to the initial place we started at. Like, I was very relatable. I had the trust and credibility of those people. So, if I said something, it's not like a cult. It's not like they lined up and were like, we are, you know, we subscribed to the School of Jen. But me saying something meant something different because they saw I was actively helping, helping, helping. And so, they, they trusted my motivation is to help, not sell, versus if someone far more senior showed up, who's to say if that would have worked? I don't know because we didn't do it that way. But I just, I encourage you, it's not always has to be like the CEO or the founder. Think about those people who already have the trust and credibility of your audience. In some cases, it might make sense to explore like creator partnerships for that if they've got strong partnerships.

Makes sense. I guess the one risk to think about there is, you know, Like, let's say you build your brand and you kind of become an influencer in that space as the expert in email marketing, and then you kind of leave to, you know, a new company as you did now, you know, working with Lavender. I guess the brand may lose some of that, or you may start getting messages from your previous company, and now you're maybe trying to build a new community based on different product, right? So that's another thing maybe some people, founders may hesitate around. building around a single employee, right?

Yeah. And I think, so Todd Clouser, who's one of my colleagues here, he has a framework he calls easy mode, which is basically an alternative to having like a single evangelist like I had at Challenger. Because you're absolutely right, like you do risk something when that person walks out the door. And what I'm in favor of is like, if you're a founder, you can have a lot of confidence if you're the evangelist, you're probably not going anywhere, at least not at your own choice. But if you were hiring people, like, I just think that recognizing that, you know, we are where we are with the state of communication and the state of noise of things.

Yeah.

I think, I believe, is that the weight that we carry in the social channels where our customers go is going to start to become more important. So if you look at Lavender, right, there are like 6 of us that have really strong followings. They didn't hire Hire us for that. They hired us for our ability to do the job, but the reason we got the job was because we also brought that to the table. So if I left Lavender tomorrow, Lavender would not see a difference, right? Because it's not wholly dependent on my voice. And that's where I think it's like really smart to have multiple different voices who maybe speak to different levels in the buying organization, different stakeholders you have to go after, so you're not dependent on one. Love it.

Yeah, this has been awesome, Jen. I appreciate you sharing all these insights, and I think our listeners would appreciate it as well. So coming to the end of this podcast, I would love to shift gears and move towards the personal, more rapid-fire questions. Sure, let's do it. Do you feel ready for this? Let's do it. All right, let's start off with the first one, which is, what's one activity you enjoy outside of work that gets you into flow state?

Music, no question. Live music, listening to music, taking a walk with music. Just music.

Love it. Yeah, that's a good one. What's one piece of advice you wish you had known? If you can go back, let's say you would tell your maybe 20-year-old self or 25-year-old self.

Oh, this is actually very easy for me. I would tell myself that my definition of professional is completely wrong. And the reason I say that is I felt for a very long time, because I didn't consider myself a natural salesperson, that I had to play the role of a sales professional, use words that I would never use, do things I would never do. And the more comfortable I got in my own skin and the more I actually brought, like, my sense of humor and who I am into the equation, the better my sales got. So be who you are.

Love it. Be authentic. Yeah, that's what we're talking about today. Yeah. Yeah. Easier said than done, right?

Yeah.

What are some of the biggest challenges you're currently facing in order to continue to grow Lavender? Meaning, I don't know if there's anything— what keeps you up at night these days?

Yeah, I mean, I think it's balancing the desire of like, gosh, I want every single salesperson in the world to have this with reality in the sense that like lots of people are doing tech stack consolidations. And so Really being mindful of how do we add clear, clear added value to all the amazing tools that already exist in the set, and how do we be super clear about like making sure sellers understand to use it in the best possible way. That's always going to keep me up at night in this job.

Yeah, yeah, fair enough. I think most founders or SaaS companies these days face that. Yeah. Who or what are some of the best 3 resources you can share with our Listeners, this can be books, it can be mentors, maybe people you follow in the space who you say have been most instrumental to your success over these last few years.

Yeah, that's an easy question. So, from a book perspective, it's The Challenger Sale. I wouldn't have stayed there for 18 years if I didn't love it. Completely reshaped my perception of, or my perspective of what I needed to do as a seller to actually help my buyers solve problems. So, that's my number one book. In terms of mentors, 2 that I will add. One is a woman by the name of Amy Volas. So she's the founder of Talent Avenue Partners. She used to run a community called Thursday Night Sales. And the reason I pick her is because she is someone that is so intentional about how she shows up. She's someone who is so helpful to her community. She's community first. And I think she's just one of those people that, like, shoots you straight and tells you what you need to hear. And I think that's probably the most important, single most important thing for me as a mentor, is someone who can say hard things with the very best of intentions.

Very nice. That's Avenue Talent Partners, right?

Oh, yes. Yes.

Awesome. Jen, what does success mean to you today, whether that's personally, business, financial, life? There's no right answer.

Success is going to bed not stressing about work and feeling good about how I spend my time with my family, my dogs, kids, my friends, just work-life balance. I certainly, for a long time, my goal was to get financial success. But once you have it, you realize it's not as sweet as it seemed. And so the other stuff starts to be more meaningful.

Yeah.

So I think that's the stage of life I'm in right now.

Love it. That's great. This has been great, Jen. You know, lavender.ai, I'm just checking this out. This looks like a fantastic tool. If anybody listening in wants to get in touch with you, learn more about you or Lavender, where's the best place to go?

Yeah, so for me, make it easy. I'm on LinkedIn all the time. Jen Allen Knuth with a K. Lavender, like you said, lavender.ai. And you'll see on there, we just launched Lavenderland yesterday, which is kind of like a Netflix style entertainment hotspot of really good, high-quality, entertaining, but also educational research about and content about emails. So check us out there too.

That's cool. Great way to stand out from the rest. Awesome.

Thank you.

Thank you so much, Jen. I appreciate you joining the podcast today.

Thank you for having me. I had a blast.

Cheers.

Thank you all for watching this episode and joining SaaS District today. Don't forget to like, subscribe, and hit the bell for future episodes where we interview top leaders in the SaaS industry. If you're a SaaS company looking to grow and unlock the true value of your business, get in touch with us at Horizon Capital, and myself or one of our consultants will provide a free assessment to help you get there and hit your goals. If you have any feedback or suggestions for this podcast, please comment down below. and help us improve our content for you all. Thanks again, and see you on the next one.

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