From Sequoia Capital to The Swarm: David Connors Launches Large

Hello my friend, and welcome to the 659th episode of the Sales podcast. I'm Wes Schaefer, the Sales Whisperer, your host.

Today we have David Connors.

He's an Aussie in San Francisco, three time starter, founder, interesting dude. His latest is called the Swarm. I had him demo that on the CRM Sushi podcast, so be on the lookout for that. Will link to it as well in the show notes and on the blog post.

But I love stories like this.

I love meeting guys like this. You will hear him and, and if you, you can watch. I mean, he's just a laid back dude. There's so many Internet bros out there that just. I'm sick of, but he's just a.

Real guy, all right? He found a need and, and he.

Filled it and he's done it repeatedly. He, he was. Had an exit to Sequoia Capital, stuck around with them. So we get into that story and then what he's developing now. So you are in for a treat. All right, if you need some help wrapping your brain around some processes, some tactics, getting rid of some technology debt, getting the right tools in place, using them correctly, restoring humanity to your process, give me a call. All right, Hit the contact us and we'll set up a free time for a free call. You can't beat that offer with a stick. So go do that and then come back and listen this episode with David.

David Connors, co founder, CEO of the Swarm, all the way from San Francisco. Welcome the Sales Podcast man. How the heck are you?

Thanks, Wes. Great to be here.

So what's that accent like? Swedish? What are you, South African? What? Don't tell me Texas. I know Texas. That ain't Texas.

It's from the deep South. From Australia.

So. So Australia. University of Melbourne. UC Santa Barbara. What. What the heck that, like, did they kick you out of all these schools or like you just, you're just a world traveler, man?

I grew up in Australia, which means I grew up on a steady diet of American culture, right? TV shows. And I wanted to have that college experience. So when my university said I could study abroad somewhere for a couple of semesters, I found this spot called UC Santa Barbara. And it looked like a pretty quintessential college experience. And a friend of mine who was in a sorority there at the time, she said, you gotta, you gotta come experience this. You know, it's American college life. And it was everything that was like in the movies. It was, it was amazing. I had such a great time that I decided to move back year About a decade later.

I mean, I don't know if that's quintessential, but it's certainly nice. I mean, holy cow, that's a beautiful campus. Beautiful weather. You head inland, right? You're like, oh, wait a minute. America is a bit diverse.

Oh, yeah. I mean, it wasn't a real, like, you know, snapshot of America. It was like a little bubble, you know, University town, Isla Vista.

Yeah, I noticed you didn't pick like Arizona state with 118 degrees, or UT El Paso or North Dakota. Why didn't you pick one of those? Are quintessential.

There's some, some fantastic schools, you know, but not quite the, the experience where you get to go to class with a surfboard under your arm, which, as an Australian kind of appealed to me.

I know, yeah. That's cool. Yeah. I've been to Santa Barbara a good bit. Have you heard of Entreport? You know, software?

Yeah.

Yeah. So I started working with them 2014, and that was my first exposure to Santa Barbara.

Like, this is a nice place, man.

Yeah.

So all over the world. Founded a few things. Oh. Got acquired.

All right.

I like, I like what. What's going on here? So. So the whole 9-5-W2 thing just wasn't. Wasn't your jam?

It. No, I wouldn't say it was my jam. I'm a reformed management consultant. So I did a stint over in London for a few years with Price Waterhousecoopers. Straight out of college, actually did a grad job with them.

And that's a grind, isn't it? I mean, those big consulting firms, like, they, they own you, huh?

Oh, man. Like, you know, all night, all day, you're making decks, you're making spreadsheets, you're. You're flying, you know, to client site, you know, get a, get an email. Sunday night, hey, pack your bag. Tomorrow morning you're off. You know, put on the suit and tie and off you go. But, you know, it's a lifestyle, right? Yeah, for a bit. You kind of learn a lot and then hopefully you get out.

Yeah, yeah. That is every. Everybody I've spoken to. It's the same experience. So you started developing software. I mean, you're not a coder, right?

No, that's right. I'm on the, on the business side. So the, the rough sort of story, how I came to find myself in San Francisco is I was doing some consulting with some startups when I was in London, getting exposure to the startup ecosystem. And before that I just only worked with, you know, Big massive companies. Same in Australia. Like there's not much of. It wasn't much of a startup in ecosystem there. There is now, which is great with a few big stories like Atlassian and Canvas that are coming out of there. But you know, back in the day there was, there was nothing. And in London it was still pretty nascent as well. So started working more and more with these small companies that just loved the energy and enthusiasm, sort of taking something from 0 to 1. And obviously had been in California before. So like that might be a nice experience getting back to California and having the opportunity to work closer to the startup scene. I didn't quite realize that the weather in San Francisco is a little bit different than Santa Barbara though.

What was it Mark Twain said the coldest winter was a summer in San Francisco? That's it, right?

It's true. No joke. The fog is no joke.

Yeah, yeah. It, yeah, but that's cool.

So.

So you start cutting your teeth.

And.

You, I mean you've had a few things, you found it, right. One was acquired, which I want to get into, but I like getting into the weeds. Like how, how do you identify something that has legs? Yeah, because people, ideas are a dime a dozen. Monetizing them, getting acquired. I mean very few get to that point.

Yeah. When I first moved here, I was an outsider, right. I hadn't gone to Stanford or worked at Google or gone through Y Combinator. Had one of those classic Silicon Valley check marks. I actually had about 12 weeks to find a job to sponsor my visa before the government kicked me out. Right. So I was on a deadline to find a job. I found one with a small health tech startup which was fantastic, kind of building like a Facebook for doctors. And I was employee number eight there, their first growth hire. So trying to figure out this whole growth hacking world, setting up outbound funnels, you know, going sort of deep into that whole community. And then on the side I started just talking to my friends and their startups. They were kind of going through 500 startups at the time. And I was like, you know, how are you guys acquiring your first set of customers? Have you heard about this growth hacking world that that could potentially help? They're like, can you come set it up for us? So I started doing that on the side and that was the first company, this is one man consulting shop setting up outbound growth funnels for these, you know, really two, three, four person startups. Started scaling that up and then left my full time job to do that full time. And that was that was the first company that I realized that, like, I need to actually make revenue here, need to be solving real pains because otherwise I can't pay my rent. Right, yeah. That time it wasn't exactly a VC backed or backable kind of business, was just pure services. But what I learned, which I think is still applicable today, is that there is no better customer discovery than doing that type of consulting service. Service where you're in the trenches with the customer, you're controlling the outcomes and you're getting paid to do it and you learn so much and you actually get to validate a lot of these ideas rather than if you're kind of sitting in a room in a whiteboard coming up with these different ideas and products and then you finally launch something and then the customer turns around and says, actually we don't need that. If you had understood us a little bit better, you would know that already. Plus you get paid for it as you do it. So I think it's one of the best ways to start a company is actually to start doing consulting first and get paid for that initial customer discovery.

Is it, is it stressful? Is it risky? I mean, because you, you're being brought in to grow sales, but like I said, you're validating some ideas. So that means maybe you don't have all the answers and you take a wrong step and you blow somebody's budget. I mean, how do you, how do you balance, like, how much of what you're doing is tried and true and how much of it is bleeding edge? Like, let's see what happens when we flip this switch.

Yeah, the types of clients I was working with were pretty early stage, so they were kind of up for experimenting and they didn't have the big budgets or big brands to be able to lean on a lot of inbound or to do any big paid ads or sponsorships and things like that. So it's more of these kind of growth experiments that we were running, which lended itself really well to what I was doing. I think to your point, like as you get into a bit more of a mature org, you got to be careful with, you know, not throwing out the entire playbook, but actually just carving out little experiments. And I like, you know, Jim Collins's metaphor of if you've got a limited amount of gunpowder, you fire some bullets, gather some data, and then you launch the cannonball. Right. You don't just launch a cannonball first and blow through all your gunpowder before you actually gather some data and run those experiments.

So we hear all the time, all the hacking and I think it's slowly dying down, thank goodness. But I mean, how much of it was really hacking versus, like I tell people, you want to get in shape, go do a bunch of push ups, jog, eat less than you burn. I mean, but it's not sexy, right? Oh, I need to get a trainer. I need to, I need all these machines, like, okay, they can certainly help, you know, but if you eat like crap, you know, you're partying every weekend, my $5,000 fitness routine is not going to help you, you know. So, like how much of it was like bleeding edge innovation and how much of it was, fellas, let's do the basics over and over and over and over and over again and close some deals.

Yeah, I mean, as you know, getting the healthy habits right and just getting the reps in is what's going to lead to that predictable and consistent success. Where I was sort of coming in to begin with was, was looking at what are these latest tools, almost being like a tech stack consultant, like what are the latest things that are on the market? So the founders and the head of revenue wouldn't have to be spending that time basically sitting through demos all day. Then I was kind of parachuting in, setting it up for them and moving on to the next one. But the way that that evolved was that I was then working more and more with the founders and they were telling me, hey, you know what, Actually the biggest pain point isn't acquiring customers right now because we're so small. It's actually just getting the product built and we just don't have the engineers to do it. So we need help hiring engineers. And at this time, they were just losing all of their top engineers to Facebook and Google and Apple down the road. There wasn't any real remote work that was available. You know, that whole phenomena hadn't kind of kicked off yet. So it's very much this talent work war for these 10x engineers. And that's when I started applying these growth tools and tactics, in particular the outbound at scale for the recruiting use case. That was then the second company automately, which ended up getting acquired by Sequoia Capital.

So it was, it was a recruiting.

Tool or it was a outbound sourcing tool. So for candidates, passive sourcing. Imagine kind of headhunting at scale, but any small startup could do it.

Nice.

And then how does Sequoia find you and how do you all arrive at fair value? And then what was it like sticking around for a couple of years because now you're part of a big company.

Yeah, that's right, that's right. Was back in. But before we got there we, you know, my co founder and I, my co founder Jules, one of my best friends from Australia, he moved over to San Francisco with me and we sort of put our forces together on automately and we had this strategy that the best channel partners would be VC firms who could then refer us into all their port codes. And a referral from a investor saying, you should check out this tool or service, we're just giving you a bunch of money is a pretty strong, you know, pretty strong lead that we found would close 80, 90% of the time. So we're like, all right, who do we have connections to? Who's the best VCs out there? We made a short list. Sequoia was, was at the top of it. And we started talking more and more with their recruiting team. They had this in house team of 15 recruiters who, as you know, surprise, surprise, are doing their own sourcing, trying to identify candidates. They're on LinkedIn all day, every day trying to find interesting candidates to talk to. So we started picking up that heavy lifting for them, starting to find and engage with these passive candidates and then they could just do the phone screens, you know, talk to a few candidates and hand it off to portfolio execs. So we started doing that more and more and then worked more and more with their portfolio companies. And then at a certain point, the talent partner, Jamie Butt, we had a chat and she said, look, you know, I'm going to be be transparent with you here. We're thinking about building something like what you've got. It's going to probably take us a year or two and we instead would love if you guys came and joined us and brought the tech in house. And at that time we were a small company, we're bootstrapped. So the economics kind of made sense where we didn't have a huge cap table that we needed to pay off or anything like that. And we decided, hey, you know what, sitting inside the top VC firm in the world for, you know, a couple of years might be an interesting opportunity. And as I said before, you know, at that point we're still sort of outsiders, hadn't had the classic like check marks that you, you know, that you have on the cv. So I thought acquired by Sequoia would be a pretty good check mark to have and the experience of, you know, learning and working with the team there. So when I did that, and thankfully it Was actually turned out to be a great experience and probably better than what I had originally, uh, you know, thought might, may have happened when I went inside.

Yeah. Was that, was it a requirement to stick around for two years?

Yeah, that's right. So there was a vest, vesting schedule for a couple of years. Yeah. And we're also had to be in person in the office in Menlo park and we'd actually just moved to LA about three months before down to Santa Monica. So we turned the wagons around and moved back up.

So kind of bittersweet, huh?

Bittersweet. But my, my girlfriend at the time who was doing long distance was, was very happy about it and now she's my wife and we have two young kids together, so all's valid as well.

So you left her, you were going to la, man. It was meant to be, huh?

That's right.

So when did you get the itch for the next iteration?

As I was sort of coming up on that two year mark, I kind of knew that, you know, I was going to be able to shake off the golden handcuffs, so to speak. And I had always had that in my mind that I was kind of there at Sequoia to learn as much as I could. But really as I mentioned before, that kind of the Big Org and the bureaucracy of that kind of partnership led organization in particular, you know, just didn't, didn't sit with me. I'm just much more prefer to be at a small startup in particular being able to control, you know, my own schedule and destiny, so wanted to, you know, move on. And when I was there I was working with the internal product team and data science team and we worked on this project to map Sequoia's extended network and understand all of the interesting people that were in Sequoia's ecosystem. I sort of saw that a few things had sort of shifted on the data side that made a few things possible to build a platform that allowed a company to map and leverage their relationships. And when I left that was that idea really stuck with me. So I kept kind of thinking about it, doing more discovery with founders, with investors, with salespeople, kind of understanding, okay, we've got LinkedIn and obviously which is great for an individual's network, but why don't we have something to leverage the collective network of a company? Why doesn't that exist? You know, it seems like it's something that should exist. And everyone agreed and said yeah, it should exist. There's been a few attempts at it in the past, so went back to the half dozen or so examples that I could find where people had tried something like this and just didn't quite work out and you know, systematically ticked through the different reasons why it didn't work before but why it could work now because a few things had, had shifted and changed that unlocked more data basically that made this now possible.

Yeah, yeah, you see it all the time. Account based marketing, go to market strategies, blah blah blah. I mean, 20 years ago I started using salesforce.com and even then we could build. Well, it may have been a little later, but I was building hierarchies when I was in high tech sale. Like Google was a client and man, I built. I was always. I would scratch my head at how amazed my bosses were at the hierarchy that I would map out in a company because you have who you're calling into and Google's huge as you know, so there's all kind of divisions, all kind of layers. But I mean I had this thing mapped out to like 20 layers. Wow. And who reported to who? And you know, who am I in touch with, who have I not been in touch with? And I never heard of go to market or account based marketing. I don't think those were even terms 10 or 20 years ago, maybe 10 years ago, but it was just common sense to me. It's like if I'm calling on you, who's your boss? Right. Who's, who's his peer?

That's right.

Who reports to you? Right, Just. And you can map that out in, in Salesforce. You know, there's a lot of things I don't like about Salesforce, but man, you can build out a hierarchy. So, so it's interesting that that, that didn't exist because this was only a few years ago. Right?

That's right. You know, you're, you're exactly right that enterprise sales folks and the top 1% salespeople have been doing a lot of this stuff already for years and decades. And I think the industry has kind of got a bit lazy to be honest, with all of the automation and tools that have become available over the last five to 10 years. But especially during the growth at all costs era where everyone had access to these mass outbound spray and pray tools where you could one click send a thousand emails to all of your accounts, right? And you think about what that kind of, what that trickles down to is then you have these, you know, dedicated SDRs and BDRs whose sole job it is to spam their TAM and basically, you know, push out as many touch points as they can to capture the demand. And then the AES again are sort of, you know, a lot of the AES were then just served on a, on a platter. These really, you know, hot leads that could then go and close so that rigor and that actual excellence of having to do that deep dive into account mapping, multi threading conversations, doing deep research and understanding the pain of the customer. Being a consultant, you know, as I mentioned before, being a real consultant as a salesperson, helping to educate them and really, you know, all of the best practices of the top 1% salespeople already do, you know, like every day that just got lost somehow. And I think now the whole industry is kind of coming back to realizing that the old ways, you know, in a sense are kind of best. And now what we're helping is to introduce some tools and technology to just take on some of that heavy lifting and help to do some of that relationship mapping and help to leverage those relationships. And in particular the trust, the trust that your company already has with your prospective customers and it's already there. That's the crazy thing that people don't appreciate and I certainly didn't until I sort of started going down this rabbit hole of how much trouble trust is already built and established that is just sitting there waiting for you to take advantage of it. And what I mean by that is all of your investors on your cap table and all the people that work at the firms of your investors, they're all potential, you know, paths for warm introductions to your target accounts. Not only your investors, but all of your partners, your vendors, all of your customers and champions, all of your team obviously, and alumni. And when you start mapping out, there's hundreds and hundreds of these warm intro path nodes you can be going through. The problem is people are lazy and they're not going to come to you and be like, hey, I've been doing my own research and looking through your target account list and I've identified 10 people that I can make introductions to, maybe somewhere, maybe some angel investors who are amazing will do that, but 90% of people won't do that. But if you do it for them and say, hey, where? So you're connected to the CMO at Adobe, used to work together for a couple of years. Do you mind forwarding on this note? You say, sure man, yeah, happy to. I'm an investor forwarded along, say Mary, it's been a while. He's a company that I'm working with. Think you'd be interested, open to a chat that's it connection. Boom. 10x higher conversion than if you'd gone cold outbound to Adobe yourself, right. And 3x higher win rates because you can push it through the funnel and you have that trust that already exists. And that's what is so cool about all of this. Relationship based, ecosystem, led, network led, partner led, whatever you want to call it. It's all kind of wraps up, I think, into what we're calling go to network, which is leveraging the network and the relationships. And anyway, I'm excited. You can tell I could talk about this for a long time.

Yeah, yeah, it's cool. And it's going to be interesting to see how this plays out because I remember a friend of mine told me years ago, using a sports analogy, you know, it's like if you, if you have to rally the, the dugout, you know, and remind them, hey, it's the bottom of the ninth, you know, we're down by three, let's go. Like if, if you got to get in their heads or up their asses, you may not have the right team, you know, so it's like you give them these tools. You know, Seth Godin talked about marketers ruin everything, you know, and salespeople ruin everything. I mean, they just, it's so. I love the tool and it, I tell the story all the time. I just told in the last episode. It's like when I was, it was, I don't know, 2001, 2002 at the latest. And you know, there wasn't Facebook, I wasn't on LinkedIn. There was a database of military academy grads, West Point, Annapolis, Air Force. And so I, I used it and lo and behold, Sprint was a client, more of a target. We had a couple little sales into them, nothing big. But I found, hey, there's a West Point grad. It's the president of the division that I sell into.

Boom.

Boom. Exactly. I sent him an email, boom. Within like 90 minutes, he replies, cc's his VP. I have a license to steal just printed money from that account, you know, and uh, it's like, it's like foreign. I tell people to do that. Now your software helps. I mean the, the salespeople and at the corporate level. So. But do people get it? I think they still will, will abuse it, but I don't know because to me it's again, it's common sense. Like, I'm going to scour the Internet to find what I can about you and I'm going to find some common ground somewhere. Because I don't I don't want to just go bash in my head. That's why I've said, dude, since the, since social media, you know, I don't think there's truly a cold call anymore. You know, if you do any research, you find some toehold, some reason to call. A pure cold call, in my opinion is, you know, 40 years ago, busting out the white pages and just calling, hey, would you like some insurance? Hey, can I sell you some kitchenware? Can I sell you some knives? Knock on the door, hey, you want to see my vacuum demo? That's a cold call, you know. Hey, I went to school with a friend of yours. Hey, I see. You know, we worked at the company different times. You got a minute? Okay. I mean, am I crazy?

Exactly. And you can do a lot of research right up front these days to understand the company, where they're at, you know, the pain points they're going to be solving. You might even know the tools they're using. What you integrate with obviously depends on your product, but you can get a long way there before you even pick up the phone. You know, I think that the guys, Apex Revenue, you know, Joey Gilkey and the Phone Ready Leads team do a fantastic job of this. It's off the charts cold calling and that, you know, stuff on LinkedIn they push out all the time is great educational content and kind of how to do it the right way. But it's exactly that. You know, you're doing your research, but you're getting really specific target accounts and your ICP is really, really segmented and narrow. And that's the key thing. You're not just sort of blasting out to the generic ICP filters, which is like thousands of thousands of companies, but so you kind of get really narrow in. So you really actually deeply understand each company that you're talking to before you pick up the phone or send an email or whatever you're doing.

Yeah. Who are you talking about that's doing the outbound Apex Revenue?

Joey Gilkey is the founder there.

Is that like a vendor that you use or how, how are you?

Yeah, they're a, they're an outbound as a service. Okay. Their, their phone data product called Phone Ready Leads is some of the, the highest accuracy and validation and validated phone numbers on the market.

Nice.

Really cool. I was chatting with them again yesterday. They're. They're just releasing it for, for public consumption now. They were, they're holding onto it for just their clients, but now they're kind of opening it up, which is Cool to see Apex revenue. Check them out.

All right. I'm gonna go look them up. I'm trusting you, man.

Yeah. You're going to get on well with these guys, everybody.

Yeah.

And so well. And I like it. I'm still a proponent of using the phone because people say, oh, I zig when they zag. Well, meet in person, call them on the phone, send them a piece of mail. Physical mail with a stamp on it. Like, dude, my inboxes are filled with junk.

That's right.

You know, all of my social media inboxes are spam. My, My email spam, my text messages, spam.

Voicemail.

Yeah. And hardly anybody calls. For real. I mean, it's an automated call. And even if they do bother to have a human call, the voicemails are crap. I mean, golly. So my son, he's in real estate. He's 26 years old, just got his first listing in our neighborhood. So, you know, he grew up here, he got married. You know, he lives a couple miles away, but he wants to. He wants to live in our neighborhood and he certainly wants to farm our neighborhood. He got his first listing here and he was up against three, at least three other agents who live in our neighborhood. Right. And so he was the youngest by far, and he was giving me. So he's got the listing, did an open house this weekend. He's gotten to know the family. They gave him feedback and he was like, he was just nice. He was a human. He was interested in getting to know them. He was not pushy. And the feedback they gave him, you know, one guy, I mean, pushy, demanding, you wouldn't shut up, blah, blah, blah, you know, the other guy, he was an older guy but new to real estate, so he was ashamed about his lack of experience and downplayed, I mean, like, so just by being honest right now. But he admits he grew up the son of the sales whisperer. So I've been pounding it in his head. You know, they've had to listen to calls as we're driving cross country. I'll be quiet, Dad's on a call, they're hearing me train. Sell. Some of it has sunk in, but still, at the end of the day, no nlp, no future pacing, no mirroring, you know, just be a human.

Yeah.

You know, I mean, are you, are you seeing this? Is this your experience as well?

Dude, this is. This is going to be the trend, I think, for the next five, ten years, plus when. And the way I, I talk about it is playing long term games with Long term people, what that means is you're not in this short term transactional mindset of just trying to close this deal this week, this quarter. Instead you're sort of taking a years long mindset and approach and it's being authentic to your point to be a human. And when it kind of comes down to it, you have all this AI and all the tools and the technology. Sure it's great, you know, but when you break it down, I think Mike Gaga Craft had a good summary. There's like a thousand micro activities that go into the sales funnel right from the top of the funnel all the way through to close. Now some of that is useful for you know, to be automated at the very top. Some of the research, some of the insights. But as soon as you get into the middle of the funnel and the bottom of the funnel, you know that no human wants to buy from another, another robot or a machine. Especially for any like high ticket, high ACV deals, you want to have a human that's accountable on the other side of the table. And that's the way I think what I'm seeing a lot of folks kind of come to appreciate and realize that the human has this really central critical point where you're working and buying from another human buyer and seller. Now the humans are obviously supported by these AI agents and these AI assistants that can help us to remember things, do some research on our behalf. But it doesn't eliminate, it doesn't remove the human in any way. And I think that's where all of the, as I mentioned before, sort of this reversion back to the old way to an extent of humans working with other humans. That's how companies are built, that's how societies are built, that's how countries are run. And that's I think going to be the mega trend we're going to see over the next five, ten plus years.

Yeah, bring humanity back. Right. Because I see all these people join my program. You use our AI to write all of your years worth of content in five minutes. It's like my inbox is full, I'm deleting all of it. So who can stand out in, in that crowd? Right? So be human. So are they giving you feedback on their, their calling metrics? Is, are they doing primarily phone call outreach for you?

So we, you know, we're, we're helping companies to leverage their network to primarily find warm intros into their target accounts and then also to identify multi threading opportunities. As you said with that salesforce example, who else in the Org do we have influence and connections with that we can be talking to? So the way it typically works is we've got our list of target accounts. Maybe there's 500 target accounts. We're using the swarm to carve out those like 30%, maybe 40% that are warm target accounts where we have relationships. We can do warm intro parts. I'm sending intro requests to investors, to partners, to employees and they're forwarding those along and we're getting the, those, those connections. Sometimes it's indirect, maybe it's not the decision maker, but someone at the target account, maybe it's the CFO that you have a strong relationship with. So you're pulling them in and you're having this coordinated, orchestrated sort of play on, on the warm target accounts. Now for those cold target accounts, that's where you're then running these cold calling, cold emailing, social touches, sending mail in person. You know, all the things that folks have been figuring out and you know, and doing over the last few years, but trying to get very personalized with it. And I think there's a few things that cut through the noise that we're learning and that we're finding out. One is a human relationship, right, that cuts through the noise, that cuts through. That's a big signal that people respond to. If they have trust with someone who sends them an email, then they're going to be, you know, way more likely to respond. The other thing is some like some product usage we're seeing that be pretty successful where if I can see that you're in our product, that you're interacting. So for us, you know, it's folks maybe have signed up for a free trial and I've invited some other folks to share the networks and they started looking through and maybe they got stuck somewhere or they kind of didn't get all the way through the onboarding. We can then kind of reach out to them. That's a very, you know, soft, warm touch where they're, they're already known to us kind of and some things like that. So there's more of these other first and third party intent signals. I think that's a big play I'm seeing at the moment is signal based selling, which you know, again it kind of gets you a little bit of the way there where it's just more segmented ICP that okay, they're a good fit and maybe there's some interest that they're actively looking. They're in the 3% of the market that's actively looking to buy right now. But at the end of the day, I think buyers are very human and some of the consumer type way that we buy as well. You're going to ask your friends, hey, like, we're about to go get a new CRM. What CRM do you guys use? I can ask my folks in my community, my sales community, my revenue leaders community, whoever it is, what's everyone else using these days? And again, that's part of the network approach that you're. Where we're sort of evangelizing that all these conversations are happening without actually talking to the salesperson. So you kind of want to be arming all these potential champions with the information and the collateral that they need when they come across one of those opportunities. But it's, it's, you know, it's messy and it's, it's hard and you know, we're trying to figure it out. We're trying to design the playbook and help all our customers, you know, navigate this transition, this change. But it's, it's an exciting time because I think it's, it's a lot more human than just sitting behind a computer and clicking send emails to a thousand people, you know.

Yeah. With typos in their names every day.

Yeah.

Are companies putting too many layers between the, the outreach and the salesperson? Because I see the, the BDRs, SDRs, blah, blah, blah, blah. I'm like, why even have a salesperson? I mean, you're just teeing up these deals because it's like I've always heard from, from salespeople. Right. I'm really good. Once I get in front of a qualified prospect and I'm like, fool. Your job is to get in front of a qualified prospect? Oh, no. I mean, we've got marketing, we've got a CRO, a CMO, we've got BDRs, SDRs, all the. Oh, so they're just teeing stuff up for you to carve up. I mean, okay, you're McDonald's. Yeah. You want to supersize that? Like, why do I pay you anything more than 30 grand a year? You know, you're just the, the dead meat just falling in your lap, you know, like.

Yeah, like, like the legal team, like getting you to sign a contract, like.

Yeah, yeah.

So, yeah. I think the trend I'm seeing, especially as folks need to right size and be more efficient with their spend and grow more efficiently because money is more expensive now. We're out of the zero interest rates policy era. Now money's more expensive. All companies are looking. How do we tighten our belt? The number one biggest cost on everyone's books is their, their employees, right? So they're thinking, do we need this many people? Do we need this many people in our sales org and unfortunately that, you know, the, the realization I think a lot of people are coming to is that as you said, we don't need as specialized roles. I think this breakdown into the SDR and then the AE and sometimes even a third role in that is all going to get bundled into one. It's going to be just the AE is full cycle. They're doing their own pipeline generation. And maybe the SDR's role becomes more of a community manager, maybe more of a network manager, maybe it's more on the marketing side. You know, there's different ways this sort of evolves and consolidates, but I think we're going to see moving forward sales teams will be leaner and they'll be doing more than they were before and I think they'll be happier as well. To be honest. I think they're going to be enjoying this work more than when you all you can have to do. Especially for an SDR. The average turnover for an SDR is like 12 months, 6 months. It's. No one wants to be in SDR for that long and they always wanted to move on to actually be the AE to help to close the deals. So we can actually see a real career path for a lot of folks who can be upskilling and up leveling themselves and not just siloed and stuck into these very highly specialized roles instead can have a much broader remit of what they're doing. So that's the way I'm seeing it. But from your side, what are you seeing? And in sales teams.

Yeah, yeah. I'm telling people all the time, it's like, why do you have so many layers, right? And it's, it's always the case that sales and marketing are in silos. They have different objectives. So I just recorded an episode yesterday that'll go live next week with the chief sales officer and chief marks marketing officer of Demand Base. So. And they just wrote a book, you know, basically how can the sides get along? And because they, they are so different. And I think like you said, people have gotten lazy and there was cheap money, there was stupid money and like, like I've sold CRMs forever and people will come to me, you know, a small little company and they'll go, Well, I want HubSpot, I want Salesforce.com. why? Well, this other Company, one of our competitors, they use it and like, oh, that $700 million competitor of yours. And you have like seven people and like, no, you don't need that tool right now. You know, so it's the same thing. These small startups. Well, I came from this company and, you know, I had, I had an assistant. I had a bdr. I had an sdr.

That's right.

Okay.

Like, you're a. Your team of assistants is bigger than your entire company right now. It's like you need people that can wear mini hats and, and juggle because you don't. You don't have it. Oh, hell.

And.

But then they don't know how to scale. Right. Because the founder brings a different passion than an employee, you know, so if I ask you, how do you sell the swarm? You're going to use different verbiage, different. Different demeanor. That's going to come through. Like, you know, I like picking on Grant Cardone for a lot of reasons. You'll see, he'll get on the phone some, like one of his guys is having trouble closing that. He'll close the deal. I see. That's how it's done. No, you're some famous dude. You just. That doesn't scale.

Yeah.

You know, you did it for the buzz. But how do I take what's in your brain as a founder and create a reproducible, predictable process? Right? What can the. The new salesperson? How do they act? How do they open the call? What questions do they ask? How do they handle tough people? How do they handle the standoffish? You know, boom, boom, boom. You got to have that mapped out and then. And train the crap out of them, you know, and, but most, they don't know how to do that. You get somebody that was a natural or good timing, right?

You.

You get some bleeding edge product, it might just sell itself. So these early salespeople think they're heroes and it's like, dude, my 10 year old could have made that sale.

Right?

You know, right place, right time. So maybe you're teaching bad habits.

So it's.

You got to peel this thing back. But at the end of the day, I've always told people, you got to remember there's a human on the other end of the screen, regardless of what you're selling, you know, so. And that, and that goes back, you know, David Ogilvy, man. Robert Collier. You know, we must enter the conversation going on in the mind of the prospects, you know, and, and Ogilvy, you know, their prospect is not a moron she is your wife, you know, so it's like what comes around, goes around and just get back to being a human. It makes it much easier.

It's much easier and it's much more fun. That's for sure.

Yeah, I mean, I tell people all the time. My very first paid sales training client when I started the Sales Whisperer was an, an architect that was going out on his own. And he's like, man, I gotta, I gotta drum up some business. Like, okay. And he, because he was very systems oriented, right? He was an architect, but you gotta, you gotta do things a certain way or people die.

Right?

So. And I showed him people are very predictable. How you engage, how you interact, you can elicit the responses that you want and need. And it's not being manipulative. I just want to get to the truth. I tell people all the time hearing no early is a win. So. Because old school sales trainers are like, never ask a question they can say no to get them saying yes. Yes. Yeah, get a bunch of little yeses, you know, because you're talking about the micro closes. One of my programs is the make every sale program. Because I say to make any sale, you must make every single sale. You know, there's a bunch of little sales along the way. So it's like. And. But if we are truly not a fit, you know, hey, David, I got this great deal on, on tires. You know, buy three, get one free. Like, dude, I bought tires yesterday. No, this is a really good deal. It's a great deal. Maybe you can store them. You know, I live in an apartment. I can't know. I, I don't drive very much. These tires are going to last me five years. That's a really good deal. No, I mean, it's like, it's like, oh, yeah, I can't, I can't overcome that. You know, I'm gonna make a note. Oh, you dry every five years. Is it okay if I follow with you in four years? Yeah, sure. Okay, great. Let me get off the call. I'm gonna put a teaser in there. I'm gonna call you in four years. Next.

Next.

Next, Next.

Next.

You know, but they, there's too many, you know, high pressure. No, you gotta close them, dude, there's a way. They got, they got bad tires. They didn't buy from you. They're crappy tires, you know, they're made in China. There's a recall. Get them to switch. I'm not doing that. I don't want to do that. I don't want that done to my mom, to my wife, to my daughters. Don't be that guy.

When you're like trying to almost trick or you have to mislead someone to close a deal, what do you think is going to happen to the retention and the satisfaction of that customer? They got to churn the first chance they get. And the, the actual. For most companies, the biggest source of revenue and value comes not just from that first initial sale, but from the recurring. Right. And I think that is another huge issue we've sort of seen is a lot of these companies got shoehorned into these deals and now they're kind of waking up to it and a lot of people are churning. There's a huge churn issue in sales right now. And just net dollar retention is a huge challenge for a lot of companies. We're seeing it just plummet. You know, you've seen even Salesforce reported last week that their sales were down for the first time, like freaking ever. Right. So this is a big challenge industry wide. And I think it comes back to the salespeople to really be great at their job, to understand the needs and the pains of the customers and to disqualify customers if they're not a fit to your point, because they're not going to be satisfied, they're not going to renew. And you want happy, satisfied customers. It's going to make your job easier. And there's. You can then expand out. You know, maybe the products is not ready yet and that's okay, you know, but you can come back to them in 612 months. Make it, make a note to come back when that feature is ready, whatever it is that they need. And I think that, you know, that's going to, for the whole industry is going to be a breath of fresh air.

Yeah. Cool, man. So I think we're going to have you back. Right. We're going to do a demo of the Swarm.

Sure.

So I will cross reference to that. But for until then, anybody listening to this, it's just theswarm.com right. You offer a free trial.

Absolutely. Yeah. Free for everyone to kick the tires. You know, we're still early stage building all this out. So we build whatever our customers need. Happy to chat to anyone directly that's interested in learning more. And as you know, as you mentioned, you can try the product yourself. We're not trying to, you know, push anyone into any annual contracts without them actually getting a chance to test the product themselves. And then if you like it, it's month to month on that.

Yeah. Very cool. You know, you. You Aussies are all right, man. I don't care what they say on tv.

We're doing. We're doing all right. We're. We're slowly taking over the States, I feel like with Margo, Robbie and Hugh Jackman and, you know, all of the Hollywood stars.

Oh, yeah, those are a couple good names. What about Crocodile Dundee? Man, I'm old, dude. I. I mean, I remember. I. I was an Aussie fan before it was cool to be an Aussie fan. All right. Very cool. All right. David Connors, all the way from SF of Marin. All right, you know, let's get. Let's get specific, man. I mean, specifics matter.

There you go.

So thanks for coming my show, man. It's been great catching up.

Thanks, Wes. Appreciate it, man.

All right, man.

Have a good day.

Cheers.

All right, I'm off to Jiu Jitsu and then the beach for the afternoon. So this wrap up will be quick. Like I said, good guy. Notice his tonality, his demeanor. Just getting stuff done right? Solving pains, having fun, doing it, making money. So follow his lead, follow his example. Okay. Be on the lookout for the link over to his episode on the CRM Sushi podcast. He made a link for me. If you go to the swarm dot com. Wesley.

I think.

Let me double check that real quick.

The Swarm. Yep.

Dot com, Wes. And that'll take you to a little bonus. It gives you a 60 day trial instead of 30. Okay. So. And then let me know if you do that. And I'm happy to set up a free call to discuss that or other technology. It's what I do anyway. Okay. So if you need help with some of that. That tech, hit me up.

All right.

Thanks for listening. Go sell something.