HOW TO DEVELOP THE BEST CAREER STRATEGY IN B2B SALES AND SELLING

Hey, before we get into the interview, let me ask you a question. Let's say you've been working with a client for a good amount of time. Everything's gone pretty well, and you're anticipating getting the order. And they either don't reply to you or they give you vague answers. Now, how do you feel about that? Let's say they, they just give you the runaround. I gave it to my manager. Oh, it's in procurement. And you ask for a point of contact and they go, oh, we'll I'll get in touch with you.

Okay.

Doesn't feel good, does it? Now, whose responsibility is that? I mean, whose responsibility is it to know where the deal is, keep the deal moving, close the deal? Is it your customers? It'd be nice if it was, but it's ours. And You know, this week yet again, somebody puts out a post on LinkedIn suggesting to customers that it's perfectly fine to tell us you won't buy and to be honest with us so that we don't pester you. Now, this seems like a logical post. It gets a lot of reactions, a lot of, yeah, that's right. But am I viewing this differently or wrong? Isn't that an external locus of control, meaning that it's someone else's job to tell me the deal's not going to happen? See, I look at it very differently. I say it's my job. If I'm relying on the customer to tell me they're not going to buy, uh, I might be chasing them for a long time. I need to read the room, smell the coffee. Be realistic with me. See, you may think that every sales rep thinks they have an internal locus of control. The locus of control is how you view the world as far as who's responsible. Who's responsible for you? I am, of course.

You are, right?

And all your actions. And your successes and failures. But something goes wrong when we— when it happens to us, when it's our deal at the end of the quarter. We're attached to it. We're emotionally involved. We worked for it. We deserve it. But it doesn't happen. And it's not fair. It's not nice. It's not polite. It's not respectful. I agree, but that's what happened. So I did a post on LinkedIn and I said, so sorry, it's not your client's responsibility to tell you they're not going to buy, that they're not interested, that they have no clue how to get a purchase done at the company, that, you know, they, they thought it was a great idea but no one else did, or they got into some resistance and found something else to do. Which is really what's going on. And I got some pushback, a lot of pushback from salespeople, sales experts, sales coaches thinking, no, that's not proper business etiquette. I didn't say business etiquette. I'm not Miss Manners. I said, whose responsibility is it? Oh, people don't like the word responsibility. And people start deflecting and rephrasing what they said. And even somebody with 30 years of sales experience told me I was wrong. But then I look at his profile and he was more of an account manager, meaning he was managing existing customers. I'm not saying— putting that down, that's a good job, but that's a very different job than selling into new accounts. You know, you've been working with an account who is a customer. You know, a little bit of responsibility is on their side because they're a customer. They want something, you want something, boom. But as a salesperson, you really want to have that ownership. And this ownership— and people call it all kinds of things, you know, psychologists call it Locus of control. There's about 20 books written about it every day, rephrasing it. Um, you know, extreme ownership, if you want to call it that. It doesn't matter what you call it. What matters is that you own it, that you start building it into your personality because it transcends all of sales. Let's say You know, every time you leave a voicemail, we all expect a call back, even though we're not going to get one. Every time we send an email, we want a reply, and sometimes we get one. Sales is about earning that, about figuring this out. And if you don't take that ownership, you will never really get sales. And it's hard to take that ownership. Believe me, even though, you know, I learned all about this internal locus of control early. I bought some, you know, tapes back before there were podcasts. People used to buy cassette tapes, these motivational tapes, and this guy named Denis Waitley, and I listened to it until I wore the tapes out, and it kind of opened my eyes to this Personal responsibility, because my life, you know, at 18 and 19 wasn't all that good. You know, I was working in a shoe store, a high school graduate going to college at night, not exactly a success story. And I didn't like it. I wanted more. So I had to study. How do I get better? I wasn't raised like that. You know, it was kind of like, figure it out. Well, how do you figure it out? You have to start hunting around. And even though I knew it from early, early age, you get into sales and you're like, you expect the callback, you expect an answer, you expect some reciprocity. And when you don't get it, it doesn't feel good. It hurts. And all of a sudden, what do we do? We have to deflect, rationalize, protect ourselves to reduce that hurt. But that just creates the hurt more the next time. When you take that leap to owning the responsibility— and it took me a long time, and still, I still get the feelings. The feelings don't go away. How you process them Changes. And I see it all the time when— and it's hard not to. It's a trap, right? Because especially today when we're micromanaged and all this silly automation and KPIs, it's really hard to take ownership when someone's telling you to do something that doesn't work all day. And most reps have to be clandestine About what does work because their manager doesn't agree that that works. But your manager's not doing it and doesn't know because they haven't done it in 10 years. But we still have to own it. We own the number. If we don't make the number, we don't get— have a job. This development of internal locus of control is at the very core of sales. And it's the number one thing that the great sales leaders that I've interviewed on the Sales Leadership Show have shared almost 100% of the time. And I noticed there wasn't one sales leader that disagreed with me on there. There was a lot of very young, early people in sales, some account managers that disagreed. And I'm not saying that the client should share that info. They should, but we don't live in the should world. We live in the real world. And this may sound harsh, but there's no safe space in sales. We're hired to really create something that doesn't exist, acquire new customers, get into new accounts. And the best way to do that is to own that. Expecting someone else to do what you expect is not good. What I learned is I hate that. I hate that part of sales. So what I do, I came up with a prevention process. I found ways of having little tests. At each stage of the sale to gauge interest and to see how committed they are and to get that next step early and locked down. Now, everyone thinks they have this under control. And I bet less than 20% do. And you hear it all the time. It's the water cooler talk, the victimization. And I've talked about it Ad nauseam. But we don't get it when it happens to us. When we feel the hurt, we want to deflect and redefine it. If you can do one thing in sales that will change your game is create that internal locus of control. And the other thing I did was I just had a motto. It's my fault. What this did for me is when something went wrong, I told myself it was my fault. What it did is it took the focus onto me. And I'd ask myself, is there a way to prevent this in the future? How could I have done it differently? Did I buy into their fake optimism when I know the likelihood is low? You know what the likelihood of your deal's going at each stage, hopefully. And you know the signals of when it's going to ghost or not close. If you don't, you have to have some sensory acuity. And by keeping track of this, I kept coming up with a better and better system. And I share it with you on the Closing the Complex Sale. Let's get into the interview. This one you're really going to enjoy. He implements the best career strategy out there. I'll let him explain it. Also, if you want to become great at anything, you have to do it, take feedback, do it again. brevitypitch.com is the way to do that. Clients are raving. People are contacting me, thanking me for introducing them to it. People get to have the reps without the pain and build up the confidence and the skills to become excellent salespeople. Practicing on real prospects is the most expensive way to learn how to sell in the world because that's revenue walking out the door. Everyone thinks you can make up for it in quantity. Good luck. So if you want to become great at sales, grab your manager and go to brevitypitch.com and get them to get you a license. Here we go. Hey, Ryan, thanks for joining us today. As a way of getting started, give us a little background on yourself.

Yeah, no, Brian, a pleasure to be here and thank you for inviting me on the show. I've been a follower of yours for, for years and seen you on LinkedIn, so I feel like like I finally made it being here. So, uh, so appreciate you, uh, you giving me the time. Um, yeah, a little bit of background. I've been, uh, doing software sales for the better part of a decade, and then prior to that I was on the client side. Um, so I currently work at a company called, uh, Duck Creek Technologies, working in the core insurance platform space. So if you think about, you know, you call up your insurance provider of choice, get a quote on your auto insurance, buying the policy, go through the billing claims, process as well as some ancillary products. That's, that's where I am today. Been with Duck for a year and a half. Prior to that, I was at Sprinklr doing customer experience management sales. So I was there for about 4 years, super cool company. Got to see them go from about 1,500 people when I joined to over 3,000, rode the IPO and worked with some pretty cool companies while there. Prior to that, spent 4 years at MetricStream. Which was governance, risk, and compliance software. So coming out of the financial crisis of 2008, obviously risk was a hot topic. And so I, before I went into sales, I was working at E-Trade, was there building out their enterprise risk management program. And before that, I started my career at Morgan Stanley. So I like to joke around and say I started in operations, one step up from the janitor getting shouted at by traders, you know, pre-crisis. So it's been, Been an interesting ride, definitely.

And help me understand the move to sales. What was behind that?

Yeah. So funny enough, like all my friends have always been like, look, you know, you should be in sales. When I was in college, always wanted to be in kind of financial services, go into sales and trading. And, you know, I went to NYU, but I was an economics and East Asian studies major. So I wasn't part of Stern. And when I started interviewing, You know, the competition to get into sales and trading was just so difficult that when I got the opportunity to go into operations at Morgan Stanley, I was like, oh, this is amazing. You know, get the chance to work at a great firm. You know, I was part of the operations analyst program and we had a presentation that we had to do as part of the program. And one of the VPs afterwards was like, hey, you should be in sales. And I was like, yeah, you know, everybody tells me that. And it's funny, early in my career, I was just very risk averse. And a lot of that has to do from my upbringing. And this isn't something I tell folks often, but, you know, my sophomore year in college, my mom was evicted from the home that we grew up in. A year later, she injured herself, hurt her back, was evicted from her home. So by junior, senior year, I'm like, you know, sleeping on couches, you know, crashing with friends. She's, you know, living with friends and family. So the idea of going into sales And having to work for a commission was just beyond me. You know, I was just scared that I couldn't make it. So it took me, took me several years. And then finally, once I established myself in the practitioner role and moved into risk management, I was introduced to software that we were trying to build internally. So Morgan Stanley at the time, very big build shop. So we were building all this technology, spending, you know, a lot on projects, went over to E-Trade and got exposure to different software. providers. And I was like, hey, why are we trying to build this when we can go buy it? So one of the programs, tools we implemented was MetricStream. And then funny enough, headhunter calls me up, he's like, hey, have you ever thought about sales? I'm like, actually, yes. And so I moved from implementing, managing the practitioner side to the sales side. So empathy, you know, understanding the client problems, that just came very natural to me and have been successful thus far. So it's been an interesting, interesting run.

Now, it's interesting that you mentioned that those were the reasons you went into sales when most people would say, people tell you because of your personality, you like being with people, you're gregarious, you're easy to talk to, you're inquisitive and curious.

Yeah.

Which was it for you?

I think one thing that's always driven me. So again, going back to kind of my upbringing was like, being able to support myself financially, you know, being able to really live that life I wanted to. I learned very young in college and in high school, you know, didn't want to be a lawyer, too much reading.

Yeah.

Didn't want to be a doctor, too much studying. And so what opportunities are there to make a lot of money and be successful and support your family, right? And live the lifestyle that I had wanted. So again, going into, you know, financial services, I really thought that was the only other option at the time. And, you know, going back to the early 2000s, I had no idea that there was this whole world of, you know, software sales or just, you know, sales in general. So that was really, you know, kind of eye-opening once I got to experience it.

And that's the other thing because I had that same fear about not making as much in sales until I found out my base salary was higher than my target income as an engineer.

Wow.

Was there much difference in yours? Was the base salary in sales a lot less than—

No. So I kind of worked it very well. You know, I was at Morgan Stanley for several years. Love the company, great culture, great place to work. But as you know, you know, if you stay at one place, it's very hard to get those aggressive bumps in salary. So I was promoted to VP and then was lucky enough to make the move to E-Trade, and I was a senior director there. So I finally got my base. To where it was a decent amount. And then the move to sales was, you know, fairly, it was pretty similar. So I lucked out. I kind of, kind of timed it well.

And, you know, having the personality and the mindset for sales is one thing.

Right.

What was that first year in sales like executing?

So, you know, it's, it's funny because I jump on my first discovery call. I still remember it and I'm like, I have no idea what I'm doing, right? Like, I've only been on the client side. So I'm talking to one of my buddies who was doing like, you know, he had done like carpet sales and then moved into like roofing and solar sales. And I'm like, dude, you gotta give me a little bit, like what methodology, how do you go through questions? So he like takes me through Sandler and all the training that he's got. And this was like very informal on my couch, right? This is like week 1 of me going into sales. It wasn't until several years later that I got formal sales training. So for me, especially early on, it was, I just leaned in heavy on the empathy, knowing the challenges, having been there as a practitioner. It was just very easy for me to have that conversation and ask the right questions around the challenges they're facing, you know, ultimately the goals they're trying to achieve and like, how do we bridge that gap? So, uh, was successful with no training and then got training and, and really leaned in.

Well, You know, I've been through a lot of the trainings. Yeah. And none of them are bad. It's just, right, it's a lot in a day or two, right? And you got to do it, you know, write it down, practice it, get feedback. You just can't sit in a room and listen. You gotta—

Yeah, totally.

Now, you had a lot of success pretty fast. What do you attribute that to?

So One of the things, and actually one of my colleagues I work with now, a gentleman by the name of Ed Park, right? So when I joined MetricStream, we go out to Palo Alto, you know, I'm in, you know, California, I'm out there, you know, people are driving Teslas. I'm like, oh, this is cool. Never seen this. And he gets up on stage and it was our, it was kind of like our GKO or annual training or kind of kickoff. And he's the top salesperson of the year. Right. And I'm, you know, maybe 6, 7 months in and I'm like, I want to be that guy.

Yeah.

Right? And so I just literally grinded for the next year. I was like taking in as much as I can learn, you know, meeting with other reps, understanding where they were successful, having them join my calls. Um, you know, had, had some good leaders that also helped to mentor me and, and kind of steer me in the right direction and just, you know, put in the work, right? And then once I started to understand the methodology and a lot more of what what makes the sales framework and the process tick, it, uh, it really just started to, uh, to solidify.

And so you had other people listen to your calls?

Yeah, it was great. We had a very collaborative environment. So we would pull in other reps depending on your region. Um, you know, my manager Susan at the time, she would join. We pulled in different specialists. We had a very good kind of team selling atmosphere, which was great. I also, I really kind of built out our practice up in Canada. So I was in Toronto flying from New York to Toronto like a couple times a week and we only had 1 or 2 clients at the time. And then I got into the financial services area up there. And so, you know, all of the big banks are downtown and being able to really, you know, start to build those relationships and connections and the trust really made it able for me to accelerate.

So And what do you think you were doing that others weren't?

You know, it's, it's funny. Again, I, I lean in. So I don't know if you've ever done the CliftonStrengthsFinder, top 5 strengths. So my, I think my number 1 is empathy. Another one up there is like achiever. Another one is like winning competitions. So those are—

Those are the good ones for sales.

Yeah. Naturally. Yeah. Yeah. Naturally levitate to. So I think for me, just being honest and transparent, understanding those challenges, because having been on the practitioner side, I got it. Like one of the things that would annoy me when I was, you know, working at E-Trade and have, you know, vendors come in and pitch, it's like that you do all this discovery, you tell everything to the salespeople, and then like the implementation team shows up and they ask you all the same questions.

Same questions. They don't talk to each other.

I went over this so many times. So just being able to understand and kind of coach our team, like, look, this is what they're looking for. This is what they've described. We understand the problem. This is how we solve it. Um, I think was very helpful because many times I was, I was almost as if I was part of the client speaking to us as opposed to, you know, pitching them, which, you know, later on I learned is, is much more of a, a partnership type of a sale than, than vendor, right? So. Well, Hope that answers the question a little bit.

It does. And that first sales job, I mean, I think that's the ideal way to get it, right? You come out of the customer, right?

Right.

That way, you know the product.

Exactly.

You know the use cases, right? So you're halfway there. What was it like then going to like Sprinklr where you weren't the client or were you? I don't know.

No, I, so I wasn't. So funny enough, my girlfriend at the time, then fiancée, now wife, she leveraged Sprinklr when she was at her former company. Okay. So, you know, I had at MetricStream for 4 years. It was all remote the entire time. I mean, we had a New York office, but it was fairly small, but, you know, headquartered out of Palo Alto. So working from home, you know, doing sales for a while, I was like, I wanna try something new. You know, I've been in governance, risk and compliance for a decade. I've been really successful, but I wanna do something cool. Like, what's all this young, like marketing, advertising, technology stuff? So she ended up introducing me to 4 or 5 of her different, you Different vendors that she worked with. I met with them, spoke with them, and one of them, Sprinklr, kind of just took the call because, you know, she was their client. They're like, okay, I'll take the call with your boyfriend, whatever. He gets off the call and he's like, oh man, like, I really, I wish I called you a month ago because I just hired somebody for the role I had open, but you're, you're a really solid fit. So I'm like, oh, you know, great, great to meet you. Great to network with you. Sorry, I'm going on a tangent here, but there's, there's a point. So great to connect with you. And a month later, he calls me up and he's like, you're not gonna believe this. The person I hired that came to GKO, they had a life event. I don't know if it was a death, a marriage, a birth, whatever it was, but declined the offer. Can't— doesn't feel comfortable moving to a new job. So, so we've got a position open. He's like, can you come in next week? Literally, I met with them on Monday. I did like a team interview pitch on Thursday. met with the VP for 15 minutes afterwards. I think I spoke to the CRO either the next day or the following Monday and had an offer within 2 weeks. It was like that quick. So moving to answer your question, moving from the risk management side to customer experience, obviously completely different product, but very similar in the sense that it was a platform play, right? So in the risk management space, we had a lot of different point solutions, that MetricStream was able to say, hey, look, we can handle all of this for you. Similarly, at Sprinklr, there were thousands of point solutions in the martech space and they were really the central solution across marketing, advertising, research. So the pitch was similar, although vastly different, different solutions.

But also the department you were selling into was dramatically different.

Yes, very. So moving from selling into auditors and, you know, folks in risk To, you know, marketers that were sometimes, you know, fresh out of college, advertising, which is a super cool space, you know, social research and listening. I mean, totally, totally different ballgame, but very cool.

Well, very hard too because marketing people, they're like cats with those laser lights. They just go change every minute. They'll say, yeah, I'm doing this. 10 seconds later, they're doing something else.

It's so, I love marketing for the record, but that's what it was. Yes. But no, but that was actually part of the beauty of it was that we were selling it to these large organizations, right? So just to your point, one marketing org is buying all this shiny thing. The other org is buying this tool for this specific need. Social is buying this little thing for 3 people. And then you come in and it's like, hey, you've got 20 different solutions That are all doing very similar things and you've got 20 different vendors that you're working with. Why not do it with the best, have it all under one house, have them all talk to each other. And by the way, you know, get a contract that, that makes sense. So it actually ironically helped us.

And, but, but that's an expensive product too. It's an enterprise product, right?

Enterprise product. Correct. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So as I was leaving, we started to move more towards the SMB in the market, but yes, very much your big brand name companies, you know.

And now how did you learn that? How did you learn? I don't know. What was the price point on the other product? Was that expensive as well?

Yeah, MetricStream was also fairly expensive. I mean, it was also very, you know, you're talking to your large banks, your pharma, you know, health and safety organizations. I mean, it was fairly large ticket, you know, you can go from a couple hundred thousand dollars entry point to 7 figures. Very quickly and then, you know, 7-figure implementations, right? So.

And which is the hardest sale of the 3?

So it's interesting. So now I'm at Duck Creek on the insurance side and you think about risk management and then you think about kind of marketing and then you think about insurance and insurance has just been around for decades and ages and it's so important what insurers do, right? I mean, it's basically the foundation of everything we're able to achieve, right? Buying a house, being able to have a car, going into new business, right? Without insurance, none of these things could happen. And so companies are very, very mindful of any changes they're going to make, right? Because it's their core business. If your policy system goes down, if your claim system goes down, this is impacting all of your customers. So before you make a multimillion-dollar decision, you really gotta think long and hard about it. So when you think about sales cycles, you know, selling to Vito, right? Talking to the C-suite. This is all part of, you know, what we're involved in currently, which, you know, takes some time.

And which C-player cares about this or manages this or is the point of contact for you?

Yeah, great question. So you've got your CIOs typically involved, your CTO from a technology standpoint. You've also got your chief underwriting officers, your chief claims officer, your chief financial officer, because all of this is flowing through. And then ultimately, oftentimes we'll need the CEO or board to sign off. So, but who has the problem you solve?

I mean, IT doesn't care until someone tells them to care, right?

Yeah. So I think it stems from the business. Typically, they want to be more agile. They want to move faster. They want to, leverage some of the newer, cooler technology, right? If you think about insurance again, calling on the phone versus right now I can chat, right?

You know, I look at this and I'm like, boy, that's hard. You know, if I put myself in your role, like let's say you got a territory, right?

Who do you target? I don't know. And it's, yeah, I mean, it's interesting because you've got obviously your large kind of tier 1, tier 2s that have been around. For, for decades, if not, you know, over a century. You've got some younger niche kind of startup technologies that are coming out and kind of building more digital online platforms. And then you've got everything in between. So it is a very interesting industry. And yeah, it's a tough sell. I mean, again, some, some of these companies have worked with their software that they built in-house, by the way, for 10, 20 years. And you've got all of this knowledge and people and resources that have been programming on COBOL. And it's like, hey, yeah, we want this new shiny thing, but are we ready to get there? And part of the challenge that a lot of organizations are finding now, especially as we look at kind of the past few years with COVID and just a bunch of people retiring and moving away, is they don't have the talent with that institutional knowledge that they had because they're walking out the door. And then the new talent coming in—

Sorry.

Also doesn't want to go program COBOL, right? So it's like, what do you do? And so a lot of that is driving where companies are going because they're, they are looking at what the next 10, 20 years look like. And it's not your old clunky, you know, on-prem system, right?

Yeah. And I gotta assume these deals are huge.

Yeah. Yeah. You know, licensing starting at 7 figures, implementation can go into, you know, 8 figures. They're— it's core, core to their business, right? You've got, you know, let's say they've got $2 billion worth of direct remit premium that they're managing. You know, it's got to be done right and it's complex and needs to be configurable, needs to meet their needs, needs to be secure, right? So yeah, it takes a while.

But when you were looking at this, what attracted you to it? Because it's yet different. Very complex.

Oh, so it's funny. I, I use the analogy in my career, like I've done well at, at like picking a horse, right? And just kind of following a good leader. So, you know, early on in Morgan Stanley, I made the jump from operations into risk management through my network and through my connections. So one of the, the analysts that was in the program with me moved into risk and she was like, hey, I think this would be great for you. I moved from operations into my first role in operational risk and control through one of my mentors. It was after '08, you know, companies are firing thousands of people at a clip. And I talked to my mentor, Perrin Wong, and I asked him, I'm like, hey, you know, I wanted to get into sales or client services, but obviously that's not happening. He mentioned, I've got 4 risk roles open. That's the only area that's, that's working. So I moved into the first operational risk and control team before making the jump into risk management. I kind of followed my team from Morgan Stanley over to E-Trade. You know, had a great leader there, Marcelo Cruz and Nivaldo Hernandez. I already told the story about E-Trade to MetricStream. You know, my wife helped me out with Sprinklr, and then from Sprinklr to now Duck Creek, our chief revenue officer Rohit Bedi was at MetricStream. He's amazing, really strong leader. Ed Park, the other gentleman I mentioned, is at Duck Creek. So when I knew they were there, we started talking and saw that the product was a leader in the industry, very well known, was a public company at the time. Now we're private, which was cool to kind of watch the transition from public to now private. And then we'll see what happens in the future. So again, just following good leaders and good people and good companies, right? You've gotta have the baseline that the product and company is strong. And then the people for me are just, you know, what makes it happen.

Well, that is my recommended career strategy. I call it the mafia strategy.

Yeah, yeah, there you go.

Because you, you pick a capo, right?

Right.

Yeah, let them do all the research on the next thing, right?

Totally.

Because they're probably better picking the right horse than you and I are, right?

Exactly, exactly. And so, you know, if you trust them and they've been successful, why not, you know, kind of follow along?

So plus you have the built-in relationship when you get there. You don't have to— no one's judging Ryan on every call he makes and every Well, I mean, everybody's judging sales always, but— Well, you know, you get a new manager, you know what that's like.

You get a little bit of street cred.

Yeah, yeah.

Right.

Because if a deal goes south, it's gonna be your fault.

Right. Totally. Yeah.

What sales skill do you wish you were a lot better at?

You know, I'll be honest, brutally honest, right? Since we're on the brutal truth, right? Just getting out there and just making the time to do PG and pipeline generation and none of this email nonsense, like picking up the phone and hitting the phone hardcore. And I block time in my day and I try to do it, but as you all know, you know, it, you get caught up in email and client meetings and I've got this proposal that's here that I need to finish by the end of the day. And so just getting back to honestly the fundamentals, I read this, uh, great book, uh, Combo Prospecting. I'm not sure if you're familiar with it.

Yep.

But it's, I was like, oh, this is amazing. Really love the analogies and just getting back to hardcore prospecting because, you know, you look at the time of the day and it just flies. Yeah.

Because, you know, the, because people are usually good at one or the other, either building pipeline or executing pipeline. It's hard to find somebody who's good at Totally.

Right.

But you have to have both.

Yeah. I mean, you've got to.

And so it— Did you have inbound at the other companies? I gotta believe you don't have inbound here or not much.

Yeah. I mean, so funny enough, since it's all been, you know, fairly decently expensive, like fairly high-level, you know, platform plays, It's not like a dialing for dollars. It's not like you get on a phone call and somebody's like, oh, give me a contract. I think that happened once when we were at another event, Sprinklr. We were talking to, we did like an hour demo and somebody was like, oh, give me a contract. I was like, oh, this is great. But no, typically, you know, it's longer sales cycles. It's enterprise software. So yes, you're always gonna have the inbound. You're always gonna have some RFPs that come through. You're always gonna have your website that's generating leads. But again, a lot of it is relationship and building those relationships. And you've gotta be doing the outbound and you've gotta do the outreach with your SDRs and going to the conferences and meeting people because even if they're not in the market now, at some point they're gonna be in the market and you want your name to be at top of mind when they are. And just those continuous touchpoints, right? Yeah.

Because I gotta believe at least 90 or 9 months to plus sales process.

Yeah.

A year and a half, 2 years.

Yeah. Well, and going back to inbound, you know, the one thing I probably despise the most is a blind RFP, right? Because it's like you're spending so much time filling it out and you already know that they've been talking to somebody for forever. They've already made their decision, you know, 90% of the time, and this is just going through the steps, right? So you've got to influence those RFPs that come in. Sorry, go ahead, Brian.

But I mean, do you have a particular take on the RFP thing? And I guess it depends on the space, but most spaces, if you get a blind RFP, it's validating a decision, not starting a decision.

Exactly. Yeah, I tend to agree. The RFP process, don't get me wrong, can be very important, right? Especially when you're going through these large decisions. It's just that we've done, you know, and this is years ago, done a little bit of research around like, how much does it actually cost to run an RFP in terms of time, effort? And most of the time you already made up your mind beforehand. So why not like spend that money and time and doing like a proof of concept? Like a paid proof of concept, like actually get something up and running, see if it works. You know, if it does great, you were right. If it doesn't, at least you know now rather than getting into a multi-year contract, you know, based on whatever it was. Right. So.

Because I've always found the harder you push back, the more you learn.

Right. Yeah.

Because if they don't call you back, you know, there's already a selection, right? And a lot of times they just want 2 more for the file for the auditor.

Well, that's the thing. It's like, oh, you've got to have at least 3 before you make a decision, you know, so prove that there's no shenanigans going on. Right. Totally.

And I mean, the empathy thing, but what part of the sales cycle do you master?

So I'm I love just negotiation and like just getting down into the deal closure. And, you know, when it's neck and neck, you're at the end of the race, you know, you're, you've got the competition, you're working with your champion, you're working with procurement and just getting it done. I mean, the rush, the energy, the excitement is, it's great. And then obviously, you know, once you have a signed contract, it feels amazing, but then it's like, what have you done for me lately? Right?

It lasts a minute.

Yeah.

On the negotiating side, you know, what lessons do you have there that you think the listeners would be—

So I think a big one is give to get, right? One of the things as salespeople, we're always like, oh yes, yes, we can do that. Yeah, let me run around and do everything you want. And it's being able to, okay, slow down. One, understand what are you really asking? Like, do you really need our financials or do you just wanna know that we've been around a while and we're a strong company?

Right.

Or if you're asking for something specific contractually, what are you going to give up in return? Right. So if you don't want CPI 5% and you want it at 3%, then, okay, I don't want net 60, I want net 30 payment. Right. Like just figuring out what those things are that you can, you know, both parties come away gaining a little bit. Right. Yeah.

Cool. Hey, I really appreciate your time today. Where can people go to connect and follow you?

Oh yeah, I'm on LinkedIn. Um, you know, Ryan Rodriguez Wiggins. Uh, feel free to reach out, connect. You know, I've got all my information out there in sales. You know, feel free to text me, email me, LinkedIn message me. Happy to, uh, to connect with folks. And Brian, thank you for this opportunity. This is actually my first podcast, so hope it, uh, hope it turns out well.

How do you like that career strategy? There's nothing better. Let me explain why. Because most of us, it takes a long time to be able to evaluate future companies. You know, what we call a picker. How do you pick the right company to go to? Most of us get excited because it's new and different, and you get that honeymoon phase again. Doesn't last that long. But our managers, good managers, have more experience at that, have a broader visibility into the issues and what works and what doesn't work. So the Mafia career strategy works so well because of that. And I don't know if I've shared the story with you. There was a bunch of salespeople that shared a beach house with me. And they were doing really well. And, you know, one night I took them aside and said, how do you keep this pattern? Because, you know, I find one company you do well, the next company, who knows, it takes too long. But to have a repeat in sales, it's really hard. Sale is different, company's too early or too late, overfunded, underfunded, all these issues. And he said, I found this manager and he treats us well. He cooks the comp plan so we make a lot of money. He has our back, we have his back, and he's really good at picking the next company. So they would do these 2 to 5-year stints at these companies. Company gets acquired, goes public, or, you know, outgrows the need For high-talented salespeople. I don't know when that happens, but— and they go to the next one. And it was kind of this mafia club. So it wasn't just hiring the manager, it was hiring the manager and his best reps. So the hiring company wins, the manager wins, and the rep wins. The previous company loses, unfortunately. But if you have this now, compare this to, you know, applying on the website. You don't know. That's the dumbest thing. You personally going to the hiring manager can work, is good, takes a little bit longer. Having a great recruiter, very good. But having your hiring manager be your past manager, you already know each other. It's plug and play. I did this with pre-salespeople, sales engineers. I had the same sales engineer, what, 3, 4 companies. And he wanted it because he knew he'd make a lot of money with me. And we worked together, we knew each other, we understood each other's strengths and weaknesses, and we could compensate for that. And I didn't have to go and recruit somebody, train somebody. And believe me, you want to talk about external locus of control? It was always somebody's fault. I mean, he left his computer in the back seat of a car, rent-a-car, unlocked because he never locked his car, in a major city parking lot. Oh, my God. And then he was surprised that it was gone and it wasn't his fault. Well, I diverted you. I'm sorry. So look at and find that great manager. If you can't find the great manager, find great salespeople who like their manager and try and get to work for them because it's almost as good as a great comp plan and a great company and a great product. Because if the manager sucks, it's really hard. You know, I've had the luck of having a couple of good managers, a bunch of okay managers, and a few really bad ones. And boy, the bad ones do make the job really hard, and really hard to keep that internal locus of control. I'm bringing up memories now. So if you want to become great at sales, go to b2brevenue.com right now. If you need Prospects, start the conversation, get the meeting. If you need to understand how to prevent these deals from stalling and no one calling you and executing poor business etiquette— oh, don't you feel better when you express that? And who cares whose fault it is? Well, in sales, it's binary. Either win or you lose. You know, if you win, Make your team the hero. If you lose, find out why and find a way to prevent it. If you don't know, I can show you. There's classic traps, traps that, you know, people, if they don't figure it out, continue to do the rest of their career because it's just easier to make up for it in volume than it is to think. We'll see you next time. Thanks for listening. If you see my stuff fly by on LinkedIn, give it a little like, a little comment, a little share. We'll see you next time.