Not Just a Numbers Game - Paul Rosen - Revenue Today - Episode # 5

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Sales, marketing, and RevOps. It's sink or swim out there, and yesterday's strategies and tactics won't help you today. This is Revenue Today, and I'm your host, Jared Robin. Join me as we interview revenue leaders in our community to learn what steps we could take right now to help you scale yourself and your company. Revenue Today is sponsored by Rev Genius, and we're on a mission to bring inspiration and creativity to all revenue professionals in the world. So today's guest is somebody that came from a space that I spent quite a lot of time in, in logistics. They're a professional and personal development advocate. Dedicated to advancing leadership opportunities. Highly skilled at revenue growth optimization, he's scaled multiple companies from $5 to $20 million to unicorn and public companies, including doing so in his current role. He's the CRO of ShipBob. Welcome, Paul Rosen.

Hey Jared, and hey everyone that's watching and listening. So appreciative and humbled to be part of this great organization and to have this opportunity to chat with you. So excited to share some stories and have some fun.

Yeah, let's jump right in. It's now July 2022. Debunk a myth about generating revenue today.

Gosh, this is probably one of the oldest myths out there, and maybe there was some truth to this, but as, and I've been in sales for a little bit over 31 years, and as the whole business environment is changing, this is really truly a myth now. And that's that sales is just a numbers game. That, hey, you've received 87 nos. That's okay. Be thankful for all those nos. On the 88th one, you're gonna get a yes. Well, now you have 120 nos. Great. That 121st, thank all these people for saying no, because now you're closer to the next yes. And what we're seeing, at least in today's environment, is it isn't about the quantity of activity that you have. It's about the quality of the activity. Like, you still need to get results, right? If you're a BDR, you still need to set meetings. If you're an AE, you still need to close deals. If you're in success, You still need to retain your customers, renew your customers, and upsell and cross-sell. But I think that companies and leaders over-index for activity, which is, I think the, or the quantity of activity, which I think especially today is the wrong metric. Data and sources that I've read through, you know, would suggest that, you know, over 50% of business owners have come really close to making a decision before they even talk to the salesperson. 90% of business owners have done some research and know a lot about you before they're even willing to set a meeting. If you don't mind, I'd love to share a quick story, which may be the one argument for the numbers game, but it's a little bit coming from a little bit different of an angle.

Okay.

So my first job out of college was in sales, and this was back in 1991. So back then there was no cell phones. I didn't have a cell phone. There was no internet. There was no LinkedIn, no Facebook, no Instagram. I think we barely even had email. So it was basically, yeah, you're calling and dialing for dollars. And when I started out in sales, I was a horrible salesperson. I was crappy and I knew it, right? And I felt like I was about 50% as good or as talented or as strong as everyone in the office. So when everyone else was making 50 calls, I would make 100 calls. So that way, like, I'm kind of now on a level playing field if I'm working twice as hard as everyone. But the added benefit I had by doing that, which I didn't realize until later in life, is it wasn't just that I was making twice as many calls, I was getting more reps and more at-bats, which meant that I was getting more experience and ramping up a lot quicker and experiencing a lot quicker. So that would be kind of the only framework where maybe saying the quantity of activity can benefit you. But in the mid-'90s, I hired a salesperson, really great guy, hard worker, hardest worker I've ever met. And, but he was a guy that just could not connect with customers. And he's a guy who'd make 300 calls a day. And a story I have, my wife and I, It was a Friday night. It was 7 o'clock. We were going out. We were walking into a Chinese restaurant to eat, obviously, Friday night date. While we were walking into the restaurant, he was walking out and he wasn't walking out because he was eating. He was walking out because it was 7 o'clock on a Friday. He was prospecting that restaurant. This individual came nowhere close to hitting his goals. And unfortunately, I had to let him go. And he made more calls than anyone. And so Today, like with following customers on Twitter and Instagram and LinkedIn and Facebook and really getting to know your prospects, you really need to be part of their DNA before you call on them. Because if you just kind of focus on the quantity of outreaches, you know, you're really not, you're really going to struggle connecting and being able to provide value. And the salesperson I mentioned, the problem was, When he was calling on people, companies didn't see him as a value-added resource.

Yeah. Would you say also there's so many tools and ways to go at it that your ICP today is more than just a company size, an employee size, a revenue size, and a geography? That was your ICP yesteryears, right?

Yep.

And They have 10 trucks in the garage, right? Like things that you could do. Today, it's more about actions they're taking, intent on your website, opening your emails even, right? So the outbounds and even getting more granular understanding, in your case, their supply chain. Right? Like, like you're not gonna just call on people that own their own warehouses unless A, B, and C as well, right? Would you agree? Like ICP is getting more granular.

Yeah. And I'm really—

yeah,

Jared, I'm really glad you mentioned that point because your total addressable market, or in this case, service addressable market for most companies is not unlimited, right? Because you have that ICP, you have that niche where you feel you compete better than anybody else. And because our, our SAMs are not unlimited, you can't have just somebody making 300 lousy calls a day or somebody email blasting 1,000 prospects because now that's 1,000 companies you've made a crappy impression on that you can't possibly go back. So every single outreach needs to be super customized. Every single outreach needs to be either humorous or value-added. And I'll give you an example. And BDRs, if you're not doing this today, you probably should, even if you're working for one of our competitors. So I follow a lot of large brands on Twitter. The CEO of a large brand that fits within our ideal client profile tweeted, our current 3PL or third-party logistics company are a bunch of crooks. And then he had a picture of the McDonald's Hamburglar. Like how many BDRs right now were connected to that guy, right? How many BDRs could have sent him an email and had a picture of Hamburglar to start the email and had a subject line, something like, it looks like you like McDonald's because you're a big fan of the Hamburglar, and then gone in. And fortunately we weren't the 3PL he was referring to. We know who was, but, you know, are you getting that customized and specific? And are you looking, are you getting Google alerts, right? So if you're at BDR and somebody in your prospect book raises money, they raise a seed round or an A round, or there's news, they get a new CEO or they get a new CFO. Like, are you getting those alerts? Are you connected with all of the people on LinkedIn? And when you're sending LinkedIn invitations, are you making it memorable, or are you just the BDR that is connecting with somebody on LinkedIn and the next day sending them a generic pitch? So, you know, I think the whole BDR job has kind of evolved over the last couple of years.

Yeah. And you bring up a great point. I mean, it would be funny if you were actually the 3PL that handled some of McDonald's business and be like, we know because we handle their business, like what you're going through. And I, and I know we're not the same as who you're dealing with come Have a burger with us or something. But I digress. Like, yeah, talk to me about how the BDR's role has evolved. Like, that's, it's a super interesting topic. Like, I remember interviewing for jobs 5, even 5, 10 years ago where I'm like, the 2 big levers that you have to push and pull, you know, managing a team are activity And the content during that activity? Yeah.

It's

changed.

Yeah, I think so. In my prior company, like for the people that were prospecting, you know, we were having them make 200 dials a day. Like we had automated dialer. And then I went from there to another company to ShipBob. And when I joined ShipBob, average BDR was making 1.5 calls a day. I knew that was probably a little light, But I also knew that 200 calls a day might not have been the right number. So where it's kind of evolved is when I started at ShipBob, we started focusing the team on making more dials. You know, at that point it was probably 30 to 50 dials a day plus emails. And the goal was, you know, 100 pieces of activity a day. Where we've kind of shifted our focus is we're a little less focused on if you're doing 100 activities a day, What we're more focused on is what is your conversion rate of how many activities does it take for you to get a meeting? So for example, if the benchmark was 100 and you're only doing 40 activities, it doesn't mean you're lazy. It doesn't mean you're not working, and it doesn't mean that you're not doing your job. Maybe you're doing more research. Maybe you're digging deeper into what's happening with these brands, and maybe you're spending more time on those outreaches. So that they're really customized. But so we've gone from more of just managing the activity to kind of looking at the conversion rate between activities and meetings. And at the end of the day, you know, meetings and how well those meetings convert into deals is way more important to us than how you got there.

I think you just shared like the most actionable insight for anybody that might be listening that's managing a BDR team or a revenue organization. that has an outbound motion, which is probably everyone, including PLGs that become later stage, but they have to reach out to the enterprise, right? How have things evolved results-wise? So the takeaways here, it sounds like, look at ratio, like the, not just the number of activities, but the number of successful and the percentage of what you're doing to be efficient. How has that led to growth where you're at?

Yep. Now I, we're a private company, so, okay, I'll kind of, I'll share, I'll share kind of a couple data points that I think we can. So to kind of put it in perspective, we have grown 15x, 14, between 14 and 15x as a company. Since 2018 in terms of revenues, in terms of new customer revenues. And the way we look at revenue isn't annualized revenue or ACV. It's like actual dollars. Like how many within the 2022 cohort of all the customers we signed up in 2022, how much actual new customer revenue did we get from that cohort in 2022? And I can say that That number has increased about 10x since 2018. And it would be difficult to attribute that to one or two things, but definitely how we look at the numbers, the KPIs we're looking at, and making sure we're tracking the right things is really important. When, again, when I first started, we were managing activity. Now we're managing Results. Like how many meetings are you setting? How many of those meetings are turning into deals? And I think the next part of the evolution, I think the next step that we get with our BDR team is having them care a little bit more about not only are you setting a meeting and not only is that meeting converting into a customer, but that's converting into a customer with a little bit more sizable revenue, which if I'm a BDR, I might argue, well, I have less control over that. But there are some things that you could do to level up your game a little bit with a little bit meatier customers. So that's going to be kind of the next step in our evolution.

Hey, I'm a big fan of putting customer success on the seller. I like you bringing in the right clients will have higher likelihood of less churn. Bigger deal sizes, growth. So I don't see anything wrong with that. My question to you, back onto the original point with like sales isn't a numbers game anymore. Well, it's not a quantity game. It's still a numbers game in terms of percentages. But you mentioned 15x, all these wonderful things that, that, that you've been at the helm for. How has activity changed on average across the reps? I'm curious. That's probably—

Yeah, I would say Activity in general is lighter today and more customized than it was in 2018.

For sure.

Like without, without a

doubt. That's the thesis right there, folks. That's spectacular. And let's dive into some other questions so that everyone could really get into your mind because these numbers aren't easy. And the fact that you've done it a few times shows that You know, you have some systems in place. What are the KPIs that are the most important for you today?

So on the BDR side, it is meetings set. It is the efficiency ratio, which is how many activities is it taking for you to get to that meeting? It is, is that meeting turning into a customer? So, or at least going to the implementation department. So we track Efficiency of activity. We track meetings. We track what percentage of those meetings or how many of those meetings make it to the implementation. And we are just starting now to kind of go through the motions of quality of meeting in terms of meeting size so that hey, if somebody's generating five thousand shipments per month, that's a more important meeting than somebody that's generating five hundred at least from. A comp standpoint and a valuation standpoint. On the AE side, we're tracking conversion rate. So when we're giving you opportunities or leads, what percent are you converting? We also, to some extent, they, some of their comp and some of their quota is based off of the expansion of that revenue. So that's not just on the success team. So part of it, Jared, to your point, which I thought was a really good one, is like if an AE sends in a deal and it churns in 2 months, like they're hurt by that, right? Because again, it's not based off of annual contract value, it's based off of actual dollars. So if an AE sends in a deal and they churn, yeah, that's painful to them. If an AE sends in a deal and then they grow, they benefit from that significantly over the first year and to a smaller extent over the second year. For the success team, we're tracking churn. We are tracking how much expansion sales are they doing. We're tracking NPS scores. And I think one of the things we're kind of moving or evolving to is right now there's a KPI to make sure that they're completing all of their quarterly business reviews. We're now going to start to look more at the quality of the QBRs, which is a little bit more intensive to track, but we've gotten to a motion where we're really good at doing our QBRs. And now I think we're in a position where we can kind of take it to the next level and dig a little bit deeper.

I love it. You know, one thing I, you know, I had Mark Roberge on and when he was going into the deal stuff, He goes, we'll pay AEs more on the second deal, like with the same client. He's like, yeah, bring a $1,000 deal in and let the second deal be $100,000 because, you know, it leads to a better client. I thought that that was like super fascinating. So these KPIs are, you know, pretty straightforward. And I love how you're evolving. The SDRs' KPIs to quality seems pretty logical. But what, in regards to challenges that you're having now, what's top of mind? What's keeping you up at night?

That's a good question. I'd say maybe there's one internally and one more macro externally. I think The internal thing is to kind of like, even though we've grown a lot over the last couple years, the expectation is to still grow at, you know, 50, 60, 70, 80% per year, which is fairly easy to do if you're a million-dollar business or $10 million business, or maybe even $20 million. Like once you're generating multiple hundreds of millions of dollars, like that growth becomes more difficult. So to try to maintain those growth levels, We are getting into new markets. And when I say new markets, like globally putting, you know, boots on the ground in Australia, UK, we're looking at other markets. It's getting into new product segments that we haven't been in, which is opening up our TAM or total addressable market so that there's, with some of the new products that we're developing, we can go after new segments of the market. We are actually changing some of our go-to-market motions and strategies to be able to attract different types of customers a little bit larger than we were before. And again, getting into different market segments. So if a customer uses us for A and another 3PL for B, that we can kind of come in and be their one source for everything. So there's probably 4 or 5 Like really super big initiatives. And so what keeps me up at night, it's a lot to kind of digest. So there's a lot of balls in the air that we're juggling. So it's like, am I dropping one this week? Or is there one that we're not putting enough attention to? Or, you know, is there a fire in one? So the thing that keeps me up at night is we have ambitious goals and we're trying to accomplish a lot. That's the internal. I think the external one, Is that is kind of thinking through what's going to happen with the economy, what's going to happen with inflation, potentially a recession. Like the majority of our team, you know, are in their 20s and early 30s and have never kind of worked through a recession. Like, I guess one benefit of being old is I was around in 2008 with the recession and crash and the Great Recession where all of the housing market tanked because people that shouldn't have been buying houses were buying like 8 houses. I was also around professionally in 2000 when the dot-com bubble where, you know, you would have like bottledwater.com or, you know, pens.com and you'd get a billion-dollar valuation even though you had no revenue just because you had the domain name. And then at some point the market figured out that that was stupid, right? That you actually need revenue. So the market crashed in 2000 and I was kind of there for that. And then early in my career, 1991 was kind of when we were kind of a smaller recession in like the late '80s, early '90s. So one of the things that keeps me up at night is what is the impact of the recession going to have? Because if consumer spending goes down, then as a third-party logistics company, our customers have less people ordering their products, which reduces our revenue. So how do we make sure that we can kind of continue on the growth rate that we're having if the market conditions get more difficult? So that's kind of the other thing that we're thinking through.

It's very interesting for you because during COVID I'm like, everything's going to go down, but e-commerce Did not.

Nope. Not, not only did it not go down, like, that's your point. People were nowhere near prepared for the onslaught of opportunities.

It, it's spectacular. So like, it's how have, and, and that's, that's also a big reference point in how you're preparing, right? Because that was 2 years ago. Nobody had jobs, as close to nobody as I've seen in my lifetime. For sure. And I mean, unemployment being the highest, but then you have all these other studies in the past. How are you preparing to building a profitable business?

Like, yeah. So, yeah, so fortunately, like the levers that we're pulling in the business and, you know, are working, our client base has been very stable in Q2. Like usually For most third-party logistics companies, you have like that summer dip where just e-commerce in general, you know, the volumes dip. We've been very, very fortunate where that hasn't happened for us in Q2, where that has happened in prior years. But yeah, we don't know what's going to happen because every recession is different, right? More companies can have layoffs, which might mean less people have jobs and And/or the prices of everyday products goes up and people have less disposable income to spend on those products. So yeah, it could work one of two ways. It could either work that overall consumer spending goes down in every category, and that would be bad, at least for our business. So I'm not talking about on a macro level, or what it could mean is that if the economy's bad, inflation is up, your income is not going up at the same rate as inflation, or you're not working. Maybe you're not spending money on a big new house. Maybe you're not spending money on a Porsche. Maybe you're not spending money on an exotic vacation, but maybe you're still spending money on the e-commerce stuff that you always do anyway. So it's real interesting. Like, I don't think we've figured it out yet. I don't think we know what to expect.

Yeah, I'm like thinking like, do you, does your ICP morph to inelastic products a little bit? I mean, you don't want to, You don't want to put that on a rep, but it's an interesting thing. And then on the other side, yeah, maybe let's assume the worst and demand goes down as a whole. Do people like Walmart start saying, you know what, I wouldn't have normally used you, but I'm going to shut down this facility because there's way too much sunk cost in it? You know, and do you get more opportunities? That could be interesting.

Yeah, potentially. It's interesting, like, and this is public information.

Yeah.

Like Amazon bought all of these buildings expecting this huge demand and, you know, it's, the information is out there that they've readily admitted. They said, yeah, we have more capacity than we need. So yeah, it'll be interesting to see how all of that and other things play out.

I'm excited for you all because you have such like a, you know, strong head on your shoulders and the team sounds really good. I know it'll end up fine, but you might get a nice coup there with that.

Well, thank you. I greatly appreciate it.

So what's a piece of advice you could offer for others? Like, this is, everybody's thinking about this, right? Like, especially VC-backed businesses that aren't profitable. What's some advice that you could give?

Yeah, like these are weird times. Like, so this would be my advice. If you're an individual contributor, like a BDR or AE, I think it's different based off of You know, what level you are. The weird or interesting thing is we have a recession impending, but there's still a decent amount of activity. Like my LinkedIn gets popped all the time for other CRO or COO types of roles. Our sales managers get pinged all the time for roles. Our AEs are getting recruited, our BDRs are getting recruited. So the interesting thing is, There's not a shortage of activity of companies that are going out and trying to recruit talent. And there's a lot of companies that are really pressing for very short-term revenue that have to hit revenue quickly. So I guess my advice is for if you're an individual contributor and you've never kind of lived through a recession, if you get recruited and let's say you're an AE, And you get recruited for an opportunity that's maybe 1 or 2 levels up where another company says, look, we've just raised some money. You look like a great account executive. We'd like you to come over and lead our sales team. That may be a risk worth taking because it gives you an opportunity for more responsibility to step up. If you're an AE and the company comes and says, hey, I'm going to offer you another AE role for $20,000 a year more in salary, if you're a BDR and another company comes in and offers you $10,000 more to be a BDR, one of the things I would be thinking through is a lot of companies have done layoffs, right? Like, I don't need to mention all of them. You all know who they are. I know personally of a couple of companies that are announcing layoffs actually today. Over the next several months, Other companies will be announcing layoffs. So here is how that happens. So if you're a company and you need to be lighter and you need to let go of team members, the first ones you look for, the most obvious ones are the lowest performers, right? The ones that maybe, you know, you could have pipped or maybe they're currently on pips. Like the next segment you're going to look for is who are the newer salespeople? Because they may be really good salespeople, but if they don't have a pipeline and they don't know your industry and they're not subject matter experts yet, maybe they're not adding enough value, even if it's not their fault, right? They could have done everything that you told them to do. They could be right on the trajectory that you were expecting, but your CRO or head of sales is getting, you know, is given a number and you have to cut. You start with the lower performers. You then probably look at some of the ones that are newer. right? That don't have pipelines. And then maybe you look for the ones that have a much higher salary level than the rest of the group that may not be at that level. So if you're an AE and you're jumping from one company to the other for a salary, and if in 3 months or 6 months the economy turns bad, you know, that's a pretty risky decision. So like my advice with the potential impending recession is, Just be really strategic about the moves you make. And I'm not suggesting that you shouldn't make a move, and I'm not suggesting there aren't greener pastures because there could be. If it's only going to be for salary, I would be really, really careful and make sure that you've really thought through all of the ramifications. I guess my advice, if you're a leader, is when the economy's really good, you can make a lot of mistakes. You don't need to be running at Perfection. You could maybe be running at like 60 or 70% of perfection and still hitting your numbers. So when the economy goes bad, you kind of need to be at 100%. Like you need to be having your A+ game every single week, every single month. And so if it's a situation where you haven't taken, you know, maybe you haven't taken a strong look at performance management because you haven't had to, or Let's just make, maybe you've been coasting a little bit, or maybe you're kind of on a track where the track is good, so you haven't had to invest greatly in yourself or your team with doing new things or trying new things or optimizing. Like once you hit a recession, you'll get hit, it'll hit you like a brick wall. So I would be looking at optimizing your department. I would be looking at ways to make your team more efficient, more productive. So that if something, if the conditions get a lot worse, that you're 1 or 2 steps ahead of it.

Thank you for that. Everyone listening is thanking you too. But what excites you about the future still? Like there's got to be something otherwise.

Yeah, no, it's not all doom and gloom.

You'd be out of the game.

Yeah, no, it's definitely not all doom and gloom. Right. So what excites me in the future is Every company, including us, is going to be forced to be performing at a really high level, right? And if you can do that and you have the discipline, resilience, and fortitude to kind of make it through those difficult times where you're still productive, you're still figuring out how to drive revenues, and you kind of make it through the storm. Once you get out on the other side, and again, I benefit from being old enough So, you know, this will hypothetically be my 4th recession in my career. You end up so much stronger on the other end that you will be absolutely unbeatable.

I couldn't agree more. And I always look at every downturn as an opportunity. I don't know what the opportunity is, but it's over the course of history, there's an opportunity. You just have to find that silver lining. Maybe it's being able to hire easier because you're the one profitable business in your space and everyone else is letting people go. And now you have the opportunity to get top talent at something where you can afford. Maybe it's optimizing, maybe it's gaining new market share because you create this new category that only you could do and the market didn't care for it because they had all the money in the world. And now all of a sudden, They need it and they need to,

for sure,

the water comes down. But, you know, that was awesome. So the first half of this, we learned from you, this interview, we learned from you. Now I want to learn about you. I want to know who Paul is. And so, yeah, who are you?

So I've been married for 24 years. I have 2 adult children that just graduated college. So now we're officially Empty nesters. I don't know if you would say that I'm a workaholic, so I love work. And I think at the end of the day, if you really enjoy your work, then it doesn't feel like work. And I've mostly been in positions where that's the case. I've been very fortunate. I'm very passionate about sports. I've never been a great athlete, but I've always admired athletes. I've always really been into sports for a couple of years. The business was a disaster, but it was fun.

Jets or Giants, Yankees or Mets?

So I'm in upstate New York. Like, I grew up in Chicago, so I'm a long-suffering Cubs fan, a long-suffering Bears fan, although I was old enough to remember the Bears '85 Super Bowl team. Blackhawks fan, Bulls fan. Yeah. So I really haven't migrated to any of the New York teams, but In upstate New York, I was the co-owner of the minor league basketball team here in Rochester, New York, which was kind of fun for a couple of years. Since I'm not an elite athlete, I got an opportunity to participate with elite athletes. So that was kind of fun.

How did that work out that you became owner of a minor league team? I'm looking at your history, like it seems like a lot of fintech payroll services early, right? And then financial services as we go and, you know, getting into logistics being one path, but getting into the minor leagues.

Yeah, that was more of a hobby. Like that was more of making an investment and hanging out with the team a little more than I wasn't operating the team. What I could tell you is minor league sports, not a great investment. Like I would never, ever recommend to anyone to invest in a minor league sports team expecting any money out. Now, it was fun. One of our players, sweetheart of a guy, his name is Bob Wagner, 7'8 in his bare feet, meaning he could dunk a basketball like this without jumping. Literally the tallest person in the United States. A great guy, like a fan favorite. So it was fun. like doing stuff like recruiting him to come to Rochester, New York, you know, and every now and then we have a couple fun performers at halftime that I would pick up the phone and try to call entertainers and come. But overall, in terms of being a business, yeah, it wasn't a great business at all. Which kind of leads me to my other passion, which is I love going to concerts. I love music. And again, I don't have a musical bone in my body. I am so jealous of people that have that part of their brain that allow them to be creative, to do music. So I've always admired athletes and I've always admired musicians because I haven't really had either one of those. So yeah, one of the, you know, one of the things I've, I had a lot of fun with, with the basketball team was hiring artists to perform. And then when we've organized President's Clubs with some of the trips, You know, hiring, you know, musical talent and then eventually becoming friends with them. And yeah, yeah. So music and concerts is the other thing that I'm really passionate about.

I, you know, my dad both ways, my brother as well, they have the NBA on nonstop. I'm still trying to figure out how you made it to the Rochester area. This isn't New York City area.

No, no.

It must be a significant other if I'm guessing.

Yeah. So, so my wife's family is originally, so I was living in Chicago. I grew up there, loved the city.

Went to school there.

Yeah. Yeah. Went to school there. Yeah. Got my MBA at University of Chicago, like lived in the city and I love Chicago. My wife's family is from Rochester, New York and kind of coincidentally, and at the time our twin boys were about 2 and coincidentally, I actually got a really good job opportunity to be head of sales of a startup payroll company that was just starting up, but had a good owner, a good founder, and was putting a decent amount and had aggressive growth plans. So it was kind of a combination of a good career opportunity plus being a little bit close to, closer to my wife's family.

I love it. I have a friend from Rochester that goes up frequently. She gets garbage plates all the time.

Oh yeah. Like if you're in Rochester, you have to get a garbage plate.

So like, I know the first thing, which is why I get asked this question. I'm like, this isn't Long Island. I mean, I can see Chicago to Long Island. Yeah, it was 45 minutes outside the city.

Yeah. When I say upstate New York, people think it's like Westchester. Like, so you go into the city all the time. I am actually a closer drive to Toronto than I am New York City. In fact, I'm a closer drive to Cleveland, Ohio than I am New York City.

Niagara Falls area. I, I, and, and you should be a Buffalo Bills fan for the record.

I'm leaning that way. I'm still a Bears fan, but I also root for the Bills.

I'm, I'm a Justin Fields fan, so that's cool. Yeah. So, so you started touching on your passions like music and sports. How does that intertwine? So, so yeah, how is that so different from what you're doing during your career?

Well, I intertwine it a little bit, right? Like, so for some of the President's Clubs, and these are going to be names most of your listeners won't know because they're older bands and older artists, but like we've had Montell Jordan, This Is How We Do It. This, remember, This Is How We Do It. Wow. So he, yeah, he has done a lot of work with Chef Bob. He performed at one of our events. We use him to do videos for us, for customers and for new potential employees. And he's actually become a pretty good friend. We've had the '90s and early 2000s alt-rock group Eve 6 perform at one of our events. They've worked with me a couple of times. They did an event for us at ShipBob. They did one of— they performed at one of our President's Clubs at a previous company. And rest in peace. I've done a lot of work and was a close friend with Biz Markie, you know, Just a Friend, you know, from the late '80s. He passed away unfortunately. So, you know, I've been, you know, I'm really passionate about music and I'm really passionate about sports. So within the business world, I get an opportunity to kind of intertwine some of that into some of the events and some of the cool things that we do.

Yeah. I mean, I think part of it, if I'm taking it away. Like, motivation is big when you're generating revenue. You need to keep going and all of that. And music and sports often are a couple great outlets to help with that.

Yeah. Like when COVID hit and everything was doing Zoom calls or Google Hangouts, you know, we had a couple of professional athletes come in and do calls for us. We had Art Alexakis from Everclear do 5 or 6 songs for our group. We We had a little bit newer and more current, an LA band called Cannons, the band Fire for You. Like, so we've tried to kind of do as much of that as we can to kind of keep people excited.

Who recruits the groups? Do you do it yourself? Or do you have somebody that helps you?

No, that's usually actually—

I figured you seem like that type of leader,

which is just like sales, like If you're passionate about something, you tend to be the best one at getting it done. So if you're at BDR, be very passionate about your company and be very passionate about how we can help your customers. Yeah, this is one of those things I'm passionate about, so I'm probably a little bit better at it than somebody that isn't as passionate.

I love it, Paul. Thank you. In closing, I've learned so much from you today, and I know others have as well. How can folks connect with you?

You can connect with me, and I actually should have been more prepared for this question. You can connect with me on LinkedIn. Look for Paul Rosen at ShipBob. You can connect with me on Twitter. I don't know my exact Twitter handle, but look for Paul Rosen.

Paul_Rosen2, I believe.

Yes. Okay.

I have notes.

Yeah. So feel free to connect with me. I'll respond to every single message. I'm always happy to help. You want to put 10 minutes in my calendar to just run an idea, or if you're hosting a president's club or an annual sales kickoff and you want to know who would be like a good celebrity that maybe you can afford to come in and do something. Yeah, absolutely happy to chat.

Yeah, just be thoughtful if it's— and understand if he's truly in your ICP or not.

Yeah.

Quality over quantity.

100%.

Thank you so much, Paul.

Hey, Jared, again, I'm humbled and flattered that you asked me to be part of this. So thank you for including me. And again, to everyone that's watching, you know, thanks for investing your time in listening to this.

Yeah, thank you. I mean, I've learned so much. I know you gave a lot of actionable tips about efficiency and stuff, and I want to thank the audience as well. If you learned something today or laughed, tell somebody about this podcast. And you know, again, Paul, thank you so much for your time. It's been great today and getting to know you over the past few weeks in preparation.

Yep, you as well. I'm super appreciative.

All right, this has been another exciting episode of Revenue Today. See you next time. Whoa, another great episode of Revenue Today. For show notes, links, and mentions, visit revenue today dot live. For all my friends in the Rev Genius community, thank you. It's been awesome to spend this time with you. Please DM me any feedback and ideas in our Slack channel or on LinkedIn. If you're not in Rev Genius, join us at revgenius.com. It's free, and it only takes like two seconds, and you'll be joining a group of 27,000 revenue professionals strong. We've got it all. Looking forward to seeing you there. Catch you on the flip side.