Grow to 10M Using Unorthodox Methods with Nadja Komnenic

Every company has breakdowns in their revenue process. Sure thing. Deals slip into next quarter, competitors creep in and swipe deals away at the last minute, and deals getting single threaded that don't get to power. These are just a few examples of revenue leak, but there are a ton more and they're preventing your team from reaching their sales targets. That's why I'm such a big fan of Clary's Revenue platform is the only tool that actually helps leaders take control of their revenue and thrive through any market conditions, especially when things get tough. You can't afford to miss a single detail, but you also can't be leading by gut. Clary combines the science and the art of sales and sales leadership. So go to clary.com if you want to answer the most important question in your business. Are you going to meet, beat or Miss on revenue? Welcome to the live Better Sell Better podcast with your host Kevin Dorsey of Inside Sales Excellence, the number one Patreon group and YouTube channel for tech sellers and tech sales leaders where we dive in deep for tactical advice on how to book more meetings, close more deals faster and lead sales teams to success. But we don't stop there. We also focus on the person in salesperson. We talk about mindset goals, time management and so much more. So thank you for listening and if you're interested, head on over to patreon.com InsideSalesExcellence now with that, grab a notepad, get ready and let's dive into the good stuff. What up everybody? Welcome to another episode of the live Better Sell Better podcast. This is your host Kevin Dorsey AKA KD and I am so excited for the topic and guest today because we are gonna be talking about a few topics that I really enjoy. One cold emailing which I believe is something that still is underutilized and most SDRs don't do the right way. Social selling, how to combine them but then also some outside the box ways of building running a team. Because if you are not familiar with the company called Lemlist you should be. Because I think Lemlist and Unorthodox go hand in hand. They have built a company the complete opposite way. Many people say to build a company raise millions of dollars. They raised no millions of dollars. Do everything in the office. They've done it remotely. Only focus on one thing. YouTube doesn't work. Social doesn't work. They have done everything the opposite direction. Most people would and they are succeeding like none other. They've gone from 0 to 10 million completely strapped in under four years and I have the leader of that sales org, Nadja Kamenet with me today to talk about the mindset, the actions, the tactics they've used to grow from 0 to 10 million. No funding in under 4 years. Nadja, welcome to the show. Let's do this.

Thank you, Kevin, for an awesome introduction and lovely to be here. I've been following your journey for a long time now. You've been one of my silent mentors, I would say, in my growth as well. So very happy to be here today.

And I love it. So Nadja and I had connected a little bit offline, and it was funny because I've been following lemless Journey for a while now when y' all first started putting YouTube videos up and it's like, wait, a SaaS company's doing YouTube videos and like declining funding and all this? And so I've been watching because it's been different. And I love unorthodox. I love thinking outside the box. And so let's start with that part of this year, right? You said, you know, the way that we run our or the way that we run our SDR team is a little bit unorthodox. It's a little bit different. Let's start with that. What are some of the things that you do differently with your team that you've seen lead to this success?

Definitely. And one of our mottos that we have in an is do things that you shouldn't. So that's actually our headline. That's the motto of our company, the way that we function since the beginning. And that is the reason that I believe we've been successful so far, thinking about all of the startups in the world that exist and how hard it is to kind of get to that first million and then from 1 million to 10 million, the percentage is crazy and the stats are really not that optimistic. So we really thought from the beginning we need to do things differently if we want to succeed. As you said, we actually refused $30 million investment year. So it was something very unorthodox for everybody out there. And we decided to remain bootstrapped for one reason only, and that is that we want to make sure that we are actually always able to do things outside of the box and that we are not being overlooked by investors and being said what it is that we need to do. We wanted to test things, we want to fail, we want to see what is working. And one of the ways that my sales team is to go back to your question, one of the ways that my sales team right now is functioning is A very unorthodox. So we do have a couple of things and projects that are going on currently. One of them is that my sales team, all of the sales reps that I'm leading and coaching, all of them have LinkedIn as part of their KPIs, meaning that they all need to be active on LinkedIn and build their personal brands, not only for the company's sake, but we generally believe that this is something that can help them long term in their future as well. And on top of that, obviously, we create like this small inbound engine for every sdr so that even if they're doing prospecting, even if they're doing outbound, and if they're about to hop on a call with the prospect on a demo, they are seen as credible and they're really the ones who are bringing in inbound leads to them. So today my SDRs, 50% of the time, they don't even have to go count for leads, they simply come to them on their LinkedIn. And this is something where we avoided the whole mess of doing prospecting in the outbound itself. So this is one of the things that we've been doing and really focusing on today. Our team actually reaches more than a million views simply because every person is very active and people really know them all the time on LinkedIn. On the other hand, we've just started a very unique project, again, something aligned with what you said being completely unorthodox. So we've actually been thinking this summer, so just to go back, we are actually a very small team, so we have under 40 employees. We grew so fast and the fact is we are competing against. Our market is crazy saturated and we're competing against some crazy big tools out there that have raised millions of funding. And we always thought, okay, how are we small as we are, with no funding are going to be able to compete with those tools, aside from having a good product, obviously. So we always thought about how we can emphasize our efforts. And this summer my team actually came to my hometown in Serbia and we started thinking, how can we actually, as a sales team, bring even more value to the company aside from doing inbound and outbound? And we started thinking what it is the way that we've actually grown so far as Lemlist. What is one reason that we actually managed to grow so fast so far in the last four years? And we really realized that all of the growth that we've had was strictly because we were so customer centric and so focused on our clients all throughout our journey Whatever we started, whatever we did, all the content that we put out was always to make our clients successful. And we thought, as a sales team, how can we, with our skills and our knowledge, actually make sure that our clients and potential clients are becoming even more successful? So we decided to kind of do something very unordinary, I would say. And for me, as a head of sales, it was a very weird thing to do and a project to kick off. And we decided to, instead of running outbound campaigns for ourselves, we're going to be doing outbound campaigns for our clients, select the clients that we choose in different industries, in different verticals, and actually do outbound campaigns for them. Two reasons for this. One reason is we want to create the most actionable content possible, and we cannot do the same if we're just posting our templates, which is focused on one icp, one industry. Really not the same way when you actually have a strong marketing as we are, and then for businesses that are smaller. And the second reason being that our ICP are also marketing agencies. So we wanted, as a sales team, to get that understanding and really feel the pain of doing outbound for somebody else, figuring out all the mess that it goes along with that and how to actually do it. So based on this, we started the YouTube channel a couple of months ago where we're sharing all of these tips, and we're going to be sharing transparently every single step that we go through in the journey with the goal to inspire help and make our clients and potential clients more successful.

I mean, we could end the podcast right there, and that's already so much value. There's a few things I want to unpack here, but that was funny enough. That's one of the things that stood out to me about Lemlist when y' all were first starting is, yes, you're in a very competitive space around sales, engagement and sales, you know, automation, whatever else you want to call it. But y' all were the first to actually help people with the emails. Y' all were the first to actually say, here's what a great email looks like, and we've built it in. Y' all were the first to say, look, you want personalization on the coffee cup or on the refrigerator, whatever else, y' all built that into the tool because, like, see, that is what people actually want. No one wants sales engagement. They want the better responses. And y' all were the first to build that into the tool. And I was like, ooh, okay, I see this, I see what's happening. But then I Love this idea of then this is very similar to like HubSpot. This was HubSpot's model, right? Is like they had their team building websites and building marketing campaigns so they understood the pain points. And I love that because it's going to make the product better. So we're going to get into that a little bit. I want to step back to this social selling idea, right? So you said, you know, you hold your team to KPIs on LinkedIn, which I think is amazing. How do you measure it first of all. But then second, like how do you get them to do it? Because I think a lot of people like, oh, we need our team social selling. But then they give them like a company post and say share it and they wonder why they don't get those millions of views per month. So how are you measuring their LinkedIn KPIs, but also what are you encouraging them to do to get those millions of views?

Of course. So when it comes to the measuring of the KPIs, I would say that those are typically very vanity metrics. So you can't really measure the impact on LinkedIn so much and so precisely like obviously you can connect with tons of people, but is it really your icp? Is it really something that is bringing value? I personally, what I'm looking for is always like more qualitative metrics. So like the regions you're getting from your LinkedIn post, how many you grew your network over the months, how much time and how often you're posting. So they should post at least three times a week and then to inspire them to do so. I believe that the biggest impact that we have is that we lead by example. So I personally, I am posting every single day. Aside from all of my job as a manager that I have, my CEO is also posting every single day. And then what they see is when they come is that they are actually seeing that I personally don't even have to do so much prospecting. And that itself gives them like high hopes that at one point they will don't have to use so much emails or LinkedIn messages. They will be able to have their life much more easier. So I think that's the kind of the end goal that they envision immediately and they see the impact of it when they start. Obviously the onboarding helps them to get an understanding of how to Write properly on LinkedIn. We give them some content that they can actually share and what are the types of content they can be posting. We've done recently a LinkedIn masterclass so we always coach customers and ourselves and our team how to do it better and they always have a full support for the marketing and sales. And I think the most important part is that obviously when an SDR starts and they start posting on LinkedIn, they're never going to be perfect. The posts are never going to be to the perfect copy, perfect engagement, et cetera. It's going to stop at the beginning, but it's okay. And I think the manager should be okay with that and being comfortable with failing a bit in the beginning and then encouraging each other to kind of boost the engagement. We actually have a Slack channel that is called Engagement Pod where we basically share the links to the linking post that we posted. People start engaging from the company. It creates a bit of a boost from our network and then it the growth organic.

I love it.

I love it.

So let's talk about a little bit like what you teach them, right, because you're the first sales leader, literally the first sales leader that I've spoken to that goes. We teach them how to write posts and we teach them how to create engaging content. What are a couple of those quick tips that you could give people say this is what we teach our team to do because there are so many Companies that are 10 times your size that if they understood what would happen if all 150of their reps, we're generating even a thousand views per post, that would be 150,000 views a day if their entire team was doing it right. So what are a couple of those quick I guess hits or quick ideas around this idea of like social selling or these posts that you teach your team?

First thing that I always teach is definitely we are targeting sales teams. So you are targeting the exact same ICP as you are. So what it is that would make you stop while you're scrolling through LinkedIn that would make you stop and read and think, okay, I got so much value from this that I want to do and test it out. So what is the type of content that you personally would like to see? What is the things that you're struggling with that you can actually help them solve? What are your learnings, your pains, your successes and share them in a way that really helps other people. So it's not about sharing company posts. You're to supposed successes. Nobody cares about that. It's really about what will help you in the beginning. And the second thing is do not copy paste what I'm posting or my CEO is posting. Figure out what it is, your voice, what it is that you, even if you're a newly hired SDR with zero experience, that makes you unique. So share what are the struggles that you're going through as a newly formed sdr, as somebody who just joined the company and somebody else is in the same situation as you are. So just share what your learnings are and everybody has something to share.

I love that. I think that's key because I think a lot of companies, when they try, they do, they tell their apps. So basically it's like copy and paste. Copy this post, right? Or marketing wrote it. Right. And it doesn't resonate with the audience at all. And so I think that's phenomenal. So that's on the posting side, you'll also do like social selling. So, like sending like messages and things like that directly to prospects.

Of course. Of course. And just to kind of add on top of what I've said before, when it comes to creating the post, I think the reason that we grew and when it comes to the content itself is that we are so vulnerable all the time and we were so transparent. So there was no fake. You know, like, we are so successful. We're killing in this. We're super awesome. People can't relate to that like you. Nobody relates to that. Nobody even cares about it. It's more about like, yeah, you know, I'm going through some shit in my mind. Like, I'm struggling with this. Like, let me find the people who are going through the same and let's help each other out. And I think this is the way we are also doing social selling. So the reason that we kind of how we started communication always is always something that we found interesting, a common ground basically between us prospects. Whether they commented on the post or we saw a similar comment where we can actually bring more value in our own opinions. And then we would just kick off the conversation without even having in mind, I will potentially pitch our product to this person. I might not. I might do so if I see there is a fit, but it's more about networking, really building that relationship.

I love that. I think that's so, so valuable and so important. And anyone listening, I encourage you go look up Lemlist. Not just the product, but, like, look at how they do things, look at how they write their posts, even how they announced that they hit 10 million in revenue. The culture comes through. Like they. I guess what. What's the right way to say this? It's like comically serious. Like, obviously all y' all take your job seriously and obviously you take your business Seriously. But you let your culture and that vibe and that energy come through. And I think that's so important because that's what people resonate with. No one resonates with a big corporate brand. No one does. But like, when you got people celebrating behind the CEO who's trying to do a serious announcement, he can't make the announcement because, like, that type of stuff people remember. People like me remember. I have never spoken to a person at Lemlist until today, not once. But I know so much about y' all because of that brand and that reach. And I just think more people could copy that, especially early because it's very hard to go backwards if y' all hadn't done this from the beginning. It is very hard to go backwards. Y' all have done it from the beginning, which, which I love and I think. And that's a segue over to the other part that I want to talk about, which is cold email. Because also from the beginning, y' all have put like the actual things that people want, right? How to write good emails, how to get more responses. No one wants sales engagement, they want more responses. And y' all built that in. And that's things that I've been talking to these other bigger companies about for years is y' all need to be experts in cold email. Y' all need to be experts in templates. Why don't I walk into the highest performing templates out there? Why do I still gotta write them all? So let's talk about cold email. Email, because, you know, cold call. Every channel is getting harder. Every channel is getting harder, especially cold calling, it's getting harder. So email is one of the places I still think you can really stand out and do a great job of. Let's talk about some of the best practices around cold email and like, what you've seen successful not only for yourself, but also for your clients.

I think it would be great to touch base on the benchmarks on what it is. When can you actually say that your campaign has been successful and when it hasn't. So I see a lot around the industry, obviously I'm talking to salespeople every day. I see open rates that average around 30% open rates. And if this is to all listeners who are listening today, like, if this is the case with you, you might have problems with your spam folders. I think it's just we always talk about like, you know, personalization, relevance, making your copy unique, making your going multi channel and doing all of these sales techniques that are very out of the box and unique, etc. But at the end of the day, if your email doesn't land in the primary inbox and the prospects can't even open it, it doesn't really matter what it is in that email. So I think this is the part where that gets so overlooked, but is the essential part of any cold emailing simply focusing on your deliverability and making sure that those emails land in a primary box. Anything else after that is your job to make sure that the copy is good. And obviously we are going to talk about it right now. But when it comes to the deliverability, there are so many things that you can do right now, technical things that you can implement today to make sure that they go above 50%. This is what you're aiming for and everything else after that becomes much more easier.

Yeah. And I want to jump in there real quick because people all the time will say like, oh well, open rates of vanity metric. Open rates of vanity metric. I'm like, oh really now, Cool. How many emails have you responded to that you didn't open?

Yep.

And people go, I'm like, exactly. The open is actually the biggest, right? Like that's the first thing that you gotta do because if they don't open it, they can't respond. So you're about to go here, but like the technical side of this, right? What are some things you can do? Because this is the boring stuff no one likes to talk about, right. They like to talk about the sexy stuff, subject line, first sentence. But if it's going to spam, it doesn't matter. So what can people do to try to make sure that their deliverability stays high?

Definitely. And as I said, a very boring subject because it's technical. But I think it is important. And if there is one thing that I would like to everybody to take from today, even if it's boring, is this one. First of all, if you're hiring new SDRs, if you're hiring new people and creating new email addresses for which from they're going to be sending emails from those email addresses needs to be warmed up. Warm up is the process that lasts around a month where we basically prove to the email provider that this email address is not going to be used to spam people, it's going to be used to actually send valuable content. And the only way to prove that to your email providers, Gmail, Outlook, whatever, is by having conversations in your inbox and getting replies to those emails. That means that you can have two ways. One is manual, one is automatic, both ways work in the exact same way, which is basically you're going to be sending emails, gradually increasing them over the course of 30 days. You're going to be sending emails to people who are going to then respond to those emails, remove them from spam if they ended up in spam, mark them as important and then the email provider sees the communication happening. So like you see that you're getting responses, you're getting responses, you're not spamming people. So it's after a month, your email domain, your email address is so warmed up already because of all of this communication that you're having that you're ready to start your outbound and then you will not go to spam. This is where the mistakes happen with sales managers because they hire a new sdr, they just give them a new email address and load it up, blowing up like 300 emails per day. All of a sudden it's a huge red signal for the, for, for the email providers. And this is something that you can easily automate. There's so many tools on the market right now that can do this, so one of them is ours as well. So on top of that there are some technical things that you can set up. Spf, dkim or custom tracking domain. All of these things are easily created but so overlooked and then you, you end up in spam. So I'm actually not sure how we can do this, but there is email deliverability checklist that we have built with all of these steps. So either you can look it up on Lemlist, literally email deliverability checklist, or reach out to me or Kevin and we're gonna share the link.

Yeah, and we'll, we'll drop the link in the show notes for sure. Because I think this is one of those like non sexy but impactful things that no one's talking about. Right. That was one of the first things too that also stood out to me when I saw Lemworm. I'm like, God, see this is the shit, this is the thing that no one talks about to go through. So okay, so let's take the next step. So I've warmed things up, I've got good deliverability. How do I still then now drive that open so I'm being delivered. What are some of those best tactics to get the email opened and then to get the email responded to?

Okay, so we are going back to the basics literally of selling, which is knowing your icp. When it comes to knowing your icp, the reason that it's important is not only that you know your Value prop. You know, all of the things that you want to say. It's more about how do you then do your lead generation. So when you're doing lead generation and when you're reaching out to prospects, they are the people who are right now relevant, who are right now willing to buy your product and who are actually perfect fit for you. Because if you're sending 100 emails and you're just sending them randomly to random people, maybe in the same industry, maybe with the same title, but they're not really your icp, you will not get responses because you're not going to be relevant to them and your product might not match their needs and their pains. When you have the very nailed down ICP and you know what are the like buying signals or trigger events or however you call them? Let's say maybe for us it would be any new company that got a new head of business development or a new SDR or is expanding into the new market. This is your trigger that you can then leverage in your copy throughout the sequence. And always personalize. Even if you're doing like personalization at scale and you're not investing so much effort into creating, you know, personalized intro lines, etc. You can make the email feel personalized and relevant simply because you're talking to these people who are going through something at this moment that you can help and address specifically because they're going through this this time. To give a very simple example, when we started expanding our outbound into the US market, I got a lot of cold emails which were basically a lot of spammy ones as well. But the good ones were very personalized in a way. Relevant, I would say. I saw your spend right now into the US market. Obviously companies that are going through this are right now facing similar challenges. And then he would highlight some of the challenges. And then even if it's like not personalized, to me personally, I do know that this is something that can actually help me out because I am going through this challenge. So this is how you can scale the personalization. As you mentioned before, like you land in the primary inbox, you get the email first things that you see, subject line, intro line. What you see here is the one way that you're going to determine whether you're going to open an email or not. If the subject line sounds like a newsletter, ish, marketing shame, whatever type of copy, nobody's going to open it. If your intro line says, hey, I'm John from XYZ Company, I'm doing this and this I Don't care. Why would I open it? Still nothing about me. You need to intrigue in the first subject line and the first sentence of your email. This is where I put additional personalization personally. So like I would do the research on the prospect. And when I say personalization, I don't mean cats, dogs, family that they posted on LinkedIn. It's about business related subjects that you can touch upon and where you found the common ground with them. Something that you would like to compliment them on, but it always has to be genuine. Don't just put anything in there just to make it feel personalized when it's not. And I think that's the most important part. Following that, tying that intro line with the rest of your email again is the second challenge that you will have. And it's all about making it connected and staying relevant in the course. Like not splitting the personalized line and then going straight into the pitch again. It will not make sense and giving them room to breathe, you know, like really building that relationship. The end goal of the first email, at least that you send is not really to book a demo. It's to get a reply is to start a conversation. That is the one thing that you need to focus on whether just to raise their curiosity, get a reply, start a conversation and then eventually book a meeting. You can't rush it. Even though I know we are all.

Under pressure and that is something that I wish more and more people truly understood. Where it's like those first emails, I'm not trying to get a response, I'm trying to get any type of engagement right. Can I get you to click right? If I can get a response, great. But I tell my own team if it was as easy as sending templated emails and asking for 30 minutes, I wouldn't need salespeople. Like if it were that easy, if I could just send a templated email with hey Nadja, I see you're the head of business development at Lemlist and I'd like 30 minutes of your time to I wouldn't need salespeople. I could literally just blast everybody and get it back. This is where the salesperson comes in is to make it relevant. I love how you said connect the dots. The personalization, you have to connect it to the value prop and you have to connect that to then whatever that call to action needs to be. And you said it well. People are like, hey KD, loved your post. We help VPs of sales. Da da da da da. You're like, ah, you had me for one Second. You had me for a second. Right? And so I actually want to spend a little more time on this. How do you craft that, that second part? Right? Like, you know, you've touched around a little bit, like really knowing your Personas, really knowing your icp. How do you craft that value prop or that hook that makes them okay? Like, this person gets me a little bit or this person's worth talking to. How do you craft that part of the email?

It's exactly as you said. So when you know who you're targeting and when you know why you're targeting that specific person, this becomes so easy. So, for example, you would be able to say, seeing right now that you're. Let's say, let's say a company is an example that is helping increase lifetime value of the customer. So, like, you're focusing on the retention and you may be like your lead gen might be based on companies that are focusing more on the client acquisitions, like investing into the client acquisition rather than optimizing their current clients and increasing their value to get more revenue. So you would be saying like, hey, so you're running, seeing your Facebook ads that you've been running these days, they're all over my feed. I'm curious right now if you're. And then you leverage that, like, are you. Do you want to make sure that you're actually right now leveraging additional revenue channel not only investing, like, you would be able to pinpoint what are the pains, highlight the pain. So what it is the pain that you're facing and then offer a solution based on that. It becomes so easy when you have this icp because then you can connect it all together. And again, tying it in is about mentioning because of this reason. This is why I thought this would be interesting to you. You are going through this challenge that we're seeing every day from either you or your similar customers like yourself. And this is something that they do or that you can do to actually help it out and make sure that it doesn't happen. Have you thought about this, like highlighting the pain even if they don't have it, maybe they are not aware that they have it. And then bringing them to like an ideal world of what can actually happen if they do things differently.

I really, I love that type of style of like, you know, have you thought about this? Have you seen this? When's the last time you looked at. Have you asked your people this? Like, planting those seeds of questions early leads onto it. Now, last on this session before we kind of move into some more Mindset stuff as well around this is any tips on, on how to learn the icp? Well, right, because you are in a unique position where you're a sales leader selling to sales leaders who have sales reps. You have sales reps so you know, you know the problem so you can speak to it for the people that don't. Right. And this is what's amazing to me still is I think it's like less than 10% I think of SaaS, salespeople use their product, so we got the other 90% that don't. Right. They're selling to security, they're selling to finance, they're selling to hr, they're selling to biz intelligence. Right. They're selling like they don't use it. So how can a sales rep or a sales leader nail that ICP when they are not the icp?

Exactly. That's a great question. And first thing that I would like to highlight, it's not only on your manager. Like if you come as a new SDR and maybe your manager is not as good as you would like hope it to be or like like to be. Maybe he doesn't walks you through the ICP entirely or onboard you properly. It's your job if you want to actually do your job well to know your icp. So take an additional extra mile and learn about the icp, the ways that you can do it. For me, the best way was actually to hop on a call with customers, current customers, and talk to them like what it is that you love about our product, what it is that you don't like about our product. Why are you using us and not the competitors? What it is that you're going through in your day to day life. Like what are your challenges in your position? Talk to them and really understand them well. Second of all, you can actually go on and research a bit the industry. So like the way that I would typically start my ICP exploration is I would go to our customer reviews, so like Quora, G2, etc. And just check out what the ICP is talking about. You like what it is that they like about you. Maybe you have it your value prop completely wrong. Maybe it's not the things that you're pushing, maybe it's something completely opposite. Then learn about the industry like join the communities that your ICP is in. If you're talking to sales, obviously communities, we know all of them that are right now very active, you can join the conversations, you can see what people are writing and talking about, be a part of those Ecosystems and learn from the others. Networking is the best way possible to do it. Like, connect with thought leaders in the industry. Check what they're writing. For example, if you're starting in sales, check Kevin, check his LinkedIn profile and check the content that he's posting. You will get soon an idea of what it is, the common pains, struggles, and everything that people are talking about.

I love that it's something that I actually do. I talk about often is salespeople never talk to customers. We talk to prospects. We don't talk to customers. Sales leaders rarely talk to customers. Right? And that's where, if you look at, you know, anytime I join a new company, the first place I go is the customers. I'll speak to 40, 50 of them. And I actually got in trouble because, like, I don't always ask CS for the customer list. I just start calling customers because if I ask for a list, I'm going to get, you know, the happiest, the best. Whereas I want to talk to people in the trenches. Like what? You know, what do you like? I love that. Why did you buy? What problem were you trying to solve? How would you describe us to another one of you? Because that's also where we get rid of some of that marketing speak, right? Where we say, oh, we have this all in one sales engagement readiness platform. Have you ever heard of V.P. ever say that? Right? And so I love that. Getting in touch with the customers. And it's great for onboarding, too, y'. All. If you're growing, getting your reps speaking to customers speeds up onboarding in a big way because it reinforces that belief. But also they get to learn the language, language of the prospect. So I think that's huge. So, okay, I want to make one last shift here because we've talked now deliverability, we've talked social selling, we've talked to cold emails. I do want to touch on mindset before we wrap here because all this is fine and dandy and the growth that y' all are seeing is amazing. But sales is hard. SDR work is hard. Right? Like, what are some of the things that you do to keep the team positive, to keep the team feeling good? Right? Everyone goes through lows no matter how successful it is. Like, what are some of the mindset things you work on with your team to keep that vibe, to keep that culture growing? Because you all are growing and you've been able to maintain that culture so far. What are some of those things that you work on with your team around mindset?

Definitely, for me, the saddest thing that I hear is when I'm talking to sales leaders and they completely ignore the mental health as a part of the game, and they just think that it's not their job to take care of their team's mental health, when in reality, maybe it's not your job, but your work. And your company is entirely focused and is entirely dependent on your team. If they're not feeling well, they're not going to be able to be productive, they're not going to do their best work, and you're going to suffer. So on that end, we always really encourage everybody in the company. Like, it's really. We have this motto saying, it's not a sprint, it's a marathon. So you don't have to burn yourself out every single day and work 20 hours per day to literally nail down every single thing that is on your list. It's okay to sometimes slow down. If you're feeling not good, slow down. Otherwise you're going to burn out. And then the recovery and everything that goes along with that, it's just completely horrible. And it's going to have effects on you and your team to do so. One of the ways that I think really helped myself specifically as well, because obviously I'm going through the same things as my team. It's not like I'm completely this, you're.

Not a robot, you're not. You're not infallible.

I'm going through the same. I'm going through the same things. And I think it's important for managers and leaders to validate that with the team and share that transparently. I do think that my team has a very strong sense that they can come to me if they're feeling not so good, simply because I've opened up and spoke about it so many times in my journey at Lemliz. And I always say, and I'm always open when I say, like, okay, I'm on the verge of burning out, I'm so tired, I cannot handle this anymore, etc. Yes, I say it, I say it. And they know that if they're feeling the same, they shouldn't feel guilty about it, they should come and ask for help and it's okay to take a break. I think this is one of the crucial things, because everything else, only knowing that it's supported and that it is okay, I think takes away a lot of pressure from the people and their minds. Otherwise, if you're feeling like you need to be perfect all the time, not show any flaw and just be all the time, best every single day. Then it gets even more stressful and creates even more anxiety.

Absolutely. Holy cow, y'.

All.

I hope you took notes on that because it's so important and we greatly overvalue what a day means, right? If someone's having a tough day, tell them to take the day. Just take the day. Like, that one day isn't going to ruin the month because those 50 calls they were going to make were going to be garbage anyway because they were stressed, they were afraid. They were in a low state, low energy. They weren't going to be good anyway. Give them that time and space. And I love what you called out that you are willing to share when you're on the verge. And that was something that was a learning lesson for me in my leadership as well, is like, I encouraged people to take the breaks and I encouraged people to voice things, and I wanted people to know that they needed to take care of themselves. But then I didn't. You know, I was always working still, and I was always in the office, and I didn't take vacations, and I didn't burn out, right? Like, I didn't want to show that. And once I started to, that's when people, funny enough, started to take better care of me themselves. When I was willing to share. Hey, y', all, I need a. I need a break. Like, I'm about to fall apart here, and I need to pull back and be like, oh, and starting that. That safe. You know, people talk about, like, you know, it's like mental safety or emotional safety at work. Like, that's a big part of it. As a leader. People will hear what you say, but they're going to watch what you do as well. And if you're never feeling stressed, if you're never feeling like you need to slow down, they won't either. So, man, this is everything I was hoping it would be. So I got three questions left for you here or two. I don't know. We'll see and we'll wrap. So the first one, right, we call it the big three. We have covered a lot. It's already been 40 minutes, and this could go on for an hour still. I still would love to keep going here, but we've covered a lot here. What would the three biggest takeaways you'd want people to have from this conversation, right? Like, if they walked with only three things, what would those three things you'd want them to walk with be?

Take ownership of your.

Role.

Meaning don't wait for your manager to give you customer calls. If you need to learn about your icp, don't wait for a manager to fix your open rate. Figure out yourself. Don't wait for anybody in the company itself to tell you to post on LinkedIn and build your personal brand. Go ahead and build your personal brand. Take ownership not only because of the company that you're working for, but yourself as well. That's the, let's say, number one thing. Second of all for the managers, be vulnerable, be transparent and show your flaws, your team to help them connect with you and follow your lead, basically. And the third tip, when you're reaching out to prospects, always focus on building their relationship, building value, giving them more value, helping them in their day to day job, rather than simply focusing on your return and on your demos and your KPIs.

I love it. I love it. And the last question here, right, the name of the podcast is Live Better Sell better, right? I have this really weird idea that if we took better care of ourselves, if we did have more joy and energy and fulfillment in life, that the sales also would get better. What would your live better advice be for people listening?

My advice would be something that I've learned actually this year only took me 28 years, years to realize. This is to be so self aware and so focused on your own personal growth and your own way of thinking and your own growth. I would say to be aware of your flaws, your priorities, and really focus on growing yourself as a person, not only as a professional, simply because the moment when you realize who you are, what you love, what you don't love, what are your priorities, you're going to be able to act in that way in your life. And that's what's going to make your life much more better. And you're going to enjoy what you're doing. Don't copy paste what everybody else is doing. Follow their lead, follow their goals and think that it's something that you should pursue. You need to find what it is that works for you and what makes you feel good in your life.

I love that. I love that. There's a quote that really stuck with me a while back where it's like, stop trying to be everybody else. They're already taken. And the second part of it was, it's better to live your life imperfectly than someone else's life. Perfectly right? Live your life what makes you happy, what brings you joy, right? And that is how you need to live your life. You can learn from other people, but you can't be them. You can only Be yourself. Right? And so. Holy cow. All right, Nigel. Where can people get more of you? Like, where can people find you? Where can people get more of your content? Like, where can they get what you are putting out? You are the future girl. I'm calling it right now. Like you. You are. You're just phenomenal. This is, I'm so excited to watch where you continue to grow. Where can people get more of you, find you, follow you, all those fun things, definitely.

So first, first things first. Definitely LinkedIn. Look me up on LinkedIn. I'm posting every single day. My team is posting every single day. And our YouTube channel right now is going to be sharing all of the actionable tips on how to write proper cold emails, multi channel strategies. So four different industries. So on YouTube you can type in Nadia and Simon YouTube channel and you're going to find it out. And obviously feel free to ping me anytime on LinkedIn. Follow our company when it comes to the content, I think you're going to love it and I hope to have more conversations with you all on LinkedIn.

Hell yes. Well, this was everything I was hoping it to be and more. Now we're finally not silent followers, right? We've gotten to meet, we've gotten to talk and I'm hopeful to have many conversations in the future. But thank you so much for your time, energy and insights today. It was great.

Thank you, Kevin.

Hell yeah.