Full Throttle leaders Podcast- Olga Karanikos

Hello everybody, it's Michael Falato again. I am at Full Throttle Leaders Podcast and today we have an awesome guest, Olga Kournikos, right?

Absolutely.

CMO at SalesScreen. Um, you're based in Boston, right? You said?

I am, yeah.

So how long have you been with SalesScreen?

About 5 years now. Uh, just started my 6th year. So yeah, quite a long time.

What, what, what got you to change from where to, to SalesScreen and why?

Yeah, so I had been in the higher ed space for quite some time and in the education space and had moved into the tech side of things and was really excited about tech. So I was approached by SalesScreen, loved what they do. I've always been a marketer, but had been a salesperson. So I love being on the side of supporting sales. So this merged everything for me. It's tech selling into sales.

And what do you, what do you think of the old adage of sales and marketing don't talk to each other? Or, or there's, it's, it's, or, or the sales hunters like SDRs, they belong under sales or marketing or work. As you see both sides of it, where does sales and marketing align the best?

Let's say they're siblings, right? For the most part, we get along, but when we don't, we really don't, but we always come back to the family, right? So I can't see a world where marketing and sales do not work together. And if that's the case, it just, the revenue team doesn't function well. So I always see them as ideally siblings that like each other.

What pivotal AI tool Even if it's your product or strategy in the last 6 months have been like, wow. Like for me, I learned about Blaze.ai, which posts content for me, or, or Whisper for typing. I don't— I just press 2 buttons. Yeah, it's awesome.

Yeah.

And I just learned a thing about town.com. So I do all these roundtables where I learn about other products and strategies. So I'll ask you of this. Is what's something you've learned strategy tip or tactic or AI-wise that's like, that was a really cool tool or strategy that I really did well or I failed, but I learned and I want people to learn from my successes or mistakes.

Yeah, I would say, so we've just moved over to Claude as an organization. So actually the failure we had was we were early adopters of a company that just did not pull out their promise for AI. So it's ever-changing. And I think the biggest mistake we made was doing the annual contract right off the bat, paying a lot of money. And AI is changing so quickly and so rapidly that we need to be able to be flexible and move from place to place. So we're loving Claude and being able to work and get all the connectors, all the MCPs set up. One of the things I was messing around with a couple days ago was FireCrawl, and that's a new and exciting one. So—

What does that do?

So it helps to review competitor websites from all different angles and gets you a tool that you're able to just spit right into it. Like, you know, tell me if they made a pricing page change this week. Tell me if they, you know, had new reviews on G2 that brought in a new light about them. Um, so it's nice to be able to pull in stuff like that. It's, it's a, you know, I have to play around with it a bit more, but that one's pretty exciting for me because I definitely want that being more proactive and coming to me versus us constantly going and doing deep research on it.

So when people buy SalesScreen, you know, especially me being in sales for 25 years, we always talk about reinforcing good behavior just like you would with a kid, right? What's the biggest thing that they like about what you do and what's the biggest objection you hear that you're like, yeah, but?

Yeah, I think what they like is the variety. You know, people hear incentivization or sales gamification in general and don't know what that can entail. So a lot of sales leaders are always going to run competitions or leaderboards, and people will think that's what we do. But there's all different ways that people are motivated. So we have everything from missions, which is sort of self-determination. You set your own mission, you get accolades if you achieve it. People can boost that for you. So you get a little bit of the groundswell and support celebrations from YouTube videos up on TV screens. So there's all different types of elements. So I think for reps that use our tool, they just love the variety of ways that they can engage. And feel like even a small win is a win. The biggest objection we get is the Big Brother side of things, right? Okay, you're watching every single call I make and every performance metric and, oh, I had a bad week and that shouldn't, you know, point to my revenue outcomes. But really, it's like knowing your data is a powerful tool. So—

The data, like before when we first started doing this, you had to input this or Manually, you probably get all the data now from all the integrations that you do, and it's not so self-loathing of me telling you what I did. It's actually the data speaks for myself, right?

And pulls from multiple systems so you don't have to do the work. Okay, I can see exactly what my week is looking like. I'm dipping, I'm a little below here. All right, let's pick up the pace. I'm good by the end of the week. So it's just knowledge is power.

Like, the HubSpot stuff's great. Some of that's used for dashboard, but It's not— it's, it's more not get into the, in my opinion, and tell me if it's right, more the emotional part of what you guys can do with the reinforcement versus just, here's a bar chart, which is great, but it doesn't get the emotion and analytical side like this.

Yeah. And knowing too, like, your PR this week may not be at the level of the top performer of the team, but that's an achievement and that's something that should be recognized. So It's also being able to see, okay, if I make that one more call this week, if I pick up my pace, you know, what do the outcomes look like? And you see that in real time. So it's also being able to sort of look at your own numbers and know what your behavior does to impact that.

What do you think the biggest thing that's tracked that gets someone to go from A to E at least?

It's usually conversion-based. So let's say like meeting connects or, you know, some qualifier on your behavior that Is a little bit of an aha moment where a lot of people will just think on sort of that top of funnel activity. Okay, dials, dials, dials. But once they start to see those connections to the mid part, that really picks up the pace for them. Like, okay, if I make this many more calls, I'm more likely to get this many meeting connects, which drives my actual pipeline conversion and seeing those metrics along the way, which a lot of times those are hidden depending on how sales leaders kind of run their numbers or. A lot of them are still living in spreadsheets. So like those numbers are sort of archaic by the time you get them on Monday morning.

What if, what if I was automating the email LinkedIn and blowing their numbers up and then everybody's getting that? So we didn't really get them in a big pickle there where it's so much, so much activity. You'd have to go, okay, well that was automation activity. What's the real person?

Right, right. Yeah.

You'd have to do this, do discount a little bit for Something that AI could have maybe bumped up your numbers and made you look like a superstar, but really you— it was automated or no? How does that work out?

I mean, the power is in the manager's hands, right? So it depends on the behavior you're trying to elicit. Let's say people are uncomfortable with that and that's something that really needs to get picked up. Okay, put some focus on it. But if that's the low-hanging fruit that everybody's going after and it's super easy and it's being done, set an achievement on the manual. activity that you really want going, and then you focus on that. Okay, Michael did a great week. You know, let's take a look at his numbers, put it on the feed, celebrate it. And then you get people that also have a bit of FOMO. Then they're like, all right, if Michael can do it, then like, I'll do the achievement next week.

I was doing automation through HubSpot 6, 7 years ago at a company, and I was sending out more emails, which wasn't hard, you know, but people were ruining their domains that long ago because they didn't understand email, right? And I'm like, yeah, but I just, I just put more time in pressing a button. So like with your platform, it sounds like, yeah, I can recognize them here, but the things that really are strategic, I put them up there and I weight it more, right?

Yep. Yep.

I gotcha.

It depends on the business, right? Some of the businesses we work with, it's, it's a grind. You know, if you work in a call center, there's an automation. You're trying to pound the phone and your job is to get on there and make those calls happen and make them connect and sell a policy if you're in insurance and all that. So. It's not easy and you're going to get a lot of nos. So you also need a little bit of a boost to get you through each one of those days and just, you know, all right, I need that many more dials. Let's hit the phones and we'll get there. So some of it's not quality all the time. It's just getting after the numbers.

So if I or anybody else was listening to this and going, how can I help Olga with their persona, their ICP, their Just the best qualified intro.

Mm-hmm.

Who, what would that be?

We love to work with sales leaders who understand the impact of activity, right? So, and if there is any sales leader just has a gap, it's like my team is really kicking up the dust and it's not hitting the revenue on that side. That's where we work really well. We help to solve that performance gap and just get the right metrics pumping up. So we tend to work with high-velocity sales teams, people who are running high levels of activity, uh, in the insurance space, uh, call centers, real estate, SaaS, um, more mid-market, small enterprise.

Yeah, light enterprise, as I call it.

Yeah.

Do you ever take a partner's LinkedIn and say, this guy has 20,000 connections, they don't compete, but they sell to the same company, and take their LinkedIn and your LinkedIn and blend in like a roundtable so that you guys could kind of cross-brand each other.

Yeah.

Yeah.

I mean, that's the, the, in theory, the best way to collaborate with a partner, right? Is just someone who has the same space that you're working in and then you can support those customers. You're not competing, but you're complementing. Like that's, that's genius. Yeah. That's absolutely the way to do it.

Have you, I was, what question is, have you done that live or on Zoom or?

I have not done it. No, but that definitely gives me the idea. Yeah.

Um, anything else you want your listeners or my listeners to, to, uh, either know, hey, how do you contact Olga or your team?

Mm-hmm.

Um, what's the best way of doing that? And then possibly, you know, is it a company that, that's growing or, or they got a serious level of funding too? Is like, is that the number one thing? Like, hey, there are 50 to 100 salespeople and they just raised $5 million or Do you have that type of people? How do they get ahold of you? I'm sorry. That's what I really wanted.

Yeah. So, I mean, you can find us at salescreen.com. Find me on LinkedIn. I'm the only Olga Karenikos that's going to be there. So definitely can reach out to me and I'll put you in touch with whoever you need on our side. But we're in our Series B search right now. So we're in that hoping for our next growth stage. So profitable business growing globally. Really focused on the UK, Western Europe, US markets. But we're hoping to hit our next growth stage in the next year.

So you're talking about you're going to Series B or your companies that you're working with want to be Series B? That's—

Sorry, our company is. Yeah. Yeah. As far as customers we're going after, I mean, just rapidly growing sales teams. Lots of new users.

How about any conferences before we let you go? that we can maybe meet you at? Any conferences coming up that you or your team are going to be at, at least in the US or Europe in the next 6 months?

So we've been hitting a lot of insurance-based conferences. We just wrapped ITI, so we don't have another big conference for this year, but we do a lot of breakfast seminars in our Norwegian headquarters and are always happy to host an event or a dinner for anybody that's interested in learning more about sales gamification. So we tend to do sort of bespoke small events. So we'd love to hear from anybody.

Awesome. Well, thanks for being on the show. And if you need Olga, you got her information. Again, my— I'm Michael Falato. You can reach me at michael@fullthrottlefalatoleads.com and can help you with your Roundtable Masterminds podcast, all that, all that type of intent data. So we got 2 people here that sell to sales organizations. So the 2 together or the 2 separate, get your sales in order, reinforce what needs to be done. And make sure you don't, you don't pitch slap people because I think that's the biggest thing that's going on right now. It's like, you know, you got to make a solution for your CROs either with top of funnel or with how do you motivate your sales team. And there's— it's not a one-size-fits-all.

No, absolutely not.

Thank you for being on the show.

Thank you so much.