Making Your Marketing Sell For You - Olivier L’abbé - Revenue Today - Episode # 008

1, 2, 3, 4. 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. Okay. Today's guest is someone I'm looking to learn a lot from. He's a GTM leader with 20+ years of experience in marketing tech, data science, recruiting, and advertising. He's built high-growth companies from the ground up. Some of his many specialties include scaling revenue, identifying product-market fit, monetization, growing teams. Recent former president of Metadata, the co-founder of Prop. Welcome, Olivier Le Bay.

Thanks for having me, Jared. Appreciate it.

Couldn't be more happy to have you today. So let's jump Right into it. Debunk a myth about generating revenue today.

This is something that I used to believe, but I've pretty much changed over the years how I think about things. And my belief was, if you have a good product, and you have a really good sales team, you don't need any marketing. And I'm here to tell you that that is not true. And we can dive into why my sentiment has changed over the years.

Yeah, tell me. Sales drives go-to-market, no?

I'm a former salesperson. Yeah, for sure. I sold a ton of deals early in my career and some of the companies I was at, particularly Paycheck, you know, it was an organization that was, you know, driven by outbound salespeople. They hired outbound people that, you know, were outside sales. Salespeople, and they would just own a territory and go door to door, and they would go and, you know, the salespeople would do the marketing. So you would basically, you know, build brand recognition in the territory you were given, which was usually a couple zip codes, and then you would just do the work and close those deals. And after spending the last 8 years in martech, I have completely changed that. And I think at the end of the day, marketing is probably more important to scaling revenue efficiently. than having really, really good salespeople, because the way that the salespeople spend their time is critical to the success of the business. After having to manage budgets over the last couple years and managing huge teams, it's really cost— it's not cost efficient to have salespeople do outbound. And so if you are not generating If you are a CEO of a company and you are not generating, or marketing is not generating at least 50 to 70% of the pipeline for the business, I think it's going to be really, really expensive to scale efficiently because having people that make over $200 grand a year spending time cold calling, it's probably not the, you know, the best way to use your money that you've raised.

Well, tell me about what you did at Metadata because we spoke about how efficient you were early on. Curious to understand that playbook and see if others can duplicate that.

Yeah. So, you know, metadata is a marketing technology that helps automate demand generation. And so you can build demand, right? Or you can basically go ahead and convert on existing demand. That's what like Google Ads are great for, because if you're willing to pay for it, you'll show up at the top. People know they have a problem, they go to Google, they put the problem in there, and you'll come up because you're paying to be at the top before the organic results are. And so building demand for your product means that you need to essentially figure out who your ICP is. So who are your ideal customers? What are their personas, right? What jobs do they have? Then you got to figure out what are their problems? What problems do these individuals have on a day-to-day basis? And once you understand that, then you start creating content. And creating content is, is not very expensive, and you don't need 20 people creating content. You just have a couple people doing it. That's how you can save a lot to your bottom line and create content that will help those individuals, one, get familiar with your brand. And 2, if you go ahead and share content that helps them be better at their job, they're gonna keep coming back and you're gonna build fans of the product. And eventually when they have that need, they're going to call you. So instead of trying to convince somebody to switch from, you know, widget A to widget B, you know, basically start creating content to help and educate the buyers and the personas that you're trying to, you know, help at the end of the day. I think that's the most important. And if you want to build a high-velocity customer acquisition model, sales reps can't do that by themselves.

That's— yeah. So at what point, at what point do you need more sales reps? Or can marketing just handle this throughout?

Well, some marketing can, right? And so if you look at a company like Jira, they have salespeople. They say they don't have salespeople, but I've had a few meetings with Jira over the years and it's a PLG motion and that's product-led growth. And product-led growth is really hot right now. And the reason is that you can get users to start using the product. Think of what Slack was able to do, right? Slack was essentially a product that you could try, download it, free and then use it internally on a team. And then once, you know, Slack realized that there was multiple teams using it, then they would send a salesperson to engage with whoever, you know, owned the budget for this and then try to upgrade them on a paid plan. And they would give them a variety of features that are important to, you know, the business, whether that be, you know, SSO or there'll be analytics or things like that. And so there's a lot of companies now where you can just go to their website download the product, use it for free, and then once you get to a certain usage or once you want to incorporate additional team members, they're going to upgrade you. And that is a very effective way to figure out, like, do I have a product that people want? Because I've talked to tons of companies over the years, and oftentimes somebody will raise some money, come up with a product, and at the end of the day, it's not successful because Not enough people want that product. And PLG is a way to figure out pretty early on when your team is pretty small, like, do people want this? And if they do, that's when you can start scaling and adding salespeople. So you ask about Metadata. So when I came to Metadata, their company probably only had like 30 people. There was 1 seller on the team, 2 BDRs. We didn't have a full-time marketing person, had lots of engineers. And in the first year, year, uh, and then in my, uh, second year there, we were able to, you know, do 2.5x increase year over year in revenue. Uh, and the first year we, you know, and this is like, you know, when I joined, it was, you know, uh, low single digits, but we were able to essentially more than 2.5x with just 3 salespeople. Um, and the reason is that, you know, our marketing, uh, we eventually got a VP of marketing who's amazing, uh, Jason Woodup, but he basically came in and, you know, was able to generate 70% of the pipeline for the sales team. During the first year, given we only had 3 reps, like, I remember when one of the reps came to me, actually a couple of them came to me like, this is too much. Like, I have too many demos. I had never been at a company where I had to go to marketing and be like, can you please slow down? The reps are not able to run efficient calls because they just have too many on their calendar every day and doing all the research before call and entering all the notes after calls and the follow-ups and like closing the deal. There was just too much for them. And that really got me thinking, like, well, this is a super efficient way to not waste too much money targeting and engaging with those buyers. And we just create a bunch of long-form content and we would reuse it, use snippets of it. You can leverage LinkedIn. LinkedIn, you could use LinkedIn for free if you create the content and then the employees of the company promote it to their networks. That's free advertising. And that's something that I don't think a lot of companies do enough of. Gong, which is, you know, is a great revenue tool, started as call recording, but now they obviously do a bunch more. I mean, they have a really engaging brand as well. They create great content, and that is how I feel like they won the space. And that's because they were able to efficiently find ways to engage with their prospects, share, you know, the, you know, the learnings from all these call recordings. If you're a data company and you track things like at Metadata, we track conversions of all campaigns. So we would basically connect to the channels. Let's say you want to advertise on LinkedIn, you want to advertise on Facebook, you want to do some display advertising, you want to advertise on Google. We'd basically be able to tell you where to spend your money based on all the conversions. And instead of having a human optimize everything, manually, right, or outsourcing to an agency. Well, the system would do it all, right? Because it would be tied to Salesforce, tied to marketing automation, and you could see all of the conversions across. And then you just spend the money where you're getting the best bang for your buck, which wasn't, you know, a solution that was available a few years ago. But now it is. And now I realize that having people cold call and do outbound is really Not the way to go.

So why'd you have 2 SDRs then? Did you make them inbound SDRs or how did that look?

Yeah, they were pretty much inbound SDRs. So SDRs can do a couple things. One is engage with people that come to your website, right? And so obviously there's chatbots and chatbots are great, but they're not a real person. And if you wanna increase conversions on your website, you should definitely make sure that a human is behind it as much as possible, especially if you could like figure out that, the IP address of, you know, whoever's on the website is one of the target accounts. That's what we did at Metadata. We switched to a software called Qualified about 6 months ago. And, you know, every rep in the company, if one of their accounts comes to the website, boom, Qualified will pop up and be like, start engaging with this prospect of yours. And we increased conversion rates on the website by 50%.

So everything was warm. So there was not true cold outbound per se. It was like warm because you showed a level of intent that was probably warmer than download an ebook, right?

Yeah.

Although I'm sure that was probably there too.

That changes over time. When I started MetaData, you know, most people didn't know what MetaData was. And, you know, in my last year, people were like, man, I love your marketing, right? I, you know, I'm only talking to you guys because I want to learn from you guys. And if you can create— and obviously we're selling to marketers and metadata so it makes sense. But if you can start creating content, um, and, you know, really get to know the pains of the people that, you know, need your product and, you know, just share how they can do their job better, that is going to bring them inbound. And the worst thing you could do when you're managing a sales team is having your sales rep trying to convert customers that are not a good fit for the business, right? Obviously they gotta— they have to hit their numbers. And I think, you know, with your episode with Mark Roberge, you know, he talked about, you know, salespeople and how the comp plan should be different. And I fully— I'm in full agreement there. You know, land and expand is the most efficient way to scale a business that's going to have high customer satisfaction because you're not overselling out of the gate. And, you know, so similar to what he said, you know, I believe that, you know, you need to set your salespeople up for success. And I think the best way to do that is to motivate them to, you know, be transactional in their first deals, and then stay, you know, close to the account, and then get ready for them to be able to, you know, upgrade down the road.

Now, you spoke a lot about PLG and how it kind of lends itself to a marketing-led motion. Do you agree with marketing-led even away from PLG? Like if you're selling on-prem stuff or, you know, something, uh, something bigger, like is, is there a point where you're like, you know what, sales-led and keeping it all in technology, of course?

Yeah, yeah. I mean, if your product is under $20 grand, I think you can run PLG, right, all day long. People will buy a $20,000 a year product and put it on the credit card. Um, I don't think that's an issue. If you're selling, you know, Microsoft Azure or AWS, you— I mean, sometimes you'll see some of the size of those contracts. They're talking like billions of dollars, right? Over like 5 or 10 years. You need a human involved there. And if you're selling a piece of technology that is sold to enterprise vendors where you have to go through legal, you have to go through, you know, security review, if you have to do all these, that's what a salesperson ends up doing once you move up, uh, selling like large deals. You know, they won't sell that many deals because each deal is very time-consuming and you have to build relationship with like you know, 20 different individuals of the company. And so that you need salespeople for. I don't think that, you know, there'll be a day where people are spending, you know, $2 million on a piece of software they've never used without talking to anybody. But if your product isn't expensive, I think it's, you know, the best way to go.

And then even if your product is expensive, you can make the argument that this, you know, outbound 2.0 movement is led by marketers.

Totally. Yeah. I mean, I've seen over the years that a lot of marketing teams now are owning the BDRs. I think there's some pros and cons there. I think from, you know, the pros is that you have messaging, right? So marketing understands what the ICP is, they're creating content for it, the messaging is on point, right? And so those are all things that are great. Now, if a BDR is really good, then they're most likely going to end up in sales. Right? Best BDRs usually will want to go into sales because you can make a lot of money. Some will go into customer success, or they might go into, you know, different lines of the business. But at the end of the day, a lot of people that get into, you know, be a BDR at a tech company, which is usually an entry-level position, is they want to sell big deals. And so that's where I see that there might be more, you know, issues down the road is one, that BDR is ready to move to the next stage, they haven't built relationship with, you know, the, the sales team or the sales leaders there, right? Um, and they'll have to like learn, you know, Sales 101, um, after doing, you know, business development work, which is different, right? It gets you good at like doing outbound and talking to people and, you know, basically sharing your value prop. But selling, there is so many more complexities to it as to, you know, how you build rapport and how you, you should spend your time. Time management is, you know, I think the difference between a good salesperson and, you know, a mediocre one is going to be how they spend their time.

Yeah, I mean, you know, it's funny, from a company perspective versus a human perspective— human perspective, you want to align it to sales because you're like, this is our bench. From a company perspective, you want to align it to outcomes. They're all both just trying to get meetings. Like, why don't we optimize on that? These people are trying to bring revenue. Never is somebody bringing meetings the same person, or, you know, I mean, obviously there's exceptions, but right, like Do you see that?

Oh yeah, for sure. I mean, in marketing, it's changed over the years. I mean, you know, back in the day, it was like, you know, print advertising, TV. And now, you know, most companies don't do that. And whenever I see a company that's wasting money advertising to the TV, and it's not a company, it's not a product that, you know, everybody knows, like, you know, Salesforce, for example, like, I don't think it makes sense because you're wasting impressions with people that don't know anything about your company, and they probably won't even look it up. So you want to make sure you're targeting the right people. And with the capabilities of today's marketing technology is like, you can build, you know, audiences based on, you know, who's visiting your website, but then also third-party audiences. And that's, you know, something Metadata does is like, I want to look by job title, seniority, location, like, and you can preview the audience before you spend a single dollar against it. So that means that you're basically only advertising to prequalified MQLs. And if they convert, amazing, But you'll know really quickly because if you use native targeting on LinkedIn, they don't let you preview. Google doesn't let you preview. All the social channels, their job is to make as much money as possible. So they're gonna, you know, take your budget and put it as many people as they can. But with the, you know, the new capabilities have come in marketing in the last couple of years, like now you can basically not waste your money and only target the right people at the right time based on their behaviors that you have and based on their, you know, their problems and their personas.

Super, super interesting. Moving forward, like, what are the KPIs that are important to you today?

Uh, KPIs that are important to the day, let's see. Uh, NRR is probably number one. Uh, you know, any, any company, um, NRR, uh, is going to be the most important to the CEO as well as to the, uh, whoever's going to lead the next round. All right. And NRR, for the listeners, is net retention rate. So if somebody gave you a dollar last year, how much of that dollar are you gonna keep? Right? So if it's not good, it's maybe 50%, 60%, 70%. If it's great, best in class is usually 150%. That means that you've increased the value of that customer by 50% in one year. That is, you know, that's where you wanna be. So that's probably the most important metric that I would think about. followed by percent of your deals sold to your Tier 1 and Tier 2 accounts. Yeah. Because what you'll find is that when you do, you know, win-loss analysis, if you put all of your customers into tiers, Tier 1 are your best ones, right? They retain, they spend more. B, then you'll have C and D. Well, when you built your list of target accounts, you should really focus your efforts on just Tier 1 and Tier to, right? Unless your TAM is so small that you have to go after different, you know, companies that are not a good fit. But at the end of the day, again, retention is what's going to give you the biggest multiple on your company when you're raising money or when you're trying to sell your business. And so, you know, make sure that your sales reps are only engaging with, you know, the top of the top and make sure that you're marketing dollars are only going to people at those companies. Um, third thing I think about is, you know, percent of reps hitting quota. Because if they're not hitting quota, you need to figure out— let's say you have 50%, and now there's sites like, uh, you know, RepView and things like that, which is, you know, geared towards like, you know, um, you know, people that are in revenue generation, salespeople, CS, and so on. You can see people will, you know, similar to Glassdoor, but they'll leave reviews and they'll what percentage of the team is hitting their number. And if they're not hitting their number, that means that there's some inefficiencies in the business. So maybe they hired too many salespeople, right? Again, it's costly. And so it's unlikely the company will do well. Or 2, they're not thinking about inbound versus outbound. They're not investing enough in creating demand. And they're only trying to, you know, jam, you know, deals down, you know, companies that might not be in the market for it. They don't have the pain at the end of the day that's going to help them be more successful.

Awesome. Yeah, all makes total sense. Now, what's been keeping you up at night, if anything?

Right now I'm sleeping pretty well.

But that's because you just recently left. Yes.

Yes.

Your next move.

I've been out of work for a couple of weeks, and I'm sleeping great. But typically, I mean, You know, I think of, since I grew up in sales, I think, you know, sales, you know, sometimes it's like people think it's like a battlefield, right? So you just leave it all on the field, right? Or like you play football, any analogy you can think of, but basically, you know, give it all. And so by the end of the day, I'm usually pretty tired and I fall asleep pretty easily and early.

I do too.

But my issue is waking up. Like sometimes when, you know, it's the end of a quarter or there's things happening at work, I'll wake up in the middle of the night and like, you know, 3, 4 AM and get back to sleep. And so I'll just at that time get up. But I have 3 kids, so I got a 4-year-old, 9-year-old, 14-year-olds. You know, I want them to, you know, be good humans, be able to take care of themselves. And so if there's something that I would think about as, you know, keeping me up at night is doing the best that I can as a father to help them, you know, be good, productive humans on this planet.

I love that. It's so funny because I empathize greatly with your at-night play. Like, this morning I was up from like 2 to 4 AM, just like— and if you get on the phone, you're done. You're done because like you're gonna see something and it's gonna keep you going. I fortunately was able to fall back asleep, but, uh, I— the early mornings is, is crazy. And then, uh, and that's where my stresses come out as well. But, um, Yeah, go on.

And I was gonna say there's an app, you know, there's, there's a bunch of meditation apps. I've been doing meditation for like, you know, 6, 7 years now, and it's really helped me, uh, become a, you know, a better human and not let stress, you know, affect me as much, right? I obviously will recognize the stress and then I will move on, but those meditation apps have, you know, uh, these meditations you can do once you wake up in the middle of night or if you can't fall asleep. Um, I've been using Headspace for years, and so that's a great way to get out of your own head because you're listening to somebody who has a soothing voice, giving you guidance on what to do from a breathing perspective and, you know, letting everything, you know, rest. And so that's probably what I would recommend. If you, you know, if it's 2 AM and you can't fall back asleep, just turn that on 10 minutes and you're gonna be like, I'm tired again.

So, you know, it's, you know, it's interesting. I practice meditation as well, but I find like I take big gaps in between like going inwards and in those gaps, the challenges come back. And, um, just sitting with yourself, like, like if, if you're restless and you're restless for, let's say, greater than 30 minutes or greater than 45 minutes, certainly just get up and sit. Close your eyes, breathe in, breathe out, breathe in, app or not, and sit with yourself because there's like a message to be had. Like there's a reason, there, there's something in your subconscious that you need to, to be with. And, uh, and so be with it. And even if that goes on for 2 hours and you don't fall back asleep, you've been much more productive than you're gonna be, like, with, with yourself, like, trying to explore that, than you would be, uh, later on. But anyway, um, that's super fascinating. Um, and, you know, as the second half of this, we're gonna, we're gonna learn more about you, so I'm curious to go into that. But before we get into that, What excites you the most about the future? Like right now you're predicting your future. I mean, you're creating your future or picking your future, I should say. You're picking your future. What excites you the most about it?

Yeah. And it's something I've been working on for the last, you know, few companies I've been at. And that is essentially go-to-market automation. Like I look forward, and this is why I was talking about marketing so much earlier, is like I look forward to a day where you don't really have to talk to somebody to buy something. Um, and by that I mean is that, you know, bring people to your website, you can figure out for the most part who they are, give them the ability to do a self-guided tour. So there's new softwares like, you know, Reprise and Walnut that instead of having a salesperson, you know, go ahead and give a demo to somebody, which oftentimes people will, you know, uh, will not even pay attention to some of those demos and, and so on, uh, only, uh, you know, let them, you know, talk to somebody after they've gone through, uh, a certain part of the educating by themselves, right? So they're watching content online, um, and they'll be part of the community. I think today, if a company is not building a community, uh, they're missing out, uh, at the end of the day, because the community is going to be there to, you know, uh, get people to be part of something, right? And so, you know, RevOps, I think, has been an overlooked area as a community, because a lot of, you know, sales software or marketing software will, you know, really make heroes of the, you know, the people doing the job. But RevOps is a critical part of any company, especially early on. I wish I'd hired, you know, excellent RevOps people earlier in my career at some of the places I went at, because they're really going to help you figure out where, what, what, you know, tuning you should be doing to your sales process based on everything, all the data they have access to. But I look forward to go-to-market automation, where you can basically go, you know, 90% of the way through the buying cycle. And depending on how much your contract is worth, then you'll be able to, you know, get a salesperson to handle legals and handle procurement and all that stuff. And if it's a low price point, you don't have to talk to somebody. So I think there is, you know, not too distant future, you know, software companies are gonna be way more effective at generating revenue and making the buyer journey more interesting. Because one of the worst things is when you have to talk to BDR, and then you talk to an account executive, you're going over the same questions that were asked, and then there's no transparency between the conversations that were had. And then onboarding comes around, and you're still asking the same question, you know, from the CSM, because it's a different person, and none of that intake of information is being able to feed through it. And, you know, I think Salesforce is an issue there. But there's some companies now that are trying to solve this. One of them is called Accord. And they're basically, you know, it's part of like mutual success plan, but it's really like your entire buyer journey will now be able to— you can save all the information and then not have a prospect have to answer the same questions by 3 different people.

I love it. What's even worse than everything you described is when you're buying something that you've bought for the last 15 years and you have to go through that. So it's like, I just want to get HubSpot, people. Like, I know exactly what I need. I could teach you about what I need because I've put in Salesforce in 15 different places at all 3 levels, worked with their APIs and all of this. And, and, and, oh my God, I always used to joke the Salesforce rep told me to Google something. Once when I asked them a question, I'm like, okay, like, like, let's fine. How can you get there faster? Cord is awesome. Friends with those folks. Doc just came out that's doing something a little similar. Alex over there who ran marketing at Lattice, and and the idea of being able to buy faster, like, like, like on a website. I don't know if you're familiar with Sales Bricks. Super cool product. Essentially, um, you have like your charge subscription model, like, like from payments, and you have your like invoicing and, and be invoiced and pay $100 grand like in one shot model. Um, and they're often separated and it's like, why? Like, and, and, and you can't go to a site and like buy anything that's not subscription. Why, like, why is this like so fragmented in 2 different ways here? Like with the, with, with the, the models, one's ARR, one's MRR. Um, why isn't it in the same? And, and you're not gonna use Stripe for everything. And, um, the second is why can't you just get like a quote from a rep and just buy it on the site? And

yeah,

and like just quicker GTM stuff is, is massive. Yeah.

And I think the review sites— I worked at G2 and, you know, they're gonna get to a point where, you know, you're not only going to G2 to, you know, read reviews and see screenshots of product, you'll be able to like, you know, use the product and, you know, be able to, you know, buy. And they want to become a marketplace. And I think that's gonna be really, really cool. And there's another— speaking of go-to-market—

Can't you buy on GitHub right now, out of curiosity? Like on GitHub, I think you could actually buy Like the SaaS world, whatever, GitHub, like way past, like, of course, crazy.

Yeah, uh, they got owned, you know, Microsoft. Yeah, yeah. So Microsoft has resellers. Microsoft doesn't really have a sales team, right? Everyone's reselling their product. Uh, but another company that's gonna, I think, help with this go-to-market automation is called Testbox. Uh, they're still pretty early and they do this for customer support now and they're rolling out marketing automation. But basically you can go to, uh, their website and you can play with the tools. So let's say you're in a market for 5 customer success or support products. You can go there and play with the tools without having a subscription. And that lets you— it takes it even one step further than, you know, um, uh, you know, like a Reprise or Walnut, which is self-guided tour, right? So they're, they're guiding you through it. This one, you can just do whatever you want in the tool. Uh, they put dummy data in there, but like, it's a really, really cool way to let people just like Do I even want this tool? Because oftentimes you, you don't get the tool until you paid for it. And, you know, I've bought software over the years and I've been disappointed more than a few times, um, because I didn't have the opportunity to do that.

I just threw a link in the chat from GitHub because I had to test myself. And I'm like, it says set up a plan. We're on github.com for another product and it guides you through a free plan. And I'm like, is it just linking to their site? And no, it's fully in. And I'm like, okay, so this is, this is exciting stuff. Um,

and CircleCI is a great, great company. Uh, isn't that cool?

It's right in there in GitHub. It's pretty rad. But, um, so the first half we learned from you and, and learned a ton. The second half of this, I want to learn about you. All right, so with that, who

Yeah, uh, what's that? That's a big question. Uh, I, uh, I was born in Montreal, born and raised in Montreal. Um, and then when I was 14, my parents, uh, decided to move to Texas. Uh, I barely spoke English, and so I had to spend 2 years in Austin, uh, freshman year in high school and sophomore year, uh, learning English. And, uh, I survived, and then we moved to California. Um, I wanted to get into the film industry. into early in my career, I was always fascinated by the flow of money. And even when I was a kid, I asked my parents, I think I was like 10 years old, I wanted to go to Wall Street. We were in New York. I'm like, I want to see Wall Street. And I've been fascinated and I still read books about Rockefeller and things like that, the House of Morgan and so on, because I'm really interested about how the current economic systems came to be. So I went in to study economics, went to wealth management, did that for a while, which is banking for rich people, and figured out that wasn't my cup of tea. And then randomly I decided to go into sales. And as a young adult, I was actually quite timid and shy. I wasn't the type of person that would go to a networking event and talk to people. That's something that I had to learn as an adult, and it's very uncomfortable, but if you keep doing it, you eventually can power through it and got to the point where now I kind of enjoy it. But I really had to change as an early adult in my 20s about figuring out a skillset that I was passionate about. And so when I tried banking, I was like, this is not something I'm passionate about. And so I randomly ended up in selling HR software. And I spent about 5 years at a company called Paychex selling software to small business owners. Like, I mean, you know, 1 to 20 employee companies for the most part, selling them, you know, payroll and, you know, workers' comp and, you know, benefits and all of these things. And so I got to learn a lot during that time. I think we were talking earlier about, you know, networking groups. I got really good at talking in front of a group of 50 people because I would go to these business networking international groups where there'd be somebody from all different types of businesses. So you'd have an insurance person and you have a mortgage person and then you'd have, you know, a real estate person, you got a banker or someone and everyone—

personal trainer.

Yeah, exactly right. You got, you got somebody that's, you know, selling some services. There's only one per, you know, uh, different types of service. And, uh, I was a payroll person in that group and, um, that is probably where I learned, uh, the most about being able to get outside my comfort zone so that I could walk into any meeting or I could walk into on a stage now with 500 people and feel not too scared about my presentation. So that was all really good. And then eventually I fumbled into tech. When I turned 30, I decided, you know what? I've been setting up all of these payrolls for these companies and some of them made it big. And I was like, I should probably go try something else, given that I lived in the Bay Area for 25 years. And so I tried it out and it was a good decision I made.

Paychecks is such a good pathway to sales. And I came from FedEx, which is another perceived commodity, let's call it. If you're in it, you call it perceived. The outside world just calls it straight commodity selling. You knew how to sell value. That's why you did so well. But the outside world just buys it on price, or at least they seem they do it. When you have that type of background where you could sell the same product at the same price to the same person and win the deals, it builds something, right? And tech is just even easier because you have value to support. I

mean, yeah, when I left Paycheck and I went to Glassdoor, which was starting out, I mean, within the span of 6 months, I was one of the best reps in the company. I had never sold over the phone before because I wore like a suit and like I—

Same, you had to.

Went to these meetings and, you know, my closing percentage was like 60% throughout my time there, which is like I ran 5 meetings a week and then, you know, I would close one call, close the majority of them. And I got pretty good at it. So when I went to, you know, doing, you know, sales at Glassdoor, before Zoom, so you didn't have to do video. When for me, video is probably the most important thing you can do to try to build a relationship with somebody. If you're going to try to sell them something, you should always have your video on. If you're a salesperson listening to this, always have your video, even if the other person doesn't have their video on, your closing percentage will increase. And companies like Gong have tons of stats on this. Always have your video on.

Yeah.

video on. But it really helped me feel really good about the confidence you get when you're closing tons of deals all the time, 150 deals a year. Whenever you go somewhere, you go somewhere like a tech company and it's pretty easy because you understand what makes people tick. And first thing you need to do is get them to build a relationship of some kind. So talking about the weather is not the best way, but sometimes there's not much you can go off of. But if you've been You build that rapport in the beginning and then you do a needs analysis and be like, tell me about your problems before you talk about the product. If somebody starts a call and says, give me the demo, I'm like, no, you don't get a demo. I don't know anything about you. I'm not gonna waste my time giving you a demo. Yeah. So tell me about your job. Tell me about your pains, because I'm not going to just be a monkey here and do your demo without you telling me anything about your business.

So yeah, you, you hit the nail on the head with that. I will say that you went to a company that had a brand after leaving Paychex versus—

No. Glassdoor

was

back then. No, 10, 11 years ago. Tell me about it. No, I would call people like Glassdoor. I'm like, I don't need any windows. I was like, no, no, no, we're a review site for jobs and, you know, we help people find the right jobs. And people are like, I hate your company. me. I just went on your website and I hate what you guys are doing. You're creating problems for— no, it wasn't. You know, my first year there, I, uh, people didn't know what it was. And if they did, they were like, I don't want to talk to you because you're making my life harder. I got the CEO telling me about these crappy reviews that are left on the website. And I was like, well, how about you participate? Right now, only the employees that are not happy will participate. How about you think about getting your happy employees to participate? And, you know, by the end of it, I was working companies like, you know, you know, Morgan, um, you know, Chase. Um, I was working with Facebook and like some huge brands, which was really, really cool. And they bought into it early. Like Facebook was like, oh, I'm gonna use this as a recruiting tool because, you know, they take pretty good care of their employees overall. And, you know, that gives them an opportunity to show like their lunchroom and to show, you know, all of the benefits that they give and how much people, you know, love working there. And so, uh, and now it's just standard. Everyone that was Glassdoor. But back then, yeah, most people I talked to did not like it or never heard of it.

My, uh, my colleague, right around the same time I went into tech, probably a year after you left Glassdoor, he went in and he's been there ever since. Uh, had, had a great career there. It's, it's funny how that works. And, um, that, that's super cool. So you're in San Francisco or the Bay Area and you end up in Boulder. What happened? You just wanted to— oh, really? Was it that recent?

Yeah, it was. So it'll be 2 years next month. It'll be 2 years. So how it happened is that I lived in the city with my wife for, I don't know, 13 years. And I had promised her that if we got to 3 kids, we would move outside the city. And so we got to 3 kids and then we moved to East Bay, nice town in East Bay. But then COVID hit. And it didn't— I didn't like it as much as I like San Francisco. There's blackouts because there's fires and there's all these issues that were happening and kids are at home. And my wife and I just looked at each other and this was August 2 years ago and there's a bunch of blackouts and smoke in the air for weeks at a time. And my wife and I We're out of here. So where should we go? And we're like, I said, well, I heard great things about Boulder. I know I've only been there for lunch once, but I keep hearing great things about it. I like the mountains and I'd like to live somewhere where I could just go snowboarding in the morning and be back home, mountain biking. Quality of life here is outstanding. And so that's the reason. And then I also, like I said, 3 kids. I want them to live somewhere where they can have the freedom to just bike around and do stuff. That's what I had growing up. And so I wanted my kids to have the ability to have freedom because if you're in a big city like San Francisco, it's kind of scary as a parent to let your kids go out. And so I wanted them to be able to have freedom that I had as a kid.

My dad's been an outerwear rep his— the last 30 years, Columbia Sportswear, Salomon, I worked in a ski and snowboard shop throughout high school and I think college in between the gaps when I was coming home. So I know it well. And what's cool about Boulder, in my opinion as well, is you could build a startup there and get talent that is— I don't want to say good enough, but good. You could build a scalable startup with the talent there in person if you wanted to. Oh, for sure.

Oh, for sure. Yeah. In the last 20 years, Boulder has really become a tech community. And so has Denver, which is about 35 minutes away. But what has happened here, the VC firms have come in. You got a campus here for Google. You have a campus for Splunk, Microsoft. So there's a lot of companies that have decided to come here over the years because it was cheaper than what San Francisco was. And then there's There's the university, UC, University of Colorado Boulder is like 10 blocks from my house. And so there's great engineering talent there. And so it's a really good place to build a business. But yeah, the funding that has been available now compared to what was here 20 years ago has really changed.

I love it. I'm so intrigued. And we talked before, I'm going to definitely be back in that area probably in the fall time. But, you know, your passions outside of work, you mentioned snowboarding, hanging out with the family.

Yeah. I love traveling, love cooking. Thought about being a chef early in my career because I love cooking that much. Love feeding my family. It's probably one of the things I enjoy the most. Just figured out that after reading Anthony Bourdain's book, I'm like, I should probably not go work in kitchens if I want quality of life. And so I like golf as well. So I probably played more golf in the last few weeks than I have in the last couple years, which is really, really exciting. Do you? Yes, it's an activity that I picked up as a young kid. My dad got me into it when I was like 6 years old and stuck with it. And so that's another thing I enjoy. Love reading, you know, podcasts now, the quality of the podcasts available now is great. You can always learn new things. And I like, you know, it's not as stuffy as, you know, watching a documentary or, you know, television. And so those are things that I enjoy.

Awesome. So yeah, in closing, thank you for coming. How can people find you? Where can they connect with you?

Yeah, probably the easiest way to find me would be LinkedIn. And so Olivier Labbé, you guys can see it, you can ping me there. If you guys let me know you watch podcasts, I will accept your Connection requests. Usually I don't accept people I don't know, but if you put that, I do quite a few podcasts, so I build a so you can connect with me there. I read Twitter, but I don't really engage on Twitter, so probably not the best way. Don't follow me; you're not going to get much value out of it. But I do, I do work the LinkedIn community pretty effectively.

Awesome. So thank you for coming today. Thank you. Thank you, Olivia. And

all right, we'll see you soon. Thanks, guys.

And thank you, audience. If you learned something today or laughed, tell somebody about this podcast. And thank you again, man. It's been another great episode of Revenue Today. Really appreciate you being here. Whoa, another great episode of Revenue Today. For show notes, links, and mentions, visit revenue today dot com. 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 2 seconds, and you'll be joining a group of 27,000 revenue professionals strong. We've got it all. Looking Look forward to seeing you there. Catch you on the flip side.

Thank you.