Interviewing Sales Candidates | Vlog #42

You gotta switch. What? Techstars booked this. Fuck. What up guys, this is future Ryan coming at you. There are 45 days left in Techstars by the time you guys are watching this, and we're on a path right now to hit our goal of $25,000 in monthly recurring revenue by the end of Techstars, 45 days away. We're right about $6,500 in monthly recurring revenue, 72 paying customers. So if you guys are new here, my name is Ryan Shank. This is our journey. Our journey building PhoneWagon from the ground up, no outside funding, completely bootstrapped. We're going through Techstars, it's a startup accelerator in New York City. I hope you guys are out there working hard, being pioneers, being Wagoneers. Welcome to the vlog. Yeah, my point though was like, I'd rather honestly people who are just like super hungry and like want to just like kill it versus like coming in with like entitled, like, oh, I know sales, you know. I would argue that marketing is like sales. Like, do you ever upsell? Yeah, for sure. Like, they want one shot, you get 3 shots. Yeah. Sell like a different wine that's like more expensive. That's the thing, I did craft beer, so I had to know about all the different kinds, and you know, people were like, what should I get? So I had to know about all that, and yeah, selling it. Alright, so sell me a beer. So one of the things that I like to do when I'm interviewing people is have them sell me something, especially something that they've been selling in the past, or something that they haven't been selling in the past. One of the things that I like to do is like, sell me hardwood over carpet. And a couple things happen when they do that to you. One, you hear, you know, how they approach sales. Are they gonna ask you questions? Are they gonna focus on benefits, and talk about how like, carpet is just like really soft and you can go into this like imaginary land and like you're like walking on the clouds and use metaphors and things like that, or are they going to go very like feature-based? Hey, I love beer. Uh, so what do you drink? You drink Blue Moon or something? Yeah, I like Blue Moon. Yeah, all right, so we got to use something not as heavy as Blue Moon, but okay, something lighter. We have a pilsner, which is a light lager, going to be not very offensive on the palate. I can get you a taste of it for free if you'd like. Um, taste it. One bite, everyone knows the rules. I like him a lot. He's hungry, he wants to make money, which is really good. We all want to make money. Um, the one thing, by the way, that he's gonna send me on— he's in a band and he said he's still gonna be in the band, so he's gonna like travel with the band. But I was like, how much time is that gonna require? Because like, we don't really have time for fucking band practice. Um, so that's the only thing, which I told him. I was like, let me see the schedule and we'll see like how how much you're gonna be traveling for your band, but if it's too much, then I'm gonna tell him no. I was like, you gotta make a decision. But if it's not, then we figure it out. From 99 to 103. Sold him a number for $4. Wow. Just out here hustling, man. Slinging these numbers. Selling $4 numbers. I ain't above it. I ain't above selling a $4 number. Why is there so many holidays in India? They have a holiday like every 3 weeks. What were you thinking about the upgrade? So I know what was happening to Joe from Green Funding Solutions. So— What was his name? Sam? Sam. You add the new card so then it'll like add that. I thought you had a new card. Why was that not working? I don't know. Is there like a maximum number of cards? Maybe. And why when you edit can you only update Yeah, that's— [FOREIGN LANGUAGE] But you gotta do it based on research. You can't just guess. There's keyword research tools. [FOREIGN LANGUAGE] Which one? [FOREIGN LANGUAGE] And then it talks about keyword search volume and stuff? [FOREIGN LANGUAGE] Alright, so the other thing that I like to do and make decisions on is actual data. One of the things that Kane and I, we're trying to do YouTube SEO right now, so we're trying to put out videos and then rank high in YouTube for people that are searching on YouTube for these videos. And one of the things that he was telling me is like, hey, this is what people would search for. And he's like, people would search for cold calling techniques or something like that, or like, how do you cold call? And I was like, well, what is that based on? He's like, that's just what people would search on. And I'm like, based on what? You're not people, you're like a sample size of 1. There's 300 million people just in the United States. So I was like, hey, why don't we use a keyword research tool tool that is gonna pull from like actual search volume, then we can figure out like what the volume looks like, the competitiveness of those keywords, and then either try to rank for something with a ton of volume or lower volume but it's less competitive. And let's like try to like, you know, then use those keywords in the title of the video to then rank for those. And then we can like, you know, keyword stuff the description and the tags and things like that. But it's like you should always, you shouldn't just do it on like here's what I think people would search on because again like You as a human are only going to be thinking like from one dimension, like one person's experience versus like, hey, this is how like the collective, you know, people are actually searching. Coffee's for closers, Mike. Okay, I'll make some coffee. Configure mail merge, let's go. Alright, so basically right here I was doing a mail merge, so I was sending an email blast to like 150 people and I was doing a mail merge in like a Google Sheet and then it sends in your Gmail. Is like configuring the mail merge so that then the emails get dropped in. There's the template that shows up and then it like basically like merges all the data fields and then it sends the email out. Hey Will, this is Ryan Shank. Potentially, I just talked to Will over at the other location. He told me Mr. Jamal would be the man to speak to. Hey, this is, sorry, this is Ryan over at PhoneWagon. Hey, what's up? Hey, this is Ryan Shank over at PhoneWagon. Hey, what's up? This is Ryan Shank over at PhoneWagon. Hey. Hi. How are you doing? Hey, what's up? Hey, uh, this is Ryan. Hey, is Mary there? Your reports, and a lot of times, as you probably know, it's like they're not really motivated to log in and look at these reports because it's kind of boring. Set is, uh, it's decent. It's not the 3, so hopefully we can come in at 4 tomorrow so you start averaging 3. Um, which lead list were you— so like, what leads were you calling? Were you calling agencies? [FOREIGN LANGUAGE] Takeaway from the EOD meeting yesterday was that we just need to like increase, like basically like demos set, start from dial. So Brett got 2 demos set yesterday. John got 3. And if we can just like increase top of the funnel, then we're just gonna increase number of demos that were set. So then my numbers were, I had 46 dials. I don't think I set zero. And I completed 1 demo. Let me just confirm. I had 3, 2, 3 no-shows today that were all like self-scheduled. So that kind of sucked. Calling into, sort of back to Brett's point, I was calling into Valpacks. So like we added, like what are we doing? Just updating KPIs? Or whatever you want. I mean, basically, like, last week we had a pretty sweet net new MRR, but it's like— I'm kind of pissed right now because we didn't get any sales today. I don't even— like, what? What is the struggle? No new sales today. Yeah, no sales today. We did get 2 expansion MRRs today. Expansion? Like upsell? Yeah, like upgraded. So like this one guy— Phone call events back to Bing. I'd have to talk with our head of engineering. What's up guys? Today I'm doing the outro. This is also future Ryan coming at you doing an outro from the next day. Crazy. This is mind-blowing shit. Today was a good day. So we interviewed guy Jack, I believe is his name, for a sales development role. We just went over all the sales metrics. So I, by the way, I was only doing dials for like 2 hours at the end the day I had 46 dials. I was calling into like really small businesses, automotive, auto repair shops and things. I was getting people on the phone. I didn't get any demos set, but I had 46 dials in less than 2 hours, which we're all not looking forward to. So thanks for following along. I hope you guys are getting value. Please like, subscribe, and share this with your friends if you guys like it. So leave a comment on something that you guys are working on in your business, and hopefully we can just start collabing and, uh, and sharing ideas each other. Peace! Wagoneers, pioneers gonna go out. Are we live?