From Being Paralyzed to a $1m+ First Year as Senior SDR with SaaStr Sr. Partner Manager Jack Ryan

I was making my way actually up the 101 to do a surf check. Decided, you know, not a lot of good surf today. So I'm gonna go to Jiu Jitsu class at noon after checking my calendar and yeah, that's when the accident occurred. I cracked two vertebrae. I have a severed artery on my left side in the back of my neck. Pretty up right now, but pretty positive. I don't care. It's gonna be a while before I'm back to normal. I had it in my mind that I was gonna walk again. But prognosis and everything else, everyone was like, yeah, good luck.

That's amazing.

That's really, that' really what progress from.

The vector to this.

I was walking independently about five months after. Six months after. So around the six month mark, I was walking without forearm crutches or any sort of poles. That's when I started to go try and live my life again. Mount Whitney is the tallest peak in the Lower 48. It's 14,505ft and it's the highest peak you can go to without any sort of technical skill. So it's one continuous hike.

The idea of Whitney was something that was happening long before the injury. This was something that he wanted to do prior to the accident and it was the first goal he set.

I trained really hard. I just wanted to prove to myself that I could go do these things that I'd always done.

Wow.

Our original plan was to do the 22 mile main trail. We couldn't get permits and then that's when the trip really became a suffer fest. What we did was 40 miles round trip. I had never done a 40 mile backpacking trip like that, able bodied or disabled. So we were kind of going into uncharted territory in that regard.

Jack was very dialed in from the start of the hike. The level of discipline and strength that this guy has regardless of everything that happened and that's part of him that stems from his core.

The first day we started really late in the day and we didn't get into our camping spot until 9:30pm at night, 10 o', clock ish. So we were just wiped and we didn't get to bed till 11 that night. I woke up the next morning. We did about five miles down to Rock Creek. I was in good spirits but my body just my right leg was not working. It would not lift. I just dragged it for five miles. And I remember sitting down and being like the anxiety sort of hit and I was like, I know we can do this, but Like, I'm scared and nervous right now, and, like, we're 14 miles into the backcountry. Like, there's no. There's no getting out of here in any easy way.

Couple deep breaths.

The terrain in this hike varied throughout the entire trip. You know, there's parts where you're on a side of a mountain where there's sand, and there's parts where you're, you know, closing towards the peak. And there's treacherous cliffs with boulders.

The terrain was so bad, and loose rock and big boulders for me are really hard to move on just because my legs don't lift to a certain height and my ankles don't work and all that sort of thing. So when we were a mile from the summit, you can look up to your right and you see the summit hut and the summit itself, but you realize you still have a mile to go, and you have to go around the backside. And so I constantly. I have multiple affirmations that I would say to myself, but one of them was just like, stay focused, Believe. And then I would just say that over and over in my head and out loud. As we got to the backside of the summit, we kind of paused, and everyone went like, you're making this a reality today. Like, this is. Like, this is three years in the making.

Yeah.

Everyone cleared the summit. It was dead silent. There had to be about 40 people up there. And I limped onto that sign and onto that rock and that summit and just. Yeah, I lost it. And it was just like, everyone let me have a moment. It was really beautiful. And then it was just like this big round of applause. Like, I was like, oh, this is. There's no trophies up there. There's no trophies when you're summoning a mountain. But if that was. I think that was my trophy was that round of applause.

I believe one out of three people make it to the peak. And Jack was one of those people.

Like, I gave three years of my life to this project, and come hell or high water, you know, we made it happen.

And now, please welcome to the stage, Jack Ryan, partner manager, Saster. What's up? This is pretty surreal. I've actually been visualizing a moment like this for two or three years now. So super stoked to be here. I was just hoping for, like, 10 people. There's way more than 10 people, so this is really radio. Yeah. So who am I? I'm the partner manager at Saster. I manage all outbound sales. I'm a Team USA paraclimbing athlete. As of June 2021, so I get to represent the US in international competition for adaptive climbing. I'm a writer, a photographer. I get to travel around the US Shooting, climbing, as well as other adventure sports. Adaptive athlete, and I'm a plant dad to Dave, who resides in my apartment back in Denver. So this was me 2018, and prior, I was running the jiu jitsu circuit on the west coast as well as internationally. I competed in Mexico City, I trained in Thailand. I got to train all over the world. And I was also a passionate surfer. So my path wasn't necessarily in tech. At the time, I was actually a luxury real estate agent. I was running digital marketing, et cetera. So November 29, 2018, everything changed. My neck was broken via my jiu jitsu instructor at C4 and C5. He did an illegal move and basically torqued me over. And next thing you know, completely paralyzed from the neck down. The way I could describe it is, you know, when you get into a hot tub and it's that, like, warm, flushing feeling, that's what it feels like to be paralyzed from the neck down initially. So this is a MRI scan of what my neck looked like post injury. So as you can see at the C4 and C5 vertebrae, you can see the impact of the spinal cord. So what I have is called an incomplete injury. There's two types of spinal cord injuries, incomplete and complete. For me, mine's incomplete, which means neurological signals from the brain are able to get past the damage in the spinal cord. Now, initially, the way I describe paralysis to everyone and an incomplete injury to everyone is it's like being stuck in an ice block, right? So essentially, the ice block is up to your neck right here, and you have no idea what's going to dethaw come three months, six months, one year, two years, et cetera. And the only way to find out is through very intensive rehab and basically time. So you're probably wondering, what does paralysis have to do with sales as a whole, right? I know the title is climbing to 1 million in sales, but yeah. So first off, it's all about taking risks. When I set out to do Mount Whitney, that was a goal I had prior to being disabled in 2018. And with that, when I said I announced it on my Instagram, I believe early 2019, being like, hey, I'm gonna go climb this mountain. Everyone looked at me and was like, hey, that's great. Good for you. But, like, slow your roll, basically. So same with sales, right? On March 31, 2021, I was actually looking for a New role. I was a digital marketing manager at the time, and I found Brian Osesser, who's actually my current boss via LinkedIn post, and he's like, I'm looking to hire somebody for the sales team at Saster. And so I shot my shot. And that's how I've gotten every single opportunity I've got in this day. From Saster to working at, like, the International Surfing Association, Everything I've done has been through cold email and cold calls my entire career. That's how I've gotten every opportunity. So for me, you know, what are the things that it takes to get to where I stand today, both from climbing mountains and from a sales perspective? And I truly believe the three things that make not only a great athlete, a great individual, but also a great sales individual, is consistency, grit, and curiosity. So with consistency, the past two years after my initial rehab, I took 2019 off to basically relearn how to do life. I really learned how to crawl, eat, breathe, swallow, you name it, everything. I relearned. At 23, my rehab process was five days a week at Craig Hospital in Denver, Colorado. Now I turned that into seven days a week because I realized if I'm not making efforts every single day, I'm not going to get to where I want to go, which is walk out of that hospital in 90 days, which is very, very uncommon, especially based off the fact that not only did I have this injury that paralyzed me, I also had multiple strokes 12 hours after the fact. So. And then consistency in sales, you know, you do have your daily tasks, and for me, that looks like simplifying as much as humanly possible. I do not like complicating my day in any way. So for me, when I think of simplifying and keeping consistent tasks, it consists of list building, prospecting, and cold email outbound. So grit. Grit's obviously a very popular buzzword in the sales community, and I think it's a little overplayed sometimes. But grit, to me, at least in sales, is we've exceeded 1 million in sales in six months at Sasser. With that being said, I can't tell you how many $150,000 deals I've lost. $200,000 deals I've lost over the course of the past six months. And for me, when that occurred, I was like, all right, I'd message pooya. I'd message Brian being like, we just lost so and so. And they're like, yeah, we did everything we could. And I'm like, all right, so what? Let's move on with our lives. Let's pick ourselves up from the dirt. Let's keep going. In terms of rehab, my rehab consisted of getting electrocuted for hours on end by stimulation packets. It consisted of dry needling and basically putting as many needles into the. Into my muscle bellies to essentially free those muscles up to encourage movement. It's very, very painful. And then when we talk about the hike, for me, I don't really, you know, I walk around with a cane. I'll walk around this venue with a cane. And it takes all of my mental effort just to walk around. Like, I am actually physically thinking about standing on this stage right now and, and shifting my weight from left to right. And so that takes a lot of grit in that I don't have a choice. I don't have a daily choice to not think about these things. And therefore, I do have to tough out even the simplest of days. So curiosity, right? So why not summit the tallest mountain in the lower 48? Why not attempt this crazy feat? Where am I falling short and what can I be better at, right? So when we talk about mountains, I did a ton of research and I was like, okay, you know, no one's ever done the tallest mountain in the lowered 48 with a spinal cord injury with quadriplegia. Why not? And so I got curious, I started Googling. Has anyone done this? Okay, there's been an amputee ascent, right? That's fairly common. You know, has anyone else done any big mountain ascents in the world besides in the US and there happened to be a gentleman in the UK who's a friend of mine named Ed Jackson who runs also a nonprofit called Millimeters to Mountains. He's the only one in the world besides me who has been above 14,000ft. He's done a few ascents in the Himalayas. So when I found him on Instagram Back in 2019, I was like, huh? Why can't I do what he's doing? And so this led to that curiosity. In terms of sales as a whole, we're always looking to basically Kaizen continuously improve our methods. Whether you're in a startup, a marketing role, a sales role, you're always trying to find that next edge. So for me, this is a message I send to one of my colleagues, Puya. One of the things that I personally have been working on in the past six months is when we have a big deal in the pipeline and we're setting that follow up and stuff, I still lack the experience in terms of, okay, pushing the steel Further down the pipeline. So that's where your teammates, Brian Puia come in. And I fall back on them because I'm only as good as the collective unit around me. And that's really important because you can't succeed in sales specifically to get to that quota, get to that number, hit that revenue goal. And I think as a broader whole, everyone here is involved in startups. You start from ground zero, right? So you're constantly looking, you're looking@sasser.com, you're looking on Google, you're looking on quote Torah, you're like, how do I make this better? And that curiosity, I think makes individuals 1 individuals great and 2 startups great by proxy. Cool. You can switch the. And now, welcome to the stage, brian ells vp sales at sester.

Jack, your story is incredible. Right? I think when going back to that slide, you showcased your initial note to me on LinkedIn and I remember I went and looked and I saw Paralyze Topeaks. What is it? He runs a non profit and then all of a sudden I was like, oh, oh, oh, like very real. Jack's actually, he's very humble, but he's actually in six months as an SDR, we're not talking pipeline. He's realized almost $1.5 million in revenue, which is really incredible. I think, bar none, in 10 years of leading teams, he's the biggest success story I've ever seen in sdr. And so I think there's a lot of here that the crowd and the people that are watching this really need to know. So I'm very curious. First off, I want to go back to your accident and the time after that. Sometimes I feel like doubt must for you become like an old conquered friend. Right. So talk us through some of those moments of doubt.

What was that like on the peak or in sales?

Let's just in general, let's start on the peak moments of doubt. We can go then to doubt in sales.

Okay. Yeah. So on day two of my Mount Whitney ascent, because we couldn't get the original permits on the main trail, we had to figure out an alternative route via another entrance. So on day two, we were coming down and as I said in the video, down to Rock Creek, I literally was literally dragging my right leg for five miles straight and I got down to Rock Creek and I sat down with my team thinking, oh my God, we have another 10 miles to do to get to our next waypoint if we want to have a rest day and a buffer in between. And so with that I sat down and I actually broke down. My buddy was talking to me. I was like, this is the first time. I don't think. I don't know if I can do this. There's a lot of doubt in my mind. And in the endurance world and the ultra running world, they say you always have a low. And day two for me was that low, where I truly encountered real doubt. So when that occurred, I basically spoke it out loud. And when you speak something out loud, whether it's depression, whether you have anxiety, whatever it may be, it loses its power over you because it can then be given to the collective to discuss and openly contemplate. And I think that's how I eliminated doubt in that specific moment during my lowest point of the hike. Wow. Wow.

So now we're going to transition that.

Right.

So there's a lot of SDR leaders, a lot of sales leaders, a lot of SDRs even here today, and they're going through doubt. And I know you've went through some doubt a little bit.

Right.

Walk me through how that might be relative.

Yeah.

So entering my first month at Sasser, I actually hadn't no idea what Saster was when I signed up for the role. I did my research, I did my due diligence, but I was like, I wasn't really super familiar with Jason Lemkin. I knew startups, I knew B2B, but wasn't all too familiar. And I remember that first month I had it in my mind, I was like, I need to close at least an $85,000 deal. And I was pinging Brian the first month being like, why haven't we gotten one? Why haven't we gotten one? And it finally hit that last week, and a brand that I outbounded happened to come on board literally 30 days to my start date. And I was like, well, it's post one month, but this is great. And I think to eliminate the doubt, at least in my mind, I once again fell back on my team. I fell back on Brian. I fell back on PUIA for their collective knowledge, because I take pride in knowing that I'm not the smartest person in the room. There's so many more brilliant people sitting down in this room than me, and so I fall back on them by proxy. And I think that's what led to my elimination of doubt, just as it led to my elimination of doubt on the hike itself.

When Jack reached out to me for the role, I had put together an assignment to see if he would fit in the environment that we had put Together. And the assignment was an Excel sheet. It had 36 accounts on, was completely blank. And the assignment was, find out who's the contact we should be in touch with. What's their relationship to Saster and why should they care? Four hours later, I'm doing my work and I get a text message and it's from Jack. And he goes, hey, do you have a minute? And I'm thinking, he has a question. He goes, I want to walk you through the presentation. I open up the Google Doc. This thing is decked out, it's color coded. It has organization all over it. And I said, yes, I have the time.

And.

And it was one of the most fascinating moments I've ever seen in an interview. So I want to talk. Let's talk a little bit about determination. Okay. That's a mental shift. That's like a setting that you must have on overdrive. Right. You're a guy that finally, like, you're laying in bed and going, okay, I'll walk again. And the doctors and nurses are going.

They literally threw their hands up. I had one person be like, I believe you're going to walk again. And then everybody else was like, yeah, cool.

Good luck.

In SDR land, you're not walking, you're running. So let's talk about the termination.

Yeah. In terms of the peak or the.

No, no, just in general. Your makeup man.

Yeah. So for me, like, I actually grew up grappling. I grew up fighting. I was all that. Always that, like, tall, skinny kid on the wrestling team. And so I've always had a massive chip on my shoulder. Right. Somebody takes me down, I'm going to take them down five times. If somebody submits me in an armbar, I'm going to choke him out three more times. Right. I think at the core of it, it's having this massive chip on your shoulder, recognizing that you have it, not letting it destroy you as well. So it really does come from fighting and grappling growing up.

I'm going to shift to the SDR role. Specifically. One of the number one questions that you get when you lead SDR teams or you're on a panel about SDR teams is like, what does it take to be. To hire the best sdr? Right. I've heard it forever. But you're actually someone that possesses these skills. So from your vantage point, okay, what are the qualities you went through? Consistency and grit and curiosity. And I think those are great, high level, but, like, maybe a day to day, like, what does it take to be that consistent that Grit that curious person.

Ownership. I think you and I actually talked about it during our interview process. Extreme Ownership, which is Jocko Willink's book, right? That was a very formative book for me back in 2017 when it came out when I was still in college. And so with that, when I came into Sasser, when I talked to Brian, I took ownership of my role. My ramp was supposed to be one month, right? My ramp realistically was seven days, eight days, right? And it's because I recognized I was like, no one is gonna make me succeed except myself, and then I'm gonna have to fall back on the team when possible. So I think what makes a great SDR manager, what makes a great sdr, what makes a great exec, right, Is one, taking ownership of the role and taking ownership of like, your shortcomings and where you're like where you're not executing on. And then two, vulnerability. I've confided in Brian on multiple occasions when I've lost friends, when I'm really struggling in the role, when something's not working and being able to be vulnerable once again when something's scary, right? And you say, hey, I'm scared right now. Like, this is terrifying. Like, I don't want to die today. Like, it immediately loses its power. And so there's that ownership aspect and then there's a vulnerability aspect.

Amazing. Really, really insightful. I think what's interesting, you also brought up the notepad on your vision of notion that we have, right? And you have an accountability workbook that you're working through. Okay. Probably one of the most accountable people I've had. So I guess, like, when you think about accountability in the morning, when you think about it throughout your day, what are some of the tactical pieces of advice that you could give someone to maybe increase their own accountability so they can have some of the similar success?

So there's good days and there's bad days, right? You're gonna have hyper productive days and you're gonna have a Tuesday where you get absolutely nothing done. But there should be a standard that you always get done. And for me at least, when I wake up at 4am, 5am, it's always one wake up. Check my notifications, set the phone down. Meditate for 10 minutes, meditate for 15 minutes. As long as I get that in and analyze any of the thoughts that come in, it allows me to then proceed with the rest of my day relatively calm and relatively aware of what I need to accomplish. Now I'm just like you guys. There are days I just don't get things done. But so long as I get those three minimum things when I wake up done, the rest of the day usually goes to plan, more or less.

So it's funny, I think when we think about grit, it's a buzzword, as you said, but it's probably the number one thing people say, oh, you gotta be gritty. Sdr. You gotta be gritty. Right? But it goes a step further, right? Cause you're doing some form of mental fortitude every day to tell yourself what you're doing. You've shared this with me. Do you have a phrase that you go to that like in your down moments, you know, is it more fluid?

It's more fluid. I do also do daily note taking and affirmations every single day post meditation. And those affirmations change on a weekly, monthly, yearly basis. When we think about the hike, my main affirmations were stay focused, believe and rage on. I can't say the F word up here, but it's rage the on. Right? But those were my main affirmations during the past probably six months. In terms of day to day, it's always focused around positive vocabulary. Right. So I believe or I'm speaking on the saster stage. I'm doing 2 million in outbound net new revenue. Right. Speaking it into existence. And it kind of tricks your brain to basically be like, oh, crap, I'm only at 900k in revenue. I have this $2 million goal. I better get those standards and those necessary things done on a daily basis to get to that new goal.

Awesome. Yeah. The affirmation piece I think, can sometimes be really overlooked. I really only have one more question for you, Jack, and you've been so forthcoming and thank you for sharing your story. But let me, let me just ask. There's a lot of revenue leaders that are going to be here that are going to be listening to this and watch this. What kind of pieces of advice or tactical pieces of advice could you offer them to help them next level, their SDR team? It's something that I think everyone wonders, what's the magic bullet? And there isn't one. So what would you, what would you say to them?

The more vulnerable you are with your team, the more your team will empathize with you. Right. Empathy is also a big buzzword in the sales community as a whole because you can't sell without empathy. And so you as a leader, whatever position you're in, the more vulnerable and forthcoming you can be with a team of where you're struggling they by proxy, are going to come back to you and be like, hey, I'm struggling with calls right now. What do I need to change? What do I need to do differently? And it creates this team environment, this supportive environment that truly will allow you to get to that revenue goal, that marketing goal. What may have you.

Jack, congratulations on your summit. Congratulations on your story and your success. And let me just say on behalf of everyone at Saster, we're super stoked to be a part of your team. So thank you very much for today.

Thank you.