CRO Confidential: 3 Secrets For Early-Stage Startups To Acquire Customers | CoSell.io Co-Founder

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Welcome to this week's episode of the Saster CRO Confidential podcast. I'm your host Sam Blonde. Two quick programming notes before we jump into this week's episode. The first is we are wrapping up our founder led sales miniseries on the CRO Confidential podcast this week and then we'll get back to sales and revenue leaders beyond this week. So just. But we're ending on a high note as you'll learn momentarily. Second programming note we have. I'm ecstatic to be attending Saster Europa that is coming up here in just a few weeks, June 6 and 7. I'll actually be doing two sessions. One around the 10 hacks that helped Brex scale from 0 to 400 million in revenue. And one session with Parker Conrad, the CEO at Rippling, my former CEO at Zenefits, also close friend and awesome person. Hope to see you all there. Let's continue with today's scheduled programming. We have an incredibly special guest this week, Brendan Cassidy, close friend of mine, my boss. I'm sure you don't like hearing you framed as such, but Brendan was my VP of sales at Echo Sign for something like four plus years. I learned so much from from Brendan as a sales leader. Prior to Echo Sign, Brendan was the first sales leader at LinkedIn company you all have probably heard of. Before post Echoz, Brendan has done a lot. The first sales leader at Talk Desk valued now at 10/plus billion dollars and now actually a co founder and co founder of a really exciting business called Co Sell. We're going to learn about that in just a moment, but welcome to the pod, Brendan.

Yeah, thank you Sam. Thanks for the introduction and yeah, excited to be here.

Perfect. Well, let's start with.

Where we're going to spend much of today which is talking about founder led sales from the unique perspective of a current founder that's also one of the most accomplished sales leaders in the world. And interestingly Brendan, your company is also building a product to help businesses acquire customers. So three things that are relevant to this podcast. Number one, you are a former sales leader and one of the most accomplished sales leaders in the world. Two, you are now a co founder of a company and we're talking about founder led sales. And three, your business is in this category of acquiring customers. That is sort of the point of this podcast in the first place. Tell us about Co Sell.

Yeah, Co Sell is been a probably 10, probably longer 10 plus year journey for me and so I've always had these sort of, you know, sort of problems you want to solve, you know, sort of over the course of your career and you may get a chance to solve them wherever you are or wherever you're working. But you know, and I know you have some yourself, but you sort of have them in the back of your mind of like, okay, no one's still nobody seemed to solve this problem. And then you're like, you know, at some point, you know, that's something that I want to spend time on, you know, I want to solve. And really that's been pretty big driver for me in my career and the decisions I've made right is like I have, you know, when I've had conviction about what the problem is right. And that the solving that problem is like incredibly meaningful. I've been right most of the time and when I didn't have that conviction, I'm not, not quite as, not as quite of a, of a track record of success. So I've always tried to follow that sort of credo. And so, you know, co Sells is everything that I've sort of the culmination of everything I kind of worked on for 20 years as a VP of Sales, as somebody that's consulted, advised for probably 70 plus startups at varying stages of growth and seeing like what are the, what's the pain, what's the problem? And you know, what are, what are things that you could do to materially increase your chances to make it? Because 90 plus percent of these companies are not going to make it right. There's going to be an outcome in which nobody makes money. And so I've really felt like, you know, obviously it's early LinkedIn. So I saw the, you know, the early power of like relationships and relationship capital.

LinkedIn really sort of shied away from sort of referrals in general. Right. Became more about sort of the data and not the sort of connection. And so I always felt like, hey, this is a problem I want to solve. And so Co sell is, you know, helping sort of go to go to market teams. Certainly for companies that are like CD B round stage companies, that's certainly where we're focusing right now. Sort of tap, identify, tap into and connect with the people around them that can help them take the most strategic and direct path to their customers with credibility, with you know, with warmth and sort of the, you know, my opinion. And by the way, not everybody agrees with it and I'm okay, I'm okay being in a place where, you know, not everybody says you're right or agrees with what I have to say but like the sort of cold sort of Outreach playbook. Right. Of like, let's just sort of sort of spam the market with sort of quasi personalized communication is waning in effectiveness. Right. You should do it, by the way. It's. It's sort of table stakes. You have to do it on some level, but it's, it's. The response rates are going down. Everybody's now been prospected to. And so, you know, there's sort of an alignment between this idea of we should tap into the people that we know and the relationships we have. And, and the people that have influence in this sort of cold playbook.

Isn'T likely going to get you where you want to go.

And so that's what we're doing. So we have software, we have this sort of chrome extension, right, that allows you to actually use it in LinkedIn, where you can sort of request an intro from anyone you're connected with. It's super simple, super easy, super clean. And so that's sort of like step one and then step two is like unlocking the people that actually have the relationships. Right. So for people like you and I and Jason and others, like, what is ultimately, that's what will.

That's. That's what will determine the winner is who can sort of unlock that sort of connector experience or that, you know, sort of gatekeeper in a scenario that's a true win win for both parties. And I think that's a big part of why Reid didn't go down this path 16, 17 years ago. Right. Is because the person that owned the relationship that could make the introduction, it was unclear as to what the win was for them. Like, what's the upside? I get the person that wants the intro, but the person that actually has the introduction to offer what's in it for them. And that's, you know, sort of an obsession for me to sort of figure that out because it's a comp. It's complex. But if you can figure it out, the, it's the. The reward is, you know, is the really the most meaningful thing I will have done in my career if I can figure it out.

I love it.

Which is to say I haven't figured it out all figured it all out yet, so.

Well, I think, I think you've identified.

A problem and you're in the process of developing a solution and realizing some exciting early results around that. Yeah. I coincidentally did a post earlier today that just talked about what types of outbound early stage startups should be leveraging. So these are startups that aren't yet household names in their target market. And to your point, you referenced earlier.

This like blast the universe with cold outbound email sequencing. If you are a little known brand, that's not going to be very effective as a sales leader. When I was at Rex or Zenefits or even Echo Sign, I received countless outbound emails, some of which were from companies that I had heard of and some of which were from companies that I hadn't. The probability of me.

Having some interest in a company that I had heard of was just much greater than having interest in a company that I hadn't. And to take it a step further, responding to someone that I trusted or that I knew that was making an introduction saying hey we love this product or hey, we love this CEO, you should talk to them because they can really help. I'm replying to that email. I'm not replying to the email from a startup that I've never heard of that has like little web presence and seven employees on LinkedIn or something like that. But that same company, Brendan, if you.

By the way, doesn't that seem like an obvious thing?

It does seem obvious. And so the outcome is at least the recommendations that I make are around leveraging personal network but that only scales so far. And so I think that that's what you are trying to tackle with co sell is not necessarily making this infinite scalable, infinitely scalable, but leveraging.

Warm introductions to companies that will ultimately generate more opportunities and more closed businesses outside of this like spray and Pray method of outbounding.

Yeah. And I think, you know, I'm a big believer in outreach. Right. And a big, I'm a big fan of Manny who's the founder and I think it's a great company and they're going to go public and everyone's going to make lots of money. Right. Riley Devine and others. Right. That we know it's going to be a great outcome for them. Right. And you should do it irregardless of whether you believe in referrals or not. It's just sort of part of the playbook now. Right. It's not a, it's not a, it's not really an optional thing. But yeah, I think there's a, you know, you should say we should absolutely take our most strategic and put our best foot forward in how we go to market as a company. And that's, that's what I'm trying, you know, that's what we're trying to do. That's what I'm trying to do. That's what's I feel like for me after all these years that's like at least, you know, countless startups that are in this situation, right. Of like nobody knows who we are. Nobody's like clamoring for the solution. Maybe nobody is even acknowledging the problem. What do I do? And you know, you've been, you've been pitched that company a hundred times and so have I. You probably consulted for some of them in the past and it's a daunting problem, right? There's not, in a lot of cases, there's not much you or I can do to help them.

And that's it. That's. I want to, I want to give people sort of a lifeline.

To get out of that situation of, you know, which is probably top three or four reasons why 90 plus out of 100 startups fail. That's one of the biggest reasons why is you never get, right, you never get to market or you can't get to market because you're too early and you know, or you're too late. And I think leveraging relationships and referrals can sort of mitigate a lot of those issues. Right. And as you know, right, like you're, you're a VC now, so you're thinking about how do you become a $10 billion company. I can tell you now as a founder for the first time, the last thing we're worried about on a day to day basis is like, how are we going to be worth $10 billion, right? You're just thinking about how do I get from, you know, where we are to like the next stage so that we can live to get to the next stage. Right. And so yeah, that's it, that's what we're trying to do. And I think it's sort of, you know, what we, what I've been talking about, I think is the market's sort of catching up to the, to the reality of that's, you know, you have to do it, it's awesome. And then how do you do it becomes the next part.

I'm going to talk a little bit about what we did specifically to acquire customers and even more tactically how we acquired customers through Outbound in the early days at Brexit, which I think will be a decent segue to sort of like what you're, what you're doing at Co Sell to acquire your first set of customers. But taking, taking me back to Brex, when I joined, we hadn't yet launched the product yet it was in beta. We didn't have much of a Website, it said coming soon and there is no publicly available information online. But we were doing outbound and we restricted outbound to Pedro Enrique went through yc. We restricted the outbound to the YC batch that they were in into prior YC batches also. And we acquired most of their YC batch and dozens of companies from prior YC batches also. And the reason is because like.

They knew who Pedro Enrique were if they were in the batch together. They knew them well. They were excited about the business, strong value prop and even you go back to prior batches, those folks to demo day, they know who the company is. And so we were really successful with outbounding even before we had a website. But we were successful because of these network effects. When we launched the first campaign that we did, and I've done a post on this is the Champagne campaign where we sent bottles of Bouff Clicquot along with handwritten notes from Enrique and we automated that handwritten note process. Just saying congratulations on your recent fundraise. We're a fellow early stage startup located in the Bay Area and we're cheering for you. We know how hard it is to build a successful business and we had something like 75% reply rate to those outbound champagnes and then email follow up and then also about a 75% conversion rate to those demos becoming customers. We did a bunch of marketing and brand initiatives. We put billboards all over San Francisco. Let's just go with that example. We owned downtown San Francisco and we specifically.

Put. I remember it was cool when there were billboards.

It was cool when you went from this company when like nobody had heard of you to oh, I see your billboards everywhere. So at least they had heard of us. But we were very deliberate about reaching out to companies that were headquartered in downtown San Francisco. And if you were headquartered in downtown San Francisco, this was back in the days when everybody went into the office every day.

You knew who they knew who Brex was.

That's right. And you know the people, people that were, I'm from Kansas City, there are probably some tech companies in Kansas City. We were not outbounding to those folks because they would have no clue who Brex was. And that sort of evolved over time and again. You just take advantage of these marketing and brand and network tailwinds that you have to increase the probability of success on your outbound. Let's talk about. You're now doing this for at least the second time, arguably many times over. But you were in a way almost like A co founder, but certainly like the very first go to Market Advisor at Gong, you're now doing this at Co Sell. Tell us a little bit about the very first campaigns that you put in place. Like where do you start?

Yeah, I mean, I think Gong's where it started for me. Right. It's like the first sort of test case in which, you know, that's, that was sort of the approach we took. So I think if you looked at the first 50 customers are gone and I guess probably 30 were referrals through two VPs of sales through myself or Amit, maybe a couple investors, right. But like we had, we had networks that were incredibly strong into that space in that market. So we actually didn't need that much other help. We just knew pretty much everything I've been doing for as, you know, 15 years, 10 years or whatever, has been talking to VPs of sales and sales leaders. And so, you know, I have, you know, and Amit as well, right? Amit, who's the founder and CEO of Gong, who's, you know, an incredible CEO and founder, just obviously incredibly impressive what they've done. Yeah, we were able to, you know, because we had these just massive networks into our target market. Probably 30 of our first 50, probably 50 of our first hundred customers were all through sort of our collective network. And that was, you know, those hundred customers set the tone for the next thousand customers, right, because they, they work through credible sources. Right. So there's just a different level of sort of accountability and familiarity with your customer when it's in you. It's hard to explain, right. But like obviously if you're cold calling somebody, they don't have any real loyalty to you. But if it comes through an introduction, through someone they know and someone they trust, you know, just, you're in better hands, you're going to have more rope, right. As your early customers are going to give you more rope, more chances to, you know, prove yourself. Because you probably haven't figured it all out. So everything you're looking for there, you get through that and, and you in, and you don't get in sort of the other, sort of the other approaches that you can take. And so that, that kind of became my sort of credo, which is everything I'm doing, I don't, I don't want to. If we're making cold calls, we're doing something wrong, right? If we're, if we're blasting cold emails, we're doing something wrong. Yeah, we were able to do that there. And I just said, hey, like this is pretty transferable. And if the people that have these networks are sort of baked into this equation from the get go, then it's extraordinarily powerful. And that's kind of what we're doing here, right? So we have this, this product that allows sort of easy, easy identification, access to and sort of requesting of intros. And then we have this sort of network of people that are super connected into these market. If you want to sort of bring them in as sort of call them like paid, we call them premium connectors, paid advisors, whatever you want to call it. But they will open doors and they will represent you and influence for you in the same way I did for Gong six years ago, seven years ago. It ain't free, right? And that's kind of, that's sort of the, that's the jumping off point for me, right, Is this sort of insistence that sort of like karma is, you know, hey, do me a favor, okay, I'll do it once. Hey, do me a favor, I'll do it twice. Do me a favor. The third time everybody's gone, right? There has to be sort of give to, you know, give, take. There has to be a win win. And that's what I believe is the win win, right, is to take the people that have the most influence and the deepest inroads and the most credibility and make them a partner, right? Not. And that doesn't just mean give them a thousand shares or 5,000 shares. It means, you know, put them on payroll, you know, so that's what we do. We pay them 500 bucks a month, they open a certain number of doors for us.

And, you know, wet their beak a little bit, right? As Jason Calcanis would say. So I think that's his trademark phrase. But that's, you know, that's it. It's not free. And if you insist that like, that it has to be this sort of closed loop, karmic.

Whatever, whatever. You're going to come away just, you're going to come away thinking, wow, we got a couple good intros and then it just stopped, right?

So that's where we're at.

Awesome. Let's go one layer deeper here. This is something that has come up on, I think, all three of the founder led customer acquisition or founder led sales versions of this podcast that we've done. And what I'm hearing from you is, Brendan, you were an early advisor to Gong. They gave you equity in that business and you acquired many.

And they paid me, and they paid.

You cash, and you acquired many of Their first customers, if not all of their.

I helped acquire. So that's. I don't want to take too much credit.

I help them. I help them. As you know, I think I made a material difference in helping establish them as, you know, sort of an early market leader. Right. In that space.

With customer traction and growth. And on some level, right, you're trying to bring customers. It's. We had customers certainly in the early days of gong, right, where there was like minimal traction, but maybe a little traction. Right. But because we had such strong relationships with a lot of them, right. It really did help us, you know, sort of like sort of lengthen out their, you know, path to value.

And that my takeaway from that is, hey, if you could replicate having myself and Amit and someone else or other people that, you know, if you sell the VP's of sales, there's no better way to go to market than leverage three or four people that know a crapload of VPs of sales. And that's it. It's binary, you know.

And so you at GONG were an advisor through your personal network, you opened doors to many of their future customers. You're doing the same thing at Co Sell. You have a number of advisors that you are paying. It's not one size fits all. Some people are motivated by equity, others prefer cash. Just solve for whatever sort of moves the needle for. For the person that you think can help your business. And then one thing that I heard is sort of like the next step in this, at least in coordination with continuing to leverage these advisors, is you then start to leverage your customers. So you acquire your first set of customers. Hopefully they're in this category of raving F fans. And then you can leverage those customers to generate more customers. Do you both at Co sell and then historically, do you combine the two? Do you make customers that may be raving fans also advisors that you are compensating, whether it's through equity or cash, to generate more business for you?

Yeah, I mean, that's. I would say that we. I. That's probably which you should. Right. And there have been companies that have come tried to solve that particular problem. Right. If you remember, like influentive with Mark Organ, he was the founder of Eloqua. Remember that was sort of what they were focused on, which was sort of harnessing existing customers to drive sort of referrals right into more business. I think that is absolutely something that you should do and probably could do out of this. I mean, obviously when the things that I've been focused on for most of the last 10 years, right. When you talk about companies I've worked for, companies that I've advise for, right. Most of them don't have customers, right? So that's like, that's a sec. You know, that's a secondary thing. I do think, like one thing that you are great at, right. You're one of the best that's ever been at this. And so was I or am I is leveraging, right? Sort of. I call reference selling, right. But leveraging the customers, you do have to, you know, that's just baked into like the DNA of how you sell, right? So, you know, you walk the floor at Echo Sign, you know, and you, you heard customers, existing customers being talked about a thousand times a day. I imagine you did that at Zenefitsprex because, you know, and we use that as armor. Armor. And we use it for offense in the sales cycle, right? When we were in a deal and we knew that we had won, you know, you know, when we were in the Facebook deal, right, and we, you know, everything we did was talk about Google and then we were in Twitter. Everything we did was talk about Facebook or.

So, Brendan, two things that you discussed that stood out to me. The first is talking about. I asked the question, do you pay the customers? Do you give advisor grants or maybe even some form of compensation? Your answer was yes. I emphatically agree. I have seen so many times. And by the way, like, maybe on the advisor side where you're giving equity, maybe there's a test here which is if this person wasn't a customer, would they make for a good advisor? And if the answer is yes, then make them an advisor as a customer and compensate them with that equity. Outside of that, you should have some form of incentive, whether it's like a former referral program or something that, I mean, at least ask, at least make the ask, but probably incentivized through some form of compensation.

It's not free, right? And what you're asking for is really, really valuable. And it's, you know, it's a complex transaction, right? It's not just sending an email through outreach, right? There's real relationships here.

And, you know, for the people that have those, the credibility, right? Like if, you know, if you're a recruitment technology company and you can connect with Kevin Gaither, right, Who was the Sierra for ZipRecruiter, right. Who's about as connected into that space as you're going to get. Guess what? Everybody knows who he is more than they know who you Are. Right. So in reality, like, what he's giving to you is, like, is. Is, you know, critical. He's giving you credit. It's not just a connection or a referral. He's giving you credibility. And it's not free. And he's, you know, I've literally talked to him exactly about this, and I think his quote was like, hey, my, my, my belly's full of karma. I think was his quote, like, I don't need any more karma. I've got. I've got all the karma I need. You know, like, if you want my help, like, you know, it's not free. And so, yeah, I've. I've probably spent 100 hours talking to people like you and me and others, you know, that have the, that have something of tremendous value for people, right, where they can open doors and they can use their influence at really minimal cost, quite frankly, right? Of, like, the, the capital cost relationship. Capital cost. And they're like, yeah, like, it's. I, I'm not going to continue to do this if there's nothing involved. Right. I might make a couple intros. And that's where like, you know, sort of, hey, let's tap into our investors, VCs, and they will help, but they're not going to continuously help because at some point they'll just say, like, yeah, I made some interest for you, bro. Like, you know, the reason I invested in you guys is you figure it out, right? They're not just going to be a volume connector or door opener. And there, there will be some. Right there. There are some investors that will do it continuously and repeatedly, but the vast majority are not going to do it. There has to be sort of scalable, continuous incentive. And if you do that, like, it's a strategic advantage that your competition likely is not going to be taking advantage of.

So, so takeaway and then takeaways incentivize your customers or make it easy for your customers to be raving fans and refer you additional business continuing down the path of leveraging your existing customers. You'll remember, Brendan, I closed Aetna when we were at Echo Sign and we did a press release with Aetna or convinced them to do a press release with us around how much paper they were saving by going green and doing electronic signature. And it was, you know, millions of pieces of paper, maybe every month, something like that. And we took that case study and I sent it to United and Cigna and all the Blue Cross blue shields, and we want them all. And so, you know, like, continuing down this path of leveraging your customers. There's both sort of like a way that you do it through the customer that we've been describing right now, which is sort of like incentivizing referrals. There's also leveraging your existing customers in the way that I just described, which is Aetna wasn't introducing us to United. In fact, like Aetna United, that.

Honestly, that's another. That's an hour podcast just on sort of reference selling, right? Which by the way, there's. As a startup, if you're not doing that, then you are. That's like a. A complete dereliction of duty, right?

Hopefully you're telling the truth, right? You're not talking about customers that don't exist, right? Of course. Well, you and I have never done that. So.

But like, you know, but like, you have to. Even if they don't have that much brand. Brand value, you have to still, you know, you. You're trying to create this perception that like, hey, the trans left the station, right? Like the, you know, everybody has turn their ships and you can be on the sort of tip of that spear, right, and realize the benefits before it's obvious, or you can be the last adopter and you can be left behind, right? And obviously it's not that. It's not that simple or binary, but that is. That's part of what you're doing as a startup, right? Like this is. This has already happened, right? Because that's all you're just trying to accelerate, you know, sort of the reality, right? The reality was in 2016, nobody was like stumping around being like, my God, I need a call recording sort of, you know, sort of analytics platform. Nobody, nobody was like, you know, if I just had that, that would unlock the key.

So, yeah. And now gong is what they're. And it's all credit. Just kidding. It's credit to many others. The incredible Amit in Iran and Elon and Jameson Young, who obviously worked for you worked for us at Echosign. So they've done is, you know, honestly, you look at it and you're just like, it's incredible that you were a part of that in the early stages and what it's become. So it's awesome.

So I hate to, I hate to use the term playbook because, like, generally that comes with negative consequences when you try and apply like some. Some playbook that worked for another company that you think might work for your company. That said, at a minimum, we're establishing a bit of a theme here. We've talked with three founders of companies that are focused on acquiring their first set of customers. A couple weeks ago it was Howard Lerman from Rome. Last week it was Colin Zima from Omni. Today, Brendan, it's you from CO Sell. All three of you referenced leveraging advisors and your personal networks to acquire your first set of customers. All three of you talked about leveraging existing customers to acquire your next set of customers. And so all three of you have very different backgrounds, very different personal networks and advantages. But all three of you are applying this same sort of, like, method. And so for those that are listening, again, there's certainly a trend here between these three folks continuing along that path. Brendan, I referenced something earlier, which was the champagne campaign, where, you know, we sent these bottles of champagne and handwritten notes and it was super effective. Have you ever tried anything, whether it's with CO Sell or Gong or otherwise, There was sort of unconventional, similar to what I just described with that champagne campaign that, like. And the reason I ask, many listeners and many folks on social media that have followed along with posts like that, they find these types of throw stuff against the wall and see what sticks examples really helpful in potentially trying the same thing or coming up with their own ideas. So curious. Anything unconventional that comes to mind?

Well, you know that you're talking about sort of a Sendoso kind of flow, right? Which is sort of this champagne or, you know, sort of greeting cards or flowers or whatever, right? Some sort of like, sort of direct.

Whatever you want to call it, direct mail, sort of drop, right? That's going to drop like something physical to the customer. And actually, so Chris Rudiger is the founder of Sandosa, actually worked for me at Talk Desk back in the day. So I'm certainly a fan of Sendoso and what they've done. I'm actually an advisor for Sendoso as well. Not to, not to steal it back to prior themes, but hopefully getting some.

Shares for that plug.

Yeah, you know, I mean, I think it's like it's, you know, you're constantly, if you're in this world, right, you're constantly thinking of sort of new or innovative or disruptive ways to get visibility or sort of, you know, mind share, market share, whatever it is. And like, you know, the reality is there's not that many new ideas as far as, like, you know, we're talking about sort of leveraging relationship capital. Well, guess what? LinkedIn's, you know, been around, right? It's not like it's a new concept to say there's Powers and referrals. I remember you and I both, I think, advised for a couple companies in the legal tech space.

Right? Which was like super, like traditional, not digital, et cetera, et cetera. And I think we, we. One of our clients that we both worked for was like, literally they were like dropping off like donuts and swag in the lobby of these law firms, right? And that was like the. One of the best ways that they could sort of drive sort of engagement and visibility and all that stuff. But yeah, the reality. What's that?

I like that the reason that I.

Like it, part of the reason why was because like these people, like, there's zero response rate to like traditional digital sort of outreach and cold calling and all that stuff. It's just like, hey, dude, you literally have to drop the donuts off in the lobby, right? That's the only way they're going to respond.

You know, I'll tell you, I like these examples, the champagne that we. And the donuts that you're describing. And I think that's a great example, similar to the champagne, but good sort of like ideation and reinforcement at least.

Each of those examples are community examples. When we sent the bottles of champagne to the founders at their offices, they probably opened the champagne and shared it with their team to celebrate the fundraise that we had sent them the bottle for. And everybody probably said like, who sent us the champagne? It was Brexit. Like, everybody then knows who the champagne is from.

And I mean, there's a certain, there's a certain level of class in champagne that's not in donuts, maybe, right?

So I like that some people don't drink, right? I think there are plenty of people out there that would prefer the donut. And you know, probably early in the morning, myself included. And so then with the donuts, you know, you are handing out donuts to folks and it's like, I think it's probably logical who you're referencing, which is this legal startup, but whether it's Brex or logical or co sell, like who sent us the donuts? And you don't get that. You know, I see a lot of people or I receive a lot of emails that are in my opinion, ineffective that are like, let me buy you a cup of coffee by sending you this Starbucks, Starbucks gift card if you take a call with me. Yeah, it's just like, that is not for those that are listening. Like, that doesn't work the way that champagne donuts, this sort of like community.

Examples that Brendan and I have just used Here, if you do want to.

Try something similar, you know, there's an I've. There's. I won't go deep, too deep into it because it's not. It's probably an offline conversation, but this idea of, like, I've always had this notion of, like, what's the angle, right? So if you're going to say, hey, I want to go after Brax, what's the angle? Right? And if you don't have an answer to that, then you're nowhere, right? So, like, hey, I'm gonna go after Sam Vaughn, okay? Who knows Sam Blonde? Or I know that Sam lives in Miami. Or I know that, you know, I know that.

Is a Kansas City. There's things about Sam that you can use that will probably get his attention that he doesn't see every day, right? Like, I know that Sam, you know, you know, hey, I fought, you know, what you did as Echo Sign and then beyond and then Brax and Zenefits. Just. I'm such a huge fan of yours.

You know, you're going to respond to that probably, right? And like, it's.

When you reach out every it to me, it should be. You should have an angle. Always. Always. And if you don't have an angle, you know, like, you're going to get sort of what you deserve, right? Like, you know, like, I know Jason Lumpkin, right? I'll give you an angle. Jason Lemkin. If you reach out to him an email and you have a good email that's personalized, he'll respond a lot, right? Make sure, you know, like, hey, if you're going to pump my ego up in an email, that your chances are better, you know, say something, right?

If you write a thoughtful email that is personal and sort of specific to both me and the value, like the problems. Jason talks a lot about solving my. My number one problem. I'll respond to that email. Or if you're fundraising, like a really good pitch on the fundraise, he will respond to that email.

Yeah. And so, I mean, there. There's all sorts of angles you can play.

You know, and certainly you have to have some knowledge base and all that stuff. But, like, that's. You can't. That's. That's not a referral. That's not sort of an AI solution or whatever, right? It's like there's this, this base of intellectual capital and people. Things people know about other people. That's. Yeah, there's something there for that, for that concept for me, right? Call it like Intel Co or something. But like.

Right, anyways, that's.

Those are other ideas. But like it's, it's all part of that. Like what's the angle? Like are you, are you taking a strategic, thoughtful sort of path to your customer? Whether it's an introduction, whether it's an email, that's super personalized, right. With information about who the buyer is or problems that the buyer has. That's, that's what, that's where, that's where we have to go. The other way is just right, there's an end, there's an end game to this mindless, you know, rolling up your sleeves and cold calling and not having a plan and sending, you know, a bunch of emails. Right? There's like it ends at zero. That's my, that's my belief. It's not a zero. Now you should do it. Table stakes not, it's not going to hold up that much longer.

So yeah, you've mentioned a couple times in this podcast. We could do an entire hour long podcast on just that. I think you and I could probably go for many hours on many different topics.

But we should, yeah, we should talk about specific deal, you know, specifically which.

I'm sure actually would be valuable for many people. But there are, there are some time constraints. Let's end and let's end on something that I imagine is a question that you get asked a lot, that I've been asked a lot. It just sort of like big picture. You have seen a lot in your career as a sales leader, as a founder, as a advisor consultant, any just favorite pieces of advice that you like to offer to other founders or sales leaders, given everything that you've experienced.

Experienced.

Yeah, I would say.

I mean it's really simple stuff, right? Like it's not rocket science, but have an extraordinarily compelling answer to like what problem you're solving, right? What problem are you solving? Can you explain it in one sentence? And if you can't explain it in one sentence, like maybe step back and reconsider or figure out a way to say it in one sentence.

I've, you know, the number of startups that, you know, I've seen and encountered in my career, even successful startups, and you're like, hey, what problem are you solving? They're like, well we have a thousand customers, right? Like, like what, what's the problem? And you know, if you don't know what the problem is, how do you know what the solution is? And how's the market going to determine what the solution is? That's extraordinarily common problem. It's Right. Which I, again, that's, I think something that you, you're incredible at is like, just distilling it down to like, here's a, here's a binary problem and a binary solution. Right? A lot of people struggle with that. I would say understanding, you know, sort of understanding what, okay, hey, we're startup. There's no, there's no organic. Nobody's knocking on our door. Like, it's Salesforce in 1999. Right. And you're a single SaaS solution, right? To take out, take an entire category over. It's not obvious, right? And like, think about.

If it's not right. What, what, what is the cost to solve that problem, right? Because I don't think a lot of founders don't understand that if the market is not. Is not obvious. Right? And, and you can't drive sort of organic growth through whatever it is marketing, LinkedIn, whatever, that you now have a grave problem that's extraordinarily expensive to solve. And I would say the vast majority of founders have no idea what they're signing up for. Right? You're talking about, okay, now I need to hire SDRs now, right? In traditional terms, right? Let's. Let's just assume, you know, this referral advisor, you know, but like, the. Traditionally, they don't understand what is the cost to solve that problem. And you're talking about, you know, hundreds of thousands of dollars to hire, train, you know, buy, you know, product and systems and data, and then that's. Without training any of them, right? And that's, you know, that's a problem. And most people don't understand what that is or how, you know.

That'S, you know, again, there's four or five reasons why 90 out of 90 out of 100 startups don't make it. That's one of them, right, that you can't figure out. How do we go to market when the market is not going to us? I know that ties into other stuff, but like, yeah, that's, that's one of the things that I would say for most founders. Understand what problem you're solving. If you can't answer the question, then you need to take a step back and maybe pause right, until you can come up. And then, I mean, you've been there before, right, where you're talking to a founder and you're like, in the back of your mind, you're like, why did you do this? Right? Like, like, why did you start this company? I don't understand, you know, like, with.

No problem in mind.

Yeah. You just started coding and then you fell sort of into a thing and then et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. So.

And then the last one would be. From a sales and go to market standpoint, there is no one sales methodology that is going to answer you. You know that it's going to solve all the things in front of you. Right. And so you see some people that are like, I subscribe to this theory, like, you know, band or solution selling or selling or value selling. And you. Right. In reality, like, if you're going to hire a VP of sales, they're going to need to have, like, be able to incorporate concepts of all those things into their own unique.

Sales methodology for your company. It will not just be some something that somebody bought a book at the library about spin selling. And it's just not going to be that simple. And if you follow those methodologies to a T, you're going to end up in the graveyard.

And I won't get into the companies.

That.

Have realized that fate. Well.

Let'S end on a positive note, which I think is sound advice from a true professional. Thank you for joining us today. It's awesome to see you. For those that listened, thank you for being here. Hope to see you June 6th and 7th. As I referenced earlier, Saster Europa, it's going to be a blast. Several thousand attendees. I'll certainly be there and I'm ecstatic to be there.

So hope to see you in London. Right?

It's in London.

Cool. Which. The.

The. Maybe, maybe.

Hey, I might get. I might. I might get on a plane for that.

So that would be cool. We'd love to see you there too, Brandon. All right, thanks so much, everybody. Take care.