Putting Strategy at the Backbone of Sales | Ep. 08

Hello and welcome to the Beyond Business podcast. My name is Charles Mackay. Today we spoke with Thomas Moyne, who is the co founder and growth and strategic officer at Trigger, which is a platform that pretty much uses the Internet to trigger activities into your plat, into your CRM or whatever instance you use for your sales team to actually give them some insights on who to call and potentially why to call them super powerful and in the current environment, probably has some merit about it too. We talk about Tom's career, how he got started in working more infrastructure and IT sales and moving through to what he's doing today. Obviously, Tom and I met in 2014 when he was a HubSpot strategic account manager and we worked with. I worked with Tom for about four years. Tom is not what you would call your traditional alpha male sales rep, is very strategic, very analytical. And what's really interesting about what we go through today is some of the things that have evolved and also changed quite rapidly in the last couple of months. Like if you're running an ABM strategy, it's now quite hard to actually get where people are sitting and why they're sitting there. Like, no longer are people sitting in corporate offices, so they're going to be working from home and what potentially the future of sales looks like. Is sales a dying breed or is it starting to evolve into beginning much more strategic than just getting the deal done and moving on to the next one? Like, how long is the deal taking? It's all really interesting stuff. Without further ado, hand over to Tom and myself and I hope you enjoy the conversation. Thomas Moyne, what a pleasure it is to have a conversation with you, mate. Tell me on this fine evening, or fine morning, I should say, welcome to the show. Whereabouts are you sitting and where would you normally be sitting in this current climate?

Charles McKay, it is a pleasure to be here. I am sitting at home in my makeshift desk that you can see that I've created. We have two desks that we've had to create in my unit, so me and my partner swap desks depending on where, where we want to see it or the mood that we're in. So that's as mixed up as we can have it at the moment. Where I would usually be would be in our office just in the city. But it is a remote life for 2020.

Yeah. How long do you envision being in this state?

You know, we've made it really work for us and we were actually talking about, hey, on the other side of all of this, maybe it is a matter of not going fully remote. Like you need your team to be able to see each other, but have it in a way where maybe it is only a few days a week or maybe it is a lot more flexible than we have been. As you would know, you and I built our professional relationship through HubSpot and they had a work from home policy from day one. So all of the systems that are in place, it's very familiar to me. Zoom, been using it for years.

Yeah.

All our documents are in the cloud, everything's, you know, accessible. Everyone's on Slack. So, you know, after the initial shock of just general business disruption, it's, it's actually pretty smooth.

Totally, totally. So, Tom, we had the pleasure of first meeting each other I think in 20 end of 2014. We'd had a few conversations on the phone and I randomly said, I'm downstairs from your Sydney office. So I rolled in, walked up to your co working space. When you're at HubSpot, there was four people slammed in an office like a sardine tin.

Yes, we were.

And that was sort of the start of the journey of how you and I met. But let's roll back a few years for yourself. Tell us a little bit about your background and what got you started into this SaaS, sort of sales slash, you know, user experience, call it whatever you want. But yeah. Where did your business career start?

How far back do you go? I mean, at uni I was, I was a major in computer science and English literature. I think I was probably the only person in the whole university that was bouncing between those, those two campuses. They were completely in contrast to each other. So I was always on, on that technical path. Couldn't tell you why. I just, I just really enjoyed it. Even in school, they call it ATAR now, but the HSC, I studied software even in year 12, before uni. So I just like tinkering with things and I was always going to get drawn into, into the technology space. But while at uni, I realized quite quickly I wasn't going to be the best developer in the room. There were some geniuses at Sydney Uni and they were leaving me for dead, but I still had a general appreciation and love for that space. Just realized I wasn't going to be a propeller head. So my first gig out of uni went into sales for a small IT integrator. Loved that. Went and did a stint at Macquarie Telecom after that. And they were going through their own transition. They'd just invested in a $60 million database data center and as a Telco, their sales team, sales motions. All their divisions were geared towards all the telco data and mobile services.

What year was this in like 2000, 2008 or Nice would be around 2000.

Yeah. 2010, 2011.

Yeah. That's interesting. So this is like building data centers before the Amazons and the Aziras had taken off. So they built their own.

Yeah, well, I saw that happen. I remember being sat down in our sales meeting and our sales manager at the time said, okay, just so everyone knows, AWS just landed this big account and it was a big deal. I can't remember what the account was, but it was a large enterprise deal. And he said, from this day forth, Amazon are no longer a small business, you know, $4.95 a month cloud hosting company, they're now a big player and things are going to change pretty quick. And I remember, I remember sitting in that meeting and lo and behold, Amazon have, you know, they now, now dominate. So that was I guess that initial exposure into the SaaS space because they were our customers, they were the ones that were buying the mission critical hosting solutions and so started to learn about software as a service and hosting your applications in the cloud and everything involved there. And then an interesting change that happened within my career is we had a bit of turnover and attrition in the team and it was all hands on deck with a few things. And I actually ended up helping with setting up their marketo system, sending out newsletters in their marketo instance, which was a pretty new tool at the time and an expensive toy that they had purchased. And I truly think that it was that exposure with Marketo that gave me the kind of the edge into launching the HubSpot office and knowing that, knowing that space. And so, yeah, when HubSpot launched in 2014, I was on the, I was one of the first recruits. They flew us over for a month to spend time in Boston and it wasn't too many more months after that that I met you. You were obviously pretty, pretty early on, come in and see us in that, in that small office at the time.

Who was, who were the first four employees in apac?

So it was myself, Emma Hogan. We were on the channel side. There was another person that had come over from Dublin, Mads Nelson. And then on the direct team, it was Madison Carmody and Nicholas Hajipuru.

Yeah, right.

All of whom have gone on to do some, some very cool and amazing things. And I cannot forget Dave o' Connor, who started as a bdr. So he started with basically doing Cold outreach. And he's obviously done amazing things since then as well.

And featured as a remote, working, surfing somewhat so called legend or pioneer. That was funny a couple of years ago when his article was, I think it was on Sydney Morning Herald.

Yeah, yeah, that was great. I remember him saying they did a photo shoot so he had to sit on the beach with his surfboard and a laptop just for the, for the feature article. And I think I remember him saying how it was just a disastrous day, like it was really cold and they just kept wanting to take all these photos. He's just sitting there in his, you know, in his bodies while they've got photographers trying to make him look, you know, like he's sitting in the sun.

Yeah, yeah, classic. So Tom, obviously, you know, going through that four or five years at HubSpot, pretty amazing journey I'd say you would have had internally and seeing that business grow from, you know, I suppose what would have been when you were there, probably 600 employees and probably three and a half thousand by the time you finished up. And I'm sure we could have a whole, whole interview on that journey in its own right. But maybe just in progression to what you're doing now, from what you were doing at Telco and then to what you learned at HubSpot, how did, what the Telco was doing from what they were selling to them, what you started selling and how selling evolved in your four years at HubSpot, what were the two biggest things, two biggest takeaways you took out of that?

Well, I think that in hindsight, when I look back, I think some of the biggest changes was that you had the rise of inside sales as a dominant force of engaging buyers. And it existed early on, but it wasn't seen as a highly skilled profession, at least within the sales realm. It was the field reps that you wanted to be. Everyone was a field rep and Macquarie Telecom was no different. You had the sales director get up on stage and he said, I don't want to see anyone in their seats. That means that you're not out talking to customers. And that was the way that things worked. Now HubSpot comes in, coming from the US a very cutting edge in terms of how they engage customers. And all of a sudden you're able to connect with people with on Webex at the time, it was before Zoom, but shows how early adopters they were and just being able to, you know, engage the customer while they're still sitting at their desk was far more efficient. And it became more, I guess More adopted and more, more acceptable to have important meetings over Zoom. There was some resistance early on. There was some big deals where we would have some Zoom calls. But then, you know, when you talk to that senior person, you still have to go out and meet them face to face. And I'm, you know, in Australia, I still think that that's pretty important. But yeah, no Zooms or webexs or anything like that. At McCrae Telecom in, in the early days.

Yeah, it's really interesting when you start looking at it. If I look at our relationship, you know, I drove up to, flew up to Sydney and drove back to Melbourne. I whipped up and had a quick coffee with you and probably over the five or six year tenure, went to your office six or seven times. So once or twice a year and we'd see each other at Boston, talk to you all the time or through all sorts of other channels. But I do believe that it's a bit of a limiting belief that you have to have a coffee or have to take them out for lunch or have to do those mundane things in the sales process. Yes, relationship building is really important, but you don't need to do it at the start, do it once they're on board and you add value at that point.

Yeah, exactly. I was listening to something earlier, just in the last week or so where lots of companies are being forced into this new world and some, you know, like, like myself doing business in, in the way that we're doing business now is, you know, the transition's been pretty smooth. But some businesses have suddenly been, yeah, you know, they've realized, hang on, I can actually have a team that can attend, you know, multiple meetings a day every day of the week and not have to pay for their flights and hotels just to do maybe two meetings per day. And they're still progressing deals forward.

And there's so much ego probably that goes into that traditional way of doing things. And a thing that I'm quite passionate about is removing the wastage from these two sales and marketing departments. There's so much wastage in marketing and there is just so much wastage in sales. You simplify that reality is the rep's life, for BDR's life's going to get better. They're going to do more work, they can do more quality work and they're not going to get as unhealthy like there's so many positives that come from it. More time with your family. So, you know, I think the quality over quantity thing becomes even more important. So it's going to be really interesting, I think, where, where it ends up and how businesses who goes back to the old way and who just adopts it and moves forward 100%.

There's going to be a lot of people that are going to be looking for quick, cheap, dirty solutions when their back is against the wall. Then there will be the businesses that actually do go quality over quantity. And I think it'll be obvious which one will reign supreme.

And we all know that the quick fix doesn't solve the problem anyway. You've got to go a lot deeper.

Correct.

Which makes sense. So you have had an amazing career at HubSpot, Tom, and then you've ventured out. Tell us what the main driver was for you to shift gears and go and partner up with someone and have a crack at something yourself. Like what was that internal drive that made you do that go from, I'm not gonna say a cushy job, but a hard working, where you got looked after very well job to having a crack on your own.

Yeah, I would say it was just a little voice in my head that's always been there and that voice just got louder and louder until it reached a point where I, you know, pulled the switch on it. So during my initial, very first interview with Jeetu Matani, who's the international VP for HubSpot, he said, where do you see yourself in five years? And I said, running my own agency. So when I started at HubSpot, I ended up working on the agency team, helping channels because that was where I was interested in. But I, I always had that vision in my head. And sure enough, it was a five year stint at HubSpot and I had no idea how rewarding that five years would be. I wrote my, my resignation letter and I posted it on LinkedIn. I did it on my last day. I didn't put much thought into it. It was kind of like I have to hand my laptop in in the next five minutes. You know what, I may as well do a quick goodbye on LinkedIn. So I just slapped it on and left it. And it ended up getting seen 450,000 times. And it got however many thousands of likes and just went completely viral, which was, was surreal. And so the reason, I guess I leapt into this space was because I had spent about my last 18 months at HubSpot focusing on sales services with people like yourself and other agencies. Because what had happened is that HubSpot had launched a free CRM and then some paid tools behind that CRM. And having worked with the channel model and the agencies, all of a sudden they're being told, well, you can provide sales services now. And for some that was great. For others there was resistance and for some there was zero interest because they'd had 20 years in marketing. And so taking agencies on that journey down sales services and what's possible with sales services sparked my interest. And that connection or alignment between sales and marketing and how important that is is essentially something that is now core to the new business that I'm at is Trigger. So I ended up going down into joining a startup which is in the sales intelligence space. So it works with sales reps to give some, give them some intel to have context for conversation all around Trigger events.

I love it. We'll get into Trigger in a minute. I think one thing that's interesting to highlight just externally too, to let people know the sheer scale of how quickly things evolved within the HubSpot sort of ecosystem. You know, 10 or nearly eight years, nine years of a marketing product to then or seven years of marketing product into a CRM, into a service product in about nine months. So you've got 5,000 odd partners globally selling marketing services and products and blogs and all of the assets that go with that. And then all of a sudden I've gone, right now you've got to sell down that channel into sales and service. And it became very disruptive for businesses, agencies, I'm sure for you guys. But it was an early play by HubSpot and I think it's going to play off in the long run. But talk about adaption and change of climate, like totally disrupted the whole industry.

Yeah, yeah. There were two big plays that HubSpot put in place and they did them both pretty much at the same time. The first one was the movement to a freemium model. Yeah. So having a free CRM and not something that's, you know, that you can barely use, like it's a fully functional CRM and they just released it for free. And then the second was becoming a multi product company and going from having that single marketing product to the full flywheel, the suite.

Yeah. And now as a platform is it moving into. And that so leading into what you're doing now that it's really interesting, that sales and marketing alignment piece sort of. It's interesting how we even started with my business when we partnered with you. It was sales marketing actually. It was the friction. So sales departments, marketing departments, punch head. But then you put the IT department in the room and then they all glaze over and look at each other and go, what are you all doing? But let's drill into a little bit about the problem that you're trying to solve now or when you started with Trigger. What is this funnel bloat or this sales process bloat that you're trying to solve for reps and to give them that insight?

Well, the way I think about it is marketing has done an amazing job over the last five or so years in terms of becoming more data driven and being able to actually measure leads, funneling through and nurturing them until they're buying ready. And with sales they, you know, they're now the ones that are a little bit behind. And so the best, best organizations in the world, the best companies in the world, you know, at best they might generate 30% of their number from, from MQL's marketing qualified leads. So that's, that's the top. So where do the rest of the reps number come from? Well, you can't afford to just smash the phone anymore. You know, it's, it's not in a world where you can make the 80 calls a day with nothing unique to say to any of them. It's just picking up the phone and you know, are you ready to buy? Are you ready to buy? And so now it's what I believe is sales is starting to lift their game and there's now a focus and an empowerment for sales reps. So what Trigger does is it gives the intel for the rep to have that contextual conversation, to actually have something unique to say. When they don't have the reliance on these MQLs, you listen out for trigger events that can lead to a valuable conversation, whatever that is, Senior role change, company adopts a technology, any of these are something that's going to lead to a conversation that has value or that you can actually help with. And it's not just the trigger platform. There's other tools that I'm really enjoying seeing the rise of like Gong and Chorus. So conversational intelligence as well. And all of these are kind of lifting the game of the sales rep to basically what we saw within marketing within the last five years I see happening now within sales.

Yeah, makes sense. So the problem that you guys are initially solving to what you're sort of seeing now and even in this current environment, have you seen any shifts and pivot? I don't like the word pivot because it should be just shifts or micro changes that you do, not a full pivot. What are you seeing that's happening at.

The minute couple of things. The first thing is people aren't in buying mode right now. So you need to be a strategic seller to start building those relationships early and understand that it's going to be a longer game and be okay with just adding value without, you know, taking, taking, taking anything in return. So what that's meant is that inbound leads have dropped off. So across the board there's, there's a lot of studies that are showing that the leads that are converting on websites have, have completely dropped off. But you know, reps still need to hit their number obviously so they need to lift up their side of the game. And then on the periphery there is another consequence that we've seen which is any organization that's focusing on ABM marketing. So account based marketing, the backbone of account based marketing is very heavily dependent on reverse IP lookup. So you can target organizations or specific accounts knowing their IP ranges from between businesses.

They're all working from home now.

Well, yeah, as far as the seller is concerned I work for tpg, you know, because that's my, that's my IP address. So that's disrupted a lot of efforts as well. That, that's not the ABM marketing isn't solely dependent on IP ranges but it's a big part of it and that's, that's been heavily disrupted. So in terms of where, where Trigger's been fitting in, it's still a similar value proposition where we're not back flipping on our strategy. I think any business that does a complete 180 you may not have had the best strategy to begin with but certainly, certainly adapting to those needs of reps are now working from home. They want to hold themselves accountable. They don't have leads to call. It's a little trickier to motivate yourself when you're sitting by yourself without the, the energy from the team that's around you and now listening out for Trigger events which can help you open strategic conversations.

From the defining these triggers, whether it be an ideal client profile, Personas of interest, whatever it may be, give some examples outside of the technical ones and job based new roles, what sort of other triggers are you seeing people get really creative with to go right. There's an opportunity for me to have a strategic conversation, not try and push product.

Yeah, I mean it obviously comes down to the company, their value proposition, their product and more importantly their buyer. One of the more creative ones that I've seen, I won't say the name of the business but they wanted to know when an employee started at a company and the location of that employee did not match the headquarters. So match the location of the headquarters. And the service that this company provides is basically travel services. And so what that means to them, that's a big trigger event because what that means is essentially if, if somebody is working in a location that doesn't match the headquarters, then they're going to have to travel a lot between back and forth between those two locations. Now, all of this data is available on the web, so it's just a matter of having a workflow tool or a workflow automation tool that can string it together, which is what we did for them. So you can certainly get very creative. I mean, an interesting stat in terms of the public web is it's 90% of the content on the Internet was created in the last two years. Wow.

Wow.

So if you think of exponential growth, that's in my eyes, exponential growth. So that that data is going to get more and more leveraged as time goes on. And buzzwords like machine learning and AI will slowly start to kick into gear and really be able to decipher informative intel out of that.

What's leading into that sort of topic. And it can become a minefield. But what's your thoughts on. As everyone now is a content creator and it's getting harder and harder to decise, what is the source of the truth, what is the factual information? Do you see a private web being built versus a public web where. So what I mean by that is it's a paid Internet versus a free Internet. Do you think that'll ever happen?

Well, there's a few points there. I mean, not talking about net neutrality or anything like that, but just the noise that's coming through. We started to see this with the early days of blogging and then everybody was. Was blogging and, you know, how did you rank to the top when there's so much noise and it just came down to quality, you know, you wasn't about just smashing out eight blogs a week. You actually had to write something of value with candy.

Content versus good content. Yeah.

And so now you're seeing that transition to video. It's no longer just about good blog content, just so you can rank number one. Ranking number one barely even exists as an idea anymore. So now it's, you've got video content, you've got online widgets, you've got all different kinds of online content. I am seeing a rise in gated or paid gateway contents as little ecosystems starting to get built. So people that want to get that higher quality you know, there's, there's businesses that taking advantage of it, sure, I see that as pretty valuable. That's not going to go away. But I, yeah, I think, I don't think content as the strategy is going to disappear. That's how you educate yourself. And if anything, education is becoming more important now. Everyone's, you know, trying to adjust and learn in, in 2020 and the spike in interest in online education courses has gone through the roof. But yeah, there's guys like SalesIQ who, for sales teams, you sign up and you get access to some of the best consultants in the world and there's other tools as well obviously that are out there.

Yeah, it's fascinating. And even the education flip and shift and how universities have tried to move into this space like overnight. You can imagine how many people have been trying to tell them, you need to build this, you need to build this. And then it's like, whoop, we need to do it now without the change management piece. And you know, now they're probably starting to wonder why teachers are going crazy and students aren't listening. And you know, that's where the change management becomes so important. You can flip something but it won't sustain through the really tough stuff and you'll pretty much guarantee they'll go back to the old way of doing it rather than this hybrid sort of solution going forward. You know, start thinking about school in the future. Like it shouldn't be five days a week at school, it should be out and about. Like you should be able to do school from a cafe. You should be able to do school from anywhere as well. Not just chain them to the, you need to be in this classroom at this time because then that's real world learning, real world thinking rather than the typical theoretical educational process which I'm sure has changed a lot. It's going to be fascinating. I think your points are interesting and we'll see where it goes.

Yeah, well, I was having a conversation with my business partner not too long ago about this and I was very much leaning into the, to what you were just saying. His counter argument was, was strong though. So he, he was basically studying mathematics and had a mathematics teacher at the time and basically saw some talent within, within him and saw that he was, you know, had some, some potential. Basically took him under the wing and the motivation that he got just by having, you know, that face to face relationship and mentoring allowed him to become quite strong and he obviously was able to go to university with great grades and he attributed a lot of that to the relationship that he built with a teacher that basically took him under his wing and mentored him. And I think the biggest challenge that we'll be facing is how do you keep that while going online. And it'll just have to be a balance.

Yeah, I agree with that. I also, there's just different ways of finding these mentors. Like if you look at everyone's career life journey, there's going to be mentors throughout it. You've just got to find your own way of finding them. And on the school piece there's an amazing YouTube clip on TED Talk actually on hacking schools where this young guy actually quit school and did his own curriculum. It's fascinating. I'll make sure it's in the show notes. But yeah, he literally goes and works in a shop and designs ski products. He loves skiing and finds all of these passions and he builds his six pillars of life. And it's just fascinating how 14 year old kid worked all this out. But it was probably because he had the right mentors and yeah, anyway, that could be what the future of school looks like. But I think there's going to be a hybrid. You need face to face time. Kids need to learn how to communicate, they need to build those social skills. Like imagine no social skills as kids. That's not going to be a good place.

Yeah, 100%.

So getting into the journey that you've been on, Tom, and you know, from success at HubSpot and moving into your own adventure and you know the journey you're on, you know you're not at the end of the journey, but what's that journey been like and tell us some insights on what you thought it was going to be to like, you know, obviously consulting and helping all these agency owners, then flipping into your own business. What's that journey been like today?

Well, certainly the map does not equal the terrain. I think that's the best way that I can describe it. So what's that mean? Well, I spent years with the likes of yourself and other agencies. So I coached about 80 agencies around business growth and acted as a consultant both around their sales coach, but also just their business growth over a period of years. And I have a newfound empathy for anyone who's running a small, small business. Definitely. I think some of the saving graces that I have had that I can attribute to HubSpot is having frameworks that you can follow and accountability systems that you can follow. So an old manager of mine at the time is now the country manager of HubSpot, Dave shepherd. Taught us and was really drilled into us. The EOS system, I believe you follow it as well, or at least are familiar with it. So I've found myself leaning back on that quite a bit. We built our hierarchy based off of that. The visionary, we've got the integrator. And anyone that wants to dive into this, I'm sure you can add the book into the show notes.

Yeah, absolutely.

It's an operating system for running your business and there's been plenty of times or days where I may have forgotten about that system. And it can seem like everything's going a bit crazy, but it's a great anchor to. To pull yourself back into and focus on what's important on a weekly basis, a monthly basis, have your accountability clearly mapped out between them, between the full team. But certainly there's things about running a small startup that you can't read in a handbook. And the biggest change that I would say is you get to be much more creative, but you have much less resources. There's many magical things that occurred at HubSpot from the head office in Boston that you never even knew were, you know, in existence.

Yeah.

Whole teams dedicated to solving problems you didn't even know you had.

Yeah.

So all of a sudden those were things that we had to think about.

Yeah. It is fascinating. We had Dave Sheppard on a few days ago, actually, and he talked about that journey of when the EOS was implemented at sort of the HubSpot APAC region. And, yeah, I will definitely put notes in there. And we have an episode coming up with one of the guys or the guy that made EOS in Australia possible, Dan Davis. So really looking forward to getting him on and going through it in a bit more detail. But, yeah, it's a framework and I agree with you that it's probably been the biggest thing. This is one of the things about HubSpot that attracted me to it was their inbound methodology. So, like, EOS is a methodology and It's a framework. HubSpot, the inbound methodology. That's what it is. The software happens. To do it, you need to drive it. And I think as all of these tactics have changed, different ways of doing things, but that's still at the core of that business. And that's why I was attracted to it. You know, being a country lad, being on the end of sales calls, like, all of these things was like, this just makes sense to me. And it's the same with aos. It's like, this just makes sense. So went and did it and it's even that's a journey like you know, the whole both of them take time and that's the thing that, you know, the longer term vision, the longer term thinking, more sustainable growth becomes such a big thing. Which you know, you can probably imagine when you're sitting in at HubSpot. It's like why aren't these agencies just growing.

In the early days? Yes. Yeah, that was certainly had that thought come through my mind a few times.

I do remember one call I rang you and this is when I was early, you know, probably less patient and looking for quicker wins and I'm like tom who Give me your top five. What they've done, who's doing it, what are they doing? And I want to copy it now. And you're like, oh, I've got this one guy in Sydney. And I'm like, I don't reckon you do. Who is this?

It was probably you from the beginning. I think you had a very good start as an agency and it was good to watch your journey as well around your, I guess your business model and how strong you were in building your systems. I think you were actually one of the early guys to adopt EOs and talk about it quite seriously. Not just having read the book that you showed me some templates that you were implementing yourself and what your rocks were and then it became a bit more important internally at HubSpot is as it was adopted and rolled out for us as well.

That's cool. So you now into your annuals and quarterlies and your level 10s and doing all of that.

Yeah, we have our monthly investor calls and we're teaching a particular framework in terms of what we need to cover off on those calls. Yeah, it certainly helps. It's the way to go. It's never the, the fastest solution is never the correct solution. So if you do it properly.

Yeah. And I think these models that have been around like reality is all been around for quite a while. I think they're going to get a bit of a retweak soon. You've got newer guys coming in that have had worked at HubSpot or worked at Salesforces or worked at these big companies that are going to have some new ways to tweak some, some of these core tools and I think they're going to get it sort of dot 2s are coming out. That's my thoughts on it because just businesses aren't like, you know, they're not 30 year old companies anymore. They're not 25 year old companies where the family is owning it or whatever it is. Like they're much newer, move much quicker, but I think they're going to get some tweaks. So it'll be interesting to see what sort of that looks like.

EOS was almost an evolution of E Myth, E Myth Master. And so I agree it will continue to evolve.

Yeah. So the theme of this podcast, Tom, is around businesses that are trying to do things better and make, you know, make lives easier and help people. What's some of the things that Trigger are doing. And probably, you know, HubSpot, they had a big mission and, you know, it was easy or not easy to get on board, but once you understood that, it was pretty powerful and they got everyone rowing in that one direction. What's been the thing that, you know, you've seen it trigger and you've started to see that this is actually making people's lives better and we're actually helping rather than just selling another thing that's going to get thrown down, thrown down the, you know, into the compost or into the bin. That's actually really starting to help people.

Yeah, yeah. I think the first moment was hearing it from the horse's mouth of the customer. And so we had a particular customer and the BDR actually called us and he basically said, yeah, I've booked like 12 meetings this week just using your tool. It's amazing. And it's like, that's so great to hear, like, tell me exactly how you're using the tool and what your approach is to doing this. And then that really drives you to say, okay, this is really something to invest all my time and effort, blood, sweat and tears into. So I see it as just helping sales reps elevate who they are and how they sell. There's a better way to actually sell. There's a better way to engage with your audience. And we're going through a period right now where I won't call it an extinction of sales reps, but lots of sales roles are now getting made redundant. A lot of the transactional order taking roles will no longer be required. You can now purchase pretty expensive software online without talking to anyone. So the future of the sales profession is going to be the strategic seller. That's. That will always be there and it will always be important, but there will be other roles that will, will essentially get, get replaced. And so how, how do you become a strategic seller? Well, you have to start early and you have to start as senior as possible. Early and senior. And taking organizations on, on that journey has been, has been Rewarding. But there's a better way to do it. You know, you can't survive just by smashing the phone anymore. You have to do research first, have something to say, have an opinion.

Yeah, I couldn't agree with you more. And you need a overarching strategy. You have to be aligned. You know, I think the really compelling thing that Brian Halligan presented at Inbound last year is how you sell is how you win. You have to not sell like everyone else. And we've had a couple of conversations actually in this podcast series around different types of personality types in sales. Like, it's no longer the alpha, you know, a type person that's winning the game. You know, it's really interesting actually. When we first met, I brought one of my good mates with me and he was like, Tom's your sales guy. Like, yeah, he's expecting that. Typical alpha, you know, get to the phone, call people, sort of, you know, alpha male, sort of ego, sort of type driven person.

I remember we went downstairs and we just had a coffee and a yarn and it was super casual. And then I was like, all right, see you guys, and just walked back up.

Yeah, yeah, 100%. And that, that's, you know, the strategic part of it. And like, I do a similar thing is like planting the seed, like seed and grow mentality that I use a lot. You can just plant the seed with one line and that won't come from fruition for two to three years. So, you know, understanding those strategic planning of the seeds now you watch, you watch a favorite tree grow, it's not going to grow in six months. It takes 9, 10, 12, 20, 30 years to grow. And that's strategic. And I think when you start to look at sales in that role, like the lifespan of a sales rep, I think is at 15 months or something. So even being strategic, if you're going to get into sales, treat it like a career and go, right, this is going to be a long term play, which is tough. I get it. I was that guy that didn't want to go to uni because that was three years that I could be doing something that was more important.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, I love it.

So, Tom, if you were to give one tip to our audience that is, you know, trying to get hyper focused and actually, you know, get results for their business, what would that be?

Yeah. So outside of sales advice and sales coaching, I think having started Trigger and running a startup, blocking out your calendar and doing what you know you need to do is so important. And it's something we used to talk about in sales. But I think it's even more important, you know, in trying to run a business and will help anybody in terms of just completing and achieving and hitting the milestones that you want to hit. And it ties back to the EOS model in terms of write down a list of what you need to achieve and block it your calendar and make sure you do it. It's simple. I don't know if that's as groundbreaking as you were hoping for this, but it certainly helps me.

Yeah. With that I want to ask you how you get around dealing with the daily grind stuff. So you know, people, expectations, how do you manage that when someone's expectations are through the roof and you know you've got something that is so important to do and that expectation is just going, how do you, how do you break that connection so that you don't get distracted from the daily noise and get those big things done?

I've got a new tactic which I'm doing since we've all been working from home and it's been great and it's what I think everyone in Australia's probably already had a stint at, which is I've done a 30 day yoga challenge. I get up at 6 in the morning and I've, I've done a session which is just self guided and I tell you, you know, win the morning, win the day. And I've, I've repeated that for a long time. But when, when you actually put it in place consistently, you know, it clears your mind in terms of what you, what you need to achieve specifically to what you said. I mean you have to set expectations. Obviously if you need to get something done, you need to call it out early to anybody else in terms of when something else may, may be completed or sent through. We have some offshore developers so I spend some time in the afternoon talking to the developers. So I break my day out by doing sort of operational things in the afternoon and I do sales related things in the morning and just that works for me because of those developers. But just having that system.

Yeah, I think that is fascinating. And a lot of people talk about the daily routine. I believe in the daily routine. I believe too that everyone has got their own and you can't put a box and dice and say that everyone needs to fit into this one routine. Some people are night workers, some people are morning workers, some people like a sleep, sleep in the afternoon. If that's how you work and you work at your best, do it, I have absolutely no problem with that. I think some people really battle with that. You know, it's like if you're not. It's similar to what you said about your boss at the start. If you're not in, you know, out and about, you're not selling. But that is such a vanity metric. Yeah, I love that tip. I think it's really powerful of defining what works for you and then double down on it. What works, what doesn't work and reassess. Like, it's one of those tools in eos, actually. It's just not your quarterly conversation clarity break, where you just go and write down what's working, what's not and start chipping away at them. And over time, things just start to get happier. Yeah.

Yeah. Well, there's a lot of. There's a lot of fads that. That come and go and like, one of them is meditation. I'm not calling it a fad, but what I will say is it doesn't exactly work for me. I've tried it and people preach about it and then I see everyone, you know, in the office doing their meditation breaks and then like two weeks later they're doing that something else. Because there's another fad that Silicon Valley is preaching about. Yeah, but certainly, yeah, do what works for you. For me, I've actually really enjoyed getting into yoga and it is a form of meditation, but meditation itself doesn't do it for me, so I don't do it.

Yeah, it's fascinating too. And obviously the rise of social media, everyone's got some tips and tricks and hacks and blah, blah, blah. But I think those things are formed when you're. The earlier they're formed in your life, the better. You know, I was very lucky that I got into sport at a very young age and that I was just addicted to it. So that just becomes. It is what is. That's my meditation. If I don't do that, I get really tense and wound up. So I couldn't agree with you more. So, Tom, you've had a pretty amazing career and journey and decisions, whether you've selected them on Tact or they have just come out. But tell us a couple of your success stories with maybe HubSpot, and then one with Trigger that you're most proud of to date. That can leave that touch, that anyone can do it. You've just got to have a crack.

Well, I mean, you're going to laugh at this because it has to do with yourself, but the most rewarding things that we had at HubSpot was seeing the success of our partners. And it was truly, you know, it validated. Wow, this is really actually changing small businesses lives. And you were one of those examples, one of the early diamond partners, if not the first or second, were you? The first? I think it was quite close.

It was pretty close between at the time, brand manager and us. But then they rebranded to salt and stone. So then I held the. Held the realm for a while.

Yep, yep. And yeah, that was extremely rewarding watching, you know, someone who I onboarded, because that was rare at HubSpot at the time. Partners tended to shift between account managers. So it was extremely rewarding to see you grow to a diamond partner, particularly with your. With your business model as well. I think it was an envy of many agencies. So at HubSpot, it was just a million small wins like that. I could, you know, it was great to go to presidents clubs or go to the US or Boston each year for the inbound conference, be able to take my partner and she gets a bit of a break from my late nights of working. So I say, well, at least you've got this. HubSpot used to take you to your partner as well, to a president's club. So being able to reward her with that as well was extremely rewarding. And then at trigger, the most rewarding thing is having something that's building something that didn't exist before is a. It's a new feeling. I think I would say it's a new. It's a new reward that I haven't had before. And so that's. That's pretty unique. And as I said, you know, you have that, that moment with a customer that says, hey, I just booked, you know, 12 meetings this week using your tool. And you're like, wow, that came out of my head. So that's been very rewarding.

I think that's fascinating. Becoming a creator and building, you know, using all of the stuff you've learned throughout the period to then, you know, build it into a product that then sells and helps people. So I think that's amazing. I think the. Just what you said about, you know, seeing other people succeed, that's like. And thank you for mentioning it, but, you know, I agree with. The best success is seeing other people succeed. I get a lot of satisfaction out of that too. You know, setting up those foundations so that they can grow and evolve. And, you know, I could categorically say that, you know, when I rang you guys for the first time, I didn't know what I was doing. I knew that I knew where the Internet and the world and technology and that was going in this space. But how and what it was going to look like, I didn't know, you know, and I had this vision of what I was trying to put together but I didn't know how it was going to come about. So yeah, it's been a fascinating ride and yeah, I want to thank you for being on the journey and I look forward to seeing where Trigger ends up, Tom, so we better start bringing it to ground. Thank you for sharing some insights and some stories. So how do people find yourself and Trigger? Where would they go?

LinkedIn. Thomas Moyne on LinkedIn is the best way to find me or just head to the Trigger website which is Trigger AI.

Awesome Tom, it's been a pleasure. I look forward to many more in the future. Thank you once again.

Thank you very much. Thanks for having me.